Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
The last two posts have been about biological extinction; today's, to continue in the same elegiac tone, is about language extinction.
A study in Ethnologue found that of the Earth's current seven-thousand-odd languages, 3,143 -- around forty-four percent -- are in danger of going extinct. Languages become endangered from a number of factors; when children are not taught as their first language, when there's government suppression, or when a different language has become the primary means of communication, governance, and commerce.
Of course, all three of those frequently happen at the same time. The indigenous languages of North and South America and Australia, for example, have proven particularly susceptible to these forces. In all three places, English, Spanish, and Portuguese have superseded hundreds of languages, and huge swaths of cultural knowledge have been lost in the process.
In almost all cases, there's no fanfare when a language dies. They dwindle, communication networks unravel, the average age of native speakers moves steadily upward. Languages become functionally extinct when only a few people are fluent, and at that point even those last holdouts are already communicating in a different language with all but their immediate families. When those final few speakers die, the language is gone -- often without ever having been studied adequately by linguists.
Sometimes, however, we can pinpoint fairly closely when a language died. Curiously, this is the case with Ancient Egyptian. This extinct language experienced a resurgence of interest in the early nineteenth century, due to two things -- the British and French occupations of Egypt, which resulted in bringing to Europe hundreds of priceless Egyptian artifacts (causing "Egyptomania" amongst the wealthy), and the stunning decipherment of hieroglyphics and Demotic by the brilliant French linguist Jean-François Champollion.
For a millennium and a half prior to that, though, Ancient Egyptian was a dead language. And as weird as it sounds, we know not only the exact date of its rebirth, but the date it took its last breath. Champollion shouted "Je tiens mon affaire!" ("I've figured it out!") to his brother on 14 September 1822.
And the last inscription was made by the last known literate native speaker of Ancient Egyptian on 24 August 394 C.E.
It's called the "Graffito of Esmet-Akhom," and was carved on the wall of a temple in Philae. It shows the falcon-god Mandulis, who was a fairly recent invention at the time, and like the Rosetta Stone, it has an inscription in hieroglyphics and Demotic:
Before Mandulis, son of Horus, by the hand of Esmet-Akhom, son of Nesmeter, the Second Priest of Isis, for all time and eternity. Words spoken by Mandulis, lord of the Abaton, great god.
I, Esmet-Akhom, the Scribe of the House of Writings(?) of Isis, son of Nesmeterpanakhet the Second Priest of Isis, and his mother Eseweret, I performed work on this figure of Mandulis for all time, because he is fair of face towards me. Today, the Birthday of Osiris, his dedication feast, year 110.
[Nota bene: The "year 110" is not, of course, by the Julian calendar; in Egypt, governmental records were dated using the number of years since the accession of the Roman emperor Diocletian in 284 C.E. The "Birthday of Osiris" is what we now call the 24th of August.]
At this point, Greek and Latin had already superseded Egyptian in written records, so Esmet-Akhom was the last of a dying breed. Ancient Egyptian lingered on for a while as a spoken language amongst the working classes; liturgical Coptic is a direct descendant. But any final vestiges of Egyptian as a living language were eradicated in the seventh century when the Graeco-Roman state of Egypt fell to the Arabs.
So it may well be that the priests of Esmet-Akhom's family were the last people capable of reading and writing Egyptian, at least until Champollion came along.
I know change is the way of things, and given the interconnectedness of the world today, that widely-spoken languages will inevitably gain more and more of an edge over minority languages. (Consider that a full forty percent of the Earth's people speak one of eight languages -- Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, and Russian.) But still, I can't help but find the loss of linguistic diversity, and the cultural information those dead languages once encoded, to be sad.
And you have to wonder how Esmet-Akhom himself felt, writing his defiantly confident inscription "for all time and eternity" at the end of the fourth century. Did he know that Egyptian was, even at that point, moribund? A means of communication that had existed for over four thousand years was on the road to extinction; what was left was only a whisper, and even that would soon be silenced.
Has to make you wonder what linguistic shifts will occur in the next thousand years.
My office window looks out over our raised-bed gardens and into our front yard. It's still chilly early spring here in upstate New York -- things won't really start greening up for another couple of weeks -- but we're seeing signs of the coming explosion of growth that tell us warm weather will soon be here. We actually got out and did some yard work this past weekend, despite clouds and a high of 45 F. Mostly clean-up that never got done last fall, but we did plant the early peas and lettuce, transplanted some clumps of chives that were taking over one corner of the vegetable garden, and moved a yucca plant that was getting a little too enthusiastic.
From where I sit right now, I can see our bit of grassy lawn, but also the bare branches of a purple lilac, a couple of still-leafless roses, the gnarled branches of a sawtooth oak, the reddish buds of peonies just starting to unfurl, the bright green spikes of daylily leaves, the stubble of the ornamental Miscanthus grass that by midsummer will be taller than I am. Clumps of brilliant daffodils, crocus, scilla, and chionodoxa already in full flower.
All cool stuff, promising lots of beauty to come. But you know what all of the plants I've mentioned have in common?
Not one is native to the United States.
Not even the grass. Just about all the lawn grasses grown in North America are European natives. Chances are, unless you have deliberately set out to do natives-only landscaping, the vast majority of the plants in your yard are imports as well. Of everything I can see from my window, only one is native to upstate New York -- a hedge of ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius). Two others are eastern natives but originally from a good deal farther south, the Carolina silverbell (Halesia carolina) and black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia).
Thing is, like everything, the situation with exotics is complex. Not all exotics are a problem. The charming little bright-blue scilla (Scilla siberica) that pop up everywhere in the very early spring, including all over my lawn, are pretty harmless. (Contrary to the name, they're not native to Siberia, but to southwestern Russia, the Caucasus, and northern Turkey.) Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), on the other hand, is an unmitigated thug -- since its introduction in the 1800s, it has spread like wildfire, each plant producing hundreds of seeds, and in many areas has crowded out native plant species. It's also toxic to a lot of native herbivores, including several species of butterflies. We've tried for years to rid our yard of this nuisance, without much success.
And don't get me started about multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora). The Wikipedia page says it's native to Asia, but I'm convinced it was imported directly from hell. It has pretty white flowers, but more than makes up for that by razor-sharp thorns borne on long, tough, wiry stems that seem to have a deliberate vicious streak. In general I love roses, but this one is an absolute hazard.
Of course, here in New York, we still have a great many native species that are doing well. Consider the situation in Hawaii, though -- where on the more populated islands, there are barely any native species left.
Oh, it looks good. On O'ahu, there are lush forests -- guava, plumeria, cinnamon, peppertree, Kahili ginger, several species of acacia and eucalyptus, banyan, satinleaf -- and flocks of showy birds like the red-billed leiothrix, red-whiskered bulbul, zebra dove, common mynah, and red-crested cardinal. But not one is native. The Hawaiian lowland ecosystems were completely destroyed for agriculture and settlement; accidental introduction of the southern house mosquito (Culex quinquefasciatus), and the avian malaria it carried, wiped out nearly all of the birds living below five hundred meters of elevation. If you want to see native Hawaiian species -- what's left of them -- you have to go up into the mountains, and even there, they're struggling to hang on.
Aarhus University ecologist Jens-Christian Svenning, who has been studying Hawaii's ecology for almost a decade, calls the current situation a "freakosystem." What's interesting, Svenning says, is that the situation has re-established a healthy, interactive community of species -- just not the ones that were there only two hundred years ago.
"These are wild but changed ecosystems," Svenning said. "They have passed some critical threshold which means they are unlikely to ever go back to how they were before. If you removed all people from the planet, Hawaii would be on a different evolutionary ecological trajectory going forward."
Hawaii's iconic plumeria trees, whose flowers are used to make leis, were introduced from the Caribbean in the 1800s [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Varun Pabrai, Plumeria rubra-4, CC BY-SA 4.0]
Hawaii, however, is just the canary in the coal mine. A study by Svenning and his colleagues indicates that between thirty and forty percent of all terrestrial ecosystems have "transformed into novel states;" that percentage is projected to rise to fifty by 2100.
It's not, of course, that these kinds of changes can't happen through natural processes. Three years ago I wrote a piece about the effect that continental collisions can have on the species that live there; and, after all, even less dramatic events than that can lead to extinction. What strikes me here is the speed with which it's happening. We've tampered with ordinary ecological succession with no forethought, and as a result, triggered what (to judge by the rates) will rank up there with the "Big Five" mass extinctions -- the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Late Triassic, and Cretaceous.
So maybe it's time to start thinking about this.
It's too late to undo the silent invasion of exotic species; here in upstate New York, I'm afraid lawn grass is here to stay, as are garlic mustard and multiflora rose, and lilacs, peonies, and daffodils. At least the last three are pretty and don't seem to be especially harmful. But we'd better wise up about what we're doing, and fast. Because remember that as prideful as we get sometimes, to the biosphere we're just another animal species. We're no more guaranteed survival than anything else.
Let's hope we learn that lesson before it's too late.
It's estimated that of the five billion species of organisms that have ever existed on Earth, something like 99.99% of them are extinct. This is with allowances for the fact that -- as I pointed out in a post a couple of years ago -- the word species is one of the mushiest terms in all of science, one of those words that you think you can define rigorously until you realize that every definition you come up with has dozens of exceptions or qualifications.
Be that as it may, there's no doubt that extinction has been the fate of virtually all of the twigs on the Great Tree of Life, from charismatic megafauna like Apatosaurus and the saber-toothed cat all the way down to single-celled organisms that lived and died hundreds of millions of years ago and left no fossil record whatsoever.
Some of the more recent extinctions, though, always strike nature-loving types like myself as a tragedy. The Dodo usually comes up, and the Thylacine (or "Tasmanian wolf," although it wasn't a wolf and wasn't limited to Tasmania), and the maybe-it-still-exists, maybe-it-doesn't Ivory-billed Woodpecker. The Passenger Pigeon, which before 1850 was the most abundant bird in eastern North America, comprising flocks of tens of thousands of individuals, was hunted to extinction in only fifty years -- the last wild Passenger Pigeon was shot in Ohio in 1900.
Wouldn't it be cool, many of us have thought, to bring back some of these lost organisms? The Jurassic Park scenario is a pipe dream; amber notwithstanding, no intact DNA has ever been found from that long ago. But what about more recently-extinct species?
A company called Colossal Biosciences, run by Ben Lamm and George Church, claim to have produced three Dire Wolf pups (Aenocyon dirus) using DNA extracted from a tooth and a skull from Idaho and Ohio, respectively -- genetically altering the fertilized eggs of a gray wolf, and gestating the embryos in ordinary female dogs. Here's one of the results:
[Image credit: Colossal Biosciences]
You're looking at a photograph of an animal that hasn't lived for ten thousand years.
My initial "good lord this is cool" reaction very quickly faded, though, but not because of some sort of "We're playing God!" pearl-clutching. Lamm, who apparently has huge ambitions and an ego to match, sees no problem with any of it, and has plans to bring back the Dodo and the Woolly Mammoth, and others as well. All, of course, big flashy animals, because that's what attracts investors; no one is going to put millions of dollars into bringing back the Ouachita pebblesnail.
But even that isn't the actual problem, here. Lamm himself gave a glancing touch on the real issue in his interview with The New Yorker (linked above), when someone inevitably brought up Jurassic Park. "That was an exaggerated zoo," Lamm said. "This is letting the animals live in their natural habitats."
No. No, it's not.
Because these species' natural habitats don't exist anymore.
Even the Dodo, which went extinct in 1662, couldn't be reintroduced to Mauritius Island today; the feral cats, rats, dogs, and pigs that helped drive it to extinction in the first place still live in abundance on the island. What would the de-extinction team do? Create a fenced, guarded reserve for it?
How is that not an "exaggerated zoo?"
And the Dire Wolf is an even more extreme example. It originally lived throughout much of the continental United States and down into mountainous regions of Central America. Adults could weigh up to seventy kilograms, so they could take down good-sized prey. If you could create a breeding population of Dire Wolves, where would you put them that they wouldn't come into contact with livestock, pets... and humans?
The truth is sad but inevitable; the world the Dire Wolf lived in is gone forever. Whether what we have now is better or worse is a value judgment I'm not equipped to make. What I do know is that recreating these animals only to have them lead restricted lives in reserves for rich people to come gawk at is morally indefensible. Ultimately, they can never live in the wild again; so a fenced-in reserve -- or the only other option, to let them go extinct a second time.
As huge as the coolness factor is, we shouldn't be doing this. How about putting our time, money, and effort into not further fucking up what we still have? There are plenty of wildlife refuges worldwide that could benefit enormously from the money being sunk into this project. Or, maybe, working toward fighting Donald Trump's "cut down all the trees and strip mine the world" approach to the environment.
So after the first flush of "Wow," all Lamm and Church's accomplishment did was leave me feeling a little sick. There seems to be no end to human hubris, and it's sad that these beautiful animals have to be its showpiece.
Stars live for most of their lives in an equilibrium between two forces; the inward pull of their own gravity, and the outward pressure from the heat generated by fusion in their cores. As long as there is plenty of hydrogen left to power fusion, those forces are equal and opposing, and the star is stable.
When the hydrogen is depleted, though, the balance shifts. The core cools, and the gravitational collapse resumes. This, however, heats things up -- recall the "ideal gas law" from high school chemistry, and that temperature and pressure are inversely proportional -- and the star begins to fuse the helium "ash" left over from hydrogen burning into carbon. Eventually that runs out, too, and the process repeats -- carbon to oxygen and silicon, and on up the scale until finally it gets to iron. At that point, there's nowhere to go; after iron, fusion begins to be an endothermic (energy-requiring) reaction, and the star is pretty much out of gas.
What happens at this point depends on one thing: the star's initial mass. For a star the size of the Sun, the later stages liberate enough energy to balloon the outer atmosphere into a red giant, and when the final collapse happens, it blows off that atmosphere into a wispy bubble called a planetary nebula.
The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]
What's left at the center is the exposed core of the star -- a white dwarf, still glowing from its residual heat. It doesn't collapse further because its mass is held up by electron degeneracy pressure -- the resistance of electrons to occupying the same quantum state, something known as the Pauli Exclusion Principle. But it's no longer capable of fusion, so it will simply cool and darken over the next few billion years.
For heavier stars -- between two and ten times the mass of the Sun -- electron degeneracy is not sufficient to halt the collapse. The electrons are forced into the nuclei of the atoms, and what's left is a densely-packed glob of neutrons called, appropriately enough, a neutron star. So much energy is liberated by this process that the result is a supernova; the atmosphere is blown away completely, and the collapsed core, which is made of matter dense enough that a teaspoonful would weigh as much as Mount Everest, spins faster and faster because of the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum, in some cases reaching speeds of thirty rotations per second. This whirling stellar core is called a pulsar.
For stars even larger than that, though, the pressure of neutron star matter isn't enough to stop the gravitational collapse. In fact, nothing is. The supernova and subsequent collapse lead to the formation of a singularity -- a black hole.
So that's the general scheme of things, but keep in mind that this is the simplest case. Like just about everything in science, reality is more complex.
Suppose you had an ordinary star like the Sun, but it was in a binary system. The Sun-like star reaches the end of its life as a white dwarf, as per the above description. Its partner, though, is still in stable middle age. If it's close enough, the dense, compact white dwarf will begin to funnel material away from its partner, siphoning off the outer atmosphere, and -- this is the significant part -- gaining mass in the process.
Artist's conception of the white dwarf/main sequence binary AE Aquarii [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]
The brilliant Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar figured out that this process can only go on so long -- eventually the white dwarf gains enough mass that its gravity exceeds the outward pressure from electron degeneracy. At a mass of 1.4 times that of the Sun -- the Chandrasekhar Limit -- the threshold is reached, and the result is a sudden and extremely violent collapse and explosion called a type 1a supernova. This is one of the most energetic events known -- in a few seconds, it liberates 10^44 Joules of energy (that's 1, followed by 44 zeroes).
So this is why I got kind of excited when I read a paper in Nature Astronomy about a binary star system only 150 light years away made of two white dwarf stars, which are spiraling inward and will eventually collide.
Because that would be the type 1a supernova to end all type 1a supernovas, wouldn't it? No gradual addition of little bits of mass at a time until you pass the Chandrasekhar Limit; just a horrific, violent collision. And 150 light years is close enough that it will be a hell of a fireworks show. Estimates are that it will be ten times brighter than the full Moon. But at that distance, it won't endanger life on Earth, so it'll be the ideal situation -- a safe, but spectacular, event.
The two stars are currently orbiting their common center of mass at a distance of about one-sixtieth of that between the Earth and the Sun, completing an orbit every fourteen hours. Immediately before collision, that orbital period will have dropped to the frantic pace of one revolution every thirty seconds. After that...
... BOOM.
But this was the point where I started thinking, "Hang on a moment." Conservation of energy laws suggest that to go from a fourteen-hour orbit with a radius of around 2.5 million kilometers, to a thirty-second orbit with a radius of close to zero, would require an enormous loss of energy from the system. That kind of energy loss doesn't happen quickly. So how long will this process take?
And there, in the paper, I found it.
This spectacular supernova isn't going to happen for another 23 billion years.
This was my expression upon reading this:
I don't know about you, but even in my most optimistic moments I don't think I'm going to live for another 23 billion years. So this whole thing gives new meaning to the phrase "advance notice."
You know, I really think y'all astrophysicists need to step up your game, here. You get our hopes up, and then say, "Well, of course, you know, astronomical time scales..." Hell, I've been waiting for Betelgeuse to blow up since I was like fifteen years old. Isn't fifty years astronomical enough for you?
And now, I find out that this amazing new discovery of two madly-whirling white dwarf stars on an unavoidable collision course is going to take even longer. To which I say: phooey.
I know your priority isn't to entertain laypeople, but c'mon, have a heart. Down here all we have to keep our attention is the ongoing fall of civilization, and that only gets you so far. Back in the day, stuff like comets and supernovas and whatnot were considered signs and portents, and were a wonderful diversion from our ancestors' other occupations, such as starving, dying of the plague, and being tortured to death by the Inquisition. Don't you think we deserve a reason to look up, too? In every sense of the phrase?
So let's get a move on, astrophysicists. Find us some imminent stellar hijinks to watch. I'll allow for some time in the next few months. A year at most. I think that's quite generous, really.
And if you come up with something good, I might even forgive you for getting my hopes up about something amazing that won't happen for another 23 billion years.
Most likely all of you know about Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole that sits at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
It's hard to talk about it without lapsing into superlatives. It has a mass about 4.3 million times that of the Sun. It's event horizon -- the "point of no return," the closest you can get to a black hole without being trapped by its gravitational pull -- has a radius of 11.3 million kilometers. It sits at the center of a fifteen-light-year-wide whirlpool of gas and dust called the accretion disk, which we know about because the material in it is moving so fast it has heated up to as high as ten million degrees Celsius, resulting in a steady emission of high-frequency x-rays.
It's curious that something this luminous wasn't immediately obvious to astronomers. First, it doesn't emit a lot of visible light; we didn't have telescopes capable of detecting the x-rays that are its fingerprint until 1933. By the 1970s, more precise observations showed that whatever the x-ray source was, it was extremely compact. It wasn't until 1994 that Charles H. Townes and Reinhard Genzel showed that its mass and diameter were consistent with its being a black hole. Another reason it took that long is that between us and the center of the galaxy there are massive dust clouds, so any visible light it does emit (or which is emitted by the dense clouds of glowing gas near it) mostly gets blocked. (Even so, looking toward the center of the Milky Way in the constellation Sagittarius, visible where I am in late summer, is pretty damn spectacular.)
The third reason that we don't get the full luminosity of whatever electromagnetic radiation is emitted from Sagittarius A* is a fortunate one for us; because of the black hole's immense magnetic field, any bursts of light tend to get funneled away along the axis of its spin, creating jets moving perpendicularly to the galactic plane. We, luckily, are comfortably out in the stellar suburbs, in one of the Milky Way's spiral arms. Our central black hole is fairly quiet, for the most part, but even so, looking down the gun barrel of its magnetic field axis would not be a comfortable position to reside.
The reason this comes up is some new research out of the University of Colorado - Boulder, which used data from the James Webb Space Telescope to solve a long-standing question about why, given the high density of hydrogen and helium gas near the galactic center, the rate of star formation there is anomalously low. This region, called Sagittarius C, extends about two hundred light years from the central black hole (by comparison, the Solar System is twenty-six thousand light years away). And what the team of researchers found is that threading the entire region are filaments of hot, bright plasma, some of them up to several light years in length.
The reason for both the filaments and the low star formation rate is almost certainly the black hole's magnetic field, which acts to compress any gas that's present along the field lines, heating it up dramatically. This, in turn, creates an outward pressure that makes the gas resist collapsing and forming stars.
"It's in a part of the galaxy with the highest density of stars and massive, dense clouds of hydrogen, helium and organic molecules," said Samuel Crowe, who co-authored the paper, which appeared this week in The Astrophysical Journal. "It's one of the closest regions we know of that has extreme conditions similar to those in the young universe... Because of these magnetic fields, Sagittarius C has a fundamentally different shape, a different look than any other star forming region in the galaxy away from the galactic center."
It is, to put it mildly, a rough neighborhood.
It's staggering how far we've come in our understanding of what our ancestors called the "fixed stars" -- far from being eternal and unchanging, the night sky is a dynamic and ever-evolving place, and with new tools like the JWST we're finding out how much more we still have to learn. Something to think about the next time you look up on a clear, starry night. The peaceful, silent flickering, set against the velvet black background, is an illusion; the reality is far wilder -- and far more interesting.
"Donald Trump is a stupid man's idea of a smart man, a poor man's idea of a rich man, and a weak man's idea of a strong man."
This quote -- often credited to Fran Leibowitz, although I can't find certain attribution -- is spot-on. He flaunts his wealth in a way that ought to be embarrassing, engages in flexes that crumble whenever someone stands up to him (witness his ongoing war of words with the leaders of Canada), and trots out just enough fancy-sounding verbiage to give the impression, at least if you don't dig very deep, that he knows what he's talking about. But even a half-assed effort at a close look, and the whole house of cards collapses. To give just one of countless examples, two days ago he announced a long litany of tariffs that are supposed to somehow fix the American economy despite just about every economist in the country saying, "No no no please merciful heavens no please don't do this it's a terrible idea," and lo and behold, the stock market had its worst day since 2020 (when, not coincidentally, he was also president). At least there was a grimly humorous note, because on the list was a ten percent tariff on imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands.
If you can't think of any American imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands, there's a good reason for that. There aren't any.
The Heard and McDonald Islands are uninhabited.
Well, they're inhabited by elephant seals and penguins. But lemme tell you, if the seals and penguins start exporting goods, the Stable Genius here in the United States is ready for 'em.
So what's happening is that people who (1) are dramatically uninformed and fact-resistant, and (2) get all their information from Fox News and OANN, are all in on policies that have most of the rest of us repeating "What the fuck?" over and over. Consider, for example, the effect that "DOGE" has had on scientific research, only two months into the second Trump presidency.
Elon Musk's clearcut-the-government approach -- I was going to call it a strategy, but it's closer to arson -- has already gutted science across the board. Some examples:
Officials at the National Institute of Health have been told to scrub all mention of mRNA from grants, presumably because the COVID-19 vaccine, long a bête noire of the right, is mRNA-based. This comes at the same time as an announcement that an mRNA-based vaccine was shown to have the potential to cure pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest and hardest-to-treat types of cancer known. Not halt its progress; cure it. But no, can't have that, not with RFK Jr., Mr. Treat-Measles-With-Cod-Liver-Oil, running health policy.
Work at many medical research institutions has ground to a halt, because seemingly random cuts, firings, and layoffs have taken out not only the researchers themselves, but critical support staff, supplies, and equipment. "Warehouse staff are also gone, and incoming shipments of reagents and biological samples are now being turned away," said one staff member, who only spoke on condition of anonymity. "We have orders in mid-process with no idea how to move forward." This, apparently, constitutes "governmental efficiency."
The journal Natureconducted a poll of over 1,600 scientists working in the United States, and found that three-quarters of them are now actively looking for jobs elsewhere, particularly in Europe or Canada. One, who works in agricultural genomics, said, "This is my home -- I really love my country. But a lot of my mentors have been telling me to get out, right now."
Responding to firings at NASA and NOAA, and bogus and partisan "investigations" of colleges and research institutions, 1,900 scientists signed a letter warning the American public of the damage Trump and his cronies are causing to our standing as a leader in scientific research. "We see real danger in this moment," the letter says, in part. "We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry. We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated."
The problem is -- to be completely frank -- Trump doesn't give a flying rat's ass about any of this, because he lacks even the smallest shred of empathy, and also because he's too catastrophically stupid to understand science. Recall that he's the guy who wanted to nuke a hurricane, and when that got nixed, thought he could change its path by drawing on a map with a sharpie.
Apparently, "Making America Great Again" somehow involves tanking the stock market, killing vital medical research, slicing other scientific programs to the bone, wiping out weather forecasting and climate modeling agencies just as we're heading into tornado and hurricane season, intimidating and censoring researchers, and forcing a mass exodus of the smartest people we've got to other countries where they'll actually have a chance at a stable career.
It'd be different if Trump and his cadre had an actual plan, but at this point I honestly don't believe they do -- beyond (1) stay in power and (2) get as rich as possible. The rest is just window-dressing, and any damage they do along the way falls into the "Oh, Well!" Department.
Even if a miracle happens and the Republicans grow a spine and start standing up to him and saying "Enough," there's already been so much vandalism done to our reputation worldwide that it's hard to see how it'll be reversible, at least in the short-term. If I were an investor in another country, no way in hell would I risk aligning myself with the United States right now, not with a capricious, thin-skinned, low-IQ egomaniac running the place.
What I'd be doing is trying to lure qualified Americans to relocate elsewhere.
The whole thing reminds me of another quote. Like the one I started with, it's of uncertain provenance, and has been misattributed to Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War. Wherever it originated, it's still apt here.
"An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground, as long as he is allowed to rule over the ashes."
I was discussing the alleged phenomenon of hauntings with a friend of mine, and he said, "There's one thing I've always wondered. Some people believe that the souls of humans can survive after death, and become ghosts. If humans can become ghosts, why can't other animals?"
Well, after pointing out the obvious problem that I'm not really the right person to state with authority what a soul, human or otherwise, could or could not do, I mentioned that there are many cases of supposed hauntings by animals. The most famous of these is the haunting of Ballechin House in Scotland.
Ballechin House shortly before its demolition [Image is in the Public Domain]
Ballechin House was a beautiful manor house, built in 1806 near Grandtully, Perthshire, Scotland, on a site that had been owned by the Stuart (or Stewart or Steuart or Steward, they seemed to have spelled it a new way every time the mood took them) family since the fifteenth century. The story goes that a scion of this family (sources point to his being the son of the man who had the house built), one Major Robert Steuart, was a bit of a wacko who had more affection for his dogs than he did for his family. That said, he provided quarters for his sister Isabella, who was a nun -- I'm not sure why she wasn't living with her fellow sisters in a convent, but some claim that it was because she'd had an illegitimate child and gotten herself, um... de-habited? Anyhow, she lived with them for a time, finally dying and being buried on the property. As for Major Steuart, he apparently took enough time away from his dogs to marry and have at least one child, John.
As the Major got older, he got more and more peculiar, and finally started claiming that after he died he was going to be reincarnated as a dog. One runs into these ideas pretty frequently today, but back then, it must have been a sore shock to his nearest and dearest. So this partly explains why when the Major did go to that Big Kennel In The Sky, his son John rounded up all of the Major's dogs and shot them.
I say "partly" because I fail to understand how, even if you believed that the Major was going to be reincarnated as a dog, killing dogs that were currently alive and therefore presumably none of whom were actually the Major, would help. But that's what he did.
And boy was he sorry.
Almost immediately thereafter, John Steuart and his family and servants began to experience spooky stuff. They heard doggy noises -- panting, wagging of tails, sniffing, and the really nasty slurping sounds dogs make when they are conducting intimate personal hygiene. (Okay, I'm assuming that they heard that last sound. I certainly hear it enough from my own dogs.) Steuart's wife several times felt herself being pushed by a wet canine nose, and reported being in a room and suddenly being overpowered by a strong doggy smell.
Other apparitions began -- the sighting of a ghostly nun, all dressed in gray, in the garden; doors that would open and close by themselves; and the sound of limping footsteps (the Major apparently walked with a limp). Steuart himself was not long to worry about them, because he was killed in an accident, supposedly the day after hearing a knocking sound on the wall. (Maybe it was a coded message from the Major that meant, "The dogs and I can't wait to see you!")
In the 1890s the hauntings were investigated on the urging of a certain Lord Bute -- I can't figure out whether by that time Bute was the owner of the property, or just a busybody. Thirty-five psychics descended upon the house, which created such a cosmic convergence of woo-wooness that you just knew something was gonna happen. And it did. A Ouija board spelled out "Ishbel" (recall that Major Steuart's sister who was a sister was named Isabella, and recall also that this entire family seemed to have difficulty with spelling their own names). The psychics experienced various doggy phenomena; one of the psychics, who had brought her own dog along, reported that one evening her dog began to whimper, and she looked over, and there were two disembodied dog paws resting on the bedside table.
I'd whimper, too.
In the interest of honesty, it must be recorded that the house was let several times during this period, once to a Colonel Taylor who belonged to the Society for Psychical Research, which is known for its skeptical and scientific approach toward claims of the paranormal. And Taylor's diary, sorry to say, records that he slept in the Major's bedroom on more than one occasion and experienced nothing out of the ordinary.
Be that as it may, Ballechin House acquired the reputation of being "the most haunted house in Scotland," and by the 1920s became impossible to rent. It fell into increasing disrepair, and finally was torn down in 1963. I think this is a little sad -- I'd have loved to visit it. I might even have brought my dogs. My puppy Jethro is highly alert, even if he has the IQ of a loaf of bread, and would certainly let us know if there were any other dogs present. I see no reason why it would matter that the canine residents of the house were a bunch of dogs who, technically, were dead. The "doggy smell" would be adequate motivation for him to bark his fool head off, as would the whole leaving-your-front-paws-on-the-nightstand thing.
So, the believers in Survival seem to, for the most part, believe that dogs have an eternal soul. However, this opens up a troubling question. Why stop there? If dogs have an eternal soul, do cats? (Several of the cats I've owned seemed to be more of cases of demonic possession, frankly.) How about bunnies? Or weasels? Or worms? Or Japanese beetles? (I'd be willing to believe that if there are gardens in hell, there'll be Japanese beetles there to eat the roses.) I find this a worrisome slippery slope. It may be a cheering thought that something of Woofy's nature will survive his demise, even if he terrorizes the guests with sticking his spectral wet nose into said guests' private regions, but I'm not sure I want to be stung by ghostly yellowjackets, or have to spray my plants for ghostly aphids. The real kind are enough of a problem.
