In case you missed it, Canada and the EU last week announced they immediately are not accepting any further certification of the Boeing 737 Max 8 or Max 9 jets from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). 

How does that make you feel? I grant there is ample reason to investigate Boeing and their software engineers, but this move signals that our allies have stopped trusting our government. Or is it that they mistrust our honesty, as if our bureaucratic infrastructure has become corrupt? 

This is not funny, as it comes immediately on the heels of the March 12 revelation by U.S. prosecutors that they have been investigating corruption in college admissions and have made arrests in the college testing apparatus, the college guidance apparatus and in college sports, with more to come. I wish I could say this came as a shock, but I taught several sections of Freshman Comp II back in the ՚70s, and I still recall the environment. Mental capacity was not a requirement if you played ball, were from Iran (this was before the fall of the Shah) or had a rich daddy. And, while I can understand that some people get assistance from diverse sources, it meant that the college degree was available for purchase without the commensurate ability to wield it. If you would like to see an analogy, search the internet for chimpanzee and AK47. The video you see is a hoax, but a funny one, and the fact remains that chimpanzees can be trained to use weapons, whereas those wielding an unearned certification cannot.

While I believe in waiting until the accused are proven guilty, I also have to accept that the determination of guilt is a function of the courts, but the determination of a problem is the function, in part, of the press, which essentially has ceased to function. So we press on. 

My job includes being a skeptic. I am supposed to both know enough about general matters and have the energy to look into such matters as they may bring themselves into focus. “Focus,” these days, seems to include “controversy.” So it goes. 

So let’s take a controversy in the media. Any controversy will work, but “climate change” has the potential to affect costs in our industry radically, so let’s look at it as a skeptic. That means just looking at facts. 

Fact 1: The idea of climate change as a political issue has been around for decades. Back in the ՚70s, it was presented as “global cooling” by the same groups of advocates as we currently see. Along the way it morphed into global warming and then the all-inclusive “climate change.” So it’s a political issue advocated by identifiable groups. 

Fact 2: The study of climate change is funded by many governments through research grants to universities. So there’s money. 

Fact 3: The academic community has been caught several times manipulating data. One of the most famous of such events began in 2009 and was named, unimaginatively, Climategate. There are arguments surrounding motives and actions on both parts, which are the subject of many internet-warrior conflagrations, and we can report on those as we like, but the fact remains that data was manipulated, for noble reasons or ill. 

Fact 4: While there is a clear geological record that shows Earth’s climate has changed back and forth substantially over time, most of that change has occurred in geological time. The last one started about 2.5 million (m) years ago.  

Subfact A: Scientists say the Huronian ice age (2.5 billion (b) years ago) was caused by the elimination of atmospheric methane, methane being the stuff of cow farts. Id est: eliminate cow farts and you get an ice age. 

Fact 5: Proponents of climate change as a political issue claim that climate change as a result of human intervention is “settled science.” As a linguist, I can assure you that science is not settled. If it’s settled, it’s not science.  

Fact 5a: Climate change as a function of human intervention is a political controversy with substantial opinion, credentialed and not credentialed, on both sides, as well as noted above, a lot of money available through governments. 

Those are facts. As noted, I recognize this is a controversial topic, and I recognize that you already have strongly held beliefs beyond the facts. For example, it is valid to speculate that we need to act because of what might happen if we do nothing, but as a skeptic, I have to allow your beliefs but point out that we don’t know what might happen. We can see what Alvin and Heidi Toffler said back in 1970 in Future Shock, or what Charles Reich said in 1970 in The Greening of America, but we can also see that their vision of the future did not come to pass. They didn’t even predict Beto, and he never learned about them in school. Even before Reich and Tofflers, Rachel Carson broke the barriers between fiction and fact with Silent Spring in 1962, a nice defense of which can be seen in the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of the International Socialist Review. 

But there are more facts. Facts about people as prophets. 

Fact 6: Fact 5 is important in geological time, since humans have believed since the beginning of historical time that their actions can affect the climate. In recent time, governments have seeded clouds. Before cloud seeding there were rain dances, water witching, observing insect behavior and prayers. All primitive cultures invoked supernatural powers and performed rituals to affect climate change. Sometimes, including in Judeo/Christian history, people offered up sacrifices and burnt offerings, and in primitive cultures climate change was affected by throwing virgins into volcanoes. Imagine where we’d be if they had not been proactive. 

Fact 7: We now have political candidates that want to affect climate change by throwing cows into volcanoes. 

There are many side-facts that bear on the current political climate. Some Democrats want to ban automobiles and cows. Beto O’Rourke believes in climate change. He also appears to believe in manipulating eternity. I believe that’s a fact, and not my opinion. Here’s why. The news last week asserts that Beto was so discomfited by his Texas senatorial loss to Ted Cruz that he went to New Mexico and ate dirt. It was special dirt, and he brought some home for his wife and family to eat because it had “rejuvenative powers.” Rejuvinate means to make young again, juvenate being from the same latin word as juvenile, and we will get to that.

Eating stuff for power is not a new idea. Popeye ate spinach. As an aside, it did not seem to advance him socially, but that’s another column. If you read the academic blatherings of 1968 writer and Ph.D. (sic) Carlos Castaneda, you will discover that eating jimson weed will let you fly. For more information on eating stuff for power, search the internet for Beto and turd. You will discover that a “verdant” (means green) baby turd can pass as an avocado to your wife. 

Let’s talk about drinking, instead. Ponce de Leon was a Spanish trust-fund baby back in 1493, who, legend has it, searched southern Florida for a rejuvenating fountain. He may have searched, or may have not. The point is, this rejuvenation idea by eating and drinking stuff is as old as throwing virgins into volcanoes. Rejuvenation, of course, is eternal life, a matter that has already been adjudicated. Old Ponce was killed by a poison arrow, dipped in plant matter (but not jimson weed) and flown at him by an indigenous person. Rejuvenation no longer being in his equation, we hope he was up on his rosaries. 

Which brings us back to education and training. Once was the time, long ago and far away, that education meant discipline based on facts, not superstition. People like Castenada pushed us along the road to fiction and fantasy, but, as I said, I was teaching English back then, and I can attest that identifiable groups had no affection for discipline or facts. They loved money, power and paper certificates for themselves. 

The unions came to prominence in that environment, and it evolved. It evolved to the point that today, the education of the ‘50s bears no resemblance, whatever, to the education of today. 

Part of education back then was “reading and writing and ՚rithmatic, taught to the tune of a hickory stick.” I can attest to that, too, since I earned a swat or two along the way. 

And education back then also focused on virtues. For those of you with good memories, can you recall what a virtue is? Virtues were once the basis of art. Ha! There’s an evolution, for you. The only plot line left in visual arts today is “pretty boy/pretty girl/blow-up bad guys/screw. The side plots involve flying without moving your butt, and moving your butt without thinking. Has anybody ever wondered what kind of “recreation” recreational pot is? Like, I mean, dude, do you achieve prowess with it? Win a pot championship? Compete against another team? Or is it just another made-up word for nothing? I wonder if anybody recreates with timed pot chess. 

Those, of course, are not facts, but musings. 

Today, we seem to have clear evidence that our educational systems are undisciplined sumps of superstition and ignorance. This is curious, since the advent of socialism requires an undisciplined sump of superstition and ignorance, and, voila!: half our new presidential candidates are lying about their indigenuity (I just made that word up), eating shit and promoting a final solution for cows. Ocasio-Cortez has an economics degree from Boston University (uh-oh), but seems to have economized on nothing but her class time. But you gotta admit; she has great teeth.¹ 

The sump is growing daily, though, and anybody that thinks we can pull out of this nose-dive whenever we grab the controls is wrong. It’s in the software. 

Meanwhile, our planes are falling out of the air, our allies don’t trust our our regulators and our most “compassionate” city governments are Chicago, Newark, San Francisco, Seattle and New York. Our universities are now staffed with the product of their own minds, and that product is verdant and smells. Can anybody that works for a living guess why academics don’t want their competence tested? Can anybody that has ever paid off a debt explain why student loan debt should exempt somebody from work until you and I pay it for them? 

For what it’s worth, I earned my degree, have the certifications to be a full professor in any university in North America, I used to teach there and I don’t. And that should say something. For example, it says I like reality. 

It seems to me, anybody that is not stoned, baffled and hateful has an uphill climb ahead, making sure those that are don’t “suffer.” From my perspective, it is better we that should feed them knowledge. I call it the Beto solution. Let them eat avocado. We can tell them it’s “smart food.” 

Did I hear somebody ask why we have a difficult time finding skilled workers? I may have an answer, but it lies in revolution. I think we have the best political system, but its application is failing. We need to revolt. More accurately, our representatives need to revolt against their usurper-handlers and answer to us. That’s what we hired them for. They need to quit staring stupidly at the rain dancers and arm themselves against the ensconced bureaucrats. We need competence among our educators. We need accountability among our law enforcement. We need the voices of the activists to be proportional to the number people that support them, not the funding they can accrue. And we need our media to abandon its carnival-barker belief that the world wants a freak show.  

Those are the jobs of our representatives. I don’t think this is a matter of political parties, although there is much to mock on both sides. However, the mockables are all products of our evolved educational system. They actually believe their stuff. I happen to agree with Elizabeth Warren that it’s time to break up the media and FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google). So what? It is also time to separate the mockables from the not. We can make two new parties: the Adult Party and the Party Party, comprising respective elements from the existing two. Then, the Adults Party can cut off the allowances, issue a caning and send the Party partiers to bed without supper. I am not averse to such treatment, believing I once benefitted from it, myself. 

It will cost. It always has. But wouldn’t it be nice if we were looking ahead to a time when the U.S. is seen as an emblem of honor and virtue, instead of just a fading memory? We need to pay the cost now or forever, and the parasite classes cannot be relied upon to supply even a token virgin. 

When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing; he believes anything. – G. K. Chesterton ¹

Two unrelated but parallel items moved on the news wires last week, each of which has the potential to change the information landscape significantly. 

First, Nick Sandmann, a student at a Catholic school in Covington, Ky., through his parents, has filed a libel suit against the Washington Post, alleging the paper defamed Sandmann for exercising his rights under the First Amendment, and using Sandmann as an acceptable casualty in an effort to discredit President Trump, since Sandmann was wearing a Trump-campaign signature MAGA hat. 

While much of the web chatter has it that Sandmann does not have a case, I am of a different opinion. Irrespective of how you see the facts of the incident itself, the coverage was typical of news in the MeToo era – a kind of ready, fire, aim approach to incidents as long as they fit a narrative, irrespective of who gets hurt – in this case, a minor. 

Sandmann is asking for $250 million, which is approximately what Amazon entrepreneur and Trump hater Jeff Bezos paid for the whole newspaper, and so has the tone of being very political and very punitive. 

News organizations have enjoyed a virtual immunity from defamation suits over the years, given that a free society must have credible, valid information on its leaders and regulators, irrespective of how badly those leaders and regulators want to remain unseen. However, there is growing evidence that the news organizations have morphed from small, independent voices of local or regional constituencies into what amounts to being leaders and regulators in their own right, but unregulated and sometimes renegade. 

I have long felt that, while we need the press to be both free and protected, there was always the underlying assumption that it would also be just and fair. Recent coverage, however, of riots, elections, investigations and allegations have given rise to concern that it is neither just nor fair, and that it operates monolithically, as if one overwhelming voice, instead of a range of voices and opinions exploring society’s situations and options. 

If, in fact, the press has been acting politically and in a partisan manner, and if it has been using its protections against defamation as a shroud and cloak, from behind which it can slash and kill with impunity, it is time for a review. Especially when it attacks a minor. 

The media’s love of directing, rather than reporting, policy became evident when Woodward and Bernstein were successful in deposing a sitting president, rightly or wrongly, accelerated down with the Anita Hill and Bork hearings, the latter successful in destroying a nominee for the Supreme Court and continued to spiral down as it attacked dozens or hundreds of would-be public servants, to the recent debacle at the hearings regarding Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. 

Concurrently, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas last Tuesday called for a review of the landmark case New York Times v. Sullivan, in which the Court recognized a higher standard of proof when suing public figures for defamation. The idea at the time was that public figures are better targets for suits, as they often have deep pockets, and they can be scrutinized continually for slip-ups. The new standard, “actual malice,” is not malice, actually, as my journalism law professor loved to quip. It is knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth. 

The Court subsequently recognized another level of public figure, known as a “limited-purpose” public figure, wherein if a private party voluntarily injects himself or herself into a controversy, that person can become a public figure for the purpose of that suit, even though they may have no other pubic profile. 

Thomas has another view. When the Court decided not to take up the case of a woman that accused Bill Cosby of abuse, Thomas concurred, but for an entirely different reason than the majority. “New York Times and the Court’s decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law,” he wrote. “If the Constitution does not require public figures to satisfy an actual-malice standard in state-law defamation suits, then neither should we. We did not begin meddling in this area until 1964, nearly 175 years after the First Amendment was ratified. The States are perfectly capable of striking an acceptable balance between encouraging robust public discourse and providing a meaningful remedy for reputational harm. We should reconsider our jurisprudence in this area.” 

Thomas is a smart guy. As an aside, if you have not read his book, My Grandfather’s Son, you should. 

Reputational harm is devastating, and the current application of New York Times vs. Sullivan has opened the gates for the vilest, most hateful, most calculated and most criminal minds in history to work their magic on reputable, productive, brilliant leaders our country can muster. The media has the bit in its teeth, and it intends to exercise its power. No longer are newspapers the voice of independent, local or regional constituencies. Ben Franklin would be confounded to see one of his dearest principles so perverted. They are the tools of megalithic corporations bent on one goal – power to generate profit. This creates, to my mind, an irresolvable conflict of interests. They cannot be trusted. 

In my view, these two cases have come in an environment where the country is ripe for a change. The abuses have gone too far and have become endemic. For my money, I will bet on Nick Sandmann. The media needs a good caning to remember what its job is and who’s the boss. 

What has this to do with the wood industry? We hope it is obvious. The incremental takeover of the trade press by commercial interests has tracked right along with commercial occupation of the mainstream press, to the point most “publishers” today are nothing more than stenographers for their best two advertisers. God forbid that anybody publish something critical of Homag or Biesse. On that point I have personal experience. 

But my situation is not an example of the oppression of commercial interests, but rather and example of how things should be. We work for the interests of the wood industry in the U.S., and we do so independently. We can be right or wrong; it’s your pick. But we are not under the thumb of commercial, political or governmental handlers. The New York Times and the Washington Post lost their right to that claim long ago. 

Wouldn’t it be great to be a superhero? Seriously. You could come busting into people’s lives, breaking up their adversaries and woes and gain eternal adulation for yourself. In the ՚50s you could be Superman or the Lone Ranger. In the ՚20s you could be Bert Wilson or Tom Mix. In the ՚90s you could be Spiderman or the Incredible Hulk. Today, you could be Chuck and Nancy.

The Messianic Complex is not a new idea. I assume many notable historic figures had it. Napoleon could have had it. Or Caesar Augustus.

Curiously, the actual messiahs of most religions lacked it. They had no idea of being worshipped for all the stuff they gave away for free to people that demanded it. In fact, I think psychiatry views a messianic complex as derangement.

Derangement or not, I suppose I have a touch of it. I was lucky to be invited to the FIMMA trade show in Bento Gonçalves, Brazil, some years back. During a break, one of the show staff took me on a tour that took us past one of the poor places in that area. People in North America that think they have seen “poor” without having been off the continent really don’t have a clue. I was an income maintenance worker in the welfare system for five years, and I have seen North American poor. It doesn’t hold a candle.

I asked the driver to stop so I could take a picture. He objected, saying it was not safe. I told him to stop, anyway, and to be ready if I jumped back in the car, so he did.

From my vantage, I was on the lip of a huge, steep ravine about half a mile across. Houses had been built up and down the sides of the ravine, the backs built into the dirt and the front on stilts. In front of the stilts was the back of another house, so close the occupants of the first house couldn’t throw waste water of the … porch? … balcony? without hitting the neighbor below.

These houses were down and across the ravine, and to my left and right as far as I could see. Thousands of houses. Maybe tens of thousands of houses. And when the rains come, there are mudslides, and if the top house slips, it pancakes down onto the next which pancakes down onto the next and so on. You can see the remains of slides coming up the road from Porto Alegre, with jumbles of the remains of houses and stilts sticking out like fractured bones in an offal pile.

Sensing the need for speed, I raised my camera for a shot, and stopped. In my attention to the landscape, I had missed a girl. She was right in front of me, at the back door of one of the houses. She was dressed immaculately — spotlessly — and was apparently on her way to her business of the day. Maybe she had a job. Maybe she had a friend. But she had a life separate from anything I have known or could know. She was beautiful, with shiny, young hair and wide, dark eyes. Maybe she was 17.

She was horrified and mortified to see me. Terrified. But she was not staring in fear at me. It was the camera. You could see she would rather be dead than be to captured in that time and in that place by the cold, context-barren record of film. “Who might see it? Who might know where I have to live?”

I recall thinking I had enough money on my debit card to totally change her life. But then, I thought, did I? At Brazilian prices, I could get her a car and an apartment in Rio, but what would my intentions be seen as? What would happen to her if she got a place in Rio? What would happen to her family, her friends, her co-workers or her church? And how many could I help before I was broke?

I recall a dinner one night at a trade show back home where the lady I was seated next to was from Guatemala City. She was talking about the poverty in part of the city, and explaining it was only a small part, despite what we in North America see. 

She was talking about the save-the-children organizations that would come to Guatemala to take pictures of big-eyed girls for fund-raising, leaving the next day, never to return. “They don’t understand what they are doing,” she said. “If you give that little girl a five-dollar bill, you are signing her death warrant. Her life is not worth the $5 somebody else bigger will see.”

Harsh. One wonders where the funds the fundraisers raised went? My dinner partner says they did not go back to Guatemala. Maybe they went for purple robes and wine.

Somebody incited those women and children from Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador to join a caravan to the U.S. From news reports, it was hell coming up, despite the clear international aid that was provided to help them cover hundreds of miles a day. I don’t know if the reports were true. I wasn’t there. But it was harsh.

Harsher, still, was seeing their international “support” dry up when the clear political aim of defeating the U.S. border failed.

Part of me wishes we could collectively tax ourselves to the max and give free money to all the poor in Honduras. I have been there, too, and seen beautiful young girls in spotless, starched, white dresses walking barefoot on the rocks.

There are dozens of old sayings for wanna-be messiahs. One is “When you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. When you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”

We in North America have tried to teach the world to fish. God knows we have tried. We rebuilt Europe and Asia following WWII. We established UNICEF and other agencies under the United Nations. We have sent food supplies to Ethiopia and Somalia. And desperate poverty — the kind of poverty that kills — prevails. Largely because of politics. It is not in the interests of the powerful warlords and charities of the world to share. Yes. Some are beneficent and some are benign. That means nothing.

So how do we teach a man to fish when all his fish are taken for the “good” of others? Do we go into Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Honduras and compel the rulers to share? Clearly not. We have tried that.

So what do we teach? If we are humble, we have only one message to teach, that message being not how we are superheroes, but how we achieved our own prosperity.

We all know the answer to that, but it is harsh. Really harsh. We got fed up with being told by a monarch what we had to share, we picked up a gun and we threw his ass out. That’s not my idea. That is what happened.

So the question presents: if we know how we found prosperity, how dare we teach others that it is we, not they, that are their salvation?

But it was not really the gun, was it? Wasn’t it a belief system and diligent attention to education that led to the formation of a more perfect union? After all, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot and Castro had an unshakeable belief in power from the muzzle of a gun. Maybe the answer is to be a model, to be charitable where we can and to educate in real values. Real morals. Real virtues. Not the engineered, remanufactured, overdone and vapid “niceness” of the latter-day, fundraising-messiah crowd.

We need unskilled workers. It is by being unskilled that you become skilled. No value to value. We can teach. But we don’t need citizens that come here the easier, softer way of ignoring, despising and disregarding the law. Congress can pass any law it wishes to bring in the caravans, but the process of the law in is the hands of Congress and the responsibility, harsh or not, rests on its shoulders.

The girl in Brazil haunts me. By now she is either older or dead. She may have found a spouse and happiness. Happiness is possible in poverty, by the way. Maybe she found a pathway out. Not everybody in poverty stays in poverty. Not there; not here. It seems to be a personal task.

I never took the picture.