CIVICS AND SCIENCE:
CONTEMPORARY ISSUES FOR CIVIL DEMOCRACY
by
Robert A. Michaels; PhD, CEP
Civics and Science: Contemporary Issues for Civil Democracy
by
Robert A. Michaels, PhD, CEP http://www.ramtrac.com
Copyright © 2022 by Robert A. Michaels All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner without written permission from the author, except for brief quotation in critical articles and reviews.
United States of America
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DEDICATION
Writing this book was made possible by my dear family, to whom I dedicate it with love.
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COVER PHOTO
Bob Michaels in laboratory Master of Science (MS) student University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 1970
Restored and enhanced by
Valerie Michaels
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About the Author
Dr. Michaels is a politically unaffiliated observer of politics. He is President of Schenectady, New York-based RAM TRAC Corporation, and a toxicologist specializing in assessment and
management of risks to public health potentially posed by environmental contaminants. He has taught at the university and high school levels. Recognized as a great communicator, ‘Dr. Bob’ has been sought for speaking engagements at professional conferences and in popular media, such as radio, television, and documentary film. As a consultant, Dr. Michaels has a strong reputation for objectivity, having served national and international Fortune 500 clients, government clients at the Federal, State and Municipal levels, and public interest organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). He has consulted to the California Governor’s office and to the U. S. Congress, and has been invited to give congressional testimony, as well as to testify before State and Municipal government legislatures and agencies.
Dr. Michaels chaired the State of Maine Scientific Advisory Panel, and for 20 years chaired the Certification Review Board of the Academy of Board-Certified Environmental Professionals
(ABCEP). For decades he has been Secretary of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Committee on Classification and Properties of Hazardous Chemicals, and a Board Member of the National Association of Environmental Professionals. He also served as a Member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of SpringerVerlag and Cambridge University Press science journals. Dr. Michaels earned his doctorate in Biology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1979, was elected a Life Member of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1986, and was awarded ABCEP’s Kramer Medal in 2004, recognizing his lifetime professional accomplishments.
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About the Book
This book is the scientist-author's exploration of the nexus between civics and science, identifying contemporary issues of critical importance to American democracy. It seeks to promote objective and clear thinking toward evidence-based decision making in a range of important issue areas. 'Contemporary' here refers to the four-year tenure of the Trump Administration and beyond, continuing to the present. Dr. Michaels, in addition to being a consulting toxicologist, is a politically unaffiliated observer of politics. Here he offers strictly non-partisan exploration of civics, science, and civility issues. His analysis is scientifically rigorous, and his writing engaging, personal, and autobiographical.
Dr. Michaels' informal writing style is fitting for a book that represents his personal exploration of lessons that we might learn individually and collectively to re-embrace civics, science, and civility in our bitterly divided society, and in the post-Trump era. The book seeks to motivate individual readers to prioritize our democratic principles over their own monetary interests: It’s the economy, stupid! must be replaced with a new message for voters: It’s the democracy, period! If we fail to appreciate the nearterm threat now posed to our long-term interest in preserving our democracy, we may learn imminently and tragically just how ‘practical’ our democratic ‘principles’ actually are. The book applies clear thinking to numerous issues, and argues from many directions that each of us has an interest and a personal responsibility to safeguard American democracy and thereby contribute to assuring our national destiny.
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Preface
This essentially non-partisan book explores the nexus between civics and science, as rejection of both is rising, and as scorn for both undermines our representative government, the rule of law, and democracy. These unfavorable trends are manifest in disunity
regarding fair elections, unbiased law enforcement, and governing norms. The consequences have included a loss of grand vision and an inability to formulate and dedicate ourselves to worthy causes. Sometimes, as now, we must dare to think the unthinkable, that democracy in our country is threatened in the near term. Sometimes, as now, we must recognize the significance of the moment: that greatness has been thrust upon us, potentially to be protectors of our democracy in the near term.
If the threat to democracy seems too theoretical, consider the near-term threat to your biological rights, for example, to terminate a pregnancy via abortion. That right has been opposed by far-right Republicans for decades, including via appointment of blatantly antiabortion justices to the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court in June 2022 overturning the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which had been the federal guarantor of abortion rights for all women in the U. S. for a half century. My critical comments about
Republicans, especially Trumpist ‘MAGA1 Republicans’, are nonpartisan because they could apply to any political entity opposing your biological rights, just as a jury might find against any defendant who is on trial for committing a crime. That is, intrinsic to fair and objective judgment in court of law or in this book is willingness to condemn wrongdoing without bias, even if far-right Republicans happen predominantly to be today’s wrongdoers threatening our democracy.
We must view this moment in the context of other historic moments, such as Japan’s attack hitting Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, or the terrorist attack hitting the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC on 11 September 2001. Before ‘9/11’, just a few analysts ‘connected the dots’ by interpreting strange behaviors of airplane flight students, seeking to learn how to
1 MAGA: Trumpist slogan, Make America Great Again
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fly big jets but not seeking to learn how to land them, in the broader context of a grand plot against our country. Despite this ominous epiphany, institutional resistance prevented those few analysts, and our nation, from preventing that attack.
We are experiencing such a historic moment now, likewise featuring institutional resistance against action in the face of a grand plot against our democracy, and against the individual rights that it guarantees us. It is not just any plot; it is a top-down plot, originating at the highest echelons of a failing (and failed) presidential administration. We urgently must use our imagination to connect the dots, and choose personally whether to be passive bystanders or active protectors. Our only viable democracy-preserving choice is to overcome institutional resistance. This imperative will become clearer if our awareness is broadened, and our choice informed by the demands of civics to act responsibly, and of science to recognize objectively the existential threats that our democracy faces in the near term.
Governing structures designed to assure adaptive and fair decision making have deteriorated, including the Senate and House of Representatives as well as agencies charged with roles to protect our nation and the world against diverse threats such as climate change and pandemics. Failed emergency responses, emblematic of such institutional deterioration, already have included inadequate responses to climate-associated events such as hurricanes and floods, droughts and forest fires, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the 6-January insurrection against our democracy’s peaceful, constitutionally mandated electoral transfer of power.
Rejection of civics and of science also is ascendant abroad, but my focus here is on our national posture regarding local, national, and global issues. In the U. S. we have seen civics rejection, especially in the form of flouting of governing laws and the U. S. Constitution. We also
have seen science rejection. Science rejection historically has been associated with religion, especially in fundamentalist communities such as evangelicals. However, I recently have discerned a healthy trend toward science acceptance in such religious communities, but I also have discerned an alarming counter-current of science rejection by the Republican Party and its supporters.
Unlike the laws of civics, the laws of science operate effectively and inexorably without our help. Functional laws of science coupled
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with rejection of civics and of science has produced rejection of evidence-based decision making. This in turn has produced recent societal disasters, and portends more and worse to come.
Civics in the U. S. is of special importance in relation to contemporary issues. By contemporary I mean the four-year tenure of the Trump Administration, 20 January 2017 to 20 January 2021. Donald J. Trump first was elected president in 2016. In 2020 he was supported for re-election by nearly half of all voters, even though Trump illegally and unconstitutionally had placed his personal, financial, and political interests ahead of Americans’ interests. Worse, Trump’s interests have conflicted with America’s interests, and with Americans’ interests: with your interests. My usage of the word ‘Americans’ is meant to be broad, including all citizens and residents of the U. S.
The most tragic significance of Trump, in my view, is that so many Americans could have failed to notice or care about his selfishness, cruelty, criminality, dishonesty, incompetence, and the threat that he posed to our democracy during his presidency, and continues to pose in his post-presidency. Trump stoked Americans’ fears, motivating voter support for an authoritarian, dictatorial, would-be autocrat, and would-be despot over their own patent personal and national interests. Our nation has become more socially divided and violent as a result.
At the risk of assuming too much, I call to your attention your high school days, and the popular students who vied to become your class president. Did they campaign for your vote based upon bullying, racism, sexism, or other forms of antisocial qualities? Do you look back on them today as wholesome kids who you respected,
maybe envied, and maybe liked? Did they exude laudable qualities such as morality, competence, and honesty? OR, did they claim that their possible loss in the school election could only be caused by fraud on the part of ‘deep-school opponents’? If they lost, did they claim that the high school election was ‘stolen’, or did they (admirably) congratulate their esteemed opponent who won the school presidency? I boldly assume that your current memories of past high school days constitute a model, or a meme, of idealism or at least of nostalgic wholesomeness. Along that line, I focus all
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chapters in this book, in an overall sense, on social re-unification and rededication to that wholesome meme: to a cherished democracy embodying time-honored (hopefully not time-worn) virtues of civics, science, and civility.
This book addresses civics, science, and civility issues outlined above in a personal, sometimes autobiographical (and sometimes chatty) manner. Mainly, I seek to focus on interesting and urgent issues, and avoid or minimize hackneyed, potentially trance-inducing survey course subjects found in dry textbooks. I’m sure I succeeded, partially! This book represents my personal exploration of lessons that we might learn individually and collectively to re-embrace civics, science, and civility in our bitterly divided society, in the (hopefully permanent) post-Trump era.
I hope also to motivate readers to prioritize our democratic principles over their monetary interests. I hope to replace politicians’
judgment of voters’ crass main priority: “It’s the economy, stupid!” We should be motivated instead to adopt a new main voting priority: “It’s the democracy, period!” If we fail to appreciate the near-term threat to our long-term interest in preserving our democracy, we may learn imminently and tragically just how ‘practical’ our democratic ‘principles’ actually are.
Trump’s Republican Administration would have been precluded, were the U. S. already a healthy democracy. Instead, we were plagued with civic maladies that helped facilitate Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. Thus ‘Trumpism’ existed, except in name, before Trump’s 2016 candidacy, and it facilitated his ascendance. Trump deserves much blame, but Trumpism involves an uncomfortably large fraction of Americans. However, assigning blame (though necessary) is not my goal. Rather, I seek to identify issues, and promote accountability and healing, as well as appreciation and preservation of our democracy, with
needed improvements and protections.
As a scientist, I will recruit science to the service of civics. Accordingly, I hope to restrict myself to objective, non-partisan analysis. I am interested in politics, but have remained unaffiliated with any political party. Here I focus on problems that would be equally serious, no matter who caused them; and actions that would be equally reprehensible, no matter who took them. To illustrate, my ethics, not my politics, condemns separation of immigrating children from their
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immigrating parents. Ethics may be subjective rather than objective, but their violation can be and should be judged objectively. If Democratic President Biden should switch from a policy of family reunification to a policy of family separation, I will condemn it as strenuously as when Republican President Trump adopted such a wrongheaded policy. In short, this book includes opinions of my own, which are different from facts, but I aim to exclude partisan opinions. I hope that I have adhered to this constraint.
Neither I nor anyone else can be an expert in all specialized subject areas represented in this book. The claim of possessing such expertise is definitely not among my various conceits! I therefore extensively rely upon external sources, and I cite them and often quote them to provide especially notable perspectives of contemporary experts. Our current situation shares much with our past, but in critical ways it also is unique. To enrich historical perspective, and highlight the uniqueness of our current place in
history, I also juxtapose contemporary views with quotes from historical figures. I do this partly because my own expertise as a scientist is narrow relative to the breadth of this book, and also because I have gained interesting historical and/or current policy perspective from the quotes that I have selected. By way of full disclosure: the selected quotes also are entertaining, at least to me!
All of my information sources were selected because they are evidently credible. None purveys ‘alternative facts’, or conveys an ‘alternative reality’. Many are peer-reviewed articles from reputable scholarly journals such as Science Magazine. Primary sources are used where deemed necessary; other, more convenient sources are secondary, adequate for identifying civics issues, though inadequate to convict judicially (for example as ‘hearsay’). Many sources are opinion pieces published in mainstream newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, or in respected policy journals
such as Foreign Affairs. As I write, history is being written, in part via synthesis of this vast body of credible documentary sources into scholarly books and academic dissertations. Most such intellectual syntheses, however, remain to be published. Without the luxury of waiting for them, I am doing my best by relying upon best information sources or, next best, convenient credible information sources. Each day I read about issues worthy of inclusion. Having excluded many if not most of them from this book, I credit myself for
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stopping short of an encyclopedia, but even so I must apologize for its incompleteness!
Most issues addressed herein are subject to opinion and interpretation. Their resolution depends upon facts and opinions. The facts presented are supported by evidence cited, yet even so are subject to falsification. Facts on which I rely, to my knowledge, have not been falsified. They are therefore eligible to support opinions, my own and others’, and even conflicting opinions. I am unabashed in providing my own facts and opinions, emphasizing that I intend to be honest, objective, and non-partisan.
Scientific thinking is linked to clear and candid thinking for conceptualizing truth and reality accurately. These are positive abilities that may encompass objectivity and subjectivity, with prejudice to neither. The importance of ability and willingness to think clearly and communicate candidly is most generally the main
message of this book (more detail, much more, is provided later, with context flowing from Chapters 1 and 2). This book’s main mission is to challenge readers while encouraging critical examination and healthy skepticism. Accordingly, I analyze selected issues sequentially (but no problem if you skip around and/or omit: chapters are intended to stand alone, in any order).
Some issues or issue areas that I address have been selected because they are especially susceptible to manipulation by individuals and/or organizations promoting their interests as if they were yours, via disseminating political, economic, or other misinformation or disinformation. I include such diverse topics to illustrate (my attempt at!) analytical clarity and objectivity, not necessarily to offer (and certainly not to prescribe!) definitive issue resolution.
Overall, I hope to promote personal involvement of readers as
citizens bearing individual responsibility for the urgent needs of their nation, of our nation, much like in a small country (maybe like in Israel) where each citizen is taught to believe that, by taking personal responsibility, s/he can make a difference. We are big, but unfortunately not too big to fail, and I fear that we might be too big to nurture such individual responsibility, notwithstanding efforts of Uncle Sam proclaiming “I want YOU.” In this book, I hope to contribute to overcoming any sense of our individuality being subsumed within a mass or morass of individually uncontributing
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beneficiaries of our magnanimous society. We each bear individual responsibility for our national destiny.
I also hope to promote reader confrontation with contemporary issues, and accountability for contemporary problems. These together seem to me to be prerequisites for national healing. I address such issues, therefore, that have faced voters in our democracy, and will continue to face voters, involving public service, public servants, and public policy. I close this preface with a request: If you generally agree with the ideas presented in this book, or even if you disagree, please think about how you might disseminate them beyond your likeminded friends, colleagues, and other acquaintances.
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C o n t e n t s
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chapter title
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00 Preface
01 A Brief Introduction to Civics
02 A Brief Introduction to Science
03 What Matters in Civics and Science?
04 Incredibility of ‘Conspiracy Theories’
05 Science: Literacy vs. Ignorance and Denial
06 Civics, Science, and Covid-19 Pandemic Management
07 Immigration, Citizenship, Voting, and Voter Suppression
08 Civics, Science, and International Re-engagement
09 Civics, Science, and Environmental Sustainability
10 Security of Academia, Information, and the Media
11 Literature Cited
12 Footnotes
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C h a p t e r 0 1 . A B r i e f I n t r o d u c t i o n t o Civics
Views of Washington, DC during approach for landing at Reagan National Airport always inspired me, as on 15 July 2014. This privileged view of some of the symbols of American democracy, from the air, for me embodies our highly-evolved civics, the resolution of centuries of institutional planning, social turmoil, personal growth, and personal as well as institutional sacrifice. Our complex history culminated in today’s, or at least yesterday’s, great democratic experiment. What feelings will tomorrow’s landing approach evoke for air passengers to our Capitol city?
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-------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Pangloss: All’s for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, 1694 to 1778). Candide. Europe, clandestine publishers including Cramer, Marc-Michel Rey; January 1759. -------------------------------------------------
In Voltaire’s banned book Candide (Voltaire 1759), the
extravagantly optimistic philosopher/protagonist Dr. Pangloss engages in naïve thinking about his society’s political and religious flaws. His naïvete and lack of self-editing result in folly while conveying clarity to the reader, though not to the protagonist himself. For the reader they evoke the related ideas of candidness (candor) and truth. In that undemocratic year and era in France, less than two decades before England took delivery of the American Declaration of Independence, the folly of Voltaire’s protagonist, clearly communicating to his readers the author’s strong social criticism, threatened Voltaire’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Voltaire fled Paris to Champagne to avoid arrest. Later (in 1726) he was arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille briefly, and then exiled to England (1726-’29). Candide’s, and Voltaire’s, numerous publishers likewise risked losing their lives and freedoms. That is why I cited them above as ‘clandestine’. All or nearly all also were unidentified.
If you believe that our world is not the best of all possible worlds, and that our society is not the best of all possible societies, you may have taken a naïve or a knowing step toward clear thinking. You might be appreciating your freedom to criticize the status quo in your own world, country, and community. You might be imagining how oppressed you would feel if your freedom to express your views were curtailed… and imagining the hopelessness that you might feel if your right to seek reform also were curtailed. You might console yourself that you could seek refuge among intimate friends and family, but you could risk surveillance by neighbors and arrest by police.
I watched something like this oppression happen among Iranian friends of mine in New York City in the 1960s, when I was in college. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had established the not-for-profit,
(scandalously) tax-exempt Pahlavi Foundation in Manhattan, ostensibly (in part) to grant scholarships for students to study in the U. S. subjects
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of concern to Iran, such as petroleum engineering. The Pahlavi Foundation in New York City, however, also was revealed to be serving as a political operative in New York City of the Shah in Iran (Crittenden 1976). Eventually, the Shah along with his westernized government was deposed and replaced by an Islamic fundamentalist government that constituted a great threat to Iranian beneficiaries of a U. S. education, especially if funded by the Pahlavi Foundation.
In 1979, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became Iran’s socalled Supreme Leader. Conversation among Iranian friends of mine revealed their fear of being betrayed to fundamentalist authorities in Iran. Their ‘infractions’ could include tuning into forbidden radio stations, or speaking against the Ayatollah or the fundamentalism that he represented. One friend had worked for the more progressive administration of the Shah. His job was to develop a natural history museum in Teheran, which was anathema to the Ayatollah, so his job ended. (Oddly, his salary did not!) Many Iranians in New York feared
being arrested if they returned to Iran, for example to visit their families– so, for literally decades, they did not return. Effectively, instead, they were forced to live as exiles. My friend, in contrast, indeed was living in Iran. I will refrain from relating his experiences interacting with fundamentalist authorities serving on ‘revolutionary councils’. I am pleased to say, though, that shear personality and wit got him through such interactions, with his life and freedom intact!
If you are reading this, you might appreciate that many if not most people on our planet are likewise suppressed. Many or most experience oppression and hopelessness proportionate to suppression of democratic rights and freedoms to which we (almost) all aspire. Rights that we regard as ‘inalienable’ here cannot be taken for granted in nondemocratic countries.
These days, democratic rights and freedoms, even in the U. S.,
are proving to be NOT inalienable. On the contrary, at the moment they are ‘alienable’, and in great danger. As President Joe Biden (2022) warned in a speech to the Nation from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, on 1-September 2022:
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic… Now, I want to be very clear, very clear up front. Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans,
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are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know, because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans… But there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country” [emphasis added].
The precarious state of our democracy has garnered attention of people of all persuasions to civics and to science in the troubling context of recent events in the U. S., such as the insurrection against our Capitol on 6 January 2021 and Supreme Court decisions like overturning Roe v. Wade. Now maybe the iron is hot; now maybe it is receptive to forging. Now might be an opportune time to strike it to promote civics and science literacy, awareness, and acceptance. I hope so.
Voltaire’s Candide is more than an ancient tome. It is a nearly
three-century old satire on optimism, from which moderns like us appropriately might justify present-day optimism, based upon comparison with Candide’s times (Felix 2020). Consider the commonality of slavery, for example. In 1575 almost no country had abolished it, but a graph of slavery abolition turns sharply upward from 1775 (Voltaire’s era), reaching approximately 65 countries in 2000. Contemporaneously, the number of European countries condoning torture as a judicial punishment likewise has declined, from 16 countries in 1650 to zero in 1850 although, as we all should be aware, reality may differ from official proclamations.
Civics. ‘Civics’ is the field of study, explication, and advocacy that we, as members of a democratic society, are obligated to embrace and transmit to our descendants in our homes and schools. We are obligated not only in principle, but in our individual self-interest. That is, civic duty is not a form of noblesse oblige that is expected of us because we can afford to offer it to those less fortunate. In the French Revolution, which
I studied in High School, the French aristocracy was figuratively guillotined, and a good number of French aristocrats were actually guillotined, most essentially because the wealth disparity between upper and lower social classes in France was allowed to grow too extreme. As a friend of mine said of the desire of rich people in the U. S. for further tax cuts, be careful what you wish for, as the lifestyle you lose might be your own. As the French Revolution said (to me), the life you lose might be your own.
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More than economics, “freedom of speech,” or more broadly, freedom of expression, is at the heart of our democracy. Democratic freedoms apply to ourselves and equally to those who may disagree with us. That is a central lesson of civics in a democracy. It is a lesson that must permeate our democracy again, or we soon might lose it, and most particularly we might lose the freedoms that it guarantees, and that we cherish.
For me, the principal lesson of civics is that living in a society from which one derives benefit implies a grand bargain requiring reciprocal responsibility to that society. This widely held belief is repudiated by some. As Arnold Schwarzenneger, Republican Governor of California from 2003-’11 (Mr. World in 1970; I nominate him for ‘Mr. Word’ today) eloquently lamented:
“Many people told me that the Constitution gives them rights, but not responsibilities… Our country became great because every
generation before us knew that liberty and duty go hand in hand. I am worried that many of my fellow Americans have now lost sight of that” (Schwarzenegger 2021).
The grand bargain takes many forms, including obeying lawful laws, and changing laws lawfully. The laws, and ultimately the grand bargain, constrain your personal freedom. That truth may be inconvenient for libertarians, who may resent and repudiate both. The adage applies, nonetheless, that “my liberty to swing my fist must be limited by the proximity of your nose.”
Digital age civics. Civics traditionally is taught to individuals, often to students in classrooms. The premise is that individual competence in civics, taught to children by parents and schoolteachers, in time will produce civically responsible adults, collectively resulting in a civically responsible society in both thought and action. This model
assumes that civics was widely taught, and has produced societal consensus supporting its democratic principles. That rosy premise is false.
We have seen a decline of civics as a curriculum component, for example in ‘Civics’ and ‘Social Studies’ courses. This decline may be manifest in reduced prevalence of Civics and Social Studies courses (and related courses with civics content), and in dilution of the content in favor of contemporary perceptions of ‘relevance’. Contemporary relevance
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might emphasize digital-age issues such as smartphone screen time, computer game/cruelty, sexting, digital harassment, digital security, and identity theft. Abundance of important digital-age content, in Civics and in Social Studies courses with related titles, may take precedence over traditional ‘golden-rule’ civics content. That is, teaching of traditional civics may decline, much as emphasis on the arts often has declined in programs that are enriched in STEM, that is, in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics content.
Imparting civics principles toward producing civically responsible children and eventually civically responsible adults may be envisioned as a bottom-up process. It once was effective, but its effectiveness clearly has eroded. A major source of erosion has been the influence of social media at all age levels. Many people are exposed to information selectively, based upon their social media preferences. Social media may exert influence via a kind of top-down process that may tend to subvert the bottom-up process of instilling civics at home and in schools from an
early age.
Conflicting information from schools teaching civics vs. social media undermining civics must resolve to a net ‘resultant’ forming the unique set of beliefs held by each individual. The cumulative effect will depend upon the distribution of unique individual results in the population. The population, however, is itself diverse, so net individual results may differ among subpopulations, such as ethnic groups, age groups, and economic groups. Subpopulations are numerous, and may correspond to geographic and/or demographic groupings roughly consisting of those considered by political strategists.
This book MUST target adults as its audience, given their determinative role in resolving urgent existential issues that we now face as a democracy. The book responds to years, probably decades, of societal divisiveness producing four years of the Trump Administration,
which continues to be intensely threatening to our democracy. Many of us are experiencing what I interpret (in myself) to be a form of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).
The trauma has not passed with passage of the Trump Administration. Our democracy continues to be at risk as Trump continues to undermine it via promulgating the fiction (‘the Big Lie’) of an election stolen from him, resulting in a widespread perception of
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illegitimacy of our democratically elected government. This circumstance has reached a crisis for our democracy. We must act urgently to protect it from seditious and even violent plotters at leadership echelons of our government, and from their base of supporters who care little for democracy, or fail to see our government as qualifying as a democracy.
The Big Lie is an interesting meme, given that its central, falsifiable tenet of a ‘stolen election’ has been falsified by any reasonable evidentiary standard. Indeed, I find remarkable the apparent fact that those who profess belief in it lack evidence of its truth, other than the claims of Trump and his enablers. This situation should be viewed as suspicious because inventors and supporters of the Big Lie so often are conflicted, being themselves beneficiaries of those who are cajoled to believe them ‘wholecloth’, uncritically. This circumstance is so patently obvious that it entered the realm of movies (well before Trump’s tenure in office). Consider the movie Galaxy Quest (DreamWorks 1999), which offers a wonderful
balance of serious commentary in a comic setting, in which a threatened alien civilization appeals to the heroes of a fictional Star Trek-like television series, whose episodes they interpret as historical records. Where, among today’s Big Lie adherents, is the healthy skepticism that might alert them to their folly, or embolden them to own up to their folly?
My brief description above of possible dynamics of civics in the digital age raises the question of how best to present civics to the full population, or to achieve the fullest feasible penetrance of civics in our fragmented society. My instinct suggests one answer: fighting fire with fire. The top-down process seems to have potential to influence masses of people, hence the popular phrase ‘crowd sourcing’. People do not think only individually, evaluating evidence as they are guided to do in a high school Biology laboratory, or on a jury. They also adopt ‘groupthink’, which means (to me) that they are susceptible to consensus thinking of the groups with which they are affiliated, or with which they identify. To a
large degree they may be indifferent or even resistant to evidence contradicting such groupthink.
In this scenario, and in any scenario, civics must be considered in the context of ‘realpolitik’, which is to say, in the context of factors that reasonably would seem likely to promote (or inhibit!) acceptance in target audiences. I favor use of local networking to identify trusted civics messengers within communities, most essentially to select messengers who are as close and as familiar as possible to the target audience. This
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strategy of relying upon trust would seem most likely to make the target audience receptive to the message. Indeed, the Biden Administration has relied upon this strategy to select trusted vaccine messengers to promote acceptance of vaccination against pandemic Covid-19 among adults in vaccine-resistant communities. For example, that strategy has identified messengers (beyond children’s parents and schoolteachers), such as doctors for their patients, and pastors for their religious congregations. An interesting possibility drawn from public health enlists barbershops and beauty salons to deliver fact-based advice to their customers. (See, for example, Releford et al. 2010).
An example of an effective messenger in the area of promoting climate change acceptance is climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe (2017, 2021). She is a Texan with a fundamentalist Christian background. She related the story of how her father was skeptical of climate change science, and of green technology to counteract greenhouse gas emissions. She
became an effective messenger promoting (at first to her father) acceptance of green technology, using the strategy of noting how much money he could save, for example by using solar energy for home heating and cooling. His civically responsible action then was driven not by scientific evidence, but by economics. The bottom line (appropriate phraseology in this economic context): we must deliver civics messages effectively, in the real world, which is a digital world in which social media enable purveyors of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘alternative realities’ to compete effectively with real reality. We must identify messengers and utilize them effectively, including operating in the digital world of social media. We must fight fire with fire.
We may promote teaching of civics to children and young adults, but in doing so we must consider their possible viewpoint that they are blameless in causing the various messes that we have made of our society. How can we motivate young people to take responsibility? I suggest
motivating them to accept responsibility for repairing our world, even if not for having messed it up.
An analogy might be useful pedagogically. Consider how passengers on the RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Titanic out of Southampton, England felt in 1912 when their vessel hit and was sunk by an iceberg. The accident was tragic, but it was not the fault of passengers on the Titanic. It was attributable to faulty design of the ship, and to its crew,
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who failed to protect the ship against its vulnerabilities.2 Passengers
RMS Titanic3
The Pale Blue Dot4
2 Notwithstanding the great marketing hype that “God himself could not sink this ship,” the Titanic had design flaws, especially related to spacing and strength of its rivets and inadequate internal compartmentalization to contain water in the event of a hull breach.
3RMS Titanic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic#/media/File:RMS_Titanic_3.jpg
4 The Pale Blue Dot: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pale-blue-dot-revisited
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must have felt useless and helpless to save the ship, but they probably would have accepted responsibility for trying to save it if only they could, even though they could not take responsibility for sinking it.
Consider a more modern voyage than that of the Titanic. Consider the current Spaceship Earth, on which we are all passengers. Its image famously was captured by NASA’s Voyager I spacecraft on 14 February 1990, from a distance of about 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers), in a photograph dubbed The Pale Blue Dot. Nature on our Pale Blue Dot “obeys no sovereign boundaries, and neither does the worsening ecological crisis” (Patrick 2021). Young people clearly cannot be blamed for the sorry condition of our planet, nor for its vulnerability before the forces of nature… but they can be encouraged to accept responsibility for our (their) planet’s future welfare via their present choices as its residents and as its citizens.
Golden-rule civics. Considering the above, civics lessons should be instilled beginning as early as possible in childhood, age-appropriately. As I was growing up, I aspired to acquire the wisdom that I saw, or thought I saw, in adults. Now that I am older (some would say ‘old’!), I have come to observe a wider diversity of adults. Many, including some elected officeholders, patently have failed to reach levels of emotional and intellectual maturity to which I had aspired. Civics requires these attributes, which I might summarize as being mindful and thoughtful. My observation that many adults are neither impresses me with the importance of emotional and intellectual maturity and self-discipline. Indeed, our legal system assigns accountability to adults, who are at legal peril if immaturity or impulsiveness prevents them from maintaining their behavior within legal (and civic) norms. In short, we have the right, and more importantly the imperative, to expect and demand civic behavior, and to hold accountable those who transgress.
Understanding civics requires more than memorizing a list of civics rules. Civics is a way of thinking and acting responsibly, for example by following the ‘golden rule’: do unto others as you would have others do unto you. With regard to contemporary issues addressed in this book, civics entails a way of thinking toward non-partisan, clear, fair, and objective problem evaluation and problem solving. For example, if a political officeholder is impeached, his or her acquittal or conviction should depend upon weighing the evidence fairly, to the
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maximum possible degree overriding inevitable personal biases. One need only consider Trump’s two impeachments to understand the civic irresponsibility of G.O.P. (Senate) officeholders in abandoning the weight of incontrovertible evidence of his guilt, placing their personal careers and preferences above the national interest. The consequence of this failure has been dire, and may prove to be more dire, depending, for example, upon what Trump has done with top secret government documents that he stole and stored at his Mar-aLago club and residence (for example, FBI 2022), and refused to turn over to the National Archives as legally required.
Office holder impeachments may affect many interests, including the personal interests of the office holder and his/her family, as well as the political associates in his/her party. Such personal interests, however, are tangential to the main stakeholders, which are the officeholder’s constituents and the district in which the office holder held office. In Trump’s case, that was (and is) the
entire nation. If the victim of a crime is an individual, that justifiably might produce a different outcome from that in the case of an officeholder’s crime against the People of the United States. If I am accused of embezzling funds that I used to improve my family’s living condition, my family might have an interest in my acquittal in the hypothetical case titled The People of the State of New York vs. Bob Michaels, but that personal interest should not be allowed to outweigh the interest of The People.
Civics most essentially demands social responsibility on the part of all voters and holders of public office. It is a non-partisan issue, but recent examples of civic irresponsibility have been perpetrated by both Republican and Democratic voters and officeholders. Their respective behavior, however, has been neither civically nor morally equivalent. I have detailed significant civic and moral irresponsibility on the part of Republicans, but here I
contrast such behavior with that of Democratic voters and officeholders. Specifically, Republican and Democratic behaviors have been neither civically nor morally equivalent, as exemplified below.
New York State Governor (now former Governor) Andrew Cuomo recently came under attack for pursuing a politically expedient strategy of burying Covid-19 deaths among nursing home residents in a sea of data on Covid-19 deaths in hospitals and
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elsewhere. Simultaneously multiple female employees of his office accused Cuomo of sexual harassment. Cuomo sought to justify his actions, and vehemently denied accusations of improper behavior. In response, Democratic office holders have demanded (and received, as of 23 August 2021) Cuomo’s resignation, and referred the matter to New York State Attorney General Laetitia James for criminal investigation, and to a legislative committee to investigate possible impeachment (Daily Gazette 2021). Voters were split on whether Cuomo should resign:
“Half of New York voters polled say Gov. Andrew Cuomo should stay in office and not resign amid mounting scandals, a new Siena poll found… The poll, conducted between March 8 and 12, found that 50 percent of voters asked said Cuomo should not resign, while 35 percent said he should, the poll found... The poll also found that 35 percent of voters said Cuomo has committed sexual
harassment, while 24 percent said he has not… Also, 57 percent of voters were satisfied with how Cuomo has addressed the allegations, while 32 percent were not satisfied.”
How does this range of voter and office holder actions in connection with evident misbehavior by a Democratic office holder compare with such egregious action by a Republican office holder? Here is the analysis published by Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin (2021):
“This is what a responsible party does. Its members assess the magnitude of credible evidence of wrongdoing, the severity of the alleged conduct, and the moral and political cost of defending a scoundrel, and then put
decency and good governance ahead of tribal loyalty. This is not a weakness; it affords them moral authority and reaffirms the trust that voters place in elected officials… The Republicans time and again have shown that they would never do such a thing.”
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Reasonableness in civics Civics additionally implies reasonableness. I will illustrate
this first via an example of unreasonableness (among Democrats). As of this writing, Democrats have been striving to pass either or both of two voting rights bills, but the Senate is evenly divided and stymied by Republican opposition. President Biden, as of this writing, plans a trip to Georgia, where he will deliver a speech supporting a Senate rules change to protect the legislation from blockage by a Republican filibuster, which would require a 60-vote majority to overcome (Collins and Brown 2022). Voting rights advocates nonetheless are demanding action, not “platitudes,” to muscle the bills through Congress, but they seem to have failed to analyze available policy options, and failed to select a preferred policy. Apparently, the absence of any reasonably attainable policy option does not constrain voting rights groups’ demands for action. Much as I would like to see progress on voting rights, I object to demands being made to promote progress in the absence of any strategic policy pathway that reasonably might be expected to achieve it.
As a related issue, if the voting rights bills both fail, a bipartisan strategy is under discussion to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887 (Sargent 2022). Trump used ambiguities and weaknesses in the Electoral Count Act to justify actions, culminating in the 6January 2021 insurrection, aimed to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The proposed Electoral Count Act would block all pathways used by Trump to subvert the 2020 election. For example, large blocs of members of each chamber would be required to object to a political party’s slate of electors. The revised Electoral Count Act also would create a judicial review procedure to prevent states from failing to follow their pre-existing, lawful procedures for appointing electors. The bill also would clarify the vice president’s role as being ceremonial only, and not discretionary. As of this writing, several Republican senators have been discussing such Electoral Count Act reform. Whether a needed minimum of 10 GOP senators will support it remains uncertain.
Unreasonableness in the U. S. Supreme Court
A related ‘reasonableness’ issue might be raised relating to the right of a woman to choose to terminate her pregnancy via abortion.
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The Supreme Court decision that protected that right since 1973 has been Roe v. Wade, in which the Court ruled that the U. S. Constitution protects the right to abortion without excessive government interference. That right has been resisted by Republicans for decades. Recently G.O.P. strategies have included unwillingness to consider President Barrack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland (currently President Biden’s Attorney General), followed by appointments of multiple antiabortion justices to the Supreme Court, which culminated in the Court in June 2022 overturning Roe v. Wade. This Supreme Court action, of course, goes way beyond ‘unreasonable’, as it also will be tragic for women whose life course will be altered by interference with a right that women had every reason to count on, over the past half century. Indeed, the new crop of state laws enabled by the overturn of Roe v. Wade generally, unreasonably, and cruelly fail to include exceptions to the abortion prohibition for rape and for medical risks to pregnant women of carrying their pregnancies to term.
A reasonable partial remedy seems achievable, specifically if the Court would carve out a religious exception to state abortion prohibitions, as the U. S. Constitution prohibits curtailing freedom of religion. Many ‘red’ states, and the Supreme Court itself, have exhibited sympathy to religious rights, and the currently right-leaning Supreme Court in recent cases already has deferred to religious rights that would allow otherwise prohibited behavior. In 1996, for example, the Court affirmed the right of native Americans to consume the banned hallucinogen peyote in religious rites.
Regarding abortion specifically, tenets of major religions allow it. In the case of risk to the pregnant woman, some religions even may prescribe abortion. Judaism, for example, teaches that a mother’s life takes priority over a fetus, whose life begins at birth. The idea of getting anti-abortion states and the Supreme Court to accept abortion based upon their friendliness to religious claims does seem like a great concept, even
if only a very partial measure. Even so, I predict that intolerance for abortion will prevail over even such a narrow appeal to religious tolerance.
Two factors might mitigate the effect of Supreme Court decisions adverse to Roe v. Wade, and to abortion. One is that unavailability of abortions in states that prohibit them will be counterbalanced by expanded access in states that do not. California, for example, has been positioning
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itself to be a sanctuary for women needing abortions who come from states prohibiting them (Beam 2021). I would expect services to these needy out-of-state women to include subsidized transport to California, and housing while waiting, along with other needed support services.
A second mitigating factor is that protection of abortion rights by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision has received high approval ratings from Democratic and Republican voters. In effect, Roe v. Wade has protected elected officials in anti-abortion (red) states from shouldering the unpopular burden of prohibiting abortions in their states. Now that Roe v. Wade is overturned, it no longer can protect women’s right to choose abortion, and it no longer can protect local officials, whose reelection may be placed at risk if they support legislation in their state rescinding women’s reproductive autonomy. Such opposition also would be unpopular among red state abortion providers, whose livelihoods would be threatened. Indeed, states prohibiting abortion would take a financial hit, as services provided in-state now would have
to be provided out-of-state, transferring money flows from in-state to out-of-state providers.
This raises a related civics issue: that people who favor the ‘right to choose’ must be heard and be counted at the polls. I would expect that the demographic of young women will be most highly motivated in this regard, as they are the principal consumers of abortion services. As a demographic, they also are highly likely to vote. A reasonable responsibility on all people who are sympathetic to this view, however, is that, to be effective, they must perform their civic duty: be heard, and be counted.
If the Supreme Court will not defend reasonableness, then states would have to choose reasonableness or unreasonableness, with attendant consequences. That is the position that the Biden Administration has imposed upon Republicans in the House and Senate,
with the plan announced on 30 June 2022 to introduce a bill carving an exception to the filibuster rule, to enable the Senate to pass a bill guaranteeing abortion rights federally. (The House does not allow filibustering.) Republicans might support this initiative, as they recently supported a modest gun control rule, for their political benefit in the upcoming November mid-term elections. OR NOT! Stay tuned.
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The extremism exhibited by the Supreme Court has motivated prominent Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson to opine “It’s not a court; it’s a junta” (Robinson 2022):
“This isn’t your country anymore. You are now governed by a secretive and unaccountable junta in long black robes, and there are going to be some changes around here… Our de facto rulers are Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. usually joining in. Be sure to remember their names, because they are now large and in charge — and because they envision a United States far different from the nation we’re accustomed to.”
I am not so sure. Almost immediately after overturning Roe v. Wade, the Court (in contrast) supported immigration, ruling that the Biden Administration could end Trump’s ‘remain-in-Mexico’ policy, which had prohibited immigrants from Central America from entering the U. S. during consideration of their petitions. This clearly was contrary to Robinson’s characterization of the Court’s social agenda.
Further, criticism of Roe v. Wade itself did not originate solely from the right. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in 2013 opined that Roe v. Wade imposed an abortion right on a nation ahead of its popular acceptance, thereby weakening rather than strengthening it (Gerson 2022.06.29): “My criticism of Roe,” she said at the University of Chicago, “is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum that was on the side of change.” The jolting overturn of Roe v. Wade, according to Gerson, comes at a difficult time, however, when “there is little evidence our democracy is prepared for it.”
Beyond Roe v. Wade, the extremism of the current Supreme Court is well documented. For example, professor of public policy Maya Sen at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, noted that “The court’s eye-popping move to the conservative right is confirmed by research that compares its decisions to public opinion” (Sen 2022). Supreme Court decisions generally had been in step with Americans through 2020, but swerved to the right with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This rightward
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trajectory has been described generally via the Court’s ideological ‘median voter’: Anthony Kennedy followed by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2018, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch currently. The rightward shift of judicial ideology also has been described quantitatively, via Martin-Quinn scores, which are based upon justices’ voting history.
Recent Supreme Court decisions clearly have been tragic, cruel, and even stupid: ---1. to overturn Roe v. Wade, and --2. to assert a constitutional right, beyond owning guns, of allowing gun owners to carry their guns in public. Yet, rather than impugn the Supreme Court as Eugene Robinson suggested, I prefer to believe, and I do suspect, that the Court envisions our nation governed more by laws passed by Congress, and less by Supreme Court decrees. So, if Congress wishes to guarantee abortion rights, it can and should pass such legislation, which now is being attempted (as explained above). If Congress wishes to limit the right to carry weapons, Congress can pass laws
reducing this practice, for example by requiring more stringent and more universally applied background checks as a condition for purchasing a gun, thereby reducing the incidence of unbalanced people carrying guns in public. At least, I hope that this more benevolent vision more accurately characterizes the Supreme Court, notwithstanding its current ‘rightness’.
If I have not reached the point of impugning the Court, I have reached the point of impugning the Republican Party of the State of Texas based upon adoption of its extremist 2022 Platform (Texas GOP 2022). It is a 40-page document replete with antidemocratic positions. Texas is a demographically shifting state that Democrats have targeted; maybe its Republicans have gone too far, even for Texans! Examples of the extremist Republican platform planks are provided below, from Carlin Meyer, who is an attorney and professor emerita of New York Law School (Meyer 2022): “It’s hard to know which of
these planks is most appalling; together they represent a frightening rejection of principles upon which this nation was founded, embodied in the U. S. Constitution.” For me, it is a call, most emphatically a non-partisan call to action by all Americans, to expunge GOP extremists and preserve our democracy. Meyer’s list of radical and destructive planks in the recently adopted Texas G.O.P Platform is provided (verbatim) here:
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--Reject “the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election” and affirm “that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States”; --Require students to learn that life begins at fertilization; prohibit the “teaching, exposure, and/or discussion of sexual matters" and remove related books or materials from schools; --Return Christianity to schools and government; --End gay marriage; --Eliminate the constitutional power to levy income taxes; --Treat homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice”; --Reject the Equal Rights Amendment; --End all gun safety measures and arm teachers; --Withdraw from the United Nations and the World
Health Organization (UJN WHO); --Support returning prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments to our schools, courthouses, and other government buildings; --Support the defunding of “climate justice” initiatives, the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency, and repeal of the Endangered Species Act; and --Call for a vote on “whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.”
Apologists for GOP extremism naïvely might ascribe such extremism to innocent ignorance. It is not innocent. It is the product of fraudulent, well-funded political action intentionally aimed at deceiving voters. This is not speculation, but the product of diligent investigation, for example by the January 6 Committee regarding the
insurrection at the U. S. Capitol. Over a longer period, it is the product of exposés such as that just published by GOP political operative Tim Miller, titled Why We Did It – A Travelogue from the Republican Road To Hell (Miller 2022). Make no mistake: now is a time for you to speak with your voice and with your vote for civics, for science, and for our democracy against formidable opposition being deployed currently against all three.
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C h a p t e r 0 2 . A B r i e f I n t r o d u c t i o n t o S c i e n c e
Introducing science is a great honor, and a great responsibility. More accurately, I am introducing science in the particularly broad context of its usage in this book. I took the above photo in my laboratory in the 1970s, and published it in my doctoral dissertation (Michaels 1979). There, I introduced it accurately but technically, writing that the image is a phase contrast light micrograph of a single cell of the green alga Dunaliella tertiolecta (Chlorophyceae) cultured in artificial seawater and photographed during its exponential growth phase, fixed and stained in Lugol's iodine, and viewed via an oil immersion lens on a Zeiss microscope at a magnification of X1600. This description passed muster in my dissertation and among the faculty members serving on my doctoral committee. Here, I want to emphasize that such information provided about the above image, though still accurate, nonetheless would NOT pass muster, being irrelevant to the present context of science, even though broad, that this book brings to bear on contemporary issues of existential importance to our democracy. More generally, bench science jargon has no place in communicating the message of science, largely because it cannot and does not communicate that message beyond a narrow group of specialists. The message of science is powerful only if it is communicated understandably. In short, science is a tool for gaining knowledge and communicating understanding. It is a powerful weapon against ignorance (“the pen is mightier than the sword”), and you don’t need a license or a waiting period to own it and use it.
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------------------------------------------------------------ “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” Continental Congress. United States of America, Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776 ----------------------------------------
Like civics, science is a realm of objective study, explication, and advocacy that we, as members of a democracy, are obligated to embrace and transmit. Science, like civics, is a way of thinking. It is not a list of scientific facts, theories, or laws. You might know all the answers to science questions on a quiz show such as Jeopardy, and still
be scientifically illiterate. Thinking scientifically most essentially entails applying the scientific method to problem solving… more (quite a bit more) on this later. In short, in science, an analytical mind is more valuable than a photographic memory. Indeed, the two may tend to be mutually exclusive as, to reason, an analytical mind manipulates information, whereas a photographic memory freezes it, possibly inhibiting such manipulation.
For me, the principal lesson of science is that falsifiable beliefs must be justified based upon evidence, not authority. The American Declaration of Independence, quoted above, states that certain truths are “self-evident,” that is, they are true by declaration rather than by evidence. The “truths” referred to in this 1776 tenet of American democracy refer to value judgments which, as opinions, are not scientifically falsifiable, and therefore are not subject to resolution via the scientific method. The Declaration is neutral about falsifiable
statements, which indeed are subject to refutation via the scientific method. The Declaration, therefore, is neutral about science. I am not.
Consistent with the Declaration of Independence, therefore, you should not be persuaded by a scientifically falsifiable statement just because a pundit penned it. Rather, you should be persuaded by supporting evidence that is sufficient to overcome healthy skepticism. You should be persuaded by persuasive scientific reasoning because it counts as evidence. For example, you should not say “show me the dead
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bodies” that may be predicted by an argument for pandemic preparedness; the evidentiary value of the argument itself must be evaluated as justifying (or not justifying) the need for preparatory action. This exercise constitutes a so-called ‘thought experiment’. When a pandemic strikes, as it has, I would prefer to show you the dearth of death as evidence to convince you of the wisdom of having taken pro-active preparatory action.
Neither physical nor purely intellectual evidence alone, however, can overcome ornery intellectual (or non-intellectual!) resistance. Evidence evaluation requires bias-overcoming objectivity, as well as science literacy in the areas of STEM AND BEYOND (Feuer 2021):
“After 4 years of boorish incivility, incendiary nativist extremism, a crippling pandemic, resurgent racism, and riotous mobs incited to attack the Capitol, can the United States rebuild its
civic and moral infrastructure? To repair the damage and prepare the next generation of citizens and leaders requires a new spirit of cooperation between the science and civics education communities” [emphasis added].
My use of the word ‘science’ in this book likewise is broader than STEM. It embraces ethics, including (for example) standards of integrity expected among Federal Government scientists (US CRS
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2021)5. It encompasses STEM, medical science6, and social sciences,
indeed, any investigative endeavors that rely upon observations that are objective, experiments that are repeatable, and results that are replicable.
This book is intended to include topics that clearly are political, but to be neither a political read nor a political screed. My intent is to address political issues in a scientific (and non-partisan) manner. That is, politics encompasses not only partisan issues, but also science, including but not limited to ‘political science’. Most essentially, this book encompasses, and emphasizes, science in decision making, and advocates evidence-based decision making. That is a broad concept, but here I will illustrate the nexus of science and decision making narrowly, regarding a strictly scientific issue.
5While there is no uniform definition of scientific integrity across the federal government, the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP’s) October 2020 report, Enhancing the Security and Integrity of America’s Research Enterprise, offers a framework for research integrity, which is a component of scientific integrity: --Openness and transparency enable productive collaboration and help ensure appropriate disclosure of potential conflicts of interest and commitment. --Accountability and honesty help acknowledge errors and correct behaviors that can hamper progress. --Impartiality and objectivity protect against improper influence and distortion of scientific knowledge. --Respect helps create an environment where all can be heard and contribute. --Freedom of inquiry allows individual curiosity to guide scientific discovery. --Reciprocity ensures scientists and institutions exchange materials, knowledge, data, access to facilities and natural sites, and training in a way that benefits collaborating partners proportionally. --Merit-based competition helps ensure a level playing field where the best ideas and innovations can advance. 6The science and the art of medicine overlap, but strictly should be regarded as distinct. The art of medicine, for example, is replete with ‘case studies’, whereas medical science more formally would require ‘case-control studies’. The science and the art, however, now overlap predominantly. Few medical doctors these days apply leeches in their practice. Indeed, much or most of the ‘art of medicine’ by now has been informed and guided by experimental verification, for example, by defining when a case can serve as its own control. page 35
Astronomers are raising a constellation (so to speak) of political issues based upon the scientifically quantifiable high nearterm (millennial) risk of a planet-threatening asteroid impact (Bender 2021). Should the planet defend itself against near-Earth asteroids? Their answer is “yes,” based upon the risks. Should this effort be undertaken via creation of an international coalition, or should the U. S. lead with its own technology? Should that technology be military (including nuclear), and should the U. S. military be the lead agency? What should we make of China’s recently stated commitment to earth defense, which would enable them to develop technologies that could be used against us militarily, for example, satellite-killing missiles? Individuals must consider these issues in a civically responsible and scientifically literate manner. This should not be a partisan issue, even if it is a political issue.
A definition of political science, from Wikipedia, is: “the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thoughts, political behavior, and associated constitutions and laws” [emphasis added]. By way of disclosure, I am a scientist who is interested in politics, but I am emphatically not a political scientist in the sense of a scientist specializing in political science.
Arrival of the Scientific Revolution in Western Europe roughly coincided with Voltaire’s 18th-Century era, at which time candor, truth, and clear thinking additionally came to be described as objective thinking. If you have opinions about aesthetic issues, however, you may be engaging in subjective thinking. Objective and subjective thinking both have a place in your scientific psyche, and not always for completely different things. A mathematical proof, for example, may be objectively correct. It also may be
viewed subjectively as ‘beautiful’, which frequently is the case among mathematicians.
Subjective experiences, conversely, may be objective. Your subjective experience of the color green might evoke yearnings for green things, such as lush lawns, temperate forests, or tropical rainforests. Green, however, also may be viewed as an objective experience, associated with a narrow spectral band of light. If your eyes lack color receptors (cone cells), you are unable altogether to
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discern green. If your eyes have a full complement of cone cells, however, you still might not see green. To (ornery) you applies the adage, “no one is so blind as him [or her, or pick your pronoun] who will not see.”
Science literacy
Science literacy denotes familiarity with the scientific method, and ability to read and understand non-technical articles about scientific topics. My usage of the word ‘science’ (as defined earlier) is broad. Here I address what I mean by literacy in science, independent of the (broad) scope of science adopted in this book. A scientifically literate individual also should be able to formulate questions, seek, find, and evaluate information, and raise issues that might be of personal and/or societal interest. I will start by exemplifying science literacy via an article (Duvvuri 2021) evaluating the public health cost of natural gas,
in which (in my opinion) science literacy is at best marginal.
Duvvuri (2021) presented a non-technical summary of a Harvard School of Public Health study (Buonocore et al. 2021). Duvvuri, with whom I sympathize, clearly was challenged by a poorly written scientific article. In her simplistic interpretation, natural gas was reported to be associated with increased concentrations of airborne particulate matter, termed PM , which are pollutants within a diameter of 2.5 micrometers 2.5 (microns), and with numerous adverse health effects also associated with PM , including premature mortality: 2.5 Among coal, gas, oil, wood and biomass, in 2017 the combusted fuel that took the greatest toll on public health in Illinois through a pollutant known as PM was 2.5 gas. This statement misleadingly implies that PM produced by 2.5 natural gas combustion was reported to be more hazardous to human health than previously understood. A more accurate explication of the Buonocore et al. (2021) report would explain that evolution of fuel combustion generally has been guided by factors most notably including fuel availability, combustion technology, pollutant capture technology, regulatory safety requirements, and (ultimately) economy. This evolution has resulted in natural gas combustion surpassing combustion of more dangerous fuels such as coal, oil, wood, and biomass. Natural
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gas has emerged as being among the safest fuels. Its contribution to adverse health effects arises, not from its toxic properties, but from its widespread use, contrary to Divvuri’s statement that it poses greater risks than previously understood, and her innuendo that maybe a better fuel should be sought.
We are at a point in technology evolution where further safety gains can be expected but, as recognized metaphorically, in environmental science “no such thing as a ‘free lunch’ exists.” If we want to heat residences (‘stationary sources’ of air pollution) in winter, we may improve efficiency and reduce impacts on the environment and on human health, but impacts will not, and cannot, decline to zero. PM is a highly toxic category of primary 2.5 combustion emissions from both stationary and mobile sources (that is, vehicles, which are not included in the Buonocore et al report). In this context, here is what Buonocore et al. stated about the contribution of natural gas to this category of air pollutant:
“Biomass and wood combustion was the largest contributor to health impacts from residential buildings, largely driven by primary PM emissions… Gas use was the second2.5 largest contributor to health impacts from residential buildings, largely driven by NH 3 emissions” [that is, by ammonia, not by PM ]. 2.5 Another comment on the Divvuri report relevant to science literacy relates to its inappropriately narrow scope. The public health impact of natural gas for heating must be balanced against alternatives. One alternative is not to heat residences. This alternative would produce greater public health impacts, except in (rare) buildings that are designed to remain livable and comfortable off the power grid in all seasons. Other alternatives may involve different fuels and/or less comfort (for example, lower indoor temperatures in winter). We are advancing along many fronts simultaneously, and probably too slowly on most or all of them… but the no-free-lunch adage is unlikely to be refuted any time soon.
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Evidence-based decision making
Evidence-based decision making refers to the scientific basis of support that should be adopted as a prerequisite to civically responsible decision making. In turn, decision making consists of more than just considering the science, or the scientific evidence/data. Decision making also should flow from prior policy making. This model is formalized to afford ‘stakeholders’ a voice in the policy making and decision-making process. At the Federal level, the state of the science around an issue is assessed, often by experts who advise government agencies. Ideally, the science is assessed broadly and non-politically. For example, in the area of airborne particulate air pollutants (particulate matter, or PM), in which I have long experience, the Federal Clean Air Science Advisory Committee (CASAC) periodically produces a ‘criteria document’ analyzing the science. The U. S. EPA then uses the criteria document to formulate policy (promulgate regulations under the Federal Clean Air Act), such as maximum
acceptable PM air levels for particles of different sizes (10 microns, PM ; 2.5 microns, PM ) and for different time-weighted averages (2410 2.5 hour average, annual average). The regulations then are proposed in the Federal register, and the public is invited to submit comments, to which the Agency must respond. My own experience as to the effectiveness of this process in practice has been mixed. My client developed and marketed an airborne particle monitoring device (then known as the TEOM7) capable of
7 The TEOM, or Tapered Element Oscillating Microbalance, represented a major advance in air monitoring. It had been developed under contract to NASA for measuring the mass of micrometeorites impinging on spacecraft operating in the absence of a gravitational base such as the surface of the earth. It therefore could not operate as a traditional laboratory scale that measured the force exerted by gravity on a sample of captured particles following desiccation. Instead, the TEOM (in space) operated as a filter placed at the end of an oscillating glass rod. In accordance with the principle by which a pendulum operates, the oscillating frequency depends upon the fixed length of the glass rod and the increasing mass of the filter as it accumulates particles (micrometeorites) during transport. The oscillation frequency was obtained via telemetry. The particle mass then would be translated to a mass per volume (such as micrograms per cubic meter) based upon the area of the filter and velocity of the spacecraft. For terrestrial use, the glass rod was replaced with a hollow glass tube, through which a known air flow rate would provide the volume
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measuring the mass of airborne particles remotely and in real time (instantaneously). My role included making presentations about the usefulness of such an instrument to address documented adverse effects of exposure to airborne particles over brief intervals, less than one day. I proposed a time-weighted regulatory average of one hour to augment the 24-hour and annual averaging times already embodied in the Clean air Act. The TEOM gradually emerged as the standard instrument in numerus nations around the world, but not in the U. S. until years later. I was invited to present a one-hour seminar on this issue at the U. S. EPA Office of Research and Development in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. In fact, the topic was interesting to EPA, and I wound up spending much of the day there… but it did not result in Agency action on this proposal… and the one-hour averaging time still is not embodied in the Clean Air Act, even though the TEOM has become the dominant PM monitoring device in the U. S.
From my experience, the concepts of science and policy are related as follows:
01. Decisions should be consistent with policy. For example, the U. S. Centers for Disease Control must decide whether, when, and for whom to authorize Covid-19 booster vaccinations. This decision should be made based upon a policy, for example, that boosters would be authorized for subpopulations (such as immune compromised people and/or seniors in general) for whom a cost/benefit analysis reveals that the combination of disease risk and disease consequence is determined to be greater than the risk of vaccine side effects.
02. Policy should be consistent with science. U. S. CDC policy on authorizing Covid-19 booster shots should rest on a firm
component of the measurement. Depending upon the environment (coal mine, smokestack, outdoor area, etc.) the filter would have to be replaced in a time frame of weeks rather than daily, adding greatly to the economic efficiency of the method. Data are obtained via telemetry, rather than via technicians visiting the filter in the field each day and bringing it to a laboratory for analysis. With additional analytical targets, such as radioactivity, biowarfare organisms, etc.), the TEOM has been modified to direct air samples into multiple chambers for automated analysis, with data transmission via telemetry.
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scientific basis, such as U. S. FDA analysis and determination of disease and booster shot risks for various subpopulations. The Biden Administration violated this principle by issuing a plan to administer booster shots eight months after completion of Covid-19 vaccination, even though the FDA had not yet evaluated the scientific merit of this plan. The decision in the absence of scientific analysis and regulatory approval offended FDA officials. Two officials leading the office that should have been in charge of approving vaccines resigned in protest (Collman 2021).
03. Science should influence policy, but often does not define policy. U. S. CDC decision making on authorizing Covid-19 booster shots clearly has been informed and influenced by science, as it should be. However, decisions must be based on all factors, not just science. For example, will the vaccine supply be adequate for anticipated demand under scenarios in which various subpopulations are authorized to receive it? Will the global pandemic be addressed better by exporting
vaccines to needy nations, from which travel to the U. S. brings Covid19 disease risks posed by emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants and subvariants of concern? What will be the economic impact of booster shots on state and local economies, and on schools including students, teachers, and families?
04. Science is never completely certain. The questions on which policy must be based, exemplified above, can be answered probabilistically, not certainly. All scientific ‘facts’ are, in a formal sense, subject to uncertainties. To convey a sense of the scope of this statement, consider the broadest objection to scientific certainty (of which I am aware): that our perceptions of reality might be manipulated, for example if we exist as characters in a vast universal computer game, in which the laws of physics as we know them are apparent, not necessarily real. In practice, the day-to-day attention of scientists and objective analysts in general is focused more on the limitations of our
own models, for example of economic dynamics in a pandemic world; it is not focused on philosophical concerns, such as whether the universe that we perceive is real or a hologram!
05. Decisions often if not usually must be made in real time, considering uncertainties. To illustrate, consider the claim against a vaccine company for injuries suffered by a vaccinated person who alleges that the injuries were caused as vaccine side effects (for example, Michaels 2017b). A definitive answer is probably unknown, but a court
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must decide the question. The court, and jury, cannot wait until the science becomes definitive; the case is in trial! Likewise, consider the claim of an individual that his/her cancer was caused by an environmental contaminant. A definitive answer is probably unknown, but the court must decide in real time, which is approximately NOW. Many millions of dollars may be at stake for Plaintiffs and Defendants. Decision making in the absence of certainty is intrinsic to the role of science in society.
06. Decisions demand different degrees of scientific certainty in different contexts. Based upon the above examples, the context of a decision can be determinative. Vaccine side effects and environmental cancer causation can be determined in court under the criterion of proof: more probably than not (p ≥0.50, that is, ≥50 percent). If you are a scientist searching for a cancer cure, you might be motivated to continue experimentation with a candidate pharmaceutical based upon less certainty (criterion = ‘maybe’!). If a
person is on trial in a criminal matter such as murder in the first degree, the criterion of certainty in the highly vaunted legal system of our democracy may be: ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt’. Similar decision criteria commonly are applied to other activities, such as launching NASA space shuttles, flying in a commercial airplane, driving a car, downhill skiing, scuba diving, and smoking. I am surprised (and chagrined), however, at the frequency with which these and other activities are undertaken without objective analysis.
07. Decision making therefore occurs in the context of risks. Two fundamental types of risks exist: type 1 and type 2. Using above examples, a type 1 risk is the possibility that a vaccine side effect (such as Guillain-Barré syndrome associated with the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine) or environmental cancer cluster will be missed, perhaps because the criterion of certainty for identifying it was too high. Type 2 risk is the possibility that a vaccine side effect or environmental
cancer cluster that does not exist erroneously will be identified as existing, perhaps because the criterion of certainty for identifying it was too low. The general area of scientific practice that involves such analysis is risk assessment (along with its companion area, risk management), which are my own areas of specialization with respect to toxicological and other public health, environmental, or occupational risks. Risk assessment also is an area within economics, in which I do not get involved.
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08. Risks may be deemed acceptable or unacceptable, depending upon context. So (for example) acceptable public health risk may differ from acceptable surgical risk. Typical maximum acceptable public health risk, say, risk of death from exposure to a cancer-causing agent (carcinogen) may be in the range of one per million (1 x 10-6) to one per hundred thousand (1 x 10-5). In contrast, if you have a potentially lethal condition that can be corrected surgically, an accepted personal risk of dying on the operating table might be one in ten (1 x 10-1), depending upon the seriousness and likely time course of the medical condition that is being corrected.
09. Overall: 'Policy’ exists in the context of problems, solutions, and decisions. That is, policies are best put in place in advance of problems arising, thereby improving response time and avoiding ad hoc actions, which might consist of policies of limited applicability that are formulated to address specific, already-existing
problems. A powerful metaphor is the U. S. Constitution, which sets forth principles of governance (policies) for application to issues (problems) as they arise. Once policies exist, alternative solutions consistent with the policies can be formulated, proposed, and compared. Based upon this activity, in which ‘stakeholders’ are given a formal voice, decisions can be made.
10. Overall: ‘Science’ exists in the context of hypotheses, experiments, results, and weight-of-evidence. This, along with repeatability of experiments and replicability of experimental results, roughly comprises the ‘scientific method’. Each problem that involves science must be evaluated anew, to account for the present weight-of-evidence. Nutrition is a notorious area where the weightof-evidence about specific issues, such as whether eggs should be a part of your diet, seems to change frequently.
11. Decisions should be consistent with the present weight of evidence. Another way of saying this is: decisions should be consistent with the present state of the science (for example, Michaels 2017b). Above all, decisions must be taken, or paralysis sets in, and issues remain undecided. In short, we should not let the quest for perfection be the enemy of adequacy.
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12. Scientists generating knowledge do not as a rule determine policy. Lawyers do! (Actually, administrators decide). One illustration of this issue is most striking to me, because it involved highly accomplished scientists, including some Nobel Prize winners and many others who would go on to win Nobel Prizes in Physics. I am speaking of the Manhattan Project, whose science and engineering activities in Los Alamos, New Mexico were led by Berkeley, California physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The Manhattan Project ultimately succeeded at producing an atomic bomb, but failed at producing it in a useful time frame for ending World War II. Many or most of the scientists who participated signed a petition advocating a decision not to use the bomb. These prominent scientists became subjects of derision, as President Harry Truman asked “Who do they think they are” to dictate military strategy to the U. S. Commander-In-Chief. The naivete of these most senior scientists to think that they were entitled to formulate military policy regarding atomic weapons use is most striking to me. It should be a lesson to all scientists and all non-
scientists… which I think is everyone.
Science appreciation. I appreciate science for many reasons. My father was a quantitative sort, but his practical upbringing guided him to business school, business accounting, and a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) credential. His post-Depression practicality eased life for our family. It eased my decision to be guided in my studies and career by my awe of nature. I had the luxury of being more academically oriented than practical. To me, science was ‘real’ in a way that accounting was not. Of course, to my father, accounting was ‘practical’, in a way (for him) that science was not.
During my science career, I did have the pleasure of observing the ‘revenge of the nerds’, meaning that people who were scholars became well-heeled because our emerging technological society needed them. My own scholarship, however, never was aimed at
profiting from the technical needs of our age. Even so, my need to pay the rent eventually did guide me toward a practical arc of professional life.
I started as an immature young college student imagining a picturesque coastal life as a marine biologist. I pursued this goal at CCNY (the City College of the City University of New York), where tuition was free and, using 15-cent tokens, I could commute to school from my parents’ co-op apartment in Queens. I continued by leaving
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home, and working toward my MS Degree in Zoology, specializing in the new field of Environmental Ecology at the University of Georgia. There, the ‘Father of Ecology’, Professor Eugene P. Odum, was a prominent faculty member. He consented to serve as a member of my Master’s Thesis Committee. I performed laboratory research on DDT toxicity to freshwater algae (Michaels 1971). Athens, Georgia was pretty far from a picturesque beach locale.
I continued further, returning to New York and working toward my Doctoral (PhD) Degree in Biology, specializing in Theoretical Evolutionary Ecology, at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. There, I performed research on PCB toxicity to marine algae (‘phytoplankters’) at the Marine Sciences Research Center, in the laboratory of Dr. Charles F. Wurster (Michaels 1979, Michaels et al. 1982). Dr. Wurster was one of two founders of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) who were on my Doctoral Committee. The other was Dr. Robert Smolker. By now,
though I was in marine sciences, I hardly could remember what a beach looked like!
A memorable occasion for me was spending a night with friends on the sailboat of its egotistical owner. He proudly confided in me: “I’ve been working for 10 years. In the next few years, by age 30, I think I will retire.” My response was: “I’ve been retired for 10 years. I think, in the next few years, by age 30, I will take a job.”
Eventually, I did have to get a ‘real job’. I had earned credentials to teach high school in New York City and New York State, so I did that while looking for a job in my own academic field. The job that I found was in a consulting firm outside of Washington, DC. This set me firmly on my path to a consulting career. I made numerous field trips (‘site visits’) to places like landfills and industrial facilities… but rarely to beaches. By then, I could hardly remember
what a beach looked like and, equally bad, I could hardly remember what a laboratory looked like!
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Science humor. Another form of science appreciation for me was (and is) science humor. It was often dry, and therefore well-suited to me. Like anyone else, scientists may indulge in humor, in which they sometimes think unscientifically. More often, scientists think scientifically even when kidding. Scientific American, for example, has published a semi-serious monthly column by Steve Mirsky, who “has been writing the Anti-Gravity column since a typical tectonic plate was about 36 inches from its current location.” Mirsky retired recently.
Science humor sometimes enters the peer-reviewed literature. A favorite example of mine relates to calculation of the possible population density of monsters in Loch Ness (Sheldon and Kerr 1972; Scheider and Wallis 1973). Scheider and Wallis “put these estimates forward as a further contribution to the study of an organism that is at best difficult to observe.” When criticized (Mortimer 1973), Scheider and Wallis (1973) defiantly responded that they could apply similar
methods to alpine ecosystems in the Himalayas to estimate the population density of Abominable Snowmen in Tibet.
Logical vs. critical thinking. Another component of clear thinking relates to the under-appreciated distinction between logical thinking and critical thinking. Logical thinking encompasses the process of identifying logical possibilities, for example, logically possible motivations for an action taken. Possibilities might include technical considerations and ulterior personal, financial, and/or political motivations. Logical thinking, therefore, accumulates possibilities and, therefore, may be an expansive process.
Critical thinking, in contrast, encompasses winnowing the universe of logical possibilities down to a necessarily (much) smaller population of possibilities that objectively might merit serious consideration, or further consideration, or maybe even experimental
investigation. Thus, scientific progress depends, not only on openmindedness (logical thinking), but on closed-mindedness (critical thinking). In short, scientific progress depends upon winnowing expansive logical possibilities down to worthy hypotheses for testing. Such winnowing therefore is formalized within a hierarchy of scientific believability, from highly credible scientific theory down to credibly speculative scientific hypothesis. In science, nothing is certain. You might consider that to be a fact, but I will not blame you if you do not!
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Quick vs. slow thinking. I have suggested that civics should be introduced to children age-appropriately, toward attaining emotional and intellectual maturity gradually, with age. At any age, civics requires what I have called ‘thoughtfulness’. Thoughtfulness means thinking a lot, about a lot of things. It does not mean thinking slowly, however.
One hobby of mine might illustrate what I mean: doing the world-renowned Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, as my father did throughout my childhood, which I spent living with my family in Queens. When I give up on a crossword clue, I sometimes consult a blog with each day’s completed puzzle, along with a difficulty rating that, as far as I can tell, equates to the number of minutes required to finish: longer completion time equates to a harder puzzle. The blogger prides himself on how quickly he can complete the puzzle, usually in about 10 minutes (‘easy’). In contrast, I derive pleasure from spending the day and evening working on the puzzle in small chunks of time,
adding up to a lot longer time for completion.
Which is better? A universal correct answer for crossword puzzles does not exist. I liken the issue to bicycle racing. Most bike races go to the swift, but a less common race measures how long the rider can remain upright (neither foot touching the ground) while zigzagging along a short course within a narrowly defined (chalk-outlined) path. The race is won by the slowest biker. Applying these ideas to civics, I offer a universal answer, which might even be correct: go slow, be tentative, and be thoughtful!
An impressive feat is when people give thoughtful answers without first taking the time (that I would need!) for thoughtful thinking. Fortunately, such rapid-fire wisdom is exhibited primarily on screen, as TV or movie entertainment code for high intelligence. Being thoughtful in real life may be difficult for people, in part because we also harbor
instincts that are its opposite: we are more or less impulsive.
Fundamentally, people today are the products of evolution over thousands of human generations. In each generation, survivors and reproducers exhibited the most adaptive genetic traits, which presumably may have included genes linked to personality (as opposed to just physical structure or other attributes). The urge to take action rather than contemplate action, therefore, may have served humankind well. That urge seems to have left us with a high fraction of relatively
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action-oriented people. To their ancestors we may owe humanity’s survival (so far). To their propensity toward haste, we eventually might owe our extinction as a species… but, if that happens, who among us could blame them?
Civics in our democracy requires commitment to thoughtfulness and contemplation. Our democracy is itself the product of both, together producing social evolution. Its current condition is different from the past, just as environments change, and just as the most adaptive traits change along with environmental change. Thoughtfulness and contemplation are needed as prerequisites to taking action. This reality belies the famous adage attributed to the Chinese philosopher Confucius (551-479 BC) that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” In his era, the path may have seemed more immediately clearer. Today’s world is more complex. The destination distance of a thousand miles might increase if the Confucian step is taken in haste, in the wrong direction, due to
inadequate prior analysis.
Thoughtfulness and contemplation are needed today more than ever to ‘work smart’, in the service of our national interests, and within boundaries imposed by democratic principles. Specifically, civics teaches us to respect the rights of others while serving the interests of our country. Incarcerating Japanese Americans during WWII, for example, constituted a xenophobic impulsive action, taken without objective consideration, that ultimately undermined our claim to democracy, and our democracy. We must work strategically and effectively. We must avoid being victimized by impulses that might undermine our great democratic project.
We must especially be sure that we do not elect to public office individuals who are not committed to thoughtfulness and mindfulness (contemplation), to ‘working smart’, and to working for the public
benefit. We must commit ourselves as civically enlightened voters to entrust our interests to people who are committed and engaged in the enlightened endeavor of enhancing our democratic institutions, and our democracy. This applies to all political groups, though my statement of this principle clearly is motivated by appallingly common voter support for most if not all of today’s right-wing Republican extremists.
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C h a p t e r 03 . What Matters in C i v i c s a n d S c i e n c e ?
The Smithsonian Institutions arrayed around the Capital Mall in Washington, DC encompass all elements that are important in civics and science as these terms are used in this book to address issues of existential importance to our democracy. Civics and science, for example, both are intrinsic to the National Museum of Natural History, which must present evolution of life on earth and, over geological time, the peopling of earth’s regions with distinct populations of humans and their hominid ancestors, together encompassing humanity. The Museum of the American Indian likewise presents the civics of human relations, including the often-fraught relations of European settlers to indigenous tribes, and the science of the relations of all humans to their (here North American) environments. The Air and Space Museum does something similar in presenting the evolution of flight through the atmosphere and space, and the relations of nations in managing the enabling technologies, which have served for transport and for waging war. Civics and science are partners in management of people, peoples, and the technologies that they employ to survive and thrive… the technologies that we must employ if we are to survive and thrive as a nation and as a democracy.
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One reason why civics has suffered (maybe). When I was a boy in New York City public schools; including Elementary, Junior High, and High School; some kids were nerdy and well-behaved, whereas others were neither. Nerds, including me, suffered bullying. More than once, I was chased from my bus stop, and had to walk to school, arriving late (Marc D once got in trouble for doing this to me!) In view of my physically unimpressive qualities, I had to make a choice. In 6th grade I was tempted by the ‘dark side’: behaving poorly, probably motivated by my desire to become more popular among ‘regular’ kids. My 6th grade Elementary School teacher considered me intellectually slow or at best average.
In elementary school (probably in 6th grade) we were administered a standard exam to determine who among us would qualify for a new ‘Special Progress’ (SP) program, in which students undertook 7th, 8th, and 9th grades (the Junior High School grades, in contrast to 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, which are the Middle School grades, more common today) in two
years instead of three. For some reason, six decades after the fact, I recall my teacher reading out the list of students in our class who ‘made the grade’, so to speak. She prefaced her reading with the comment that most of the students who qualified for SP were the ones who were expected to qualify, but others (me!) were a surprise. So, with parents’ permission, we nerds embarked on SP.
SP students were unpopular among non-nerds, which (in the public schools that I attended) comprised the majority of students. I joined the Math Team. I performed reasonably well academically, but I was physically still at a disadvantage relative to ‘regular’ students, more so because, by 9th grade, I also was a year younger than them. As Junior High School drew to a close, therefore, I did not join the majority of SP students who took an exam to qualify for special High Schools, most notably Stuyvesant High School (in Manhattan) or the Bronx High School of Science (yep, in the Bronx). Instead, I attended a local high school in
Queens, where I encountered amore average group of students, including many whose resentment (and/or envy) of nerds was intense.
This experience may be valuable in enabling me to understand why so many people in our country reject science, truth, and objectivity. It’s the resentment. As we nerds grew older, a phenomenon emerged in association with the growing technical sophistication of our (eventually) smartphone society: ‘revenge of the nerds’. Nerds who epitomized the avengers included tycoons such as Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs
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and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Rewards awaited us nerds for our earlier sacrifices in popularity at school!
To navigate the community of potential bullies at LIC, I helped certain key individuals in my home room, especially Andy, whose surname began with an L, who therefore was seated next to me. I helped him understand (I essentially did!) his math and science homework, in exchange for which I was shielded from bullying by his crowd. Being shielded was greatly appreciated, as demonstrated when one such student pulled out a switchblade in World History class while sitting in front of me (and while our teacher pretended not to notice). At the end of that term, we were called up to the front desk one-by-one to receive our grades. The teacher initially mistook me for John, the switchblade wielder, and informed me of his (low) grade instead of my own (high) grade, before correcting herself (to my relief, as you can see from the fact that I still remember it!).
Looking back on such experiences, I reminisce that bullies were unpopular. They never would have been elected to the Student Government, for example. Somehow, that all has changed, and bullies and their ilk commonly are elected to public office. What motivates such new voting behavior?
My answer, tentatively and with respect to only some voters, is that nerds were objects of envy, especially once they became winners recognized in our technological age with high status and high salaries. Now, bullies and their ilk came forward to put those former nerds in their place… in a perhaps-unprecedented anti-nerd uprising! So, voters electing low-brow bullies as public representatives may be their (possibly unconscious) way of rejecting nerds, who they resented and envies. This in turn seems (to me) related to, but not quite the same as, rejecting science, truth, and objectivity. These rejections may be a kind of collateral damage associated with a deep psychological tendency of adults today to
perpetuate a past social rejection of nerds!
For me, being bullied made my life stressful. Learning to deal with such stress turned out to be a valuable experience for me. It enabled me to withstand the stresses of being a graduate student for (I think) an inordinately long period of time. Later, my skills at dealing with stress served me well by enabling me to become a consultant, which (if you’ve never tried it) can be a highly (even if episodically) stressful lifestyle for intellectual as well as financial reasons, among others.
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Rejection of science, truth, and objectivity may be related, not only to being a bully(!), or once having been a bully, but to a current need to create chaos, defined as “the desire to disrupt and destroy… political and social institutions.” Lawson and Kakkar (2022) conducted eight studies, together involving 4,642 participants, addressing the linkage, if any, between politics and conscientiousness in sharing news stories that they knew to be false and fake. They found no difference in the tendency of highly conscientious individuals with politically conservative vs. liberal ideologies to share fake news. However, low-conscientious conservatives (LCCs) were more likely than low-conscientious liberals to spread fake news: “LCCs… expressed a general desire for chaos, and this need may explain their proclivity to spread misinformation.”
Checks and balances in American government. The U. S. Constitution prescribes a tripartite Federal Government consisting of three branches: Executive, Judiciary, and Legislative. Each branch is vested
with a distinct role, including a role in checking the power of each of the other branches, and thereby establishing a robust balance of power. This system of checks and balances has been somewhat fluid. The War Powers Act of 1973 (50 U.S.C. 33, Public Law 93-148), for example, restores previously expanded power of the President to wage war without declaring war more nearly to its originally intended requirement of seeking consent of Congress.
Detailed enumeration of the powers of each branch of government is important in many contexts, but presently I limit this discussion in favor of emphasizing the importance in civics to respect the Constitution. This respect for the Constitution was incorporated into the most recent preTrump Republican Party (2016) platform, adopted when Trump was just one of many Republican presidential candidates, and retained by the Republican Party in 2020:
“We reaffirm the Constitution’s fundamental principles: limited government, separation of Powers, individual liberty, and the rule of law. We denounce bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic prejudice, and religious intolerance. Therefore, we oppose discrimination based on race, sex, religion, creed, disability, or national origin, and support statutes to end such discrimination” (Republican Party 1960; emphasis added; retained as the 2020 Republican Platform).
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Antidemocratic attempts to subvert the checks and balances that are intrinsic to the architecture of our government are to be avoided. Unfortunately, this point is especially relevant currently, given the excesses of individuals in the highest echelons of government who respect neither the Constitution nor its checks and balances. Of course, Trump himself has been eager to centralize power in the Executive Branch, specifically, in himself: “Trump put the United States on a path to autocracy, all the while promising to ‘make America great again’” (Russia expert, former Trump advisor Fiona Hill; Hill 2021)… “There's no Team America for Trump… Not once did I see him do anything to put America first. Not once. Not for a single second" (Harwood 2022, quoting Fiona Hill).
I am chagrined, however, also to include in this rogues’ gallery at least one member of the Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch (Millhiser 2021):
“In his four years on the Court, Gorsuch has staked out a more ambitious agenda than many preceding justices articulated in four decades… He is broadly anti-government, skeptical of democracy and the institutions that make it possible, and eager to centralize power within the judiciary.”
Importance is important. When you enroll in a college course, you might or might not be intellectually interested in its subject area. If you are not interested, your teacher might have difficulty in motivating you to take interest. In important issues, however, you also may have intrinsic interests. For example, if you are bored by airport procedures, you might not take an intellectual interest in airport public address system announcements. Yet, if you are a departing passenger, you have in
intrinsic interest in such announcements: if you ignore your boarding announcement, you might miss your flight. Likewise, when you take a life experience course such as Pandemics 101, you are intrinsically interested. You had better learn to recognize your intrinsic interests, because failure to recognize them might cost you a lot, from money, to time, to your life.
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Expectations matter. The concept of expectations arises in (at least) two civics contexts and in the context of psychology. In the context of psychology, recently I was reminded of the potential influence of surnames on occupations and, I assumed, on personality. I was reading a Scientific American article on marine biology, whose author mentioned two colleagues, with surnames Haddock and Herring! So, I am inclined to express my sympathy for Donald Trump and other children who bear the burden of having a surname with negative (rather than marine biological) connotations!
Bearers of the Trump surname bear the burden of its linguistic affinity for the negative word ‘trumpery’, whose meaning according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is “worthless nonsense,” and referring to “trivial or useless articles: junk.” A recent study involving approximately one million people in a Chinese database of criminals matched with one million non-criminal controls found that “bad” names strongly predicted criminal behavior (Bao et al. 2020): “These findings
demonstrate the ethical costs of bearing bad/immoral names and enrich the understanding of how social-cognitive dimensions (warmthcompetence) are associated with human behavior.” Though having sympathy for Trump, I am not overwhelmed by it. Many, probably most people with surname deficits manage to satisfy the reasonable expectation of conducting themselves within the boundaries of ethics and applicable law.
The first civics context in which expectations matter is derived from the lessons of science, and of fairy tales. An important science concept, for example, is that mimicry is a common and often successful species survival strategy. A commonly cited example is the close resemblance of viceroy butterflies to monarch butterflies. Monarch butterflies, which eat milkweed, are (as a result) poisonous or distasteful to predators, many of which therefore avoid attacking them. Of course, not being eaten by a predator is generally favorable for survival (although
the biblical Jonah, swallowed by a ‘great fish’ and then regurgitated, seems nonetheless to have done well enough). An important difference between monarch butterflies and Jonah, however, is that monarch butterflies are real, but Jonah is mythical8). The evolution of viceroy
8 Jonah’s mythical status is not a repudiation of the Bible. It is a fact. Whales that grow large enough to swallow Jonah whole have baleen to strain their planktonic diet. Jonah strained through baleen would be soup. Smaller whales might bite and swallow Jonah, but he would be in no condition to be regurgitated alive.
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butterflies to resemble monarch butterflies (in reality) confers survival benefit on viceroys.
A related lesson is that expectations formed by scientifically valid evidence should be adequate to guide your expectations. That is, one should avoid learning only by experience, advice on which I have published, for example, in connection with the Gulf Oil blow-out in 2010 (Michaels 2010)9. Your belief in the biblical story of Jonah might tempt you to let a large crocodile consume you, on the expectation that you will be regurgitated intact, maybe even still wearing your hat. I recommend against this; on faith, accept the science!
Along those lines, when science tells you that Covid-19 poses an enormous risk to your health and even to your life, I recommend accepting the science, getting vaccinated and boosted, wearing a mask while indoors in the company of other people, maintaining physical distance, and generally reducing health risks. Many adults have not
followed this advice. As of 30 June 2021, in the U. S. over 140,000 children under age 18 have lost a parent or primary caregiver (such as a parent or grandparent) to Covid-19 (US NIH 2021). Globally, over 1.5 million children have lost at least one primary or secondary caregiver over the first 14 months of the pandemic.
The above considerations illustrate that science in the service of civics saves lives, and if accorded the credence it deserves, can save many more lives. Yet, I have heard too often the blithely uttered mantra that “it’s fate,” as if all risks are created equal, and one’s favorite deity decides what will happen to you. NO, risk decisions are your own personal responsibility, and you must own the consequences of such decisions. That is, high risks are more likely to affect you than lower risks. Persistent exposure to high risks is likely to affect you sooner than persistent exposure to lower risks. Let’s exemplify this concept to make
9 In 1899, according to Wikipedia (accessed on 30 September 2021), U. S. House (Democratic) Rep. Willard D. Vandiver said, "Frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri.” Henceforth, Missouri unofficially has been known as the ‘show me state’. Does that mean “show me the scientific evidence” so I can take precautions proactively, or “learn only by experience,” so (for example) I will not act on the science until you “show me the predicted sick and the predicted dead Covid-19 victims”?
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it more concrete: Covid-19 poses a higher risk to one’s health than vaccination against Covid-19. The longer you go without being vaccinated, the higher your Covid-19 disease risk, and the sooner you are likely to be affected adversely, specifically by contracting Covid19.
I have read numerous news reports that should be instructive, but (from my experience) seem to be ignored by too many people. The reports go something like this: a person doubts the vaccine’s effectiveness, or views it as a government ploy to abridge personal freedom. That person gets Covid-19, and expresses regrets before dying. Sometimes the person exhorts others to get vaccinated “before it’s too late.” Sometimes multiple members of a family become victims within days of one another because they shared a household in which all decided against vaccination. Sometimes the victim was a news reporter who preached anti-vax sentiments or beliefs. The circumstances are diverse, and the stories seem never to stop, because
enough people who should have known better ignored the wisdom of science. I will give just one example, in which seven physicians attending an anti-vaccine summit in Florida contracted Covid-19, along with six other physicians among the 800 to 900 event participants (Yang 2021b).
People who ignore Covid-19 disease risks do so at their own peril. Many such risk ignorers act on assurance of a populist politician parroting Trump, that the virus will “just go away,” or will not hurt them more than a common cold or flu. Such politicians, by the way, commonly know better and, knowing the risks, many are vaccinated, notwithstanding their public stance that they are not. So, they share their ‘wisdom’ with you, but only you share the consequent risks. Such secretly vaccinated populist politicians may be compared with mimics in nature because they mimic unvaccinated people, but are secretly vaccinated. Typically they are Trumpists, not anti-vaxers.
Anti-vaxers actually are rare in the U. S. population, whereas Trumpists are numerous. Many may adopt Trump’s anti-vax rhetoric, independently of whether or not they are vaccinated. Consider tennis star Novak (‘NoVax’) Djokovic, who claims to be unvaccinated against Covid-19. Is he a Trumpist? Is he really unvaccinated? I do not know either fact, but he is smart and has much to lose health-wise and career-wise if he contracts Covid-19. So, I do not credulously and gratuitously assume that Djokovic’s public stance is medical in additional to being political!
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You might say (I am saying), that mimicry of butterflies has come to transcend science, and has entered politics. Trump for example, has mimicked a monarch. Less tongue-in-cheek, in a 17thCentury French fairy tale, a Big Bad Wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing stalks the (seemingly) naïve Little Red Riding Hood. Such fairy tales are parables that (like the news stories described above) might teach an important lesson, such as: do not be fooled by mimicry in politics, politicians, or elsewhere. Most notably, don’t be fooled by contemporary populist politicians who pose as your saviors. After election to office, they may behave as your predators. They may pose as much risk to you as the Big Bad Wolf did to Little Red Riding Hood. Responsible citizens therefore give priority to identifying mimicry among wolves and among political populists, much as an astute poker player gives priority to identifying ‘tells’ to warn of bluffing bettors. Being astute keeps poker players in the game of poker, and might keep you in the (existential) game of life.
The second civics context in which the concept of expectations arises is derived (loosely) from political science. Civics encompasses the role of government and the justified expectation that democratic government must fulfill its responsibilities fairly, competently, and efficiently. Governments may exhibit many problems. Yet, a contemporary problem among the governed is failure to hold elected officials accountable, along with the government institutions that are administered by their appointees. For example, many voters sorely needed financial relief as a result of job loss or illness in the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, many have opposed measures to provide such relief, in part because they lack sufficient appreciation that such relief falls within the purview of government responsibility. Think again. Such responsibility is built into the very titles of our Federal Government agencies, most notably including Health and Human Services (formerly named Health, Education, and Welfare).
More specifically: you might oppose Covid relief, but you must justify such opposition in the context that government properly can (and I would say should) provide for your welfare via enhanced unemployment benefits for yourself and for other people who have lost their jobs. Likewise, you might oppose the Affordable Care Act (‘ObamaCare’), but you must justify such opposition in the context that government properly can provide for your health and your family’s health via subsidizing medical insurance and mandating medical
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insurance coverage, including coverage for pre-existing medical conditions. The list goes on, but the list is erased and useless if unenforced by voters and by the representatives who they elect to public office.
You might not like ‘big government’, but your opposition must be viewed in the context that adequate government is essential. Indeed, in the long run, inadequate government may cost more than adequate government. The Biden Administration wisely has advanced a farsighted infrastructure bill, costing trillions of dollars. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg described it as “generational.” The bill deserves bipartisan and unanimous support, in the context of the adage “penny-wise, dollarfoolish.” As of this writing, a portion of the original bill was passed, on party lines.
Despite our current divisions, however, bipartisanship has been achieved at the State and Federal levels recently. I was edified (and entertained) by a wonderful and extreme State-level example, extending
official mascots beyond flowers, birds, and mammals (Daley 2021). The Illinois legislature adopted the mold Penicillium rubens as the State Microbe. A different species, Penicillium notatum, in 1928 had produced the world’s first antibiotic, penicillin, based upon research by Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming. Penicillin production by P. notatum, however, was too limited to fill needs of the U. S. military in WWII. Researcher Mary Moyer (nicknamed ‘Moldy Mary’), however, studied a moldy cantaloupe from a Peoria fruit market, and discovered that P. rubens could be used to scale up penicillin production adequately. Peoria thereby revolutionized the medical field of immunology for millions of people. Selection of P. rubens as the first Illinois State Microbe was accomplished in May 2021 with unanimous support of both parties in both houses of the Illinois General Assembly.
The Federal infrastructure initiative likewise has garnered bipartisan support. It addresses many modern-day infrastructure needs,
such as broadband internet access in areas lacking it. Trumpist GOP members have opposed the initiative, claiming that infrastructure should not be construed to include modern needs, but should be restricted to traditional infrastructure such as roads and bridges. An initial $1-trillion infrastructure bill, however, did pass in the evenly-split Senate (on 10 August 2021) with bipartisan support (69-30) encompassing, beyond roads and bridges; power grid, climate resilience, and broadband initiatives (Cochrane 2021). The bill is pending in the House, where it must be coordinated with a larger ($3.5-trillion) social policy bill.
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The fact that Republicans and Democrats recently have worked together provides proof that they can work together. It provides hope that the relationship will evolve toward comity. I am not optimistic. However, examples of bipartisanship, in my mind, belie the oft-stated generality that GOP hostility is a constant fact of political life. At least some exceptions clearly exist, and one might hope for more.
Many examples illustrate that government inaction may cost (a lot) more than action. In 2018 Trump shortsightedly disbanded pandemic response teams in the National Security Council’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense in 36 countries including China. That money-saving measure was cost-ineffective, to say the least.
Likewise, Japan protected its Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant from a devastating 2011 tsunami, but bean counters blocked
protection of the reactor’s emergency diesel electricity generators, which were flooded by the tsunami and, by shutting down, in turn shut down (and melted down) the reactor itself (US NAP 2014)10. New Orleans likewise took shortcuts in protecting its levees, but Hurricane Katrina in 2005 breached over 50 of them, flooding the city. Boeing took shortcuts in designing the 737 Max, but in 2019 and 2020 catastrophic air crashes produced ruinous 737 Max groundings.
More recently the world has come to regret shortcuts taken at the Suez Canal (which itself is a shortcut!), having failed to deepen its full channel width since canal opening in 1869. Deepening would have prevented grounding of the enormous Evergreen Marine container ship Ever Given in a windstorm. As of this writing, about 400 ships were lined up, waiting to cross the blocked canal, freezing $10 billion of daily commerce.
10 The Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission’s August 1990 Regulatory Guide for Reviewing Safety Design of Light Water Nuclear Power Reactor Facilities (NSCJ 1990) provides the following guidance on station blackout: Guideline. Design Considerations against Loss of Power. The nuclear reactor facilities shall be so designed that safe shutdown and proper cooling of the reactor after shutting down can be ensured in case of a short-term total AC power loss. According to an unofficial translation of the Nuclear Safety Commission’s Special Committee on Nuclear Safety Standards and Guides, “short term” has been routinely interpreted as specifically referring to DC battery capacity to maintain residual heat removal for 30 minutes under station blackout conditions (NSCJ 2012). page 59
Some might excuse inaction in Egypt by asking, who could have anticipated such winds? Some might deny that climate change might amplify hurricanes in New Orleans. Some might deny that governments should regulate airline manufacture stringently. Avoiding shortsightedness is an important civics lesson. Its importance is comparable to passage of the infrastructure initiative, and prevention of the I-wish-I-could-take-back-that-decision pandemic (Michaels 2021c).
Inadequate government as exemplified above may be associated with big expenses and unnecessary suffering, most notably the unnecessary deaths of roughly a tenth of a percent of the U. S. population (one per thousand people) from Covid-19 in just a single year (2020). Even the enormously expensive ($1.9 trillion) Biden Administration stimulus package termed the American Rescue Plan, enacted in March 2021, conformed with the traditionally proper role of the Federal Government (Gerson 2021c): “In the legislation, you will find a line
item for a long list of social needs. What you will not find is a new or transformational role for government. A great deal of money is devoted to shoring up existing programs and institutions, as you’d expect during a national emergency.”
According to the U. S. Centers for Disease Control (US CDC), U. S. life expectancy, which generally has risen since WWII, dropped by a full year during the first half of 2020 (January to June, from 78.8 to 77.8 years) for the population as a whole, and by 2.7 years for the Black population (Tavernise and Goodnough 2021). Much, if not the preponderance of, this excessive loss of life was attributed to the Covid19 pandemic, and was unnecessary. Indeed, Xing et al. (2021), studied the effectiveness of pandemic management via non-pharmaceutical interventions (mainly reduced economic activity) using satellite imagery of air pollution as a surrogate for regional economic activity. The authors reported the following:
“Over the winter of 2020/2021, nearly 1 million daily COVID-19 cases could have been avoided by optimizing the timing and strength of activity reduction in different regions...”
In the U. S., such unnecessary societal costs of the pandemic were attributable, and attributed, to a president who disparaged such effective
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pandemic management factors, along with others such as mask wearing, social distancing, and other non-pharm control measures. Instead, Trump promoted disease transmission by holding ‘superspreader events’ such as massive, densely packed political campaign rallies at which masks were unwelcome.
The pandemic death toll and reduction of life expectancy represent just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the grim statistics of death are the morbid statistics of unnecessary long-term Covid-19 health consequences (‘sequelae’) and associated economic costs (such as loss of jobs), together affecting many times the number who died (U. S. Covid-19 deaths have exceeded a 0.6 million11). These consequences primarily have been due to federal government inaction, incompetence, and depraved indifference. This assessment of consequences is factual and non-partisan: though attributable to a Republican administration, they would be equally reprehensible if attributable to a Democratic administration.
----------------------------------------------------- The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
Science Officer Spock, Starship Enterprise, United Federation of Planets, including rejoinder by Captain James T. Kirk; Gene Roddenberry. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 4 June 1982 ----------------------------------------------------- Public service matters. People who aspire to positions of public trust should understand and accept their obligation to serve the
11 The actual number of Covid-19 deaths in the U. S. in 2020 was much greater than the official count of 600,000, as indicated by reports indicating that, in counties with a significant excess death count, only 82 percent on average were attributed to Covid-19 (Lewis and Montañez 2021). If all were attributed to Covid-19, the death tolls would be 732,000. However, many if not most Covid-19 deaths in the 18 percent excess-death category were misattributed to non-Covid causes. Factors contributing to such underreporting include lack of testing, especially early in 2020, lack of medical experience with Covid-19, especially in rural counties, and political reasons aiming at understating the seriousness of the pandemic, especially in Red counties.
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public. This universal sentiment was expressed famously, not only by Roddenberry (1982) quoted above, but more narrowly by U. S. President John F. Kennedy (1961) 12 in his inaugural address to the nation two decades before Roddenberry, on 20 January 1961:
“… my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
Public service should be the primary personal motivation for running for President or other public office. Doing so should NOT be motivated, for example (relevant example!), by the desire for personal visibility or free advertising for one’s business ventures.
Our federal government has grown larger, and its role has evolved and expanded. For example, relatively new agencies have been formed to protect us against foreign espionage (such as the Central Intelligence
Agency, CIA) and hacking into our technical infrastructure (such as the National Security Agency, NSA). Our government now consists of numerous agencies that focus upon specific missions that should be, and generally are, consistent with U. S. government function.
Voters should expect agency heads to be competent and work diligently to fulfill their agencies’ mission. In contrast, acting as president, Trump gutted many of our agencies (such as the State Department) and populated many with sycophants and enablers who would do his bidding (such as the Justice Department), notwithstanding their lack of competence and poor record of relevant experience. Indeed, Trump appointed people to some agencies with orders effectively to contravene the agencies’ mission. For example, Scott Pruitt was appointed EPA Administrator, and proceeded to destroy the protections it afforded to environmental and public health. He was successful, but nonetheless dismissed for cause, including misusing agency resources for
personal benefit. An important lesson of civics, therefore, is that voters should act to serve our collective interest, along with their personal interest, by electing to office only candidates committed to entrusting
12 Many people remember the Kennedy Administration fondly by the nickname ‘Camelot’, after the musical blockbuster starring Richard Burton as King Arthur (Lerner and Loewe 1960). Camelot may have been a great place to live, but it was not a democracy. For example, its Environmental Protection Agency (CAM EPA), as an Executive Agency under the King, prohibited the falling of rain before sundown and of snow before December.
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competent, diligent, and well-intended people to positions of high responsibility.
Our nation’s security and economic viability, and the health and welfare of members of our society, all depend upon this civics lesson. Accordingly, the Biden Administration acted immediately upon taking office to reverse erosion of our agencies. Most notably, President Biden immediately requested resignation, and then fired, Peter Robb, the Trump-appointed general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, and his deputy (Rosenberg and Thebault 2021). Robb was “seen as a foe by worker advocates and labor unions.” Shortly afterward, the White House demanded resignation of Trump appointee Sharon Gustafson, general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and upon her refusal, fired her in a continuing “push to oust controversial Trump appointees viewed as hostile to the mission of the agencies they worked for” (Rosenberg 2021). Many other examples could be cited.
The civics concept of public service comes with a caveat. Office holders who are devoted to doing public service may pursue policies with which you or I disagree. I have had many occasions to vote for candidates who are compatible with my own views, at least generally, and against other candidates. I have agreed or disagreed with many political appointees on many issues. Disagreement, however, does not justify disrespect. Indeed, I have sought out people with whom I tend to disagree, for the value of their counsel. In my profession, for example, I served (pro bono) as Chairperson of the Academy of BoardCertified Environmental Professionals (ABCEP) for 20 years. Early in this period, a more fiscally conservative ABCEP member tendered her resignation due to our different approaches to fiscal issues. I asked her to continue on the Board, which she agreed to do… to everyone’s benefit for many years.
Likewise, I value, and have great respect for, many public figures with whom I tend to disagree. As several examples: I have disagreed with Republican views of former Presidents George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and with views of former Senator Bob Dole (of Kansas, 1969-’96), former Senator John McCain (of Arizona, 19872018), and former House Speaker John Boehner (of Ohio, 2011-‘15). I have the deepest respect for each of these American patriots for (my perception of) their devotion to public service and to ethics… not to mention their often-wry sense of humor (for example, in deal-making
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with Democrats, Boehner quipped “I would trade my crazies for yours any day”). In short, for political reasons, I might not vote for these individuals… but the issue of dedication to public service is entirely separate. This happy situation emphatically has NOT been the case regarding Trump and his sycophantic enablers. You should appreciate the difference(s), which this book attempts to illustrate.
------------------------------------------------------------------- German chess grandmaster Siegbert Tarrasch to Mexican grandmaster Carlos Torre: To beat Alekhine and win every game: All you must do is obey the fundamental rule… Quite simply, always make the strongest move.
Advice for 1925 tournament against Russian World Chess Champion Alexander Alekhine. Reuben Fine. Great Moments in Modern Chess. New York City, Dover Publishing, 1948. -------------------------------------------------------------------
Courage matters. If you are not a chess player, you might fail to appreciate the wisdom of Tarrasch’s advice to Torre on beating Alekhine. Everything was on the line. The temptation to be overly cautious must be resisted by maintaining the courage of one’s convictions, that is, to make the strongest move. Certainty was unattainable. Alas, Torre lost to Alekhine despite receiving great advice. Having the courage of one’s convictions was a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for victory. Carlos Torre needed more, perhaps superior skill or a better pretournament night of sleep.
Courage especially matters for people who expose that which others would conceal. As a graduate student at the State University of
New York at Stony Brook, I once acted as a ‘whistleblower’, which probably was more crazy than courageous. Walking around the halls of the Marine Sciences Research Center (MSRC), I repeatedly encountered a noxious odor, which I assumed originated from a laboratory. Walking slowly past each lab, I identified the source, and enquired within. The experimenter tried to reassure me that he was working with radioactive thorium, of which “zero” could escape the negative-pressure hood in which his apparatus was set up. I called the radiation safety officer, who followed up by closing the lab pending repairs. The lab (inevitably!) belonged to the MSRC Director, Dr. Jerry Schubel, who summoned me to his spacious office, I feared to terminate my graduate career. Instead,
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he sat me down and thanked me for my responsible action, for which I was grateful, and remain grateful, as you can see!
Character matters. Civics teaches voters to value candidates’ character, not just their positions on voters’ pecuniary interests. This means that voters must ask themselves key questions, such as questions of whether a candidate for office merits their respect and trust. Should you believe the candidate’s statements? Would you have confidence in his/her promises on a handshake? Would you have confidence with a signed a contract? Would you trust the individual enough to go into a business venture with him/her? To be specific, if you think Trump campaign promises would address the nation’s problems, and/or your own problems, do you trust that he will keep those promises? OR, might he have been lying?...
Imagine living with Trump or a Trumpist. What would that be like, especially for a female living with a cruel misogynist who brags
about grabbing the crotches of women on first meeting them (“because I can”)? Did you vote to elect this individual? If you could not imagine living happily with a cruel Trump or Trumpist as a housemate or as a spouse, try to avoid the temptation to elect him (almost always a ‘him’) to office! In civics, as in domestic life, character matters.
I have a pet dog, Cupid, with whom I walk every day, usually in a park. I always use an extensible leash attached to a comfortable harness. Sometimes I have asked myself, why not trust Cupid off-leash? My answer is: that is the wrong question. I might trust Cupid off-leash with my life. The right question, given the dangers of cars and other threats to a small dog, is: do I trust Cupid off-leash with his life? What does that say about my own character? I don’t know what my (excessive?) caution might imply to you, but to me it implies that I try to be pet-centered rather than self-centered in my relationship with Cupid. Character matters but, sorry, I am unlikely to run soon for any public office.
A person’s character might be judged in many ways. For me, one way is to observe how a person treats his/her pets. A brief observation of a person privately mistreating a dog tells me more, I think, than longerterm observation of the same person’s behavior in public, which may be self-edited. Cruelty to animals also is, often, a matter of public record, and may serve as one of the most powerful red flags for identifying people who might commit gun violence. It could be the basis for a powerful ‘red flag law’ to protect pets and people. That is the powerful message of
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Diana Urban, founder and president of Protecting Kids and Pets Partnership (Urban 2022):
“Buffalo, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Parkland, Columbine, Pearl High School. Terrible tragedies [mass shootings] and many opinions as to what went wrong. Anguished cries about red flags that were ignored, including mental health issues, early childhood trauma, social media posts, the availability (or straight-up purchase) of high-powered weapons. The list of potential causes and early warning signs of future mass shootings continues to grow… But wait a second. There is one red flag that ties all of these massacres together, and that is a history of animal cruelty.”
A recent legislative proposal in the U.K., based upon research at the London School of Economics and Political Science, upon
enactment will add decapod crustaceans and cephalopod mollusks to the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill (Gilbert 2021). The bill will recognize all decapod crustaceans (including shrimp, lobsters, crayfish, and hermit crabs) and cephalopods (including squid, octopus, and cuttlefish) as being sentient, possessing a central nervous system (CNS), and able to feel pain. These organisms will be protected, though only within the extremely narrow limits of the law, which:
“will not affect fishing practices or restaurants that sell shellfish but will protect the animals in future decision-making. Once the bill becomes law, an Animal Sentience Committee will be created and report on how well the government is accounting for sentient animals it its decisions.”
As an advocate of animal protection and prevention of cruelty to animals, I applaud whatever protection this law might provide to sentient animals. The law, however, seems fundamentally wrongheaded, as it mis-assigns the burden of proof of sentience. Likewise, I recall long-ago debates in the U. S. over whether dogs are sentient, with idiots claiming that they cannot be deemed sentient until proven sentient. Further, I have a little to say about the Jewish ‘bris’ ritual, in which newborn male infants are circumcised. I disagree with the self-serving assumption that they do not feel pain in the procedure.
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That claim should be dubious, at least to anyone who has ever attended a bris and seen and heard a wailing infant whose penis was trimmed. In short, I am more inclined to assume that human infants, and animals possessing a CNS, can feel pain, unless or until proven incapable.
As we live in a political world, I also must ask whether the U.K. Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill is not also (or primarily) aimed at appeasing opponents of human abortion. This speculation is based upon Ernst Haeckel’s 19th-Century biogenetic law, stating that embryonic stages of a particular animal species represent a chronological sequence of steps in the evolution of the species. Popularly summarized as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” the biogenetic law originally was cited as a justification for human abortion, as the early stages of an embryo were deemed equivalent to animals, not humans. The U.K. Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill, however, might be aimed at adding a basis to protect human fetuses:
specifically, that they could feel pain.
The basis for protection, in that argument, would accord with the following syllogism:
--1. the U.K. Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill recognizes organisms as primitive as arthropods and mollusks as being sentient and able to experience pain;
--2. early stages of the unborn human fetus resemble evolutionarily simpler organisms such as arthropods and mollusks; and
--3. therefore, the unborn human fetus likewise can feel pain, possibly as a result of an abortion procedure, in which case early fetal stages should be protected by
prohibition of abortion.
Haeckel’s biogenetic law, however, is not recognized as scientifically factual, and should not be used in accordance with the syllogism just described. A detailed critique is provided by Gould (1977).
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--------------------------------------- The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is. Winston Churchill (1874 to 1965). Speech to the British House of Commons, 17 May 1916 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Facts matter. Facts may be derived from evidence and its deployment in hypothesis testing via the scientific method. More commonly, facts are derived from empirical observations, and may be supported by photography or other documentary procedures. In the legal
world, protection of evidence may be accomplished via establishing a ‘chain of custody’, in which each stage of evidence development is documented via signatures on a chain-of-custody form. This procedure, for example, is common for laboratory evidence, beginning with sample collection, transport, transfer to a laboratory, instrumental analysis, and results reporting.
Deployment of facts toward making findings and drawing conclusions is intrinsic to science. As a recent example, efforts are underway in Russia to reform management of its forests, which constitute roughly a fifth of the world’s forest land area (Sheil, Nabuurs, and Shvidenko 2021). The authors report that “The previous forest code and a long history of extraction [of forest resources] without investment have been widely blamed for exacerbating these problems (1, 4, 5).” I interpreted this statement in multiple ways. The authors cited three supporting papers, taking themselves out of the role of “blaming”
previous policies for present problems. That is, they deployed facts in evidence toward making their findings and drawing their conclusions. An additional layer of possible meaning is that, in view of the sensitivity of the issue, the authors may have sought to avert sanctions against themselves by enlisting external support.
This routine but skillful use of facts exemplifies an adage that is attributed to lawyers: “You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own set of facts.” You are constrained to form opinions, and support your opinions, based upon a single fact-set that is shared by all contending parties. In the four years of the Trump Administration, however, that adage was consistently violated. It continues to be violated by Trump and
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Trumpists issuing statements for strategic reasons, even though the issuers (often demonstrably) know them to be false.
Perhaps the most prominent purveyor of lies is the highly influential New York-based multinational cable television news channel Fox News. As of this writing, ahead of Veterans Day 2021, former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals Sol Wachtler (now Distinguished Adjunct Professor at the Touro Law School, in Long Island, New York) opined:
“In honor of Veterans Day, Fox Nation has offered to give veterans a one-year free subscription to Fox News’ streaming service. It would be much more appreciated by us war veterans if the Fox News hosts stopped running down the military and America… Fox News hosts have been spreading unrelenting false narratives that are not only
affecting the morale of our servicemen but are diminishing the pride we veterans have always felt in having served our great country” (Wachtler 2021).
Consider Tucker Carlson, the highly popular right-wing host of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News. How can we judge his honesty, apart from his (in)accuracy? One way is to consider his own admission that he lies, for example as in the following statement made by Carlson during an interview by Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report broadcast on YouTube and BlazeTV:
[CNN anchors like Brian Stelter, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon] … “just lie again and again… [Regarding himself]… I guess I would ask myself, like, I mean, I lie if I’m cornered or something. I lie. I really try not to. I try never to lie on TV. I just
don’t—I don’t like lying. I certainly do it, you know, out of weakness or whatever, but to systematically lie like that, without asking yourself, why am I doing this?” (Goodykoontz 2021).
Tucker Carlson’s behavior is the antithesis of being objective, honest, wise, and fair. It also is willful, and therefore worse than simple, naive ignorance. Adherence to the lawyers’ adage is essential in science and civics. That may be one reason why denial of Trump’s 2020 election
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loss has earned the moniker ‘The Big Lie’. I do like to think that most potential voters reject The Big Lie, as it has been tested in numerous venues and refuted in all. These venues include approximately 60 lawsuits, in many cases presided over by judges appointed by Trump. The recent attempt to recall California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsome failed by a landslide, possibly in part because Republican proponents of The Big Lie may have discouraged Republican voters to participate in it (Manchester 2021). The Big Lie, therefore, may pose risks for Trump-supported candidates in the upcoming (as of this writing) 2021 and 2022 elections.
Even attorneys, who are subject to a professional code of ethics, have propounded The Big Lie. Indeed, numerous GOP attorneys were sanctioned, including referral to their professional organizations for possible disbarment, following misuse of the legal system in an attempt to overturn Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss in Michigan:
“This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process. It is one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election. It is another to take on the charge of deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated. This is what happened here… And this case was never about fraud—it was about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so” (Parker 2021b; emphasis added).
The Soviet mathematician and cosmologist Lev Landau (1908- ’68) said (of cosmologists), they are often in error, though seldom in doubt. In today’s messy world, certainty more commonly is rare. You may be certain, and yet also be wrong. A juror, for example, might be
certain about the innocence or guilt of a defendant in court, possibly as early as when the defendant enters the court. The ensuing trial, however, is designed to enable jurors to form beliefs based upon objective evidence. If jurors are prejudiced, which all jurors are, the trial aims to challenge them with belief-confirming or belief-refuting evidence. Jurors then may be placed in the difficult but valuable position of confronting their prejudices in the (legally required) pursuit of justice. This process was documented most famously and, I think, most instructively, in the dramatic 1957 movie, 12 Angry Men (sorry, no
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women on that jury) which most people would call fiction. That movie illustrated clarity of thinking and ornery opposition to objective evidence; it also illustrated the need for courage of one’s convictions (okay, the pun was intended).
For issues in which scientific consensus has been reached, the relationship between knowledge and certainty among people who reject the consensus recently was reported to be (roughly) inverse. Light et al. (2022) distinguish between objective vs. subjective knowledge: “those with the highest level of opposition [to the scientific consensus] have the lowest levels of objective knowledge but the highest levels of subjective knowledge.” Perhaps in an attempt actually to be understandable, the authors helpfully clarify that “Results from five studies show that people who disagree most with the scientific consensus know less about the relevant issues, but they think they know more.” Sometimes they think they know what scientists know, but reject scientists’ consensus beliefs. In other cases, they hold simplistic but incorrect beliefs, so their rejection
of consensus may reflect ignorance rather than ornery opposition to compelling facts.
This raises the social issue for scientists of how best to address potentially disastrous rejection of scientific consensus. Light et al. (2022) suggest appealing less to facts and more to thought leaders who might be convinced to encourage helpful behavioral norms. For example:
“A survey on transmission of the coronavirus has found that the major reason people report wearing masks in Japan is not to mitigate risk nor be altruistic but conform to a social norm…, and studies in the U. S. have found that perceptions of the extent to which one’s social circle engages in preventive behaviors are strongly related to one’s own behaviors…”
Competence matters. I think we are in an age of diminished,
maybe even diminishing, competence. Competence is essential in public service, as in most if not all fields. I will have more to say about competence in many places in this book. Here I wish only to emphasize that, increasingly, even with abundant influencers all around, people must make decisions independently. People never were well advised to rely exclusively on surrogates, such as ‘experts’ serving in roles of public service. In my view, people increasingly must be more broadly competent; they must be ‘citizen scientists’, by which I here mean, most essentially, scientifically literate. The examples of clear thinking in
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selected issue areas presented in this book are aimed at promoting readers’ (civics and) science literacy, and ability to recognize and advocate for their own interests. Nobody will serve as your science literacy proxy. It’s on you!
Credibility matters. One component of critical thinking consists of screening information by evaluating the credibility of its source. I recently read the full content of articles in the July/August 2021 issue of Foreign Affairs, which usually is a credible source of information and wisdom. The issue was devoted to the overall topic Can China Keep Rising? One article, however, seemed to lack credibility because it was poorly reasoned and seemed more like propaganda for China. The article (Jisi 2021), titled The plot against China?, originated from Peking University, in close proximity to the seat of political power and possible influence in China. This made me wonder whether its author, Wang Jisi, was in a compromised position there as President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies. A quick internet search revealed a site
(Columbia – Harvard 2021) describing Jisi as follows:
“He serves on top advisory boards for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party. He has taught at the Central Party School, the mid-career training ground for China's rising government leaders, and has been a mentor to many government officials in China as well as the next generation of Chinese foreign policy scholars.”
Jisi’s perspective would have been valuable, had the article been more authoritative. I contrast it with Xia (2021). Her article, also in Foreign Affairs, was titled “The party that failed.” It is a highly detailed and authoritative account of the Chinese Communist Party from a highranking insider who became disenchanted, and who criticized the CCP:
“Soon, I was expelled from the party. The school stripped me of my retirement benefits. My bank account was frozen. I asked the authorities at the Central Party School for a guarantee of my personal safety if I returned. Officials there avoided answering the question and instead made vague threats against my daughter in China and her young son. It was at this point that I accepted the truth: there was no going back.”
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Screening information is a necessary, but not always a sufficient, criterion to justify belief. If an information source is deemed credible, effort then might be deemed worthwhile to evaluate whether or not it also is correct. An adage expressing this idea reveals its familiarity: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” To be explicit, an information source might be credible and yet incorrect, and therefore it might deceive you. Once deceived by the previously-deemed-credible source, however, the credibility of that source is diminished, and its information less reliable. So, don’t rely on it.
To illustrate beyond news personalities, who ought to be honest, consider the example of Trump himself. Kessler (2021) reported that during Donald Trump’s presidency, Trump made “30,573 false or misleading claims — with nearly half coming in his final year.” Yet, a majority of Republican voters expressed belief of his claim that he received many more votes than his opponent, now-President Joe Biden. Such widespread belief of an unreasonable claim demands explanation.
One hypothesis is interviewee dishonesty. I prefer to believe that many people exhibit a dearth of healthy skepticism about received information, especially from sources that they are predisposed to believe. An objective evaluation reveals two basic conclusions: Biden’s electoral victory was validated by numerous voting audits and recounts, and by approximately 60 lawsuits, some reaching the U. S. Supreme Court, in which arguments and evidence were evaluated (actually, substantive evidence of voter fraud was not presented because it evidently did not exist). Further, Trump’s claim should have been doubted a priori, from his prior record of fabrication. Any person, including a U. S. President, who lies routinely to suit his/her personal, financial, and/or political interests should be viewed as non-credible and unreliable. Regarding the possible decision to buy into statements issued by such an individual: caveat emptor: let the buyer beware!
A second component of credibility is a combination of
competence and objectivity. In particular, people who serve society in a technical capacity should possess, and excel in, both qualities. An example of violation of this principle is the common role of coroners in determining causes of death when the causes are questionable (Scientific American 2021). Many if not most coroners lack medical training, and approximately 80 percent of them are elected. As elected officials they are beholden to voters and to political forces, such as a U. S. president who denies the seriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic. Coroners lacking medical training, for example, might identify pneumonia as the cause of
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a death, while failing to identify Covid-19 as the cause of the pneumonia and, therefore, the underlying cause of the death, which should be listed on the death certificate. This error (or intentional distortion), and similar types of misinformation, have resulted in massive under-reporting of Covid-19 pandemic deaths in the U. S. Indeed: “A recent analysis carried out for science news service STAT found that tens of thousands of deaths from COVID are going unreported, mostly in counties that supported former president Donald Trump.” The medical function of determining the cause of a death should be performed by a medical professional, as recommended by a committee of the American Medical Association in 1857, the National Academy of Sciences in 1928, and by US NAS again in 2009. I endorse this recommendation as a means of maintaining credibility in this area.
Feelings matter. Think of who you trust… maybe your parents, siblings, children, friends. The qualities of people you trust are likely to include honesty, empathy, and generosity. In the realm of public
servants, I would add to the list competence and a principled concern for promoting the public interest, even over their own interests. Public servants who merit your trust avoid conflicts of interest and, to maintain public confidence, they also avoid the appearance of conflicts.
If you are a Trump supporter, ask yourself who he trusts. The answer is, I think you will agree, almost no one. People he trusts primarily include people who he can control via threats of diverse types. To be clear, if he has nothing over you, he does not trust you. If you admire Trump, you might emulate Trump. If so, do as he would do: do not place your trust in such an individual. Do not vote for such an individual. If, more appropriately, you do not admire and/or emulate Trump: do not place your trust in such an individual. Do not vote for such an individual. Ask yourself: would you go into a business with him? What risks would you take on the faith that he would reciprocate your commitment? Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State (1997-2001)
in the Clinton Administration, was most succinct: “The notion that despots care most about the welfare of the average family is nonsense…” (Albright 2021).
Your emotions/feelings play a huge part in your ability to think critically. Your brain’s emotional (‘reptilian’) center (amygdala, in the limbic system) has a relatively primitive evolutionary origin. It may override your brain’s logical center (cerebral cortex), which is of more recent evolutionary origin. The questions and suggested answers above,
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therefore, depend upon you being in touch with your emotions/feelings.
Your emotions or feelings should constitute an important factor in your belief system and voting behavior. This is an inconvenient truth, because people often have emotions/feelings, that is, subjective experiences, that conflict with their objective experience. You must reconcile these internal viewpoints when they conflict. I can think of no better strategy, at least to begin the process, than to recognize the conflict. That will help you to resolve it… maybe!
Words matter. Another component of critical thinking consists of screening information by evaluating the language used by the communicator and, from the language, the likely intent of the communicator. As with evaluating credibility, language evaluation is a necessary, but not always a sufficient, criterion to justify belief. An example of language evaluation justifying (dis)belief follows, regarding a story of investment in nuclear fusion technology to generate energy. I
was unable to evaluate the technology because only a short time was available to me, whereas a long time would have been needed… but I quickly evaluated the language, and decided not to devote further time and energy to the technology (or investment), as described below.
Entrepreneurs who are successful at raising money must develop a compelling story, as exemplified by this fascinating TechCrunch article that I recently came across. Shieber (2021) describes a promising new fusion technology that wealthy investors have been pouring eye-popping money into13. “General Fusion’s process is based on a technology called magnetized target fusion (MTF), first proposed by the U. S. Naval Research Lab and developed in the 1970s.” The author states the unimpeachable pedigree of the technology, developed in the 1970s, but not the apparent fact that, sometime afterward, it was abandoned. Another language problem makes the story, and prospect of investment, even less compelling. That is, the article misrepresents the fashionably self-
deprecating “wry joke” about fusion progress: “In the past, the wry joke about fusion technologies was that they were always 10 years away, but
13 Readers might decry my (twice consecutively) ending a sentence with a preposition. As a rule, a preposition is not something one should end a sentence with. In my defense, I cite the response of the similarly-criticized British grammarian (and Prime Minister) Winston Churchill: “That is a rule, up with which I will not put.”
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now companies are looking at a four-year horizon to bring fusion to initial markets, if not the masses.” I have heard this wry joke for decades, but never with “10 years” as the time variable. My memory is of a duration of 30 to 50 years. The revised “wry joke” would compress extremely the technological and implied financial return time conjured by the (compellingly described) General Fusion technology. I prefer being ‘compelled’ by a less apparently conflicted conjurer…
Regarding this story, I emphasize that it might be true, despite my skepticism, and investors might get rich. I am here distinguishing between narratives that are true vs. believable. Narratives that are believable might not be true, and those that are true might not be believable.
Actions matter. Actions matter and, as the adage goes14, actions speak louder than words. So, when words mean one thing, and are (or were) contradicted by actions, I believe that the actions refute the words, not the reverse. The vocabulary word of the moment, therefore, is ‘hypocrisy’.
One example will suffice: words and actions, or words vs. actions, against domestic terrorists. The Biden Administration has identified domestic terrorism as currently the main U. S. counterterrorism priority (Gordenstein and Hughes 2021). Amy Cooter, who has studied militias for many years, testified to the House Committee in Veterans’ Affairs that militias have been targeting military veterans, in part to add military skill sets to their ranks (Cooter 2022). Militias in this country are diverse and pliable, she reported, in many cases susceptible to adopting far-right radical causes and to promoting them with militant-style violence:
“I have learned that there is important variation across militia groups. They fall on a spectrum. At one end are units whose activities are largely limited to outings for “grown-up Boy Scouts,” … At the other end are units that are openly angry, whose members plot violence against
government officials and advocate overt white supremacy. Some of the latter stormed the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The more extremist militia bands tote guns in public,
14 Readers also might notice that I like adages. I like them because of their familiarity and, often, believability. Adages, at least the ones I cite, lend credibility, and may help to persuade. Only ACRONYMS exceed adages in lending credibility. Civics lesson of the day: only government programs that illustrate an adage can be funded, and then only on condition of first being assigned an acronym.
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wear military garb and endorse various conspiracy fantasies. They have confronted racial justice activists and protested pandemic public health measures in many states” (Cooter 2022).
Strategically, the Biden Administration has taken action consistent with its words. Specifically, it has been focusing on social media as a rich source of potential warning signs of radicalization and attacks. Recognizing the transborder reach of social media, the U. S. also is joining 54 other countries and 10 major technology companies in the Christchurch Call to Action to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online. This action, supported by funding, is consistent, with the Administration commitment to countering 'racially motivated violent extremists’ (RMVEs) and ‘militia violent extremists’ (MVEs).
Whatever is your opinion of the new focus on domestic terrorism, it constitutes data-driven, not bias-driven action consistent with the Biden
Administration’s words. Contrast this sequence of words and consistent actions with the previous administration. Under Trump, the U. S. refused to join the Christchurch Call to Action, citing free-speech concerns (Gordenstein and Hughes 2021). Consider whether refusal to join the international effort against violent social media content reasonably could be attributed to free-speech concerns, given that Trump took many actions to muzzle the media, most famously labeling the media “an enemy of the people.” Trump’s motivations may be complex, but probably include some combination of America-First disdain for international cooperation, sympathy with hate groups, and an inclination toward violence against political opponents.
Choosing racial, religious, and ethnic equality matters. Descriptors of who we are prominently include race, religion, and national origin. Of course, many other descriptors also apply. Many if not all are important, but I will not wax encyclopedic in listing them here or
addressing them relative to civics and science. The U. S. Constitution, however, has come to be viewed as an exemplar of institutional evenhandedness involving racial, religious, and ethnic matters. This view may be justified by relatively recent egalitarian interpretations of this founding document, though its original meaning suggests otherwise (Gerson 2021e). For example, “all men are created equal” in our Declaration of Independence has come to be interpreted differently from the original sense, and now is applied in a more egalitarian manner with
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respect to our Constitution. That phrase now is understood to include females and all non-white persons.
The list of descriptors of groups protected from discrimination has grown institutionally. Trump, however, has conspicuously and unconstitutionally narrowed it. Again, I will refrain from waxing encyclopedic, as this book must have a finite length, thereby differing from the (seeming) length of encyclopedias, especially Wikipedia. To exemplify, however, Trump explicitly advocated and implemented unconstitutional and unlawful discrimination against Muslim, black, and Hispanic groups in ways too numerous to catalogue here. From my own viewpoint, the point must be emphasized that civics requires forceful, personal repudiation of such discrimination.
Intent matters. On 6 January 2021 I watched television news coverage of (now former) President Trump addressing unruly supporters in Washington, DC. He exhorted them to have strength to
reclaim their country, or lose it. He pounded his fists while goading the crowd to fight, repeating the word ‘fight’ many times. Trump was exhorting the crowd to attack the U. S. Capitol, and to commit violence upon its occupants, to “stop the steal” of his (fabricated) claim of a (landslide) re-election victory. He exhorted the mob to insurrection.
I came to the above conclusion about Trump’s intent (in part) from evaluating his language, including verbal and body language. In retrospect, and as history now has recorded, Trump’s exhortations quickly became manifest in a lengthy, brutal, and lethal premeditated attack on the U. S. Congress. The Congress was meeting at the Capitol to perform its Constitutionally prescribed counting of Electoral College votes as part of the protracted U. S. ritual of transitioning to the next Federal Administration.
Obstruction of Congress was not only evidently premeditated.
It was predictable, and predicted, from Trump’s actions prior to the insurrection. Warnings of impending obstruction, if not accurate in detail, were issued, including by myself. On 31 December 2020 I (ineffectually) warned Washington Post reporter Justin Moyer and Congressman Paul Tonko (New York, 20th Congressional District)15 about my concerns:
15 My e-mail to Washington Post reporter Justin Moyer, warning of possibly impending obstruction of Congress: Hi Justin, My (urgent) story suggestion: publicize the issue of potential Trump supporters obstructing
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I hope (and expect) that arrangements indeed have been made to assure that Democrats will be able to travel safely and arrive [at the Capitol] in a timely manner. Even so: this may be an issue that is worth airing, to prepare DC Police and others who might be needed to assure unobstructed travel and voting, and unobstructed implementation of normal transition procedures.
free travel by Democratic Senators and House Members to Capitol Hill on 6 January. As you know, Trump has been summoning his supporters to Washington, DC to protest Congressional certification of Electoral College votes for President-Elect Biden. At least one House member and one Senate member plans to protest the certification. This will trigger a required debate and vote in each chamber. To vote, Senators and House Members will have to arrive at Capitol Hill, and to their respective voting locations. Most may be traveling from home. I do hope that the Biden team has addressed the possibility of Democratic Senators and House Members being obstructed by Trump supporters, who may have been provided with home addresses, from traveling to Capitol Hill to participate in the Joint Session of Congress, and to their respective chambers to participate in the debate and the vote. I hope (and expect) that arrangements indeed have been made to assure that Democrats will be able to travel safely and arrive in a timely manner. Even so: this may be an issue that is worth airing, to prepare DC Police and others who might be needed to assure unobstructed travel and voting, and unobstructed implementation of normal transition procedures. My e-mail to Diana Bennett, aide to Congressman Paul Tonko, warning of possibly impending obstruction of Congress on 6-January 2021: Hi Diana, As you know, Trump has been summoning his supporters to Washington, DC to protest Congressional certification of electoral votes to each presidential candidate. At least one House member and one Senate member plans to protest the certification. This will trigger a required debate and vote in each chamber. To vote, Senators and House Members will have to arrive at their respective voting locations. Most may be traveling from home. I do hope that the Biden team has addressed the possibility of Democratic Senators and House Members being obstructed by Trump supporters, who may have been provided with home addresses, from traveling to debate and to vote in a safe and timely manner. I expect that arrangements have been made to assure that Democrats can participate, but I had to write this e-mail to raise the issue, just in case… Please advise! I look forward to hearing from you. page 79
My warnings clearly turned out to be inaccurate in detail, depicting an insurrection of far less magnitude than the actual 6-January 2021 insurrection.
Videos of the attack revealed rioters shouting the phrases used by the President minutes earlier. Indeed, evidence is accumulating suggesting Trump’s intent and his long-term planning of the violent culmination of his campaign to overturn his election loss and subvert the Constitution. See, for example, Rutenberg et al. (2021):
“Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president, who wielded the power derived from his near-infallible status among the party faithful in one final norm-defying act of a reality-denying presidency.”
The 6-January Capitol riot has been linked to both Trump and the GOP Accumulating evidence now includes, for the first time, the arrest of a member of the Trump Administration, Federico Klein, “who was then a mid-level political appointee at the State Department and former Trump campaign aide” (Blake 2021a). Others with “ties to Trump and the Republican Party” also were arrested. These include, for example, a New Mexico County Commissioner, Couy Griffin, who in 2019 said “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” They also include Derrick Evans, a Republican state lawmaker from West Virginia, who on 6 January 2021 said on video “We’re in! Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!” He resigned after the siege, and after “he was taken into custody and accused of violent entry and disorderly conduct.” In short: “as the story of the Capitol riot continues to unfold, there are several connections between those involved, and Trump, the broader GOP and others that invite further investigation.” This story is unfolding as, indeed, further investigation is under way by the U. S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January
6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
Former Republican House Speaker (2011-‘15) John Boehner (2021) blamed Trump for inciting the 6-January “bloody insurrection.” That exhibit of Presidential insurrection quickly resulted in a bipartisan vote in the House of Representatives to impeach Trump (again). The insurrection should be regarded more broadly as an exemplar of how violence effectively can be threatened publicly, though only implicitly, that is, retaining ‘plausible deniability’ (or at least, in a court of law,
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arguable deniability). Similar exemplars are famous in fiction, for example, in the movie “The Godfather,” in which the mafia leader Don Corleone intimidates a witness against him to remain silent in court by staring at him menacingly. The lesson applies equally to either Don, Corleone in fiction or Trump in fact.
A friend of mine rhetorically asked how someone like Trump can profess to love America, while in fact hating (most) Americans. Trump’s attitude applied even to his supporters, as reported by a member of his coronavirus task force (Mazza 2021): “Olivia Troye… said Trump was happy when pandemic safety measures meant that he’d no longer ‘have to shake hands with these disgusting people’… it wasn’t just the hands he didn’t like. It was the people.” Radio host Howard Stern also was quoted: “The oddity in all of this is the people Trump despises most love him the most.” Such discerned realities have materialized into historical realities, upon Trump strategically disavowing his rioting supporters, and leaving them to face their legal plight without presidential pardons or
other support for their loyalty to Trump.
Trump’s actions seem to fulfill a need for attention, admiration, and adulation. His persona, however, is of an embattled person. His actions, therefore, have tended to incite counter-reactions that have embattled him. Pundits have argued in the media about whether Trump’s actions tend to backfire from intent, poor judgment, or failure to plan adequately. My own belief is that Trump’s actions tend to backfire because, at a conscious or (sometimes) unconscious level, his intent is not benevolent. He wants them to backfire, and he wants to be embattled, and evoke sympathetic support, as a result. Though basically cruel, he nonetheless dons the mantle of victimhood. He attributes his victimhood to persecution by others, for example, others who he invented in “the deep state.” I am not a psychologist, but this is how Trump’s niece, clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump (2020), characterized her uncle in her recent book:
“His egregious and arguably intentional mishandling of the current [pandemic] catastrophe has led to a level of pushback and scrutiny that he’s never experienced before, increasing his belligerence and need for petty revenge as he withholds vital funding, personal protective equipment, and ventilators that your tax dollars have paid for from states whose governors don’t kiss his ass sufficiently.”
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Reason does not compel you to agree with me about Trump’s cruel intent, but I hope that you will agree that clear thinking in civics requires the attempt to infer apparent civic intent, even though one often or usually cannot reliably get inside the head of another person.
Trump’s call to violent action on 6 January was followed by a speech by his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, explicitly calling on the crowd to engage in “combat,” clarifying Trump’s will for anyone who missed it. Following Giuliani’s speech, organizers of the riot showed a video (Stanley 2021) at the Ellipse, which is an oval-shaped park located between the Washington Monument and the White House:
“To a scholar of fascist propaganda, well-versed in the history of the National Socialist’s pioneering use of videos in political propaganda, it was clear, watching it, what dangers it portended. In it, we see themes and
tactics that history warns pose a violent threat to liberal democracy. Given the aims of fascist propaganda – to incite and mobilize – the events that followed were predictable…
Increasingly central to Trumpism is the QAnon conspiracy theory, which, as many commentators have now pointed out, closely resembles Nazi anti-Semitic myths. QAnon is just the most obvious manifestation of the increasing parallels between Trumpism and Hitler’s framework itself. Indeed, several contemporary fascist and white supremacist movements find similar roots in the framework Hitler developed, even if they did not culminate in such extreme actions as the Nazis…”
Context matters. Trump was advised by his attorneys that he might
face legal and unpardonable civil liabilities for financial damages precipitated by his messaging on social media culminating in the acts of violent insurrection on 6 January 2021. To mitigate legal exposure and potential financial damage to himself and his companies, Trump (who was banned from using his Twitter account and other social media accounts) recorded and broadcasted a video (half-heartedly) condemning violence and law breaking by the rioters. Yet, as the record clearly and abundantly documents, violence and law breaking have characterized the Trump Administration for its entire four-year tenure. If you aspire to clear
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thinking, therefore, you must view this brief, aberrant video performance in this broader context. You must apply the adage that actions speak louder than words.
------------------------------------------------ “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
Santayana, George (1863 – 1952). The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense. New York City, Charles Scribner & Sons, page 284, 1905 ------------------------------------------------
Two additional components of context evaluation are consistency and honesty. Multiple Senators and Representatives made statements condemning Trump for incitement of insurrection, only to walk them back in subsequent statements. U. S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for example, made a clear statement of condemnation on the Senate floor, seeming to end a long history of being a close ally of Trump. Then he accompanied Trump on Air Force One, after which he reversed his posture, perhaps as if reminded of compromising information that Trump could deploy against him, or as if otherwise threatened or seduced by Trump.
Consistency properly can include honestly changing one’s opinion as new information emerges. Further, inconsistency can be a well-motivated political strategy to accomplish good. For example, U.
S. policies in the oil-rich Middle East often were justified via diverse rationales. Often those rationales were tailored to different targeted audiences. One audience might be persuaded to support Middle East policy if it were characterized as promoting democracy in autocratic countries. Another might be attracted to policy rationales relating to protection of the supply and/or the reasonably low price of oil.
Consistency evaluation, ultimately, must consider the context of different and possibly mutually inconsistent statements, and specifically whether such statements are, nonetheless, honest and consistent with facts as known and as believed. If they are not, consider applying the vocabulary word of the day: hypocrisy. ‘Hypocrisy’ is a good vocabulary word to describe GOP ‘sentiments’ to move on from Trump’s actions, instead of embroiling the nation in bitter dispute.
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History suggests that reconciliation will be impossible to achieve if premature (Barnes and Janney 2021):
Before reconciliation can take hold, we must be clear about who we want to be as a nation and act on values that support the practice of democracy. We must also use our Constitution, laws, and norms to defeat those who don’t support them. The lesson that must be learned from the Civil War and Reconstruction is that accountability, not denial, is essential to healing.
According to George Orwell, whose famous novel “1984” (Orwell 1949) depicted a dystopic society, “to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration” (Orwell 1981). Our contemporary attempt at reconciliation will be premature unless made in the context of, for example, GOP acknowledgement of the fairness of the Biden/Harris election victory, and of the responsibility of Trump for
inciting insurrection against the U. S. Capitol, Congress, and our democracy. Indeed, numerous actions have been taken to begin to hold accountable those responsible for the numerous infractions against our Constitution, laws, and ethical standards (Helderman 2021).
Thought matters. In the good old days, science often progressed via personal, even avocational thinking. Albert Einstein, for example, famously conducted ‘thought experiments’, from which his insights shook the scientific world and beyond, most notably with his special and general theories of relativity in the early 20th Century. Einstein opined that an ideal job for a physicist was lighthouse keeper, to benefit from freedom during duty to work with paper, pencils, and thought; and thereby to make scientific progress.
Unlike science in the good old days, modern-day science commonly depends upon project funding being won competitively
based upon research proposals that are judged via peer review, preferably (but only inconsistently) judged blindly. Research proposals formally argue for the likely benefit of a described project being funded. Funding agencies then compare competing proposals, applying (among other criteria, such as clarity of explication and inclusion of persuasive documentation to justify the proposed project budget) the critical criterion of distinguishing scientific vs. unscientific hypotheses. In short, scientific progress depends (in part) upon the winnowing process of critical thinking to eliminate unscientific, ad hoc hypotheses, which
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may emerge from logical thinking, but whose likelihood of being true is miniscule.
Selection of research to be funded and undertaken ultimately depends upon applying the scientific Law of Parsimony, and wielding Occam’s Razor. Both of these conceptual instruments denote the idea that the simplest explanations of phenomena, a priori, are more likely to be true than more complex a priori explanations of the same phenomena. For example, consider which explanation of a lottery jackpot is more likely to be true: luck or cheating? The scientific answer, a priori, is the simpler explanation, usually luck: if someone has won, absent evidence of cheating, then that someone most probably was (very) lucky16.
Consider a slightly modified picture of the above lottery example. Which explanation of three lottery jackpots won by the same individual in the same year is more likely to be true: luck or cheating? The a priori scientific answer again is the simpler explanation, usually cheating: if
someone has won each lottery, the (quantifiable) odds against that lucky someone being the same individual multiple times typically are astronomically low, absent some form of cheating. The salient difference between the two examples, which share astronomically low a priori odds, is that an eventual single winner is inevitable despite the long odds (against); a single winner of three lotteries is not (it is almost impossible).
This all may seem theoretical, not practical. I assure you that theory and practice both are of equal scientific value. Being ‘theoretical’ does not detract from being ‘practical’, and vice versa. Einstein’s relativity theories, for example, also have enabled supremely practical global positioning system (GPS) technology. Indeed, in the above lottery examples, the theoretical answer likewise has urgent practical application, such as regarding conspiracy ‘theories’ [actually conspiracy hypotheses
16 In the U. S., state lottery proceeds tend to offset important societal expenses that otherwise might be funded via tax revenues, including education, economic development, parks, and broad band access. Kearney (2005) reported that “On average, a dollar wagered on a state lottery game returns about 50 cents to players in the form of prizes and 30 cents of profit to the state, with the rest covering administrative costs.” Lottery sales amounted to $212/year per adult in lottery states, and $372/year per household nationally. I therefore have been a lottery winner each year for decades, based upon my practice of never buying lottery tickets. However, I do miss the excitement and possibility of being a big lottery winner. Investments in lottery tickets by people who appreciate these benefits, can afford to participate, clearly may be well-spent money! page 85
or, as suggested by Cooter (2022) “conspiracy fantasies”] that (these days) seem to be embraced with increased popularity by scientifically illiterate and/or ignorant adherents of political interest groups such as Q’Anon. The truth of such conspiracy theories might be logically possible, but critical thinking should eliminate them from serious consideration, or from further consideration. Formally, they are ad hoc hypotheses that, as such, require a confluence of gratuitous assumptions all to be true. They are therefore more than minimally complex, and so, a priori, they violate the Law of Parsimony and fail the test of Occam’s Razor.
Indeed, the rantings of conspiracy theory proponents often have been objectively refuted, as in the Trump claim of a stolen election. Such refutation often has been unpersuasive to their proponents, who rarely have met their burden of due diligence before adopting extreme beliefs. Clear thinkers should understand that such opposing claims merit neither morally nor intellectually equivalent status. Falsifiable claims that have
been falsified must be deemed false. For example, defendants who are found guilty by a jury of their peers often have refused to admit their guilt (except on Perry Mason), but they are treated as guilty parties, and rarely are found to be otherwise.
Here is a historical example of an evidence-based conspiracy theory that critical thinking has been unable to eliminate from further consideration: that President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in 1963 was part of a conspiracy, and that conspiracy involved a second shooter. Conspiracy proponents argued that Oswald could not have acted alone, citing (disputed) acoustic evidence of a second shooter who missed the target. The assassination was the subject of numerous investigations, the most extensive conducted by the Warren Commission (headed by U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren), which issued a 15-volume report concluding that Oswald was the sole shooter, and was not part of a conspiracy. Subsequent investigation by the U. S. House
Select Committee on Assassinations found that a second shooter (who missed) indeed had been present, and that a conspiracy probably existed. The relevance of this episode to science and civics is in the retrospective view of historical records: our perception of the 1963 tragedy depends upon the evidence, and upon evidence-based decision making, notwithstanding uncertainty that persists even today.
Indeed, Occam’s Razor and the Law of Parsimony support simplicity over complexity, but many issues are indeed complex.
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Recognition of their complexity does not negate or violate these logical laws. For example, one might defend the libertarian view by opposing Covid-19 vaccination mandates. Alternatively, one might defend the vaccine mandates by supporting public health protection, according that imperative priority over the libertarian view. That is my own view, given that (as of this writing) deaths of over 700,000 people in our country already have been attributed to Covid-19, and many (even many-fold) more Covid-19 deaths are unattributed to that cause, but actually are, or should be, attributable to it.
The civics point here goes beyond the priority that should be accorded to public health. More fundamentally, conflict between two principles exemplifies the civics phenomenon of real-world complexity. You cannot, or should not, view the world simplistically. You must, or should, confront complexity, here regarding the issue of conflicting principles, and the need for civil conflict resolution involving them. Your preference for one principle over the other might be understandable and
excusable, but not your dogmatism if you fail to weigh the conflicting principles in the real-world context. One principle might win out, and it might or might not be the one you prefer, but the principles still must be considered side-by-side, and a rational decision made. This exercise should be familiar, as we all (I think!) have learned that the principle of free speech in our democracy does not win out in the conflicting case of someone shouting “fire!” in a movie theater. The danger to human life in this example is given priority over the libertarian free-speech viewpoint. As a bottom line: balancing is a hallowed principle of community responsibility, AND… contrary to conspiracy theorists, vaccine mandates are not a conspiracy of Democrats to usurp the rights and freedoms of Republicans!
For me the issue of complexity and priority of human life and health over libertarian freedom-at-any-cost is especially poignant in the case of (the small minority of) healthcare workers who refuse to get
vaccinated even when vaccination is mandated. Vaccinations protect workers and their families, as well as patients (or other charges) of the healthcare workers. Vaccinations also protect healthcare institutions by enabling them to keep their patients (or other charges) safe. Yet, surprising numbers of healthcare workers have rejected this view, some at the cost of their jobs. In my view, such ‘healthcare’ workers probably are not needed. The curricula that train them should be augmented to teach the civics principles addressed above.
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C h a p t e r 04. The I n c r e d i b i l i t y o f ‘C o n s p i r a c y Theories’
The White House is a symbol of American democracy. As the residence of the U. S. President for over a century, it also has served as American democracy’s Executive Branch nerve center. The Trump Administration, however, undermined this venerable history, fashioning the White House instead as a refuge for well-meaning public servants toiling for public good against a hostile “deep state” seeking to undermine them by conspiring against Trump and his sycophants and enablers. One person’s deep-state conspirator, however, is another person’s patriot, defending the state against a corrupt, self-serving, would-be autocrat. Conspiracies may be common in real politics and in the real Washington, DC, but they are nowhere near as common as those imagined and invoked by ‘conspiracy theorists’ including the previous Chief Executive, aimed at promoting misinformation or disinformation, or to explain away inconvenient truths (such as why an election was lost). In this chapter, I explore the difference between a real conspiracy and the spurious allegation of a conspiracy that was manufactured by a ‘conspiracy theorist’. That is, I explore, most essentially, clear thinking.
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----------------------------------------- “Despite widespread fears and false allegations, the 2020 balloting was free of both significant locally engineered fraud and disruptions traceable to foreign disinformation campaigns. The high voter turnout was a sign of robust democratic health, as were the actions of courts and state officials to uphold the results.” Madeleine K. Albright, President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State (1997-2001). The coming democratic revival – America’s opportunity to lead the fight against authoritarianism. Foreign Affairs, 100(6):99-111, November/December 2021.
You may (and maybe should) wonder why ‘conspiracy theories’ (or, conspiracy ‘theories’!) and other ad hoc hypotheses are unlikely to be true. Consider further the two lottery examples presented in the previous chapter. If just one ticket in a million is a jackpot winner in a fair lottery, the odds of a purchased ticket being a jackpot ticket are one per million
(1/1,000,000 = 1.0 x 10-6). Despite these long odds (against), in a large population of lottery entries, a winner is likely eventually to be picked. Once picked, the odds against the winning ticket being a winning ticket shift from one per million to roughly 100 percent (100/100 = 1.0 x 100). This transition from long odds (against) to near certainty (in favor) occurs at the moment when the winning ticket is identified, that is, once an outcome has emerged. In conspiracy theories, outcomes that might be logically possible if not inevitable, like fair lottery jackpots, are attributed to allegedly nefarious circumstances that were diabolically engineered beforehand, to overcome the long odds against winning. In technical terms, this is the difference between viewing events a priori vs. a posteriori, that is, prospectively vs. retrospectively, looking ahead vs. looking back, or with foresight vs. hindsight. More tangibly, a conspiracy theorist unreasonably might cast doubt on an honest lottery winner on the justification that the odds of winning honestly were vanishingly small. In contrast, an objective thinker, recognizing that a winner inevitably will be
picked notwithstanding low odds, might ask instead how the lottery winner could have cheated. In the likely absence of a plausible method of cheating, s/he might conclude that the lottery was honest, and that the winner was (very) lucky.
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The significance of the distinction between judging predictively vs. judging in hindsight is familiar to many if not most people, as illustrated by the familiar phrase Monday night quarterbacking. When appropriate, this critical distinction should be recognized and generalized. It might be extrapolated, for example, to a parent whose young child has wandered away in a crowd. The lost child might ask a random stranger for assistance in finding his or her parents. In a mostly virtuous community, the child is likely to have reached out to a benevolent stranger who might render parent-finding assistance. Consider a slightly modified picture of this lost-child scenario. What are the odds of the same child being treated benevolently when the stranger approaches the child instead of vice versa? The odds of benevolence when the child approaches the stranger are a priori odds, which may be highly favorable. The odds of benevolence when the stranger approaches the child are a posteriori odds. That is, the stranger is no longer random, but a (self-)selected individual, just as a lottery ticket, once identified as a jackpot winner, is no longer a random ticket, but a selected ticket. This intuitively simple statistical
lesson might be suitable (in some understandable form) for parents to teach their children.
As most of us may know, and as laws in the U. S. and U. S. States recognize, conspiracies actually do occur. The important concept to apply when judging whether observed events justify the ‘conspiracy’ label is that conspiracies that are logically possible also are less likely to be real when posited a priori, and more likely to be real once explicit planning (conspiring) and plan implementation have been observed and proven. Planning and implementation are retrospective observations, associated with a posteriori odds. In the absence of such proof and/or of reasonable evidence of planning, proffered by a credible source, interpretation of an event, such as an election that was lost, as a conspiracy, such as an election that was stolen, must be deemed speculative and very probably not credible. The odds of a conspiracy being real thus depend critically upon the distinction just discussed between a priori vs. a posteriori, prospective
vs. retrospective, looking ahead vs. looking back, or foresight vs. hindsight.
One might wonder what reasoning deficiencies might explain why anyone would fall into the conspiracy theory trap. Research from the University of Cambridge suggests that people who are most receptive to extremism might be identified via neuropsychological and personality testing (Zmigrod et al. 2020). The authors reported that (potential) extremists among their study participants exhibited difficulty with
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emotional control, and with complex tasks that required complex reasoning. Accordingly, they adopted relatively simplistic, blackand-white worldviews. They also had perceptual difficulty with processing evidence. Accordingly, they tended to be dogmatic and to resist credible evidence. Regarding the ‘Big Lie’ that Trump won the election, not by a little, but by a landslide, the former President of Union College, and Republican candidate for Mayor of Schenectady (Hull 2021) noted:
“Ironically, none of those who question the election seems to have any difficulty with votes cast for Republicans who won. Somehow, only votes on the presidential line were magically changed.”
Biden’s electoral victory, and Trump’s loss, have inspired conspiracy theorists to adjust their narratives to adapt to the postInauguration-Day reality without abandoning their interpretation of the
evidently refuted, election-stolen belief. An example involving QAnon and its vanished leader Q may be instructive (Harwell 2021): “Tiffany echoed a number of ideas that QAnon channels on the encrypted chat app Telegram have floated in the past day, including that Biden’s swearing-in actually had been taped 11 hours earlier…” and “[Tiffany] believes that everything is still humming along according to plan — and that Trump’s election loss was all part of Q’s master strategy to expose the evildoers who corrupted the vote.” I will not analyze whether these hypotheses constitute logical possibilities. Even if they do, they clearly are manufactured to preserve a cherished belief in preference over abandoning it due to countervailing evidence: “Will you believe Q, or your lyin’ eyes.” Such unreasonable post facto hypotheses must be alleged true, despite being very unlikely to be true, if the stolen-election belief also is to be sustained.
Proliferation of conspiracy ‘theories’ 17 around the 2020
presidential election raises the issue of how well received such ‘theories’ are beyond those proposing them. I do not know. In Eastern Europe, among former Soviet Republics, however, evidence in the form
17 I prefer the phrase conspiracy hypotheses over conspiracy theories, because theories have a higher status in the hierarchy of scientific knowledge, being supported by persuasive evidence. Conspiracy ‘theorists’ are not actually theorists at all, but shotin-the dark wishful thinkers who typically lack objective justification for their allegations of conspiracy. In science, to qualify as valid hypotheses, such allegations must be supported by some form of reasonable evidence.
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of surveys and focus groups (Lipman 2021) has suggested that “even among people who are generally receptive to conspiracy theories, the essential cynicism of those theories tends to deepen public suspicion of the very officials who endorse them.”
Our Civic Ecosystem
We humans are part of nature, and we live in a natural ecosystem that includes predator and prey organisms. Our society of humans includes people who prey on other people, and people who are preyed upon. It includes people who seek to benefit others, who might be termed ‘social donors’ or ‘altruists’, and people who seek to exchange benefits equitably, the equivalent of ecosystem ‘commensals’. We include among our numbers some who are parasitic on others, sapping their health and resources. We learn to protect our money against such scammers, and we likewise must learn to protect our democracy against incursions by populists who would advance their interests at the expense of our nation’s interests.
As a biologist I am committed to the study of nature, with its Darwinian ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ competition, and its economic equivalent, often termed ‘social Darwinism’. I often dislike what I see in nature, as it often seems so cruel, making me want to escape to someplace relatively tame, like a managed, stereotypical English garden or park. Instead, I live in the woods within a suburban community. It is in Upstate New York, so it actually is relatively tame, compared (say) to big-predatorrich places like the African savannah, which is stereotypical safari country.
An appealing aspect of living in a natural setting in relatively tame Upstate New York is its relative seclusion from our planet’s top predator, Homo sapiens. From my partially sheltered vantage point, I am most appalled by illegal and unethical behaviors of people against other people, or against animals or nature, as in trading in endangered species. I am aware of morally ambiguous human behaviors as well but, in writing this book, I
do wish to distance myself from such foibles, as unambiguities abound!
My outlook may be traced to my childhood background as a Jewish post-War Baby Boomer, whose family exists to a greatly diminished extent because much of it was in Europe during World War II. That branch was wiped out in the Holocaust. Indeed, I recall my mother telling me that my grandmother and grandfather together made two trips to Europe after the war to look for family members. They placed advertisements, looked in refugee camps, and looked who-knows-where else, but they found no
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surviving relatives. Now, in the internet age, I uncovered records from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, documenting the fate of several European relatives. They were murdered by Nazis, who sent them to labor camps (‘farms’) to extract their labor until they died by unspecified means.
In writing about ethics and civics, I would be pleased if a war criminal, or an unethical political figure, read my words. I would be pleased if my words motivated contrition and a cathartic change of character. I do not expect this to occur commonly, or at all. The populations of horrible people who I will have occasion to mention are not targets of this work. They do not constitute a motivation for my writing this book, which aims to help readers to do a thing that I try to do: recognize and avoid noxious and infectious agents.
Clear Thinking and Objectivity in Decision Making
Scientific thinking is linked to clear and candid thinking for conceptualizing truth and reality accurately. These are positive abilities that may encompass objectivity and subjectivity, with prejudice to neither. As introduced in the Preface, the importance of ability, and of willingness to think clearly and communicate candidly, is most generally the main message of this book. Its main mission is to challenge readers while encouraging critical examination and healthy skepticism. I hope to promote reader confrontation with contemporary issues, and accountability for contemporary problems, which together seem to me to be prerequisites for national healing. I address such contemporary issues, therefore, that have faced voters in our democracy, and will continue to face voters, involving public service, public servants, and public policy.
Clear thinking is essential for combatting misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation and disinformation are important tools that autocrats typically use to control their populations: mainly, get them to lose
track of objective truth. The autocratic leader wants truth to be defined as what he declares to be true, even if false. He (almost always a ‘he’) will restrict the media (“enemy of the people,” according to Trump) and attack academics and academia. The further people are from being connected to sources of objective information, and from independently recognizing the truth, the easier they can be manipulated. Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine is illustrative. He restricts citizen access to news, information about the motivation for the war, and Russia’s (Putin’s) failures in the war, with grave punishments for violator of the restrictions. Indeed, that is what
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Trump has admired and aspired to. For example, supporting a candidate for governor of a state, he recently assured voters that, if elected, the candidate “will govern with an iron fist.” Think clearly: is that what you want?
A challenge that may be met more easily by children than by adults is internalization of such lessons. Yet, this book is written at a level that will be inaccessible to very young children. The urgency of reaching youngsters, however, highlights the need for parents and teachers to adapt them for phased introduction, always in an age-appropriate manner. Successfully internalizing lessons of clear thinking probably depends upon having been introduced to those lessons from childhood. An example in my own life may be illustrative.
A European friend of mine decades ago asked me how well I had internalized the metric system of measurement, which is used commonly in Europe, but less commonly in the U. S. I responded that, as a student of science, I had come to understand the metric system, which also had become
beautiful to me. My European friend, who had been raised using the metric system, asked me further whether, driving my car, I instinctively thought of its highway speed in kilometers per hour, or in miles per hour. I could convert back and forth fluently but, unlike him, I did not think (except when in my laboratory) in metric units first, because I was raised with English units. The metric system was second nature to me, but first nature to him.
These different perspectives may clash catastrophically, as they did in 1999 when software errors caused a $125-million (these days more expensive) Mars Climate Orbiter to approach the planet too closely. It crashed on Mars, primarily because engineers and scientists typically work using different measurement systems (English vs. metric). Lockheed Martin engineers in Denver, Colorado had programmed mission computers with English units of distance and velocity, in conflict with NASA scientists in Pasadena, California, who had used metric units.
Clear thinking in economics and personal finances. Clear thinking is beneficial regarding preservation of our democracy and, toward that end, it is also worth exemplifying beyond, regarding other contemporary issues addressed in this book. Clear thinking is clearly, to say the least, a good skill. (To say more, it is a potentially lifesaving skill; to say the most, it is a potentially planet-saving skill.) Its use here regarding multiple areas facilitates its use beyond, on behalf of our democracy. Here I address economics, personal finance, and investment; which are important and also commonly the subject of, at best, misdirection.
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Consider the financial advisory industry, which profits even if clients lose money, because services performed for clients are chargeable, whether capital markets rise or fall. For the concept of an impending market decline, the financial industry has a euphemism: volatility. Strictly (and statistically), volatility denotes high variation around a mean value, producing a high standard deviation (square root of the statistical variance). Volatility, however, can occur around an upward- or downward-trending mean value but, in my experience, the industry seems to apply it to a declining trend. So, contrary to statistics, in the financial advisory industry ‘volatility’ seems to be a commonly used euphemism for ‘decline’ or ‘expected decline’. As an investor naively hearing the word ‘volatility’, you might fail to understand that your advisor could mean more than ‘market variability’; s/he might mean ‘market decline’, which is a concept of possibly greater concern than variability!
The financial advisory industry makes money by attracting or,
depending upon one’s viewpoint, luring people to become clients. Clients then invest in capital markets, utilizing supporting advisory services and implementing services provided by the industry (financial advisors). A major attraction is the industry premise that, even when securities markets fall, they are likely later to rise, eventually to recover fully, and profitably surpass a client’s market entry level. This premise has a grain of truth!
How can the premise be evaluated? Three thought experiments, though simplistic, will be useful. The thought experiments described below most essentially construct a framework for objectively thinking about and evaluating selected capital investment issues. My framework might constitute just one example among multiple potentially useful frameworks. Most notably, however, it is NOT one that the financial advisory industry is likely to adopt! Rather, it is my attempt to contribute toward a holistic view of the financial advisory industry, that might usefully support evidence-based (investment) decision making. I think it
exposes at-best sly marketing strategy used by the financial advisory industry, to its benefit (and not necessarily to yours).
In the thought experiments below, I ignore much of the richness of options for capital investors, such as betting on (and profiting from) a falling market, or even from a moving market. I also ignore the possibility of hand-picking high-performing securities even in a declining market. Rather, I assume that the investor, directed or not by a financial advisor,
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invests in a market basket, such as the S&P 500, that most essentially invests in, and moves with, the U. S. economy.
The U. S. economy, like capital markets, fluctuates. To be (thematically!) clear, in this book I do not predict the economy’s near-term or long-term prospects, nor do I advise readers on whether to invest, nor investors on how to invest. Rather, I narrowly address the issues of clarity of thinking and of civic responsibility in economics and personal finances, consistent thematically with other ‘clear thinking’ issues addressed herein.
By way of further prelude: Each of us is necessarily engaged in an existential investment game, by which I mean an (investment) game that you are in if you are alive. Indeed, life itself has been characterized as an existential game. You might judge that your best game strategy is to invest in a securities market, or to remain on the sidelines. Both options, however, constitute participation in the investment game, so you are necessarily in it. The three thought experiments described below compare
the strategy of entering a securities market with staying on the sidelines.
Thought Experiment No. 1 is to consider the value of invested capital on any given market entry date, and compare it with the value at subsequent potential exit dates. If the investment has declined as of the market exit date, the investor has lost money. Thought Experiment No. 1 is, most essentially, a before-and-after comparison, or ‘case study’, where the ‘case’ is a single investor. Lacking a strict, parallel (simultaneous) scientific control, it is not a ‘case-control’ study, in my simple (possibly over-simple) usage where a ‘case’ is matched to a ‘control’ for comparison. (A more complicated terminology applies in scientific specialties such as epidemiology, but I will not further defend my semantics!) The beforeand-after comparison may qualify as science only to the limited degree to which a ‘case’ can serve as its own ‘control’, which is: Not always: if I took a pill and felt better, did I feel better because I took the pill, or because I learned that I had won the lottery?
Now consider the financial advisory industry premise, wellsupported by statistics of past stock market performance, that the value of investments that were made in a declining market probably will recover. To the degree that such history is an indicator, losing investments eventually are likely to become winning investments, even when severe market shocks have occurred, as in 2008, with whopping investment losses of commonly a third to a half. That is, investors remaining in the shocked
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market are likely eventually (possibly over years) potentially to exit the market with a gain. Again, a thought experiment will be useful.
Thought Experiment No. 2 is similar to No. 1, but involves two potential investors, either of which can be yourself. One potential investor (‘case’) enters a securities market while the other (‘control’) remains on the sidelines, together constituting a small but scientifically rigorous ‘casecontrol’ study (in my simple terminology). If the market declines, the wealth of the investor will decline, but the wealth of the non-investor will remain constant (ignoring investment erosion via inflation, and investment growth via earned interest).
Thought Experiment No. 3: As a final thought experiment, consider the same two potential investors, assuming further that both initially possessed equal available capital for investment (or non-investment). Now compare the value of assets available to the investor who lost money in the declining market (‘case’) with the value of assets available to the non-
investor (‘control’). Then consider further that the market turns around, as predicted (from history) by the financial advisory industry. Finally, assume that the sidelined (non-investing) individual fortuitously (or by some form of analysis, however imperfect) now decides to enter the securities market as it begins to rise. In this scenario, both individuals now are investors.
Notwithstanding the initial parity of capital available to both potential investors, the investor who lost money in the declining market now has (maybe a third) less remaining capital to invest in the newly rising market. Both investors will gain, but the one who had stayed on the sidelines during the declining market cycle will have higher (undiminished) capital to invest, and therefore higher returns on his or her larger investment at any given future date compared with the individual who invested less, having lost money by investing in a declining securities market.
The financial advisory industry may be correct in predicting, from
history, that declining markets are likely to recover fully. In contrast, however, the three thought experiments described above together suggest that investors in a declining market will never recover fully to the position they would have had if they had not invested in the declining market. Together the thought experiments show that market recovery is not the same as investment recovery.
From misleading financial industry communications, however, market recovery might seem identical to investment recovery, and that is
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the way it commonly is portrayed. Consider consumer financial software, such as that on my own smartphone. It has an app that reports on performance of markets and of selected securities.
If the market and a $100/share security that I own both decline by 10 percent, my new share price is $90. If the market and my $90/share security then both rise by 10 percent, the market might seem to have recovered, but my share price now is only $99 ($90 + 0.10 x 90). Despite the apparent market recovery, my share price still has dropped by a net of one percent relative to its earlier $100 price, even though the financial industry has recorded a 10-percent drop followed by a seemingly fullycompensatory 10-percent rise. Financial advisory industry communications, for example communications embodied in such consumer financial software, (carefully) do not lie. To my understanding, they do seem to fulfill the industry’s legal fiduciary responsibility to their clients but, keep in mind, I am (thankfully) not a lawyer! Whether or not acting within the law is equivalent to acting in a civically responsible manner
strikes me as an unanswered question.
To illustrate one reason why market recovery may differ from investment recovery, I offer a capital market analogy. Consider the ‘case’ of an elite athlete, say a sprinter, who turns an ankle. S/he sits on the track, being passed by other runners, but like the market, she soon recovers fully. The sprinter’s position, however, has been set back irretrievably relative to uninjured ‘control’ sprinters, just as the losing investor’s position has been set back irretrievably relative to his/her simultaneous non-investor ‘controls’ in Thought Experiment No. 3. Other analogies might be used to illustrate other reasons why market recovery and investment recovery might differ.
A counterexample (favorable to the financial advisory industry) invokes the wonderful movie “Breaking Away” (Tesich 1979), illustrating that, in the long term, market recovery can look a lot like investment
recovery. In this movie, privileged college students compete with disadvantaged ‘townie’ high schoolers in a long bicycle race for the title, and for the heart of the girlfriend of the star college racer. (Almost) needlessly, I add that the star college racer cheats by causing the star high school racer to fall and injure himself. However, being athletic (and motivated!), the injured racer soon recovers, remounts, and has time to win the bike race, because it is way longer than a sprint! This analogy suggests two things: --1. The near-term advantage of avoiding a market downshock
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can be diluted (not necessarily reversed) in the long term, and –2. I can be influenced profoundly by movies.
The thought experiments described above together show that investing in a declining market compromises investment performance, even in the long term. The Breaking Away analogy confirms that, as the financial advisory industry says, victory (financial gain) can be realized in the long term. Actually realizing this goal, however, required many years after the 1929 stock market crash and “Great Depression’, and after the 2008 crash and ‘Great Recession’. If your goal is merely qualitative, to realize a gain, you might do so, even after investing in a declining market. If your goal is quantitative, to maximize investment performance, you may be better off choosing (possibly fortuitously) non-investment in the declining market. In short, you should not position yourself uncritically to be ‘in it to win it’. Sometimes, you are better off being ‘out of it to win it’!
The financial advisory industry is well aware of the spuriousness of its premise that you must be ‘in it to win it’, and is well-prepared with a routine response: you cannot ‘time the market’, meaning enter when it is low and exit when it is high, before it falls again. This response likewise has a grain of truth, but I suggest taking it with a shakerful of salt. Ultimately, timing the market is one thing that the financial advisory industry does (or tries to do successfully!); indeed it is intrinsic to the services offered by the industry, where it sells some of your assets and buys others. Ultimately, the analyst (or the analyst’s software!) is judging that now is the time to sell this and now is the time to buy that.
Indeed, the financial advisory industry itself actually does predict future market performance actionably, and it does so routinely and frequently, as exemplified by capital market outlook reports arriving in my e-mail in-box weekly! One caveat: this market timing advice is provided to clients! Market outlook reports may be worded carefully, for
example, avoiding stating the goal of market timing. Their purpose instead may be to help navigate markets or take advantage of emerging market trends.
Generally, many technical factors influence capital market performance, and serve as actionable criteria for profitable investment, especially by professionals equipped with sophisticated software capable of, for example, effectuating rapid-fire securities trades. For most people, especially non-professionals, such technical factors effectively constitute
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noise, and longer-term trends are more important for them to discern. For example, I was wary of entering capital markets recently because of my perception of impending geopolitical risks that could undermine my investment. I was thinking of possible Chinese aggression against Taiwan, but my fear materialized with Russian aggression against Ukraine. Was I wise? I do not know!
The financial advisory industry message, that you should be in the market because you can’t time the market, essentially translates to: invest responsibly which, pared down to its basic concept, translates to: “invest.” I regard it as equivalent to the liquor industry’s similar, carefully worded message: “drink responsibly” which, pared down, translates to the basic message: “drink.” Contrary to the financial advisory industry, but also as illustrated by it, market performance is predictable, at least roughly.
Trusting one’s judgment, one’s market entry timing might avoid one, or maybe even more than one, impending capital market shock, to
one’s enduring financial benefit. More likely, I think, is that a market downturn already has begun. In that circumstance, the financial advisory industry orthodoxy is to advise clients to stay the course rather than sell. The premise is: losses eventually will reverse but, if you exit the market, you will be unable to time market recovery, and your own market re-entry. Two effects of such advice may be: --1. Less selling occurs, mitigating market decline at least temporarily, and –2. Clients remain in the market longer, lose more money, and recover their investment value more slowly, if ever. Alternatively, the advisers could be right: you might be better off financially (not so sure about psychologically!) if you ride out downturns. At a minimum, advisers advising clients to stay in a declining market raises the question of whether a conflict of interests exists, because the market declines less when selling is inhibited.
The three thought experiments described above are generic; they have more or less equal validity when the assumed investment is self-
directed via the S&P 500, or is directed via financial advisors. As the financial advisory industry self-protectively says, past performance does not guarantee future results. (Therefore, caveat emptor!) I am here reminded of Warren Buffett’s recent (and often-expressed) sentiment: “I would rather invest money on the advice of a monkey than on the advice of a financial advisor” (for example, see DigitNews 2022). In fact, financial advisors have a poor track record if measured against the benchmark of beating S&P 500 performance (for example, Anderson 2021). That is, you
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might justify paying financial advisors for diverse investment services, but beating the S&P 500 is unlikely to be one of them!
Clear thinking about economics and personal finance promises clear benefits. If you have sufficient assets (however you define sufficient), your optimum rate of investment return may be zero, ignoring inflation. With inflation, your optimum rate of return may equal the inflation rate. To be clear, I do not want to make zero on my investments, nor advocate this for anyone else: the more profit, the better! What I am suggesting is that your investment goal is related to investment risk: the more risk, the worse!
Seeking higher investment returns may (typically does) pose higher risks, which may be significant if you are not already wealthy beyond the dream of avarice. In contrast, if your assets are insufficient (however you define insufficient), you still might be better off seeking those higher returns by investing more speculatively, thereby probably
exposing yourself to higher risks, especially if you are young and your investment horizon is far. OR NOT: securities markets have done well historically, but that is no guarantee that they will do well in the future, or for your particular investment time horizon.
Up from Political Correctness (UPC): Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)
Unfortunately, scientists at times are among those who think unscientifically (Strevens 2020). Usually, they think scientifically, but some scientists tend to ignore viewpoints that are unfashionable, such as (perennially!) the study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Yet, UFOs constitute a possible link in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). UFO reports seem to be roaring back to notoriety under the reworked moniker, UAP, for unidentified aerial phenomena. The U. S. Navy recently has released multiple videos of UAP in the
vicinity of military planes and other military assets, which seems to have stimulated new interest in their scientific study (Kopparapu and HaqqMisra 2020).
In response to UAP, the Trump Administration in 2019 established the U. S. Space Command, as if extraterrestrial invaders constituted a clear and present danger to our planet, presumably beginning with America First… The Space Command might be justified, however, if UAP turn out to be manifestations of technologies
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developed by the Chinese or the Russians, constituting a national security risk (Rogoway 2021). More likely, I think, UAP are manifestations of American military technologies.
That technologies of Russia or China are capable of UFO-like behavior seems unlikely to me, though visitation by extraterrestrials (ETs) seems much more unlikely! A third hypothesis is my own: atmospheric anomalies affecting surveillance equipment such as radars. The ultimate clarification of UAP matters in many ways, but in only one way within the civics and science scope of this book: the need for objective, unbiased scientific study and analysis.
Recent analysis of UAP dynamics revealed putative “structured craft” exhibiting anomalously high acceleration consistent with vehicles for interstellar travel (Knuth, et al. 2019; von Rennenkampff 2022). That is, if sustained in space, “the craft could easily reach relativistic speeds within a matter of minutes to hours and cover interstellar distances in a
matter of days to weeks.” Such flight characteristics, however, also seem inconsistent with interstellar vehicles, as they suggest extreme and grossly expensive overdesign relative to the needs of such vehicles.
Several observations suggest consistency of observed UAPs with massless images such as holographs, rather than massive objects such as piloted or autonomous vehicles. For example, released images lack resolution that reasonably might be expected from satellite and aerial photography, which can discern fine details of solid objects such as license plates from surprisingly long distances and high altitudes (A friend once noted to me that the U. S. military can detect anything the size of a grapefruit entering our atmosphere; I think the size of a mosquito might be more accurate today!). Other observations, however, seem inconsistent with massless images. Following are several observations that raise doubt about UAPs being massive objects, and that highlight the desirability of conducting further study, even if ‘politically incorrect’, to
reconcile apparently conflicting observations and/or interpretations.
Knuth et al. (2019) suggested that UAPs of apparently similar ilk have been observed over a period of decades. I have long agreed with Knuth et al. that anti-UFO sentiment over those (at least seven) decades has led to dismissal of credible claims, and ignorance of evident phenomena. Like many people, a part of me has rooted for UFOs to be real interstellar visitors. I also could understand our need to study such vehicles over decades to understand their technology, as documented(!)
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in the blockbuster movie Independence Day (Devlin and Emmerich 1996).
Unfortunately, I find hard to understand the need of UAP from an advanced civilization to study our relatively primitive military ships and aircraft for that same timeframe of decades. Further, interstellar craft conducting decades-long missions reasonably should not require design accommodating transit times of just days or weeks. Absence of communication from the UAP further suggests behavior inconsistent with observation of terrestrial ships and aircraft over decades-long intervals. Other reported UAP behaviors likewise undermine the (terrestrial or extraterrestrial) vehicle hypothesis.
Knuth et al. report, for example, that UAPs were found present at a secret rendezvous point 60 miles from the point of original UAP siting. ETs could not possibly have known about this secret location. This strongly suggests that the UAP were not vehicles, but massless images
created unintentionally as artifacts of U. S. military ships and/or aircraft. Such images might have been generated via military communications or operation of equipment such as radar. In that case, their appearance at a secret rendezvous location is easily explained: that’s where the military equipment generating the UAP were located!
The appearance of UAP in the vicinity of terrestrial military ships and aircraft likewise seems suspiciously coincidental. UAP, whether piloted or autonomous craft, reasonably would be expected to explore our planet without regard to the presence or absence of terrestrial instruments capable of detecting them. If you want to abstain from communication, undetectable exploration would seem preferable. UAP have been observed, at least visually, over the entire globe, but that does not diminish the potential significance of their preferentially frequent observation where instruments (military equipment) might have a role in creating them artifactually.
A related UAP behavior likewise casts doubt on their physical solidity, and therefore on their possible status as terrestrial or extraterrestrial vehicles. Specifically, UAP of comparable size to U. S. military aircraft were reported to oscillate below the surface of the ocean as observed by military aircraft crews from an altitude of 20,000 feet. Yet, the ocean water did not exhibit turbulence expected from such side-toside motion. We may know nothing of the technology utilized in the
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submerged UAP, if it was a vehicle, but we do know enough about the ocean to raise doubt about a reported airplane-size vehicle moving beneath its surface without creating ocean water turbulence.
Further, a U. S. military aircraft descended to observe the submerged UAP (craft!), whereupon the UAP rose to meet it, leaving the water, again without creating expected turbulence. Distilling the essence of this encounter, the UAP initially appeared small from 20,000 feet, and then appeared larger, filling more of the observers’ visual field, suggesting rapid ascent and approach. This reminds me of a short story that I had read as a child, about (as I recall) a man sitting on his porch, enjoying his view of surrounding hills. Suddenly, a large animal resembling a spider appeared to be walking on the hillside. This mystified the observer… until he came to realize that a tiny spider had become suspended by a silk thread in front of his face. The man’s eyes superimposed the tiny image of the spider onto the distant hillside, suggesting a huge spider.
Likewise, the UAP hovering over (or in) the ocean appeared suddenly to rise to the altitude of the descending military aircraft. This ‘maneuver’ over the seemingly impossibly brief period of about a second brings to mind a sudden change of instrument magnification of an image. In my experience, rotating the objective lenses on a microscope nosepiece could abruptly switch a tiny image viewed at low magnification to a large image viewed at high magnification. The object initially would have occupied a tiny fraction of the visual field under low power, but suddenly would occupy most or all of the visual field under higher power. That is, an object that originally appeared to be tiny suddenly appeared to be large, creating the impression of a massive distant object approaching with anomalously high acceleration and speed. In reality, the seemingly approaching object was an image, whose zero mass enabled its apparent high acceleration, and (thankfully) preserving the laws of physics.
Ultimately, UFOs and other UAPs must obey the laws of physics,
though not necessarily the laws as we imperfectly understand them. Our understanding is in flux. Even so, I am inclined to believe that UAP reports of recent note will be revealed to be spurious images, not solid objects of terrestrial or of extraterrestrial origin. That is, physics will constrain our understanding of the nature of UAP; UAP will not overturn our understanding of the nature of physics. So, does this mean the Space Command is unneeded? I don’t know; maybe it will contribute to learning enough about UAP to decide the issue at a more appropriate future date.
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This all does not mean, however, that our planet never was visited by ETs. The ‘flying saucer flaps’ of recent decades, especially postdating WWII, generally were dismissed as familiar astronomical objects (such as the bright planet Venus), atmospheric phenomena (such as ball lightning), or ground-based phenomena (such as swamp gas and insect swarms), figments of the imagination of untrained observers, or hoaxes. Efforts at scientific study of UFO reports were hindered by such explanations, and the risk to scientists interested in them of losing credibility. As a result, numerous UFO sightings lacking plausible terrestrial explanation were left unstudied, or studied in only a cursory manner, or retrospectively, after evidence was lost or distorted such as by imperfect memory (greatly exacerbated by deaths of witnesses). ‘Political correctness’ generally serves science and society poorly.
I am inclined to believe that UFO reports postdating WWII, like recent UAP reports, are explainable as artifactual images, not solid objects of terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin. Post-war UFO reports were
generated when radar was new, and understanding of the potential effects of atmospheric phenomena on its imaging was primitive. Surveillance of the sky in that era, especially among coast dwellers, was intense because of the fear of aerial attack. Transition of these WWII issues to the postWWII period naturally occurred with onset of the ‘cold war’, and attendant fears of nuclear surprise attack by ICBMs.
My tidy concept described above was amenable to scientific study, and to potential refutation. It might have been refuted, or become more credible if not refuted, had UFO reports received unbiased scientific study, which I think they should have. Bias among decision makers, including scientists, compromised credible explication of UFO phenomena and reports, to the detriment of our current understanding of the weight of evidence.
A recent exception to my condemnation of scientists in this issue
area is the in-your-face hypothesis advanced by Avi Loeb (2021), who is highly credible as chairperson of the Harvard University Astronomy Department. He argued that the interstellar object nicknamed ‘Oumuamua that traversed our solar system in 2017 is artificial and was created by technologically advanced ETs. The argument is meticulously reasoned and, as acknowledged by Loeb, very possibly incorrect: “In the spirit of transparency, know that some scientists find my hypothesis unfashionable, outside of mainstream science, even dangerously ill conceived. But the most egregious error we can make, I believe, is not to
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take this possibility seriously enough.” Whatever is the origin of ‘Oumuamua, the point for civics, and for science in civics, is that scientific thinking is more important than correctness, and especially more important than political correctness… as Professor Loeb illustrates.
Scientists often are poor communicators, and can be misunderstood
Scientists thinking scientifically also can be misunderstood. In my experience, this often is attributable to poor communication ability, especially when communicating to non-specialists. One currently relevant example of poor communication is poor terminology. Here is an example that has annoyed me: scientists frequently refer to ‘fomite’ transmission of the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 disease. A ‘fomite’ is an inanimate surface, such as the letters in your mailbox. As a scientist, maybe I should know this term, but I had to look it up. Would the social stature of scientists somehow be diminished if they referred, more understandably, to ‘surface’ transmission? That actually would be (also) a better term, as virus
transmission reasonably could be mediated via animate surfaces, such as the fur of your family’s dog or cat or (even more relevant) the hair or skin of your significant other human companion.
Misunderstanding of scientists, and by scientists, can be attributable to more than just poor terminology. One such example of misunderstanding will suffice. Swan and Colino (2021) reported that, at the observed rate of decline over recent decades, men’s sperm counts would drop to zero by 2045, imperiling the human species. The decline seems largely to be caused by chemicals in the environment known as endocrine disruptors. These are substances that mimic hormones such as sex hormones.
Failure to control human exposure to endocrine disruptors might cause the extrapolated rate of sperm count decline actually to materialize, and to cause the human species actually to disappear for failure to reproduce. I did not read the book, but this message seems to be represented
in popular media without the important caveat (that I assume Swan and Colino must have mentioned) that efforts are underway to regulate endocrine disruptors such as perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) by reducing their manufacture and use in commerce (for example, Schug et al. 2013), preventing or controlling their release to the environment, and treating drinking water systems to prevent their consumption in residences and workplaces. The distribution of sperm count reductions also is uneven, such that humans at distant locations from one another are unlikely simultaneously to arrive at zero sperm count. The problem, in my
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view, is not just the reduced sperm counts per se, but the unhealthy effects on humans (males and females), of which two manifestations (in males) are reduced sperm count and reduced sperm viability. I am pessimistic that the measures I’ve described will be implemented adequately. My point here is that effective scientific communication requires cooperation by scientists and reporters to prioritize accurate messaging over simplistic messaging. I would counsel against predicting that we will go extinct shortly after 2045!
Scholars (including scientists) sometimes think unscientifically. A popular phrase that I have heard often exemplifies this: “the exception that proves the rule.” Rules often do have exceptions18, but exceptions challenge, if not disprove, rules. Yet, a recent analysis of Middle East politics (Pollack 2022) identifies at least two exceptions that ‘prove the rule’: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Libyan leader Muammar alQaddafi. Maybe I am being unfair. Perhaps a ‘rule’ is first conjured by the perception that an observation is an exception to it, without which the rule would not have been perceived. A fair expectation is that
observations that are perceived as exceptions should cast doubt on the nascent ‘rule’; they should not be regarded as proof!
An example of scientists thinking unscientifically was especially disturbing to me because of its origin, which might as well have been from a different galaxy or universe. An editorial in the (usually) scientifically solid magazine Scientific American opined that our nation had committed itself to scientific thinking even before its founding, in the 1776 Declaration of Independence. The editorial rightly decried science denial and/or science ignorance by Donald Trump in his 2016 presidential election campaign (“The Tweets We Hold To Be SelfEvident,” September 2016):
“When the founding fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, scientist and inventor, wrote arguably the most important line in the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to
be self-evident’, they were asserting the fledgling nation’s grounding in the primacy of reason based on evidence.”
18 In 1931 Austrian logician Kurt Friedrich Gödel (1906-’78) formalized this concept in his ‘incompleteness theorem’: that not all mathematical statements are ‘complete’, that is, provable or refutable; statements such“This statement is unprovable,” may be both true and unprovable (see, for example, Hofstadter 1999).
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BUT, no, they were not. To the contrary, our country’s Founding Fathers were asserting that certain ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence should be believed without evidence. That is, ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and, by extension, by Donald Trump in 2016, can be and should be deemed true based upon being self-evident rather than being evident on the strength of the scientific method. If applied to falsifiable statements, this would amount to adhering to Natural Law as distinct from scientific laws. In science, all truth is evident; none is self-evident.
The truths about which the Founding Fathers were certain may have been self-evident to them, but the Founders also were wrong about at least some of their certainties. Proffered “truths” foundered on contrary evidence. As the Scientific American Editors themselves (ironically) noted, Mark Twain’s Huck Finn (Twain 1884) presented contrary evidence: “It warn’t so. I tried it.”
Consider “All men are created equal,” and are “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights,” among which are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These exalted ideals are wonderful as value judgments. They make living in the U. S. (usually) wonderful as we (or many of us) strive to attain this ideal (“to form a more perfect union”).
Even so, in 1776 equality was aspirational rather than real, as it prevailed neither among men, nor among men and women; indeed, the Founding Fathers included slave owners. Likewise, in today’s reality, equality prevails in the U. S. neither among men, nor among men and women. “Inalienable” rights still are bestowed in some places, to some people, but not to others, in other places. Thus, in many places, rights that we may regard as inalienable for all Americans are from it. Clearly, all men [and all women] never were equally free to pursue life, liberty, or happiness in the face of prejudice and economic disadvantage. A
fashionable term of art is ‘critical race theory’, most essentially expressing the concept that actual enjoyment of these “inalienable” rights clearly is not, and never was, evenhanded. Whether or not you agree that the truths explicated by the Founding Fathers actually are now (and were then) untruths as observations of reality, you should understand that their selfevident truth is based upon their intent as value judgments, not as falsifiable observations of reality. As observations of reality, they always have been arguably true or arguably false based upon evidence; they never were “self-evidently” true, or “self-evidently” false.
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As suggested above, the issues of science illiteracy and science denial are linked tightly to politics, which has an inseparable nexus with public service, public servants, and public policy. I will not be shy about raising issues that are political but, speaking as a scientist, I must emphasize the caveat that my remarks about political issues are intended to be non-partisan. That is, they arise from my analysis. Hopefully (no one is perfect!), they do not arise from political views of my own, or of anyone else’s. Indeed, I am (and for many decades have been) unaffiliated with any political party.
------------------------------- You can always count on Americans to do the right thing… after they have tried everything else.
Winston Churchill. Undated quote. -------------------------------
We seem to have tried something else; hopefully we will not continue on our (self)destructive track until we have tried everything else. To be specific, I already have mentioned Donald Trump, and will have occasion to mention the Republican Party.19 My remarks will be
extensive and preponderantly critical of Trump and the GOP Indeed, this is necessary, because the unprincipled behaviors and attributes that I will describe, which are as obvious as the nose on your face, give rise to the need for this book. They must be confronted, not swept under the carpet. I again emphasize, however, that my negative comments are intended to be non-partisan. That is, if the roles were reversed, and my negative comments instead could be applied to a Democratic President, or to the Democratic Party or to any other political entity, they would be expressed here with equal forcefulness, independently of partisan political affiliations. I have endeavored to place my prejudices in that portion of my brain known as the ‘garbage can’. In short, the Trump phenomenon, which has acquired the name ‘Trumpism’, must be mentioned and described, because from its base (literally) arises the need for this book20.
19 The Republican Party is also known as the GOP, for Grand Old Party. Perhaps it was “grand” when it was new but, then, it was not “old!”
20 My usage of the term ‘Trumpism’ differs from that of Cass (2021): “There is no discernible Trumpism independent of Trump himself. His presidency was an earthquake, the immediate result of a political landscape shifting
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Trumpism threatens our democracy and civil order within our communities and country. Trumpists are, according to a recent Washington Post opinion piece by Paul Waldman (2021a):
“making thuggery a core strategy in taking hold of local systems. Any election official unwilling to sign on with Trump’s ‘big lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen, or any school board member overly concerned about the health of their community during a pandemic, can expect abuse, intimidation, and even death threats” (Waldman 2021a).
Faced with such consequences, a significant number of moderate Republicans, unable to win primary elections against Trump-supported far-right candidates, understandably have been leaving politics, thereby
leaving Republican politics to their Trumpist replacements…
“who have no more respect for the law, fair procedures, or democratic traditions than their hero does — and who, like him, don’t care who knows it…. That is one of the hallmarks of Trumpism: Not just contempt for the law, but pride in one’s lawlessness” (Waldman 2021a).
An important civics concept relating to the evolution of extremism of the Republican Party is the civic duty of voters to be aware, to be heard and, at the polls, to be counted. Another important civics concept relates to the duty of the media to avoid treating the two main parties as morally equivalent options for voters. I have been impressed that the media in many cases (not, for example, Fox News) have made great strides in this endeavor, with the voting public lagging, but hopefully catching up.
To avoid confusion, however, I wish to go further regarding my negative comments about the GOP. Specifically, as a democratic nation,
after decades of mounting pressure. Earthquakes do not build anything. They disrupt and destroy, but they are temporary, and they provide the benefit of exposing structures that were sloppily built or that rested on crumbled foundations” [emphasis added]. My usage of the term ‘Trumpism’, however, is consistent with the decades of mounting pressure on the political landscape to which Cass refers.
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we need Republicans as we need Democrats. We especially need GOP members of the Republican Wing now, as their voices in support of democratic principles and our democracy will resonate most forcefully with Trumpist/Seditionist Wing Republican voters. Numerous examples are documented of prominent Republicans leaving today’s extremist Republican Party. These include, to highlight several: U. S. Senator Justin Amash of Michigan (Byrd 2019), California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye (Morain 2018), prominent donor Charles Koch (Koch and Hooks 2020, Peters 2018), strategist Steve Schmidt (Hines 2018), and George Will (2020). Will (2020) opined that “Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.”
In short, the currently extreme Republican Party must be restored to health, from within and from without. Several proposals for accomplishing this are of special interest to me and to civics (Friedman 2021a):
“… the solution starts with getting rid of the filibuster in the Senate, granting the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico statehood (they each have more U. S. citizens than Wyoming), and passing a new Voting Rights Act that forbids voter suppression… More and more, Republican members of the House were being elected from gerrymandered districts drawn up by Republican state legislators from gerrymandered districts. Meanwhile, the Senate overrepresented sparsely populated red states, meaning the Electoral College favored Republican presidential candidates, who could then stack the court system with conservative judges who would allow Republican politicians to suppress the votes of Black and other Democratic leaning constituencies.”
Comparably important for restoring the health of the Republican Party and our two-major-party system is departure of non-prominent
Republicans from the GOP As a small example, consider this excerpt of a letter to the editor of the Times Union Newspaper in my area (Streeter 2021):
“After being registered as a Republican since I was first able to vote more than 60 years ago, I have now rescinded my registration… Leaving the Republican Party is a small action in a Democratic state like New York, but if enough people take this action across the country, maybe the
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party leaders will take notice and return to the democracy our country expects of elected leaders.”
This leading-edge effort may be remembered as part of a groundswell grassroots movement.
From the above, I also emphasize that my criticisms of Trump and the GOP do not animate my writing. Other scholars have documented criticisms of Trump and many of his GOP supporters, sycophants, and enablers in far greater detail21, including (but not limited to) the following attributes: science denial, cruelty, incompetence, dishonesty, disinformation and “alternative facts,” impeachable behaviors, undermining Constitutional checks and balances, undermining democracy, posing a national security threat, posing a planetary threat, criminality, and abdication of moral responsibility. A mid-presidential-term contribution to this genre, of enhanced credibility because the author is a Republican strategist, is memorable to me for its
title, and for the irony of its perspicacity and seeming clairvoyance: Everything Trump Touches Dies (Wilson 2018).
As my parents taught me, you can tell a lot about a person by the company s/he keeps. Trump surrounded himself with unethical advisers in the White House, and other associates who enabled his nefarious activities. Associates who would not cooperate were deemed “disloyal” (Cohen 2020) and replaced, producing a record turnover rate, and bringing in more extreme sycophants as Trump’s enablers. Many close Trump associates have been arrested, convicted of felonies, and/or jailed (for example, Reuters 2020):
--Steve Bannon, campaign adviser, White House chief strategist, --Michael Cohen, personal lawyer and ‘fixer’,
21 Against the possible accusation that my coverage of the Trump era is too sparse, I
emphasize that it aims at breadth to identify subjects worthy of civics content; it is not aimed at depth in any of these subjects. I imagine that history will record thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of pages analyzing the significance of the Trump Administration as a threat to our democracy. This estimate is based upon historical coverage of a different subject over a comparable (somewhat longer) duration of history: the significance of British intelligence during World War II (1939-’45). Britain’s official historian of this subject alone contributed thousands of pages to the historical record (Hinsley et al. 1979, 1981, 1988; Hinsley and Simkins 1990). page 112
--Michael Flynn, national security adviser, --Rick Gates, deputy campaign chairperson, --Paul Manafort, campaign chairperson, --George Nader, foreign policy adviser, --George Papadopoulos, campaign adviser, and --Roger Stone, longtime friend and adviser.
The phrase ‘guilt by association’ comes to mind as a possible defense against using Trump’s associations to criticism him. To be clear, I agree that merely incidental ‘association’ should not constitute grounds for prosecution. The concern relates to the important roles of the associates named above, who Trump placed in those roles, ostensibly on behalf of the public interest. The expectations that Trump had of these people indicate that the roles actually were on behalf of Trump personally, and often conflicted with the public interest. I have no doubt about the unethical intent of a president who appoints unethical people, even criminals, to do his bidding.
With complicity of unethical enablers, Trump committed nefarious actions too numerous to list. Resistance attempts by ethical Republicans often were met by violence, or by the threat of violence to prevent resistance (Waldman 2021b). Nefarious actions by Trump include the following small list of examples, any one of which, I wrongly thought, would have eviscerated Republican voter support:
--science denial: understating Covid-19 seriousness, and advocating unproven pharmaceuticals for its prevention and treatment (for example, hydroxychloroquine; Abella et al. 2021), --cruelty: wresting young children from their parents in immigrating families, --incompetence: failing to record information that would have enabled family reunification (see, for example, Samuels and
Beitsch 2021), --dishonesty: promising distribution of non-existent Covid-19 vaccine stores for booster doses, --disinformation and “alternative facts”: Labeling the media as “enemies of the people,” --impeachable behaviors: accepting emoluments of many types, --undermining Constitutional checks and balances: politicizing the Department of Justice,
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--undermining democracy: sowing doubt about U. S. election security and legitimacy, --posing a national security threat: releasing state secrets, endangering intelligence agents; --posing a planetary threat: repudiating global warming and nuclear weapons agreements; --criminality: inciting violent insurrection against our Capitol, Congress, and democracy; and --abdication of moral responsibility: exhibiting depraved disregard of the Covid-19 pandemic’s human impacts.
Cunegonde to Candide: Pangloss most cruelly deceived me when he said that everything in the world is for the best.
Voltaire (1759). Candide, Chapter 8.
The abominable descriptors exemplified above characterized the
Trump Administration and many individuals in the Administration, beginning at the top. In contrast, the 2020 election constituted a Trumprejection trifecta, delivering the Presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives to the Democratic Party. With transition to the Biden Administration, the descriptors above now characterize institutionally neither the Executive nor the Legislative Branch of U. S. Government, but they do continue to characterize many Trump supporters and enablers remaining in office even with departure of Trump himself. As Republican commentator and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson (2021a) noted, in the wake of the 6-January insurrection, a schism has opened between the GOP’s traditional Republican wing and the Trump wing: “Activists feel the anger that Trump has fed rather the contempt for Trump that he has earned. They feel cheated rather than defeated.”
Trump has given license to racists and other haters. His reference to the novel coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” gave license to violence
against Asians, which then soared in the U. S. In my own area in upstate New York, likewise, terrorism and white supremacy attributed to Trump have increased (Blanchet 2021): “The past 12 months saw a rise in how often local residents heard about events that could be deemed hate crimes, hate speech or acts threatening to minorities or people of certain religious beliefs or ethnic backgrounds.”
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The examples above highlight unethical and criminal figures central to the Trump Administration. Equally miserable examples also are present at the State Government level, such as in Texas and Florida, where Trumpist Republican Governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis have acted to outlaw mask mandates needed to protect children, teachers, and families in their states’ schools, even as Covid-19 infections are accelerating with ascendance of the highly infective delta variant of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. These governors literally are harming and even killing their residents for political benefit to themselves. I would have thought that such thugs and other riffraff would motivate repudiation by people affiliated with all political parties. Republicans in substantial numbers, however, have maintained their support for Trump and the now-extremist Republican Party. This highlights a civics issue, specifically, that GOP cruelty, criminality, and thuggery combined with GOP existential threats to our democracy together have failed to turn a predominant fraction of Republican-identifying voters away from right-wing GOP extremists.
The disturbing observations such as those above about numerous individuals associated with Trump raise a related issue: that of pattern recognition. To protect our democracy, voters must do what sportscasters do routinely: highlight individual athletes’ performance, and recognize team performance. Commentary integrates these factors, sometimes emphasizing how individual performance enhances team performance, and sometimes how teams bring out the best in individual team members. Likewise, individuals assembled by Trump constitute a team. Generally speaking, the goal of the individuals and the team is to do Trump’s bidding. Voters therefore must scrutinize individual merit, or lack of merit, and also must connect the dots to recognize the team and its goals. When individuals subsume their individuality to the team, they are subject to judgments of guilt by association. In conspicuous cases, individual Trump team members refused to engage in anti-American, anti-democratic, or illegal behaviors. In those cases, of course, the phrase ‘guilt by association’ cannot apply. Such individuals were meritorious, and
especially meritorious in the context of their association with nefarious Trump team goals.
Notwithstanding criminal and unethical behaviors of numerous Trumpists, I am relieved that, overall, institutional support for our democracy has been restored, if only barely. Even so, our democracy will remain on life support for as long as numerous unprincipled elected officials who sought to subvert and overturn it remain in office, and as long as many voters remain unable or, worse, unwilling to distinguish between
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their personal interests vs. the interests of our democracy. Some people, I must come to accept, simply do not like principles very much.
--------------------------------------- I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.
Marie Curie (Marie Salomea Skłodowska Curie, 1867 – 1934). Undated quote. Autobiographical Notes pp. 167-168.
On the other hand, I was heartened to learn that “a Monmouth University poll taken at the end of January indicated that 57 percent wanted [Trump] barred from holding federal office and 52 percent wanted him convicted by the Senate” (Enten 2021). In addition, more than 30,000 Republican-registered voters changed their voter registration in the weeks after the trump-incited mob attack on the Capitol (Wilson 2021): “It could also represent the tip of a much larger iceberg: The 30,000 who have left the Republican Party reside in just a few states that report voter registration data, and information about voters switching between parties, on a weekly basis.” In my own area, the Saratoga Springs, New York, Public Safety Commissioner Robin Dalton resigned her affiliation with the Republican Party (Liberatore 2021) because it “has taken an extreme turn… It’s turned into a party of racism, intolerance, and hatred… Those values fly in the
face of the principles our country was founded on. I’m deeply uncomfortable with where they are headed, and I knew it was something I was not comfortable being a part of.” Legislators around the country who supported overturning the 2020 election, and thereby subversion of the U. S. Constitution, “are being stripped of powerful posts” such as committee assignments (Greenblatt 2021). The GOP evidently retains a moderate, right-of-center Republican wing. Perhaps it will regain its dominance within the GOP but, vocabulary phrase of the day: don’t hold your breath.
As may be evident at this point, this book constitutes my opportunity to ask myself, notwithstanding the recent (modest) exodus from the GOP of some members of its moderate Republican wing: who would vote, in such an unprincipled manner, for far-right extremists? It is my chance to promote (maybe naively) clear thinking toward exorcising dangerously incorrect beliefs that ignorant voters might use, wittingly or un-22, to justify such voting preferences. In her 2016 presidential campaign against Trump,
22 You might say, if I want to be taken seriously, do not shorten ‘unwittingly’ whimsically, but I aim to be more wry than dry. Please take me seriously, except when I am not serious. No less a grammarian than Jay Alan Lerner (Lerner and Loewe 1960), had this to say in Camelot on the Lusty Month of
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Hillary Clinton unwisely referred to Trump voters as “a basket of deplorables.” I believe that, more accurately, they can be divided into several baskets, only one relatively small ‘basket’ consisting of “deplorables23.” I presume that most voters; Republican, Democrat, and Independent; are upstanding citizens. In 2016, I would guess, Republican voters believed that they would be better off with a Trump presidency and, by extension, the U. S. would be better off. I am convinced that they were wrong regarding both rationales.
Trump’s term as 45th president24 ended too recently to be judged by history, but it was judged by 184 presidential historians participating in the most recent C-SPAN (2021) survey of U. S. presidential leadership. CSPAN has been conducting these surveys since 2000. Participation more than doubled over the previous, 2017 survey (of 91 participating historians). The 2021 survey resulted in Trump receiving the lowest overall ranking (no. 44) in 150 years, and 41st of 44 in all of U. S. history. Trump’s moral authority and administrative skills rankings were the lowest among all
presidents ever. Yet, Trump has retained support of startlingly high fractions of GOP politicians and GOP voters.
Rather than by criticism, I am motivated here by the phenomenon, troubling and amazing to me, that nearly half of all voters in the 2020 election voted for Trump and GOP candidates obviously fitting, the negative descriptors exemplified above. Nearly all Republican voters, according to numerous opinion polls, supported such candidates (a higher fraction of people, actually, than the opinion polls generally had estimated). If Republican voters are generally upstanding people as I believe, then I also must believe that their preference for an obviously dangerous candidate, and
May: It’s “the time for every frivolous whim, proper or im-,” and “when all the world is brimming with fun, wholesome or un-“
23 among whom I count those who stormed the U. S. Capitol on 6 January 2021. 24 Trump, the 45th president, was ranked 41st overall, though among only 44 presidents, as one president served twice: Grover Cleveland served as the 22nd and the 24th president. Presidents were ranked in 10 categories: Category Trump Ranking Category Trump Ranking (of 44) (of 44) Public persuasion 32 Administrative skills 44 Crisis leadership 41 Relations with Congress 42 Economic management 34 Vision / setting an agenda 36 Moral authority 44 Pursued equal justice for all 40 International relations 43 Performance within context of times 42
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in retrospect confirmed dangerous to our democracy, must reflect an absence of clear thinking rather than an abundance of selfish or cynical thinking… Of course, I could be wrong about this!
An acquaintance of mine sought to justify her own support for Trump, noting that the stock market was soaring, and her retirement account was doing well. Unfortunately, I did not think quickly enough to ask her how well her planet was doing. If the stock market and her investments were healthy, why not extrapolate that selfish viewpoint to the rest of the country? In the U. S., two-thirds of the tax savings from the Trump tax cuts of 2017 benefited the top 20 percent. Economic growth stalled and tax revenues plummeted. This increased the U. S. deficit, the Congressional Budget Office estimated, by $1.9 trillion over ten years (Tax Policy Center 2017). I would encourage readers to extrapolate the growing disparity between rich and poor not only to the U. S., but to our planet.
People’s priorities in our country seem to me to be out of whack. This situation should motivate responsible people to develop and teach a basic ‘Civics 101’ course to all in the U. S. This writing constitutes my own contribution, which hopefully will be of interest to the Biden Administration and to others who may be formulating Civics 101 curricula, as well as to people who might benefit from studying it.
Civics clearly must be restored as a priority for teaching at school and at home. The Biden Administration should assure that is done, both via the Federal Department of Education and via advocacy by President Joe Biden and his wife, First Lady and educator Dr. Jill Biden. Exactly six decades after JFK’s famous Inaugural Address, Day 1 of classes in the Civics 101 course already has been held, on Inauguration Day, 20 January 2021. This event was highly emotional for me, and I think for most of the Nation. It featured bipartisan participation and, with rituals and statements, committed us to
overcome recent divisiveness, and re-committed us to protecting and enhancing our democratic institutions. We’ll see…
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C h a p t e r 05 . Science: Literacy vs. Ignorance and Denial
We view our world through lenses, such as the lenses of our eyes and eyeglasses, binoculars and telescopes, televisions and computer screens. Ultimately we view our world through the ultimate lens: our brains. What is the effect of each lens on the image(s) that we see? Some combination of increased clarity and increased distortion seems inevitable. What is the effect of lenses on those who view me through theirs? Here I am on break from a conference at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 28 August 2004, standing before a lens to (maybe) find out. “The medium is the message” proclaimed Canadian philosopher of communications Marshall McLuhan (1964) famously. Perhaps he was too literal; as the medium of each lens (glass, vitreous humor of the eye, or gray matter of the brain) may affect the message, but is not itself the message. Clearly (or unclearly), our viewpoints provide us with us a refracted vision of reality, more or less distorted. Science most essentially offers (actually is, I would say) a powerful way of striving to unmask reality to obtain an undistorted view of it. That endeavor to reveal objective reality imparts power to science and to science literacy. In contrast, rejection or willful ignorance of science imparts the likelihood of prejudice and of flawed (possibly fatally flawed) decision making.
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--------------------------------------------------------------- The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! You hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. Matthew Arnold (1822-’88), from the poem Dover Beach, 1867 ---------------------------------------------------------------
Science and Civics
Science is intrinsically linked with objectivity, and therefore with the scientific method for developing knowledge, adopting beliefs, and
overcoming ignorance. Less obviously, civics also is intrinsically linked with objectivity. Juries, for example, may apply the ‘reasonable person’ standard for accepting or rejecting evidence or argument in trials. As a scientist and as a citizen, I consider myself bound to objectivity from both sources. As a scientist, I sometimes have been tempted to isolate within the sanctuary of science, and to withdraw from the fraught realms of politics and civics. I am drawn to the image of reclusiveness evoked by Matthew Arnold in his famous poem Dover Beach (Arnold 1867), in which the speaker overlooks the cliffs of Dover from a remote, safe vantage point, from which the distant sea, and the world, seem calm and eternal. I resist such seclusion (at least part-time!), however, knowing that our democracy will be eternal only if we work diligently (smart and hard) to maintain it.
Being smart is a source of pride among many if not most of us, yet some people (too many, apparently) are exceptions to this generality. One way in which this may manifest is via a contrarian emotional
response to reasoning. This falls in the category of ‘spite’ rather than ignorance regarding a particular subject area. That is, presented with a cogent, forceful argument, the spiteful contrarian response might be: I
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don’t have to accept your logic; I can (and I do!) believe the contrary. In this example, the argument rejecter rationalizes his/her response via a counterargument: that accepting the conclusion implied by logic is optional, and uncompelling, when balanced against the right to disagree. Even with understanding of the logic (ignorance is unnecessary!), such a tendency to rationalize acceptance of wrong arguments nonetheless does indeed exemplify ignorance of a different kind. That is, accepting wrong arguments based upon the desire to exercise the right to do so, rather than rejecting wrong arguments based upon their (lack of) merit, exemplifies wrongheadedness. Being wrongheaded may be worse than being wrong; it is kind of ignorance that may be more general, and therefore deeper, than ignorance regarding reasoning within a narrow (possibly esoteric) subject area.
A familiar adage equates ignorance with bliss. Ignorance, among some, has been elevated to a virtue. One person once commented to me about Barack Obama as a presidential candidate, “He’s too smart.” My
response, which (astonishing me) seems to have changed the commenter’s mind, was that the U. S. President is like your doctor; you want him/her to be as smart as possible. Further, if you hire a consultant to solve a problem that you have, or a lawyer to represent you in litigation, you want him/her to be as smart and as capable as possible.
A poster child for flaunting ignorance recently has emerged. A far-right conspiracy ‘theorist’, she is U. S. House Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. For me, her ignorance is not particularly a problem. Her presence in the House of Representatives is more of a problem, even though she was stripped of her committee memberships. The biggest problem, in my view, is her election to office by voters, who ought to have been wiser, and voted more wisely.
Science ignorance, and science illiteracy, historically have been
associated with science denial, and they remain so associated. Science denial, in turn, most closely has been associated with religious fundamentalism (not with Republicanism25!). It also has been associated
25 Indeed, the role of scientists and mathematicians as advisors to the Federal government began with Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, who had relied upon them in planning and executing the D-Day campaign to liberate Europe in WWII. Perhaps the most famous post-WWII advisor was the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who had led the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb for the U. S.
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with devastating personal and social costs that are markedly distinct from ‘bliss’. The 1979 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Steven Weinberg (2018), warned against science denial generally, especially in the area of climate change:
“It is generally foolish to bet against the judgements of science, and in this case, where the planet is at stake, it is insane.”
Science denial and science illiteracy may be viewed as polar extremes. Science illiteracy implies lack of science knowledge, whereas science denial implies denial of facts by people who know the facts, possibly for political or religious motivations. Science illiteracy characterizes people who might be receptive to science if only they are introduced to it effectively. Between these extremes, a vast territory would seem to exist, which has been termed ‘science distrust’. Indeed, as a scientist, I have sometimes occupied that territory of distrust. Recently,
for example, I have been distrustful of the Covid-19 vaccine development effort, the credibility of the clinical trials, and the safety of the resulting vaccines. Some of my suspicions remain, though I am (more than) pleasantly surprised that available vaccines have proven to be safe and effective. I am fully vaccinated and boosted against Covid-19, which I arranged to accomplish as soon as doing so became possible for me.
My distrust of Covid-19 vaccine development was motivated by distrust of institutions in the Trump Administration that were entrusted with it, not by distrust of science. I was especially distrustful as I became aware of political pressure placed on the U. S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and as these agencies succumbed to such pressure by approving Covid-19 treatments such as hydroxychloroquine that were not shown to be safe and effective, or even were shown to be ineffective and/or dangerous. In a whistleblower complaint, and in testimony to Congress, epidemiologist
Rick Bright accused US DHHS of a “reckless and dangerous push” of hydroxychloroquine and its analogs as Covid-19 treatments (Cohen 2022). During Trump’s tenure, FDA granted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for treatment of hospitalized Covid-19 patients with chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine (and revoked it on 15 June 2020; US FDA 2020). Likewise, CDC provided guidance to physicians on how to prescribe chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 patients, and
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removed that guidance from its website, probably in March or April 2020 (Roston and Taylor 2020).
My distrust in Covid-19 vaccine development must be distinguished from anti-vax distrust of vaccines, and Trumpist distrust of Covid-19 vaccines. Anti-vax distrust has existed for a long time, and Covid-19 is merely one example of vaccines that they distrust. Such distrust may have been motivated by distrust of science and/or scientists, along with misinformation about vaccine formulation, most notably the fiction that vaccines are delivered in a (mercury-containing) carrier medium that causes autism (autism spectrum disorder). This information has been discredited, as have anti-vaxxers, but that seems not to have dissuaded anti-vaxxers from being anti-vaxxers!
A more interesting distinction must be made with Trumpists’ distrust for Covid-19 vaccines, because it (commonly) appears to be motivated politically rather than by distrust of science and/or scientists.
Indeed, people who resist vaccination against Covid-19 typically are vaccinated against other diseases. Their resistance to Covid-19 vaccines apparently is political. Trump’s FDA approved the vaccines, and Trump’s CDC promoted them, notwithstanding irregularities in vaccine development, which I already have exemplified. Those irregularities motivated my own distrust, but they were Trump’s irregularities. Trumpists, I would have thought, would not distrust vaccine development conducted under Trump oversight, no matter how bad it was… but they do, apparently because Trump encouraged them, and downplayed the virus in the interest of maintaining a semblance of normality in the economy and stock market. This did not work out well, however, as the rate of increase in Covid-19 incidence accelerated with abandonment of proven pandemic management techniques, such as distancing and masking. The U. S. economy went into recession.
The Trump Administration further aroused my distrust by
committing billions of dollars to underwrite mass production of vaccines, even before the vaccines had gone through clinical trials. What independence would pharmaceutical companies exhibit in the presence of apparently large financial conflicts of interest? I will have more to say about this in the next chapter (Chapter 6), on pandemic management.
At this point, I emphasize the need to give people space to distrust science, and to avoid alienating the distrusters, especially where
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suspicion is justified by the appearance (even if not the actuality) of irregularity, such as when it is attributable to institutional factors rather than to denial of science itself. The realm of distrust that apparently occupies the vast territory between science denial and science illiteracy also constitutes a fertile ground for civic remediation. Such remediation has been proposed for the Biden Administration. Mertz and Mishra (2021) noted the dichotomy of science’s role in American life: “breathtaking discovery and innovation alongside growing distrust of scientific evidence and recommendations. How can the country reconcile this dissociation?” Their innovative answer should be adopted immediately and developed urgently:
“…launch a non-partisan ‘American Science Corps’ (ASC26) to elevate science as a central part of American culture. [ASC] would employ early-career scientists in underserved urban and rural communities to fulfill the goal expressed by Alondra Nelson, the Office of Science and
Technology Policy’s newly appointed deputy director for science and society: ‘to situate [scientific] development in our values of equality, accountability, justice, and trustworthiness’. Eventually placing 20,000 full-time ASC service members across the country, each serving roughly 16,500 Americans, would create a cooperative extension service—for science.
The ASC is inspired by the Agricultural Extension Service, which, for over a century, has employed county agents at land-grant universities. The agents serve as a conduit between academic researchers and farmers, designing educational programs that respond to local needs and communicating farmers’ problems back to researchers. Equally ambitious, the ASC would administer civic science workshops, public events, and training programs to engage
Americans.”
The 2020 Biden presidential election victory was billed as “The people have chosen science,” but Hilgartner, Hurlbut, and Jasanoff (2021) ask and reassuringly answer three related questions: “Was ‘science’ really on the ballot? Is it useful to imagine U. S. citizens as
26 In my Federal Government experience, acronyms (preferably catchy ones) are prerequisites of credibility.
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divided into pro-science and anti-science camps? Does the label antiscience serve the purposes of deliberative democracy? The answer to these questions is plainly no.” The authors note that, even with the Biden victory, nearly 74 million voters chose Trump, in that case “presumably not choosing science.” Can this really be so, they ask.
Inevitably, I think, a significant fraction of 2020 voters, especially Trump voters, did indeed reject science, and/or might be scientifically illiterate. That science was on the ballot might be cast as the null hypothesis in a scientific thought experiment. Trump was literally on the ballot, confounding the test, but Trump was not on the ballot after he lost the election. Yet, a significant fraction of his supporters have been polled, and have been reported still to believe the ‘Big Lie’, that the election was stolen from Trump, who was the actual winner, indeed by a landslide (Raju 2021):
“With polls showing roughly three-quarters of GOP voters
believing there was widespread fraud, many Republican lawmakers show little willingness to set the record straight with their voters, even as court after court rejected one Trump-backed lawsuit after another in a futile bid to throw out Biden’s victory.”
Given the complete absence of evidence, and numerous (dozens of) legal tests (about 60), the stolen-election belief flies in the face of the (absence of) evidence, and (absence of) reason. It exemplifies profound confusion, and defies clear and scientific thinking. This example of the concept of belief despite countervailing evidence also has been communicated via a pithy phrase that captures it perfectly: “The Big Lie.” Sometimes a well-turned phrase can be powerful for communication and even for acceptance, as was the case with a similar phrase: “The Big Bang,” proposed derisively by Fred Hoyle, the Astronomer Royal of Britain. The phrase famously has been adopted, as it pithily captures the
essence of the more complicated concept of how our universe came into being evidently27.
27 Adoption of the phrase The Big Bang as shorthand for the concept of the origin of our universe is ironic because it was introduced by Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), the Astronomer Royal of England, who was a proponent of the competing Steady-State Theory of the universe. The steady-state theory proposed that the age of the universe is infinite, that is, the universe (and time itself) did not have an ‘origin’ at all. The near-‘universal’ adoption of “The Big Bang” is instructive, as both theories were constructed from the best science of the time,
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Can credulous Trumpist voters possibly be scientifically literate, which would require a deep respect for evidence? Maybe (Sontheimer 2021):
By mandating behaviors such as wearing masks to fight COVID-19 …, those in government are essentially saying that they don’t trust us citizens to inform ourselves and make sound choices. Republicans strongly value individual liberties. So to them, the issue is the way the science is used by the government to justify further intrusions on the lives of its citizens.
More than ignorance or denial of science, Sontheimer’s opinion suggests to me that, psychologically, Trump still was on the ballot, so the post-election thought experiment actually might constitute a poor test of the null hypothesis that science (not Trump) was on the ballot. Consider a further test, embodied in the results of a Kaiser Permanente poll, results of
which were released in February 2021. The poll indicated that 28 percent of Republicans would “definitely not” get vaccinated against Covid-19, and that an additional 18 percent would “wait and see” (Diamond 2021). If these potentially life-threatening stances are consistent with giving a passing grade in science acceptance for such voters, we have a serious case of grade inflation.
Among voters who are scientifically literate, voting for Trump therefore poses a central dilemma addressed in this book: why? Explanations would seem necessarily to reside in science, civics, or both (that is, not neither). I ascribe greater weight to civics among scientifically literate voters. That is, if I am comfortable attributing science literacy to a Trump voter, I am less comfortable with his/her civics literacy, including his/her ability and willingness to identify and prioritize the national interest in preserving our democracy. Civics and science might trade off one another!
and resolved to general preference for one of the theories based upon accumulating scientific evidence. As a side-note of interest (at least to me!): Fred Hoyle was a polymath. Two of the topics that he studied, and on which he opined, were Stonehenge and the greater intelligence of our human ancestors (than our own currently) who designed Stonehenge (I think slaves actually built it). I have no idea whether Hoyle was correct about either subject… BUT I loved the fact that he was invited to the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the 1970s, where I had the pleasure of attending one of his lectures that covered both topics. page 126
Hilgartner, Hurlbut, and Jasanoff (2021) make astute observations, but their observations (ironically) amount to refutation of their own conclusion that science was not on the ballot. The authors instead offer explanations of why voters actually did reject science, most notably because science may be perceived as conflicting with voters’ individual liberties:
“Americans are indeed divided, but the division is not between those who march for science and those who march against science. It is between competing understandings of how to balance collective responsibility and individual liberty. That division runs so deep that, for some, it even justifies violence and insurrection.”
Accepting the premise that many or most Trump voters are scientifically literate suggests, necessarily, that they placed greater value
on their perceived individual liberty than on the historic and abundantly evident catastrophe of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic, in terms of human lives prematurely lost, amounted to a thousand times the burden of the attack on Pearl Harbor attack on 7 December 1941, and a thousand times the burden of the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. As a result of the massive loss of life attributed to Covid-19, amounting to roughly a tenth of a percent of our total population, the U. S. population went down instead of up in 2020.
Those same voters routinely have accepted the wearing of seat belts while driving or riding in cars; they routinely have accepted restrictions on their freedom of speech, such as the proverbial prohibition against yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theater. Yet, the need to wear a mask or in other ways limit contagion was deemed so severe an abridgement of personal liberty as to constitute the moral equivalent of massive pandemic death, suffering, and economic impact. Such
abridgment of personal liberty indeed has been used to justify violation of routine pandemic precautions, and therefore imposition of life-ordeath consequences for residents of this country. For libertarians it constitutes an intolerable attack on personal liberty whereas, or me, it constitutes profound confusion and a grave civics malady.
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------------------------------------------------ All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances… As You Like It. William Shakespeare, 1623
My formulation of the civics malady in the case of scientifically
literate Trump voters in 2020 might be expressed best via Shakespeare’s analogy of the world as a stage, and people as actors. Was Leonard Nimoy lying in his (second) autobiography, titled “I Am Spock” (Nimoy 1995), the Science Officer of the Starship Enterprise? My answer is “no,” he was only, and honestly, acting as Spock. As a fictional dramatical work, Star Trek clearly is not subject to fact checking. Nimoy paradoxically was honest in his earlier autobiography, titled “I Am Not Spock” (Nimoy 1975). That is, Nimoy’s contradictory statements both were honest, one because Nimoy was not Spock in real life, the other because he was indeed Spock in fiction.
Nimoy’s dramatic acting context is the one that I would apply to the cast of Trumpist characters who, for example, propound ‘The Big Lie’ of a stolen presidential election. They seem to have joined as a cast in a grim real-life performance designed to entertain the political base of Donald Trump for politically strategic reasons. That is, these people are NOT deceived by ‘The Big Lie’, nor can they be excused for propounding it on a
dramatic stage for benign entertainment. These knowing liars are not honest in the sense that Nimoy was honest, and in the sense that works of fiction cannot be labeled ‘dishonest’ if they are first labeled ‘fiction’.
Some Trumpists, for the above and/or other reasons, rejected science as a symbolic libertarian expression of rebellion, and others were extravagantly credulous in the face of completely unreasonable assurances by a candidate who they were pre-disposed to believe. “Say it isn’t so…” seems like the credulous demand. The implied rejoinder is: “I’ll believe you (I’ll believe almost anything!), if you only you tell me.”
A schism apparently exists between people whose behavior reflects belief in the scientific merit of vaccines, vs. people whose behavior reflects a conceptual disbelief that the vaccines potentially could be effective. The latter group seems (commonly) to experience an imperative to doubt, along with an anti-vax groupthink. I was impressed by one example of this. A man in Texas was fully vaccinated against Covid-19, but he professed
disbelief that the vaccine that he was administered could be effective. Accordingly, he (visibly) adopted a daily regimen of ingesting various
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unproven home Covid-19 preventative agents (including boiled orange and lemon peels, zinc, the blood pressure drug reserpine, and vitamin D3):
“Like most residents of rural Dimmit County, [he] is fully vaccinated. But a steady diet of online misinformation, and the continued proliferation of the virus, has convinced him the vaccine doesn’t work. ‘I did some research and started taking a couple supplements, and I believe this is why I’ve never contracted the virus’ (Hardy 2021).
Well, I am pleased that he is vaccinated, and that he cannot be unvaccinated! The case illustrates yet another civics/science nexus, specifically, (as of this writing) nearly everyone who becomes severely ill or dies from Covid-19 is unvaccinated. Everyone else, that is, everyone who does not become severely ill or die from Covid, is vaccinated. Among that huge population, which (as of this writing) exceeds 160
million in the U. S., very few consume boiled orange and lemon peels, zinc, reserpine, and vitamin D3. Think: which concoction is protecting nearly 160 million people in the U. S.?
Science was not literally on the 2020 ballot, but science may have constituted hidden baggage accompanying Trump on the ballot. Acceptance of Trump therefore was linked intrinsically to rejection of science, in turn constituting a grievous abdication of citizens’ civic responsibilities as voters. The claims of political candidates might be believed on faith, arguably in the case of Trump in 2016, as a candidate without a record in public office (he certainly had other egregious records, which I think should have warned). In November 2020, however, the credibility of claims made by Trump as a candidate having acquired a clear record of untruth was beyond justification by visceral thinkers, or clear thinkers, whether thinking scientifically or civically.
Hilgartner, Hurlbut, and Jasanoff (2021) imply that scientists as ‘experts’ bear responsibility for apparent science rejection by Trump voters:
“It is tempting to treat matters of health, safety, and environmental policy as if they are primarily about facts… This creates fertile ground for alternative facts and conspiracy theories that reframe problems and relocate the focus of blame.”
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This statement is wrong and, more important, wrongheaded. Scientists, as I have said, often may be poor communicators, but they are not responsible for creating “fertile ground for conspiracy theories,” or for other scientifically ignorant interpretations placed on scientists’ communications. The authors also note that: “Restricting liberty in the name of public health becomes especially fraught when scientific knowledge is unsettled but policy responses are urgently needed.” Yet, scientists often must render opinions in the context of the state of relevant knowledge being in flux, for example in court and in identifying vaccine side effects or cancer clusters (Michaels 2017b, 2018a). Discharging such responsibilities should not be “fraught;” living with uncertainties constitutes an intrinsic cost of doing science and, indeed, of doing anything objectively. One must live with uncertainties comfortably, or as comfortably as possible.
Confusion has been sowed in the U. S., for example in the 2016 and 2020 elections, most notably due to manipulative communications aimed at
undermining our democracy via deliberate purveyance of misinformation and disinformation, often via social media, and often originating from malefactors strategically situated outside our country. This has been documented abundantly, for example in the Mueller Report, dating back to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. This included Trump’s famously public request on 12 April 2017 for Russia to release hacked e-mails of his opponent, Hilary Clinton: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.” As we know, Trump’s request, which he subsequently characterized as “a joke,” was followed shortly thereafter by Russia’s compliance. As reported by the Associated Press (Day and Tucker 2019):
“Actually, Russia was doing more than listening: It had been trying to help Republican Trump for months. That very day, hackers working with Russia’s military
intelligence tried to break into email accounts associated with Clinton’s personal office. It was just one small part of a sophisticated election interference operation carried out by the Kremlin — and meticulously chronicled by special counsel Robert Mueller.”
In short, much of the criminal behavior of Trump and of his GOP enablers was tangible and visible to voters. That voters ignored such patent
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criminality is an affront to ethics and civics. The affront part is my opinion; the patent criminality is factual.
Science and Religion
“Mr. Bryan, do you know the age of this rock?” Clarence Darrow
“Mr. Darrow, I’m more interested in the Rock of Ages than in the age of rocks.” William Jennings Bryan, ‘the silver-tongued orator’
Nature has inspired awe throughout history, stimulating scientific study often conflicting with theology. Conflict has been manifested as promotion of creationism and its euphemisms in school curricula, and promotion of science denial, recently in the U. S. Government, most notably in the Trump Administration. Unification, however, is an emerging reality for the science/religion relationship, driven by convergent evolution of each toward saving our shared planet from
ourselves. No longer can religion deny science, nor science overlook the power of religious institutions as partners toward achieving our common existential goal. The science/religion relationship, often portrayed as static, has proved dynamic, with emerging green science and green religion cooperating toward creating potentially planet-saving synergies (Michaels, Hammerman, and Silva 2018).
In short, the idea that science and religion can maintain friendly relations has the heuristic appeal of worlds meeting without colliding. The relationship, however, already has progressed beyond an aspirational state of comity. It has become more than friendly; it has become mutually supportive.
Over many millennia, finding meaning (Gordon 2015) or its absence (Weinberg 1977) have been products of human curiosity about the nature and complexity of our universe, our world, and most especially of life. To religious people, complexity in a chaotic universe may imply design, a designer, and therefore a deity. Proof of this premise from scientific evidence is beyond reach, but unnecessary. Faith in the truth of
received wisdom, often based upon events or imagined events that were
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interpreted as ‘miracles’, may suffice as the basis for belief among the faithful. Religionists may see divine intervention as necessary to explain the complexity of our universe, world, and life (see, for example, Polkinghorne 2009). Only divine intervention may seem adequate to explain such ‘miracles’, which are perceived to conflict with the familiar tendency of ordered states to decay to disorder, instead of vice versa, in accordance with religionists’ (often flawed) understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in physics. This perceived conflict has been used as a justification to insert creationism and its euphemisms ‘creation science’ and ‘intelligent design’ into school science curricula in the U. S. and in other countries.
To scientists, complexity typically is understood as the product of a gradual process of evolution from simplicity. It features gradual information accumulation, consistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which predicts increasing disorder of orderly states, but only in thermodynamically isolated systems. That is, scientists generally believe that life, and its tendency to increase in complexity over time, is a
form of order that evolves in open systems, such as on land, situated at an interface (surface) between an energy source (the sun) and an energy sink (the earth). Likewise, hydrothermal vents are warm interfaces between an energy source (Earth’s hot molten core) and an energy sink (Earth’s cold oceans). In either environment, any increase in complexity results in a (more than) compensating increase in disorder (‘entropy’) elsewhere, outside of the living systems. These opposing conceptions historically have placed science, especially astronomy, geology, and evolution, at odds with religion, and most acutely at odds with the Christian Doctrine of Separate Creation (‘creationism’).
In a democratic society, people are free to believe as they wish, in either way or in both ways (or in neither way). Conflicting beliefs about the origins of complexity and of life have suggested to some that science and religion are incompatible fundamentally (for example, Mahner and Bunge, 1996). Others, such as Ayala (2007), have sought harmony. At
the opposite extreme, Dawkins (2016) viewed the conflict as unresolvable, even to the point of repudiating meaningful dialogue.
Consistent with the ‘independence’ classification of Barbour (1990), I view the realm of science as actually being distinct and nonoverlapping with that of religion. Science encompasses all that may be addressed, in practice or in concept (‘thought experiments’), via the scientific method, and religion potentially encompasses all else. This
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ideal separation of realms, endorsed by Gould (1977) as ‘non-overlapping magisteria’, was unrecognized for most of human history. Indeed, for most of history science and religion did not clash because, for most of human history, science did not exist. Religious explanation was the only game in town… and religion really ‘went to town’.
The emergence of science in the past millennium showed that religion, in the absence of science, had claimed too much. Emerging scientific disciplines, especially astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology, challenged religious beliefs about our world’s centrality in the heavens, its young age, and creation of life by a purposeful god, including creation of humans in his (or, nowadays, her or ‘their’) image. Much that religion claimed, and still may claim, turned out to be subject to scientific experimentation, and therefore to potential refutation.
The scientific method encompasses commonly understood controlled experiments, the less commonly understood null hypothesis in experimental design, and the still less commonly understood concept of the burden of proof, which is essentially selection of an appropriate null hypothesis as the default assumption that must be assumed to be true unless and until refuted via probative, controlled scientific experimentation. Superimposed upon this structure is the premise that experiments must be repeatable and results replicable. The burden of proof is especially difficult for non-scientists to understand because it shifts subtly, depending upon the weight of evidence evinced at the time of experimental design. This can be especially troublesome in legal proceedings, where court decisions must be made in real time, not whenever relevant science becomes incontrovertible (Michaels 2017b).
Non-scientists (and less commonly scientists) have doubted that Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution conceivably could be the subject
of a priori scientific experimentation because evolution occurred in the past; it even might have ceased occurring long ago. This doubt is unjustified because it ignores multiple avenues of successful a priori experimentation in the realm of evolution theory. Micro-evolutionary processes often are demonstrated via experiments of short duration relative to science career durations and, equally critically, relative to science grant funding durations. In such experiments, changes in genotype and/or phenotype frequency are demonstrated in response to selective pressure applied to populations of a species, or even to mixedspecies communities in nature or in laboratories. Demonstration of micro-
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evolutionary processes experimentally has enabled extrapolation toward understanding macro-evolution. Most recently, for example, the question of speciation, which had dogged Darwin, has been clarified via micro-evolutionary experiments with Darwin’s finches, in just three generations producing reproductive isolation and speciation (Lamichhaney, et al. 2018; Wagner 2018). Protestations of the inadequacy of evidence from experiments therefore have been deemed to be among the poorest arguments of creationists (Dawkins 2009).
More basic than experiments with micro-evolution is the impressive track record of prediction directly from the fossil record. Just as physicists have predicted from theory subatomic particles that ought to exist, and then found them, scientists have predicted features of the fossil record that ought to exist, and then found them. Well-known examples, sometimes colloquially termed ‘missing links’, include the African lungfish Protopterus marking the transition of multicellular animal life from water to land, and the flying dinosaur Pterodactyl
marking the transition to early bird life, such as Archaeopteryx, which had feathers but still retained dinosaur-like features such as heavy teeth and solid bones (rather than lighter beaks and hollow bones of modern birds). Just as subatomic particles predicted by physics were ‘found’ experimentally even though they already had existed, the transitional fossils predicted by evolution theory were ‘found’ in the fossil record, experimentally confirming a priori the past existence of the organisms whose fossils were newly discovered (or sometimes newly interpreted). Darwin, of course, famously applied fossil evidence in support of his deductions about evolution. Fossil evidence evinced by paleontologists continues to support the theory of evolution (Prothero 2007), and no scientific evidence, from fossils or other sources, has refuted it. Evolution has passed all scientific tests that could have refuted it.
A third avenue of successful research into evolution applies mainly to astronomy and its related field of cosmology. Powerful
telescopes now can resolve objects at great distances. Such objects are visible today from light or radio waves emitted earlier in the history of the universe, almost as far back as the Big Bang some 15 billion years ago. Thus, objects actually can be seen today as they existed in the past, and can be compared with present-day objects such as nearby stars and galaxies. Such comparisons of the building blocks of today’s universe at intervals encompassing almost its full history have revealed details and dynamics of its evolution.
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A most recent addition to this observational toolbox is gravity wave detectors. Most notably, the gravitational wave interferometers Ligo and Virgo detected the gravitational signal of two merging neutron stars, confirming and enriching our understanding of such critical evolutionary events (Bloom and Sigurdsson 2017). Equally impressive, the interferometers were able to localize the neutrino star merger event in space, enabling detection of its counterpart radio and optical signals via ‘multimessenger astronomy’. The impressive strength of astronomical evidence of cosmic evolution has motivated acceptance even by theists who reject evidence of biological evolution (Scott 2009).
The above and other avenues of research together illustrate that a hypothesis in evolution may set forth a priori an expectation, or a possibility, such as finding in the fossil (or astronomical) record some precursor to that which exists presently. The follow-up experimental approach may consist of searching for probative fossil (or astronomical) evidence. Such evidence might be detected by astronomical or
cosmological observation, or in the archived database of past astronomical observations. Fossils of past life might be unearthed via fieldwork in geological formations (‘in situ’) and/or found in museums or other collections, which play a vital role in identifying new species (Kemp 2017). The presence or absence of probative evidence in the fossil or astronomical record, and subsequent investigation (if it was found), may confirm or refute the evolutionary hypothesis that is being tested a priori, even though the objects (or events) that are being sought existed (or occurred) in the past.
Another concept that often is unfamiliar to non-scientists is the status of a ‘theory’ in science. A scientific theory is an area of knowledge and investigation, such as relativity theory in physics, graph theory in mathematics, or probability theory in statistics. Evolution theory rests on ground just as firm. Indeed, each of these ‘theories’ rests on ground that is at least as firm as, for example, evidence used to convict criminals in our highly vaunted judicial system: ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt’. Evolution
has progressed from a hypothesis to a theory and, indeed, currently to a scientific fact (Gould 1981).
Knowledge in the area that a theory encompasses can be advanced via experimentation. Experimentation in a particular theory most commonly increases the richness of knowledge. Experimentation is not expected to topple a theory. Refutation sometimes has occurred, of course, such as in replacement (or more accurately extension) of Isaac Newton’s Theory of Motion in physics with Albert Einstein’s Theories of Special
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Relativity and of General Relatively. Such rare events sometimes are termed scientific ‘revolutions’ (Kuhn, 1962). Most essentially, the term ‘theory’ does not, or should not, imply doubt about the science; it should imply incompleteness at most.
By steps such as those described above, scientific theories and science itself advance. In a democratic society, people may form their beliefs based upon the contemporary state of science, or they may reject science in favor of a preferred belief system. Rejection of science by those in positions of responsibility to apply it for the public good, however, is deplorable, in part because of negative consequences that can result, and that have resulted.
Science illiteracy, Science Ignorance, and Science Denial
------------------------------------ The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
Matthew Arnold (1822-’88), from the poem Dover Beach, 1867
The receding Sea of Faith is Matthew Arnold’s metaphor for the retreat of religion before the advance of science. Arnold is more pessimistic than pugilistic in the face of this sea change. Such
reconciliation has ebbed and flowed, as the sea itself. We seem to live in a time of flux, with increasingly many people of faith seeking to co-exist with people of science, even (as described above) to ally themselves with scientists toward solution of the existential problems of our planet (Michaels, Hammerman, and Silva 2018).
Resistance to science may be based upon science illiteracy or, among scientifically literate people, science ignorance (knowing, but ignoring what you know):
“There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded people are those who choose to
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ignore what they already know” (variously attributed, for example, Jonathan Swift 1738).
Both phenomena (science illiteracy and ignorance) together produce the phenomenon of science denial. Thus, suspicion of science and of scientists has existed since well before publication two centuries ago of Mary Shelley’s still-celebrated tale Frankenstein (Shelley 1818), which remains influential (Cohen 2018).
Denial of climate change science, and of science generally, has been attributed less to the science than to the implications of the science for personal identity, and this seems likely to be true more generally, including science denial by Trumpists. Fighting science denial with scientific evidence therefore has been judged futile with respect to many if not most science deniers (Hayhoe and Schwartz 2017). Indeed, the conflict between science and religion may be based more on underlying assumptions than on facts or theories (Ulanowicz 2004).
Conflict between scientific and dogmatic/doctrinal thinking likewise can mean life or death, as it did for millions of Russians in the 1940s when the uneducated, scientifically illiterate Trofim Lysenko was appointed Josef Stalin’s agriculture minister. Lysenko rejected Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics, which Russians under communism viewed as the scientific version of capitalism, which they termed ‘social Darwinism‘. Instead, Lysenko embraced the discredited but (in Russia) politically correct Lamarckian belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lysenko’s policies predictably failed to produce crops such as wheat and other grains resistant to harsh Russian winters, instead producing widespread famine. Famine in Russia spread with Lysenko’s ideas to China, where they were adopted under Chairperson Mao. Science illiteracy and political correctness likewise both remain major societal threats today. Our education systems therefore must prioritize science literacy in the service both of science and of civics (Feinstein 2011,
Feinstein et al. 2013).
Contemporary examples of doctrinal/dogmatic thinking include, today, rejection of not only evolution as in Lysenko’s agricultural policies of the 1940s, but also of climate change. The Covid-19 pandemic reveals potential costs of science rejection, for whatever reason(s) science is rejected, including doctrinal/dogmatic thinking. In the U. S., Trump’s denial of the seriousness of the disease, deliberate understatement of the public health threat that it poses, and inaction to stop its transmission
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together have resulted in the mostly avoidable deaths of about one in 500 people in the country, and in long-term illness of many times that number of fatalities. These examples illustrate the human cost of science rejection (Nature 2021b). Comparable public health catastrophes in India and Brazil are attributable to science rejection, beginning with their chiefs of state, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Jair Bolsonaro, respectively.
Covid-19 also has caused an economic recession, from which our nation appears to be emerging as we ‘build back better’. However, the recovery is uneven, as SARS-CoV-2 variants of increasing infectivity emerge. Further, we have yet to tally the inevitable future economic burden on individuals and on the nation as our generation’s disease burden from long-term Covid-19 inevitably materializes. I anticipate health care expenses increasing, both in absolute terms and as a fraction of all expenses. The economic burden of health care and health insurance might even impact the overall health of our economy.
One example of science denial, in contrast, resulted in beneficial consequences, though perhaps not for the deniers. In Germany after World War I, Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was spurned as ‘Jewish science’, and was targeted, for example in 1919 by the anti-Semitic 1905 Physics Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard (Cornwell 2003, Rhodes 1986). With the rise of fascism, Jewish physicists from Germany (including Einstein) lost their academic positions (and sometimes, as in Einstein’s case, their homes), and fled. This exodus resulted in loss of nearly half of Germany’s theoretical physicists, including many Nobel Prize winners, and many of Germany’s top-ranked experts in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics (Cornwell 2003, page 140). This ‘brain drain’ precluded a viable German atomic bomb project during WWII. Nazi-threatened Jewish physicists from Germany and beyond, most notably from Hungary, flocked to the U. S. Influenced by Einstein’s famous letter, President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted the Manhattan Project, securing for the U. S. a timely (but temporary) monopoly on atomic bomb (fission) technology and, later,
hydrogen bomb (fusion) technology.
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C h a p t e r 06 . C i v i c s , S c i e n c e , a n d C o v i d-19 Pandemic Management
Hatred has been likened to a virus, and the Holocaust of World War II to a scourge or pandemic. The most prominent treatment of this theme in the U. S. resides in Washington, DC, in the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Indeed, the Holocaust of WWII is more than an isolated though prominent example of hatred. It is more generally a statement about hatred, intolerance, and bullying anywhere… I would say including mistreatment of animals anywhere. Sometimes the bullying may originate from neighbors, as it did in the case of Anne Frank, who was betrayed to Nazi occupiers by a neighbor in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), to be incarcerated in Auschwitz and the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where she died of starvation and untreated disease. Sometimes the agent of death is a literal, not a figurative virus, as in the Covid-19 pandemic, caused by infection with SARS-CoV-2. As with Nazi denial of the “Final Solution” when confronted with it at the Nuremburg trials, Trump denied the mass illness and death being inflicted by the virus, which he tolerated and indeed promoted by holding densely packed ‘super-spreader’ events at which masks were unwelcome. Over a million Americans died as a result, hundreds of thousands unnecessarily, and U.S. population actually declined. Pandemic management ranks with hatred management among the responsibilities of our leaders. Abdication of this role regarding either or both is a crime against humanity. page 139
-------------------------------------------------------------- I have come near no infection or any infected person; I am sure it is the air. We draw in death when we breathe, and therefore ’tis the hand of God; there is no withstanding it. Defoe, Daniel (circa 1660 – 1731). A Journal of the Plague Year / Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London. London, E. Nutt, 1722; (probably based upon the 1665 journal by Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe) --------------------------------------------------------------
The Covid-19 pandemic inextricably links civics and science, in part because Trump undermined our preparation for it. Flouting expert advice, in 2018 Trump disbanded pandemic response teams in the National Security Council’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense in 36 countries including China. When the pandemic emerged
in Wuhan, China, Trump without evidence blamed it on China. When the pandemic reached our country, Trump deliberately minimized it and flouted scientific and medical principles of pandemic management, resulting in unprecedented loss of life and health, exceeding that experienced in other countries having far less wherewithal to combat pandemics.
The Covid-19 pandemic is the result of infection with the SARSCoV-2 virus. Though it has variants and subvariants, SARS-CoV-2 is just one of many viruses. Marine (oceanic) viruses alone have been termed “major actors in the global ecosystem” (Suttle 2007). Collectively, viruses have the potential to infect many if not most species, beginning with microbes. Indeed, microbial infection by viruses routinely may cause the death of 10-20 percent of the living mass of all microbes on the planet in any given day, on average. The potential impact of viruses, however, is not only negative, but positive (Suttle 2007). Even if one might expect the best from beneficial viruses, but one had best plan for the worst from viruses generally, and particularly from SARS-CoV-2, which is just one of many
viruses having the potential to infect humans and to cause deadly pandemics.
To illustrate the negative impact, life expectancy in northwestern Europe has increased by 50 years since the mid-1800s (Johnson 2021), in large part due to the emergence of scientific epidemiology and data
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analysis. This gain, which would not have occurred without societal acceptance of science and scientific medicine (and its precursor, ‘the art of medicine’), is one of many ways that illustrate the potential cost of science rejection. The contemporary conflict between scientific and doctrinal/dogmatic thinking has meant potential life or potential death for three hundred million people in the U. S. during the Covid-19 pandemic alone. The pandemic has been associated with tension between scientific knowledge in areas most notably including virology, immunology, and epidemiology vs. populist science-rejecting forces seeking to deflect blame, for example by normalizing life and/or stabilizing the stock market.
An equally nefarious motivation also may have animated Trump: to exploit virus-induced clinical weakness as an advantage to facilitate control over the U. S. population (Ben-Ghiat 2020a, b):
“The initial responses of illiberal heads of state to the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic are a case in point… In
each case [China, Hungary, Brazil], the leader’s priority was not to save lives, but to maintain or expand his power” (Ben-Ghiat 2020b, page 4).
“Unfortunately, some of the conditions the pandemic causes are perfect for autocracy. For example, you have a defenseless nation that cannot turn out in numbers to protest. So, some of the instruments of resistance against creeping autocracy, like public demonstrations, you can’t do at this time. You also have a population that’s more in contact than ever, but is weakened and distracted. Those are just some things that would make it easier rather than harder for someone in the autocratic mind frame to increase their power” (Ben-Ghiat 2020b).
As President (at the time), Trump bears responsibility for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the U. S. caused (in part) by deliberately dishonest communications understating the seriousness of the disease, setting a destructive (lethal if not murderous) example by failing to wear a face mask, holding crowded Covid-19 ‘superspreader’ events, and failing to adopt strategies of demonstrated effectiveness to reduce Covid-19 spread. Consequently, in 2020 the U. S. exhibited the worst Covid-19 death toll of any advanced nation, with about 4 percent of the global population, but nearly 20 percent of all COVID-19 deaths
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(Steenhuysen 2021). According to Anthony Fauci, director of the U. S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases:
“Even under the best of circumstances, this would have been a very serious problem… However, that does not explain how a rich and sophisticated country can have the most percentage of deaths and be the hardest-hit country in the world.”
Indeed, the Trump Administration refused to embrace numerous non-pharmaceutical interventions that had been shown to be highly effective at mitigating the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, such as switching schools and universities from in-person to remote instruction, closing (restricting) businesses, limiting gatherings, and ordering people to stay at home when possible (Brauner et al. 2021). The cost in lives lost is obvious; less obvious are the long-term health consequences and associated
economic costs of long-term adverse Covid-19 sequelae, which may be considered in three categories: Covid, long Covid, and lifelong Covid. Both the health and economic costs and consequences might have been, and might continue to be, exacerbated by persistent Trump and Trumpist GOP efforts to dismantle and declare unconstitutional the health care insurance safety net known as ‘Obamacare’ (the Affordable Care Act).
How might Voltaire’s extravagantly optimistic Dr. Pangloss explain such civic cruelty?
“…private misfortunes make the general good, so that the more private misfortunes there are the greater is the general good" (Candide, Chapter 3).
Possible political consequences of evil pandemic management
The consequences of evil pandemic management by Trump, beyond causing mass death and illness, extend to politics. The consequences evidently include affecting the 2020 presidential election, most notably Trump losing the popular vote to Joe Biden by approximately 7.1 million votes (about 4.5 percent of total votes cast). In comparison, in the 2016 election, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by only about 2.9 million votes (about 2.1 percent of total votes).
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The 2016 presidential election turned on a relatively small number of votes in closely contested ‘swing states’, the most important being Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (Meko et al. 2016): “This election was effectively decided by 107,000 people in these three states. Trump won the popular vote there by that combined amount. That amounts to 0.09 percent of all votes cast in this election… [In contrast,]… if Clinton had won these states, she could have sealed the presidency with 274 total electoral votes.”
I wondered how the 2020 vote in each of the three swing states listed above compared with 2016. All three of these 2016 Trump states became Biden states in 2020 (Table 1): Michigan by 154,188 votes (2.8 percent of the combined vote for the two candidates in that state), Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes (1.2 percent of the combined vote), and Wisconsin by 20,682 votes (0.6 percent of the combined vote). The sum of the Biden victory margin therefore was 255,425 votes in the three states together (equal to 1.64 percent of the three-state combined vote). That is,
between 2016 and 2020 (ignoring absolute numbers of votes, which differed in the two elections) Trump’s percentage share of the popular vote in the three states declined by over 1.7 percent (calculation: +0.09 to -1.64 = 1.73 percent).
As a further question, I wondered whether the death toll in the Covid-19 pandemic, which began here around January 2021, might have been demographically significant for the November 2021 election, as it predominantly affected unvaccinated people, primarily consisting of Republicans. Table 1 shows that the pandemic death toll (as of 12 January 2022, about two months after the election in November 2021) in the three states listed above was 30,114 in Michigan; 37,899 in Pennsylvania; and 11,527 in Wisconsin, totaling 79,440 in the three states combined.
Even if all of these deaths in each state had occurred among registered voters, and even if all had voted in 2016 (but not in 2020), and even if all
had voted for Trump, the deaths would not total a sufficiently high loss of voters to have cost Trump any of those three states in 2020 (Table 1). Indeed, Covid-19 mortality was just 2.8 percent of the Biden margin of victory in Michigan, 1.2 percent in Pennsylvania, and 0.6 percent in Wisconsin. The pandemic killed Republicans preferentially but, from a strictly demographic standpoint, not to a degree that could have explained the turnaround in any of the three swing states listed above.
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Table 1. U. S. Presidential Election (3 November 2021) vs. Covid-19 Deaths (as of 12 January 2022), Alphabetical by State (n = 50) or District (n = 1) votes for votes for Biden vote margin of Covid-19 Covid-19 mortality-
state U co S d P e S population1 C d o e v a id th -1 s2 9 mo r r a t t a e lity v B o i 2 d t 0 e e 2 s n 0 f i o n r t v
… … … … (per 100K) … (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) Alabama AL 4,934,193 16,630 337.0 849,624 Alaska AK 724,357 980 135.3 153,778 Arizona AZ 7,520,103 24,986 332.3 1,672,143 Arkansas AR 3,033,946 9,358 308.4 423,932 California CA 39,613,493 77,226 194.9 11,110,250 Colorado CO 5,893,634 10,528 178.6 1,804,352 Connecticut CT 3,552,821 9,435 265.6 1,080,831 Delaware DE 990,334 2,373 239.6 296,268 Florida FL 21,944,577 62,813 286.2 5,297,045 Georgia GA 10,830,007 31,744 293.1 2,473,633 Hawaii HI 1,406,430 1,105 78.6 366,130 Idaho ID 1,860,123 4,243 228.1 287,021 Illinois IL 12,569,321 31,093 247.4 3,471,915 Indiana IN 6,805,663 19,908 292.5 1,242,416 Iowa IA 3,167,974 8,200 258.8 759,061 Kansas KS 2,917,224 7,115 243.9 570,323 Kentucky KY 4,480,713 12,434 277.5 772,474 Louisiana LA 4,627,002 15,102 326.4 856,034 Maine ME 1,354,522 1,623 119.8 435,072 Maryland MD 6,065,436 12,328 203.3 1,985,023 Massachusetts MA 6,912,239 20,763 300.4 2,382,202 Michigan MI 9,992,427 30,014 300.4 2,804,040 Minnesota MN 5,706,398 10,978 192.4 1,717,077 Mississippi MS 2,966,407 10,563 356.1 539,398 Missouri MO 6,169,038 16,722 271.1 1,253,014 Montana MT 1,085,004 2,927 269.8 244,786 Nebraska NE 1,951,996 3,486 178.6 374,583 Nevada NV 3,185,786 8,560 268.7 703,486 New Hampshire NH 1,372,203 2,032 148.1 424,937 New Jersey NJ 8,874,520 29,634 333.9 2,608,335 New Mexico NM 2,105,005 6,045 287.2 501,614 New York NY 19,299,981 60,986 316.0 5,230,985 North Carolina NC 10,701,022 19,706 184.2 2,684,292 North Dakota ND 770,026 2,079 270.0 114,902 Ohio OH 11,714,618 30,435 259.8 2,679,165 Oklahoma OK 3,990,443 12,666 317.4 503,890 Oregon OR 4,289,439 5,814 135.5 1,340,383 Pennsylvania PA 12,804,123 37,899 296.0 3,458,229 Rhode Island RI 1,061,509 3,144 296.2 307,486 South Carolina SC 5,277,830 14,803 280.5 1,091,541 South Dakota SD 896,581 2,528 282.0 150,471 Tennessee TN 6,944,260 20,941 301.6 1,143,711 Texas TX 29,730,311 76,643 257.8 5,259,126 Utah UT 3,310,774 3,922 118.5 560,282 Vermont VT 623,251 483 77.5 242,820 Virginia VA 8,603,985 15,715 182.6 2,413,568 Washington WA 7,796,941 10,026 128.6 2,369,612 Washington, DC DC 714,153 1,237 173.2 317,323 West Virginia WV 1,767,859 5,452 308.4 235,984 Wisconsin WI 5,852,490 11,527 197.0 1,630,866 Wyoming WY 581,075 1,588 273.3 73,491 total Covid-19 deaths: 838,542 total votes 81,268,924 74 1. Wikipedia. 2020 United States presidential election, https://worldpopulationrevi 2. Statista. Number of deaths from coronavirus (Covid-19) in the United States as https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103688/coronavirus-covid19-d page 14
v tr o u 2 t m 0 e 2 s p 0 f i o n r B (m i d d e i e n f n i u c v s it o ) = t e v o m ic r t a l o o r r g s y s in ( ( + o -) f ) m Co o r v r a t id t a e - li 1 t 9 y m to o - r r m a ta t a i l o r it g y in - m t r o a o - t r m io ta a r l a r it g n y i k n -
… … (%) (%) (%) … (g) (h) (i) (j) (k) (l) 1,441,170 -591,546 -25.8 0.34 1.31 27 189,951 -36,173 -10.5 0.14 1.29 30 1,661,686 10,457 0.3 0.33 105.93 2 760,647 -336,715 -28.4 0.31 1.09 34 6,006,429 5,103,821 29.8 0.19 0.65 44 1,364,607 439,745 13.9 0.18 1.29 29 714,717 366,114 20.4 0.27 1.30 28 200,603 95,665 19.3 0.24 1.24 33 5,668,731 -371,686 -3.4 0.29 8.44 8 2,461,854 11,779 0.2 0.29 122.82 1 196,864 169,266 30.1 0.08 0.26 49 554,119 -267,098 -31.8 0.23 0.72 43 2,446,891 1,025,024 17.3 0.25 1.43 24 1,729,519 -487,103 -16.4 0.29 1.78 18 897,672 -138,611 -8.4 0.26 3.09 11 771,406 -201,083 -15.0 0.24 1.63 22 1,326,646 -554,172 -26.4 0.28 1.05 35 1,255,776 -399,742 -18.9 0.33 1.72 21 360,737 74,335 9.3 0.12 1.28 31 976,414 1,008,609 34.1 0.20 0.60 47 1,167,202 1,215,000 34.2 0.30 0.88 39 2,649,852 154,188 2.8 0.30 10.62 7 1,484,065 233,012 7.3 0.19 2.64 12 756,764 -217,366 -16.8 0.36 2.12 15 1,718,736 -465,722 -15.7 0.27 1.73 20 343,602 -98,816 -16.8 0.27 1.61 23 556,846 -182,263 -19.6 0.18 0.91 38 669,890 33,596 2.4 0.27 10.98 6 365,660 59,277 7.5 0.15 1.98 17 1,883,274 725,061 16.1 0.33 2.07 16 401,894 99,720 11.0 0.29 2.60 13 3,244,798 1,986,187 23.4 0.32 1.35 26 2,758,775 -74,483 -1.4 0.18 13.46 5 235,595 -120,693 -34.4 0.27 0.78 41 3,154,834 -475,669 -8.2 0.26 3.19 10 1,020,280 -516,390 -33.9 0.32 0.94 37 958,448 381,935 16.6 0.14 0.82 40 3,377,674 80,555 1.2 0.30 25.12 4 199,922 107,564 21.2 0.30 1.40 25 1,385,103 -293,562 -11.9 0.28 2.37 14 261,043 -110,572 -26.9 0.28 1.05 36 1,852,475 -708,764 -23.7 0.30 1.27 32 5,890,347 -631,221 -5.7 0.26 4.55 9 865,140 -304,858 -21.4 0.12 0.55 48 112,704 130,116 36.6 0.08 0.21 50 1,962,430 451,138 10.3 0.18 1.77 19 1,584,651 784,961 19.9 0.13 0.65 45 18,586 298,737 88.9 0.17 0.19 51 545,382 -309,398 -39.6 0.31 0.78 42 1,610,184 20,682 0.6 0.20 30.87 3 193,559 -120,068 -45.0 0.27 0.61 46 4,216,154 7,052,770 4 .5 % Biden victory margin iew.com/states, access date 15 January 2022; s of January 12, 2022, by state. deaths-us-by-state/, access date 15 January 2022. 44
The civics issues engendered by Table 1 may be illustrated by consideration of the possible effects of Trump’s evil pandemic management going forward, especially what they might portend for the 2024 presidential election. The 2024 presidential election therefore should be viewed prospectively in the contexts of both civics and politics, and both should be informed by (broadly defined) science. Based upon the analysis described above and illustrated via Table 1, the demographic significance of the Covid-19 mortality rate can be ignored as a factor in determining either the 2020 or the 2024 election. However, analyses have suggested that Trump’s loss in the 2020 election largely was attributable to low voter regard for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic; that is, to political factors (for example: Bump 2021, Dawsey 2021).
Swing states are, by definition, important in determining elections because they are neither reliably Republican states nor reliably Democratic states. Rather, they are contested, competitive states, at least during the campaign leading to an election, and at least (for present
purposes) for the presidential election. After an election, of course, each state will have become a Democratic or a Republican state. In Table 1, I arbitrarily define a ‘swing state’ as one producing a margin of victory or loss of under 10 percent of the total vote. By that definition, Table 1 shows 14 swing states (marked in bold). Of the 14 bolded states (and bolded values in some Table 1 rows), three exhibited a (victory or loss) margin of 0 to ≤1 percent of the combined vote, and 11 exhibited a margin of 1 to ≤10 percent.
The impact of the unnecessarily high mortality imposed on the American public by Trump, above the mortality rate that (for example) other countries experienced, nonetheless appears to have exerted a mixed political effect. Table 1 includes a column (k) that uses a ratio to compare the Covid-19 mortality rate (as a percent of total state or District population) with the margin of victory or loss (as a percent of total votes cast for Biden and Trump in each state or district). Those ratios included
two states with Covid-19 mortality exceeding the (victory or loss) margin: Georgia (1.2, or 123 percent) and Arizona (1.1, or 106 percent). Trump won both states in 2016, but lost both in 2020. All other states (48) and districts (one, the District of Columbia, Washington, DC) had mortalityto-margin ratios of less than one (that is, less than 100 percent)
Table 2 ranks the above-described mortality-to-margin ratio from one to 51, including the highest to the lowest values for the 50 states and one district (the District of Columbia). Table 2 therefore is merely a
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Table 2. U. S. Presidential Election (3 November 2021) vs. Covid-19 Deaths (as of 12 January 2022), Ranked by Covid-19 Mortality-to-Margin of Victory, by State (n = 50) or District (n = 1) votes for votes for Biden vote margin of Covid-19 Covid-19 mortality-
state U co S d P e S population1 C d o e v a id th -1 s2 9 mo r r a t t a e lity v B o i 2 d t 0 e e 2 s n 0 f i o n r v t
… … … … (per 100K) … (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) Georgia GA 10,830,007 31,744 293.1 2,473,633 Arizona AZ 7,520,103 24,986 332.3 1,672,143 Wisconsin WI 5,852,490 11,527 197.0 1,630,866 Pennsylvania PA 12,804,123 37,899 296.0 3,458,229 North Carolina NC 10,701,022 19,706 184.2 2,684,292 Nevada NV 3,185,786 8,560 268.7 703,486 Michigan MI 9,992,427 30,014 300.4 2,804,040 Florida FL 21,944,577 62,813 286.2 5,297,045 Texas TX 29,730,311 76,643 257.8 5,259,126 Ohio OH 11,714,618 30,435 259.8 2,679,165 Iowa IA 3,167,974 8,200 258.8 759,061 Minnesota MN 5,706,398 10,978 192.4 1,717,077 New Mexico NM 2,105,005 6,045 287.2 501,614 South Carolina SC 5,277,830 14,803 280.5 1,091,541 Mississippi MS 2,966,407 10,563 356.1 539,398 New Jersey NJ 8,874,520 29,634 333.9 2,608,335 New Hampshire NH 1,372,203 2,032 148.1 424,937 Indiana IN 6,805,663 19,908 292.5 1,242,416 Virginia VA 8,603,985 15,715 182.6 2,413,568 Missouri MO 6,169,038 16,722 271.1 1,253,014 Louisiana LA 4,627,002 15,102 326.4 856,034 Kansas KS 2,917,224 7,115 243.9 570,323 Montana MT 1,085,004 2,927 269.8 244,786 Illinois IL 12,569,321 31,093 247.4 3,471,915 Rhode Island RI 1,061,509 3,144 296.2 307,486 New York NY 19,299,981 60,986 316.0 5,230,985 Alabama AL 4,934,193 16,630 337.0 849,624 Connecticut CT 3,552,821 9,435 265.6 1,080,831 Colorado CO 5,893,634 10,528 178.6 1,804,352 Alaska AK 724,357 980 135.3 153,778 Maine ME 1,354,522 1,623 119.8 435,072 Tennessee TN 6,944,260 20,941 301.6 1,143,711 Delaware DE 990,334 2,373 239.6 296,268 Arkansas AR 3,033,946 9,358 308.4 423,932 Kentucky KY 4,480,713 12,434 277.5 772,474 South Dakota SD 896,581 2,528 282.0 150,471 Oklahoma OK 3,990,443 12,666 317.4 503,890 Nebraska NE 1,951,996 3,486 178.6 374,583 Massachusetts MA 6,912,239 20,763 300.4 2,382,202 Oregon OR 4,289,439 5,814 135.5 1,340,383 North Dakota ND 770,026 2,079 270.0 114,902 West Virginia WV 1,767,859 5,452 308.4 235,984 Idaho ID 1,860,123 4,243 228.1 287,021 California CA 39,613,493 77,226 194.9 11,110,250 Washington WA 7,796,941 10,026 128.6 2,369,612 Wyoming WY 581,075 1,588 273.3 73,491 Maryland MD 6,065,436 12,328 203.3 1,985,023 Utah UT 3,310,774 3,922 118.5 560,282 Hawaii HI 1,406,430 1,105 78.6 366,130 Vermont VT 623,251 483 77.5 242,820 Washington, DC DC 714,153 1,237 173.2 317,323 total Covid-19 deaths: 838,542 total votes 81,268,924 74 1. Wikipedia. 2020 United States presidential election, https://worldpopulationrevi 2. Statista. Number of deaths from coronavirus (Covid-19) in the United States as https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103688/coronavirus-covid19-d page 1
v tr o u 2 t m 0 e 2 s p 0 f i o n r B (m i d d e e in f n i u c v s it o ) = t e v o m ic r t a l o o r r s g y s in ( ( + o -) f ) m Co o r v r a t i t d a e - li 1 t 9 y m to o - r r m a ta t a i l r o it g y in - m t r o a o - t m i r o t a a r l r a i g t n y i k n -
… … (%) (%) (%) … (g) (h) (i) (j) (k) (l) 2,461,854 11,779 0.2 0.29 122.82 1 1,661,686 10,457 0.3 0.33 105.93 2 1,610,184 20,682 0.6 0.20 30.87 3 3,377,674 80,555 1.2 0.30 25.12 4 2,758,775 -74,483 -1.4 0.18 13.46 5 669,890 33,596 2.4 0.27 10.98 6 2,649,852 154,188 2.8 0.30 10.62 7 5,668,731 -371,686 -3.4 0.29 8.44 8 5,890,347 -631,221 -5.7 0.26 4.55 9 3,154,834 -475,669 -8.2 0.26 3.19 10 897,672 -138,611 -8.4 0.26 3.09 11 1,484,065 233,012 7.3 0.19 2.64 12 401,894 99,720 11.0 0.29 2.60 13 1,385,103 -293,562 -11.9 0.28 2.37 14 756,764 -217,366 -16.8 0.36 2.12 15 1,883,274 725,061 16.1 0.33 2.07 16 365,660 59,277 7.5 0.15 1.98 17 1,729,519 -487,103 -16.4 0.29 1.78 18 1,962,430 451,138 10.3 0.18 1.77 19 1,718,736 -465,722 -15.7 0.27 1.73 20 1,255,776 -399,742 -18.9 0.33 1.72 21 771,406 -201,083 -15.0 0.24 1.63 22 343,602 -98,816 -16.8 0.27 1.61 23 2,446,891 1,025,024 17.3 0.25 1.43 24 199,922 107,564 21.2 0.30 1.40 25 3,244,798 1,986,187 23.4 0.32 1.35 26 1,441,170 -591,546 -25.8 0.34 1.31 27 714,717 366,114 20.4 0.27 1.30 28 1,364,607 439,745 13.9 0.18 1.29 29 189,951 -36,173 -10.5 0.14 1.29 30 360,737 74,335 9.3 0.12 1.28 31 1,852,475 -708,764 -23.7 0.30 1.27 32 200,603 95,665 19.3 0.24 1.24 33 760,647 -336,715 -28.4 0.31 1.09 34 1,326,646 -554,172 -26.4 0.28 1.05 35 261,043 -110,572 -26.9 0.28 1.05 36 1,020,280 -516,390 -33.9 0.32 0.94 37 556,846 -182,263 -19.6 0.18 0.91 38 1,167,202 1,215,000 34.2 0.30 0.88 39 958,448 381,935 16.6 0.14 0.82 40 235,595 -120,693 -34.4 0.27 0.78 41 545,382 -309,398 -39.6 0.31 0.78 42 554,119 -267,098 -31.8 0.23 0.72 43 6,006,429 5,103,821 29.8 0.19 0.65 44 1,584,651 784,961 19.9 0.13 0.65 45 193,559 -120,068 -45.0 0.27 0.61 46 976,414 1,008,609 34.1 0.20 0.60 47 865,140 -304,858 -21.4 0.12 0.55 48 196,864 169,266 30.1 0.08 0.26 49 112,704 130,116 36.6 0.08 0.21 50 18,586 298,737 88.9 0.17 0.19 51 4,216,154 7,052,770 4 .5 % Biden victory margin iew.com/states, access date 15 January 2022; s of January 12, 2022, by state. deaths-us-by-state/, access date 15 January 2022. 146
reorganized version of Table 1, in which rows are rearranged from alphabetical, by state or district, to ranked, by the ratio of the Covid-19 mortality-to-margin of presidential election victory. Table 2 therefore contains no new or different values. However, by reorganization, Table 2 visually reveals an observation that is astonishing (to me).
Specifically, the highest 12 ranks of the mortality-to-margin ratio include 12 of the 14 swing states as defined earlier. Only two of the 14 swing states have a mortality-to-margin ratio rank that is lower than any non-swing state(s): New Hampshire (rank 17) and Maine (rank 31). In short, 14 swing states can be regarded as input variables to the analysis of mortality-to-margin ratio ranks, along with 36 additional states and one district, but the astonishing result is the appearance of 12 of the 14 swing states as output variables occupying the top 12 mortality-to-margin ratio ranks.
The outcome revealed in Table 2 clearly is non-random, by
which I mean highly unlikely to have resulted from chance alone. It therefore seems worthy of further exploration. My most general observation is that, IF Table 2 suggests political effects of the pandemic on the 2020 presidential election, the effects were bimodal, as suggested by the following simplified chart:
The above simplified chart uses blue and red for each state to indicate victory by Democrat/Biden vs. Republican/Trump. The chart shows that the distribution of the top 12 Covid-mortality-to-vote-margin
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ranks is not random, but bimodal. That is, all 12 of the highest mortalityto-margin ranks were occupied by swing states, but some of the states (roughly half) were won by Biden (one mode), and others (roughly half) by Trump (the other mode). Specifically, the highest 12 ranks include seven states that were won by Biden, and five that were won by Trump. Further, the relative positions within the top 12 ranks appear to be non-random. The highest four ranks were occupied by Biden states, and four of the lowest five ranks were occupied by Trump states. What, if anything, does this mean? The short answer is: I don’t know.
The non-random results described above strongly suggest either a data artifact or a real political effect. They would suggest (to me) a data artifact if the critical parameters are not independent. The critical parameters are the fractional margin of victory or loss, and the Covid-19 mortality rate. Both are absolute numbers that depend upon the population of the state or district to which they apply. Yet, for a given population size, Covid mortality and voter preference appear (to me) to be independent,
except to the degree that they might be linked politically.
That is, the non-random results do not appear to be a statistical artifact of critical parameters lacking statistical independence. Rather, having a Covid-19 mortality rate comprising a relatively high fraction of a state’s Biden-vs.-Trump election margin appears (to me) to have constituted a significant factor in determining which presidential candidate prevailed in the state. Indeed, a high Covid-19 mortality rate alone was non-predictive.
As I indicated, IF the non-random bimodal results described above carry a political message, that message is complex. That is, the observed mortality-to-margin ratios alone were not predictive of a winner, as seven of the states in the highest 12 ranks went to Biden, and five of the 12 states went to Trump. That is what makes the observed distribution of the mortality-to-margin ratios ‘bimodal’ as opposed to random. The observed non-random distribution instead suggests that something about each state’s
culture and demographics might have determined the receptiveness of its voters to opposing messaging by the competing candidates. I would think that, as a matter of political strategy going forward, discerning the cultural and demographic differences among the states would seem to be useful. However, I leave such investigation, if deemed worthy, to smarter people than myself…
The Covid-19 pandemic in the U. S. began affecting supporters of both parties roughly equally. With the advent of vaccination against Covid-
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19, Republicans rejected vaccines far more commonly than did Democrats. The mortality rates quickly diverged, eventually with nearly all deaths occurring among the unvaccinated, that is, mainly among Republicans. Indeed, deaths eventually were highly skewed (over 90 percent) to unvaccinated people. In short, Covid-19 mortality (eventually) affected Republicans more than Democrats and, I would reasonably suppose, affected Republican voters more than Democratic voters. Although the demographic significance of Trump’s evil pandemic management was minor as shown above, evidently its political significance was not.
Competence and Covid, vaccine and voting
The TV news on 14 January 2021 included a report that a community in Texas as of that day had received not a single dose of any of the vaccines against Covid-19 currently being distributed and administered en masse. At best, this news report suggests
incompetence in implementing vaccine distribution logistics. The report joins numerous reports around the nation, including in my own state (New York), attesting to initial slowness in implementing vaccine distribution and administration. Such reports demand a hard look at the causes of inefficient and unfair resource allocation to remediate the most devastating health crisis in our nation’s history. Hard lookers should include voters, who should apply high expectations at the polls in judging the performance of elected officials, on whom we all depend for our health and safety. You should adopt high expectations, as already described, for the performance of elected officials, including their performance in appointing honest and competent experts who are dedicated to the public good to oversee critical functions of government, most notably including health and welfare.
Science appropriately should inform Covid-19 pandemic management with respect to numerous policy issues, such as the following:
--mandating mask-wearing, --mandating physical distancing, --testing for coronavirus infection and immunity, --achieving ‘herd immunity’, --opening vs. ‘closing’ area economies, --in-person vs. remote instruction in schools, --vaccinating against Covid-19, and --providing booster vaccinations.
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Pandemic management via mandating mask-wearing and physical distancing
In our brave new pandemic world, risks of Covid-19 virus infection have skyrocketed. We missed the opportunity to limit U. S. cases mainly via isolating travelers from China and other hotbeds of infection, and their contacts. Increasingly infective SARS-CoV-2 variants are evolving, most notably as of this writing the delta and omicron variants. That is, superspreader events (such as maskless Trump political rallies) now may involve superspreader variants and subvariants of SARS-CoV-2. Clearly, as we have crosse the grim benchmark of one million Covid-19 deaths, further risk management is urgent. Risk management via social engineering, however, is encountering (primarily) GOP headwinds. We seem to be approaching political limits to further social engineering. As Republican scholar and former (George W.) Bush Administration White House Director of Speechwriting (2001-’06; now Washington Post
columnist) Michael Gerson (2021d) commented: ‘Freedom to infect’ isn’t a civil right.
The pandemic might have ended in the U. S. with less impact than flu, but only if we immediately had implemented effective risk reduction strategies. We did not. In the 2019/’20 flu season, reports the U. S. Centers for Disease Control, we had 13 million cases; 120,000 hospitalizations; and 6,600 to 30,000 flu-related deaths. Manyfold more of each were averted by vaccination. As the flu example illustrates, personal Covid-19 infection risk estimates have enhanced meaning in at least one specified risk management context.
Until vaccines became available, and until immunity becomes sufficiently widespread (in the U. S. and globally), people must decide how best to reduce their infection risk, and risk of infecting others in their families, households, workplaces, and communities. Young people may be
at lowest personal risk but, as potential vectors, they share this onus. Testing, mask wearing, and physical distancing are the three most essential, most effective strategies. Walking is safer outdoors, for example, than in an indoor shopping mall, as viruses are likely to be less concentrated. Exposures outdoors when masked are more likely to be subclinical, and even might promote immune protection, as was the case with epidemic polio decades ago.
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How can you tell if your exposure to SARS-CoV-2 is subclinical? You can’t, at least not for certain. You can only guess, based upon your behavior. If you attend a closely packed political rally, your exposure situation is in a high percentile, maybe the 99th percentile, definitely an infectious percentile. In contrast, if you walk solo on a rural path, your exposure (if not zero) is at a very low percentile, maybe under the 1th percentile, and almost certainly a non-infectious percentile. If 10 percent of people get infected, they were likely to be in an exposure category of the 90th to 100th percentile. People who did not get infected (90 percent) would have been in a low exposure category, perhaps from the 0th to 10th percentile.
Physical distancing is essential for reducing exposure and preventing infection. Each of us therefore must limit personal contacts at meetings and events, and incidental contacts in public places. Numerous strategies are available depending upon personal circumstances. Most of us, however, must shop at stores, report to workplaces, and pick up mail.
Most of us cannot achieve total isolation; most of us can reduce but not eliminate infection risk.
Pandemic management via testing
Testing serves medically by identifying Covid-19 cases, and by enabling treatment and patient isolation. It enables tracking of patient contacts for priority testing and isolation. Thus, testing reduces transmission risks and infection incidence. It enables quantification of the average number of people infected by an infected individual (the pandemic ‘R value’). Testing enables comparison of the effectiveness of risk reduction strategies.
Testing underpins genetic sequencing to identify virus variants or strains, and informs adaptive vaccine modification to maintain protectiveness against evolving viral threats. Testing is essential for
epidemiology and pandemic management, as it quantifies infection incidence and risks geographically, and time trends of infection by location. It also quantifies incidence and severity risks by age category. Is clinical severity increased by age, or only by age-related co-morbidities such as immune system compromise and respiratory and cardiac conditions? What is the benefit, if any, of early diagnosis? In short, testing is essential. Our weeks-late start in testing came at great cost to life and health. That is being remedied.
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Covid-19 in New York State In the early phase of the pandemic, with newly available testing, the number of Covid-19 cases in New York State (as of 12 March 2020)
abruptly increased by 96, bringing the total to 421, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo (Michaels 2020b). On 14 March 2020 New York had its first Covid-19 death. Cases began to appear in Albany and the Capital area, including in Saratoga County, SUNY/Albany, and Union College. The data initially were only qualitative, however, reflecting the (then) new reality of the presence (no longer the absence) of recognized cases locally. They also revealed, independent of possibly varying infection risks, more cases with more testing.
A fuller, quantitative characterization of risks and risk trends is needed. The number of cases recognized at any time reflects infections that occurred weeks earlier. The actual number of present infections is unknown. It may be 10s, 100s, maybe even 1000s of times higher than the number of initial infections, and of presently recognized cases. Time and expanded testing will tell.
The initially small number of recognized cases locally was accompanied by ominous reports of community transmission. The exposure network therefore expanded beyond traced contacts with people, possibly adding environmental transmission via breathing and/or hand-tomouth exposure from contaminated surfaces. Accordingly, many meetings were canceled, and meeting places closed at least temporarily.
In 1665 the bubonic plague pandemic closed Trinity College in Cambridge, England. Isaac Newton, a young student working from home, (according to legend) sat under an apple tree and got beaned. He thereby discovered that gravity on earth and elsewhere is the same single force. Newton appreciated the situation of our gravity; we must appreciate the gravity of our situation.
Pandemic management via vaccination
Acceleration of Covid-19 cases attributable to the Delta variant
(Parker 2021a) have scared GOP governors and many representatives in the House and Senate. Delta, of course, is just one of multiple variants already evolved at the super-infectivity vanguard, and more are sure to follow. At last, many GOP leaders are imploring unvaccinated people to get vaccinated. For states, almost exclusively red states, whose vaccination
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fractions are low, case loads are accelerating alarmingly, along with (after a brief lag) hospitalization rates and (after a further lag) death rates. For those paying the price in health and life itself, prevention would have served well. Vaccination now is necessary, but for new Covid-19 cases, it is too little too late, notwithstanding numerous reports of unvaccinated patients begging for vaccination before intubation and possibly death.
Pandemic management via achieving ‘herd immunity’
SARS-CoV-2 spreads in proportion to the fraction of potential hosts (people, though other organisms such as dogs and deer have been shown to be susceptible). People who have sufficient circulating antibody titers against the virus may resist infection (though mucous membranes of the nose and mouth may be unable to fend off surface infection, and the eyes may be unable to fend off surface infection and maybe also brainpenetrating infection via the optic nerve). When a sufficient fraction of people is immune, the number of people on average infected by infected
persons (the pandemic R value) drops below unity (one), and the pandemic gradually dies down. This pandemic-inhibiting condition is one definition of ‘herd immunity’ (though other definitions are less precise and less demanding).
The threshold fraction of the population who must be immune to produce herd immunity, in short, is neither defined nor known exactly. Ultimately, it is a variable that depends upon the behavior of people, especially of infected people. As the frequency of interpersonal contact increases, so does the fraction of the population who must have antibodies against the virus to produce herd immunity.
Herd immunity erroneously has come to be considered by some misguided individuals to qualify as a strategy for managing Covid-19. It is not a strategy. Herd immunity is a threshold population susceptibility fraction that can be attained by alternative strategies. An eLetter of mine
in Science Magazine (Michaels 2020a) addresses this issue in connection with a report by Krammer and Simon (2020), who appropriately highlighted uncertainties about SARS-CoV-2, and the potential of serological testing to reduce them. The authors asserted without evidence that serological assays “measure the antibody responses induced by SARS-CoV-2 infection (past but not current infections).”
Serology assays do test for antibodies, but antibodies often are produced by mechanisms other than infection. Ideally, they are produced
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by vaccination and, ideally and usually actually, vaccines do not produce infection. Lots of people vaccinated against polio have antibodies; they do not typically have a (current or past) polio infection. That is, herd immunity, as against polio virus, can be attained either by vaccination or by infection. The preferable strategy is vaccination. In short, vaccination is a strategy to achieve herd immunity, but herd immunity itself is NOT a strategy; it is a result of applying strategies such as vaccination, which is humane, vs. unimpeded community spread of the disease, which is inhumane.
Ironically, the extraordinary transmissibility and infectivity of the omicron variant, along with its apparently milder symptomatology, inevitably will constitute an immunization process. It even may be the dominant immunization process occurring in the most vaccine-resistant populations (in red states and rural parts of all states). That is, people in those places must choose between getting vaccinated or (probably) getting Covid-19. In either case, they will get immunized if they survive, which
many will not.
Antibodies generically indicate past exposure, not necessarily past infection, though the antibody positivity rate might be regarded as an upper limit of the infection rate. Most exposures to SARS-CoV-2, especially outdoors, involve aged, not fresh virus particles. The viruses precipitate out of the air in minutes to hours, and die within hours to days of landing on surfaces. These aged viruses may be weakened (‘attenuated’), inactivated (‘dead’), or fragmented.
Such compromised viruses may predominate human exposure and even stimulate antibody production. They also may be useful for vaccine development. Ultimately, serology testing alone might neither record Covid-19 infections, nor quantify Covid-19 infection prevalence.
Determining Covid-19 infectivity is complicated. The infection rate
might be determined best via simultaneous serology testing for antibodies and diagnostic testing for viral RNA. That strategy would improve prediction of infection rates under relaxed distancing scenarios for reopening regional economies and resuming in-person instruction at schools.
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Pandemic management via opening vs. closing (slowing) area economies
Tension has existed between managing the Covid-19 pandemic with economies open vs. closed. The optimum, as in New York State, embraces both sequentially. Pandemic modeling illustrates for Covid-19 the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
That’s because shutting down (actually, slowing) regional economies reduces community transmission, preventing unmanageable Covid-19 disease prevalence. Failure to control may cause an invisible infection chain reaction to go critical, producing a pandemic time bomb. Unsurprisingly, pandemics are modeled much like nuclear reactions.
If uncontrolled, both grow exponentially. In a pandemic, that portends exploding populations of infected people to identify, contacts to
trace, and possibly contagious people to quarantine. To illustrate, if each infected person infects on average two people/day (one possible pandemic R value), in one uncontrolled month over a billion people get infected.
That’s why early pandemic control constitutes a cost-effective ounce of pandemic prevention. Unlike runaway nuclear chain reactions, pandemics unfold slowly. Such time dilation allows monitoring of the Covid-19 pandemic in daily time intervals. Data on Covid-19 incidence and prevalence require aggressive antibody and diagnostic testing.
Timely, accurate reporting also are needed for data-driven introduction of public health ‘control rods’. These reduce infection incidence and prevalence to within tolerable levels. Together, however, they require diminished social and economic activity.
New York’s Covid-19 data responded predictably, enabling
phased re-opening of schools and regional economies. This is a tribute to science and to evidence-based decision making. In other states, as science deniers are tragically learning, inadequate data and premature re-opening allowed their pandemic time bombs to explode.
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Pandemic management via adopting the ‘precautionary principle’
I published the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 might enter organs, such as the brain, where immune surveillance is ineffective (Michaels 2021d, Michaels 2022a). Four days later, an NIH study (Chertow et al. 2021) confirmed this. The weight of evidence now suggests that the virus could persist, reactivating when we become old, sick, or weak. That is, Covid and long Covid could become lifelong Covid.
Opportunistic virus re-activation is common. Childhood chicken pox becomes adult shingles. ‘Cured’ Ebola re-emerges years later, without external re-infection. Yet, the FDA and CDC (at the time of this writing) have remained overly restrictive regarding Covid-19 vaccine boosters.
Our over-riding priority should be to prevent as many Covid-19
cases as feasible, not tolerate them because they tend to be mild. Even mild or non-symptomatic cases might impose future health and economic burdens. We therefore must adopt the precautionary principle.
That is the lesson that we should have learned from Michael Crichton’s infamous Jurassic Park. Lacking dinosaurs, our communities are microbial Jurassic Parks. They must separate people from a vaccineescaping virus, for example, via colleges conducting classes remotely.
Omicron is more vaccine-resistant than previous variants. All are evolving toward still greater infectivity, and the pace of this evolution seems to be accelerating. These challenges may overcome the best-laid, most careful containment plans, as happened in the real (that is, fictional) Jurassic Park.
We must remain vigilant and patient. A ‘new normal’ is around
the corner. Pharmaceutical firms are committed to developing vaccines tailored to emerging variants within 100 days, and this process already is under way for omicron. The US Army soon will conduct clinical trials of an mRNA vaccine to protect against all coronaviruses, including future variants. To quote Pete Seeger, rarely one to council patience: ”we shall overcome.”
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Pandemic management via remote instruction in schools
The need to adopt effective strategies to suppress our surging COVID-19 pandemic also has lent urgency to the question of whether schools should be open or closed (for example, Michaels 2020c). Infection risks at schools may be lower than at students’ homes. Many New Yorkers therefore have advocated keeping non-residential elementary, middle, and high schools open.
This reasoning is simplistic and invalid. Non-residential schools (in New York and anywhere else) might be kept open if incremental risks are acceptably low, and if the benefits are deemed to justify the infection risks. They should not be kept open simply because school risks are lower than home risks.
Infection risks at residential schools versus homes differ in being independent. That is, those risks can be compared to decide whether
instruction should be on-campus or remote. If risks are lower on campus, students living there would be safer, and colleges could hold in-person classes, and switch to remote instruction temporarily, as might become necessary.
Analogous reasoning, however, is invalid for non-residential schools. Their students attend school for only part of the day, but they live at home. This nexus brings school risks to homes, and home risks to schools. Non-residential schools therefore should not be opened or closed based upon risk comparison, because the risks are entangled, and are therefore (at least) additive. Such co-mingling promotes risk enhancement and community spread.
With the surging omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 at the time of this writing, New York City’s newly elected mayor, Eric Adams, addressed the City’s policy of retaining in-person schooling. He declared “Fear not…
schools are the safest place for your children.” This statement, as discussed, might be supported by a grain of truth, but it should be taken with a grain of salt, or maybe with a full saltshaker (Michaels 2022b) . The statement that infection risks are lower in school might be correct. Surely, at least, Covid-19 infection risk is a variable that must depend upon time and school location.
Even assuming the truth of Mayor Adams’ statement in the narrow context of a risk number, it is fundamentally flawed in the broader context
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of its policy implication. The implication is that the lower infection risk in schools justifies keeping them open for in-person instruction. Whereas the narrower context posits a lower transmission rate at school than at home, the broader (unaddressed) context harbors fallacy: that a lower Covid-19 transmission rate at school implies a lower infection rate of students and of teachers, even though they do not remain in school residentially. Rather, they generally will go home, and generally will mingle with their families and neighbors, and generally will place their households at risk of infection. The combination of school and home necessarily expands the potentially exposed population greatly beyond the school community alone. Even if the Covid-19 transmission risk will be lower at school, that transmission risk will be borne by a very much larger population. This ‘inconvenient truth’ means that the Covid-19 health burden inevitably will be higher for communities, even if transmission risks are lower in community schools than homes. In-person instruction also is likely to increase the pandemic R value because transmission rates at home are likely to be higher than at schools.
This raises an interesting civics issue, specifically, the relationship of policy to science. New York City Mayor Adams must make policy, such as policy regarding in-person vs. remote instruction at City public schools. He reasonably might proclaim that schools will remain in-person even though infection risks to the community will increase. He reasonably might justify such a policy via counterbalancing social and economic considerations. What he should not do, but has done, is make policy based upon an invalid premise, in this case that Covid-19 risks at school are lower than at home. His policy properly should be consistent with the science, even if it is not determined by the science, or solely determined by the science.
Colleges and Covid
At the time of this writing, surging of the highly infectious
omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 suggests the wisdom of conducting college classes remotely. A recent article of mine (Michaels 2021d) raises the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 entry into immuneprivileged ‘refugia’ including the central nervous system, where immune surveillance is ineffective. Confirmation of this hypothesis quickly came to my attention in the form of a major NIH study (Chertow et al. 2021), published online four days after my own article, documenting widespread distribution of SARS-CoV-2 including a high
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incidence of entry into the human brain. Together, these articles raise the specter of Covid, or long Covid, or even of lifelong Covid.
College and university campuses are not (and generally cannot be) hermetically sealed from the general community, where vaccination is incomplete. To protect members of campus communities, therefore, colleges and universities should adopt the precautionary principle, a main point of my article for the general case, not just for colleges. College campuses are a kind of microbial Jurassic Park, which must keep people safely separated from a vaccine-escaping virus. Omicron is more transmissible and more vaccine-resistant than previous SARS-CoV-2 variants, which are evolving toward still greater infectivity. The pace of this evolution also appears to be accelerating. These challenges may overcome the most careful containment plans, as happened in Michael Crichton's real (that is, fictional) Jurassic Park.
For colleges and universities, therefore, this is a time for patience
and application of the precautionary principle. Normalcy (a new normalcy) appears to be around the corner. Pharmaceutical firms are committed to developing (mRNA) vaccines tailored to emerging SARSCoV-2 variants within 100 days, and this process already (at the time of this writing) is under way for omicron. Further, the US army announced impending clinical trials of a new mRNA vaccine aimed at protecting against all coronaviruses, including future variants. Colleges should have faith that they will regain control of their campuses in reasonable time.
Pandemic management via vaccinating against Covid-19
Public resistance to Covid-19 vaccines threatens their effectiveness at countering our surging pandemic. Resistance transcends fringe antivax groups. It includes large segments of the public who distrust the Federal Government, its Operation Warp Speed vaccine program, and Federal vaccine approval agencies, most notably the U. S.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Urgent calls for restoration of public trust are misguided. Exhortation to trust agencies that clearly do not deserve trust places the onus of the problem on the public. Agency reform is needed as a prerequisite for trust.
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SARS-CoV-2 evolution
Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness inevitably will depend upon evolutionary adaptation of the virus, producing new ‘variants’ and ‘strains’, much as in the case of flu. Although some have bemoaned the unpredictability of the Covid-19 pandemic, I believe that its behavior has been predictable. Indeed, it was predicted in rough terms as far back as the 1990s, with publication of a book co-authored by my Doctoral Committee Chairperson, George C. Williams, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. They essentially introduced a new field: evolutionary (“Darwinian”) medicine (Nesse and Williams 1996). Evolutionary medicine may be invoked to predict and explain trends in the Covid-19 pandemic, most notably decreased viral virulence and Covid-19 severity, which is strongly favored by natural selection because it confers advantage by reducing viral host mortality, and thereby increasing viral proliferation among new potential hosts.
Development of vaccines to protect against Covid-19 has progressed to clinical trials against a largely invisible background of rapid genetic evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA virus in the UK and other countries (Kupferschmidt 2021a, Michaels 2021a). The UK, however, has been a standout for detection of the B.1.1.7 variant and others. Coincidentally, the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine collaboration in the UK revealed an anomaly in which effectiveness of its two-dose vaccine regimen was greater when a standard-size booster dose was preceded by a half-size primer dose than when preceded by a full-size primer dose.
Clinical trials were conducted over several months. The half-size primer came first, and months later was switched to, and compared with, the full-size primer dose. This timing suggests the hypothesis that the apparent vaccine effectiveness difference, which seems anomalous, predominantly is attributable to genetic changes associated with ascendancy of the UK variant during this interval.
This hypothesis, to the degree confirmed, would suggest that diminished effectiveness with the full-size primer dose was attributable to enhanced vaccine resistance of the UK virus variant. It also might suggest, with accelerating vaccination, greater future genetic plasticity of the virus with increasing selective pressure favoring vaccine-escape mutations. This in turn might affect the useful vaccine lifetime, and the frequency of needed vaccine modification to maintain protectiveness against the adapting virus. Inevitably, the new reality is the flu reality:
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with prolonged evolutionary pressure, virus evolution will attain vaccine escape capability, and we will need modified vaccines, much as in the familiar case of annual flu vaccines.
The evolutionary origin of SARS-CoV-2 variants
The evolutionary origin of SARS-CoV-2 variants is widely misunderstood. For example: "’Unvaccinated people are potential variant factories’, Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told CNN” (Al-Arshani 2021). This statement has a grain of truth: unvaccinated people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 generate and harbor mutations of the virus. However, vaccinated people who get ‘breakthrough’ infections likewise generate and harbor mutations of the virus. The salient difference is that evolution treats these populations differently, because vaccine-escape mutations are more likely to be adaptive (confer a competitive advantage,
in which the variant is more infective) in vaccinated people. The same mutations are more likely to be non-adaptive or deleterious for the virus in unvaccinated people. If anyone is a vaccine-escape “variant factory,” that person has a higher probability of being a vaccinated than being an unvaccinated individual.
The medical (mis)judgment that unvaccinated people are ‘variant factories’ may have (at least) two explanations. One likely explanation is that MDs generally disapprove of vaccine resisters, especially amid a pandemic that vaccination could overcome. The second is that SARS-CoV2 infections are less common among vaccinated people. Infections among the unvaccinated therefore will greatly outnumber infections among the vaccinated, and will therefore produce vastly more mutations of SARSCoV-2. This infected-vs.-uninfected population difference, however, reasonably would seem relatively unimportant in determining the significance of the unvaccinated population in generating vaccine-escape
variants, as the vaccinated population, though smaller, is likely to select for the vaccine-escape variants that they harbor. That is, mutation in all people is the raw material of evolution, but natural selection promotes vaccineescape variants only in the vaccinated population, thereby favoring their eventual dominance. In the absence of such natural selection, wild-type SARS-CoV-2 was the most fit, and became dominant; that’s why it is termed ‘wild-type’. In short, vaccine-escape variants become dominant only when favored by selective pressure, as when the wild-type viruses encounter a scarcity of potential hosts.
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A third factor must be considered. The viral load (number of virus particles, or ‘virions’) and the viral titre (virions per unit of tissue) in an infected person each become enormous with uninhibited viral replication. Viral replication is the mutation step, so a wide range of mutations can be expected to appear in even a single individual. A typical mutation rate might be one per million cell divisions (1 x 10-6), whereas the viral load and titre in a single individual are likely to be orders of magnitude higher, say 1010 virions per ml of blood and 1014 virions per infected individual. The small number of vaccinated people who become infected, compared with the number of infected unvaccinated people, therefore seems unlikely to constitute a limiting factor in producing variants. This consideration reinforces the view that vaccine-escape variants originate preferentially in vaccinated people, not unvaccinated people.
A fourth factor is worth considering. Mutation rates usually are applied to cell divisions, and therefore to cell lineages. Viruses cannot replicate independently, however, so they lack a mutation rate in the usual
sense. Viruses instead are incorporated within host cells, and the host cells do the replicating. Specifically, DNA viruses incorporate themselves into host cell DNA, and RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 incorporate their RNA into host cell RNA. Infection of a host cell commonly results in either of two outcomes. The cell might ‘commit suicide’ via the process known as ‘apoptosis’, or it might be destroyed by circulating host cells that conduct immune surveillance, such as killer T cells, thereby releasing the virions to the intercellular fluid.
In either case, some viruses infecting host cells might survive, and then might infect neighboring healthy cells, or distant cells if they enter the general circulation. Such transfer of viral genes (DNA) or viral RNA is termed ‘lateral transfer’, as distinguished from transfer to descendant cell lineages, termed ‘vertical transfer’. That is, lateral transfer may augment vertical transfer, producing increased infectivity and altered evolutionary dynamics.
Lateral transfer also may undermine immune surveillance in which, for example, killer T cells interpret virus-infected cells as ‘foreign tissue’ based upon detection of viral antigens attached to the infected host cell surface. They then would kill the infected cells, potentially releasing virions. Lateral transfer therefore can transmit infection to previously uninfected people, for example via body fluids. It also may enable the virus to cross species lines. Ultimately, science again is linked to civics via informing evidence-based decision making for pandemic management.
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One vaccine dose vs two doses
Controversy has emerged over the related issues of whether twodose vaccines could be reduced to one dose for previously infected people, and whether second doses can be delayed safely. In one study (Prendecki et al. 2021), 72 UK healthcare workers gave blood samples before receiving a first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech (BNT162b2) vaccine, and again in about three weeks. The study was small, and other vaccines might have different characteristics.
Of the 72 UK healthcare workers, 21 (29 percent) had evidence of previous “infection.” I think a more correct term would be “exposure,” as the 16 with antibodies before vaccination might have acquired them from exposure to weakened or inactivated virus particles, or to a subclinical dose of virus particles, without infection; maybe the same was true for the other five who exhibited strong T-cell responses.
After vaccination, antibody and T-cell levels again were measured. People with previous infection (or exposure) had higher antibody levels (humoral response) than people who were not previously infected (or exposed). People who exhibited strong T-cell responses (cellular responses), but who had been negative for antibodies before vaccination, showed intermediate antibody levels (humoral response) after vaccination.
So, a single dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine induced a strong cellular immune response, and a strong humoral immune response, in previously infected people. People who had not been infected (or exposed) generated only weak cellular and humoral responses after a single vaccine dose. The non-previously infected (or exposed) people in this study therefore needed a second vaccine dose. Certainly, they needed a second vaccine dose more than previously-infected people needed
one. Finally, age (over 50) also was a factor in producing immune response… stronger humoral and cellular immune responses occurred among the younger people.
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The future disease burden of Covid-19 for individuals, communities, and society
Pandemic Covid-19 has exposed tension between personal choice and public health policy. Vaccination has damped pandemic inertia in the U. S., but emergence of highly infectious variants such as delta and omicron has increased infection of fully vaccinated people. This worrisome trend justifies vaccine booster eligibility and access for all vaccinated people in a timeframe responding to waning protection. In restricting booster eligibility, US FDA and CDC statements indicate failure to consider that SARS-CoV-2 might be persistent, meaning that it might remain dormant in immune-privileged 'refugia' such as the central nervous system of previously infected people, even if their Covid-19 symptoms had been mild or non-existent. Opportunistic re-activation of dormant viruses can cause severe illness, as in childhood chickenpox producing adult shingles decades later. External re-infection is unnecessary. Consistent with the 'precautionary principle', the overriding
FDA and CDC public health priority should be to prevent as many SARSCoV-2 infections as possible, not tolerate them, assuming optimistically that they will not impose major public health and associated economic burdens in the future. We naturally have focused upon our tragic past losses. We also must focus upon the future, learning from Covid-19 to manage pro-actively the inevitable next pandemic.
Pandemic Covid-19 has imposed a huge disease burden in the U. S. and globally. It has exposed tension between personal choice and public health policy, for example when individuals test themselves to verify that they have mounted an immune defense following vaccination, or seek vaccine boosters well ahead of U. S. FDA and CDC approval of such boosters. Such tension between personal action and public agency advice may be especially acute for seniors and other immunologically compromised people. Findings regarding several inter-related issues together support these and other personal choices, notwithstanding
possibly countervailing agency guidelines, or lagging public agency approvals.
Vaccination has damped pandemic inertia in the U. S., but emergence of highly infectious variants such as delta and omicron has increased infection of fully vaccinated people (‘breakthrough’ infection). This worrisome trend justifies vaccine booster eligibility and access for all vaccinated people in a timeframe responding to waning immune protection. Indeed, in restricting booster eligibility initially, US FDA and
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CDC technical statements indicate failure to consider that SARS-CoV-2 might be persistent, meaning that it might remain dormant in immuneprivileged 'refugia' such as the central nervous system of previously infected people, even if their Covid-19 symptoms had been mild or non-existent.
Opportunistic re-activation of dormant viruses can cause severe illness, as in childhood chickenpox producing adult shingles decades later. External re-infection is unnecessary. Consistent with the 'precautionary principle', the overriding FDA and CDC public health priority should be to prevent as many SARS-CoV-2 infections as possible, not tolerate them, assuming optimistically that they will not impose major public health and associated economic burdens in the future. We naturally have focused upon our tragic past losses. We also must focus upon the future, learning from Covid-19 to manage pro-actively the inevitable next pandemic. Indeed, in a study described as “foundational” (Pennisi 2022), Edgar et al. (2022) used a supercomputer to scan genome databases for new RNA viruses. Their efforts yielded more than 100,000 novel RNA viruses, including nine
coronaviruses. The novel viruses are likely to include many that can be lethal to people, and many candidates for future pandemics.
Covid-19 Disease Burden. The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, as of 16 June 2021 was reported to have killed 3.82 million people globally, and infected 176.3 million (UN WHO 2021), corresponding to a 2.2-percent cumulative fatality rate. After so much tragic experience, these disease burdens naturally have focused us on our losses. However, we also must focus on the future. To manage future risks pro-actively, we must reduce present uncertainties.
Covid-19 symptom intensity, which is statistically associated with comorbidities, still eludes reliable individual prediction (Kaiser 2021; Wynants et al. 2020). The range of clinical infection and post-infection effects remains only incompletely known. A recent large study, analyzing nearly two million health insurance claims in the U. S., revealed new
medical issues among nearly one in four ‘recovered’ Covid-19 patients, including patients who had been non-symptomatic or only mildly symptomatic (FAIR Health 2021). That study illustrates that the future disease burden of Covid-19, which is fully vested in pandemic survivors, whether or not they were infected, constitutes a major unresolved public health issue for individuals, for their communities, and for society.
In the U. S., the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that, as of 16 June 2021, the virus had killed 597,965 people (over 0.5 percent of
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U. S. population) and infected 33,315,272 million (over 10 percent), corresponding to a 1.8-percent cumulative fatality rate (US CDC 2021b). The number of fully vaccinated people in the U. S. as of 19 June 2021 was reported to be 149,125,164 (44.9 percent of total population; US CDC 2021c). Vaccination and enlightened public health policies together have suppressed Covid-19 infection, hospitalization, and death rates, although less so in states that have resisted these strategies.
Pre-vaccination and post-vaccination era data illustrate great progress. For example, the number of fully vaccinated people in New York State as of 19 June 2021 was reported to be 10,084,575 (50.6 percent of total population; NY.gov 2021). In New York State, on 14 January 2021, the number of positive Covid-19 tests was 19,942 out of 324,671 total (Forward New York 2021), corresponding to a 6.1-percent pre-vaccination era positivity rate. On 15 June, the number of positive Covid-19 tests had dropped to 349 out of 100,477 (Forward New York 2021), corresponding to a 0.3-percent post-vaccination era positivity rate.
The success of vaccination and enlightened public health policy may suggest that continued progress is inevitable on all fronts, though possibly with a patchy geographic pattern and uneven time course. Yet, vaccination has produced a new and increasing population of people who are being tested for Covid-19 less commonly, and whose SARS-CoV-2 status, future health risk, and long-term disease burden therefore are more uncertain.
A good fraction of vaccinated people have abandoned routine precautions for Covid-19 surveillance, thus reducing testing, tracing, isolation, and case detection. The data, though highly variable geographically and over time, suggest that roughly, on an order-ofmagnitude basis, surveillance has dropped to a tenth of pre-vaccination levels. Specifically, in New York state, the post-vaccination era number of Covid-19 tests and positive tests on the two sample dates reported above dropped, respectively, to 0.30 and 0.02 of pre-vaccination era levels.
Covid-19 test positivity dropped to 0.05 of the pre-vaccination era rate.
SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough: Covid-19 among fully vaccinated people
Available data indicate strong vaccination suppression of Covid-19 incidence. Even fully vaccinated people, however, are at risk, especially with emerging variants (Lovelace 2021): “The World Health Organization… urged fully vaccinated people to continue to wear masks,
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social distance and practice other Covid-19 pandemic safety measures as the highly contagious delta variant spreads rapidly across the globe.” Less certain is the degree to which vaccination also has suppressed future risk, in part because breakthrough cases, of unknown incidence, do occur (MMWR 2021b). Breakthrough has increased uncertainty about the SARS-CoV-2 status of all vaccinated people, whether infected or not.
As the reported cumulative incidence of Covid-19 in the U. S. is in the range of 10 percent (US CDC 2021b), the preponderance of vaccinated people (roughly 90 percent) never contracted it. If breakthrough is rare, as reported by CDC (MMWR 2021b), then the causative SARS-CoV-2 virus likewise may have a low prevalence. If breakthrough is common, however, the issue of its potential clinical significance becomes paramount.
Concern about persistent, dormant, and/or latent SARS-CoV-2 most essentially arises from the unknown risk of breakthrough. The
concern is exacerbated by rapid viral adaptation to Covid-19 vaccines, emergence of increasingly infective variants, such as the delta variant, that reduce vaccine effectiveness, and the possibility of eventual evolution of vaccine-escape strains that will necessitate booster vaccinations.
Breakthrough implies viral penetration of multiple layers of immune defense, not just antibodies. Although breakthrough might involve emergence of vaccine-resistant variants, it also might occur for other reasons. Vaccine inactivation might occur, possibly due to improper storage (Shammas 2021). Vaccinated individuals, possible those who are immune-suppressed (Couzin-Frankel 2021), might fail to mount a timely and competent immune response. Vaccinated individuals also might challenge their vaccine protection excessively, perhaps during prolonged indoor exposures.
Such concern might seem misplaced because breakthrough is rare.
CDC (MMWR 2021b) recently reported breakthrough incidence of just 102 cases per million (0.01 percent; see Table 3). This ‘CDC incidence’, with acknowledged under-reporting due to surveillance being passive and reporting being voluntary, was based upon 10,262 cases among 101 million fully vaccinated people. However, if breakthrough is as rare as CDC reported, it should be rare consistently. However, nine cases were reported among New York Yankees coaches, support staff, and players (Enriquez 2021; Stieg 2021; Wu 2021), and 18 cases were reported among
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residents of a single Kentucky nursing home (MMWR 2021a, Rabin 2021; Table 3).
Breakthrough cases among the New York Yankees corresponds to an incidence in the order of 10 percent. According to Dun & Bradstreet (D&B 2021), the Yankees have 50 employees in the Bronx and 300 at all sites combined. The breakthrough infection incidence would be 9/50 (18 percent, or 180,000 per million) if only Bronx employees are counted, or 9/300 (3.0 percent, or 30,000 per million) if all Yankees sites are counted. A risk of 3.0 to 18 percent may be considered reasonably good medical odds (82 to 97 percent success rate), say, for individuals facing surgery. In the world of public health, however, 30,000 to 180,000 per million is a huge risk for a potentially fatal disease. It is a risk that deserves high-priority regulatory risk management, and aggressive risk communication. It is a risk that should supersede politics.
The actual Yankees breakthrough risk may be higher than the
order of 10-percent. Vaccination of Yankees employees was reported to be ≥85 percent (Stieg 2021), but was conservatively assumed to be 100 percent. Also, employees became breakthrough cases in mid-May of 2021, soon after completion of the full vaccination series (one-shot), and a two-week waiting period. Thus, the breakthrough incidence reported in mid-May translates to a risk incurred over roughly one month. It would be higher if translated to an annual (12-month) risk, and higher still if translated to a lifetime (assumed 70-year) risk.
The New York Yankees constitute a young, occupationally active population. Risks to older populations, such as nursing home residents, might be higher. A Kentucky nursing home with 83 residents, 90 percent of whom (75) were vaccinated, experienced a Covid-19 outbreak traced to an unvaccinated health care employee (MMWR 2021a, Rabin 2021). As Table 3 shows, that outbreak included 18 breakthrough cases among 75 vaccinated residents, corresponding to a 24-percent (or 240,000-per-
million) breakthrough incidence. Four of 58 vaccinated health care employees also became breakthroughs, corresponding to a 7-percent (or 70,000-per-million) breakthrough incidence in this younger population.
The CDC has been obtuse regarding infection risks to vaccinated people, and opaque regarding possible long-term effects thereafter. CDC has suggested that breakthrough is rare and generally insignificant clinically (MMWR 2021b). Indeed, one might take comfort that eight of the Yankees’ nine breakthrough cases were non-symptomatic or only
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Table 3. Breakthrough Incidence: Covid-19 Among Fully Vaccinated People
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mildly symptomatic (Enriquez 2021). Non-symptomatic Covid-19 cases, however, still might have the potential to produce long-term effects. The premise that vaccination has solved the problem therefore seems premature, given that breakthrough cases have been reported to occur more commonly than reported, that increasingly infective variants are emerging, and that no assurance exists that breakthroughs tend to be clinically insignificant in the long term.
One difference between CDC’s breakthrough risk estimate and my own inferred from the Yankees and the Kentucky nursing home is that CDC’s numbers predominantly arose from passive surveillance and voluntary reporting. The Yankees numbers in contrast arose from active surveillance including aggressive testing, with follow-up viral genetic sequencing (‘analysis of variants’). The Yankees also constitute a small sample, so I cannot be confident of the quantitative accuracy of my comparison of the Yankees experience with CDC’s larger database. Even so, if nine fully vaccinated members of the Yankees, 18 fully vaccinated
residents and four fully vaccinated health care employees at a Kentucky nursing home became breakthrough cases, one cannot be confident in CDC’s assurances that breakthrough is rare.
Possible long-term SARS-CoV-2 persistence in infected people People may be unlikely to protect themselves after vaccination, and unaware of mild breakthrough infection. If SARS-CoV-2 persists in
‘refugia’ where it cannot be detected even if present, then dormant virus populations and/or latent infections invisible to routine surveillance may contribute to explaining decreases in post-vaccination Covid-19 positivity rates. People harboring invisible SARS-CoV-2 would be unaware, and unlikely to take protective precautions. In this scenario, the potential future clinical significance of possible long-term persistence of the virus, both in recovered Covid-19 patients and in fully vaccinated people who become infected (or re-infected), must be deemed uncertain.
Recurrence of infection effects is known to occur with many other viruses, such as Herpes simplex type 1 (HSV-1), which causes ‘cold sores’, and Varicella zoster, which causes chicken pox and shingles. People infected with HSV-1 may harbor dormant, potentially infective virus in nerve cells in the skin indefinitely (Mayo Clinic 2021a). After a case of HSV-1 infection, HSV-1 opportunistically may emerge from dormancy and cause cold sores repeatedly, at times of disease,
malnutrition, or other stress. Likewise, after a childhood case of chicken
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pox, V. zoster persists in an inactive state in nerve tissue near the brain and spinal cord (Mayo Clinic 2021b). It may reactivate as shingles in adults decades later.
The possibility that coronaviruses (Desforges et al. 2019), and SARS-CoV-2 in particular (Petri 2020), might persist in previously infected people and in breakthrough cases suggests that the legacy of pandemic Covid-19 might be greater than we know. This concern would be enhanced if persistent SARS-CoV-2 eludes detection via routine surveillance, which it might do if restricted to immune-privileged places such as the brain (Desforges et al. 2019, Petri 2020). In that case, the disease burden that we see might be the visible tip of a predominantly invisible iceberg.
This scenario might seem alarmist. However, the hypothesis of clinically significant SARS-CoV-2 persistence seems credible given experience with HSV-1 (Mayo Clinic 2021a), V. zoster (Mayo Clinic
2021b), and many other viruses (Boldogh, Albrecht, and Porter 1996; Traylen et al. 2011), possibly including human coronaviruses (Desforges et al. 2019). The possibility of such long-term health consequences should trigger application of the ‘precautionary principle’, in which conservative assumptions, even if thought unlikely to materialize, are made in the interest of being protective.
Eligibility and access to Covid-19 booster vaccination
Two issues together suggest the need for unrestricted booster eligibility (and access). Variants, such as the current delta variant, are being selected strongly to exploit personal immunological weaknesses (for example, Goldman 2021). Progressive viral adaptation has produced increasing susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection and increasingly frequent breakthrough infections (infections among fully vaccinated people; Kustin et al. 2021, Scheepers et al. 2021). Booster vaccinations
would counter these trends by enhancing levels of circulating antibodies, which otherwise wane naturally with time. In conjunction with other immune system components, such as T cells and memory B cells, boosters therefore would accelerate immune response and thereby strengthen protection against possible SARS-CoV-2 infection.
The biological plausibility of SARS-CoV-2 persistence after ‘cure’ is suggested by its ability to affect both the animal central nervous system (CNS; Dias de Melo et al. 2021) as well as the human CNS
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(Meinhardt, et al. 2021). SARS-CoV-2 is a human respiratory virus and, like other human respiratory viruses, appears to be an opportunistic human CNS pathogen (Desforges et al. 2019) that can cross the bloodbrain barrier (Boldrini et al. 2021). Consistently, the virus is strongly associated with Covid-19 symptoms affecting memory, commonly including ‘brain fog’. The CNS is an immune-privileged refuge (Petri 2020), which could facilitate viral evasion of otherwise robust immune surveillance.
Discussion
Breakthrough infections may be attributable to three main causes: - -1. failure of vaccinated people to mount a competent immune response, -- 2. exposure of vaccinated people to variants resistant to received vaccinations, and --3. ability of the virus to bypass immune surveillance that otherwise would be competent to prevent infection. The last posited cause is of most concern in the present context.
SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory virus that can infect the olfactory nerve following nasal inhalation exposure. As an airborne infectious agent, SARS-CoV-2 also might be able to infect the optic nerve following airborne exposure of unprotected eyes. Neurons of the olfactory and optic nerves might represent ‘express trains’ to the brain, which means that neuronal exposure might be possible by bypassing the blood-brain-barrier, which might otherwise be competent to prevent it.
The neuronal pathway to the brain, though well-documented for nerve signals, is by no means certain for viruses. Axons of nerves are surrounded by a protective fatty sheath, which might constitute an effective barrier to viral penetration. The virus still might travel through axons via streaming neuronal cytoplasm, but eventually such virus particles would encounter dendrites leading to a synapse. Nerve signals can be transmitted across synapses, but virus particles might be blocked.
Foreign agents detected in body fluids might be attacked by white blood cells, which can engulf them via the process known as phagocytosis (‘cell eating’). Liquids can be consumed via a similar process, known as pinocytosis (‘cell drinking’). Such processes might enable SARS-CoV-2 viruses to enter cells, though not necessarily nerve cells.
They would then encounter another barrier to infection. Viruses are not competent to reproduce without marshaling RNA and/or DNA of a host
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organism. To reproduce and infect a host, SARS-CoV-2, which is an RNA virus, would have to be incorporated into host ribosomes.
The issue of whether olfactory or ocular nerve exposure can produce brain infection clearly is uncertain as described above. Though uncertain, the more general hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2 persistence (Jacobs 2021) in infected people is more than speculation, as it is evidently biologically plausible. Many viruses are persistent if they invade one or more of the body’s immune-privileged ‘refugia’, which are not limited to the CNS. That is, in people who contract Covid-19, the issue of SARS-CoV-2 persistence might depend primarily on whether the virus entered an immune-privileged location. It might depend only secondarily, if at all, on whether the infected person had experienced severe symptoms, or any symptoms.
Persistent viruses, shielded from effective immune surveillance, can re-emerge opportunistically. This is especially likely to happen when
people become weakened physiologically by malnutrition or with other illnesses, or immunologically with aging. Re-emergence of persistent viruses does not depend upon new exposure or external re-infection.
Re-activation of long-dormant viruses also can cause severe illness (Petri 2020). Examples include childhood chickenpox (Varicella zoster). The chickenpox may have been 'cured', but the virus may persist, and cause shingles many decades later. Likewise, people ‘cured' of Ebola still may harbor the virus and may initiate Ebola outbreaks years later (Liverpool 2021).
Public health policy in the U. S. has been influenced by non-public health factors, such as the political need to return to normal (Moghadas et al. 2021). Science Magazine Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp (2021) recently opined: “The CDC has been occupying a gray zone somewhere between the very different worlds of science and politics.” The public should have
confidence that CDC guidance is based upon public health, not pandemic politics.
CDC, for unspecified reasons, recently (1 June 2021) recommended against post-vaccination antibody verification testing (CDC 2021d): “Antibody testing is not recommended to assess for immunity to SARS-CoV2 following COVID-19 vaccination.” FDA likewise has recommended against such antibody testing (US FDA 2021). CDC may have had purely public health reasons for making this recommendation, such as the
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expectation of only marginal benefit to be derived from such antibody testing, but the cited CDC web source fails to assure that politics is uninvolved. Regarding non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masking, distancing, contact tracing, isolation, and testing: CDC likewise should provide public health guidance that demonstrably is based upon public health reasons, not political reasons. As an agency that formulates public health policy, CDC also cannot mediate personal medical risk tradeoffs. Only individuals can formulate their personal health policy.
Conclusion
CDC now acknowledges that its breakthrough incidence data have been under-reported. The under-reporting, however, seems massive. It may render the published rare breakthrough rate neither credible nor reassuring to members of the vaccinated population that they will be safe if they return to normal activities.
Vaccination has reversed the grim pandemic trend of increasing Covid-19 incidence, and stemmed our ongoing losses of life and health. However, prospects for future management of Covid-19 are complicated by possible long-term persistence of SARS-Cov-2 in people who were infected, and in vaccinated people who become infected. In both, the future health risk and disease burden for individuals, communities, and society depend upon the clinical significance, if any, of remnant SARS-Cov-2 virus in people who contracted Covid-19 and, among vaccinated people, the incidence and clinical significance of breakthrough infections.
Uncertainties around SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough and the clinical significance of breakthrough leave open the possibility of vastly underestimated future Covid-19 health risks and disease burdens. These unknowns must be addressed forthwith toward managing future SARSCoV-2 risks and disease burdens proactively. Health agencies at all levels, including U.N. WHO and U. S. CDC, and in all countries, will be
challenged to develop and disseminate state-of-the-art knowledge and wisdom objectively. That is, science must supersede politics in health agencies.
Of course, politics is intrinsic to pandemic management. Accordingly, governments must resolve scientific, economic, and other possibly competing interests toward effective policy making. They must value scientific input from all sources. To protect and enhance credibility, confidence, and compliance with agency public health
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policy guidance, governments must avoid confounding their own political roles with health agencies’ scientific roles.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is more than a tragedy. It is an example of existing and emerging viruses that can and will cause future epidemics and pandemics. The response of health agencies and of governments to the Covid-19 pandemic must be evaluated in detail to inform and improve preparations for, and responses to, the inevitable next pandemic.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- A dreadful plague in London was in the year sixty-five, Which swept an hundred thousand souls Away; yet I alive!
Defoe, Daniel (circa 1660 – 1731). A Journal of the Plague Year / Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London. London, E. Nutt, 1722; (probably based upon 1665 journal by Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe) --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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C h a p t e r 07 . I m m i g r a t i o n , C i t i z e n s h i p , V o t i n g , a n d V o t e r S u p p r e s s i o n
Washington, DC’s Lincoln Memorial expresses to me the American repudiation of slavery, and the aspiration to freedom of all people. Its dedication to a Republican U. S. president is a compelling illustration that our two-party system can work. The Lincoln Memorial most essentially reinforces the bipartisan message of this book: that we are not ordained to disunity and to G.O.P dysfunction. As Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War illustrated, however, we must fight for the national unity and comity to which we aspire. We must learn the lessons of civics and science, and apply them to contemporary issues of existential significance for our democracy. Here, I try to help in this endeavor.
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---------------------------------------------------------------- God saw the people’s distress and sent Moses to Pharaoh with a message: ‘Send forth my people, so that they may worship me.’ But despite numerous warnings, Pharaoh refused to heed God’s command. God then inflicted upon the Egyptians ten devastating plagues, afflicting them, and destroying everything from their livestock to their crops.”
Bible. Book of Exodus, 8:1-4; rough translation. Anonymous, undated. ----------------------------------------------------------------
Immigration and Citizenship
Every immigrant also is an emigrant. Much of the story of immigration therefore is the story of emigration. The biblical account of emigration of Jews from Egypt (‘The Exodus’) quoted above may be
viewed in both contexts. Pharaoh understood the value of slave labor, and therefore getting Pharaoh to allow Jews to leave Egypt required coercion (arising from the often-quoted demand: “Let my people go…”). In being more religious than political, the coercion of Pharaoh may have differed from typical modern-day pressures, but I was surprised to read an account of one similarity. Australia this year (2021) is suffering from a plague of mice caused by Covid-19 interruption of the seasonal immigration of foreign ‘back packers’ who traditionally harvest crops there each year (McGuirk 2021). Instead, mice are harvesting the crops:
“’We’re at a critical point now where if we don’t significantly reduce the number of mice that are in plague proportions by spring, we are facing an absolute economic and social crisis in rural and regional New South Wales’, Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall said this month.”
As in biblical times, we must understand the value of immigrants,
which is both economic and cultural. The failure of immigration in the U. S. would mean the failure of farming, which is one reason why many U. S. farmers have objected to Trump’s policy of denying visas to our traditional seasonal immigrant work force. Indeed, Trump’s rejection of immigration to the U. S. as of this writing accounts for approximately two million immigrants missing from our work force because of Trump-era
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policies (Lalljee and Kiersz 2021). It likewise may explain why Trump brazenly violated his immigration policy by hiring undocumented workers (‘illegal aliens’) to work at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach County, Florida (Jordan, et al. 2019).
Republican centrists, in contrast to right-wing extremists28, are more likely to value immigrants. This recently was highlighted by former President George W. Bush (2021). Bush is an artist. Recently he presented 43 portraits that he painted of American immigrants, along with “stories that exemplify the promise of America and our proud history as a nation of immigrants” (Bush Presidential Center 2021).
Xenophobia. The U. S. has been analogized to a ‘melting pot’, as its residents originally have immigrated here from all over the world, and represent all of the world’s ethnic and religious affiliations. Our immigrants have entered our country, our communities, our cultures, and our economy. They have become our citizens. With the exception of
groups indigenous to the land now comprising the U. S., our citizenry almost entirely consists of our immigrants. This perspective imparts importance to recent GOP prejudice against immigrants, including entry into our economy and our citizenry.
Republican resistance ostensibly has been justified based upon the claimed fear that they might “steal” jobs that Americans crave. This motivation for prejudice is at best questionable. More likely, the Grand Old Party prefers the Good Old Days when America was predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Christian. They fear that immigrants of differing races, religions, and national origins will clash with Republicans culturally, and ultimately dilute Republicans’ electoral clout, and ultimately their governing clout. They may fear that immigrants eventually will become citizens, and eventually fill elected offices that might otherwise be filled by Republican Mayflower descendants.
Entry of immigrants primarily has been valued to fill jobs that Americans will not fill, thereby contributing value to the American economy. Prejudice against immigrants, often lumped in the rubric ‘illegal aliens’, seems to occur despite their contribution to our economy. The xenophobia
28 Exceptions exist to my characterization of extreme right-wing Republicans as generally anti-immigrant. Recently, with Taliban victory in Afghanistan, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has advocated for helping Afghans who supported U. S. operations in Afghanistan, and now are mortally threatened by the Taliban.
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factor, including religious and ethnic prejudice, therefore cannot be dismissed. Indeed, in cultures all over the world, xenophobia has motivated atrocities against outgroups. Such atrocities have been characterized in familiar ways, such as ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’.
Each victim of prejudice, immigrant or native-born, might be viewed hypothetically as a potential defendant in our criminal justice system, in which s/he is presumed innocent until found guilty in a fair trial conducted in a court of law. Guilty parties also are protected by the Eighth Amendment of our Constitution, which precludes “cruel and unusual punishments.“ Ultimately, a simple principle applies: that innocent people should not be punished, and guilty people should accorded due process, without which they likewise should not be punished. This is how people should treat other people, including people against whom they are prejudiced.
If YOU are one of the people who would punish people without due
process, you should learn to accept principles of criminal justice in our democratic society. If YOU are a person who would punish people who committed no crime, you likewise should learn to accept principles of justice in our democratic society. Like everyone, you are prejudiced; unlike everyone, you have failed to overcome your prejudices to act instead in an ethical and civically responsible manner. In short, if you hate people who differ from you religiously or ethnically, or otherwise, your behavior may contribute to injustice; you would be undermining our democracy. You would be undermining the cherished system of government that accords you the privileges that you might think you are protecting by your reprehensible behavior.
A reasonable comment might be: get over it… really… get over it. That comment, though pithy, barely addresses the issue. It does not do justice to the challenge of recognizing, learning, reflecting, and rising above the generations of culturally embedded racism, sexism, and other ‘isms’ that
a person must overcome to create a more inclusive vision.
Family separation. U. S. politics is polarized to an unprecedented degree (for example, Michaels and Dworkin 2018) but, notwithstanding xenophobia, bipartisan outrage over separating children from parents is promoting unity beyond politics. As Ben Sales (2018) reported: "Twentyeight Jewish groups — including, in a rare show of unanimity, the leadership of all four major American Jewish religious movements — signed an open letter to [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions decrying the
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policy, saying it 'undermines the values of our nation and jeopardizes the safety and well-being of thousands of people'.”
Apologists for Trump Administration policy may have supported this inhumane practice on the premise that at least some immigration is illegal. However, young children properly are separated only from abusive parents, and from parents who are jailed if they are justifiably ineligible for bail release while awaiting trial. Immigration, even when illegal, fails both criteria.
Consensus is emerging that Trump Administration actions, consistent with its xenophobic America First slogan, violate our values as a democratic and compassionate society. Compassionate people now have expressed agreement, including former First Lady Melania Trump and all four other living former First Ladies. Judicial separation of children from parents constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, barred by our Constitution. If the cruelty is pre-judicial, such horrid separations
also improperly (and unconstitutionally) deny due process.
We are (or aspire to be) a nation of laws, by bipartisan consensus (once more robust than we seem now to enjoy). Our institutions must treat all people lawfully and evenhandedly, including asylum seekers and others who subject themselves to our laws by immigrating. Immigrants properly might be held in limbo along with their children, pending resolution of their status. However, separation of children, and deportation without due process (with or without children), both constitute institutional cruelty and abuse of power.
We also have consensus that abusing children is wrong. That condemnation includes the Trump Justice Department taking children hostage for the announced extra-legal purpose of discouraging potential immigrants, even including immigrants who might be eligible for asylum. These broad-based guidelines lead to my own belief (Michaels
and Dworkin 2018), based upon ethics, that separating (thousands of) children from their parents is unconscionable. The Biden Administration quickly has taken action to find lost children and reunite them with their families, but Trump functionaries have placed formidable obstacles to accomplishing this, for example, confiscating children’s identification documents, failing to record children’s and parents’ identities and potential contact information. As a result, extraordinary efforts by the Biden Administration have been exerted toward reuniting families, such as utilizing DNA matching to confirm family ties.
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Immigrants matter. How nice when ethics and economics coincide (Michaels 2019). Historically, accepting immigrants has been ethical and profitable for our nation. We value immigrants but, more now than ever, we need them. The anti-immigration policies of Trump and Republican xenophobes therefore have threatened our society and our economy. They are unethical and uneconomical. As Washington Post columnist George Will (2021) reported:
“The nation now has a declining birth rate and an aging population that is retiring, at a rate of 10,000 a day, into Social Security and Medicare systems that are unsustainable without a workforce replenished by immigrants. Furthermore, a steady influx of them will enable the U. S. economy to regain, late in this century, its place as the world’s largest economy as China’s workforce shrinks, a debilitating echo of the 1980-2016 one-child
policy.”
Nations are powered by their populations, but the U. S. fertility rate for decades has been below the two-child replacement rate. Immigrants provide essential labor and help balance our age distribution. We are a melting pot of immigrants. Three executive orders signed by President Biden seek to reform the U. S. immigration system (Samuels and Beitsch 2021), including establishing a task force to identify and reunite children with parents from whom they were separated. A second executive order seeks to reverse Trump’s ‘public charge rule’, which effectively applies a wealth test on immigrants by denying them green cards if they are deemed likely to use public services such as food stamps. A third executive order seeks to address the root causes of immigration from Central America.
Ultimately, we need immigrants. We might meet our demographic needs by promoting increased fertility, but doing so also would increase
population, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions unsustainably. That would accelerate global climate change (for example, Michaels 2014). Happily, immigration is a sustainable demographic alternative for us, because people always have wanted to come to our land of opportunity (for example, Michaels 2021b).
In contrast, China is paying the price of its decades-long onechild-left-behind policy. China’s fertility rate, at about 1.5, is well below replacement. Its labor force is falling grievously, with little near-term
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prospect for augmentation via immigration. China’s population is aging rapidly, and by 2040 has been predicted to have fewer average years of schooling than that of Bolivia or Zimbabwe.
Pundits have predicted decline of our economic and military competitiveness and global influence, and ultimately the end of the American-led liberal order. If we embrace immigration, however, we might maintain primacy over China and over other competitors into the indefinite future. To defend America globally, however, we must repudiate Trumpism and Republican xenophobia locally.
Voting Rights and Voter Suppression
Political candidates and parties must have messages. Candidates’ messages predominantly have focused on achieving re-election. Parties likewise must deliver effectively the message: elect our candidate(s). A message that is at least equally important, but commonly delivered less
effectively, is: VOTE. This message, as a matter of civics, should be communicated not only by candidates and their parties, but by election officials at every level, who must facilitate voting, but also should remind citizens of their responsibility to vote. This is especially important these days, as far-right Republicans seek to suppress voters who they anticipate will be hostile to their candidates and election platforms.
Principles under attack. For example, far-right Republicans have been espousing imposition of proof-of-identity requirements on voters to assure fair elections, while opposing imposition of proof-ofCovid-19-vaccination requirements to assure public health protection. They espouse the former on the spurious basis that it is needed to manage voter fraud risks, but oppose the latter on the spurious basis that it is not needed to manage public health risks. They fail to view both proposed proofs under the same lens: if potentially life-saving vaccination IDs constitute government overreach, then unnecessary voter IDs likewise
must constitute government overreach. Some people, as I said earlier, do not like principles very much. That is a narrowly focused criticism of ‘some people’. More important for civics, such hypocrisy should be recognized broadly and repudiated universally.
A second principle also is under attack: don’t blame the messenger for an unwelcome message. Based upon interviews conducted in a cooperative project between the Brennan Center for Justice, the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), and Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash
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Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, election officials in multiple states have reported receiving threats (Brennan Center for Justice, and Bipartisan Policy Center 2021; Smith 2021a). One in three election officials has reported feeling unsafe in his/her job. Nearly one in five reported concern about threats against his/her life. One in six has been targeted personally. This brutish bullying behavior is corrosive to our democracy, just as brutish bullying of jurors, a form of jury tampering, is corrosive to our democratic system of administering justice.
------------------------------------------------------ Republicans counter truth with absurdity, rendering the truth inoperable. Now a party of fascists, they call Democrats socialist communist Marxists, which is effective in part because it is so nonsensical and in part because they are never asked to define the terms. They cover up their massive (and successful) efforts at voter suppression with wild claims of widespread voter fraud, which essentially doesn’t exist—31 incidents in over a billion votes cast, a number so vanishingly small as to have no meaning.
Mary L. Trump, psychologist. Donald’s Plot Against America, 12 August 2021 ------------------------------------------------------
Elections under attack. I earlier introduced the lawyers’ adage that “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own set of facts.” Violation of this adage by Trump and Trumpists is highly relevant to voting rights and voter suppression. GOP purveyance of “absurdity” disrespects voters, and should offend them, which is more likely to be appreciated among educated voters. Denial of Trump’s 2020 election loss has earned the moniker ‘The Big Lie’ among those seeking to return him to power immediately or, if necessary, by winning or stealing the 2024 presidential election.
Democrats, along with a handful of moderate Republicans, have struggled to find ways to “Trump-proof” the White House. More broadly, they seek to formulate a response to the far-right threat to elections and,
ultimately, to our democracy. A premise of this book is that an educated public constitutes the most fundamental means of ‘Trump-proofing the White House’. Of course, legislative proposals have been underway as well. Such proposals have focused on protecting voting rights (for example, Sargent 2021) and reforming and clarifying the Electoral Count Act of 1887 [for example, (Kyle) Cheney 2022]. Such measures are essential, but they
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face probably-insurmountable GOP opposition. This harsh reality adds urgency to the essential role of enlightened citizens educated in civics and science voting responsibly in accordance with the long view of protecting our elections and our democracy.
Electoral politics properly should focus upon the next election, not the previous. ‘The Big Lie’ contravenes the fact-set adage, and has been sustained by Republicans (at least in part) because of its utility at the State level for passing laws intended to suppress the votes of demographic groups who are least likely to vote for Republicans. Republicans know that they cannot win a presidential election by a popular majority, given unpopularity (especially outside of the Republican Party) of Trump and the supporters who he is promoting in the 2020 mid-term (2022) elections.
Given Trump’s unpopularity, the GOP also doubts that it can win with a minority of voters, via the Electoral College. Democrats agree. GOP calculations suggest that, to win, Trump supporters must cheat. They must
pursue unfair (illegal and/or unconstitutional) electoral advantages, for example, via voter suppression, empowering state legislatures to overturn legitimate election outcomes by political might, and extreme gerrymandering.
The broad tapestry of voter suppression laws being woven nationally might succeed at delivering to Republicans victories in the midterm and/or next presidential election. I cannot avoid delving into this essentially political topic, because it also poses an existential threat to American democracy. To protect our democracy, Trump and Trumpists must be purged from the Republican Party. This must be done electorally, and it must be done. All of us; including Democrats, Independents, and centrist Republicans; must convey effectively to voters of all affiliations the seriousness of this threat. The threat message must gain high penetrance in the population, so that voter repudiation of anti-democratic forces may overcome disadvantages introduced by voter suppression legislation.
Democracy under attack. A premise of the American Declaration of Independence is the following:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
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their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness” [emphasis added].
Trumpist Republicans increasingly have turned their attention away from the beginning of the premise quoted above, in favor of the end of the paragraph. They increasingly embrace “the mad desire to blow up our political order,” using the Declaration of Independence to justify violence against our democratically elected government as merely the exercise of their right, indeed responsibility, to revolt against it (Gerson 2021f). Our country, Gerson notes, has experienced an occasionally bloody history: “The peaceful conduct of politics is not a natural state; it is a social achievement. Maintaining it requires positive moral effort.”
Further, “the only way to discredit the logic of violence is to dispute each of its steps. No, we are not living under ‘medical fascism’ or ‘tyranny’ of any sort. No, elections have not been routinely stolen. And no, ‘these people’ are not enemies to be killed with assault rifles; they are neighbors and fellow citizens.”
Far-right (MAGA) Republicans largely have abandoned the foundational principles of our democratic republic, relating to equality under the law as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. As detailed earlier, in a speech to the Nation from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, President Joe Biden on 1-September 2022 warned as follows (Biden 2022): “there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country.”
MAGA Republicans instead have come to stand for governing
with the consent of only some of the people. By invoking ‘the Big Lie’, Republicans rationalize altering our democratic government toward their goal of seizing power contrary to the will of the governed. Indeed, the Big Lie has been bolstered by threats of violence against those who would dispute it (Robinson 2021), including threats by GOP members of the House of Representatives against their colleagues. Most recently, Rep. Paul Gosar (GOP Extremist of Wisconsin) circulated an altered animated video depicting himself murdering a fellow member of Congress (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat from New York). During
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discussion of the ensuing motion to censure Gosar: “Speaking one after the other, lawmakers delivered candid and raw confessionals about the frequency with which they, too, had received violent threats… But the Republican response to Gosar’s eventual censure was just as striking: Party leaders in the House pointedly refused to condemn the video…” (Edmondson 2021).
Gosar was censured by the House, and stripped of his two committee seats. Nearly all Republicans including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Rep. California) voted against censure. In response to such for-cause disciplinary action, Republicans responded by threatening, if they retake the House in the 2022 mid-term elections, to strip Democrats of their committee seats without cause, other than retribution. What does this mean, from a civics viewpoint? My answer is Ocasio-Cortez’ answer: “This is not about me. This is not about Representative Gosar. This is about what we are willing to accept.”
The most fundamental tenet of our democracy is “government by the people, for the people.” This phrase has come to be a non-partisan phrase, embraced in civil society with few dissenters. Its history, however, is ironic in the present context, as it dates back to Republican President Abraham Lincoln’s historic Gettysburg Address on 19 November 1863:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting
and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
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It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Lincoln thought that the world would “little note, nor long remember what we say here.” In my reveries I was inclined to think he was naïve. Yet, I am rudely awakened by the present context, in which many of us seem to have forgotten the message of these 268 words. Yes, as you already might suspect, I am primarily referring to Republicans, who have placed authoritarianism and despotism over democracy, and voter suppression over
“government by the people, for the people” (for example, Boot 2021):
“Trump’s unprecedented assault on our democracy has not shaken his support with the base... Republicans realize that Trump remains unpopular with the country as a whole. (His approval rating among registered voters is only 37 percent.) But instead of renouncing Trump, they are renouncing democracy. ‘In 43 states’ … the [Washington] Post notes, ‘Republican lawmakers have proposed at least 250 laws that would limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting with such constraints as stricter ID requirements, limited hours or narrower eligibility to vote absentee.”
Republicans have denied this by claiming concern about voter fraud and election fraud, but these claims have been debunked. Republicans also have attempted to justify their attacks on democracy by attempting to
redefine who counts as “the people,” suggesting that not all of “the people” should vote: the quality of voting counts as much as the quantity of voting. In fact, we have a pretty clear definition of the concept of ‘the people’, and the Voting Rights Act defines who among them should be allowed to vote, and who among them are protected from state laws that discriminate. We should adhere to the concept and the law at a minimum, and expand voter protections when deemed appropriate, which should be now.
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Voting under attack. Voting in our democracy is under great pressure due to the rise of ‘tribalism’ in the U. S. (Brigety 2021):
“The contentious 2020 presidential campaign laid bare deep divisions in American society, exhibiting precisely the kind of tribal politics—when strict loyalty to a foundational identity (such as race, religion, clan, or region) is the organizing principle of political life within a country... The campaign looked less like a contest of ideas and more like a battle between tribes, with voters racing to their partisan corners based on identity, not concerns about policy.”
Tribalism is the antithesis of rational government. Think of the (once banal) Americana of “going to the candidates’ debate” popularized in the song Mrs. Robinson by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel (1968) in the movie The Graduate. In my town of Schenectady, New York, candidates’
debates have been held regularly ahead of Election Day. I have attended some of these debates, which left me feeling very democratic… Indeed, candidates’ debates remain a social component of the electoral process to this day, often sponsored by the League of Women Voters.
In recent years, however, debate, and community involvement in deciding issues based upon debate, have devolved toward tribal identity warfare. Such polarization might seem symmetrical as implied by the concept of tribalism. The source of such divisiveness, however, clearly is not symmetrical (Hacker and Pierson 2019):
“Skyrocketing inequality, regional economic divergence, and demographic changes have all played their part. But there is one overriding culprit behind the failure of the U. S. political system: the Republican Party. Over the last two and a half decades, the GOP has mutated from
a traditional conservative party into an insurgent force that threatens the norms and institutions of American democracy.”
Democratic voting and democratic elections should be decided based upon voters weighing competing candidates’ slated policies. Winning democratic elections should require winning the hearts and minds of voters by advancing winning policy and winning philosophy arguments. In contrast, the GOP strategy in recent years and decades
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instead has been to suppress voting by those unlikely to support Republican policies and slates. Indeed, the Brennan Center for Justice reported that in excess of 165 bills were proposed in 33 states to restrict voting in just the first two months of 2021 (Barnes 2021).
The right-of-center GOP under attack. Evolution of the Republican Party from a conservative right-of-center party to an extreme Trumpist party that is ‘conservative’ only as a misnomer, has undermined the party. That, in a nutshell, was the recent assessment of Oren M. Cass, who is Executive Director of a reform-oriented Republican organization known as American Compass, whose mission is to “restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity” (American Compass 2021). Cass also had served on the 2008 and 2012 U. S. presidential campaigns of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In Cass’ view (Cass 2021):
“… A right-of-center that is neither conservative nor responsive to people’s problems is incapable of playing its vital role as the outlet for a nation’s conservative impulses and the counterweight to its progressive ones. Nor will it win many elections…
In his run for the White House, Trump exposed the weakness of the Republican establishment and the frustration and alienation of its voters. But he was no conservative. Indeed, he lacked any discernable ideology or capacity for governing. He left the White House in disgrace, having also lost his party the House, and the Senate; abdicated all responsibility for leadership during the pandemic, and broken a centuries-long tradition of outgoing presidents conceding defeat and transferring power peacefully.”
The GOP emphasis on voter suppression seems to me to be motivated by inconvenient truths explicated by Cass, such as those quoted above, together strongly suggesting that GOP electoral success in the near term will depend upon gerrymandering and selective voter suppression in swing states.
The U. S. Postal Service under attack. Another insidious effort to undermine voting in November 2020 took place with appointment in
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June 2020 of Trump ally and Republican mega-doner Louis DeJoy to the position of Postmaster General of the U. S. Postal Service. Ahead of the 2020 election, DeJoy ordered removal of post office mail-sorting machines necessary for meeting on-time delivery benchmarks (for example, Corasanti et al. 2020). This measure was implemented preferentially in Democratic-leaning states and cities. Such erosion of USPS capacity and performance constituted a critical element of Trump’s plans to undermine the election.
It backfired for multiple reasons, most notably because the public became alarmed, and voters adjusted their behavior to in-person voting or ballot drop-off voting to assure that their votes would be counted. Some courts also ordered restoration of mail-sorting equipment to assure adequate USPS capacity to deliver ballots on time. Some states, such as Pennsylvania, also extended their ballot receipt due date, and some also expanded use of ballot drop-off boxes. Informally, postal workers looked out for mail-in ballots, and prioritized their delivery.
Louis DeJoy’s actions were consistent with Trump’s purpose of undermining the election. DeJoy (falsely) attributed mail delays to the Covid-19 pandemic. In testimony to Congress, DeJoy also attributed his actions to massive USPS budget shortfalls, notwithstanding Congressional proposals to provide funds to alleviate such shortfalls. The Biden Administration has taken steps toward removing DeJoy from the Postmaster General position. Proposals also have been advanced to improve the USPS business model. I will address my own proposal.
Upon assuming office, the Biden Administration quickly explicated two goals: fix the Postal Service, and factor climate change into all policies. In 2018 I proposed both in a peer-reviewed article (Michaels 2018b). USPS was unsurprisingly unreceptive.
Under my proposal, sender-paid postage would be reduced, and
resulting reduced postage income would be augmented by a second revenue stream, from letter recipients. Postage stamps henceforth would pay for transport only to recipients’ local post offices. Recipients then would have a choice: receive delivery at their home or business, for a (subscription) price, or pick up for free at their local post office, using existing post office boxes that are used for mail sorting.
Under my proposal, all parties including senders, receivers, and the USPS would be financially invested. A similar but more extreme
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proposal was made to stop mail delivery to local addresses in Canadian cities, which would require all postal customers to pick up their mail at their local post office (Austen 2013). The U. S. postal system, founded in 1753 by Benjamin Franklin, is linked historically to Canada’s postal system, as Canada and the 13 U. S. colonies were under British rule.
Payment for mail service by recipients has a strong historical precedent in European countries such as the Netherlands (Hunt 2021):
“… three hundred years ago, before envelopes, passwords, and security codes… At that time, there was no such thing as a postage stamp and recipients, not senders, were responsible for the postal and delivery charges. If the recipient was deceased or rejected the letter, no fees could be collected, and the letters weren't delivered.”
Under the British system, until around 1820, recipients paid for mail
delivery. Mail in 19th-century Britain was delivered under the system that we now term “postage due,” in which the sender pays nothing, and the recipient pays all:
“[Around 1812 Charles] Babbage recommended that Britain introduce the ‘penny post’, in which a letter’s postage was paid in advance by the sender, and a fixed amount was charged for any distance within Britain. Under the current system at the time, postage was paid by the recipient based on how far the letter had traveled. Babbage calculated that the cost of sorting the mail and determining the appropriate postage cost more than what the postal service earned by the extra postage. Eight years after Babbage’s book was published, Britain took up his suggestion and instituted the penny post” (Snyder 2011, page 122).
My proposed two-stream USPS business model might save hundreds of thousands of vehicle miles each day, and millions of USPS vehicle idling hours. Customers routinely passing their post offices enroute to work or elsewhere would drive no further. They would just stop at their local post office, and pick up their mail. Reduced driving would reduce our carbon footprint.
Most USPS customers might opt to pay for delivery. This cost would be offset on average by their savings on postage for sending
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mail. Delivery subscription prices can be levied via a price algorithm embodied in an annual IRS tax form, with possible subsidies for people with low income.
To illustrate, stamps might cost $0.25 instead of $0.50, with USPS making up the difference via delivery subscriptions. Reduced stamp prices presumably would increase business (mail sending) volume. USPS might become more competitive, maybe even profitable, while reducing its climate impact.
Minority Americans under attack. The GOP’s voter suppression strategy conflicts with the democratic principle of representative government, hard-won by the 1776 Revolutionary War against British rule, which famously had imposed upon the American colonies “taxation without representation.” Repudiation of monarchy and of voting disenfranchisement are embodied in our Constitution. Toward making a more perfect union, enfranchisement also was
enhanced subsequently via emancipation of slaves and, with the Suffragette Movement and Civil Rights Movement, via inclusion of women and African Americans.
Enfranchisement was enhanced further Federally by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It prohibits racial discrimination in voting. In 2021, however, (as of this writing) the Supreme Court is expected to consider a case testing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting any voting practice that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color” (Barnes 2021). In contrast, the GOP now is selling a mythical 'replacement theory' (Blake 2021b), justifying suppression of voting by minorities because they ‘replace’ traditional voters who would uphold traditional America with minority voters who would uphold Democrats’ radical socialist agenda, thereby replacing our traditional America with a socialist America.
Against this background, Collinson (2021) reported that Trump, at his first speech as former president, to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on 28 February 2021, announced that he "intends to use his hold on its grassroots to try to suppress the vote heading into the presidential election in 2024" and "lashed out at Supreme Court justices for failing to intervene to throw him the election… 'They should be ashamed of themselves for what they've done to our country ... the Supreme Court didn't have the guts or the courage to do anything about it’.” Hopefully, Trump’s incendiary remarks about the Supreme Court
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will alienate its justices and heighten the Court’s awareness of the continued threat posed by Trump and his enabling GOP voter suppression strategies.
I might go further to speculate that: --1. Trump would not have risked further alienating the Court if he planned actually to run for office in 2024 (though, as of this writing, he apparently now does plan to run), - -2 the Court will be especially vigilant to protect our Constitution, our democracy, and our Voting Rights Act; and --3. Given Trump’s vindictiveness and anger at the Republican Party for failing to overturn his loss in the completely fair 2020 election, he may be aiming to punish the GOP by forcing it to field extreme candidates who will alienate independent voters needed to win in the 2022 and 2024 elections.
The future of the GOP under attack. The future of the Republican Party may depend upon its decision at the present juncture, whether to enlarge its ‘tent’ or continue to suppress legally eligible voters. This latter effort unfortunately seems strong, as exemplified by recent
legislative proposals in Georgia, including one bill euphemistically described as seeking to “secure the voting process” (Filbin 2021). If enacted by the Georgia State Legislature, this bill, introduced by Georgia Republican State Senator Jeff Mullis, would “get rid of its no-excuse absentee voting, require those who are eligible for absentee voting to submit a form of ID and ban ballot drop boxes, among other things.”
The high-stakes 2020 U. S. election motivated record voter turnout. The number of voters was a record but, more important, the fraction of eligible voters who actually voted was a record. Most media coverage of this high level of participation was laudatory, but I disagree. Voter apathy is a healthy response to vying candidates who, depending upon their party, will apply different political philosophies in working honestly and diligently on behalf of their constituents of all parties, and their country. Either side will suffice. Elections that turn out the highest fraction of eligible voters occur in countries where the outcome can be a
matter of life or death, or of other grave consequence. Our democracy might benefit from lower voter turnout (Abernathy 2021, Brooks 2021). In (rare) recognition of this possibility, Brooks (2021) opined that “People [in the U. S.] believe lies because of motivated reasoning. Under Biden the motivation will go down. Frankly, we need more political apathy in this country.”
The fraction of people eligible to vote vs. the fraction who actually do vote (‘voter turnout’) is a product of political party efforts to get out
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the vote, along with the seriousness of issues to be voted on. Over the past several decades, the fraction of voters declaring no party affiliation has increased (Mihm 2021). As a fraction of the voting public, by 1992 the share of Independents (36 percent) finally surpassed both Democrats (33 percent) and Republicans (28 percent). By 2020, the share of Independents reached 43 percent, and settled at 41 percent. The trend of increasing Independent share of the voting public is significant, as they are not generally neutral; in 2020, for example, exit polls indicated that they favored Biden over Trump by a margin of 54 percent to 41 percent. The 6-January 2021 Trump-instigated attack on the U. S. Capitol highlighted the issue of the party identification of the voting public: “thousands of Republicans changed their registration to “unaffiliated” or “independent”… It was the latest reminder of an underappreciated trend in American politics in recent years: the rise of independents as a political force.”
The democratic (and Democratic) response. The proper
response to the existential challenges to American democracy such as those outlined above is to recognize them broadly and repudiate them universally. Go tell it on the mountain. In the world of realpolitik, politics has been defined as the art of the possible. One possibly possible democratic response is to enhance the still-current but quaint Candidates’ Debates to which Simon and Garfunkel referred in song. In such resurrected debates, which should be held all over the country, candidates would be required as a condition of participation to adhere to rules of civility and subject area scope.
Today, we can anticipate violation of agreed debate limits by disrespectful candidates who violate their agreement and abuse the system. This is a problem, but one that can be handled handily. Such debates must be conducted in the light of public expectations and public scrutiny. The strategy, generally, would be to set forth debate rules and expectations well in advance, invite candidates and moderators who are
committed to them. Attendance at such debates would be offered to members of the public who likewise commit to the ground rules. Candidate performance then would be judged based upon civility and persuasiveness. Egregious behavior would be rewarded with damaging media coverage, and ultimately by public opinion costs among probable voters.
Another democratic response strategy is to pass proposed Federal legislation, known as the For the People Act, to protect voting right
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against GOP depredations against them. This strategy would require weakening the Senate filibuster rule (the House does not have a filibuster provision). This step might be taken by Democrats if necessary, though it appears to lack sufficient support as of this writing.
My expectation of the situation is that Democrats will protect voting rights for the 2022 mid-term election only if they lack confidence that they can maintain their majorities in both houses. If they think they can win the 2022 election on the strength of voters in demographic groups that have not been suppressed, they may seek to expand their control of the House and Senate. Sufficient gains in the Senate might enable them to override any filibuster attempt, and pass the For the People Act (or an equivalent measure) in time to protect the 2024 presidential election.
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C h a p t e r 08. C i v i c s , S c i e n c e , a n d I n t e r n a t i o n a l R een g a g e m e n t
The Air and Space Museum off the Capitol Mall in Washington, DC documents the evolution of flight through the atmosphere and through space, and the relations of nations in managing the enabling technologies, which have served for transport and for waging war. Indeed, the historic precursors to rockets to outer space were the Nazis’ V1 and V2 missiles, which delivered conventional explosives to target municipalities, most notably in the siege of London, during World War II. Now, ‘guided missiles’ can deliver nuclear weapons to targets globally. Civics and science therefore are partners (not strange bedfellows!) in air and space, and in management of people, peoples, and the technologies that they employ globally to survive and thrive… the technologies that we likewise must employ and control effectively if we are to survive and thrive as a nation and as a democracy.
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------------------------------------------------------------- Never before in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965). Speech to the British House of Commons, 20 August 1940. -------------------------------------------
We were fortunate in having an inspiring national leader in Winston Churchill, whose oratory had a powerful effect. We were also very fortunate in having, in King George VI, a dedicated sovereign who was well able to command every citizen’s loyalty to the country.
Gordon Welchman (1906-’85). The Hut 6 Story. Kinderminster, England; M & M Baldwin, 248 pages, 1982, updated 1997. -------------------------------------------------------------
International re-engagement is needed to remedy deterioration of U. S. economic and military relationships, though here I emphasize the military component of our national security challenges. Superficially, and correctly, the above quotes would seem to belong to the realm of politics. They belong to multiple realms, most notably here, also to civics: “Perhaps most important of all, leaders must give due attention to citizens’ understanding of basic civics and the foundation necessary for healthy civil-military relations… in the long run, the civilian side of the relationship … will dictate the republic’s health” (Feaver 2021). Our civilian and military leaders should be held to the highest standards of ethics, dedication to the public good, and intellectual ability and credibility.
In contrast, Trump pursued foreign policy for his own aggrandizement. Quoted above, Winston Churchill extolled the sacrifices made by the Royal Air Force heroically defending against prolonged daily attacks by German Air Force (Luftwaffe) fighter planes and bombers in the Battle of Britain during World War II. Gordon Welchman led ‘Hut 6’ at Bletchley Park, engaged in the equally heroic, but purely intellectual, defense of Britain by breaking German Army and Air Force Enigma machine ciphers daily, over a prolonged period (years). Different ‘Station X’ sections broke German submarine and other Navy messages, such as those enabling sinking of the powerful, much-feared German battleship
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Bismarck, thanks to efforts, most familiarly, of Alan Turing29. Bletchley Park, once its personnel were (partially) released from Britain’s 1939 Official Secrets Act in the 1970s, demonstrated the immense value of applying pure intellect, included within the modern term ‘intelligence’, to national security. Such intelligence enhanced Britain’s military effectiveness, enabling its survival through the Battle of Britain, and through WWII.
Welchman extolls the loyalty commanded by King George VI. Note the critical distinction between loyalty to country vs. loyalty to a particular figure such as, recently in the U. S., Trump. Note the value Welchman ascribes to Churchill’s oratory as a means of inspiring hope and courage in national adversity. Compare with Trump, barely literate, who communicated with ungrammatical tweets and offered speeches consisting of untruthful, self-serving streams of consciousness. Think of the qualities of a leader who can formulate, and unify a nation behind, a shared cause, such as survival in wartime, and more broadly a shared vision. That is what
the U. S. now needs urgently, and actually may have, minus the charisma needed to unify, in the person of President Joe Biden. This admittedly a political comment, but it also is a non-partisan comment. In better times, such a unifying leader could be Republican. Currently, however, that is hard to imagine.. Certainly, achievements of the Biden Administration, even in the face of a divided Congress, suggest so (Rubin 2022):
-- Inflation Reduction Act: …investing in green energy, …limiting prescription drug costs, and …imposing obstacles to tax avoidance by big corporations; --American Rescue Plan, --infrastructure plan, --gun-control bill, --semiconductor manufacturing bill, --expanded health care for veterans exposed to burn pits,
--Violence Against Women Act reauthorization,
29 Many others deserve (more than) mention, prominently including Hugh Alexander, Joan Clarke, Josh Cooper, Nigel de Grey, Alastair Denniston, Jack Good, Peter Hilton, Harry Hinsley, John Jeffreys, Dillwyn Knox, Stuart MilnerBarry, Max Newman, Oliver Strachey, John Tiltman, and Bill Tutte. Bletchley Park’s work was preceded by brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential contributions by Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, Henry Zygalski, all of the Polish Cipher Bureau.
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--Senate (and expected House) approving admission of Finland and Sweden to NATO, --confirmation of 76 federal judges, --confirmation of the first Black female Supreme Court justice, --gain of nine million jobs since Biden took office (and very low unemployment rate), --successful rollout of coronavirus vaccine boosters and treatments, --record-low eight-percent medical uninsurance rate; and --elimination of al-Qaida leader Ayman al Zawahiri
A shared vision within the U. S. seems elusive in our presently divisive climate. Our divisions seem tribal, with many unthinking people giving loyalty to their respective sides. This book seeks to elevate the level of debate to a thinking level, in which legitimate differences rise to philosophy rather than tribal loyalty. Most essentially, the ‘MAGAmania’ movement of Trump and his loyalists does indeed have a legitimate philosophical basis (Fukuyama 2022):
“People feel the strongest bonds of affection for those closest to them, such as friends and family; as the circle of acquaintance widens, their sense of obligation inevitably attenuates. As human societies have grown larger and more complex over the centuries, the boundaries of solidarity have expanded dramatically from families and villages and tribes to entire countries. But few people love humanity as a whole” Fukuyama 2022; page 88).
That is, the globalism, or internationalism, of liberal thinkers may be objectionable to conservative thinkers because it prioritizes caring far beyond our own society, which already is big, maybe (to some) too big, and inclusive, maybe (to some) too inclusive. This objection, from my point of view, constitutes a political issue that must be decided, hopefully on rational and ethical grounds. For example, we must decide who we
will support, based not upon their racial, ethnic, or political groupings, but based upon our ethics and our interests. I will not expound upon this analysis here, except to emphasize its legitimacy, and that of people who consider it rationally and empathically. This decidedly has not included the preponderance of Trump or Trumpists.
Trump systematically weakened U. S. international commitments, at great cost to our credibility and national security. My focus on civics precludes me from being encyclopedic regarding the full breadth of
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Trump’s erosion of our security. The erosion involved many specific involvements, exemplified by weakening of the following major military and/or economic international accords, to our detriment and, I would say, to the detriment of democracy globally:
--Paris climate accords, --Iran nuclear agreement, --South Korean security, --Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), --North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the --Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Trump also was overly deferential to such countries as North Korea, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. He was hostile to China except when repression of minority ethnic populations in China by President Xi vindicated his own repression of minority ethnic populations in the U. S. For example, China persecuted its population of millions of Uyghurs:
“In 2014, Uyghur terrorists took dozens of lives in the autonomous territory of Xinjiang, in western China. State media referred to the attacks as ‘China’s 9/11’. [Chinese President] Xi urged CCP [Chinese Communist Party] officials to follow the American post-9/11 script, setting in motion a crackdown that would eventually lead to a million Uyghurs being thrown into concentration camps. At a meeting in 2019, Trump reportedly told Xi that detaining the Uyghurs in camps was “exactly the right thing to do” (Rhodes 2021; emphasis added).
Trump’s hostility prominently included waging economic warfare via imposing tariffs on imports from China. Trump, however, likewise erected tariffs against our own allies’ exports to the U. S. The economic effectiveness of such tariffs was zilch, as the preponderance of tariffs
ultimately were not paid by the exporting country, but by increased prices of imports purchased and paid for by U. S. consumers. Whatever your opinions are about such strategically significant economic policies, you should agree that they should be (or should have been) formulated via objective analysis undertaken by competent analysts working in the national interest. These conditions patently were not met. The relevant civics lesson is: maintain expectations of excellence and dedication in your elected leaders, for potentially existential reasons.
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In addition to emergence and growth of external threats over recent decades, the Biden Administration inherited much domestic damage wrought by Trump and his incompetent, undedicated administration. Biden now must manage internal threats to our national security arising from societal divisions that Trump instigated and/or nurtured. Indeed, out of office, Trump continues to promote such divisions.
The Biden Administration must contend with external threats arising from erosion of U. S. credibility and strength relative to our allies, adversaries, and potential enemies. Biden indeed must manage threats embodied in all areas addressed in this book. Military threats must be viewed in the context of each of the other threat areas that is addressed herein and, I’m sure, in the context of threat areas that are not addressed herein, together determining our national security.
International re-engagement has another dimension, which is environmental. Addressing this dimension will require imagination and U.
S. leadership. A currently prominent example is the critically important rainforests of the Amazon Basin, largely within the borders of Brazil. Brazil’s scientifically ignorant, environmentally rapacious president, Jair Bolsonaro, has opened the rainforests to corporate exploitation for profit, accelerating their shrinkage and resulting climate impacts. Bolsonaro has stated that he regards Brazil as owner of Amazon rainforests within its border, whereas the world has a possibly existential interest in their protection, and therefore in viewing Brazil as steward, not owner, of Amazon rainforests over which it claims “nonnegotiable” sovereignty (Patrick 2021).
U. S. leadership is needed to encourage the world’s governments to persuade Bolsonaro (and/or his successor) to cede elements of sovereignty where legitimate international and planetary interests are at stake. Civics, therefore, has something to say about U. S. voters supporting enlightened U. S. national policy regarding international issues. Of course,
civics also exists in every nation of the world, which consists of nearly 200 nations, whose citizens likewise should be enlightened to act favorably regarding their intrinsic interest in securing our planetary future through environmental protection within the borders of all countries.
Restoring U. S. credibility and leadership is essential to defending democracy, but the Biden Administration will have difficulty pursuing international re-engagement without public and political support. The link between populism and foreign policy is strong (Mounk 2021). The threat
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of major power wars and their possible escalation to nuclear war is especially worrisome. I hope that major powers, being highly developed economically, will find that they have too much to lose from destruction of their extensive infrastructure in war. This factor might put a brake on any major power decision to go to war.
Indeed, foreign policy scholars known as ‘restrainers’ premise their belief that U. S. foreign policy should be less adventurous than it has been, in part because our threat perception tends to be hypersensitive, and war has been in decline since 1945 (Fazal 2021). The decline is demonstrable in a narrow definition of ‘war’, mainly focusing upon international conflicts between rich northern countries plus Japan. The analysis ignores civil wars and states of conflict resembling war that exist between India and Pakistan, Russia and Ukraine (in 2021, not 2022), and Iran and Saudi Arabia. Even so, the threat of major-power wars does seem to be in decline (or did seem so, before Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine, which threatens major-power conflict, including NATO conflict, with Russia, even if civil
wars and other conflicts are increasing. Thus, the U. S. clearly must remain militarily prepared.
Even so, I do hope and expect that our cities will not be laid waste by war with major-power opponents such as China and Russia. Putin, as perhaps our most bellicose opponent, also may be the wealthiest person in the world. At age 70, he may have many years of remaining life, and therefore much to lose, if he precipitates Armageddon. I am not confident in this optimism, because assumptions of public awareness, public support, and the caution of nations’ leaders (most notably Putin) on which this hope depends do not inspire enduring confidence.
The problem of national security via international re-engagement might be manageable if, like British Intelligence in Bletchley Park during WWII, we ‘work smart’. Today, we must define our international goals realistically, within resources available to achieve them. We must back
away from acting as the world’s peacekeeper and democracy’s promoter, and we must reconsider our regional priorities. We can and should protect democracies, for example, but we cannot install democratic governance where it does not exist and may be unwelcome. We must focus upon rebuilding alliances to bolster our global strength and coordinate our efforts with our allies toward achieving shared goals.
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Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (2021) addressed the prospects for success of democracy in the international arena. She expressed optimism:
“the outcome of the 2020 U. S. presidential election was a blow to autocrats everywhere. Trump’s belly flop demolished the myth he helped create that relentless egotism is a political winner. Many of Trump’s most outspoken international admirers have also suffered losses or are under siege. These include Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and France’s Marine Le Pen.”
China. The biggest single challenge to U. S. security and democracy, both economically and militarily, will be China:
“For the United States, China, not Russia,
poses the greatest foreign policy challenge of the twenty-first century, along with the urgent existential threats of climate change and global pandemics” (Hill 2021).
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, U. S. National Intelligence Council (US NIC 2021) recently conducted a synthesis of multi-agency assessments of the origins of Covid-19, concluding that Wuhan, China evidently was the origin, but was not bioengineered for release, and was not deliberately released. The pandemic is raging with emergence of the delta and omicron variants whose origins, though unclear, probably were not China. However, China has hurt its credibility and lost international trust as a result of obstruction of UN WHO and other investigations of the pandemic origin. China’s intransigence has bolstered the widely-held belief that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped containment at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where it was being studied
(Wade 2021). US NIC offers a more moderate assessment, as follows:
“China’s cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of COVID-19. Beijing, however, continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information, and blame other countries, including the United States. These actions reflect, in part, China’s government’s own uncertainty about where an investigation could lead as well as its frustration the
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international community is using the issue to exert political pressure on China” (US NIC 2021, page 2; emphasis added).
Maybe so, though the above statement seems politically tailored to steer a path between Trump’s xenophobic characterization of SARS-CoV-2 as “the China virus,” and the Biden Administration’s desire to maintain pressure on China to cooperate with origin investigations.
China is aggressively modernizing its military technologies and expanding its inventory of threatening resources. As of this writing, China has tested maneuverable hypersonic missiles that threaten to evade U. S. missile defense systems (Sanger and Broad 2021). Such missiles can fly any course, evade radar detection by flying at low altitude, and (if early warning satellites are disabled or fail) possibly deliver surprise attacks, especially via south polar routes, as all U. S. missile defenses face the north. Hypersonic missiles soon might become capable of delivering nuclear
weapons, especially relatively small, lightweight tactical nuclear weapons. Indeed, China also is building an arsenal of antisatellite weapons, and digging hundreds of new silos suitable for long-range nuclear missiles.
China’s aggressive military posture has been accompanied by arrogant attempts to bully other nations, beginning with expressions of outrage over diverse, relatively minor transgressions of Chinese interests (Horton 2021). The impression is developing that China’s broadsides, replacing targeted outrage, reflects an increasingly thin-skinned and fragile nation. Nations around the world, including the U. S., are increasingly disregarding China’s arrogance by developing relationships with its rivals, most notably including Taiwan, which China claims as its own.
The U. S. military maintains supremacy over China. The scale of the power disparity and is indicated by the record of U. S. military spending. It should give reassurance (Zakaria 2021):
“The U. S. has about 20 times the number of nuclear warheads as China. It has twice the tonnage of warships at sea, including 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers compared with China’s two carriers (which are much less advanced). Washington has more than 2,000 modern fighter jets compared with Beijing’s roughly 600... And the U. S. deploys this power using a vast network of some 800 overseas bases. China has three. China spends around
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$250 billion on its military, a third as much as the United States… U. S. military spending remains larger than the defense budgets of the next 10 countries put together, most of which are Washington’s close allies.”
My own sense of reassurance against military insecurity relative to China derives from inclusion, among the above-quoted military advantages, of a U. S. hypersonic missile program, and the inability of China (or any other nation) to defend against potential U. S. missile attacks, including nuclear. That is, China is unlikely to use its maturing nuclear attack capabilities because it would face certain massive retaliation. The Cold War doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) apparently has been reinvigorated. Fortunately, it has been successful against early nuclear powers including China and the Soviet Union, which clearly do not subscribe to apocalyptic visions, and for whom memory of nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki may continue to be sobering.
Beyond military advantages, another U. S. advantage over China relates to demographics (Michaels 2019). Nations are powered by their populations. China is paying the price of its decades-long one-child-leftbehind policy. Its fertility rate is well below ours. It is about 1.5, well below the replacement value of approximately two. China’s labor force is falling grievously, with little near-term prospect for augmentation via immigration. Its population is aging rapidly, and by 2040 has been predicted to have fewer average years of schooling than that of Bolivia or Zimbabwe.
Pundits have predicted decline of our economic and military competitiveness and global influence, and ultimately the end of the American-led liberal order. If the Biden Administration embraces immigration, however, the U. S. might maintain primacy over China and over other competitors into the indefinite future. To defend America globally, however, we must repudiate Trumpism and Republican
xenophobia locally.
Russia. Although China may pose the greatest foreign policy challenge for the U. S., Russia remains a source of existential threat, and of continued confrontation and competition (Hill 2021):
“Americans point to a pattern of Russian aggression and provocation: Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea in 2014
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and its subsequent assaults on Ukraine’s territory and sovereignty, its intervention in Syria in 2015, the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 U. S. presidential election, and the frequent ransomware attacks and email hacks attributed to Russian actors” (Hill 2021).
From a U. S. civics viewpoint, an interesting and possibly even hopeful U. S. initiative occurred recently. A bipartisan (Cohen-Wilson) House Resolution 806 (Kara-Murza 2021) to withhold U. S. recognition of the legitimacy of a Putin government after the Russian constitutionally mandated end of Putin’s term of office, on 7 May 2024 evoked a conspicuously defensive response from Russia: “The nervous reaction in Moscow betrayed the sense of insecurity the Kremlin usually hides behind an assertive facade.” The House proposal, however, was vetted by extensive legal analysis revealing multiple violations of Russia’s constitution by Putin’s plebiscite to extend his term beyond its clear constitutional limit. The House proposal also has been vetted relative to
historical precedent, in which U. S. administrations have withheld recognition for other illegitimate governments: “The very least the world’s democracies can do is refuse to help Putin with his unlawful power grab. House Resolution 806 is an important step in this direction.” In the context of this book, we are seeing another example of Congressional bipartisanship, and we might be seeing emergence of an effective response to Russian and to Americans’ Russia-related insecurities.
When I was a doctoral student at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the 1970s, I sometimes attended an annual conference called the Northeast Algal Symposium. I attended at two locations: at the University of Rhode Island, and at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, at the west end of Cape Cod. At Woods Hole in August 1977 a Soviet oceanographic vessel named Argosy had come to port to pick up 10 Stony Brook graduate students for a research cruise, part of a settlement (I was told) over encroachment by
Soviet fishing vessels on prime fishing grounds off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. A Russian scientist was on board, studying PCB effects on marine phytoplankton, which was an area similar to my own doctoral research at Stony Brook, on PCB effects on laboratory-cultured marine phytoplankton (Michaels 1979). When the Stony Brook students mentioned that I was in town, I was invited on board for dinner.
The ship was primitive. It had bulky iron ladders between decks. Next to one ladder was a large metallic structure that reminded me of the
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rectangular monolith in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” This was the ship’s computer, housed in a steel frame and crudely bolted to the wooden floor of the deck. It packed probably less computing power than a handheld calculator today. We had Hungarian goulash for dinner in a mess hall decorated garishly with oversize portraits of Soviet commissars. The current one in 1977 was Leonid Brezhnev, whose official title was General Secretary of the Communist Party.
Whenever I think of Americans’ Russia-related insecurity, I recall my experience on that ship. Maybe the Argosy was primitive for the Soviet Union, which was reputed to lead the world in oceanography. The Argosy, however, clearly did not epitomize Russian scientific or engineering prowess or superiority characteristic of the time. That, of course, was a time when the Soviet Union was a far more dominant military power than is Russia today under its President, Vladimir Putin. Again according to Hill (2021): In truth, most American policymakers simply wish that Russia would just go away so they can refocus their
attention on what really matters.
With Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine, however, “what really matters” has gained new meaning, as Putin clearly seeks more than territory belonging to Ukraine. He apparently aspires to re-establish the sphere of influence enjoyed by the Soviet Union during the Cold-War. Russia’s humiliating military failures in Ukraine also have precipitated Putin’s use of nuclear blackmail to gain his ends, placing the world in renewed peril of nuclear devastation.
Putin’s unethical aggression against Ukraine, and effectively against NATO member nations and other European countries, has warned the world of the global peril that he poses, and made him an international pariah. One certainty associated with Putin’s nuclear blackmail is his own realization of the unacceptability and foolhardiness of placing the power of wreaking global nuclear devastation in the hands of one individual, who
could be unstable or apocalyptic. Putin is only the current weak link in today’s more robust chain of nuclear war inhibitors. Weaker links will arise, perhaps among emerging nuclear powers, or among national leaders who are apocalyptic or too young to understand the unfitness of nuclear weapons for tactical use on a small planet.
Given that realization, a person in Putin’s powerful position should be thinking along grander lines than securing his place in Russian history. He should be thinking about more than leaving a weak legacy of
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murderous local and regional conquest. He should be thinking boldly and globally about his position in World history. He should be thinking about leaving a legacy as the savior of mankind via promoting international treaty-level reform to shield the world from any future one-person nuclear trigger finger. He also might consider bequeathing on Russia his full (trillion-dollar?) fortune, remembering that Russian history is subsumed within World history.
A recent analysis of the global significance of Putin’s Russian aggression places it in appropriate context. Fazal (2022) percipiently observes that Russia's invasion of Ukraine (Crimea) in 2014 pursued Vladimir Putin's "sinister, long-held goal: to erase Ukraine from the map.” Putin relied on misinformation, such as denying that Ukraine was a valid state having the right to exist. Fazal characterized such wars of conquest as “shocking" and “anachronistic” for modern times though, she conceded, some wars of conquest (including Putin again in 2022) have occurred recently.
Remarkably, among these modern-day wars of conquest Fazal includes “Israel’s occupation of parts of its neighbors.” A more parallel and accurate characterization would have been ‘Egypt’s denial of Israel’s right to exist, and subsequent attack aimed at erasing Israel from the map’. Clearly, changes to the map were a consequence of Egypt’s failed aggression, not of Israel’s successful defense of its borders. Perhaps if Ukraine is successful at defending its borders, Fazal will lament Ukraine’s shocking, anachronistic war of conquest against Russia.
An issue raised commonly is to identify the factors that motivated Putin to war. Many answers have been put forth, and I will leave to the interested reader the task of finding them. More relevant to my theme is what we can and should infer about this issue from Putin’s own statements. Specifically, he has justified his war as a “special military operation” to stop NATO expansion, rid Ukraine of Nazis, and protect oppressed Russian
speakers within Ukrainian borders. The barbarity of Putin’s attack, which pales against the barbarity that would have materialized had it been successful, suggests otherwise: far greater suffering has been inflicted than alleviated, including on Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Ukraine was not a candidate to join NATO, though it may become one soon as a result of Putin’s war, which has stimulated, not inhibited, NATO expansion, most recently including applications by Norway and Sweden to join. Further, Ukraine (unlike Russia) is not perfect. Even so, Ukraine is not a Nazi country, and it is not led by a Nazi president. Ukraine’s President
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Volodymyr Zelensky actually is a former actor and comedian who is Jewish… he is hardly a candidate for being labeled ‘Nazi’! In short, accused of many crimes including war crimes and genocide, Putin has had many opportunities to respond and explain his actions. His explanations personally and through his spokespersons so far have failed the laugh test. I believe that the world owes Putin no defense beyond evaluating, and properly rejecting, his own self-defense.
Afghanistan. U. S. involvement predominantly was motivated by Afghanistan’s importance as a staging ground for terrorist activities against Americans, especially within the U. S. as illustrated by the al Qaeda attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC on 11 September 2001. A major part of U. S. efforts in Afghanistan consisted of searching for attack planner and financier Osama bin Laden, who ultimately was found and killed in neighboring Pakistan. Two decades of military involvement ended, at least officially, in September 2021, though anti-terrorist activities will continue (officially)
from afar, including activities against Taliban attackers.
The Taliban have imposed Sharia law, an ultra-orthodox form of Islam, and have brutally restricted women’s rights, suppressed protests, and persecuted less extreme Islamists. Even so, one might suppose that the Taliban, though different from Americans, are nice people to the same degree that Americans are nice people, as they treat their families and coreligionists well, even if under strict Sharia law. Their complicity in visiting great cruelty on outsiders, even on outsiders who are insiders (residents of Afghanistan) is, however, an extreme form of intolerance and xenophobia. Most Americans (I think and hope) would not condone Taliban behavior in their treatment of outsiders.
Evidence of Taliban mistreatment of those under its power exists in the form of news reports, and most vividly in the desperation of Afghans to escape with their lives. I have for decades administered the completely
free and non-commercial B’nai B’rith Capital Area (of New York State) Holocaust Essay Contest for Middle School and High School students in a 12-county area contiguous with Albany and Schenectady Counties. In this context I was especially impressed by the views of Rabbi Will Berkovitz, CEO of Jewish Family Service, during his organization’s efforts to extract families of its staff from Afghanistan. Berkovitz likens the plight of nonTaliban people in Afghanistan to the plight of Jews (and other Nazi targets) during the Holocaust of WWII seeking to escape from Germany and occupied Europe. Berkovitz (2021) reports:
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“I have heard the audio messages of gunfire in the streets. In a terrified call from a family in Panjshir province Tuesday we were told the Taliban dragged all males aged 10 to 65 from their homes and executed them in the street.”
He assigns Americans a moral obligation, and:
“All people of faith have a religious one [obligation] as well. The call of history echoes loud today. In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible” (quoting Rabbi Joshua Heschel back in 1972).
Our two-decade Afghanistan experience constitutes a long-lived political issue and, more relevant here, a contemporary American civics
issue. Right-wing Republicans have vilified President Biden for the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, even though it was made earlier by Trump (Phillips 2021),30 and for the flawed and costly withdrawal of U. S. troops.31 Consider the statement of the third-ranking House Republican,
30 Trump signed an agreement with the Taliban requiring U. S. withdrawal by 1 May 2021 in exchange for a commitment by the Taliban to negotiate peace with the Afghan government, and to assure that Afghanistan would provide no haven for terrorists including al Qaeda (which, however, already was linked to the Taliban). The agreement bore no enforcement provisions, and was violated by the Taliban even as U. S troops were withdrawn ahead of signing of the agreement. Biden claimed that he (that is, the U. S.) was bound by the agreement, though he actually could have repudiated it as he did other agreements entered by Trump. Biden instead extended the deadline for U. S. withdrawal by several months, to 11 September 2021.
31 A bomb blast at the Kabul Airport during withdrawal from Afghanistan resulted in 13 deaths among U. S. service people (Cunningham et al. 2021). In addition, many Afghans who had aided U. S. operations in Afghanistan (such as translators) were left behind, in part due to the unexpectedly rapid collapse of the Afghan Army, and in part due to a prior (2018) decision by Trump to slow acceptance of Afghans wishing to immigrate who had worked for the U. S. (Alvarez and Warren 2021). The airlift of U. S. and afghan citizens was among the largest in history (George 2021), with approximately 120,000 people including roughly 2,500 U. S. Embassy employees evacuated by air. However, it left behind approximately 2,000 U. S. Embassy contractors and immediate family members.
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Representative Elise Stefanik (New York, 21st Congressional District). Stefanik is a Trump supporter. As a reward for her support, in May 2021 she was appointed Chairperson of the House Republican Conference, replacing Liz Cheney (Republican of Wyoming, At-Large Congressional District, 2017 to present). Cheney had been ousted from her Chairperson position for criticizing Trump for his role in instigating the 6-January insurrection against the U. S. at our Capitol. According to Stefanik:
“This horrific national security and humanitarian disaster is solely the result of Joe Biden’s weak and incompetent leadership. He is unfit to be commander-in-chief.”
More recently, Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and fellow Republican Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) agreed to participate as members of the House Select Committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, established via a House resolution (HR 503) on 30 June 2021. To punish their
participation, the Republican National Committee on 3 February 2022 adopted a Resolution To Formally Censure Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger (Dawsey and Sonmez 2022). I was heartened to read a published letter from former RNC Chairperson Marc Racicot to current RNC Chairperson Ronna McDaniel highly critical of the RNC action (Racicot 2022): “Many intensely loyal Republicans, more polite and less dangerous than those who breached the Capitol, are, in larger and larger numbers, quietly but persistently looking for alternatives in the form of political movements and candidates of conscience, character, conviction and courage.” I hope he is right.
Withdrawal from Afghanistan was implemented badly, with unnecessary loss of life (including 13 deaths of U. S. service people, documented above). To put this in perspective, a far greater loss of life, including deaths of American soldiers, occurred on multiple single days during WWII.32 One example was the D-Day invasions on 6-June 1944
to liberate France from German military occupation, and turn the tide of the war against the Axis powers in Europe. The loss of life then was understood to be a tragic but, to an unfortunate degree, unavoidable cost of war. Far from being the target of disingenuous complaints such as that
32 In Afghanistan, according to Wikipedia (access date 2021.09.04): U. S. service members killed during (roughly) two decades, through April 2021 = 2,448. In 6-June 1944 D-Day invasions during WWII, according to Wikipedia (access date 2021.09.04): U. S. service members killed in the Normandy landings alone = 2,499 (and many more deaths among U. S. Allies).
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of Elise Stefanik, General Dwight Eisenhower, architect of the Allied D-Day invasions, was treated as a hero. He was supported back home by Democratic and Republican political leaders, and by voters, who in November 1952 elected Republican candidate ‘Ike’ the 34th U. S. President (serving 1953-’61).
------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. Matthew Arnold (1822-’88), from the poem Dover Beach, 1867 -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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C h a p t e r 09. C i v i c s , S c i e n c e , a n d Environmental S u s t a i n a b i l i t y
The U. S. Capitol in Washington, DC, which I photographed on 17 July 2014, was Trump’s target on 6 January 2021, when he incited an insurrection aimed at preventing Congress from fulfilling its Constitutional mandate to transfer power peacefully to the next elected Administration. The Capitol is the business office of Congress, where bills are proposed and debated, and where votes are taken to define our nation’s evolving body of law, including laws to protect public and environmental health. Such laws, and regulations promulgated by responsible agencies to implement them, must transform our relationship to the environment from degrading exploitation to sustainability. This goal requires concerted national action, and re-engagement with other nations to (This sounds dramatic…) save our planet’s habitability for ecosystems including human communities. Okay, it is dramatic but, most essentially, it is accurate, not hyperbolic.
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----------------------------------------- Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. Rachel Carson (1907-’64). Silent Spring, New York City, Houghton Mifflin, ISBN: 0-618-25305, 378 pages, 27 September 1962. ----------------------------------------------------
Environmental sustainability is a relatively recent concept that is coming to replace the forever-growth ethic of American-style free-market capitalism, under which I was raised starting in 1946. My parents believed in the ethic of assuring that their children’s generation enjoy a better life than had their parents, grandparents, or earlier forebears. I believe that my
parents associated this ethic with Judaism, but I would guess that it applies across most if not all ethnic and religious groups in the U. S. and, I would think, beyond. For my taste, the ethic too often produced excessive consumerism and attitudes of entitlement. Abroad, U. S. tourists earned the catchy nickname “The Ugly American,” after the title of a 1958 book (Lederer and Burdick 1958).
The ethic of an improved life for one’s children often translated into a life of greater economic benefits, ease, and security. For me, it (also) translated to an academic bent, along with a desire to leave to my descendants traces of my life activities and accomplishments. That may help explain why I like to keep records of my life, and to publish works that (hopefully) will survive me. More hedonistic people might advocate recreation over productivity, whereas I am more satisfied by what I regard as a healthy allocation of my time between productive activities (such as writing) and recreational activities (such as kayaking). The Covid-19
pandemic, of course, has thrown this balance off, as I have been pooch walking but otherwise engaging in significantly less recreation.
As a consultant, my vocational activities include a lot of analysis, writing, and communication of my findings and ideas. This accords well with my inclination also to write avocationally. In both, I like to leverage my ideas toward action for social benefit. In my mind, writing-to-influence is a power multiplier, in that I can vote once, but my written and oral
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communications might influence for the better the opinions, actions, and votes of many more people, including people with executive power to act (or not act) for the public good.
I also, on occasion, have taught at the high school and college levels. I regard the teacher as having the role of a guide, not a container of information that is to be transferred to students, in a form of ‘trickle-down academics’. My communications and presentations, therefore, have left a good fraction of allotted meeting time to accommodate discussion.
One goal of mine has been to teach students to think clearly and express themselves clearly in writing, with the idea that clear writing is a sign of clear thinking, and unclear writing may be a sign of unclear thinking. Unfortunately, I see unclear writing too often, even (for example) among scientists publishing in Science Magazine, which I have extolled for the quality of its manuscript editing. As a recent example of my perception that this quality has deteriorated, consider the essay
Synchronizing neural rhythms (Reinhart 2022), with the subtitle Personalized, noninvasive network-based neuromodulation aids impaired cognition. My first reading of this subtitle suggested to me that the subject that was examined in the article (neuromodulation aids) unfortunately had “impaired cognition,” whereas perusing the full article revealed that the opposite was the case: the article subject actually was “neuromodulation,” which fortunately was found to aid impaired cognition! Maybe my calling out this example seems churlish, but I also note that the essay was published as the grand prize winner in an essay contest!
Teaching can involve non-prescriptive social activism, especially in environmental science and public health. Social activism can be incorporated naturally into such courses, especially at the college level. For example, students might be assigned individually or in groups to select an issue under consideration by a municipal, state, or federal agency. They might research that issue, and prepare comments for submittal to the
involved agency. Initial draft(s) might be submitted to teacher(s) as homework, and revised in response to teacher advice. The final version could be re-submitted to teachers as a grading instrument, and then also submitted to the agency as a public comment. This approach ultimately is aimed at teaching students sequentially and non-prescriptively to identify important issues, investigate, report, and advocate. The approach also may promote student networking, and academic use of free public domain resources, such as agency rules and proposed rules (reducing reliance upon expensive textbooks).
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My background has included Education courses leading to New York City and New York State high school teaching credentials. I also have taught high school in Georgia and New York City. In endeavoring to teach students to think and express themselves clearly, which by extension is a main goal of this book, I often have assigned essays for homework. For written communications to influence, they must be hardhitting, as succinct as possible. Students often asked me how long their essays must be. My consistent response: as short as possible. To the inevitable follow-up question, how short can it be, I consistently have responded (tongue-in-cheek): one word, but you must choose it carefully!
I have failed to acknowledge perhaps the most important contribution to my writing ability. I regret this omission, for which I will partially atone here. The teacher of my required Freshman English Composition course at the City College of New York (CCNY) was an Assistant Professor named Harry Levtow. In 1964 he began the course
with a two-part English literacy test consisting of students writing one paragraph and then individually reading it to him at his desk at the front of the classroom. I did both, conveying the self-assured attitude of the immature 17-year-old wise guy that I was. Dr. Levtow, I will never forget, said something like: “So, you think you can write just because you are grammatical. You must learn to be simple, direct, and succinct.” I failed to appreciate this lesson at the time, but I appreciate it immensely now, as it was the most influential lesson contributing to my own English literacy. I try to encourage in others more humility than I had exhibited regarding their language literacy and beyond, specifically, regarding their science literacy. Harry Levtow died in 2014, placing him beyond my reach to thank him personally. I am pleased to accept this consolation prize: the opportunity of acknowledging him in this book.
Teaching in high school was a great training ground for effective communication in my eventual career as a consultant. In consulting, I
have had to communicate effectively about technical issues, usually to non-technical audiences. The venues have been diverse, including classrooms, the U. S. Congress, the New York State Senate and Assembly, depositions, courtrooms, public meetings, television and radio programs, as well as colleges (such as in presenting seminars). I also have an ongoing commitment to Holocaust education. For decades I have administered a free, completely non-commercial Holocaust Essay Contest for high school and middle school students in 12 New York State counties contiguous with Albany and Schenectady Counties.
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My family lived in the age of “better living through chemistry,” the E. I. duPont de Nemours Company slogan coined in 1935 (originally as Better things for better living, through chemistry) and maintained until 1982, when duPont dropped the phrase “through chemistry.” My own upbringing did not emphasize the consumerism that characterized many members of my generation, who are known as Baby Boomers (born 1946- ’64) for their population explosion beginning after the conclusion in 1945 of World War II.
With population increase, however, came increased pollution, recognition of the environmental and public health consequences of pollution, institution of academic courses and degree programs in Environmental Studies and Environmental Science, and professional credentialing via certifying and accrediting bodies (Michaels 2009). For example, I am recognized as a Board-Certified Environmental Professional (CEP) in Environmental Assessment. This credential was awarded me by
the Academy of Board Certified Environmental Professionals (ABCEP). It also is accredited by the Council of Engineering and Scientific Specialty Boards (oddly, CESB).
The environmental movement often is dated back to the famous book Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson (1962). It actually was born earlier, possibly as early as publication of Thomas Malthus’ famous essays, together noting that the human population can grow exponentially, whereas the human food supply can grow only linearly (Malthus 1798 and later):
“The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race” (Malthus 1798, Chapter VII).
I was, and remain, influenced by Malthus, who seems out of favor
these days because the carrying capacity of the planet has proven to be more flexible (and greater) than he had imagined. That is, more people can be supported sustainably via products such as ‘miracle rice’ that direct more of a crop’s nutritional biomass to edible portions of the plant, and less to inedible portions such as roots and stalks. Malthusian pessimism has continued to lose favor with emerging green energy technologies such as hydrofracking (‘fracking’; Michaels and Simon 2013, 2017) and nuclear fusion, and with emerging genetic engineering technologies such as CRISPR.
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Malthus was right, however. Although we can extend our limits to growth, and thereby delay reaching them, we cannot do so forever. Ultimately, we must confront Malthusian limits to growth, and make the choice between birth control and death control:
“The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world” (Malthus 1798, Chapter VII).
The world has made impressive strides against hunger and poverty, in accordance with scholarly treatment of these interrelated problems (for example, Sachs 2005). Even so, as I think should be evident to all, the choice between birth control and death control has become more urgent in some regions than in others. In some, it already has been made, as malnourishment and death stalk populations in the poorest countries.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- “People of Earth, attention... This is a voice speaking to you from thousands of miles beyond your planet... Look to your sun for a warning...”
Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, starring Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor. Aliens in flying saucers warning people of earth of impending, severe climate effects. Los Angeles, California; Clover Productions, distributed by Columbia Pictures, released 13 June 1956. --------------------------------------------------------------------------
A related threat to human life is global climate change, for which I look to the earth, not to the sun. It is a product of numerous planetary comorbidities. This lesson was reinforced for me when I filled in for a physics professor to teach an Environmental Science course at the Albany, New York campus of Sage College. The course used a textbook that was
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organized by environmental sustainability problem areas, such as biodiversity, key resources, and environmental quality. Each problem area then was subdivided. For example, the Sustaining Human Societies chapter included sections on cities, environmental economics, environmental politics, and ethics. In each sub-area, problems were defined, and potential solutions toward sustainability suggested. I was left then, as now, with the impression that solutions in each problem area implied further pressure on most if not all other problem areas and subareas, all with time pressure for action before time runs out for timely action.
As the long-engaged Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls said of setting the wedding date with Nathan Detroit, who had sought to assure her that they would be married sooner or later: “… after 14 years, it's already too late to be 'sooner', and if it gets much later, soon it'll be too late to be later” (Mankiewicz and Hecht 1955). Like Nathan, we have procrastinated chronically. A feasible, politically attainable overall
climate solution has not been proposed, let alone agreed and implemented. Maybe I should be more hopeful. After all, Nathan finally did propose, and married Adelaide before the end of the movie…
My pessimism for our planet, however, is undiminished and has grown in scope. Specifically, I view our planet as an astronomical object, subject to astronomical (and astronomically large) forces having no regard for humans, and having no capacity to ‘regard’ anything at all. Such forces already have (at least twice) frozen the planet into a ball of ice (dubbed ‘snowball earth’; Poppick 2019). Emergence from this static stage of planetary evolution only occurred after millions of years, in one case over 58 million years. Extreme conditions of our planet clearly have occurred, and I am afraid that they will reoccur.
An asteroid impact over 65 million years ago in the Yucatán Peninsula off today’s Mexico caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass
extinction. It quickly eliminated numerous species and genera, indeed most life on earth, most famously including dinosaurs33. The K-T mass extinction changed the trajectory of evolution, probably paving the way for mammals and eventually humans. Just as the K-T impactor exhibited
33 An exception exists: birds. Most of us may not think of birds as dinosaurs, but they descended from theropod dinosaurs, which included the velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus rex. Even though birds are warm-blooded, based upon other traits paleontologists consider them to be the only extant dinosaurs (Weisberger 2020).
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no regard for dinosaurs, future impactors will exhibit no regard for humans.
No human-centered principle protects us from extreme long-lived environmental conditions, whether abrupt, as from an asteroid or nuclear war, or gradual as from progressive Amazon deforestation and other environmental insults leading to regional and eventually global climate change. Amazon deforestation, as an example of gradual degradation, provided the impetus in the 1960s for biologist Thomas Lovejoy (in the vast Brazilian Amazon) coining the now-familiar phrase ‘biological diversity’ to express and quantify the plethora of life on which our ecosystems and planet depend, and the need to protect the diversity (for example, Goering 2021).
The world has failed to protect Amazon rainforest biodiversity, and ‘failure is not an option’, though it might occur non-optionally. This has become evident as Brazil’s right-wing, scientifically ignorant (or worse)
President Jair Bolsonaro has accelerated loss and fragmentation of this world-sustaining resource by allowing, even promoting, deforestation and forest fragmentation (Goering 2021). Lovejoy has come forward with a strategy for countering the absence of scientific awareness, civic responsibility, and political will in Brazil and beyond. He has proposed harnessing corporate financial resources toward fulfilling planetary net-zero goals via protecting the Amazon rainforest and planting trees to capture carbon and overcome deforestation and forest fragmentation. Essentially, Lovejoy’s strategy of harnessing corporate power would make Amazon forest land more valuable, and its destruction more expensive and therefore more difficult to justify economically, especially for people like Bolsonaro who seem to be motivated economically (and selfishly), notwithstanding the expectation of long-term harm.
Gradual environmental depredation equates to gradual steps toward extinction of biota, which already has occurred on a scale motivating
a new geological term referring to the ‘anthropocene epoch’, evoking (unofficially) the human threat to global environmental sustainability. Such extinctions also are associated with increasing numbers of threatened and endangered species, arguably including our own species. Indeed, we are seeing this now, with accelerating dislocations of people and communities in areas hard-hit by climate change, for example in tropical and semitropical coastal areas. The dislocations have been associated with conflict and death, essentially stemming from environmental factors, but implemented (primarily, numerically) via political factors.
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Climate change impacts, including increased forest burning due to heat and dry conditions, also drive a vicious cycle of further greenhouse gas impacts and accelerating climate change. Dry forest conditions result from drought, which itself is a potent stress for natural and human communities. In some coastal areas flooding is an increasing problem. Both types of ‘water shock’ also can produce dislocations. In the case of humans, “people are five times as likely to move following drought conditions as they are after floods or periods of excess water” (Walton 2021).
An enlightened response to the evident linkage of drought with conflict including war is exemplified by Israel. Israel is located in the parched Middle East, with much of its territory consisting of the Negev Desert. Yet, Israel has deployed an array of policies to overcome the destructive force of environmental problems, most essentially via maximizing the efficiency of its use of available water, and developing technologies to create more (fresh) water (Siegel 2015). Indeed, Israel’s
innovative water strategy has translated into highly effective regional water diplomacy. Such ‘hydro-diplomacy’ has broken down barriers between Israel and historically hostile neighbors by promoting enlightened water policies, such as charging consumers the real price of water; and sharing its emerging water technologies, such as water pipe repair in situ, drip irrigation, desalinization via solar power, and wastewater purification and re-use. In short, Israel exemplifies the linkage of civics and science, and the power of both toward formulating effective policy.
Many have argued that climate change processes can be reversed (for example, Hayhoe 2021). I agree, with two caveats, which also are two ‘inconvenient truths’. First, climate change is associated with momentum that will carry us inexorably forward unless and until countered aggressively. This seems unlikely to occur in anticipation of lethal climate change; actually, the leading edge of accelerating lethal climate change already is under way. Climate change reversal looks more likely to occur,
if at all, only under extreme duress, when existentially urgent global climate geo-engineering will be required, for example greenhouse gas scavenging from the atmosphere. Such global-scale engineering is unprecedented, and might exert unintended consequences. As we have only one Planet Earth, climate engineers will not have a ‘control Earth’ on which to experiment. Environmentally, as in other ways, we are living in perilous times.
Planetary geoengineering, and failure to perform needed planetary geoengineering, each may have similar odds of exerting unintended
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planetary consequences. This was vividly demonstrated to me allegorically, by the fate of Superman’s home planet, Krypton (Siegel and Shuster 1978). Superman’s father, Jor-El (Marlon Brando), a prominent scientist, detected structural instabilities that he feared would lead to his planet’s destruction. His warnings went unheeded by the KGS (Krypton Geological Survey), which failed to undertake needed planetary krypto-engineering. Krypton, as feared, broke up, killing nearly all of its inhabitants (except enough to populate movie sequels). With destruction impending, however, Jor-El and his wife Lara (Susannah York) launched the infant Superman to Earth, where he grew up as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve) and acquired super powers. The rest is history. We on Earth, so far, have failed to avert the fate of our superhero’s planet.
Second, mortality and suffering associated with ‘disruptions’ are real; they already have occurred, and they continue to occur. The scars on surviving organisms, including people, will persist. Forest fires in the western U. S., for example, have killed swaths of flora and fauna, and
scarred the land. They have dislocated, hurt, maimed, and killed innumerable animals and humans. This is not just an ecological impact, but a humanitarian disaster in the sense of science educator Michelle Ashkin (Hond 2021). This ‘inconvenient truth’ may be below the radar of many scientists because many tend to take a broad view of problems. Such scientists, and many other individuals, may ignore the consequences of climate change disruptions on individuals, because affected systems are more important than afflicted individuals. This viewpoint has value, but is too narrow as justification for those who aspire to be ethical, and to act in a civically responsible manner.
Suffering is not a problem for the sole reason that it might disrupt ecosystems (or economic systems). It is a problem (in my view) also because suffering is horrible and heartbreaking, and more so when inflicted unnecessarily via callous indifference to the well-being of living organisms… that is, not just of people. Of course, the barbaric Russian
attack on Ukraine exemplifies such callousness and unethical behavior. We all should decry it, as it adversely affects each of us and, hopefully, all of us, both because many if not most of us can empathize with Putin’s numerous Ukrainian victims and his 60,000 to 80,000 Russian victims (estimated by the U. S. Pentagon; Knox and Anders 2022), and because explosion of munitions burdens our atmosphere, and therefore our planet, with greenhouse emissions that we can ill afford to release.
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Environmental sustainability is an issue area with obvious, and obviously related, science and civics components. A civics lesson to be learned relates to the behavior of scientists and non-scientists relative to such potentially controversial issues. An urgent case in point relates to the outsized carbon footprint of air travel: “Annually airplanes spew some 920 million tons of CO [carbon dioxide], accounting for roughly 2 3.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide” (Service 2022). To reduce its carbon footprint, the airline industry is trying to turn farm and food waste into ‘sustainable aviation fuels’ (SAF): “Because the carbon it contains originated in plants, which drew it from the atmosphere, the net emissions from bio-based jet fuel would only be a fraction of those from fossil fuel.” This statement contains a grain of truth: if you want to travel, do so sustainably. Clear thinking, however, reveals its essential fallacy: you have been profligate for a century. You must do more than fly sustainably; you must compensate for accumulation of environmental toxins and degradation resulting from past profligacy.
Like money, fossil fuels are fungible. If you spent too much money on recreation over a period of, say, decades, you must compensate. That is, you must spend a minimal amount on future recreation to wipe out the accumulated deficit produced by decades of overspending. If your budget reasonably could sustain half of your actual recreation expenditures for decades, you should spend less than half going forward, until the accumulated deficit from your long recreation profligacy has been wiped out. Likewise, if your budget reasonably could sustain half of actual aviation fuel combustion for decades, you should combust aviation fuel (preferably SAF) at a rate less than half going forward, until the accumulated deficit from your long air travel profligacy has been wiped out.
The fungibility of aviation fuels means that you can reduce consumption now You do not have to wait until a more ecologically sustainable alternative aviation fuel (SAF) becomes available. This
inconvenient truth can be acted on via economic disincentives to air travel, such as a carbon tax on aviation fuels. Remember that fossil fuels that have sustained the aviation (and automotive) industries ultimately originated from earth’s atmosphere via decay of dead biomass. Millions of years of processing produced today’s fossil fuels, whose combustion for transportation is unsustainable. That is, our aviation behavior over the past century was unsustainable because the atmosphere cannot receive aviation emissions without planet-threatening damage. We engaged in unsustainable behavior for the past century, and now we must compensate
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by reducing emissions of CO and other greenhouse gases, most notably 2 methane. We must do this urgently, not whenever an ecologically and economically sustainable substitute comes along. Disincentivizing air travel would introduce a new calculus into travelers’ decision process. They must ask whether the positive impact of air travel will compensate for its negative impact. A direct comparison is simplest: if I travel to a conference, whose impact is reducing carbon footprint more than my travel has increased it, that might justify air travel. However, if I can exert the same positive impact via virtual conference attendance, then avoiding air travel to attend the conference personally would contribute toward wiping out the unsustainable behavior of my decades of profligate combustion of aviation fuels. Indirect comparisons are more problematic: do I travel to see my aging parents or new grandchild? I will leave this analysis to smarter people than me.
Another urgent case in point relates to plastics pollution of
ecosystems globally (Brock, et al. 2021). One burgeoning solution to the problem is mining of plastic waste from landfills and treating it to produce refuse-derived fuel (RDF) for combustion in cement kilns in place of, predominantly, coal. Unlike coal and other fossil fuels, landfilled waste plastics are virtually free. Their combustion to power cement kilns was criticized by Paul Connett, a chemistry professor now retired from St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, who said that plastic releases harmful substances like dioxins and furans when burned.
Connett ignored counterarguments. Of course, as a chemist he must have been aware that, like plastics, coal releases harmful substances such as dioxins and furans when burned (for example, see Mokhtar 2014). Further, dioxins and furans can be captured via pollution control equipment such as particle filters (‘baghouses’) and electrostatic precipitators. Finally, combustion conditions can be controlled to minimize production of dioxins and furans, for example by controlling flow rates of combustion
products to minimizing their residence time at flue locations having temperatures in the range most conducive to producing them.
Remarkably, some criticized the practice of burning plastics to reduce their presence in landfills as being too easy, for example: “Burning plastic for cement fuel… is a ‘quick fix’… If you can dump everything in a cement kiln, then why would you still care about the problem?” This argument is spurious, as the scale of the plastic waste problem greatly exceeds its potential alleviation by cement kilns. My own
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viewpoint, without seeking to decide the controversy, is generically that a ‘quick fix’ is timely and efficient compared with a slow fix. A civically responsible person should evaluate the ‘fix’ objectively, with ‘quick’ being on the positive side of the ledger! The applicable shorthand is “work smart.”
My pessimism for our planet has been based upon a panoply of civically questionable behaviors and environmental and social conditions, some of which I have mentioned above. The conditions, though not necessarily the pessimism, now are reflected internationally, at a very high level, in the report of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (UN Secretary-General 2021). The report issues a dire warning that our planet is at a pivotal moment, hurtling toward self-destruction, but conducting business-as-usual that, if selfishly continued by the nations of the world, will break down global order and produce a state of perpetual crisis. Nations urgently must change course by cooperating toward alleviation of enormous stress in a confluence of global areas too numerous to list here.
The America First slogan of the Trump Administration flies in the face of the harsh global reality of climate change and of limited, and limiting, resources. The U. S. is wealthy by global standards, contributing to global wealth disparities. Wealth disparity also exists within our country, and has been growing. Trump and the GOP have acted as if this problem is extraneous, even desirable. It is neither: not desirable nationally and not desirable internationally. It also is not sustainable. Poverty and associated hunger and insecurity produce worrying instabilities on all scales. They also engender ethical problems, for me expressed memorably (and succinctly) by the character Alvy Singer in the 1977 Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall:
“I can't enjoy anything unless everybody is. If one guy is starving someplace, that puts a crimp in my evening.”
For ethical and humanitarian reasons, we must adopt sustainable policies urgently, even while the limits to growth still may be increasing. Sustainability, however, is antithetical to the America First policy, which most essentially arrogates to our country the resources of the world that we can secure, whether by economic or (other) coercive means. It would enable us to grow, but only at the cost of increasing our carbon footprint, and only at the expense of reducing growth potential outside our borders, where many of the poorest countries would be affected adversely and disproportionately.
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This may be exemplified by the impacts of climate change, which are greatest in tropical places, where many of the planet’s poorest nations are situated. Poor countries can least afford to adapt to adverse climate impacts, especially impacts that are extreme or that develop relatively quickly. The most recent report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC 2021) places great urgency on global cooperation to counteract the momentum of global climate change, and contain its effects to within sustainable levels:
“Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years… Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered. Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in CO and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the 2 coming decades.”
You might consider this assessment to be pessimistic, but concerns about climate impacts on the health of our planet have been publicized stridently, most recently by Ripple, et al. (2021), who updated their 2019 declaration of a climate emergency warning of impending “untold suffering.” The report was signed by 11,000 scientists from 153 countries. The update brings the total to about 14,000 signatories:
“Out of the 31 variables that we track, we found that 18 are at new all-time lows or highs… We need to stop regarding the climate emergency as a stand-alone environmental problem. Global heating, although ruinous, is not the sole symptom of our present struggling Earth system but is only one of the many facets of the accelerating environmental crisis.”
------------------------------------------------------- "Once-ler!" he cried with a cruffulous croak. "Once-ler! You're making such smogulous smoke! My poor Swomee-Swans... why, they can't sing a note! No one can sing who has smog in his throat. Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-‘91). The Lorax, 23 June 1971
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---------------------------------- We have met the enemy, and he is us
Walt Kelly (Walter Crawford Kelly Jr., 1913-’73). Pogo, 22 April 1971 -------------------------------------------------------
In this regard, I am influenced also by the foundational article establishing the phrase ‘the tragedy of the commons’, by Garrett Hardin (1968). The ‘commons’ refers to a pasture open to all. Ideally, herdsmen
would graze as many cattle as possible on the (British) commons without degrading them, but each herdsman knew that his good citizenship would count for naught, if a later arriving herdsman overgrazed the pasture. The inevitable result, in the absence of agreed and enforced regulation, Hardin termed the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Today’s ‘commons’, of course, encompass far more than community pastures. They extend as far as the eye can see, and beyond, to including ocean areas that are beyond national jurisdiction (Claudet et al. 2021).
Environmental stress on the commons produced environmental professionals to evaluate risks, protect ecosystems, and mitigate ecosystem degradation. Historically, in the Industrial Revolution, would-be professional artists and artisans apprenticed themselves to practitioners who had earned favorable reputations. Generations of mentors and students proved themselves by practicing their trades and, if they did what they did well, they did well. Our Information Age, however, has imposed new
requirements on many practitioners. Beyond training they might need certificates attesting to training, degrees attesting to learning, and licenses allowing them to practice. The Information Age, ironically, was compensating for information inadequacy, as the number of practitioners and specialties grew, and as the distances over which practitioners were recruited expanded more rapidly than word of mouth, and so more rapidly than reputation.
With population growth also came space and resource limitations, increasing urgency of land use and pollution issues, and environmental practitioners to address them. They were a new breed of professional, with expertise drawn from the pedigreed disciplines, from sciences and social sciences such as physics, biology, chemistry, political science, and communications. Environmental professionals were hybrids, each mongrel breed combining a unique combination of characteristics drawn from the traditional pedigreed disciplines. New rules emerged for accepting them.
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In Darwinian fashion, as demand for environmental services increased, so did the number of specialists to fill them. In response, new forms of validation arose, such as college degrees that credited ‘life experience’, though the validity of these validations was itself uncertain. The growing public need to qualify environmental practitioners, coupled with the proliferation of specialties and specialists, together created a niche for organizations conferring environmental professional certification, including my own, ABCEP: the Academy of Board-Certified Environmental Professionals, which offers the CEP credential, now four decades old (Michaels 2009, 2017a).
The problem of validating professionals, not only environmental professionals, resembles the problem of identifying a ‘Philosopher King’ as guardian of Utopia in Plato’s “Republic.” Plato had strong feelings about the type of person who should serve, something along the lines of being intelligent, philosophical, objective, and benevolent… in short, being much
like Plato himself. Yet, selecting such an individual (other than oneself) was difficult, as the selection would depend upon the choice of selectors. The problem was recursive: a valid Philosopher King could be chosen only by validated selectors, who would have been chosen by validated selectors of the selectors, with no clear end to the chain. Few utopias, therefore, exist. I will mention, but not here explicate, the implications of Plato’s ‘Philosopher King’ problem when applied to the U. S. Electoral College, whose electors are selectors of the U. S. president.
Ominously for democracies, Plato’s problem proved intractable. Ominously for many professions, including environmental, multiple certifying organizations have appeared, raising the thorny platonic issue of how each profession might select a valid Philosopher King. Can the environmental professions select a certifying body trustworthy and trusted among consumers of their services? Toward that end, certifying organizations have enhanced the credibility of their professional credentials
via accreditation by organizations that serve multiple professions under one umbrella.
Environmental regulation evolved rapidly. The first Earth Day was celebrated on 22 April 1970, while I was studying for my MS Degree in Zoology at the Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia. This historic event (Earth Day, not my graduate career) was followed quickly by the proposal to establish the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, on 9 July 1970. In the present context of civics and science, I take pleasure
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in noting that the modest proposal to establish U. S. EPA was made by a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon. EPA was established on 2 December 1970. Yet, it had not gained, or sustained, the full confidence of Congress.
EPA’s performance waxed and waned. In 1976, the 94th Congress enacted the Toxic Substances Control Act. In TSCA, Congress expressed its lack of trust in the EPA by specifying the phasing out of U. S. commerce of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), as it feared that EPA would not do so expeditiously or assertively without statutory marching orders from Congress, especially in the face of persistent industry influence.
EPA is an Executive agency, meaning that it answers to the Chief Executive of the Executive Branch of our Federal Government, that is, to the U. S. President. EPA’s record, therefore, mirrored the environmental record of presidents since Nixon. The record was not always good. In my own life, EPA played a defining career role. My first job in my field
of toxicology after graduation with my PhD degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook was with the EnviroControl consulting firm, in Rockville, Maryland. Such consulting firms were situated outside the Washington, DC city limits, and were wryly called ‘Beltway Bandits’. My job there, to which I had to relocate from New York, came to an abrupt end in less than a year, with onset of the Reagan Administration.
Ronald Reagan in 1981 appointed as U. S. EPA Administrator Ann Gorsuch, the mother of (then-future) U. S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch (who was born in 1967 and was just 14 at the time). Ann Gorsuch served only briefly, until 1983. During her tenure she participated in downsizing the Agency and, of great significance to me, freezing contracts with companies, including EnviroControl, on which I had been hired to work. With nearly a dozen coworkers, I was laid off.
What is the vocational term applied to unemployed scientists?
Consultant! … and so began my career as a consultant in toxicology, specializing in assessment and management of risks potentially posed to environmental and public health. My first contract was as ‘Coordinator’ of the Safe Substitutes Project in the Sacramento-based Office of Appropriate Technology (OAT) of the State of California during the first administration of Jerry Brown as California Governor. Cal OAT most essentially was the small-is-beautiful version of the U. S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), which also became my client, as you can see from my (understandably) redacted U. S. Congress OTA ID card
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depicting me so young that I can hardly believe it…
Many other clients, and client types, followed, including national and international Fortune 500 clients; Federal, State and Municipal government clients; and public interest organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). These experiences belied what I have heard often in various forms, that industry is bad and industry is corrupt. I found this to be untrue: I provided services, usually with a handshake and/or a brief letter of understanding, almost never with a legalese contract,
largely because, in my own business experience, a handshake is binding. Over decades of practice, I can count on one hand (maybe half a hand) the number of times that I have been ‘stiffed’ by an industrial (or any) client.
---------------------------------------------------------- The war between the East and West, which is now in its 326th year, has at last come to an end. There is nothing left to fight with and few of us left to fight. The atmosphere has become so polluted with deadly germs... that it can no longer be breathed. There is no place on this planet that is immune. The last surviving factory for the manufacture of oxygen has been destroyed. Stockpiles are rapidly diminishing... and when they are gone, we must die.
The Time Machine. Movie Script, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, released 17 August 1960 ----------------------------------------------------------
Environmental sustainability gained centrality in my career, which has been broad, including serving government agencies at all levels, the U. S. military, corporations, and public interest organizations. Never until
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Trump, however, have I encountered an EPA that seemed more focused upon corporate sustainability than environmental sustainability. Trump’s original EPA administrator was Scott Pruitt, who lacked environmental science expertise and acted unethically. Pruitt inappropriately applied to Agency policy making his personal, non-expert judgment that the contribution of our industrial society to global climate change is insignificant, notwithstanding the consensus view of U. S. and international climate experts that it is both significant and primary (for example, US GCRP 2017). This antiscientific view led to U. S. withdrawal from the international Paris climate accord, which had not been ratified by Congress, notwithstanding the disproportionately large contribution of the U. S. to the overall impact of societies, especially of industrial societies, upon global climate.
Global consequences of U. S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord would unfold gradually, not abruptly. The pandemic also reduced economic activity and associated pollution including greenhouse gas
release. Political and economic factors further mitigated the impacts of U. S. withdrawal (for example, Obama 2017), including state, city, and private sector plans to strive nonetheless to meet Paris Accord goals. The Biden Administration now has rejoined the Paris Accord, reversing the scientifically ignorant and globally damaging Trump decision to withdraw from it.
Climate change impacts already include disastrous events. Recent years have evinced a trend toward increasing frequency and intensity of storms (Matonse and Frei 2012), including extreme events such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Irene in 2011, and Sandy in 2012, all attaining extraordinary energy, largely from warmer ocean surface water in their path (Trenberth 2007). The most recent additions to this trend include, in just a single year (2017), major hurricanes impacting Texas (Harvey), Florida (Irma), and Puerto Rico (Maria). These three recent events alone have caused widespread human suffering and massive economic damage,
in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars. Indeed, considering Hurricane Sandy alone, a recent study attributes to anthropogenic (human caused) climate change an additional four inches of sea level, $8 billion of damage (13 percent of the hurricane’s total damage of $62.5 billion), and flooding of an additional 36,000 homes (Strauss et al. 2021). The trend toward increasing climate impacts was recognized much earlier, though not uniformly, by the insurance industry, which has been disproportionately impacted by it (Mills 2005).
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The most important economic factor that may spur investment in climate change mitigation is the decline of the ‘real’ interest rate, which has made investments on future climate benefits worth the money today (Stock 2021). This is based upon predicted interest and inflation rates. The predicted rates are used to determine a discount rate, that is, to convert future climate change costs and future climate mitigation benefits to current dollars:
“In the case of climate policy, the so-called social cost of carbon (SCC) is the present value of the harm done by emitting one metric ton of carbon dioxide… At the end of the Obama administration, the federal government estimated the SCC to be $51, a value it computed by setting the discount rate to three percent. The Trump administration revised this down to $7 by considering only domestic climate damages, and not global ones, and then further lowered it to just $1 by setting the discount rate to seven percent. The choice of where to set the discount rate matters a great deal: at three percent, it would make economic sense to pay $97 today to avert $1,000 in damages in the year 2100, whereas at seven percent, it would make sense to pay only $5. In this light, the Trump administration’s calculations encourage the conclusion that under current U. S. policy, climate change will inflict tremendous global damage—but that it would still be cost-effective just to let future generations deal with the problem.”
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C h a p t e r 10. S e c u r i t y o f A c a d e m i a , I n f o r m a t i o n , and the Media
Eleanor Roosevelt is depicted in statuary in my 14August 2014 photograph near the entrance to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York. She was appointed by President Harry S. Truman to the U. S. Delegation to the United Nations, and then appointed head of the UN Human Rights Commission, which created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (approved in 1948), and thence the International Covenants on Human Rights, taking effect in 1976.
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------- On the grounds that citizens ought to be in a position to avail themselves of what science teaches, and to estimate the work of the serious scientist as well as the claims of the faker, it is essential that the people understand modern science. Science News, Scientific American 124(20), May 1921. --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Security of Academia
Academia commonly is viewed as a bastion of liberal democratic thought and an enemy of autocrats. Security of all levels of our education
institutions is essential for the security of its host democratic government. In the U. S., nefarious attempts have been underway to undermine independence of academic institutions from influence by anti-intellectual forces. Recently, for example, world-renown Yale University became the object of such attempts, specifically in the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, characterized as “one of the University’s most celebrated and prestigious programs” (Schuessler 2021). The cudgel was money, to the tune of $250 million gifted by donors seeking to exert oversight and/or control over the Program’s curriculum and faculty hiring. Yale acquiescence in this effort, and creation of a new advisory board “that would be dominated by conservative figures of the donors’ choosing,” undermined Yale’s vaunted academic independence, and resulted in resignation from the Program of its director (since 2017), historian Dr. Beverley Gage.
Academic excellence denotes high quality of primary, secondary,
and post-secondary education, but here I refer to the broader context of intellectual excellence. Intellectual excellence is exemplified by high quality of intellectual life, both within and outside of academia. On 2 March 2021, contravening advice of public health experts in the state and nation, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced rescission as of 10 March of the mandate for people to wear face masks and for businesses to operate within capacity limits (Svitek 2021). This action inevitably must have caused increased Covid-19 deaths in Texas and probably beyond. Abbott took this action when vaccinations were ramping up, and lives could have been saved, and health consequences of Covid-19 averted, if only a small amount
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of additional time were allowed to let the vaccination process unfold and effectively limit contagion.
More broadly, it raises the question of how to distribute culpability between unwise elected officials, in Texas and beyond, and voters who unwisely elected them. Can such intellectually unwise officials possess the emotional capacity needed to love their families, yet lack the emotional capacity needed to love the people they were entrusted to serve beyond family? Thus, my use of the phrase ‘academic excellence’ denotes more than just intellectual wisdom. It encompasses emotional wisdom, and it encompasses our imagination of big ideas and great tasks, and the expectation that we might achieve them if only we try. This sentiment was made famous by President John F. Kennedy in Texas, the state in which he was assassinated, in a speech at Rice University on 12 September 1962, in connection with the space race:
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the
other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman expressed this concept pithily: On science, look to Mars, not to Texas (Friedman 2021b). In February 2021, NASA’s Perseverance surface rover, launched in July 2020, landed on Mars. Also in February 2021, Texas experienced an unusual cold weather episode, probably portending similar episodes in the future, with progress of ‘climate change’.
The state’s power generating infrastructure froze and failed, as did its water distribution network. Friedman contrasted these two February
episodes:
“Texas is the poster child for what happens when you turn everything into politics — including science, Mother Nature, and energy — and try to maximize short-term profits over long-term resilience. The Mars landing is the poster child for letting science guide us and inspire audacious goals and the long-term investments to achieve them… Going forward, if we want more Mars landings and fewer
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Texas collapses, we need to take a cold, hard look at what produced each.”
I watched NASA TV as the Perseverance rover approached Mars. It was a tense, emotional experience. The perilous arrival of Perseverance at Jezero Crater on 18 February 2021 inspired me to place two of its technologies in a larger perspective (Michaels 2021b). On approach, Perseverance used instruments to plot its course to the surface, much as a shark remotely detects odors and vibrations to plot its course to potential prey. On close approach, a shark may switch to visual instrumentation to attack.
On close approach, Perseverance likewise switched to visual instrumentation, obtaining and increasingly relying upon real-time views of the planet surface. Perseverance used photographs of potential landing sites transmitted from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to compare realtime terrain views with its photographs of acceptable landing sites. When
a high-quality site match was established, computers controlled eight thrusters to approach, decelerate, and land within the target zone.
An antecedent to this technology was highlighted in the 1995 iMax film Across the Sea of Time (in which, ironically, Donald Trump appeared). It dramatized the arrival of Russian stowaway Thomas Minton, who jumped into the ocean as his ship passed Ellis Island. Minton’s perilous arrival required swimming while wearing a backpack containing all of his possessions. These included a stereoscope, primitive by today’s technology standards, and photographs of the New York City home of his great uncle, who had immigrated via Ellis Island in 1904. Minton climbed to numerous rooftops. Like Perseverance, he compared real-time views with his photographs. Eventually he established a highquality skyline match, and found his American family.
The reprehensible example of Texas (Friedman 2021b) described
above fails to capture a related issue: whether our focus should be on the future or on the present and, assuming both, with what balance (Bloom 2021):
In 2019, in a speech to the United Nations about climate change, the young activist Greta Thunberg inveighed against the inaction of policymakers: “Young people are starting to understand your betrayal,” she said. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you… [BUT] there are also those who
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worry that we are too future-biased. A typical reaction to longrange programs, such as John F. Kennedy’s Apollo program or Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is that the money would be better spent on those who need it right now.
Threats to our education institutions also have been mounted at the kindergarten through twelfth grade levels. For example, the State of North Dakota recently banned teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in K-12 education curricula (Gerson 2021g). The law defines CRT as “the theory that racism is not merely the product of learned individual bias or prejudice, but that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality.” Under the North Dakota law, for example, History teachers are prohibited from teaching about inequities in wealth accumulation due to centuries of stolen labor, about zoning and lending practices that have maintained white neighborhoods, and about systems of policing and incarceration that regularly produce indignities and injustice for Black
people. According to Gerson, cultural conservatives also are imposing a system of parental vetoes on state-run education, in which a small group of angry parents can intimidate an entire school system, resulting in self-censorship. Further, Gerson finds:
“discontent with the presence of mental health professionals in schools, [who] engage in confidential conversations with children and assume roles that should be played by parents. Of all the targets of right-wing activism, this is the most reckless. Most teens with clinical anxiety and depression are not likely, I expect, to get useful help from the kind of parent who views psychiatry as progressive mind control. The same would be true of bullying or sexual identity issues. And in a nation where suicide is the second-leading cause of death between ages 10 and 34, the choice of mental health resources as an ideological target is morally monstrous… It
is rare to find such a potent mix of ignorance and cruelty.”
Academic excellence has benefitted from the fact that American families have been forged in the melting pot of immigration waves from many countries. In many cases they arrived to escape repressive education policies, for example, policies prohibiting girls from receiving an academic education. Many of our immigrants, including Albert Einstein, have contributed handsomely (and historically) to our culture of academic excellence and scientific achievement. Yet,
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we seem to have lost something in this area. Our education systems, in the service of both science and civics, must prioritize academic excellence including attainment of science literacy among non-scientists (Feinstein 2011, Feinstein et al. 2013).
Feinstein (2011) understates the value of science literacy: “Our field has produced little evidence that any science taught in school, from Newton’s laws to natural selection, helps people lead happier, more successful, or more politically savvy lives” (Feinstein 2011). This statement seems ludicrous for the year 2011 in which it was published, as the personal cost of science ignorance and/or science rejection has long been known to include loss of life and of health, from numerous avoidable causes such as smoking, resisting vaccination, and excessive consumption of alcohol.
In the context of our Covid-19 pandemic, the Feinstein (2011) statement quoted above seems even more absurd a decade later. The
evident costs of science illiteracy, especially in the upper echelons of government, should illustrate the evident value of science literacy. That is, many or most of the Covid-19 deaths of roughly a half million U. S. residents by 2021, and much or most of the long-term post-Covid health and economic challenges facing many others, constitute avoidable costs (for example, Michaels 2021d). Such cost avoidance via public engagement of non-scientists in science would seem to have illustrated the evident value of science literacy in the pandemic context in the U. S. alone. Indeed, Feinstein advocates such public engagement, but even though citing as a potential benefit of science literacy and of public engagement the living of ‘politically savvy lives’, he fails to explicate one of the most potentially valuable venues for such non-scientist engagement with science: the voting booth.
Feinstein, et al. (2013) formulate the problem of achieving science literacy recognizes the need to know the textbook, and access the science
you need:
One promising approach…. is Problem-Based Learning (PBL), which confronts students with ill-structured challenges, asking them to extend their existing knowledge and develop concrete solutions… PBL can produce durable knowledge gains and foster metacognitive skills that underlie self-directed learning, although researchers have yet to identify which features of PBL contribute most to
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learning… Developed in medical schools, PBL needs further validation in kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) settings, but it shares features with other promising pedagogies specific to K-12, such as Science-TechnologySociety (STS) and Place-Based Education… All of these mimic public engagement with science by making the problem a focus for learning…
Problem definition is not key to science literacy. However, it is key to public engagement in specific issue areas involving science, such as Covid-19 pandemic management. By 2013 Feinstein, et al. had not explicated a concern about science literacy constituting an essential contributor to responsible voting behavior. They had acknowledged, to their credit, that “…science is not a single, uniform thing.” In the context of civics, science must be viewed more broadly than it commonly is viewed, to embrace clear thinking about socially important issues, as explicated earlier: any investigative endeavors that rely upon observations that are
objective, experiments that are repeatable, and results that are replicable.
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Security of Information
Information is an energetically low-cost commodity, notwithstanding complaints to the effect that computers and auxiliary computer equipment such as external hard drives consume large amounts of energy. They do but, overall, expenditure of energy on information saves a much larger expenditure of energy (and of time and money) on performance of work. To illustrate, from your desktop or computer, or from your smartphone, you can determine where to buy a product at the best price. You don’t have to drive your car around to look for products, determine whether they are available in stock, or to compare prices among multiple vendors. If you want to buy the product from a particular vendor at its offered price, you can order it online, and avoid expensive travel altogether. The energy, time, and money costs, in this example, are negative, even considering that vendors will recover their own costs in the prices they charge to consumers. This is (in large part) because vendors enjoy operational and bargaining efficiencies, such as favorable product shipping
arrangements that individual consumers rarely can match.
The internet is an information resource that saves energy, time, and money on a vast scale. The vaster the scale of internet usage, the vaster the scale of saving. Indeed, saving of energy expenditure alone goes hand-inhand with climate change mitigation, pollution reduction, and reduction of scarce-resource consumption. For these reasons, information access constitutes a major social benefit at many levels.
During pandemic times, internet access has been correlated strongly with vaccination rates, in large part because vaccination is arranged via appointments mainly via the internet. That is, vaccination and protection from disease requires computers or smartphones, internet connections, and digital literacy [Michaels (Isaac), et al. 2021]. Internet access, in turn, is correlated with zip codes differing in economic well-being, as indicated by multiple economic descriptors.
Access to information is valuable, and ultimately linked to access to computers and the internet. This gives rise to a strong societal benefit of assuring and even subsidizing internet access for widespread social and environmental benefit. Accordingly, as of this writing, New York City is considering enacting a bill introduced by City Council Member Ben Kallos that would require broadband internet to be treated as a utility, like
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electricity and hot water, in all apartments in the City (Troutman 2021).34 Information access and subsidies [already in Vermont and Virginia (Smith 2021b)] will expand geographically and, in that valuable (though narrow) area, reduce disparities between haves and have-nots. Among the many things that information qualifies as being, it clearly qualifies as a civics and science issue.
A corollary of our great societal interest in information access and information security is our interest in combatting foreign and domestic disinformation and misinformation campaigns. For example, as of this writing, Microsoft and U. S. cybersecurity experts have reported a massive effort by the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (SVR) to penetrate thousands of sites of cloud storage of information by U. S. government agencies and U. S. corporations (Sanger 2021). To the degree that information and access are valuable societal investments, protection of information accuracy and information networks likewise are valuable. Public and private investment in
information and network protection is valuable, notwithstanding the high cost, only in part because the cost of inaction is higher.
------------------------------------------------------ “Gentlemen do not read each other's mail.”
U. S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, regarding his 1929 decision to shut down the ‘Black Chamber’ cryptanalysis unit, which had been founded in 1919 ------------------------------------------------------------------
The value of information naturally gives rise to the issue of information security, most notably including information privacy and cyber-security for individuals and for companies and governments. Ironically, as mentioned earlier, perhaps the worst breach was perpetrated by Donald Trump, who transferred massive numbers of secret U. S. Government documents to his residence/club at Mar-a-Lago at the end of
34 This bill (Int. No. 2418), titled A Local Law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to the provision of internet service to residential tenants, would require owners of multiple dwellings with 10 units or more to bear the cost of providing tenants with broadband internet service or its functional equivalent. Such dwellings would be subject to additional technical requirements, including installation of Ethernet ports and wiring to facilitate internet access. Violations would be punished under the Housing Maintenance Code.
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his tenure as President (see, for example, FBI 2022). After at least a year of possession of these documents, that is, opportunity to sell them, I can only speculate on whether originals and/or copies indeed have been sold. I can think of several reasons why Trump might wish to sell secret U. S. Government information. Considering his much-publicized deep indebtedness, Trump’s character, and his lengthy possession of the documents, I can hardly imagine what factors might have dissuaded him from selling the information, primarily (I would think) but not necessarily only to relieve his indebtedness.
In recent years information security also has gained prominence with private data breaches including identity thefts of increasing frequency and seriousness, especially from foreign sources that appear to be sanctioned by governments such as China and Russia (Lucas 2017). The problem has grown worse. For example, the State of Washington recently has been the victim of massive unemployment fraud and a data breach that exposed a million people’s personal data. Lawmakers therefore want to
improve cybersecurity and security data sharing among allies to prevent future cyberattacks (Demkovich 2021).
A threat somewhat different from disinformation and private information breaches is the ransomware problem (for example, Scientific American Editors 2022). Ransomware attackers “infiltrate a target’s computer system and encrypt its data. They then demand a payment before they will release the decryption key…” Self-protection includes multifactor authentication, training on recognition of phishing attacks and other attacks, and regular back-ups of data. However, these steps do not always suffice, for example, when ransomware ‘worms into’ and compromises back-up systems. An adequate solution seems to require domestic legislation to require reporting of attacks, and cooperation with international actors to hold perpetrators accountable. These solutions have not materialized, but constitute a civics responsibility domestically as well as internationally.
A possibly counter-intuitive threat to information security may be its biggest domestic threat: government over-classification of documents (Hathaway 2022). Documents may be classified as top-secret, secret, or confidential by nearly 2000 government employees having ‘original classification authority’. These employees typically are at risk if they under-classify, so they tend to over-classify. This inflated body of classified documents produces a much larger number of documents that become ‘derivatively classified’ when any of some four million people having
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access to originally classified material creates a new document using such information: “In 2017, more than 49 million documents were derivatively classified,” much if not most unnecessarily, for example including a Merry Christmas e-mail received by former National Security Agency (NSA) Director Michael Hayden (Hathaway 2022).
The civics consequences of information over-classification are enormous, as “a state cannot keep secrets from its enemies without also keeping them from its own population… since it makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the public—and, often, for members of Congress—to know what the executive branch is up to.” (Hathaway 2022). For example, CIA ‘black sites’ for years engaged in torture, which would not have survived public scrutiny if exposed to it. Secrecy has undermined public trust in intelligence agencies, as it did in 2013, when NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed a massive surveillance program under which NSA had accessed the email, instant-messaging, and cell phone data of millions of Americans. Secrecy also has chilled free speech and freedom of the press,
as when the Justice Department indicted WikiLeaks whistle blower Julian Assange for publishing classified documents. Trump used secrecy to promote his political interests, as when he sought to suppress the whistleblowing book by his national security adviser John Bolton by demanding that remain unpublished pending ‘prepublication review’ and approval.
Another information security concern relates to information technology. Globally, for example, one corporation dominates the computer chip manufacturing industry: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (Yang, et al. 2021a). Taiwan Semiconductor has trillion-dollar revenues ($362.4 billion in Quarter 1 of 2021 alone). Worse, the company is based in Taiwan, near China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, and might take military action to enforce this claim. Taiwan has been placed under increasing pressure by China’s military, including air force and naval incursions. Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-
Wen wrote an impassioned appeal in Foreign Affairs (Ing-Wen 2021) for international support, asserting her country’s commitment to maintaining its democracy and independence from China:
“Vibrantly democratic and Western, yet influenced by a Chinese civilization and shaped by Asian traditions, Taiwan, by virtue of both its very existence and its continued prosperity, represents at once an affront to the narrative and an impediment to the regional ambitions of the Chinese
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Communist Party. A fundamental part of this embrace of democracy is a firm belief that the future of Taiwan is to be decided by the Taiwanese through democratic means… Indeed, with its high-tech leadership and educated and globalized workforce, Taiwan is well positioned to help create secure global supply chains in sectors such as semiconductors, biotechnology, and renewable energy—all areas where international cooperation is needed now more than ever. Our semiconductor industry is especially significant: a “silicon shield” that allows Taiwan to protect itself and others from aggressive attempts by authoritarian regimes to disrupt global supply chains.”
Maintaining independence of Taiwan and Taiwan Semiconductor from China clearly is a matter of concern, as China appears to be inclined for strategic benefit to restrict supply of chips and raw materials (rare earth elements) needed for electronic chip manufacture. Action by China
against Taiwan and Taiwan Semiconductor, however, might be devastating to China, which already has inspired fear among governments and corporate clients around the world (Friedman 2021c). In response to the China threat, Taiwan Semiconductor also plans to build production facilities (foundries) elsewhere, possibly including U. S.-based manufacture of chips for military use (Li and Ting-Fang 2020).
The continuing hesitation of China to invade Taiwan may have been reinforced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s war has exemplified how an aggressor might be defeated, not only militarily, but by ethical revulsion, economic sanctions, and isolation by world opinion. Indeed, reinforcement of the near century-old sentiment against aggressive war by European states has been interpreted as an upside consequence of Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine (Mueller 2022): “The key objective is not so much about winning as making sure that the country that started the war is far worse off than if it had not done so.”
Equally concerning is the possibility of foreign-made computer chips undermining mission-critical U. S. and European military equipment, for example via inserting ‘back doors’ to overcome computer security, say, in military aircraft and missiles. Technology companies evidently have incorporated security-compromising features into their products. Two examples were revealed recently by cybersecurity experts in Lithuania (CBS News 2021). The Lithuanian National Cyber Security Center reported finding four major cybersecurity vulnerabilities in
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smartphones made by the Chinese companies Huawei and Xiaomi, and warned against using these brands. Huawei stated that its smartphones do not send user data externally, and Xiaomi assured that its devices “[have] never and will never” censor communications to and from their users.
The U. S., with 12 percent of the global chip supply market, is in less dire straits, as we have domestic chip manufacturing capabilities, such as Advanced MicroDevices (AMD) in Malta, in upstate New York. This company, though manufacturing locally, has foreign ownership, and also is dependent upon imported raw materials for chip manufacture. Other U. S. chip manufacturing companies base their operations in Asia.
As we are experiencing dire shortages of chips, to the point (for example) of interrupting automobile manufacture, efforts are underway here and in Europe to address the raw material and manufacturing problems (Cerulus and Goujard 2021). In the U. S., the Chips for America Act, within the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, would invest
tens of billions of dollars in this industry sector. In the works likewise is a forthcoming European Commission proposal, the European Chips Act, to link together world-class research, design, and testing capacities to boost the European Union share of the global chip supply market to 20 percent by 2030.
Foreign governments, most notably China and Russia, evidently have sponsored massive hacking operations in the U. S., Europe, and elsewhere (for example, Cordes et al. 2021):
“FBI and NSA have "high confidence" that hackers contracted by China's Ministry of State Security carried out the cyberattack on the Microsoft Exchange email server this spring, a breach that exposed tens of thousands of private and public U. S. entities. Victims worldwide included schools, hospitals, cities, and pharmacies.
White House officials say the attack was just one example of "malicious cyber activities" spearheaded by Chinese hackers, including the use of "ransomware" to threaten businesses and extort millions of dollars…
The U. S., joined by major global allies Australia, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the European Union, on Monday formally called out the
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Chinese government for the behavior. Their intention is to signal to China that its cyber activities will prompt countries around the world to unite to protect their networks…
There are notable differences between the Chinese and Russian cyberattacks, however. A senior administration official says there are close ties between contract hackers and the Chinese government: Essentially, the hackers are on the government's payroll and operating at the behest of the government. Russian hackers, on the other hand, have a more tenuous connection to official Russian intelligence agencies.”
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Security of the media
Trump famously labeled the press “the enemy of the people.” He lied whenever it suited him, which was often (daily!), and embraced “alternative facts” when it suited him, which was the same: often. This contravention of the democratic principle of ‘freedom of the press’, and more broadly, freedom of expression, has been facilitated by social media in our digital age. Exploitation of social media by nefarious actors domestically and abroad has spread misinformation and disinformation, and sown mistrust of our democratic institutions, including free and fair elections.
Toward alleviating this burden on our democracy, some social media companies have acted to discourage such behaviors. Facebook, for example, banned (‘deplatformed’) Trump for life, for his nefarious activities promoting misinformation, violence, and overthrow of the U. S. Constitution. Such oversight by social media, however, has spawned
controversy over the degree to which it contravenes the U. S. Constitutional guarantee of free speech. This controversy has been described by many observers, for example Simama 2021): “In clamping down on access to social media platforms by conspiracy theorists, white supremacists and domestic terrorists, we need to protect our truly marginalized citizens' ability to speak truth to power.” A similar controversy has arisen in nations, such as Germany, that have criminalized Holocaust denial.
Simama (2021) favors keeping the internet and social media as open as possible: “What is most precious, though, about the Internet and public access television before it is that these media have provided a way for historically and truly marginalized citizens to speak truth to power. Let's keep it that way.” I have sympathy for this principle, but ‘realpolitik’ provides a cautionary counterpoint. For example, on the day that his lawyers argued that Trump’s words to the mob that stormed the
U. S. Capitol were protected by his First Amendment right to free speech, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump supporter, announced a Florida legislative initiative “to penalize social media companies for blocking politicians, even if they incite violence” (Klas 2021): According to DeSantis: "Under our proposal, if a technology company de-platforms a candidate for elected office in Florida during the election, a company will face a daily fine of $100,000 until the candidate's access to the platform is restored again."
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Our future, our democracy’s future
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I’ve got a hammer, and I've got a bell, and I've got a song to sing, all over this land. It's the hammer of justice; it's the bell of freedom; it's the song about love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land.
If I Had A Hammer. Lyrics by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, 1949; First recorded by The Weavers (Seeger, Hayes, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman), 1950. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Our future will be forged by a multitude of often-conflicting forces. For our democracy to survive, conflicting forces must be resolved favorably in the near term, meaning 2022 and 2024 when critical elections will occur. These elections, existentially important for our democracy, will be decided by two generic types of voter: social-force voters who will defend our democracy (or not) irrespective of politics, and political-force voters who will decide how to vote based upon traditional political issues, most notably including their perceived near-term financial interests. Each group is essential. Together, therefore, the diversity of sociopolitical forces constitutes a nexus between temporal politics and the social issue of
democracy’s prospects, which is my main subject and my main concern… and hopefully yours.
Against this background must be considered the issue of far-right extremism. During the interval from 11 September 2001 to 6 January 2021 the U. S. has focused its anti-terrorism efforts on jihadists, almost to the exclusion of home-grown far-right terrorist groups (Miller-Idriss 2021). A similar trend occurred in Europe.
We are just beginning to understand the importance of combatting far-right extremism at home. This understanding has been increasingly illuminated via scrutiny of technology to analyze the expanding role of social media. Spearheading our understanding of the importance of combatting far-right extremism at home has been the Black Lives Matter movement. BLM has been energized by highly publicized recent examples of cruel policing directed against minorities, especially blacks (for example,
Muller 2021), resulting in vicious beatings and murders. In our
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technological age, these events often have been captured in photographs and/or videos taken with smartphones and disseminated on social media.
The overwhelming message of such egregious police practices is that, to a shockingly large segment of our population, the lives of blacks do not matter, especially within racist police departments (I have no idea of how prevalent they are, but police department racism does seem common) and within especially racism-tolerant communities. The response that “black lives matter” (more precisely, “black lives should matter”) is entirely appropriate in this context. A pervasive self-righteous response by the extreme right has been “All lives matter” or “White lives also matter.” These statements may seem reasonable because they are true, but they actually are unreasonable because they ignore the context: white-dominated police forces have most effectively protected whitedominated communities because, to them, white lives matter most. This structural racism (Rucker and Richeson 2021) is the target of “black lives matter,” and “black lives matter” is the target of right-wing extremists
who refuse to hear or heed this long-overdue message.
The approach to combatting far-right extremism at home or in any country must include age-appropriate civics education, and it must transcend the narrow context of law enforcement:
“Perhaps the single most important lesson to draw from the far right’s mobilization over the past 20 years is that liberal democratic ideas and institutions must be nurtured through education and not just defended by force. The best way to fight an omnipresent extremist fringe is not through suppression alone but by making mainstream society more resilient and less vulnerable to far-right appeals“ (MillerIdriss 2021).
Protection of American democracy must include but also
transcend protection of its disadvantaged segments. Anti-democratic forces are appealing broadly to traditionally centrist groups such as evangelicals (for example, Butler 2019, Gerson 2021b). They also seek to restore previously lost support among educated suburbanites, especially women (Barabak 2019). A strategy for protecting our democracy must be formulated in the near term and implemented effectively. Such a strategy was explicated recently, based upon the apparent effectiveness during and since the Cold War of MAD (mutually assured destruction) at averting nuclear war. Stevenson and Simon (2022) suggest expanding analytical
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activities that assess the success of democracy against specified threats against it, for example via modeling approaches:
“War games, tabletop exercises, operations research, campaign analyses, conferences, and seminars on the prospect of American political conflagration — including insurrection, secession, insurgency, and civil war — should be proceeding at a higher tempo and intensity… The very process of intellectual interaction and collaboration among influential analysts of different political stripes could reconcile many of them to the undesirability of political upheaval, and thus decrease its likelihood” (Stevenson and Simon 2022).
Stevenson and Simon suggest deliberately presenting democracy’s vulnerabilities as a means of increasing awareness among members of the public, many if not most of whom regard democracy as a critically
important quality of our society. This book hopefully will contribute toward informing members of the public of contemporary risks to our cherished democracy, the severity of the risks, and the urgency of addressing them pro-actively.
----------------------------------------------------- “I wish the world was a place where fair was the bottom line… Unfortunately, we don't live in that world.” “Funny, I've always believed that the world is what we make of it.”
Contact. Astronomer Dr. David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt) to SETI researcher Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), and her response. Warner Bros., 11 July 1997 -----------------------------------------------------
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Literature C i t e d
Pre-dawn departure from Reagan National Airport on 18 July 2014… Still waiting for the light.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Winston Churchill. The end of the beginning. Speech delivered at The Lord Mayor's Luncheon, Mansion House, London; 11 November 1942 --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Chapter 01. A Brief Introduction to Civics
Beam, Adam. California unveils plans to be abortion sanctuary if Roe v. Wade overturned. California unveils plans to be abortion sanctuary if Roe v. Wade overturned. Los Angeles, California, Fox 11, https://www.foxla.com/news/california-abortion-sanctuary-if-roeoverturned, 8 December 2021; Biden, Joe. Full transcript of President Biden’s speech in Philadelphia. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/us/politics/biden-speechtranscript.html, 1 September 2022; Collins, Michael; and Matthew Brown. Voting rights groups tell Biden they want action, not 'platitudes,' as he travels to Georgia for speech. USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/01/11/bidenaddress-voting-rights-georgia/9131872002/?gnt-cfr=1, 11 January
2022; Crittenden, Ann. The Shah in New York. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/09/26/archives/the-shah-in-newyork-his-pahlavi-foundation-mixes-business-and.html; Daily Gazette Staff. Siena Poll/ Half of voters in new poll say Cuomo should stay and not resign amid scandals. Schenectady, New York; Daily Gazette, 15 March 2021; DreamWorks. Galaxy Quest. Story by David Howard; directed by Dean Parisot; Universal City, California; DreamWorks Pictures, movie released on 25 December 1999; FBI. Affidavit in support of an application under Rule 41 for a warrant to search and seize. Case 9:22-mj-08332-BER, Document 102-1, Entered on FLSD Docket 08/26/2022, 38 pages, 26 August 2022; Felix, Zak. Ironically Candide—a satire on optimism—should make you optimistic - looking back at Candide's misfortunes 270 years later. Books on Trial, https://www.booksontrial.com/ironically-candide-
a-satire-on-optimism-makes-me-optimistic/, 2020; Gerson, Michael. Ruling may launch a war of unreason. Washington Post op-ed column reprinted in the Albany Times Union Newspaper, 29 June 2022; Hayhoe, Katharine; and Jen Schwartz. The roots of science denial. Scientific American, 317(4):66-8, October 2017; Hayhoe, Katharine. Saving Us – A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. Simon and Schuster, Atria/One Signal, ISBN 978-1-982143-83-1, 320 pages, 21 September 2021;
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Meyer, Carlin. New York Republicans, reject Texas’ platform. Albany, New York; Times Union Newspaper, 1 July 2022; Miller, Tim. Why We Did It – A Travelogue from the Republican Road To Hell. New York City, Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, 259 pages, 14 June 2022; Patrick, Stewart M. The international order isn’t ready for the climate crisis - the case for a new planetary politics. Foreign Affairs, 100(6):166-76, November/December 2021; Releford, Bill J.; Stanley K. Frencher, and Antronette K. Yancey. Health promotion in barbershops: balancing outreach and research in African American communities. Ethnicity & Disease, 20(2):1858, 2010; Robinson, Eugene. This is not a court. It’s a junta. Washington Post oped column reprinted in the Albany Times Union Newspaper, 30 June 2022; Rubin, Jennifer. Opinion: Here’s the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. The Washington Post, 14 March 2021;
Sargent, Greg. Opinion: a new plan to ‘Trump-proof’ the 2024 election quietly comes together. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/11/newproposal-electoral-count-act-trump-2024/, 11 January 2022; Schwarzenegger, Arnold. Don’t be a schmuck; put on a mask. The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/schwarzenegge r-schmuck-mask-vaccines/619746/, August 2021; Sen, Maya. Save the Supreme Court and democracy. Science Magazine, 377(6607):693, doi: 10.1126/Science.ade2724, 12 August 2022; Texas GOP. Report of the 2022 Platform & Resolutions Committee, https://texasgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/6-PermanentPlatform-Committee-FINAL-REPORT-6-16-2022.pdf, 40 pages, 6 June 2022; Voltaire, Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire. Candide. Europe, clandestine publishers, including Cramer, Marc-Michel Rey;
January 1759.
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Chapter 02. A Brief Introduction to Science
Bender, Bryan. Whose job is it to prevent Armageddon? Calls grow for a global planetary defense strategy as thousands of near-Earth asteroids are discovered each year. Politico, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/20/global-planetarydefense-earth-asteroids-523072?cid=apn, 20 November 2021; Buonocore, Jonathan J.; Parichehr Salimifard, Drew R. Michanowicz, and Joseph G. Allen. A decade of the U. S. energy mix transitioning away from coal: historical reconstruction of the reductions in the public health burden of energy. Environmental Research Letters, 16: 054030, https://doi.org/10.1088/17489326/abe74c, 2021; Collman, Ashley. 2 top FDA officials resigned over the Biden administration’s booster-shot plan, saying it insisted on the policy before the agency approved it, reports say. Business Insider,
https://www.businessinsider.com/2-top-fda-officials-resignedbiden-booster-plan-reports-2021-9, 1 September 2021; Duvvuri, Radhika. Unveiling the public health burden of natural gas. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Union of Concerned Scientists, https://blog.ucsusa.org/science-blogger/public-health-burdennatural-gas/, 19 July 2021; Feuer, Michael J. Science, civics, and democracy. Science 371(6528):442, doi: 10.1126/science.abg7402, 29 January 2021; Michaels, Robert A. Effect of DDT On Growth Rate and Photosynthesis in Pediastrum boryanum (Chlorococcales). Athens, Georgia, USA; University of Georgia, Institute of Ecology, Department of Zoology; Master of Science (MS) Degree, James E. Schindler, Major Professor; Donald C. Scott, Reading Committee Chairperson; 89 pages plus Appendices, August 1971; Michaels, Robert A. Polychlorinated Biphenyl Toxicity to Two Phytoplankters as a Function of Environmental Conditions. Stony
Brook, New York, USA; State University of New York at Stony Brook, Department of Ecology and Evolution, Marine Sciences Research Center (MSRC), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Biology Degree, George C. Williams, Dissertation Committee Chairperson (Department of Ecology & Evolution); work performed in the laboratory of Charles F. Wurster, Marine Sciences Research Center, 182 pages including Front Matter, August 1979; Michaels, Robert A. Confidence in courts: a delicate balance. Science, 357(6353):764, Letters, doi: 10.1126/science.aao3967, 25 August
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2017b; Michaels, Robert A.; R. George Rowland, and Charles F. Wurster. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) inhibit photosynthesis per cell in the diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana. Environmental Pollution (Series A), 27(1):9-14, 1982; Scheider, W.; and P. Wallis. An alternate method of calculating the population density of monsters in Loch Ness. Limnology and Oceanography 18(2):343-5, 1973; Sheldon, R. W.; and S. R. Kerr. The population density of monsters in Loch Ness. Limnology and Oceanography 17:696-8, 1972; US Continental Congress. Declaration of Independence, United States of America, 4 July 1776; US CRS. Federal Scientific Integrity Policies: A Primer. U. S. Congressional Research Service, https://crsreports.congress.gov, R46614, 20 pages, 2020, updated 16 April 2021.
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Chapter 03. What Matters in Civics and Science?
Albright, Madeleine K. The coming democratic revival – America’s opportunity to lead the fight against authoritarianism. Foreign Affairs, 100(6):99-111, November/December 2021; Bao, Han-Wu-Shuang; Jianxiong Wang, and Huajian Cai. Blame crime on name? People with bad names are more likely to commit crimes. PsyArXiv preprint, https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/txhqg, 9 July 2020; Barnes, Melody; and Caroline E. Janney. Opinion: In a civil war, accountability must precede healing. The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-a-civil-waraccountability-must-precede-healing/2021/01/15/8a8004de-576911eb-a817-e5e7f8a406d6_story.html, 15 January 2021; Blake, Aaron. How the Capitol riot has been linked to Trump and the GOP. The Washington Post,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/05/how-capitolriot-has-been-linked-trump-gop/, 5 March 2021a; Churchill, Winston. Speech to the British House of Commons, 17 May 1916; Cochrane, Emily. Senate passes $1 trillion infrastructure bill, handing Biden a bipartisan win. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/us/politics/infrastructurebill-passes.html, 10 August 2021; updated 11 August 2021; Cooter, Amy. Inside America’s militias. Scientific American, 326(1):3441, January 2022; Daley, Jim. Bacterial bipartisanship. Scientific American, 325(3):22, September 2021; Fine, Reuben. Great Moments in Modern Chess. New York City, Dover Publishing, 1948; Gerson, Michael. Rescue plan is a boost, not a revolution. Washington Post op-ed column reprinted in the Albany Times Union Newspaper,
17 March 2021c; Gerson, Michael. A lesson from Frederick Douglass. Washington Post op-ed column reprinted in the Albany Times Union Newspaper, 10 November 2021e; Gilbert, Asha C. Crabs, octopus and lobsters feel pain, study says. They will be recognized as 'sentient beings'. USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/11/22/crabshrimp-lobster-recognized-sentient-uk/8716768002/, 22 November 2021;
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Goodykoontz, Paul. 'I lie': Oops. Fox News host Tucker Carlson says the quiet part loud. USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2021/09/15/foxnews-host-tucker-carlson-lies/8349425002/, 15 September 2021; Gordenstein, Carly; and Seamus Hughes. A sea change in counterterrorism. Lawfare Institute, https://www.lawfareblog.com/sea-change-counterterrorism, 13 June 2021; Gould, Stephen Jay. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-63940-5, 501 pages, 1977; digitized by the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/ontogenyphylogen00goul, 2017; Harwood, John. Former top Trump Russia adviser details the sharp contrast between the former President and Biden. CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/20/politics/fiona-hill-donaldtrump-joe-biden/index.html, 20 February 2022; Helderman, Rosalind S. Impeachment is over. But other efforts to reckon
with Trump’s post-election chaos have just begun. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/election-claimslegal-sanctions/2021/02/21/4b051646-71fe-11eb-85fae0ccb3660358_story.html, 21 February 2021; Hill, Fiona. The Kremlin’s strange victory - how Putin exploits American dysfunction and fuels American decline. Foreign Affairs, 100(6):36-47, November/December 2021; Jisi, Wang. The plot against China? Foreign Affairs, 100(4):48-57, July/August 2021; Kearney, Melissa Schettini. The Economic Winners and Losers of Legalized Gambling. Washington DC; Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2016/06/200502kearney.pdf, February 2005; Kennedy, John F. Inaugural address to the Nation, 20 January 1961; Kessler, Glenn. Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims as president. Nearly half came in his final year. Washington Post,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-fact-checkertracked-trump-claims/2021/01/23/ad04b69a-5c1d-11eb-a976bad6431e03e2_story.html?itid=sf_politics, 23 January 2021; Lawson, Asher; and Hemant Kakkar. Fake-news sharers. Highly impulsive people who lean conservative are most likely to pass along false news stories. Scientific American, 326(4):78, April 2022; Lerner, Alan Jay; and Frederick Loewe. Camelot. Majestic Theatre, Broadway, New York City, opening performance 3 December 1960;
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Lewis, Tanya; and Amanda Montañez. Covid’s hidden toll: many of the excess deaths in rural U. S. counties last year were not recorded as Covid deaths. Scientific American 325(3):84, September 2021; Light, Nicholas; Philip M. Fernbach, Nathaniel Rabb, Mugur V. Geana, and Steven A. Sloman. Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues. Science Advances, 8(29), eabo0038, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abo0038, 10 pages, 20 July 2022; Manchester, Julia. Trump's election fraud claims pose risks for GOP in midterms. The Hill, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/572484-trumps-electionfraud-claims-pose-risks-for-gop-in-midterms, 16 September 2021; Mazza, Ed. Kimmel gives Trump supporters an uncomfortable truth about the ex-president - the late-night host tells Trump’s fans how the former president really feels about them. HuffPost, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jimmy-kimmel-trumpsupporters_n_602cb057c5b6cc8bbf37e9e3?ncid=APPLENEWS00
001 17 February 2021; Michaels, Robert A. Gulf oil blowout: a lesson not to be learned by experience. Environmental Practice, 12(4):396-7, December 2010; Michaels, Robert A. Infrastructure plan invests in the future. Letter, Schenectady, New York; Daily Gazette Newspaper, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350609274_Michaels_R obert_A_Infrastructure_plan_invests_in_the_future_Letter_Schene ctady_New_York_Daily_Gazette_3_April_2021, 3 April 2021c; Millhiser, Ian. The nihilism of Neil Gorsuch. Vox, https://www.vox.com/22431044/neil-gorsuch-nihilism-supremecourt-voting-rights-lgbt-housing-obamacare-constitution, 2 October 2021; NSCJ. Regulatory Guide for Reviewing Safety Design of Light Water Nuclear Power Reactor Facilities. Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission, August 1990; updated 2012;
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London, Secker & Warburg, 328 pages, 8 June 1949; Orwell, George. Politics and the English Language - A Collection of Essays 156-71; 10th edition, Essay No. 157, 1981; Parker, Linda V. U. S. District Judge Opinion and Order in the matter of: Timothy King, et al. (Plaintiffs) v. Gretchen Whitmer, et al. (Defendants) and City of Detroit, Democratic National Committee, Michigan Democratic Party, and Robert Davis (IntervenorDefendants), Civil Case No. 20-13134, U. S. District Court, Eastern
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District of Michigan, Southern Division, 110 pages, 25 August 2021b; Republican Party. Republican Platform 2016. Committee on Arrangements for the 2016 Republican National Convention (www.gopconvention2016.com, inoperative on 28 January 2022), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/books/president ial-documents-archive-guidebook/national-political-partyplatforms-of-parties-receiving-electoral-votes-18402016/117718.pdf, 66 pages, 2016; Roddenberry, Gene. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Screenplay by Nicholas Meyer; starring William Shatner (Kirk) and Leonard Nimoy (Spock); Paramount Pictures, released 4 June 1982; Rosenberg, Eli. White House fires Trump EEOC official after she refuses to step down. The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/05/biden-eeocgeneral-counsel-trump/, 5 March 2021; Rosenberg, Eli; and Reis Thebault. Biden fires Trump-appointed labor
board general counsel and deputy who refused to resign. The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/01/20/biden-firesnlrb-peter-robb/, 21 January 2021; Rutenberg, Jim; Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg, and Michael S. Schmidt. 77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election. New York City, The New York Times, 31 January 2021; Santayana, George. The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense. New York City, Charles Scribner & Sons, page 284, 1905;Scientific American Editors. Coroners should be abolished. Editorial. New York City, Scientific American, 324(5):8, May 2021; Sheil, Douglas; Gert-Jan Nabuurs, and Anatoly Shvidenko. Hopes for Russia’s new forest code. Science, 372(6541):472-3, doi 10.1126/science.abi9095, 30 April 2021; Shieber, Jonathan. Nuclear fusion tech developer General Fusion now
has Shopify and Amazon founders backing it. TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/14/nuclear-fusion-tech-developergeneral-fusion-now-has-shopify-and-amazon-founders-backingit/?guccounter=1, 14 January 2021; Stanley, Jason. Movie at the Ellipse: a study in Fascist propaganda. Scholars on the Nazis and anti-Semitism have seen this before. Just Security, https://www.justsecurity.org/74504/movie-at-the-ellipsea-study-in-fascist-propaganda/, 4 February 2021;
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Tavernise, Sabrina; and Abby Goodnough. Covid causes sharp drop in U. S. life expectancy. New York City, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/us/covid-lifeexpectancy.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210217&instan ce_id=27236&nl=themorning®i_id=77476632&segment_id=51871&te=1&user_id= ae02264a2dde1a4933664e05346d707b, 18 February 2021; Trump, Mary L. Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. New York City, Simon & Schuster, 240 pages, 14 July 2020; Urban, Diana. Recognize animal abuse as a red flag for gun violence. Albany, New York; Times Union Newspaper, 8 June 2022; US NAP. Lessons Learned from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident for Improving Safety of U. S. Nuclear Plants. Washington, DC; U. S. National Academies Press, 395 pages, 2014; US NIH. More than 140,000 U. S. children lost a primary or secondary caregiver due to the COVID-19 pandemic. U. S. National Institute
of Health, https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/more140000-us-children-lost-primary-or-secondary-caregiver-duecovid-19-pandemic, 07 October 2021; Wachtler, Sol. Here’s how Fox News can honor vets: stop lying. Albany, New York; Times Union Newspaper, 10 November 2021; Xia, Cai. The party that failed – an insider breaks with Beijing. Foreign Affairs, 100(1):78-96, January/February 2021; Xing, Xiaofan; Yuankang Xiong, Ruipu Yang, Rong Wang, Weibing Wang, Haidong Kan, Tun Lu, Dongsheng Li, Junji Cao, Josep Peñuelas, Philippe Ciais, Nico Bauer, Olivier Boucher, Yves Balkanski, Didier Hauglustaine, Guy Brasseur, Lidia Morawska, Ivan A. Janssens, Xiangrong Wang, Jordi Sardans, Yijing Wang, Yifei Deng, Lin Wang, Jianmin Chen, Xu Tang, and Renhe Zhang. Predicting the effect of confinement on the COVID-19 spread using machine learning enriched with satellite air pollution observations. Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, PNAS 118(33), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2109098118, 17 August 2021; Yang, Maya. Seven doctors contract Covid after attending Florida antivaccine summit - doctors tested positive or developed symptoms ‘within days’ of conference at which alternative treatments were discussed. London, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/23/floridadoctors-covid-coronavirus-bruce-boros?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1, 23 November 2021b.
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Chapter 04. Incredibility of ‘Conspiracy Theories’
Abella, Benjamin S.; Eliana L. Jolkovsky, Barbara T. Biney, Julie E. Uspal, Matthew C. Hyman, Ian Frank, Scott E. Hensley, Saar Gill, Dan T. Vogl, Ivan Maillard, Daria V. Babushok, Alexander C. Huang, MD, Sunita D. Nasta, Jennifer C. Walsh; E. Paul Wiletyo, Phyllis A. Gimotty, Michael C. Milone, Ravi K. Amaravadi, and the Prevention and Treatment of COVID19 With Hydroxychloroquine (PATCH) Investigators. Efficacy and Safety of hydroxychloroquine vs. placebo for pre-exposure SARS-CoV-2 prophylaxis among health care workers - a randomized clinical trial. Journal of the American Medical Society, online 30 September 2020, doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.6319, JAMA Intern Medicine, 181(2):195-202, 2021; Albright, Madeleine K. The coming democratic revival – America’s
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Chapter 06. Civics, Science, and Covid-19 Pandemic Management
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S. Winkler, Björn Tampe , Franziska Scheibe , Péter Körtvélyessy, Dirk Reinhold, Britta Siegmund , Anja A. Kühl, Sefer Elezkurtaj, David Horst, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Tsokos, Barbara Ingold-Heppner, Christine Stadelmann, Christian Drosten, Victor Max Corman, Helena Radbruch, and Frank L. Heppner. Olfactory transmucosal SARS-CoV-2 invasion as a port of central nervous system entry in individuals with COVID-19. Nature Neuroscience, 24:168-75, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-020-00758-5, February 2021; Meko, Tim; Denise Lu, and Lazaro Gamio. How Trump won the presidency with razor-thin margins in swing states. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016election/swing-state-margins/, 11 November 2016; Michaels, Robert A. Serology testing for antibodies induced by Covid19 may indicate past exposure without past infection. Science, eLetter, online:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6495/1060/tab-eletters, 18 June 2020a; Michaels, Robert A. Look to science, data to slow Covid-19. Letter, Schenectady, New York; Daily Gazette Newspaper, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342715717_Look_to_s cience_data_to_slow_Covid19_Letter_to_the_Editor_Daily_Gazette_Newspaper_Schenectad y_New_York_Sunday_5_July_2020, Sunday 5 July 2020b;
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Michaels, Robert A. Look at risks of in-person schooling. Letter, Schenectady, New York; Daily Gazette, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347358002_Look_at_R isks_of_Inperson_Schooling_Letter_to_the_Editor_Daily_Gazette_Newspa per_Schenectady_New_York_16_December_2020, 16 December 2020c; Michaels, Robert A. Comment on “Viral evolution may herald new pandemic phase.” Science Magazine, e-Letter, online: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6525/108/tab-e-letters, 19 January 2021a; Michaels, Robert A. The future disease burden of pandemic Covid-19 for individuals, communities, and society. Environmental Claims Journal, https://doi.org/10.1080/10406026.2021.2015821, 15 pages, online 16 December 2021d; Michaels, Robert A. In-person schooling is not without risks. Albany, New York; Times Union Newspaper, page A-9,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358002951_Inperson_schooling_is_not_without_risks_Albany_New_York_Time s_Union_Newspaper_page_A-9_21_January_2022, 21 January 2022b; MMWR. COVID-19 outbreak associated with a SARS-CoV-2 R.1 lineage variant in a skilled nursing facility after vaccination program — Kentucky, March 2021. U. S. Centers for Disease Control, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 70(17)639-43, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7017e2H.pdf, 30 April 2021a; MMWR. COVID-19 Vaccine breakthrough infections reported to CDC — United States, January 1 - April 30, 2021. U. S. Centers for Disease Control, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 25 May 2021b; Moghadas, Seyed M.; Pratha Sah, Thomas N. Vilches, and Alison P. Galvani. Can the USA return to pre-Covid-19 normal by July 4?
Lancet Infectious Disease, https://doi.org/10.1016/ S14733099(21)00324-8, online 2 June 2021; Nesse, Randolph M.; and George C. Williams. Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine. New York City, Knopf Doubleday, 304 pages, January 1996; NY.gov. COVID-19 vaccine tracker, https://covid19vaccine.health.ny.gov/covid-19-vaccine-tracker, access date 19 June 2021;
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Parker, Emory. A new way to visualize the surge in Covid-19 cases in the U. S. Stat News, https://www.statnews.com/2021/07/26/new-wayvisualize-covid-19-case-surge-us/, 26 July 2021a; Pennisi, Elizabeth. Computer scan uncovers 100,000 new viruses - clues to future outbreaks may be hidden in existing genomic databases. Science Magazine, 375(6580):483, doi: 10.1126/science.ada0854, 4 February 2022; Petri, William. Does coronavirus linger in the body? What we know about how viruses in general hang on in the brain and testicles, https://theconversation.com/does-coronavirus-linger-in-the-bodywhat-we-know-about-how-viruses-in-general-hang-on-in-thebrain-and-testicles-142878, 31 July 2020; Prendecki, Maria; Candice Clarke, Jonathan Brown, Alison Cox, Sarah Gleeson, Mary Guckian, Paul Randell, Alessia Dalla Pria, Liz Lightstone, Xiao-Ning Xu, Wendy Barclay, Stephen P. McAdoo, Peter Kelleher, and Michelle Willicombe. Effects of previous SARS-CoV-2 infection on humoral and T-cell responses to
single-dose BNT162b2 vaccine. The Lancet, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00502-X, online 25 February 2021; Rabin, Roni Caryn. An unvaccinated worker set off an outbreak at a U. S. nursing home where most residents were immunized. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/health/vaccinenursing-homes-infections.html?referringSource=articleShare, 21 April 2021;Shammas, Brittany. Nearly 900 people got expired Pfizer-BioNTech shots In New York City. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/06/16/expiredcoronavirus-vaccine-doses/, 16 June 2021; Scheepers, Cathrine; Josie Everatt, Daniel G. Amoako, Houriiyah Tegally, Constantinos Kurt Wibmer, Anele Mnguni, Arshad Ismail, Boitshoko Mahlangu, Bronwen E. Lambson, Simone I. Richardson, Darren P. Martin, Eduan Wilkinson, James Emmanuel San, Jennifer Giandhari, Nelia Manamela, Noxolo
Ntuli, Prudence Kgagudi, Sandile Cele, Sureshnee Pillay, Thabo Mohale, Upasana Ramphal, Yeshnee Naidoo , Zamantungwa T. Khumalo, Gaurav Kwatra, Glenda Gray, Linda-Gail Bekker, Shabir A. Madhi, Vicky Baillie, Wesley C. Van Voorhis, NGSSA, Florette K. Treurnicht, Marietjie Venter, Koleka Mlisana, Nicole Wolter, Alex Sigal, Carolyn Williamson, Nei-yuan Hsiao, Nokukhanya Msomi, Tongai Maponga, Wolfgang Preiser, Zinhle Makatini, Richard Lessells, Penny L. Moore, Tulio de Oliveira, Anne von Gottberg, and Jinal N. Bhimann. Emergence
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and phenotypic characterization of C.1.2, a globally detected lineage that rapidly accumulated mutations of concern. MedRxiv preprint, https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.20.21262342, 24 September 2021; Statista. Number of deaths from coronavirus (Covid-19) in the United States as of January 12, 2022, by state, https://statista.com/sttistics/1103688/coronavirus-covid-19-deathsus-by-state/, access date 15 January 2022; Steenhuysen, Julie. Fauci says U. S. political divisions contributed to 500,000 dead from COVID-19. https://www.reuters.com/article/ushealth-coronavirus-fauci-idUSKBN2AM2O9, Reuters, 23 February 2021; Stieg, Cory. 9 vaccinated Yankees players and staff tested positive for Covid — here’s how that happens. CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/new-york-yankeesbreakthrough-covid-cases-in-vaccinated-team-members.html, 18 May 2021;
Suttle, Curtis A. Marine viruses – major players in the global ecosystem. Nature Reviews of Microbiology, 5(801): doi: 10.1038/nrmicro1750, October 2007; Thorp, H. Holden. Come on, CDC, we need you. Science 372 (6546):1017, doi: 10.1126/science.abj7320, 4 June 2021; UN WHO. WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard. Lyons, France; United Nations World Health Organization Emergency Dashboard, https://covid19.who.int, access date 16 June 2021; US CDC. COVID Data Tracker. Atlanta, Georgia; U. S. Centers for Disease Control, https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-datatracker/#cases_casesper100klast7days, access date 16 June 2021b; US CDC. Covid Data Tracker: Covid-19 vaccinations in the united states. Atlanta, Georgia; U. S. Centers For Disease Control, https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations, access date 19 June 2021c; US CDC. Interim clinical considerations for use of Covid-19 vaccines
currently authorized in the United States. Atlanta, Georgia; U. S. Centers For Disease Control, https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid19/clinical-considerations/covid-19-vaccines-us.html, access date 26 June 2021d; US FDA. Antibody testing is not currently recommended to assess immunity after Covid-19 vaccination, https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safetycommunications/antibody-testing-not-currently-recommended-
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assess-immunity-after-covid-19-vaccination-fda-safety, 19 May 2021; Voltaire, Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire. Candide. Europe, clandestine publishers, including Cramer, Marc-Michel Rey; January 1759; Wikipedia. 2020 United States presidential election, https://worldpopulationreview.com/states, access date 15 January 2022; Wu, Katherine J. What breakthrough infections can tell us - Postvaccination infections reveal how effective vaccines are—and which variants are sneaking past our defenses. The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/05/trackingbreakthrough-infections/619027/, 27 May 2021; Wynants, Laure; Ben Van Calster, Gary S. Collins, Richard D. Riley, Georg Heinze, Ewoud Schuit, Marc M. J. Bonten, Johanna A. A. Damen, Thomas P. A. Debray, Maarten De Vos, Paula Dhiman, Maria C. Haller, Michael O. Harhay, Liesbet
Henckaerts, Nina Kreuzberger, Anna Lohmann, Kim Luijken, Jie Ma, Constanza L. Andaur Navarro, Johannes B. Reitsma, Jamie C. Sergeant, Chunhu Shi, Nicole Skoetz, Luc J. M. Smits, Kym I. E. Snell, Matthew Sperrin, René Spijker, Ewout W. Steyerberg, Toshihiko Takada, Sander M. J. Van Kuijk, Florien S. Van Royen, Christine Wallisch, Lotty Hooft, Karel G. M. Moons, And Maarten Van Smeden. Prediction models for diagnosis and prognosis of covid-19: systematic review and critical appraisal. BMJ (British Medical Journal), 369: M1328, doi: 10.1136/bmj.m1328, online 7 April 2020.
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Chapter 07. Immigration, Citizenship, Voting, and Voter Suppression
Abernathy, Gary. Opinion: How much better would government be if only the people who truly cared voted? Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/15/our-voterturnout-problem-isnt-result-suppression-its-apathy/, 15 April 2021; American Compass, https://americancompass.org/about/, access date 11 March 2021; Anonymous. Book of Exodus. The Bible, Old Testament, 8:1-4; undated; Austen, Ian. Canada to stop delivering mail to city homes over 5 years. The New York Times, 11 December 2013; Barnes, Robert. Supreme Court to again consider federal protections for minority voters. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supremecourt-voting-rights-act/2021/02/27/11ade0f8-7870-11eb-9537-
496158cc5fd9_story.html, 27 February 2021; Biden, Joe. Full transcript of President Biden’s speech in Philadelphia. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/us/politics/biden-speechtranscript.html, 1 September 2022; Blake, Aaron. The GOP’s gradual descent into ‘replacement theory’. The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/17/gopsgradual-descent-into-replacement-theory/, 16 April 2021b; Boot, Max. Opinion: The GOP is accelerating its descent into authoritarianism. The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/17/gop-isaccelerating-its-descent-into-authoritarianism/, 17 March 2021; Brennan Center for Justice, and Bipartisan Policy Center. Election Officials Under Attack – How to Protect Administrators and Safeguard Democracy. New York City, Brennan Center for Justice;
and Washington, DC; Bipartisan Policy Center; https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/BCJ129%20ElectionOfficials_v7.pdf, 38 pages, 16 June 2021; Brigety II, Reuben E. The fractured power – how to overcome tribalism. Foreign Affairs 100(2):40-6, March/April 2021; Brooks, David. In America, a new age of optimism. Albany, New York; Times Union Newspaper, 25 January 2021; Bush, (former U. S. President) George W. Out of Many One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants. New York City; Crown, imprint of
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Penguin Random House, 208 pages, 2021; Bush Presidential Center. Out of Many One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants. Dallas, Texas; George W. Bush Presidential Center, https://www.bushcenter.org/immigration/out-of-many-onebook.html, access date 20 August 2021;
Cass, Oren M. A new conservatism – freeing the right from free-market orthodoxy. Foreign Affairs 100(2):116-28, March/April 2021; Cheney, Kyle. Efforts to Trump-proof presidential certification crash into congressional realities. Politico, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/01/congress-futurepresidential-ballots-trump-challenge-526168, 1 January 2022; Collinson, Stephen. Trump unleashes new threat to American democracy. CNN Politics, https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/01/politics/cpac2021-trump-speech-american-democracy/index.html, 1 March 2021; Corasaniti, Nick; Kenneth P. Vogel, Luke Broadwater, and Hailey Fuchs. As courts back broad mail-in voting, Dejoy apologizes for missteps. The New York Times, 17 September 2020; Edmondson, Catie. Despite a congressman’s censure, Republicans have shown a growing tolerance for violent rhetoric. The New York Times, 22 November 2021;
Filbin, Patrick. Georgia senator introduces bill to secure voting process. Chattanooga, Tennessee; Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Governing.com, https://www.governing.com/now/GeorgiaSenator-Introduces-Bill-to-Secure-the-VotingProcess.html?utm_term=Georgia%20Senator%20Introduces%20Bi ll%20to%20Secure%20the%20Voting%20Process&utm_campaign =Fewer%20Police%2C%20No%20Parades%3A%20The%20Sque eze%20on%20Local%20Budgets&utm_content=email&utm_sourc e=Act-On+Software&utm_medium=email, 3 February 2021; Gerson, Michael. Our once and future violence. Washington Post op-ed column reprinted in the Albany Times Union Newspaper, 17 November 2021f; Hacker, Jacob S.; and Paul Pierson. The Republican devolution – partisanship and the decline of American governance. Foreign Affairs, 98(4):42-50, July/August 2019; Hunt, Katie. Rare 'locked' letter sealed 300 years ago is finally opened
virtually. CNN, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/opening-sealedletters-study-scn/index.html, 2 March 2021; Jordan, Miriam; Annie Correal, and Patricia Mazzei. At Trump’s Florida resort empire, a quiet effort to eliminate an undocumented work force. The New York Times,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/us/mar-a-lagoundocumented-workers.html, 9 April 2019; Lalljee, Jason; and Andy Kiersz. Three million workers are missing amid the labor shortage, and two million of them are immigrants who never came to the U. S. because of Trump-era policies. Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/immigration-couldsolve-labor-shortage-3-million-missing-workers-trump-2021-11, 2021; Lincoln, Abraham. Gettysburg Address, 19 November 1863; McGuirk, Rod. Plague of ravenous, destructive mice tormenting Australians. AP News, https://apnews.com/article/plagueravenous-destructive-mice-tormenting-australiansb8b85ecc13e147f151510e8635d2d032?ct=t(rss_email_campaign), 28 May 2021; Michaels, Robert A. Introduction to the Special Topic: Environmental and Public Health Risks Associated with Climate Change. Environmental Practice, 16(1):2-3, Letter from the Guest Editor,
March 2014; Michaels, Robert A. The emerging urgency of mitigating environmental impacts and potential public health risks of the United States Postal Service. Environmental Claims Journal, 30(2), 142-50, doi: 10.1080/10406026.2018.1442077, (https://doi.org/10.1080/10406026.2018.1442077), published online 9 March 2018b; Michaels, Robert A. Trump, GOP threaten future of country. Schenectady, New York; Daily Gazette, 13 July 2019; Michaels, Robert A. Mars rover landing conjures images of 1900s odyssey. Letter, Schenectady, New York; Daily Gazette Newspaper, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349570937_Michaels_R obert_A_Mars_rover_landing_conjures_images_of_1900s_odysse y_Letter_Schenectady_New_York_Daily_Gazette_24_February_2 021, 24 February 2021b;
Michaels, Robert A.; and Earl Dworkin. Beyond politics? Bipartisan outrage brings unity. Schenectady, New York; The Jewish World, 53(21):2, 12 July 2018; Mihm, Stephen. Political polarization and Independent voters in the U. S. Bloomberg Opinion, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-31/politicalpolarization-and-independent-voters-in-the-u-s, 31 January 2021; Robinson, Eugene. Trump and dysfunction define GOP. Washington Post op-ed column reprinted in the Albany Times Union Newspaper, 18
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November 2021; Sales, Ben. Jewish activists are helping families separated at the border. Jewish Standard, https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/jewish-activists-arehelping-families-separated-at-the-border-2/, 21 June 2018;
Samuels, Brett; and Rebecca Beitsch. Biden immigration orders include family unification task force. The Hill, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/536872-bidenimmigration-orders-include-family-unification-task-force, 2 February 2021; Sargent, Greg. Opinion: How Democrats will try to ‘Trump proof’ the White House — behind the GOP’s back. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/09/schifftrump-executive-branch-reform/, 9 September 2021; Simon, Paul; and Art Garfunkel. Mrs. Robinson. Song recorded on Columbia Records, released 5 April 1968; Smith, Carl. Under fire and overworked, election officials feel unsafe. Governing.com, https://www.governing.com/now/under-fireand-overworked-election-officials-feelunsafe?utm_term=Under%20Fire%20and%20Overworked%2C %20Election%20Officials%20Feel%20Unsafe&utm_campaign=
Special%20Voting%2FElections%20Edition&utm_content=emai l&utm_source=Act-On+Software&utm_medium=email, 7 pages, 18 June 2021a; Snyder, Laura J. The Philosophical Breakfast Club. New York City, Broadway Books, Crown Publishing Group, Division of Random House, 439 pages, 2011; Trump. Mary L. Donald’s Plot Against America. The New Republic, https://newrepublic.com/article/163115/donald-trump-plotagainst-america, 12 August 2021; US Continental Congress. Declaration of Independence, United States of America, 4 July 1776; Will, George. Increase in immigration good for U. S. Albany, New York; Times Union Newspaper, https://digital.olivesoftware.com/olive/ODN/AlbanyTimesUnion/ PrintArticle.aspx?doc=HATU%2F2021%2F01%2F24&entity=ar 05500&ts=20210124100250&uq=20210107113312&mode=text,
24 January 2021.
Chapter 08. Civics, Science, and International Re-engagement
Albright, Madeleine K. The coming democratic revival – America’s opportunity to lead the fight against authoritarianism. Foreign Affairs, 100(6):99-111, November/December 2021; Alvarez, Priscilla; and Michael Warren. Trump adviser Stephen Miller warned of 'Iraqs and 'Stans' in the US while slow-walking the entry of Afghan allies. CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/03/politics/trump-adviser-stephenmiller-afghan-allies-us-entry/index.html, 3 September 2021; Arnold, Matthew. Dover Beach. In: Matthew Arnold, New Poems, Boston, Massachusetts; Ticknor and Fields, 208 pages, 1867; Berkovitz, Will. Afghan allies in hiding, executed in the street — Jewish people know this haunting story. USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/09/09/afghan istan-taliban-killing-people/5772708001/, 9 September 2021;
Churchill, Winston. Never before in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. Speech to the British House of Commons. London; 20 August 1940; Cunningham, Erin; Rachel Pannett, Ellen Francis, Karoun Demirjian, John Hudson, Paulina Villegas, and Claire Parker. Biden vows retribution after 13 U. S. service members were killed in Afghanistan bombing. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/26/afghanistankabul-taliban-live-updates/, 27 August 2021; Dawsey, Josh; and Felicia Sonmez. RNC votes to condemn Cheney, Kinzinger for serving on House committee investigating Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump mob. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/03/rnc-cheneytrump/, 3 February, updated 4 February 2022; Fazal, Tanisha M. The case for complacency. Foreign Affairs, 100(5):204-8, September/October 2021;
Fazal, Tanisha M. The return of conquest? Why the future of global order hinges on Ukraine. Foreign Affairs, 101(3):20-7, May/June 2022; Feaver, Peter D. A stormy but durable marriage. Foreign Affairs, 100(5):232-5, September/October 2021; Fukuyama, Francis. A country of their own – liberalism need the nation. Foreign Affairs, 101(3):80-91, May/June 2022; George, Susannah. U. S. Embassy contractors, visa applicants among Afghans left behind after one of the largest airlifts in history. Washington Post,
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/05/afghansleft-behind-us-embassy/, 5 September 2021; Hill, Fiona. The Kremlin’s strange victory - how Putin exploits American dysfunction and fuels American decline. Foreign Affairs, 100(6):36-47, November/December 2021;
Horton, Chris. The world is fed up with China’s belligerence - democracies are no longer as worried as they once were about offending a fragile Beijing. The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/11/chinataiwan-democracy/620647/, 9 November 2021; Kara-Murza, Vladimir. Opinion: A congressional proposal reveals the Kremlin’s Achilles’ heel. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/24/congressi onal-proposal-reveals-kremlins-achilles-heel/, 24 November 2021; Michaels, Robert A. Polychlorinated Biphenyl Toxicity to Two Phytoplankters as a Function of Environmental Conditions. Stony Brook, New York, USA; State University of New York at Stony Brook, Department of Ecology and Evolution, Marine Sciences Research Center (MSRC), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Biology Degree, George C. Williams, Dissertation Committee Chairperson
(Department of Ecology & Evolution); work performed in the laboratory of Charles F. Wurster, Marine Sciences Research Center, 182 pages including Front Matter, August 1979; Michaels, Robert A. Trump, GOP threaten future of country. Schenectady, New York; Daily Gazette, 13 July 2019; Mounk, Yascha. Democracy on the defense. Foreign Affairs 100(2):163-73, March/April 2021; Patrick, Stewart M. The international order isn’t ready for the climate crisis - the case for a new planetary politics. Foreign Affairs, 100(6):166-76, November/December 2021; Phillips, Amber. Trump’s deal with the Taliban, explained. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/20/trumppeace-deal-taliban/, 26 August 2021; Rhodes, Ben. Them and us – how America lets its enemies hijack its foreign policy. Foreign Affairs, 100(5):22-31, September/October
2021; Rubin, Jennifer. Opinion: What have Republicans don lately, from The Washington Post. Albany, New York; Times Union Newspaper, 10 August 2022;
Sanger, David E.; and William J. Broad. China’s Weapon Tests Close to a ‘Sputnik Moment,’ U. S. General Says - Gen. Mark A. Milley said China’s testing of a hypersonic missile “has all of our attention.” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/us/politics/chinahypersonicmissile.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20211028&instance id=43999&nl=themorning®iid=77476632&segment_id=72873&te=1&user_i d=ae02264a2dde1a4933664e05346d707b, 27 October 2021; US NIC. (Declassified) Updated Assessment on Covid-19 Origins. Washington, DC; Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National Intelligence Council, https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declassifi ed-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf, 18 pages, 2021; Wade, Nicholas. The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-ornature-open-pandoras-box-atwuhan/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_cam paign=NewsletterPost05132021&utm_content=NewsletterQuote_ TheOriginOfCOVID05132021, 5 May 2021; Welchman. Gordon. The Hut 6 Story. Kinderminster, England; M & M Baldwin, 248 pages, 1982, updated 1997; Zakaria, Fareed. Opinion: The Pentagon is using China as an excuse for huge new budgets. The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-pentagon-is-usingchina-as-an-excuse-for-huge-new-budgets/2021/03/18/848c82968824-11eb-8a8b-5cf82c3dffe4_story.html, 18 March 2021.
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Chapter 09. Civics, Science, and Environmental Sustainability
Allen, Woody. Annie Hall. Beverly Hills, California; United Artists,
released 27 March 1977; Brock, Joe; Yuddy Cahya Budiman, John Geddie, and Valerie Volcovici. Trash and burn – big brands stoke cement kilns with plastic waste as recycling falters. Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/specialreport/environment-plasticcement?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&ut m_content=Science+news%3A&utm_campaign=Science+Saturd ay+Email, 28 October 2021; Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York City, Houghton Mifflin, ISBN: 0-618-25305, 378 pages, 27 September 1962; Claudet, Joachim; Diva J. Amon, and Robert Blasiak. Transformational opportunities for an equitable ocean commons. PNAS 118(42): e2117033118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117033118, 5 pages, 13 October 2021;
Clover Productions. Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, starring Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor. Based upon Donald Keyhoe, Flying Saucers from Outer Space, 1953). Los Angeles, California; Clover Productions, distributed by Columbia Pictures, released 13 June 1956; Goering, Laurie. Biodiversity guru Thomas Lovejoy warns of peril to Amazon forest’s ‘living library’. Thomson Reuters Foundation News, https://news.trust.org/item/20211010075858u1b06/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&ut m_content=Science+news%3A&utm_campaign=Science+Saturd ay+Email, 10 October 2021; Hardin, Garrett. The tragedy of the commons - the population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality. Science 162(3859):1243-8, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243, 13 December 1968;
Hayhoe, Katharine. Saving Us – A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. Simon and Schuster, Atria/One Signal, ISBN 978-1-982143-83-1, 320 pages, 21 September 2021; Hond, Paul. What are they thinking? For science educator Michelle Ashkin [Columbia University ‘04GSAS], teaching kids about the
minds of other species is more than a passion – it’s a wake-up call to humanity. Columbia, pages 34-7, Fall 2021; Kelly, Walt. Pogo. Ink and blue pencil on paper, Pogo Collection, 22 April 1971; Knox, Oliver; and Caroline Anders. Russia has lost up to 80,000 troops in Ukraine. Or 75,000. Or is it 60,000? Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/09/russia-haslost-up-80000-troops-ukraine-or-75000-or-is-it-60000/ 9 August 2022; Lederer, William; and Eugene Burdick. The Ugly American. New York City, Norton, ISBN B01B98TKBG, 285 pages, 1958; Malthus, Reverend Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population. London, J. Johnson, First Edition (of Six Editions, to 1826), 1798; Mankiewicz, Joseph L.; and Ben Hecht. Guys and Dolls. Beverly Hills, California; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 3 November 1955; Matonse, A. H.; and A. Frei. Hydrological Impacts of Hurricane Irene
and Tropical Storm Lee in Historical Context: Is the Frequency of Extreme Hydrological Events Changing in Southern New York State? Millbrook, New York; Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies; Impacts of Tropical Storms Irene and Lee on the Hudson River, Poster Abstract, Conference Proceedings, page 25, 19 September 2012; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Time Machine. Beverly Hills, California; MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, released 17 August 1960; Michaels, Robert A. Three decades of the CEP credential and environmental professional certification. Environmental Practice, 11(1):52-6, March 2009; Michaels, Robert A. Thirty‐eight years of the CEP credential and environmental professional certification. The Certified Environmental Professional, Academy of Board Certified Environmental Professionals Newsletter, http://www.abcep.org/images/Newsletters/ABCEPNewsletter_FEB2017.pdf, ABCEP Newsletter, pages 8-13,
February 2017a; Michaels, Robert A; and Randy W. Simon. Fracking in New York State: weighing risks and benefits. Albany, New York State Bar Association, NYSBA Municipal Lawyer, 27(3):12-6, Fall 2013; Michaels, Robert A; and Randy W. Simon. Fracking in New York State: weighing risks and benefits. Environmental Claims Journal, 29(4), 253-68, Fall 2017; doi 10.1080/10406026.2017.1372392; published online 27 November 2017;
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Mills, Evan. Insurance in a climate of change. Science, 309(5737):1040– 4, doi 10.1126/science.1112121, 12 August 2005; Mokhtar, Mutahharah M.; Rozainee M. Taib, and Mimi H. Hassim. Measurement of PCDD/Fs emissions from a coal–fired power plant in Malaysia and establishment of emission factors.
Atmospheric Pollution Research, 5:388-97, doi: 10.5094/APR.2014.045, 2014; Obama, Barack. The irreversible momentum of clean energy -- privatesector efforts help drive decoupling of emissions and economic growth. Science, 355(6321):126-9, 13 January 2017; doi: 10.1126/science.aam6284, online 9 January 2017; Poppick, Laura. Snowball Earth: the times our planet was covered in ice. https://astronomy.com/news/2019/04/the-story-of-snowballearth, Astronomy 5 April 2019; Reinhart, Robert M. G. Synchronizing neural rhythms - personalized, noninvasive network-based neuromodulation aids impaired cognition. Science Magazine, 377(6606):588-9, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add4834, 5 August 2022; Ripple, William J.; Christopher Wolf, Thomas M. Newsome, Jillian W. Gregg, Timothy M. Lenton, Ignacio Palomo, Jasper A. J.
Eikelboom, Beverly E. Law, Saleemul Huq, Philip B. Duffy, and Johan Rockström. World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency 2021. BioScience 20(10), https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biab079, 5 pages, 2021; Sachs, Jeffrey D. The End of Poverty – Economic Possibilities for Our Time. New York City, Penguin, ISBN 0143036580, 402 pages, 2005; Service; Robert F. Can biofuels really fly? Science, 376 (6600)1394-7, doi: 10.1126/science.add5097, 24 June 2022; Seuss, Dr. (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-‘91). The Lorax, 23 June 1971; Siegel, Jerry; and Joe Shuster. Superman. Story by Mario Puzo. Hollywood, California; Warner Bros., U. S. release 15 December 1978; Siegel, Seth M. Let There Be Water: Israel's Solution for a WaterStarved World. New York City, ISBN 978-1250098306, Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press, 337 pages, 2015;
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Chapter 10. Security of Academia, Information, and the Media
Barabak, Mark Z. Trump has turned the suburbs into a GOP disaster zone. Does that doom his reelection? Los Angeles Times,
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-11-29/2020battleground-suburban-women-voters, 29 November 2019; Bloom, Paul. Being in time. New York City, The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/being-intime, 9 July 2021; Butler, Anthea. White evangelicals love Trump and aren't confused about why. No one should be. NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/white-evangelicalslove-trump-aren-t-confused-about-why-no-ncna1046826, 27 September 2019; CBS News. Lithuania says built-in cybersecurity risks found in Chinesemade Xiaomi and Huawei phones. CBS News/Associated Press, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lithuania-china-cybersecurityrisks-chinese-xiaomi-huawei-smartphones/, 22 September 2021; Cerulus, Laurens; and Clothilde Goujard. EU wants ‘Chips Act’ to rival US. Politico, https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-wants-
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Feinstein, Noah Weeth. Salvaging science literacy. Science Education 95:168-85, doi 10.1002/sce.20414, online 20 September 2010, print January 2011; Feinstein, Noah Weeth; Sue Allen, and Edgar Jenkins. Outside the pipeline: reimagining science education for nonscientists. Science 340:314-7, doi: 10.1126/science.1230855, 19 April 2013; Friedman, Thomas. On science, look to Mars, not to Texas. Albany, New York; Times Union Newspaper, 26 February 2021b; Friedman, Thomas. China just might end up hurting itself. Albany, New York; Times Union Newspaper, 22 October 2021c; Gerson, Michael. Republicans, Whom would Jesus shun? Washington Post op-ed column reprinted in the Albany Times Union Newspaper, 3 March 2021b; Gerson, Michael. Troubling lessons on education. Washington Post oped column reprinted in the Albany Times Union Newspaper, 24 November 2021g; Hathaway, Ooma A. Keeping the wrong secrets – how Washington misses
the real security threat. Foreign Affairs, 101(1):85-98, January/February 2022; Ing-Wen, Tsai. Taiwan and the fight for democracy - a force for good in the changing international order. Foreign Affairs 100(6):74-84, November/December 2021; Kennedy, President John F. Speech at Rice University. Houston, Texas; 12 September 1962; Klas, Mary Ellen. DeSantis: penalize social media that blocks politicians. Miami, Florida; Miami Herald, via Governing.com, https://www.governing.com/now/DeSantis-Penalize-Social-MediaThat-BlocksPoliticians.html?utm_term=DeSantis%3A%20Penalize%20Social %20Media%20That%20Blocks%20Politicians&utm_campaign=F ewer%20Police%2C%20No%20Parades%3A%20The%20Squeeze %20on%20Local%20Budgets&utm_content=email&utm_source= Act-On+Software&utm_medium=email, 3 February 2021;
Li, Lauly; and Cheng Ting-Fang. Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in U. S. Nikkei Asia, https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/ExclusiveWashington-pressures-TSMC-to-make-chips-in-US, 15 January 2020; Lucas, George. Ethics and Cyber Warfare – The Quest for Responsible Security in the Age of Digital Warfare. New York City, Oxford University Press, ISBN: 9780190276522, 187 Pages, 2017;
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Michaels, Isaac H.; Sylvia J. Pirani, and Alvaro Carrascal. Disparities in internet access and Covid-19 vaccination in New York City. Preventing Chronic Disease, 18(E83):1-5, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2021/21_0143.htm, August 2021;
Michaels, Robert A. Mars rover landing conjures images of 1900s odyssey. Letter, Schenectady, New York; Daily Gazette Newspaper, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349570937_Michaels_ Robert_A_Mars_rover_landing_conjures_images_of_1900s_ody ssey_Letter_Schenectady_New_York_Daily_Gazette_24_Februa ry_2021, 24 February 2021b; Michaels, Robert A. The future disease burden of pandemic Covid-19 for individuals, communities, and society. Environmental Claims Journal, https://doi.org/10.1080/10406026.2021.2015821, 15 pages, online 16 December 2021d; Miller-Idriss, Cynthia. The war on terror supercharged the far right. Foreign Affairs, 100(5):54-65, September/October 2021; Mueller, John. The upside of Putin’s delusions - Moscow’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine will reinforce the norm against war. Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-
federation/upside-putinsdelusions?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=fatoday&utm campaign=The%20Folly%20of%20Pakistan’s%20China%20G amble&utmcontent=20220802&utm_term=FA%20Today%20- %20112017, 2 August 2022; Muller, Christopher. Exclusion and exploitation: the incarceration of Black Americans from slavery to the present. Science 374(6565):282-6, doi: 10.1126/science.abj7781, 15 October 2021; Rucker, Julian M.; and Jennifer A. Richeson. Toward an understanding of structural racism: implications for criminal justice. Science 374(6565):286-90, doi: 10.1126/science.abj7779, 15 October 2021; Sanger, David E.; and William J. Broad. China’s Weapon Tests Close to a ‘Sputnik Moment,’ U. S. General Says - Gen. Mark A. Milley said China’s testing of a hypersonic missile “has all of our attention.” The New York Times,
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/us/politics/chinahypersonicmissile.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20211028&instance _id=43999&nl=the-
morning®i_id=77476632&segment_id=72873&te=1&user_i d=ae02264a2dde1a4933664e05346d707b, 27 October 2021; Schuessler, Jennifer. Leader of prestigious Yale program resigns, citing donor pressure. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/arts/yale-grand-strategyresignation.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20211001&instan ce_id=41762&nl=themorning®i_id=77476632&segment_id=70381&te=1&user_id= ae02264a2dde1a4933664e05346d707b, 30 September 2021; Scientific American Editors. Science News. New York City, Scientific American 124(20), May 1921; Scientific American Editors. Hacking the ransomware problem – organizations can protect themselves, but collaboration is the best defense. Editorial. New York City, Scientific American, 326(1):8, January 2022; Simama, Jabari. The Tension Between Online Hate Speech and Preserving Free Speech In clamping down on access to social media
platforms by conspiracy theorists, white supremacists and domestic terrorists, we need to protect our truly marginalized citizens' ability to speak truth to power. Governing.com, https://www.governing.com/now/Tension-Between-Online-HateSpeech-and-Preserving-FreeSpeech.html?utm_term=The%20Tension%20Between%20Online %20Hate%20Speech%20and%20Preserving%20Free%20Speech& utm_campaign=The%20Double%20Edge%20of%20Our%20Digit al%20Revolution&utm_content=email&utm_source=ActOn+Software&utm_medium=email, 5 February 2021; Smith, Carl. Stimulus funds help Virginia, Vermont build broadband equity. Governing.com, https://www.governing.com/now/stimulusfunds-help-virginia-vermont-build-broadbandequity?utm_term=Stimulus%20Funds%20Help%20Virginia%2C %20Vermont%20Build%20Broadband%20Equity&utm_campaign =Stimulus%20Funds%20Help%20Virginia%2C%20Vermont%20
Build%20Broadband%20Equity&utm_content=email&utm_source =Act-On+Software&utm_medium=email, 27 October 2021b; Stevenson, Jonathan; and Steven Simon. We need to think the unthinkable about our country. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opinion/january-6-civilwar.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20220113&instance_id= 50210&nl=themorning®i_id=77476632&segment_id=79580&te=1&user_id= ae02264a2dde1a4933664e05346d707b, 13 January 2022;
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Svitek, Patrick. Gov. Greg Abbott says he's rescinding statewide mask mandate and capacity limits on businesses - The change, which comes as the seven-day average of new coronavirus deaths remains above 200, will go into effect March 10 2021. Texas Tribune, https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/02/greg-abbott-
texas-announcement/, 21 March 2021; Troutman, Matt. Free internet for every NYC apartment, new bill proposes. Patch, https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/freeinternet-every-nyc-apartment-new-bill-proposes, 7 October 2021; Warner Brothers. Contact. Burbank, California; 11 July 1997; Yang, Jie; Stephanie Yang, and Asa Fitch. The world relies on one chip maker in Taiwan, leaving everyone vulnerable - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s dominance poses risks to the global economy, amid geopolitical tensions and a major chip shortage. Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/articles/theworld-relies-on-one-chip-maker-in-taiwan-leaving-everyonevulnerable-11624075400, 19 June 2021a.
READER NOTES
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Publication citation
Michaels, RA. Civics and Science: Contemporary Issues for Civil Democracy. United States, Kindle Direct, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BF175BN9/ref=sr_1_4?crid=2U6QC7HPZ5H0D&keywords=Civics+and+Science&qid=1663007453&s=books&sprefix=civics+and+science%2Cstripbooks%2C71&sr=1-4, print length 415 pages, 11 September 2022;