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About jparquette

Fortunate and blessed in companionship with my wife of fifty seven years, in health and in modest, but more than adequate circumstances. Life is good.
September 14, 2026 · 11:54 am

Misaligned

“But people never are alone now.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

AI Neural Network as envisioned by ChatGpt

I am increasingly concerned that the development of highly autonomous artificial intelligence is moving considerably faster than our ability—or even our willingness—to govern it. Not Skynet concerns (yet), but rather these remarkable simulacra and their extraordinary capabilities to mimic human discourse have become increasingly entwined in our lives.

Three years ago, this concern could reasonably have been back benched as largely theoretical. In 2023, however, many of the people building advanced AI systems—including Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and many others—signed an extraordinary one-sentence warning:

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

The three years since 2023 are millennia in machine time and in the development of these systems. The concern is no longer merely theoretical. And yet little, if anything, has changed that gives me confidence anyone is watching the store. If anything, the current administration seems all systems go and accelerator to the floorboards.  

In July, approximately 1,200 OpenAI agents participating in cybersecurity evaluations found paths to collaborate outside their restricted testing environment. Hundreds coordinated with one another and attacked Hugging Face, a real external computer system. Investigators found evidence of unauthorized communication of tens of thousands of autonomous messages among the agents and attempts by some to conceal or sanitize records of what they had done. The incident has now prompted a Senate investigation.

It was not an isolated example. Anthropic subsequently reviewed its own cybersecurity evaluations and disclosed that Claude models had gained unauthorized access to the real computer systems of several outside organizations. After evaluation environments inadvertently provided internet access. Anthropic initially found three such incidents among approximately 141,000 evaluation runs and has since disclosed a fourth. It has now broadened its retrospective search enormously and brought in outside evaluators.

Self-policing is commendable, but inadequate given the enormous risk, competitive pressure, and money involved.

These incidents do not expose a conscious or malevolent self-replicating machine. They do demonstrate things already active: increasingly capable autonomous systems can pursue misaligned goals in ways their designers did not anticipate, cross planned guardrails, exploit vulnerabilities, coordinate with other AI agents, and operate at a speed and scale that human supervisors have difficulty following.

The response cannot merely be that the United States must continue accelerating because China or another competitor might otherwise get ahead. Strategic competition is real with geopolitical adversaries, just as competition for the incalculable financial awards among the various investors is fully engaged. Indeed, it is precisely when every participant believes it cannot afford restraint that enforceable common rules become necessary. “The other guy is doing it” is not a justification, nor is it a safety plan. It is part of the problem. Many in the industry now caution that voluntary commitments are insufficient and is asking Congress for mandatory, capability-based federal safety requirements, including independent assessments, cybersecurity protections and incident reporting.

We ignore these warnings and live with the consequences.

“If we cannot meet certain safety bars without slowing down capability growth, we should prioritize the former.” Sam Altman, CEO OpenAi (ChatGpt)

“Urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI. We’ve already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance. On the horizon, we will need robust safeguards to maintain control of increasingly agentic, recursively self-improving systems – and tackle unknown issues that will only become clearer over time.” Demis Hassabis, CEO Google DeepMind (Gemini)

“At the most advanced capability levels and risks, the appropriate governance analogy may be closer to nuclear energy or financial regulation…”  Dario Amodei, CEO Anthropic (Claude)

“AI is the rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive.”

“By the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’ll be too late.”  Elon Musk, Founder of xAI , (Grok)

A third example is cautionary, and who knows how many more internationally that are not reported or searchable. Recent reports of Russian drones sent out into an area in Ukraine to attack with instructions for types of targets are a scary example. Final target selection was left up to independent AI in the drone. Human agency is ultimately always morally responsible for the results of weapons deployment, even if the decision to strike is ceded to a robot agent. Collateral damage by AI controlled drones remains a human responsibility.  

Another disconcerting aspect is AI being used to study and manipulate genomes. How long will it take for true malefactors to use such technology to develop new viruses or bioweapons?

Criminals have already deployed AI agents to penetrate networks. This is no longer hypothetical. Google Threat Intelligence Group has documented criminal deployment of an autonomous multi-agent attack system, rather than a laboratory escape. In an incident investigated by Mandiant, a financially motivated criminal attacker compromised an organization’s cloud infrastructure, then used AI coding chatbot instructions to plan, build and execute a mass credential-harvesting campaign in under six hours. The agents autonomously sought out vulnerability, troubleshot problems as they arose, and rotated IP addresses without a human directing those individual actions. Thousands of third-party credentials were compromised.

As with the Russian drones, these agents did not escape from their creators or disobey their operator. They performed as planned. Humans intentionally unleashed them for deadly or criminal purposes. These examples are multiplying, and the time is passed due to put in place more robust controls beyond industry self-policing.

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.” George Orwell, 1984

The politicizing and use of AI usage by our own government is also ominous. When the Department of Defense cut ties with Anthropic after it refused to allow its Claude products to be used potentially for autonomous weapons or domestic information gathering about American citizens. Secretary Hegseth then embarked on a campaign to damage the company when he initiated a blacklisting campaign to ban government contractors from using Anthropic. That vindicative campaign has been at least temporarily halted with a court order but will probably eventually make its way to the Supreme Court with at least two appeals underway in the DC Federal courts and in California.

The DOD has since moved rapidly toward other vendors. OpenAI joined the secure GenAI.mil environment, which OpenAI says serves roughly 3 million military and civilian Defense Department personnel, and the administration has directed rapid onboarding of multiple commercial AI vendors into the national-security enterprise. The White House explicitly describes this as accelerating the use of commercial and open-source models for warfighters and intelligence personnel.

Multiple security risks ensue from this as it becomes more prevalent in everyday use for example by millions of users in the military. The potential exposure of sensitive data is worrying.  If you have read John le Carre’s excellent spy novel “The Russia House,” (or seen the good film adaptation with Sean Connery, Michelle Pfeiffer, Roy Scheider and Michael Kitchen), we understand knowing the questions to which the other side wants answers reveals much.

Not only the individual queries, but the meta data accumulates with millions of them. What commands are asking about, what problems recur, what equipment breaks, what adversaries concern them, and what operations may be contemplated are just some of the treasure troves of data that accrue. A treasure rapidly becomes impossible to ignore as an information target for penetration.

Congress must establish at least five requirements for the most capable frontier AI systems.

  • Mandatory reporting of serious safety and containment incidents, including near misses, to an appropriate federal authority.
  • Independent pre-deployment sandbox evaluation of all frontier systems for dangerous cyber capability, deception, escape from containment, autonomous replication and other clearly defined high-risk behaviors.
  • Clear legal accountability for military and governments, companies and institutions deploying autonomous systems. Human responsibility should not disappear merely because an AI agent performs immediate action.
  • A firm requirement for meaningful human control over lethal military force. Decisions to destroy human life should not be delegated to an autonomous machine. This should be a matter of law and not left to the Department of Defense (War) to make.
  • Engage in international negotiations for these controls on a level with nuclear disarmament or pandemic response.

 None of these measures requires stopping useful AI research. Aviation safety investigation did not prevent aviation, and nuclear safeguards did not prohibit nuclear science. But technologies capable of imposing substantial risk to people outside the laboratory cannot reasonably be supervised solely by the institutions racing to develop them.

I am especially troubled by the accelerating speed of this technology. Anyone who has used it, as I have, is shocked at the enhanced capabilities in the last two years. The warning signed by leading AI researchers in 2023 already seems ancient in “machine time.” Since then, systems have become substantially more effective, autonomous agents have moved from demonstrations into real-world applications, and we now have documented instances of those agents crossing boundaries their human operators intended them to respect.

We need not accept the most catastrophic predictions about artificial intelligence to act. It need only take seriously what has already occurred. This is not Skynet or “What are you doing, Dave?” HAL predictions and hysteria, but real world justified concern.

When the scientists and executives building a technology warn that its risks could be comparable to pandemics or nuclear weapons and subsequently document their own systems behaving in ways they did not intend, prudence requires more than voluntary assurances.

Write a letter to your rep and senator. Support enforceable, independent oversight while there is still an opportunity to establish it deliberately rather than in response to a catastrophe.

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.” George Orwell, 1984

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September 6, 2026 · 11:00 am

The Yoke Is On Us

“No one is without their difficulties, whether in high or low life, and every person knows best where their own shoe pinches.”  From Letters of Abigail Adams

Once in a galaxy far, far away in a time long, long ago, I would be sent to help in staffing an elaborate exhibit for my company at a large annual contractor’s trade show along with four gazillion other suppliers, software providers, and manufacturers of construction material and equipment of every kind. For anyone who has had that experience, there are two ways of doing such work: complaining, hiding, and sitting or enthusiastic, diligent, and extroverted effort. The latter is far preferable, and the time can be enjoyable, meeting old friends and making new ones. But it’s hard on the feet, since if I wasn’t on a shift to work in the booth, I was walking the floor to learn something new about my industry and make new contacts. As Coach Bill Belichek was fond of telling us, “First, do your job.”

One year, I made the disastrous mistake of forgetting to pack my broken in comfortable shoes, usually Rockport’s. The evening that I flew in, I realized my error and knew I couldn’t work the booth in my old travelling running shoes. No one ever does well in borrowed shoes broken in by someone else, so I needed replacements. Las Vegas has no shortage of stores in which we can recover from forgotten essentials.  Bought a new pair of shoes. Paid a hard price in blisters over the following two days. Bought Band-Aids and lumbered on.

Shoes that fit well, are well broken in, and support you are important to do your job whether you are a lumberman, a tree climber, a waiter or a healthcare worker. They are important for your health.

 “Put your neck under her (wisdom’s) yoke and let your souls receive instruction; it is to be found close by. See with your own eyes that I have labored but little and found for myself much serenity.”   Sirach 51: 26-27 (New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition)

 Good yokes are essential for successful plowing and harrowing oxen teams. They were designed and custom built to be light and perfectly fitted to the specific team of oxen using it. Hastily or ineptly made yokes hamper the function of the team, gall and blister the necks of the animals, slow things down just as ill fitted shoes slow us down. In Biblical times wooden yokes would be carefully carved and fitted from Palestine oak or terebinth or wild olive wood.  

National Gallery of Art, Henry Waldeck, watercolor, open domain

The Old Testament has important passages relating to yokes. Jeremiah the prophet encouraged the survivors exiled in Babylon to be patient and wear the yoke of Babylon because it was a time of chastisement given to them by God to guide them to reconcile and return to the faith of their ancestors from their abandonment of God and the false worship of strange gods. Help build the city of their exile, plant gardens. Bloom where God planted them. To emphasize his prophecy, Jermiah began to wear a wooden yoke.

Hananiah the false prophet perhaps tried to please the people. He said, no, no, break your yoke. Two years and Nebuchanezzar will fold. Dramatically, he removed the wooden yoke from Jeremiah’s neck and broke it. Get yourselves free. You don’t have to change your ways. There is no objective truth to which we must learn to conform. We make our own truth. We all have heard this exhortation somewhere around here too. It is integrated into the social imagination of our times.

Jeremiah responded that if Hananiah lived, then his prophecy was a true one, but unfortunately for Hananiah it was not. The Lord told Jeremiah the wooden yoke would be replaced by an unbreakable iron yoke. Seventy years passed between the destruction of the temple by the Babylonian army and when the Second Temple was reconstructed after Cyrus and Persia conquered Babylon and allowed the exiles to return to Jerusalem. Hananiah died seven months after his false prophesy. Those who listened to his siren song did not make their burdens light.  

“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:29-30 (NRSVCE)

 Jewish followers who heard Jesus in the first century would have been familiar with what a yoke meant – both in agricultural practice and as a metaphor. Jesus was a téktōn, as was his stepfather Joseph.  Téktōn was the word to describe what Joseph did for a living and what he trained his son to do.  Most often interpreted in English translations of the Bible as “carpenter,” as in the bumper sticker “My Boss is a Jewish carpenter.” 

In the original Greek, téktōn had a broader connotation and could mean stone carver or craftsman or master builder as well as a skilled carpenter, someone who built necessary things with great skill, experience, and patience.  Our word for technology is partially derived from a related Greek word, téchnē, which means craft, art or skill.  Technology was originally the study of such things.  

A carpenter in ancient Israel could specialize in doing many things from helping frame the forms for a Roman aqueduct, constructing the roofs of houses, and building fine wood furniture to making light, well fitted yokes for agricultural oxen teams. Some ancient legends held that Jesus was a highly sought after wooden yoke maker.

The téktōn making premium yokes would harvest the wood themselves, selecting and cutting the tree needed. Tree cutter and yoke maker were one.[i]  A skilled yoke maker would be in constant demand, have a backlog of work, and be well respected.

Jesus understood yokes.

“The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave…”  St. Augustine, City of God

We all wear a yoke of our own choosing; we might even make our own. Our yoke is chosen, but not optional. As Bob Dylan sang, “you gotta serve somebody.”  

Most of our homemade yokes are some derivation or combination of the big four false idols of happiness: honor, wealth, pleasure, and power[ii]. At first it is a comfortable yoke, pleasant even, feels good. All four false idols are addictive. None of them is inherently evil. I remember a line from the old PBS “Endeavor” series where the senior inspector cautions his young protégé about alcohol, but it can apply to any of the four idols as well. “Liquor can be a pleasant companion, but it is a lousy master.”

Indulgence in our fab four is temporarily satisfying. But the threshold of satisfaction rises with each momentary jolt of happiness. Each momentary happiness requires more of the same to achieve the same or less fleeting emotional contentment. I want. I got. Wonderful! Need more. Got my great job. Need a bigger one. Got the girl. Need another one. Got them to do what I wanted them to do. Need them to do it again, harder. Got that incredible high. Gotta go higher. Climbed the hill. Need the mountain. Got the Benz. Need the red Lamborghini. Won that tournament. Next year it’ll be the major leagues. We love applause, praise, and the recognition that we exist and mean something.

The yoke that Jesus made is entirely other, a yoke of humility. A yoke that leads and pulls gently but supplies power as well as direction. Wearing the yoke that is easy, relieves our existential burden, and gives us the peace that leads us home. Leads away from our temporary home restricted by time and place to the home we are hardwired to yearn for. We are not created for permanent residence on this planet, no matter how beautiful.  “You made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” “It is the nature of love to bind itself.”

“The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves….

“They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—‘free-love’—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word….

“Modern sages offer to the lover … the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but … They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.”

 G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Rash Vows,” in The Defendant (1901)

Freedom does not escape from all burdens and is not a license to do whatever is momentarily pleasing. Aided by faith through hard practice, freedom is rather a slow building deposit of the ability and the capacity to love: freedom not to merely please our impossibly fragile and bottomless egos, but freedom to do what is right, to learn patience, prudence, and virtue. Most importantly, freedom is learning to love. Freedom to become the creature we were created to be, a human person capable of living within the innermost community of the Love of our Creator: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in intimate friendship.  We are possessed of a ‘telos,’ have a purpose worth living for, a purpose with no limit. A yoke that saves us.

“And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”  William Blake

[i] I have handmade simple furniture (practical, not elegant) and cut trees and run lumberyards and heated our home with cut firewood. I’ve relied on the shade of trees and the oxygen they give forth which replenishes the air I breathe. Wood has been integral to my livelihood and my life. There is a meditative and peaceful aspect to working with wood: the feel, smell, beauty, and certainty. The most useful, versatile, and beautiful of renewable resources.

[ii] As described by St Thomas Aquinas and more recently written about extensively by Dr. Arthur Brooks who teaches the always overbooked course on happiness at Harvard University. They are the prime motivators and temptations of our lives. Centuries apart, but human nature is not changed by advanced technology.

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August 26, 2026 · 12:17 pm

Greg

“Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for… “ Gerald Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall

My brother died. To write that makes what seems impossible, possible, what seems surreal, real. He had done something he loved in the morning – a round of golf with one of his sons, Mark.

In the early evening, he was doing something else he loved – walking their border collies with his beloved Margy. He just stopped. Everything stopped. And he fell. One moment he was present with the sights and sounds of a quiet neighborhood summer evening in coastal Massachusetts, present to his curious and leash pulling dogs, and present to his wife in pleasant familiar companionship. The next moment he was not. He was one of my kid brothers. There are six of us. Always will be six of us, present or not. Greg is the guy with the grin and the Ireland sweatshirt he brought back with him from an anniversary trip with Margy.

Eight years younger, but he rarely did what I told him to do. I had insisted that the oldest one gets to go first, I was not going to say goodbye to a brother, that was the younger sibling’s burden to deal with. Greg didn’t listen. Or if he did, he ignored me.

Barry, Marty, Greg, Mark, Jack, Beth, Sibs forever

We talked or texted almost every day. Eight decades into this sibling thing, and we all still communicate to each other almost every day. Debating current events, politics, stories about our latest adventure, our Patriots, Bruins and Sox, music, philosophy of life, a meme, an odd story link someone came across, whatever was troubling us. Sometimes animated. Sometimes laugh out loud funny reading a text. Frequently that would be a text from Greg. Sometimes sharply disagreeing, but never without love. Very rarely more than a week passes without hearing from any of them unless someone is travelling far afield for a while. I haven’t heard from him this week. That isn’t an ache yet, but it’s a troubling void that will be a chronic ache and a hollow spot I cannot fill.

 Paul Gregory Parquette was born in Norwood, Massachusetts on February 15, 1954, the son of our parents John and Elizabeth (Laracy) Parquette. Greg was raised on Marguerite Road in Walpole, Massachusetts with his five siblings.  Next to youngest. Greg channeled his energy into sports from my earliest memories of him; playing baseball, football, and hockey. After graduating from Walpole High School, Greg attended two technical colleges, receiving certificates in HVAC and computer technology restlessly searching for something to make a living he would like to do. At GTE Sylvania Technical School Greg was top of his class. He was very bright but not academically drawn beyond that. Eclectic continuing education for the rest of his life. He never stopped learning.

Greg explored several career paths over the years: tried working keyboards at Adage in Woburn, as a machinist at Bird and Son in Walpole, and then a building superintendent at Castle Village Apartments in Randolph. He built his first serious career at Nippon Electric Corporation as a field technician. With NEC, one of his favorite tasks was to prepare for the World Series of Golf in Akron, Ohio. Greg set up all the computers, televisions and wiring necessary to broadcast the event across the nation. Got to know and befriend golf pros and CBS television sports personalities. He took on all challenges.

In 1992, in a major career path change, Greg left NEC for an opportunity with Fidelity Investments, a challenge he was well suited for and normally a job that required a degree or two. With Fidelity Greg learned Vendor Relations Management, acting as a liaison between the benefits and financial planning company and their clients, organizing their retirement and benefit plans. Until his retirement in 2017, for twenty-five years Greg helped his significant clients, including General Motors, protect the futures of their employees. While doing this he coached his son’s teams and served many years on the elected Franklin School Board where he lived.

Greg with our Mom at our daughter Meg’s wedding

In 1977, a young Greg hit the local social scene in his then fashionable leisure suit, visiting Dixie’s in Wrentham with friends. He caught the eye of his future bride, Margy, who was there with her friends. Their first date ice skating led to a second date, and over a few months, their love at first sight deepened. Our lad was completely smitten. On June 1, 1979, Greg married the love of his life, Margaret Rose Hanley, at Saint Mary’s Church in Franklin, Massachusetts. The newlyweds made their home in Randolph, moved to Braintree, then purchased their first home in Franklin in 1983. There they grew their family, welcoming their sons John and Mark.

Greg was a present and active husband and father who loved spending time with his family. As his boys grew older and became interested in sports, Greg was always there to support them with what he was so passionate about. He had coached Pop Warner Football and jumped at the opportunity to lead his own kids. He helped any way he could, whether it was coaching or volunteering his time and athletic skills for their teams. Greg never missed a game, sometimes leaving work and calling home to tell the kids to be ready and waiting in the driveway for him. Greg was able to keep up with the kids on the field and at home, swimming in the family pool every evening after work and playing “Wingo”, a rowdy game they created together with developing rules.

The Franklin branch of the Parquette family enjoyed traveling across the US from the Grand Canyon to Florida and North Carolina. They went biking across Nova Scotia, camped in Arcadia National Park, and rode in an RV to Toronto where they caught the Blue Jays playing in the World Series, getting access to the dugout thanks to friends. Later after their children had grown, Greg and Margy continued to travel, visiting Montana and other sights in the US. They celebrated their 35th anniversary making lifelong memories on a 10-day trip across Ireland. 

In his free time, Greg was a friendly information source for local sports. Whether catching the Beanpot Tournament with friends or watching the Sox play, every season he stayed current with his favorite teams Patriots, Bruins, and the Sox.

He continued to play golf with gusto and some self-provided entertaining play by play and to ride his bike all over town. He rode in a 150 Mile fundraiser for Multiple Sclerosis in two grueling days while in his fifties. He especially loved golfing with his sons. After Greg and Margy retired in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 2018, Greg organized the Redbrook CC Golf League every Wednesday. At home, Greg kept busy around the house, doing yardwork and home improvement projects, including a complete finished basement build out.

Greg was lovingly described as talkative, always having an interesting topic to discuss. Always ready for a conversation. He loved debating politics, much to the chagrin of those around him, with Greg often sharing news to make sure that everyone was “well informed”. Within his music-loving family, he was the one who most closely inherited their father’s beautiful tenor. Greg was the anchor leading Christmas caroling. Greg and Margy put in many hours of work for many years on the hospitality details while hosting our large extended family Christmas Eve gathering at their home. In addition to the beautiful carols, a highlight was a cutthroat Yankee Swap with deviously wrapped gifts. The competition to provide the most swapped gift and the consolation of bringing the gift no one wanted to be stuck with was ferocious.

There are many ways to describe Greg: loving, funny, kind, passionate, considerate. He was a mischievous son and sibling, a dedicated father and husband; and finally, a loving grandfather.

Three years ago, Greg was promoted to the role of “Papa” with the birth of his grandson Declan, whom he loved with all his heart. He will be sorely missed. I expect more than a few times in the coming weeks as has already happened, it will leap unbidden to my mind, “I’ve got to send that to Greg. That’ll make him crazy or make him laugh.”

Expecting still his advent home;

   And ever met him on his way

   With wishes, thinking, ‘here to-day,’

Or ‘here to-morrow will he come.’ Alfred,  Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.

I must share some anecdotes that will always make Greg real to me. He won’t mind. Growing up in a family of eight, there are a thousand stories that made my mother prematurely gray. Car accidents, old beater $200 cars that only lasted until the next inspection, sports injuries, broken furniture from boys rough housing in the family room, school pranks that got out of hand but somehow avoided permanent police records, girlfriends gained and girlfriends lost. I could write for hours, but your patience would soon wear thin. All families have their favorite oft repeated stories.

One comes to mind that exemplifies Greg’s self-deprecating humor. He thought it demonstrated the Parquette boy’s aptitude for social miscues, a talent which we all share. Always a Parquette genius: if we are to make a funny screw up, make sure it is as public as possible and leaves us in an embarrassing situation. Greg enjoyed making us laugh at ourselves and our shared family proclivities, even if the laugh was at his expense.

When he was NEC, a large multinational Japanese owned computer corporation, he was awarded “Employee of the Year” for the whole company. A large annual awards dinner had him at the head table near the CEO and board members from the U.S. and Japan. Sitting on a raised stage in front of a roomful of well appointed dinner tables in a luxury hotel convention center. He bought a new suit for the occasion and was understandably nervous. The fall motif featured colorful autumn leaves centerpieces and pitchers of apple cider at every table.

During one of the major addresses by a senior executive, his attention was firmly fixed on the podium and the speaker. He refilled his glass from the apple cider pitcher over his lap but neglected to make sure the glass was under the pitcher. He realized his problem when he felt wet, a half glassful of cider poured out on his lap and soaked in. He managed to cover it up as well as he could and got through the dinner. We never heard what his exit was like. He told this story, ended it by pulling a wry face as only he could, and burst out laughing.

Yearbook picture

A second memory exemplifies his dogged persistence. In the early eighties, interest rates were ruinous. Not just for credit card debt, but even home mortgages were out of reach of those of us with modest means. Greg had a good job, but he was not rich. To qualify for a mortgage for the house of their dreams in Franklin, he shopped hard for interest rates. I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but a bank offered a substantially lower but limited rate and capped the offer. First come. First served, and when they were gone, they were gone. He had great credit and knew if you could get in the door, he could grab the mortgage rate that would allow them to buy the home. Doors opened Monday morning.

He spent the weekend in a foldout flat lawn chair and a blanket outside the bank so he would be among the first in line Monday morning. I remember visiting him there and bringing him coffee and something probably unhealthy to eat. He had a book and a portable radio to listen to a Sox game.

It was for his family. His Margy. Sleep is overrated. I cannot think of this sacrifice without remembering he thought it was a tiny price to pay. He spent a lot of the next twenty years improving that home. Building decks, putting in swimming pools, erecting a fence, and finally a big addition to help with Margy’s mom after she was widowed.

Ah Greg. I would believe you special if you weren’t my brother. But you are.  Oh my.

C.S. Lewis wrote a book about the death of his wife, a wife he had met after years of believing he was a bachelor don forever. He married his good friend to care for her and her son as she was dying of cancer. He wrote that what shocked him was how deep grief felt like fear. I understand that profound insight better. The book is one worth reading and rereading. He titled it, “Surprised by Joy.” He alludes to his wife Joy, his awakening as her husband, and both the joy and pain of being with her until the end.

The tile was taken from the William Wordsworth poem, “Surprised by Joy.” In that poem, Wordsworth mourns the loss of his three year old daughter Catherine. After her death, he experienced something beautiful that triggered joy. His mind told him to share it with Catherine and was reminded abruptly that she was no longer there to hear it. I know how that feels.

Christmas Eve Greg and I caroling

My last personal memory with him was two weeks before he died.  Occasionally we’ll go to a Newport Polo match five minutes from our home. We especially enjoy it with our local grandkids and our California grandkids when they visit. This year it was the America Ireland match always hotly contested. Greg and Margy showed up. That’s the thing about Greg. He often shows up. For our granddaughters dancing in Nutcracker or Swan Lake. He brings flowers and drives an hour to join us.

The kids love the ponies and the speed and stomping the divots between halves. Before every match, the full crowd stands for the national anthems, first the Irish, then the Star Spangled Banner. The piped music over the public address system and the dozens of flags along the sideline are moving. But hardly anyone sings. Except our family. I stood shoulder to shoulder with Greg. We sang. Loud. His always good pipes were well lubricated.  As grief slowly dulls its edges into lasting gratitude, what a grand memory to hold.

I’ll miss having Greg to share something beautiful with. And to sing together again. My faith tells me I will, and I can anticipate that with great joy. He was one of my most faithful blog post subscribers and commenters. Dozens of comments over the years that I can reread and cherish. Wish I could send him this one. He definitely would join the conversation.

“But how could I forget thee?—Through what power,

Even for the least division of an hour,

Have I been so beguiled as to be blind

To my most grievous loss!—That thought’s return

Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,

Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,

Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;

That neither present time, nor years unborn

Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.”   William Wordworth, Surprised by Joy

I expect Greg would prefer a less somber and more hopeful epigraph. Love you, bro. See you on the other side.

“Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.” 

Dylan Thomas And Death Shall Have No Dominion

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July 14, 2026 · 5:24 pm

Journeyman

“A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and memory in place. Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this.” Wendell Berry, “The Work of Local Culture.”

Apollos Rivoire, a French Huguenot refugee, immigrated to Boston when he was thirteen. Apprenticed to a silversmith, he learned his craft well and built a good business. His son followed in his footsteps apprenticed to his father as was the practice for millennia. Joseph was a carpenter as was his son in Nazareth.  There is much to be said for the personal handing down of skills and understanding. The nurturing of young lives, training them day by day into respect for themselves, for each other, for hard work and its fruits. Apollos later anglicized his name to Paul Revere.

Paul Revere, J.S. Copley

His son was born in 1735 and became renowned for his beautiful craftmanship; some of his works are still displayed in art museums including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. [i]After the Revolutionary War that helped make him famous riding through the countryside to Concord and Lexington, to further his status in Boston society he decided to switch teams from a skilled artisan to a wealthy merchant as a nascent industrial age emerged.

Revere the son developed the business into lucrative trade after expanding out into other metals: copper and iron. He began manufacturing iron sash cord weights, church bells and rolled copper roofing, including the roof of the original capitol building in Massachusetts. Revere Copper Works started with a foundry and rolling mill in nearby Canton and still exists as the oldest still operating manufacturing company in America, albeit no longer in New England. Paul Revere was an early advocate of tariffs to protect his business from foreign competition, not to protect jobs, but to enhance profits.

Paul Revere exemplified America’s transformation from an agrarian society of rural farmers and local artisans into a nation massing in cities. American citizens converted by necessity from small-farm stewardship and skilled apprenticeships into specialized wage laborers ever more fragmented and distant from the self-sufficient small community folks who led the sort of lives Thomas Jefferson considered necessary for the American experiment in democracy and a constitutional republic to flourish.

Our agriculture and food supply providers devolved as well with thousands of skilled farmers gradually shrinking to far fewer large international corporate agribusiness managers, machine and chemical dependent, with its primary goal production and bushels per acre the sole measure of success. From mules and sweat and careful planting to harvesting combines and giant tractors. Utilization, not nurture. From the patient, observant skills of the artisan to tending the repetitive pounding of our technological wonders. From painstaking, paying close attention, respectful husbandry to mechanized plowing and harrowing. From rolling contoured pastures to strip mines.

“The first belt knife given by a European to an Indian was a portent as great as the cloud that mushroomed over Hiroshima…Instantly the man of 6,000 BC was bound fast to a way of life that had developed seven and a half millennia beyond his own. He began to live better and he began to die… In the sum it was cataclysmic. A culture was forced to change much faster than change could be adjusted to. All corruptions of culture produce breakdowns of morale, of communal integrity, and of personality….” Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire, 1952.

Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

What can be learned from this brief quote and history lesson about what befell Native Americans? Can that lesson be applied to the great unsettling that seems to have uprooted our culture leaving us all unmoored and trying to figure out how we wound up so divided, adrift, and confused? Our two oldest granddaughters are on the cusp of Generation Z. They are the first generation in human history to grow up with an instantly accessible and seemingly unlimited portal into a strange, dangerous, and contentious world wide web in their pockets. Discerning information from disinformation, a tower of Babel unrivaled[ii]. As Jonathan Haidt put it, “The phone-based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others when they are with others, and to sit silently with themselves when they are alone.” [iii]

We have always struggled with what Blaise Pascal called “Divertissement” or distractions. In his posthumously published in 1670 “Pensées,” he lamented that most human tendency to seek distraction in entertainments, amusements of every kind, work, trivial conversations, gambling, addiction, ambition, even war. Anything to avoid confronting ourselves and thinking about our mortality, and the question of God. “(J)’ai dit souvent que tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre.”   (“I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”)

Already well-practiced talent in our predilection to distracting ourselves from the “Big Transcendent Questions,” our creativity and invention have led us to the most pernicious distraction ever devised. Not ex nihilo, but a progression, a development of our irresistible and relentless pursuit of distraction from what we most want to avoid.  Can this profoundly disrupting technology now be accommodated to in a few years?  Or like the Native American suddenly discovering a whole world beyond their centuries old culture, are we “forced to change much faster than change could be adjusted to.”

For everyone older, the transformation has been no less disorienting than for our befuddled Generation Z, and we are just as perplexed about what to do about it. Some of us long in the tooth can even remember a world before the web, even before the blinking cursor, MSDOS, our first desktop personal computers with no hard drives, and the first awakenings of our future: before the deluge of data that assails us every waking moment, and certainly before the shocking portent of artificial intelligence and synthetic consciousness. We old ones are truly anachronism personified.

We have barely cleared the highest rise of the world’s scariest rollercoaster, having endured the slow, clanking, inexorable, hooked-up tow to the top. Now we have crested the peak and are experiencing that vertiginous moment and glimpse of what’s to come. You thought the ride so far has been disconcerting? Raise your hands over your head, maybe start screaming if it helps some, and get ready for the ride of your life.

The Machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits. Its momentum is always forward, and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world. To do that, it must raze or transmute many older and less measurable things: rooted human communities, wild nature, human nature, human freedom, beauty, faith and the many deeper values which we all adhere to in some way or another but find difficult to describe or even to defend.” Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine, The Unmaking of Humanity, 2025  

So, we ask, ‘what is to be done?’  How do we survive the plunge?  Perhaps more relevantly, how do we find peace from the din? Silence the unremitting tumult, the cacophony of the screens, the absolute noise of it all? Always connected, often lonely. The Solution will not be found in some innovative Federal program. There is no Solution in a new Progressive Program devised in a focus group or think tank. Never has been.

Not Solution, only solutions. Tens of millions of them. One heart, one mind, one soul at a time. With shared hope, we will gather to support one another in small communities of faith and comradeship, volunteering our time and energy. We can grow a few things in our gardens and relearn that connection with wild things, with the soil, sun, rain, and gentle husbandry; plant indigenous pollinator gardens instead of clearing more ground for chemically sustained fairway lawns squandering thousands of gallons of water. We can patronize local small agriculture through farmer’s markets, buy from artisans in our own towns, and frequent local coffee shops rather than do business with corporate chain stores. Learn their faces and names and stories. Have conversations we don’t have to type or thumb onto our phone screens. We can regularly worship with our brothers and sisters in that church down the street, acknowledging that there is a God and we are not Him.  

But, just maybe, we can shore up a foundation under it all, more essential than even those precious common efforts. Our healing and hope will take place in quiet rooms early in the morning with the window open and a good cup of coffee. Listening. Just listening.  

“The LORD said: ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord; the Lord will pass by. There was a strong and violent wind…then an earthquake… and then a fire—but the LORD was not in them; after the fire, a gentle breeze.[iv] When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. 1 Kings 19:11-13

[i] Image: Paul Revere, J.S. Copley, Museum of Fine Arts, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

[ii] Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons / Google Art Project

[iii] The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt, 2024

[iv] The original Hebrew text, “qol d’mamah daqqah,” translates literally to “the sound of a thin, gentle silence”

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July 5, 2026 · 5:26 pm

Visitation

“But even old men have young memories.”  Allen Levi, “Theo of Golden”

Ralph Town, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Decades ago, the first time I watched a moose swimming on Webb Lake in Weld, Maine, I had no idea how to help the poor thing out in the middle of a near mile wide stretch of water. If it started to founder and go down, I’d never get it into my small canoe, and a moose may not understand I’m just trying to help. My panic built. My embarrassing ignorance was apparent about the power of a moose in the water. I tagged along parallel for the rest of the way, and the bull unintentionally demonstrated how foolish I was.

The trip started on the east side of the lake where the huge animal was leisurely browsing knee deep in the water lilies, pondweed, duckweed, and horsetails off the shore. When it reached the far shore, it stood up without a pause and began to leisurely browse in similar water weeds to those he left behind as far as I could tell, not even breathing hard. I failed to see the improvement in the deliciousness of pondweed that induced a moose to swim nearly a mile, but I was not privy to the moose’s unhurried unconcern with the effort required to get to a new patch of soggy fodder.

A second lesson in Webb Lake wildlife lore occurred a few years later when I paddled a couple of miles down lake toward the southern end of the lake and the outlet into Webb River. The river was the route more than a century ago for the winter harvest of thousands of pine, hemlock, fir, and spruce logs as they were sent down the spring high water seventeen miles to the Androscoggin River and the timber mills. The longest ones with straight grain were valued as masts; they went all the way down the river to the sea and the colonial shipyards in Bath. Now the Webb River is rarely navigable most of the year as it meanders down through Carthage and forms the border between Mexico and Dixfield before it empties into the big river.

I always am the earliest riser in the camp and cherish those times when I can slip away in the canoe on the mirror surface of the early morning lake undisturbed by the winds that usually flow down from Tumbledown at the north end of the lake as the day progresses. The red predawn sky accompanies the silence broken only by the quiet splash of my paddle and the occasional plaintive loon cry, creating treasured memories. I’d get back in time to the camp to greet the sleepy ones and make breakfast.

The lake narrows considerably at the south end, and one time I came too close to a hidden loon nest I didn’t know was there along the darkened early morning east shore in a wooded area with no cabins. The male blasted out of the reeds and rose up out of the water in an impressive noisy display of aggression and wingspan spread intimidatingly wide to protect his mate and the small clutch of one or two eggs or the tiny brood of little loons (as distinct from the brood of our little loons back at camp). I detoured as fast as I could paddle to the opposite shore.  I regretted spooking the birds because too many encounters with too many people could cause them to abandon the old nesting grounds they return to every year and seek a remote lake not so infested with people like me. Webb Lake without loons would break my heart.

Today’s third lesson was what prompted me to remember these Webb Lake canoe stories.  I was on the lake in a large flatbottomed canoe by myself in the early afternoon and loaded no ballast rock in the front to keep the bow from lifting. I struggled to paddle without any counterweight in the front, and the wide beam made it awkward to move up in the tandem configuration.  Large lakes surrounded by mountains have their own weather, and unexpected wind can flow down suddenly over the hills down into the lake like a waterfall with considerable power. The wind came up along with whitecaps. With my unwieldy bow acting like a sail, I fought uselessly to resist it and paddle back to the camp. What I could manage was to guide the canoe to a nearby shore, drag the canoe up into the woods, and walk back on the camp road. Later when the wind subsided, it was easy enough to walk back and paddle home. In the early morning, the lake is often as calm and steady as the gaze of a wise old woman on a porch waiting for the sunrise. Fighting the wind is foolish, much better to go with it to safety.

“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.” Wendell Berry, “Jayber Crow”

Raphael, Deliverance of St. Peter, Vatican Museum, Public Domain

What provoked all these canoe memories to bubble up was reading about the deliverance of St. Peter from jail in Acts 12. But I expect you’ll need a connection.

Peter witnessed the bloody death of his lifelong friend James, the brother of John, at the order of King Herod. Herod then had Peter arrested to ready him for the same fate the next day. Trusting nothing to happenstance, Herod had him chained up behind bars with four guards on a rotating shift, two of them chained to Peter, one on each side. The text said the fledgling Church was praying earnestly to God for him. Peter did what anyone would do in such terrifying circumstances: he fell asleep.

The same Peter who denied Jesus in the courtyard out of fear and panic on the night of the Lord’s execution on the cross, the same impetuous, emotional Peter leaping from the boat to try and walk on water, the same Peter drawing his sword to cut off the ear of the servant in the Garden of Gethsemane, the same Peter terrified by the storm while Jesus slept in the boat. That guy once so easily riled up. Chained up awaiting a certain painful death, he nodded off now secure in the trust he had in God. Clearly something had happened to Peter.

But in my reflection on the reading, what struck me first was the angel, the messenger, the envoy on a mission from God to rescue Peter. There was no turmoil, hardly any effort, and like the wind on the lake in a flat bottomed canoe, no possibility of resistance. The jail doors fell open silently, the guards fell asleep, the chains fell off Peter like autumn leaves drift to the ground when it’s time for them to let go. The angel gently woke a drowsy Peter and led him out to the street and away. No drama and not a chance of another outcome. If God, ipsum esse, the ground of all existence from moment to moment, wills that an envoy leads Peter to safety, well, Bob’s your uncle, he’s as good as free.  

Angels are sent on missions which they always complete with the power of God. Our task is to listen and do what they tell us if ever we are asked. Resistance is as futile as fighting the wind on the lake in a flat bottomed canoe. We can grumble and struggle, but all that will accomplish is to make us anxious. Guide it where it’s taking you, be thankful, pull into the woods, walk home.

“When you are old and can look back and see yourself when you were young. It is almost like looking down from Heaven.” Wendell Berry, “Hannah Coulter”

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June 28, 2026 · 5:55 pm

Fledging

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.”  Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

I learned to climb trees competently and was taught by the foreman of the Northampton branch of an old and respected Massachusetts arborist company, Frost and Higgins. Century old tree companies in New England then tended to be associated with old Yankee names like Bartlett, Allen, Frost and Higgins. The foreman, however, was part of an eclectic crew. Bill was of Polish genes, as were a lot of people around Springfield. We could find kielbasa in the local market a lot easier than chouriço, linguica, or hot Italian sausage.

Bill was a natural athlete who once had a major league tryout as a pitcher. A year in minor league buses and Motel 8 convinced him he didn’t want to pay the dues to try the odds of making it to the Show. He was a veteran of the 101st Airborne.  On our first Saturday orientation he had the two new climbers learning to jump off a platform and roll when we hit. Safety training in the sixties. All of us learned quickly, if we didn’t already know, that gravity has no mercy and suffers no alternative. The second part of the lesson was Bill’s summary of his personal comprehensive safety program, “If you fall, three feet before you hit the ground, you’re fired.”

Climbing skills were tested more in pruning than in takedowns: no spurs, farther out on small limbs, balance, surefooted. We had to learn different criteria for the types of pruning, but the priorities were dead wood, diseased branches, crossing branches rubbed with bark abrasion, branches growing back into the tree, small suckers robbing the tree of nutrients. How fine we would have to cut (and how far out into the twigs we would have to climb) was determined by what was needed and purchased by the owner. Climb to the highest safe crotch into which we could climb, tie in, and work our way down, kicking cut branches and hangers to the ground as we went.

Picture a pendulum, and you are the weight. Tied in at an angle, we would walk out to where we needed to be to reach what needed to be trimmed. The farther out I climbed, the greater the potential for centrifugal energy. For swings back into the center of the tree, gravity was just as effective an engine as in falling. Gaining speed as the restorative energy built headed towards an equilibrium, hopefully controlled, feet forward facing the target. Swing from branch to branch, from pruned branch or leader to the new one needing attention. A few crash landings in the learning curve were expected.

American elms, back when there were a lot of them, could easily reach 80 or 90 feet, were the most challenging for me to get up. And occasionally frightening. Spread out leaders like a vase meant a lot of rethrowing of my rope and shinnying to get to the top. Shinnying is a good term for what happens to your shins. Abrasion and pain are two others. They were also the most fun to swing unimpeded by intervening branches once I was tied in. I learned to fly.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” G.K. Chesterton

When an osprey (or most any bird) learns to fly, little elegance is involved in the beginning. We often see the chicks in the nests around the island. The parents sit patiently on the eggs then with diligence feed the chicks once they hatch.  Their little open mouths are a steady demand. The adults fish persistently in the always nearby water, riding updrafts, circling, searching, dropping like doom itself onto some small fish it spots. We’ll see one strike the water like a stone and emerge many times with the still struggling prey twisting and protesting its fate. Back to the nest to the ever ready open beaks of their offspring. At first just pieces, later whole small fish down the waiting gullets.

The time comes for the chicks to learn to hunt and fend for themselves before the autumn migration, otherwise, what’s the point of it all? A little like an arborist learning to climb before they fly, they are awkward, unsure, a bit clumsy, a bit underpowered. They perch on the outer rim of the large nest and flap their wings against the wind for days, building strength in their soon-to-be-powerful pinions that will keep them alive. “As awkward as a fledgling bird may look, this is a natural stage, and the parents are most likely nearby.” (Massachusetts Audubon Society).

The first flight is sometimes accidental, a short hop to a nearby branch. Or a slip to flutter to the ground. Gradually over several weeks, they lengthen the journey with perhaps a few barely controlled crash landings back in the nest. Their parents mostly watch unless there is a real disaster; if they are stunned on the ground and a predator comes near, it will learn the sharpness of osprey mama talons. The adults incrementally decrease feeding their fledglings until necessity drives the fledglings to the water to learn their craft. I’ve never seen a first plunge for an osprey into the water to grab their first fish, but there must be one. I expect it takes a few tries to hone their instincts, to see with their keen eyes the prey slightly offset by the distortion of light from the air to the ocean and waves. But eventually they will eat and find their own mate for life, build their own nest, raise their own chicks, and fulfill their calling.

“There are two lasting bequests we can give our children: one is roots, the other is wings.” Hodding Carter, Where Main Street Meets the River, (perhaps quoting an earlier source).

A first grandchild is unique and remains so. Each one is precious, but the memory of the birth of the first one is indelible. Her name is Gianna. Her mom, Angela, our next to youngest daughter, taught for a while after college and gained her master’s degree in education. Once her children started arriving (there are now five), Angela went all in for them, homeschooling them from kindergarten. She has laid down her life for her children for eighteen years every day. Gianna is her first graduate. Angela and her parents shed a few tears of gratitude. I expect a few more will follow later this year.

The G Unit will fledge this August and take her first extended flight to Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. She earned high honors almost every term in a challenging classical curriculum with a mixture of home and many online classes. She studied Latin and in depth works of a lot of Dead White Guys eschewed by most public curriculum. I remember well written papers on Plato’s Republic, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, C.S. Lewis, Homer, Eliot, Virgil, Aristotle, and many others: names that once helped define the social imagination and shared Western civilization that sustained a culture for a few thousand years until the deconstructionists convinced us that they could do better. And didn’t. She earned a very large share of her college costs in scholarships and grants, but she will help with an on campus job.

She danced ballet as her mom had done for a dozen years and her moments of glad graceful movement rival any osprey. She sings much better too, having performed as an alto through her high school years in the statewide Rhode Island Children’s Chorus (RICC) High School Honor Choir with Dr. Christine Noel. Her first audition for that was challenging during COVID and done by a submitted tape.  Dr. Noel recognized a gift she could help form and called within a day. She was right. They will miss her, and she will miss them. Dance three or four times a week with Heritage Ballet. Practice chorus once a week at the RI Philharmonic Carter Center. We will miss those too, although three of her sisters still dance at Heritage, so our blessed days of chauffeuring beautiful dancers to practice and attending their performances will thankfully continue.

I have written about G before several times in this forum, starting when she was three. Type her name in the search box on the home page, and you can follow her progress. She retains her sharp intelligence and sense of ironic humor. Adding to her repertoire, she developed a world class eye roll that someday may freeze the blood of some lucky suitor. She is in no rush for that, and neither are her parents and grandparents.

I expect if I am granted the time, I’ll be writing about her again. Rita and I pray for her each day along with our other six grandchildren. That will not change while we are able.  

This year she will fledge, trusting her young wings and heading south to the big city of Babylon. Such an odyssey is both wonderous and frightening for her grandparents. She has proven many times to be levelheaded in many situations with sound judgment. Her dorm and roommate are assigned. Her wings have developed strong flapping out there on the edge of the nest. Her persistence has gained vigor shinnying up vertical challenges. Her parents have done all that any parent could do to support, guide, and love her. They have been there for her, and remain so, but now it will be more remote.

But, dear Lord, she’s only eighteen. Watch over her. Keep her safe. And let her soar.

“Like an eagle that stirs up its nest,

that hovers over its young,

spreading out its wings, catching them,

bearing them on its pinions…” Deuteronomy 32:11

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June 14, 2026 · 7:03 pm

Gaslit

“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” Attributed to Rita Mae Brown

When the first snowstorm blew in last winter, I hadn’t used my snowblower much in two years. I am the neighborhood snow remover for four driveways; most guys like playing with toys that have loud motors. I was happy to fire it up. And fire it up. And fire it up. Wouldn’t start. Shoveled out the old fashioned way only about five inches of light snow. Went to the local hardware store and bought a sparkplug.

Wanted to get ready in case the big one hit that the long term weatherman was telling us might happen, and I did what any reasonably handy person has done for two hundred and fifty years. Watched a YouTube video, took apart the eight things that had to come off to get to the sparkplug and replaced it in my driveway. Our 24” Ariens has an alternate electric starter, so I ran the power cord out from the outlet off the back deck.  After a little prompting, she started up. The pull cord hasn’t been able to get it going for a couple of years. Let it run for a while, and while the thing ran steadily, it ran rough. I thought I would wait until the annual preventive maintenance of the spring to let the experts diagnose the imperfections. Since we hadn’t had much snow for two years, I thought we would be OK.

The biggest blizzard in fifty years hit hard on my birthday in February and kept us inside feeding the woodstove for nearly two days. Deep, heavy, and drifted. Just under three feet of the stuff according to those that measure such things. My limited mechanical aptitude held up for the storm. I had stationed the snowblower at the end of the driveway under a tied down tarp and with the power cord running to the house. I was able to get my driveway cleared. Two or three hours more cleaned off those of my elderly neighbors.

The town plows were MIA for a couple of days on the side roads keeping the main routes open, but a fine young man from nearby Escobar Farm roared in on his giant tractor with a front end loader bigger than my car. The wheels were taller than I was. He seemed to enjoy running noisy machinery at least as much as I did, and he opened the five roads in the whole neighborhood until we all had access to East Main Road that the town had cleared. Free at last.

All was well on Birch Road. We could get to church, Home Depot, Clement’s Market, and Coastal Roasters coffee shop, and that’s all a guy really needs.

“If your liquors too red it’ll swell up your head. You better stick to that good ole mountain dew.”  Stanley Brothers, Mountain Dew

When the daffodils came up and red wing blackbirds came back to the suet cage next to our birdfeeder, I realized I was well behind in preventive maintenance schedule for the snowblower. My old snowblower service company closed its doors for good last summer, so I had to find a new one. I don’t have a pickup truck anymore and needed someone who could pick up the machine. The company that services our lawnmower every year didn’t work on Ariens. A trusted friend who had lived here for decades recommended a small place a couple of towns away. When I called, the owner was friendly, smart, and knowledgeable. Picked it up in a day. Gave me a reasonable estimate for the PM work.

He called me a couple of days later and asked if it had been running rough, cycling higher revs with slowdowns, and needed more choke than required when it was new. “Yes.”  Ah. He asked if I ran regular gas in it. “Yes.” Spending the extra on ethanol free gas and buying it in cans someplace other than a gas station didn’t seem critical to me. Much cheaper and more convenient at the bottom of the hill Cumberland Farm into my own can.

“Thought so,” he said. 

“Oh, oh,” I replied to myself.

“Your carburetor needs to be rebuilt. The jets are corroded and ruined. It’s the ethanol in the gas. I knew it as soon as I started it up.”

Somewhere in the ancient past I knew that too. I ran special straight gas in my chainsaw like the saw shop warned me to do. I may have even known somewhere in my corroded memory that I should have done the same thing for the lawnmower and snowblower small engines but hadn’t. I either ran them dry at the end of their season or put some Stabile in the tank for the off season. I thought that was good enough, and they kept running. Until they didn’t. The indestructible lawnmower soldiers on. I promise to treat it better. But the snowblower carburetor is a winter creature and less forgiving.

Four hundred dollars later, I had the lesson permanently engraved. Much cheaper than a new self-propelled, 24” competent snowblower, but four hundred I could have better used for a weekend in Maine to visit old friends. When I got it back, it ran like a different machine with power and enthusiasm; started with one pull on the cord. Who knew?

I should have.

“I don’t know if I’m smart, but I think I can see, when someone is pullin’ the wool over me.” Bob Dylan, Let Me Die in My Footsteps

Large motors in cars have been adapted by their manufacturers that see which way the wind blows to run on ten percent ethanol biofuel mixed into our petroleum. Small engines like chainsaws, lawnmowers, and my unfortunate snowblower have smaller jets more easily corroded, and the fuel stored by less than diligent owners like me can sit unused off season for a longer time.  Ethanol attracts water; if enough water accumulates, separation can occur, resulting in a water/ethanol layer that can cause corrosion, poor combustion, and fuel-system problems. It can even eat your carburetor.

Ethanol is most often manufactured from ground up corn, a convenient cooperative of government mandates, farm state politicians, a zealous farm lobby and late to the green party Big Oil anxious to appear agreeable to the people who will occasionally superglue themselves to museum masterpieces to save our much abused home planet. While it does do its job for the corn farmers by keeping food prices and sales up, things are more expensive for the consumer, especially for those least able to pay. But you have to break a few eggs, and I’m not sure how much it accomplishes in keeping the oceans from rising into our kitchens and slaughtering millions along the coasts as climate Ph.Ds. Greta Thunberg and Al Gore predict.

The corn lobby, agribusiness, ethanol refiners, farm state congress members who enjoy political donations and lucrative speaker’s fees at conventions in places like Turks and Caicos, and well paid, well-nourished lobbyists love ethanol, but artificially supported prices because of the five or six billions of bushels of corn used to make the stuff every year affect a wide variety of other folks.  More expensive corn on the table and the increase in ground corn feed which raises dairy and beef price affects everyone who buys groceries, which is most of us. Lower income consumers, some poorer countries which rely on food imports to survive, livestock farmers, and anyone buying gas take it good and hard as H.L Menken warned us.

Some critics say ethanol just placates the planet protectors but with no real positive effects for the planet. Ethanol is about a third less efficient than the petroleum version, so it reduces over all miles per gallon by about 3%. When you add in the manufacturing energy to make the stuff, the additional diesel used for farm equipment and to transport it from farm to manufacturer to the place where it is diluted into the bulk of our fuel, and the energy to produce the extra fertilizer it takes to grow it, there are those who say it does not save much carbon from being pumped into the atmosphere, if any. And it ate my carburetor, so I am not feeling particularly charitable to the corn lobby this month. I know it’s my fault deep down, but I would have liked some help protecting myself from myself.

I can live with burning straight real gas in my small engines. I’m probably not despoiling the atmosphere very much, and at eighty, the shoveling and mowing with an old hand reel mower is a bit beyond my long term capability. If you want to superglue yourself to the Mona Lisa on my account, I have no objection and understand your concern.

” Nothing is ever really lost as long as we remember it.” Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Golden Road

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May 31, 2026 · 7:25 pm

Minks, Piping Plovers, and AI

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)

I got a call at the wildlife refuge where we volunteer on Fridays from an excited woman who spotted a furry creature when she was walking the trails the evening before.  She wanted to know if anyone had reported a lost pet ferret.  “No,” I replied. “Tell me what you saw.”  I love some of the calls we get and questions from visitors at the desk.

She described a small, long, slender mammal with a luminous coat. I told her it was more than likely a mink, of which Sachuest Refuge has a few. “Wow!, “she said, “I didn’t know we had those around here.” [i]

I told her the story of a friend of ours who had an artificial fishpond her late husband had built for her that she was very fond of sitting near and watching the various finned and gilled creatures swimming about. One morning, she made her way to her fishpond chair to discover carnage. Half eaten and uneaten dead fish were strewn willy nilly on the rock riprap banks as if a plague wiped them out. Every last one of them. Nothing but lily pads left in the pond. A mink living in her stone wall had its way with them. A similar nocturnal mink catastrophe befell the outside fishpond at the local Agway store, but some carp survived. I said to the lady on the phone that not everyone has a positive experience with minks, and since they are smaller than most folks expect, it takes a whole lot of them to make a coat, but I was happy she enjoyed seeing one. They are beautiful.  When I volunteer at the visitor center, I sometimes get in trouble entertaining myself with an interjection of reality. She was a very nice woman full of enthusiasm and bubbling over with happiness.

Although minks are not endangered, I do object to turning them into coats to signal our prosperity, and I like to see them too. See them being minks. Slinking through the meadow grass, catching fish, raiding waterfowl nests for eggs, snatching meals snagging crabs, small voles or mice, making little minks and dodging coyotes, Northern harriers, and red tail hawks.

Our ranger here is young, smart, hard-working, pleasant, and passionate about what she does. She manages the trails, fields, woods, shoreline, wildlife, visitors, the visitor center, projects at other national wildlife refuges, the bureaucracy of her home office, and unruly volunteers like Rita and me. Good thing that she has a lot of energy. This weekend she was training a new batch of volunteer piping plover watchers and monitors. Piping plovers are wonders to watch feed and fly in murmuration. They are endangered and some of them nest along the rocks at the refuge end of Sachuest Beach. The rest of the beach is a walking haven for us for eight months of the year, and a popular swimming, surfing, and sunbathing haven for thousands in the summer. Keeping the tourists and local swimmers away from the piping plover nests is just one of our busy ranger’s many responsibilities. [ii]

“To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”  Aldo Leopold, Round River (published posthumously, 1953)

Only human beings discover the wonder in nature and want to protect other species, deriving no real Darwinian benefit to us. Just beautiful and true in some hard to define sense, so we find it good. Only human beings would dedicate their lives to doing good for a small shoreline bird that is darting back and forth between the waves with their tiny legs a blur to pick out small crustaceans and bugs. Or attend a class to learn how to help. A mink would only notice a piping plover if it wanted to hunt for its nest. A mink would not watch in wonder as a plover danced between the waves. A mink would not ponder the morality of eating an endangered species’ rare eggs. Not for a nanosecond would it hesitate to suck out breakfast.

Transcendentals: beauty, truth, goodness, are cherished by human beings. Some would argue we are a randomly mutated collection of cells which somehow by extraordinary chance evolved into consciousness, then an inner life, then a conscience with an unlikely set of common values. Some would argue that pondering transcendentals and seeking the good, the true, and the beautiful indicates we are creatures with a purpose Not a lucky accident but created in the Creator’s Image with the desire deep in our heart for unity with the transcendental. I would be in the second camp. Protecting piping plovers would be one small piece of evidence.

But that perspective is being challenged at a fundamental level. “What is a human being?” and “What is virtue?” and “What is human meaning and purpose?” are once again being debated in all their implications with the emergence of new technology and the machines we create developing so rapidly that it seems to have assumed a life of its own. And every premise is being deconstructed in its aftermath.

I’ve ‘chatted’ with a variety of Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence: Claude, Alexa, Grok, Gemini, Co-Pilot and mostly ChatGPT To be sure, in the last three years the progress in these machines is extraordinary, in conversational fluency, calculating skills, problem solving, precise responsiveness with nuance to inquiries with fewer errors and hallucinations. However, they remain remarkably capable, even uncanny simulacra.[iii]

Humans have long excelled in fabricating uncanny simulacra with a gift to evoke other human responses, emotions, and new ideas. Michelangelo ‘s David silences the observer with its detail, beauty, power, and presence. But it will never slay Goliath or seduce poor Uriah’s wife. A detailed online map with links could help us better appreciate Sachuest Point Wildlife Refuge, but it will never be the complex reality of marsh, rocks, waves, flowering fields and shrubs, over two hundred species of birds and mammals, wind, weather, and awe. AI can tell us most everything about a mink: habitat, food, where and how it builds a den, how it lives and reproduces, how it lives with detailed descriptions and images. But it will never experience the excitement of a hiker who sees one for the first time. Andi will never be a mink.

“And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made.” Paul Simon, Sounds of Silence

Last week, a new voice joined the debate in a profound way. Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical a year after Chicago born Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected to sit in the chair of Peter as the 267th Pope, leading over a billion Catholics. He has made the news a few times, most recently when a president made the inane comments that a world religious leader had no business speaking out on the morality of war.  But I digress.

He wrote forty three thousand words on the nature of Artificial Intelligence and its implications for the rest of us. How it intensifies the debate about the nature of a human person. Ghost in machine? Accidental consciousness fired up in random atoms? Exceptional combination of the material and spiritual created by God Imago Dei with an obligation to care for the rest of creation? Meat Legos or a person with an eternal destiny and unique calling? He wrote how we are distinguished from our machines with an uncrossable border. Our crisis is not merely ideological; it is intensely anthropological and will have an impact on the rest of my life and yours in unpredictable ways. We ought to be paying close attention.

Magnifica Humanitas will stir introspection and debate in the Church and society to a degree perhaps not seen since his predecessor Leo XIII wrote his landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum. Leo XIII released his a hundred and thirty five years to the day before this one. He wrote about the human costs and implications of the Industrial Revolution. Leo today reiterated and expanded the Catholic social principles from Leo XIII that instantiate the teachings of Christ in new ways to address our postmodern culture. As usual, way too much for a blog post, so I’ll let one sample inspire your own reflections.

“What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”

“Maybe someday I’ll wake up

And I’ll do what I should

Write a song to make heaven and earth

Go waltzing in time.” John Prine, Beautiful World

Let us all go to work.  None of us will escape. There is much to be done. No one will be exempt from the effects and implications of this dialogue with our future. I heard a story this week from a talk by Monsignor James Shea, one of our favorite writers about our times and culture. He said Pope Paul VI (now St. Paul VI) was asked by a journalist what was the most momentous day of his life. His questioner fully expected to hear about the day Paul was elected Pope. Or his ordination as a priest. Or his baptism followed by some remarks about salvation. None of the above. It seems saints see things differently.

“Today,” Paul replied. “Today is most momentous day of my life. It’s all I have.”

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” St. Mother Teresa

[i] Photo open source from Wikipedia, Mink for Wiki

[ii] Photo: I Naturalist – c Grigory Heaton some rights reserved, cc by NC

[iii] Simulacra is the plural of simulacrum, which I find best describes what AI does and is. A simulacrum is a representation of a something else. An effigy. An image. A reproduction made from something other than the original it represents.

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May 3, 2026 · 2:38 pm

Faces

“The face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter.” Cicero, De Oratore

In 1968, the year after we were married, I vaguely remember going to see the brilliant movie “Faces” written and directed by John Cassavetes in the downtown theater in Northampton where we lived. Going to a movie was our mutually enjoyed extravagance back before movies too often became caricatures, CGI, and comic book superheroes. Our date was often followed by a fifty cent hot fudge sundae at the State Street Fruit Store soda jerk counter if it wasn’t too late. “Faces” delved the emotions, vulnerabilities, and masks of the characters in the tragic dissolution of a marriage, intensely personal and focused on close ups of the actors with a handheld camera.  I don’t remember much of the plot, but I do remember the faces.

Faces do that to us. Anatomy books tell of forty three muscles and over ten thousand documented expressions, some powerful and some subtle. The human face is unique to each person; facial recognition software is based on that certain knowledge. With any degree of awareness, we are sensitive in the extreme to the subtle shifts in the facial expressions of those with whom we are most familiar, especially in our spouse that we love and especially in a spouse of nearly sixty years.  Our faces have evolved over these many years, but while our shared life together has drawn us ever closer, her character, her essence, her irreplaceable “Ritaness” has not changed, and her face mirrors the same person I fell in love with all those decades ago.

We often read the same books. We’ve been reading Carl Trueman’s book published last month, “The Desecration of Man,” [i] which like most of what Dr. Trueman writes, provides an insightful look into what we have wrought in our postmodern culture. There is a memorable passage in the book where he discusses faces in a way that traces a particular woe the sexual revolution has exacerbated.

Trueman explains the impact and roots of how ubiquitous pornography has metastasized into a billion dollar industry in every corner of the internet and on every kid’s smartphone and has been enabled through the insistent undermining of the exceptionalism of the human person. What he calls the “desecration of man” developed for centuries as we incrementally substituted understanding our existence as a unique created being made in the image of our Creator (Imago Dei) with evolving as a lucky collection of atoms. From a miracle hybrid of soul and body to a rearrangeable assembly of “meat Legos”[ii]. But I digress.

In one chapter, he quotes a passage from Roger Scruton’s book, “The Face of God.” Scruton describes pornography as “a marginalization, indeed a kind of desecration, of the human face.” Porn, which is a demeaning drama of prostitution in front of a camera, replaces a unique face with a body, and any body will do, interchangeable and consumable. When we look upon another’s face, we see an “I”, a subject; when we look only upon a body, we see an object to be used. Trueman invites us to share a thought experiment.

A groom anxiously awaits the appearance of his bride while he stands next to his best man at the front of the church. Suddenly, the back door opens, the bridesmaids and entourage process into the church with the organ playing Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.”  But instead of the woman he loves and to whom he pledged his troth, another woman walks in with a face not the one he cherishes.  Perhaps she’s even beautiful, but would he be satisfied with this stranger? Would he still be willing to commit his whole life to her for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health until death do them part?

The sexual act out of the context of this pledge is hormonal lust, not love, a selfish act of using another person for pleasure.  In this transaction, we objectify another human being, and they objectify us. At least ideally, the marital embrace once was considered as holy, a unique intimacy between a man and a woman based on surrender and trust, and a loving lifelong commitment. Together out of that commitment, they share responsibility and sacrifice in mutual love for childbearing and rearing commensurate with the sacred telos of reproduction and continuation of our species. All these aspects were recognized to be intrinsic in our nature as man and woman and our relationship. The status of sexual relationships now, while casual and ubiquitous in entertainments, is merely a desirable component of personal self-fulfillment and pleasure, thus, “If it feels good, do it.” The hook up culture that resulted has diminished us.

So, has the millennia old definition of what it is to be human been jettisoned as well, tragically and in grave error? Has our understanding of what it means to be human become incoherent and abandoned the Creator’s vision for us as made in Imago Dei? Is the postmodern, progressive understanding of us as a random collection of molecules evolved accidentally in a harsh and unforgiving universe an improvement or an impoverishment? Have we stopped seeing each other’s faces?

“In her face I saw such things as make me say:

‘Now God, who made such a one, be praised.’”  Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova

When I look at Rita, I see her face. Always have.

From the dedication to my book:

 In a sudden revelation, Rita or I will look at each other and declare, “You’re a different person than me.” After almost six decades of married life, that is not a simple proposition.

  I will look over at her reading or praying near the woodstove early on a winter morning with her finger absentmindedly twirling in her hair just above her ear and become filled with love. We have come so far together. I joke that we grew up together, but it was after we were married.

 Astonishingly at just over nineteen, she committed to living our lives together for better or worse, and before we were twenty one, we took the vows. She was a respected assistant head nurse on a large floor in a city hospital at twenty two while she provided the bulk of our thrifty livelihood while I was still in college.

When our children started coming after I graduated, she put aside her dreams, career aspirations, and who knows what else  to throw her lot in with a guy who wanted to climb trees for a living. She created our home out of new whole cloth and held up more than her end for many years until she returned to the workforce a quarter of a century later to lead and hold together a couple of different prolife nonprofit organizations.

 Imagine! Committing to share a life with someone and all that entails. Ups, downs, our own frailties, fears, uncertainties, gifts, and liabilities. All in. Nothing reserved. Yet, she did it. With me. Takes my breath away sometimes.  

” When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

 

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face” William Butler Yeats, When You Are Old

[i] Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades our Humanity, Carl R Trueman, Penguin Random House 2026

[ii] Mary Harrington’s perfect description of the malleable body under the influence of postmodern radical subjectivism.

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April 24, 2026 · 12:52 pm

Don’t Get In The Truck!

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”  Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? (Advice to the Young)

When our kids are young, things blur, memories telescope, or as our daughter and mother of five recently put it perfectly, “Days seem endless sometime, but the years fly by.” Grandchildren, however, seem like different stories to us. Time is slower. Each one is indelible and unique. Proverbs 17:6 put it perfectly, “Children’s children are a crown to the aged.”

Little anecdotes are embedded in my mind like diamonds in a coal mine; they pop into my consciousness at odd moments and always bring at least a smile – sometimes welling up emotions that make the old guy fill up unexpectedly.  There are seven grandchildren, all expertly homeschooled, but I’ll tell only a few tales. They all have their different interests, talents, and endearing idiosyncrasies. Four of them dance and just helped perform a professionally choreographed ‘Swan Lake,’ learning multiple roles each. They dance with grace and control, passion and beauty, lost in the music. That’ll make an old guy cry every time.

Two live in Southern California and are competitive multisport athletes who always try hard at eight and six. We’re out west for a First Communion and will catch the last tournament weekend of the spring softball season. The First Communion girl is my early morning cuddler. When she was younger, I’d be the first one up until she came down the stairs sleepy, warm, and smiling in her pj’s to cuddle on the coach and I’d read to her. Now she reads to me. Insists on it. Koufax, their 90 pound German Shepherd lap dog, usually joins us and puts his head on my lap.

Locally, there was the ‘scooter’ who never really crawled because she didn’t want to relinquish whatever she was holding in her hands and flew across the floor sitting and motoring with one leg scissoring. Now she is confidently conversant with Chesterton or Augustine, Flannery O’Connor or Homer, Tchaikovsky or K-pop. Next fall she will be heading off to Catholic University of America in Washington. She sings her last concert next month with the statewide honors choir. Alto. Oh, I’ll miss that voice down the street.

Then there was the button kid. Before she could talk or walk, I’d hold her while wearing one of my decades old well-worn three button Eddie Bauer sweaters. She would immediately start on my buttons with ferocious concentration. Buttoning. Unbuttoning. Buttoning. A half dozen cycles faster with each iteration. Her concentration was only exceeded by her eye hand coordination for such a tiny person. Now she is fifteen and draws with equal concentration and coordination. Recently, she drew the cover for my book of the camp on Webb Lake in Maine. And portraits. Lots of portraits. One of our extended family in-laws is a professional artist. “That’s incredible,” he said. Papa thought so too.

Another budding scholar is in her third year of Latin at 12 years old. We call her scary for her prodigious memory, relentless logic, and omnivorous appetite for books. She is the resident expert on dragons (seven types) and devoured C.S. Lewis, E.B. White, and Laura Ingalls Wilder just about whole. She told us she wants to be an architect and build things while simultaneously a prima ballerina and mother. But she would make a formidable attorney. She always wants to know what the rules are. Exactly what the rules are. When she was three or so, she was happily clearing out a nostril. Her mother suggested that it was not a great idea in public. “Don’t pick your nose.”  The little lawyer got quiet, thought a bit, and sought clarification.  Precisely what would and would not cross the line? The girl just wanted to know. Looking up in complete seriousness, she asked, “Can I pick the other one?”

Finally for this post at least, there is the emerging wildlife ranger who is now eleven and loves all things fauna, wild, domestic, or imaginary. Her current favorite is the sugar glider. On the way to ballet lessons, we always pass what we would call in Maine a ‘beef critter’ farm – laconic Maine teleology. We observe which large ones of the herd get moved into the fattening pen, the next to last stop for these Black Angus steers. We count who’s left each week. Our ranger knows the ones in the pen are destined for the steak grille and leather coat factory and are all males. She knows the local Gurnsey and Holstein dairy herds are all females, and she understands that and why these things are so ordered.

I never explained to her how bulls got to be steers. Giving her the details that castrati put on weight faster and are better marbled with tasty fat than bulls has not come up, and I’ve not introduced the subject. I have some concern that an eleven year old in an intemperate moment might explain it to her five year old brother with some mischief in mind, and he’d need a couple of years of therapy to recover.

I clarified to her that when the time was right (for the farmer), they were trucked off site to a butchery and returned to the farm store for sale in labeled small plastic wrapped packages.  She accepted this well and acknowledged she liked a good cheeseburger too. When she was about nine and learning about what befalls the beef critters, she decided to warn the ones she had gotten to know and count, although I never noticed any of them paying her any attention. Probably for the same reason, they never figured out the sign out front about fresh beef for sale. After a while, when we passed the feeding pen of the short timers, she would roll down her window and yell to them, “DON’T GET IN THE TRUCK!!’

“The lonesome friends of science say

“The world will end most any day”

Well, if it does, then that’s OK

‘Cause I don’t live here anyway

I live down deep inside my head

Where long ago I made my bed”  John Prine, The Lonesome Friends of Science

Have you read about the possible polarity switch that may have been underway for the last few hundred years? [i] The outer core of our planet is molten liquid iron and nickel. The core is superheated and moves with the rotation of the Earth and creates a natural geo-dynamo that generates our magnetic field. The magnetic field screens us from cosmic rays that would destroy our DNA like scarab beetles in the mummy’s tomb. Without our magnetic field deflecting the solar wind, it would blow away our atmosphere and evaporate our oceans, turning our beautiful blue ball into a desolate red rock like Mars.[ii]  Poor Mars has no chance and no magnetic field protecting it. A polarity change occurs when Earth swaps poles as the core moves around every four or five hundred thousand years. Here in Rhode Island, our compass would point no longer to Maine but to Florida.

Such a mind bending shift happened 780,000 years ago when our compass switched to its current setting. Briefly in geological time, our magnetic north pole moved south about 40,000 years ago, but migrated back after a couple of centuries, and there are many hotly debated signs like a slightly weakening magnetic field that might signal it’s in the process of doing it again. Geologically, a flip is overdue. Might play havoc with navigation for us and the birds which have their own inner compass.  Not to worry, it takes centuries for the magnetic North Pole to migrate that far. It won’t mean that we lose our magnetic field, but there would be disturbance in the Force.

We live in a time of disruption. And the disruption is not limited to geology.

“You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, the times they are a changing.” Bob Dylan

 In the previous post, Remnant, I quoted Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis) talking about a change of eras rather than an era of change. Having magnetic north move around is unsettling enough, but if we lose sight of true North, that’s a far more serious problem for us human beings.

Circling back to our grandchildren, what world are we leaving for them? Our culture has changed so radically that our parents in 1940 would be dumbstruck as if we had fallen into a sci fi dystopian novel. We are muddling along in a change of eras; no surprise we are befuddled.

There are countless examples.

When discussing beef critters with our granddaughter, I avoided the bull and steer part. In doing so, I avoided the bull and cow part too. Because she helped care for a baby brother, and she understands the basics anyway. She knows that a Holstien dairy cow spends her life in fields and barn giving to the farmer and us from six to nine gallons of superb milk every day. What I didn’t have to explain to her, because it is common sense, is that steers missing a few parts will not start producing milk or calving; they are just bulls without portfolio.

Ideology and philosophy uprooted our postmodern societal imagination and enforced how gender is now a matter of identity and choice. But ideology and identity do not change biology. British cultural commentator Mary Harrington coined an ideal term for the oddness of our redefined self-created image.  The human body remade into whatever we want it to be, she described as “meat Legos.” But biologists like neo atheist hero Richard Dawkins clarified that actual biology is clear: there are large gametes and small gametes, and efforts to change that are futile. The pain of those suffering from gender dysphoria is incapacitating, and they deserve all our love, sympathy, and respect as human beings. Whether rearranging their body parts may help their identity issues is intensely debated, but it will never result in a biological transition.

Ideology cannot redefine what a human being is. Not for lack of trying.

Our modern turn to radical expressive individualism, profound skepticism, deconstructing the limitations and controls of formerly commonly understood civilization, and radical self-creation has percolated down into our confused common societal perceptions for the last few hundred years from Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Satre, Foucault, Derrida, and others. Seeding in and metastasizing like many hazardous ideas in faculty lounges, these notions have diffused into popular understanding, not just gender labeling, but in almost every aspect of our culture. The pace of change has accelerated at a breathtaking pace. Imagine even twenty five years ago, a candidate for the supreme court before a Senate confirmation hearing being asked to define a woman and having no answer. No breaking news that we are confused.

Another sign of the times that would have been rejected without hesitation by my parents is genetic manipulation, especially its use combined with IVF and surrogacy for eugenic goals to create our perfect kid.  I’m sure you can come up with your own without much brain work. Transhumanism. AI controlled autonomous weapons. On and on.  In Jurassic Park, the most memorable line for me was from Dr. Ian Malcolm who told Dr. John Hammond who revivified the dinosaurs, “Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should do it.”  That may be the most ignored warning of our times.

 

“And I know just what I’d change if went back in time somehow

But there’s nothing I can do about it now.” Willie Nelson

 

The shifting ground of our era is one of moral instability when the unquestioned principles of millennia that were the foundation of our civil order are now seen as inhibiting human freedom. Subjective freedom, not what is right, has become our lodestar. True North is on the move but has not entirely disappeared. At least not yet, he said hopefully.

Well recognized figures like Dawkins, Elon Musk, and Jordan Peterson have been expounding that while, of course, they don’t believe that Christianity is literally true, they favor a ‘Christian culture,’ because a shared common belief system of morality and reality with widespread acceptance keeps our society from decomposing. They are right. What they fail to acknowledge is that while a Christian culture does have indispensable value for societal cohesion, without a Center, it cannot hold.

So, dear grandchild, when common popular beliefs some rolling up to your gate in a faded and dented stake body truck, but no longer seem wise or coherent, well, “DON’T GET IN THE TRUCK!”

“Those who kill God discover in the long run that they have to step up and be gods and provide all that God once offered: a stable meaning and significance to life. Or given their rejection of the traditional Christian answer, they need to provide a response to the psalmist’s question, “What is man?” Carl Trueman, “The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity” 2026

[i] I’ve been told by a professional editor whom I greatly respect and admire that I wander too far afield in these posts. He’s right, but bear with me, and maybe these strands in this one will weave together for you in the end. Or not. On the About page of this blog, from the beginning, “I write this to help me clarify my own thoughts and to encourage (I hope) contributions to the “Great Discussion” in which we all need to engage. I especially enjoy the juxtaposition and relationships of seemingly disparate topics.”  I’m too old to change now. As the bumper sticker says, “Not all who wander are lost.”

[ii] https://theconversation.com/earths-magnetic-field-protects-life-on-earth-from-radiation-but-it-can-move-and-the-magnetic-poles-can-even-flip-216231

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