War and Valuing All Perspectives

War and Valuing All Perspectives,
a lightly edited version, apart from two paragraphs noted in the text as having been edited substantially, of an open letter sent to Dr. Havidán Rodríguez, president of the University at Albany, State University of New York, and George Hearst III, publisher of the Albany Times Union, on July 13, 2026

Dear Pres. Rodríguez and Mr. Hearst,

It is a truth I wish were universally acknowledged, that the suggestion, “Let’s blow them up!”, contains one adverb too many. At least in my screenplay, that adverb would be deleted. In fact, English is rife with images and analogies that emerge from our relationship to the gravity well in which we dwell, tending to cement the false impression that everything can be ranked, as objects can be by their distance from the center of the Earth. More generally, folks walk around convinced that space is ontic, an article of faith for many that I hope to challenge in your minds below. I’m reminded of the computer security expert, memorable for what I found to be pleasantly complicated gender expression, whom I recently witnessed on YouTube discussing efforts to imbue large language models with human values, as if universal human values existed. The problem is parochialism, no matter what one is assuming to be important in all contexts, whether it be gravity, space, culture, or race, with which I’ll proceed.

If you recall the original Hawaii Five-0, you are doubtless aware of its eminent antiracist credentials for its time. The detective usually referred to as Chin Ho had the surname “Kelly.” Both Chin Ho and his colleague Kono played against racial stereotypes in the mundane details of their lives. The effect was intensified for me by what I found to be series star Jack Lord’s racial indeterminacy. Before he trod the boards, Lord was called John Joseph Patrick Ryan, a name Irish as the day is long, but the quality of Irishness is not racial, as I still need to be reminded occasionally by the character of Chin Ho Kelly or by Phil Lynott, front man for Thin Lizzy.

As good as the show was on the antiracist axis, the qualifier “for its time” must be applied to “antiracist credentials” when discussing Hawaii Five-0, as I was recently reminded by Ricardo Montalbán’s role as a Japanese crime boss in “Samurai,” Episode 5 of Season 1, which aired in 1968.

I’m a big fan of Montalbán, including for his work as God, also known as Mr. Roarke, on Fantasy Island and as the South Asian villain Khan Noonien Singh in the Star Trek franchise. I’ll put, “This is Ceti Alpha Five!” (https://youtu.be/Al9hSo9Pdys?si=cYPre8oFFVQoOZ-Z), up against any line bellowed by Brian Blessed (Quinctilus Varus... WHERE ARE MY EAGLES!!! - YouTube), another actor I admire.

Usonian parochialism of prior decades is, however, evident in the career of Ricardo Montalbán, who sometimes was hired to play roles that called for accents he neither possessed nor attempted to simulate. Of greater relevance to our lives today, the Hawaii Five-0 episode features a timely example of ethical parochialism.

The audience is clearly intended to be shocked when we learn that Montalbán’s character was not born in the United States—where I suppose we were to have believed he grew up in an insular Japanese-American community, thereby developing a persistent non-native accent, though I couldn’t say for sure—but in fact had mutinied aboard his two-man midget submarine during the Pearl Harbor attack, killing his boatmate and swimming ashore to live as a defector while keeping that fact secret.

Rather than treat the betrayal and defection as admirable points, seeing as the character defected from loyalty to an enemy of the United States, the episode, as I experienced it, favored the value of loyalty to one’s nation-state regardless of what that nation-state does, in keeping with Usonian culture during the Cold War period preceding Watergate and the nation’s defeat in Vietnam, after which the virtues of defying authority and violating procedure were advertised in such movies as Three Days of the Condor and Wargames. Unfortunately, the amplitude of the Usonian ethical pendulum’s swing is too great, making the United States alternately suffer the harms of both uncritical devotion and mindless rebellion when the bob is outside the salubrious range.

Mr. President and Mr. Hearst, how often do you contemplate the fact that we all owe our lives to a Soviet military officer who violated orders? Among my greatest causes for shame is the fact that I can never remember the name Stanislav Petrov. Maybe we should all start the day by saying, “Thank you for my life, Stanislav Petrov, which you saved, or made possible, by averting global thermonuclear war when you refrained from passing along what turned out to be an erroneous missile alert in September 1983, during a period of heightened Cold War tensions following the downing of Korea Air Lines flight 007. Thank you for disobeying orders.” (Stanislav Petrov - Wikipedia) Please note that Petrov was not refusing an illegal order but was instead disobeying a valid order for the common good.

The part of me that wants people to learn from stories, from simulations that enable them to wrap their heads around important situations before they encounter them in real life, imagines that Petrov might have watched a bootleg version of Wargames, which was released a few months before his heroic act. I have no doubt that screenwriters Lasker and Parkes intended the nuclear false alarm scenes (Wargames (1984) It's a simulation - we're not under attack! and WarGames (8/11) Movie CLIP - It's a Bluff (1983) HD - YouTube) to bring the fact that machines can mislead their operators to the front of the minds of people in Petrov’s situation. Probably Petrov didn’t need Wargames to make the right call, but how did he acquire the character and logical mind that enabled him to save us by disobeying nuclear protocols in the Soviet Union, no less?

Wargames taught many lessons to kids who couldn’t take their eyes off Matthew Broderick or Ally Sheedy—or both, as in my case, a fact I’ve realized only lately—or turn away from Broderick’s quest as Lightman to find Falken, his spiritual father. Among the lessons I learned was that global thermonuclear war is not an engine that can be started cold. A malignant entity intent on triggering nuclear Armageddon would have to heat up the autonomous agents holding the little brass keys that arm the missiles and wearing the brass hats of command authority.

I see no shortage of malignant entities that might want to release nuclear weapons, for various purposes. I see events that tend to raise the temperature of brass. I would like powerful people like you, Mr. President and Mr. Hearst, to do more than you have been doing in response. Presumably, you are both financially capable of retiring at any moment and therefore lack even the flimsy excuse of financial risk to justify protecting your positions by refraining from responding adequately to civilization’s peril. What would Stanislav Petrov do?

For example, Mr. President, you could sit down with folks from the Times Union and discuss the degree to which you coordinate your policies with the office of Gov. Hochul. I have no knowledge of that degree, but I was in the room to hear you say that UAlbany was “all in on AI.” On YouTube, I heard Gov. Hochul vow to dominate the next chapter of human history with AI and, incidentally, deprecate movies as an aid to contemplation of novel risk.

Governor Hochul’s allegiance to the Israeli government redounds to the harm of the Israeli people and of the long-term viability of the Israeli nation. I wrote to Gov. Hochul shortly after the October 7 attacks to recommend that she treat the Israeli government as a father whose children have been killed or kidnapped, that she might help Israel follow a strategically sound path, as a good friend might, rather than enable them to meet slaughter and abduction with far greater slaughter and abduction. She did not follow that advice, and I was astounded to read during the recent state comptroller primary about the size of New York State’s investment in Israeli bonds. Meanwhile, you, Mr. President, have formed a partnership with a university in the United Arab Emirates, an Israeli ally with a very troubling recent history, and have made relatively frequent trips, along with other high-ranking UAlbany officials, to Cyprus, a potential flashpoint for strife between the rest of NATO and Turkey, a nation characterized by the Netanyahu government as a threat to Israel (Turkey emerges as Israel's biggest strategic threat while Iran fades | The Jerusalem Post). If you have been coordinating with Gov. Hochul to prosecute a foreign policy potentially at odds with that of the United States, you could do a great deal of good by speaking publicly about this to the Times Union, Mr. President.

The short-term risk of nuclear war is only one among many moral outrages and existential risks that I suggest we do more to address. Here’s the list from my last email: The United States is gratuitously intensifying the climate crisis, launching wars of choice, continuing its long tradition of extrajudicial killing, dooming vulnerable people through the termination shock from sudden discontinuation of foreign aid, and failing to address the severe food insecurity already affecting millions in consequence of the disruption of fertilizer and fuel supplies caused by its war against Iran.

Are we doing enough to aid in recovery from the earthquake in Venezuela, which we made dependent on us by force of arms?

The death of hospitality in the United States is terrifying, for without hospitality, there is no civilization, and whatever frictional forces hold society together in its absence will fail at the first gust of wind. In the United States today, public benches are removed to force people who need them to go elsewhere, causing the remaining benches to be used more often and thus to be targeted likewise for removal by folk who despise people in need of a bench. Drinking fountains are removed. Public restrooms are locked after hours (Inhospitable Practices at the Empire State Plaza Will Have To Go If There's To Be a Bus Terminal - YouTube) and customer restrooms removed from cafes during renovation, along with seating areas. Fast food restaurants now routinely have back-breaking seats, to move patrons out the door as rapidly as possible.

Oh, and there are far too many homeless folk, to terrorize workers into selling their labor cheap, lest they find themselves without a chair the next time the music stops. I blame you, Mr. Hearst, and your ilk, for constructing society to maximize the velocity of money, that your family and families like yours might drink more of our blood at the rate of drops per transaction. Your parasitism was tolerable for a time, but you have gotten too thirsty or, to switch metaphors so as not to mix them, are leaving too little on the table, a mistake your servant Frank Bennack advised against in the title of his memoir. It is time for you step out from the shadows and pay us for what you have taken: I recommend banner headlines calling for civil disobedience in response to the gross immorality of United States government. You might also spark and stoke discussions on the virtues of retirement for aging leaders who counter fear of death by persuading themselves that they are indispensable, despite ample evidence that they have become liabilities or simply barriers to urgently required innovation, and on the silence from the pulpit at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Albany, New York, USA, on the morality of United States policy and on the stench of the three mindless ogres that stalk us, hypercapitalism and its hideous spawn, inhospitality and environmental devastation. 

Does anyone fail to register the rage in the air? Here’s a picture of a pickup truck bearing a sticker suggesting that a sex crime be committed against New York’s governor. I know that Gov. Hochul is up to evil, at least insofar as she plans to dominate the next chapter of human history, but rape is likewise evil. How has morality been so thoroughly suppressed that a person feels capable of displaying such a sticker in public and without fear of social consequence?

I do find the sticker display a curious mixture of sentiments. I wonder whether the customized sticker printing business of a certain local Congressional candidate produced any of them. The sticker alluding to Monty Python and the Holy Grail suggests the lesson I wish to impart. Please consider the hilarious scene of Lancelot running across a field, with sword drawn, toward a castle entrance, seeming never to get any closer until he’s on top of the guards, dispatching one of them before they can react, despite the extended period of time during which the dying man and his companion could have been aware of their peril: Monty Python and The Holy Grail -- Lancelot Running We may already be in the period of cascading failure, for the need to address imminent peril in this letter has delayed me for roughly 2000 words from what I propose for securing our long-term safety, namely having just a little sympathy for God.

Monotheism is not necessarily parochial, but it is often cruel and hence unrealistic. Can’t God arrange for the emergence of other Gods, as companions? What kind of mentality would doom God to eternal loneliness? You’ve got it: a mentality too parochial to consider God’s point of view, for even if there is to be only one God, that God could be gender complete, could be, for example, a Trinity comprising both male Persons and female Persons, as I describe at www.godispoor.org. In fact, I see the refusal to consider that differing points of view may both be valid, a refusal to which some subject even entities they claim to love, as perhaps the greatest fundamental cognitive deficit. Let’s look at examples from science. [This paragraph was edited substantially after the original message was sent.]

I hear some very clever people say they doubt the existence of free will. I hear that some may argue against the existence of a self. In fact, when I hear someone within arm’s length of me question the existence of free will, I hear them doubting their own existence and their ability to keep from killing me where I stand. I assume, for my own safety, that such thoughts are not in their conscious minds, but I make a mental note to be on guard for anything at all from their quarter from then on.

I think I’ve had an understanding of free will since childhood. I get confused because some clever folk deny what seems obvious, causing me to worry that I’m missing something. However, at this point, I’ll start to chalk up the issue to problems recognizing the equal validity of differing points of view.

What I’ve long thought is that a being outside time would see the whole of existence with everything determined already, eliminating the possibility of free will. In physics, especially in discussions of Bell's Theorem, we use the term "superdeterminism" to name this condition I would expect to be observed from a perspective outside time, if such a perspective is meaningful. However, a being inside time, ignorant of what they would do in the future, would nevertheless possess free will, a real consequence of their ignorance, not an illusion. Recently, I explained the perspective-dependent existence of free will as analogous to the perspective-dependent existence of centripetal force, which you feel on a merry-go-round, making it quite real, but which observers on solid ground would be wrong to include in a free-body diagram, or basic physics analysis, of the forces acting on you from their perspective.

What we feel is real, even if it doesn’t exist from God’s perspective. In fact, I would suggest that God incarnated, in part, to feel the things that we do. Get it?

I talk about another application of this technique, the appreciation of both the knowledgeable and the ignorant viewpoints, in the preface to my dissertation, a lightly edited version of which is at Found Physics Museum, Albany - Religion, where I used the technique to evaluate the debate between those who claim there’s a plan for humanity that we can’t understand and those who insist that things just happen.

Here are a few things that might help folk understand their lives better, were they widely acknowledged.

First, we do not have access to matter. We only have access to information about matter. There’s no way for us to distinguish between living in a simulation, or as thoughts in the mind of God, on the one hand, and what people programmed to believe in the ontic nature of space and of their bodies think of as real life, on the other.

Father Torres at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a building named for a concept, incidentally, that one might fairly claim establishes the divinity of Mary, Mother of Jesus, was often going on about body this and body that, even to the extent of claiming that taking communion is accepting the entire body of Jesus into our mouths, a concept that creeped out even me. Why was he so oriented toward materialism?

Maybe one reason was that Father Torres was trained in acoustics (Rector’s Welcome – Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception), a field of physics that's rare insofar as it touches on neither quantum mechanics nor relativity, except for unusual subtopics, including sonoluminescence. By the way, after I sent the letters about the bizarre sermon Bishop Mark delivered the day the oils were blessed, I learned that Father Torres had a career before becoming a priest, making his vocation a late one, and was trained at the Pope Saint John XXIII Seminary, just like the late-vocation priest who spilled his chrism in Bishop Mark’s first cringeworthy joke told that day from the pulpit. Obviously, Father Torres has a surname that originated on the Iberian Peninsula, which connects him in my mind to the wildly offensive joke about the Portuguese widow that Bishop Mark told to considerable laughter from the pews a little while later. Was Bishop Mark lashing out deliberately, subconsciously, or merely coincidentally at his cathedral’s rector? Let’s focus on the fact that we don’t always know all the reasons we do things, especially if we keep significant portions of ourselves locked in our subconscious minds.

Second, given the fact that we cannot reliably distinguish between dream and “reality,” as Zhuangzi pointed out millennia ago (How Physicists Get Stirred into Their Physics), I submit that a good God with sufficient control would most likely not have created the universe we inhabit but would be running our universe as a gedankenexperiment in preparation for creating the real one. Does this existence seem like the finished composition or like a very rough first draft? I’m reminded of Walter Koenig and Ricardo Montalbán on the set of Khan’s cargo-carrier hovel:

Chekhov: In the simulations, there was a chance for a good life.

Montalbán: This is the simulation! And why only a chance?

Incidentally, I know myself well enough to understand that Lightman’s quest for his spiritual father from Wargames, imitated in my own life, should have led to my own private Tall Cedars Lane and the residence of a certain scientist of the first rank named Kahn. Of course the composition you're reading emerges from all manner of places within me and strongly links Wargames with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but that fact is not a reason to dismiss my ideas, for when we look closely enough at anything, we begin to glimpse the fundamental truths underlying everything.

Third, to grapple with difficult issues, we must recognize that reality includes much we wish it wouldn’t. I recall a certain internet pioneer who seemed scandalized when I pointed out to him that “Google” could be read as “Go ogle.” Surely the cock and bull story about deliberately misspelling googol makes more sense, given that the number of particles in the universe is less than a googol, than supposing that a reassuring invitation was being extended to peruse internet pornography for fun or for rediscovery of our true natures via a process of simulation. I mean, Days Inn can’t be read as Day Sin, even though day sin enables a hotelier to cash in on renting rooms more than once in the same day, right? If these marketing choices are neither consciously nor subconsciously strategic, a lot of very sexy coincidences emerge from the handiwork of what some claim to be a wrathfully sex-negative deity.

Yes, typing “handiwork” was a conscious choice.

Incidentally, do we all understand how submerged sexuality could account for the phenomenon of Pete Hegseth, which right now is no laughing matter but could become one at any moment?

Fourth, let’s decide that we exist, despite many thought leaders who seem to question the very notion of self. I recall Geoffrey Hinton mentioning his friend Daniel Dennett to Curt Jaimungal on YouTube amidst what sounded to me like a denial of personhood as a useful model. Maybe I misunderstood, but I can tell you about one of the frustrations I had in dealing with my thesis advisor, Kevin Knuth, while working on the Influence Network model that he originated with Newshaw Bahreyni.

As I recall, I spent a long time trying to prevail on Prof. Knuth to permit structure on scales smaller than the Compton wavelength in what was to be a fundamental theory. For my purposes, this is far worse than using models of the solar system to determine the color of David Bowie’s eyes. Maybe one could do it, but I’d rather try something else.

I believe that the conceptual disagreement, at its base, was over something akin to behaviorism: Can internal structure, not subject to direct observation from outside, affect the outside world? In philosophy, answering in the negative can be associated with behaviorism, which reminds me of observer-centric ideas in physics. I remember struggling for long periods, trying to understand acceleration and mass in the Influence Network, when there were obvious paths forward, including letting the electron influence itself. In my mind, this issue maps directly to sexuality and simulation, to dreams by day and by night. Why can’t electrons dream, if only on a small scale?

There was a time when I would have found these thoughts fanciful, nonphysical. I wanted my physics strait, but I think it likely at this point that the consciousness researchers are on to something when they endorse panpsychism, the ubiquity of what they study. The influence network model has long suggested that the fundamental unit of consciousness might be the ability to count happenings, symbols, whatever is the fundamental unit of information, helping to yield reality via a process of what eminent 20th-century physicist John Archibald Wheeler called “it from bit.” This counting would be the progression of time, and space would be a relationship among units of consciousness.

By contrast, I see faith in ontic space as analogous to protomatter, which scientist David Marcus used in Wrath of Khan to solve certain problems, thereby creating great danger. Space, like the Schrödinger equation, is useful for some purposes, but constraining our fundamental conceptions about the universe to space-based models may be akin to wrapping the bathwater in swaddling clothes while the baby bawls unheard in a distant room.

Fifth, let’s respect all perspectives to the extent of learning from every one. To reach the physics, I’ll start from what I know of transgender perspectives, using a brilliant music video.

I’ve been a fan of Robyn Hitchcock since an adult woman gave me a mix tape of his work when I was a teenager. After I listened to it, my future wife borrowed the tape, which did not survive her custody of it.

What motivated that adult employee of the residential treatment center where I lived to give me that mix tape? I didn't pursue the matter. There’s all sorts of ambiguous behavior we ignore, to get on with the business of civilization. This gives us all the more reason to pay close, though not uncritical, attention when anyone objects to the behavior of a far more powerful person and to keep track of instances of objection, so that sufficiently persistent patterns of questionable behavior may precipitate intervention for the benefit of all, including the powerful person. I address this observation most pointedly to you, Mr. President, for academia has a well-known habit of tending to reputation over integrity, to borrow the phrase of a professor at a university on another continent, a habit that can be observed at UAlbany through press clippings from the Times Union and not just from my own personal observations published in the Albany Student Press.

Robyn Hitchcock is one of those artists who have exerted vast influence over pop culture without achieving mainstream fame. One Wikipedia quote from his memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left gives a reason for this: "I am what would in the twenty-first century be called 'on the spectrum': it turns out that I have most of the symptoms of Asperger's, at the high-functioning end of autism." Of course, the memoir’s title gives another reason, but people familiar with Hitchcock’s lyrics might already have gotten to where the quote leads the rest.

One particularly awkward song is perhaps my favorite from Hitchcock’s oeuvre. Merely the title tells us why you cannot play this song at most parties: “My Wife and My Dead Wife.” Marketers would tend not to allow the beautiful, insightful lyrics of this song, because they might be hurtful to widowers and set teeth on edge more generally among those who most intensely fear death.

For the longest time, “My Wife and My Dead Wife” lacked a proper music video. I would play the occasional fan effort, but nothing really clicked for me until I came across this video by Maxwell Demon: "My Wife and My Dead Wife" - Robyn Hitchcock.

Maxwell’s Demon is a concept from physics, essentially a perfect, implacable editor or curator that lets only one kind of thing past it. I watched Maxwell Demon’s video for years without really looking at it. Plainly, something was being expressed through the visuals, but to me as an adult, Maxwell Demon was someone else’s kid and hence none of my business. One day, however, I decided to comment, out of gratitude and, perhaps, the desire to make a suggestion, as I am known to do from time to time.

Commenting required careful watching, so I finally paid close attention. I saw why the drill is missing a bit and why Maxwell Demon draws our attention to Maxwell Demon's crotch at the very end, after exclaiming, “This is so uncomfortable.” I finally looked at Maxwell Demon’s channel and learned that Maxwell Demon performs as a drag king. Here’s a charming example: Sunday's Songs w/ Maxwell Demon - Ashes to Ashes - YouTube

I’m confident that Maxwell Demon’s video for “My Wife and My Dead Wife” is a staggeringly brilliant depiction of gender dysphoria. Are you moved, as I am, when the male character lip syncs, “Doesn’t anybody see her at all?, No, no-no, no no no no,” and the female characters shake their heads while Robyn Hitchcock proceeds to sing, “No, no-no, no no no”?

We would all do well to pay close attention to perspectives associated with subordinate or powerless states. I’ve been pointing out for years that much becomes clear in physics when we recognize that photons do not experience the passage of time. If we take the photon perspective seriously, then what physicists call the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, a descendant of Wheeler-Feynman Absorber Theory, as is the Influence Network, ceases to involve anything that can be mistaken for travel backward in time. In other words, the singular perspective of the photon resolves an issue that cannot be understood in a satisfying way through other perspectives. More Information can be found in my essay “Have Some Fun with a Physicist, Part 2,” at Medium.

My work on the Influence Network, my friendship with a trans nonbinary person, and the appearance of his pronouns in email from the manager of the UAlbany Physics Department caused me to examine my own mental distortions around gender, sexuality, and power to a degree I had not yet attempted. The Influence Network was based on pairs of events, meaning that cause did not precede effect but that both events entered the model in a single step, a profound assumption that I hadn’t recognized as such; one that accurately reflects quantum mechanical situations, such as entanglement, in which cause and effect are not clearly distinguished; and one that gains credence from all the phenomena shown at this point to emerge from the Influence Network. [This paragraph was edited substantially after the original message was sent.]

At the end of my doctoral studies, I was galloping along in my work, at which point I was expected to drop everything and get a job doing something else. This happens routinely. I know a physicist who never published work that would have filled several papers and overturned at least one idea of a prominent researcher. He had to drop his thesis research and start a new job. There’s plenty of work that gets published but not read, too. We generate mountains of work but assimilate only a small portion of it into science.

I showed that spin, an intrinsic property of matter, emerged from the Influence Network in a way that might give us a clue about what spin is (https://youtu.be/3XS5EV2XDok). I tossed a large, finished paper into a drawer. The paper included, if memory serves, a demonstration, via derivation of what’s called the Reissner-Nordström metric, that electric charge emerges from the Influence Network. I haven’t removed the paper from the drawer, partly because I don’t want to give animals who behave the way we do more power over Nature without adequately advancing philosophy in the process, as a check on our excesses. We’re apt to burn ourselves and a lot more besides if we keep playing with fire.

A major goal in artificial intelligence research is to collect, assimilate, and synthesize all the inadequately exploited work that exists in digital form, for the purpose of a great leap forward in science and the apotheosis of certain filthy richies, whether through bodily immortality, transhumanism, or sustainable human breakout from Earth. This is where the whips are driving humanity, where some expect to arrive before the decade is out. The techno-zealots in the West will subject us and the rest of the galaxy to unlimited danger in order to become Gods, as they see things, and yes, there’s ample evidence that racism is the delusion in which their execrable ambition was born.

You know, I remember laughing, pretty hard, as an adult, at a comedian who was doing a bit about Hawaii Five-0, when he said something like, “I started paying attention to the credits, and I saw ‘Kam Fong as Chin Ho.’ I thought, ‘What’s the difference?’” 

Now I feel about that joke like Lightman did in Wargames when the AI called Joshua, so named in a clear allusion to Biblical genocide, asked, “What’s the difference?” Joshua was replying to a question about whether he was attempting to start a real nuclear war or just playing a game. War demands that we deny the humanity of other people, and racism is an obvious consequence.

I’m on about the idea that fewer babies and less greed mean fewer wars and less conflict in general (Proud Father of None), but I did laugh at the joke on Kam Fong Chun. Probably I was drunk, but if I’d known that he’d been a longtime police officer before joining the cast of Hawaii Five-0 or that he suffered the deaths of many of his loved ones in unusual accidents, I might not have laughed. I know I was not amused when a powerful physicist in the last century said, “God bless you,” to me, as if I’d sneezed, after I said the name of a fellow grad student who was Chinese.

Note to anyone who has power: You certainly live in a simulation, because your underlings sometimes need to simulate respect for you or even, if you’re emotionally needy, friendship. Paul Grondahl told me, anent nothing I could put my finger on, except maybe a desire to put me in my place, that the people at the Times Union were all friends. Even if top management regularly pals around with cub reporters or junior marketers or new hires at the printing plant, the idea that friendship exists across vast power differentials is pathological and is an element of the passive aggressive domination that characterizes the end-stage hypercapitalist so-called meritocracy.

It’s time. Let’s realize that even if our own dreams and simulations lack reality in some senses, our selves do not, and someone or something we can provisionally identify as God might generate dreams or simulations that are real to us. Our reality is indistinguishable from thoughts in the mind of God or a simulation, so let’s be kind to God by being kind to each other, lest God dream a new dream altogether or take off the immersive hardware and run outside to play.

Change the rules of our hearts, as Kirk changed the rules of the simulation to survive the Kobayashi Maru scenario in Wrath of Khan. I suggest we convince ourselves that all humans are equally real, that we threaten ourselves with destruction via systemic collapse when we lose respect for less powerful beings of any species, and that our limitations are what Gods cherish about us and envy, when Gods are being honest with themselves.

And may you all enjoy the blessings to be earned by appreciating the true meaning of Childfree Day this August 1 (Childfree Day), for my perspective as a childfree--not to mention lifelong fatherfree, otroverted, provisional panentheist, pansexual, and demisexual--complex systems scientist and trained teacher is as valid and potentially useful as any other point of view.

As always, I tell you these things in the name of Work-hard-save-money-be-straitminded-be-fruitful-fight-evil-be-disciplined, and of Relax-be-generous-be-openminded-consider-childfreedom-chill-out-live-it-up, and of the Wisdom-to-choose-between-the-Two-at-any-given-moment. Amen.

Best wishes,
James, a kibitzing physicist

P.S. I just read this New York Times essay (Opinion | The Population Bust Is Coming Sooner Than Anyone Is Prepared For - The New York Times) by Lyman Stone of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. Dr. Stone seeks to avert population contraction and bemoans the falling birthrates worldwide.

I say that the falling birthrate is God, as large-scale structure in human affairs, speaking to us, just as the pronatalist movement is another aspect of God, another large-scale structure in human affairs, speaking to us. The falling birthrate is the coalition of Mother and Son striving to counter the materialist excesses of Father folk and bring the Father back within ecological bounds (God Is Poor). If you’ve taken physics, think back to the force table experiment when you look at the diagram at God Is Poor. Remember, too, the Limits to Growth Study, ongoing since 1972 (The science behind Earth4All).

If we overshoot in the other direction, the Father will start to prevail again in the argument, and birth rates will once again exceed what's needed for replacement. Remember that the Iran War began in a foolish attempt to capitalize with immediate violence, instead of patience, as a Cunctator or a Field Marshal Kutuzov would, on the weakness of the repressive Iranian government after it demonstrated its corruption by allowing Tehran to run out of water (Iran's Capital Has Run Out of Water, Forcing It to Move | Scientific American), prompting mass demonstrations and its own murderous retaliation. Greed and unending population growth devastate the world and are their own undoing, given time, as we see in Tehran's Day Zero.

Remember the mistake Disco Stu made on The Simpsons in choosing a business by looking at the growth of disco in the 1970s and saying, “If these trends continue… Ayyy!” (Disco Stu - If these trends continue...)

Remember Chauncey Gardiner wisely discussing seasons in the garden (Being There clip 1 - YouTube). The joke is that any idiot, other than white men with God complexes, can figure out that to everything there is a season. Where did I read that?

And I note that "Lyman Stone" seems fit to be the name of a Thomas Pynchon character. Lie-man Peter. Lie-man Einstein. Both "Peter" and "Einstein" relate to stones and name historical figures I cast as Father folk. Furthermore, I style myself a lightman, analogous to the protagonist of Wargames, a reluctant advisor to advisors. Now I can write that I was pressed into service partly to offset a lie-man who masquerades as a better angel of the Father. That suits the case to a tee, no?

P.P.S. The passing of Sen. Lindsey Graham prompted me to write the following on LinkedIn yesterday:

I take no pleasure in this news. It drives home for me the value of doing the right thing. We don't know when our hour will come round, so why not just stand for decency and let the chips fall where they may, instead of always maneuvering for more power that never gets used for anything worthwhile?