This morning I enjoyed my pre-dawn hot tub in a gentle, cool rain. I had on my new felt hat, which kept my head dry – and the rest of me was in the water so I couldn’t get any wetter. The clouds were glowing from the reflection of lights in town, just enough to show the silhouette of a large, leafless, Valley Oak tree just to the west of my hot tub. A large evergreen Live Oak tree formed a dripping canopy above my head, converting a gentle mist into large drops of water that splashed around me in the hot tub.

I was rather transfixed by the beauty of these two trees, marveling that while they appeared to be as stable as the rocks in the garden, they are actually very much alive and full of the mysterious “life force” animating all beings on the earth. In their own way they “experience” life – perhaps sleeping in the case of the deciduous Valley Oak, or in a dreamy wakeful state of the Live Oak. In any case, they are alive, growing, making and using energy, fighting off predators and disease, healing wounds, reproducing and perhaps enjoying life. It became clear that they were just like me, perhaps just operating at a different pace. It appears that live moves more slowly for them, but it is always moving and always active. When they are awake and the sun shines, their leaves and green parts make sugar that is stored for later use. During this part of the day they make and release oxygen into the atmosphere. At night, they are still awake and working, but using the stored sugars plus oxygen to grow through the night. Luckily for us they make more oxygen than they use – our lives depend upon it.

As I sat in the warm water marveling about these two great trees, my attention turned to the many other trees and plants in the area. A neighbor shares space with a big, bushy palm tree that seemed to be reveling in the rains that have been so long in coming to California. As the day grew brighter at the approach of dawn it was clear that all of the plants were greener, freshers, more flexible and perhaps happier than they appeared a couple of weeks ago before the rains settled in for the winder. I don’t know if plants can experience “happiness” or “joy” – but it sure looked like it to me.

I wonder if they have an “experience”, I wonder if they have anything approaching “awareness” at any level; or are they just chemically powered machines? I even wonder if they are separate from us, or if they are truly an integral part of something like a larger, global, organism described by all of DNA/RNA on this tiny blue ball we call home. Do the trees “experience” this shared life similarly to my other organs, such as my liver? Is my liver alive? Sort of… but it is not independent of the rest of “me”. The same applies to all of my body parts – they are clearly alive, clearly react to their environment, but only “experience” anything as a part of the whole. There “experience” seems to be associated with my mind’s experiences, not theirs. Are they “sentient” or just part of a sentient being?

According to one source I found on the Internet, sentient describes a being that can feel pleasure and pain. Clearly, not all parts of my being share in those experiences. I am not even sure if my liver, or hand, can experience pain. They can certainly be damaged, injured or become diseased – but it seems that the “feeling” of pain is somewhere else, it seems that it is my mind. If that is true, then the “me” that is made up of all of these non-sentient body parts is really just the part of me that has feelings/emotions. If life on earth is really one big individual composed of all of the individual parts, then those parts of this “individual” (Gaia?) that experience feelings creates sentience for all of the other parts. There is no more difference between me and the trees as there is between me and my liver (or brain). In that case it seems to imply that the entire earth is a sentient being, and it behooves us to treat is accordingly. We are not separate, we are all part and parcel to the whole – the whole being everything on this little blue ball. For us to remain healthy and experience pleasure more than pain, we need to take care of all of the parts.

A few days ago I had a rather irritating encounter with one of a friend that I have known for several years. A group of friends came to visit me and go to lunch. I offered to buy lunch for the group at a “nice” restaurant in the area. All went well until one of the ladies started complaining that I only bought one bottle of wine for the group (of three). (I had offered to purchase whatever they would like to eat or drink.) She thought I should have purchased three bottles. Obviously that was silly since we all knew that as these folks were almost certainly only going to have a glass each. I bought a separate glass for myself because she ordered a bottle of rose which I don’t particularly like. They were all free to order whatever, and how much, they wanted. I thought it was rather odd to accuse me of being stingy with the wine given that I offered them to pick anything on the menu – which included some rather pricey wines.

Things seemed to go alright until such time as the meal was finished. I picked up the bill as I had promised, but she insisted on adding a few dollar bills as a tip. I thought that was odd, and told her she needn’t do that – I was treating them. However, using a stage whisper, she explained to one of the others that she did this because “I am wealthy and wealthy people never leave good tips”! Perhaps I didn’t leave a big enough tip, but she had no way of knowing and it wasn’t something I normally advertise. I tipped almost 25% for the meal that I bought for her, which seemed generous to me. Besides, she couldn’t see how much I had paid – she just made the idea that I hadn’t tipped enough because she is convinced that I am stingy.

She spent the rest of the time during the rest of the afternoon insulting me about how selfish I am because I haven’t given away all of my money to poor people such as herself. She insisted that I don’t give sufficiently to charity and am never generous but am always greedy. Her reasoning was that she decided that I am too rich Therefore, she assumes that I am always stingy, and therefore I am a terrible human being; even though I recently gave her $1000 so she could get hearing aids and had just paid for her lunch. It was just weird. Perhaps I am too stingy, and perhaps I am not generous when I should be – but for her to launch into such a extreme bit of insults was pretty odd. She started it before she had a glass of wine, so she wasn’t reacting to too much alcohol – she apparently had created a mindset about how horrible I am because I have saved up enough money to retire (I hope). I would have been happy to discuss the whole thing if she could have listend, but she wouldn’t (or couldn’t).

I am not at all sure whether I am “wealthy” or not. I worked hard for many years as an independent engineer, saving money with the goal of having sufficient investments to allow me to retire without having to rely upon charity or the government for my support. My planned budget is designed to be empty by the time I die at perhaps age 100. I include a rather large “gifting” component in my budget that gives me a little discretion should the future bring unforeseen expenses. My “wealth” is in place of a retirement plan because I have always worked as an independent consultant and therefore have no retirement plan beyond Social Security.

I don’t think many people with retirement benefits (from the government or otherwise) realize how valuable those plans are and how large an investment is required to achieve that level of security. For example, it takes more than $3,000,000 in low risk investments to achieve a retirement equivalent to a typical $100,000 a year retirement plan in California. I suppose poor folks consider an investment portfolio of $3,000,000 to be wealthy, or a budget of $100,000 a year to be exorbitant (and perhaps it is). An investment sufficient to achieve an adequate income stream when needed during retirement years carries considerable risk. An income of $100,000 per year in California is considerably less than can be achieved by a typical two-income couple for white collar workers and other professions with a single wage earner doing things such as firemen and police officers.

I am not sure where the break between “normal”, “poor” or “wealthy” lies. Personally, I don’t consider myself wealthy, I consider myself to be adequately funded to finish my life without having to depend upon others. If I ended up with left over “wealth” upon my death, that has been directed to assist my grandchildren (or perhaps great grandchildren) in getting an education and having a little “nest egg” to start their lives as adults. It certainly won’t be sufficient to cover their expenses, but it might be enough to help with something like a down payment on a home should they desire to purchase a house. Gifting any more than I currently am doing would not be prudent because it would leave me at risk of financial disaster, with the result of depending upon others for my support. I worked and saved for fifty-five years with the intention of not becoming a burden to my loved ones, or the State.

Obviously, at some point accumulating sufficient money can certainly make a person “well-to-do” or maybe even “wealthy. I am not exactly sure where this point of being “wealthy” is to be found. Perhaps it is when you have enough money that there is no longer a reasonable way to use, or lose, it. Another measure might be conspicuous consumption. For example, yesterday I noticed a brand new Bentley automobile in town – maybe this implies that the owner is “wealthy”. I certainly can’t afford to drive a $300,000 car – but I don’t know anything else about that person so can’t really can’t judge his situation. Clearly it is possible to spend down very large amounts of money in a short period of time, many professional ball players have demonstrated that in rather spectacular fashion. I don’t know how you can spend over $100,000,000 – but they seem to figure it out on a regular basis.

The issue of some people judging people to be “bad” because they have accumulated a lot of money is interesting. I think it offers a bit of insight into a particular set of prejudices that people create for themselves. I find it to be quite common for people to assume that if you managed to gather enough money to retire without using government subsidies or charity you must be nasty and greedy (even when you happen to be giving them money to help them along). My “friend” was absolutely convinced that my only concern is to get as much money as possible so I can die wealthy. She is convinced that I don’t donate to any good causes, don’t contribute to Society, and am just mean and nasty because of my overwhelming greed. Perhaps I am mean and nasty (I have friends that don’t seem to agree with that idea), and perhaps I don’t donate as much as she would if she had my resources. I agree that I might have these types of faults – but I really don’t think they were evident in this situation. .

It is unfortunate that the topics of income, savings, wealth, financial security are taboo in our culture. That taboo means that we can’t share our experiences and rationales, which means that we all stay firmly planted in our pre-conceived set of prejudices and judgments. This keeps us pointed to others as being “at fault”, that the others are the cause of whatever ills we are thinking about. It keeps us from understanding from a wide variety of points of view, and keeps us from creating solutions. There are two things here- one, perceptions: we see the world and people, not the way they truly are, but the way WE are. The way WE think we are (or pretend to be) and the way we REALLY are

I would like to explain my long absence from writing my blog offerings for those who might be checking it out now and then. There aren’t many of you, but it seems like the polite thing to do.

Back in July my wife had an “event” that landed her in the emergency room at a local hospital, followed by a few days in intensive care. She had a period of seizures with no apparent cause. The hospital did all of the expected tests but found no cause other than possibly a late onset epilepsy. After a few days of total incapacitation, she woke up one morning “cured” and we went home. When she had the event, I decided to drop my focus on everything except for her well being.

Three weeks went by uneventfully, so I decided I could travel to Cincinnati to attend a conference, and she would stay with our daughter just in case something came up again. I was in Cincinnati two days when I got a call from my daughter that my wife had another event and was back in the emergency room. I got a ticket home as soon as I was able, and was at her side that evening. They symptoms were similar, but this time the MRI showed many “shadows” indicting cancer. A biopsy confirmed that it was advanced brain cancer that because it was disbursed was inoperable. At that point I totally re-focused on only her. Thus the hiatus on my blogging. She started a regime of 6 weeks of radiation treatment 5 days a week coupled with chemo therapy 7 days a week.

She once again “got better” and things were almost back to normal for a couple of weeks, then back to the ER, followed by another “recovery”. Things were apparently going as hoped for up until the beginning of week six. Starting at about week four of the treatments she became very tired and slept a lot, but that was expected. Then when it would have been the last week of therapy she had another event, but this time it was vastly worse. She went into a coma for a few days, and then died.

That was about six weeks ago and I am just now recovering from the shock enough to write this short blog. I am still deeply in a state of shock and grief, but am finally starting to have a few hours where I can think about doing other things, such as this. I am not expecting a quick improvement, but at least hope to begin the process of moving along with my life.

One of my plans is to pick up on my blogs again, but perhaps maybe a bit more like some sort of diary where I write about important events or experiences in my journal toward some sort of “normalcy”. I decided to take some time to stop “planning” my days, but instead just go along with them to see what happens and develops. Interesting, and perhaps important, events seem to happen almost daily. Some are probably only interesting to me, but I will share them just in case anyone else finds them worth considering.

Of course, my blog has almost no “followers”, those that do visit seems to only do so once or possibly twice before the go on. I suspect they are searching for “hoes” (as in whores) looking for porn and are quite disappointed by finding that “Hoes” in my family name, not a description of the content. However, I refuse to change my name, and refuse to change the name of my website, so I will just keep doing what I am doing – knowing that I am unlikely to get much of a following. I am mainly just writing to hear myself think, so I don’t suppose it matters.

I was sitting outside in my hot tub (“spa”) this morning enjoying the splendid view of my favorite constellation friends; Orion, Taurus, The Pleiades, Gemini, Canis Major, Cassiopeia, Perseus, and a few others. The weather was perfect for star gazing with a moonless morning; 55F, no wind, clear skies and quiet. I like to lay my head back and just watch – today I saw 5 meteors (I suppose they might represent an early start on the Orionids which are leftover pieces of Halley’s comet). I usually spot 10 to 15 satellites and perhaps one or two meteors during my 15 to 30 minute morning soak. I didn’t see any satellites this morning – perhaps I was too early in the day for them.

In any case, while semi-dozing and watching the stars I got to thinking about where it all came from. The current theory is that it all started with a big bang – and then things just happened after that. The “just happened after that” part is the job of “science” to describe. Once the bang happened it seems that the rules of physics came along for the ride, resulting in all there is. Things just are because they are. Perhaps a different bang would have resulted in different rules – or not.

The mystery for me isn’t so much about how the universe evolved following the bang, but instead – what banged??? If the universe is something and the pre-universe isn’t that, then does that mean it is nothing (no thing)? How could nothing bang into existence? Or are we just some sort of fluctuation around zero so that from the BIG picture point of view there is still nothing. Not only did this big bang apparently happen, but the scales (energy, mass, distances, time) involved are unimaginably huge. “How very odd” is about as far as I can get along this line of thought. The story seems to be that there was (perhaps is) nothing at all, no anything, no energy, no waves, no ….. nothing. Then “it” (nothing) got really bored and turned into everything – all at once! This didn’t even happen in a flash because it was so dense that nothing could flash. It is more like the universe was vomited into being. Maybe “it” rolled over in bed.

Once the change happened, then the physics geniuses can play their favorite math games and describe how it evolved into atoms, and molecules, and galaxies, and stars, and eventually “us” – but they can say nothing about the transition, or before the transition. Interestingly, apparently there was no “before the transition” because there was no time and time is necessary for a “before”. This odd state of affairs turns the entire discussion into a pseudo-discussion because there was actually nothing to discuss.

The results of this pondering was a simple, “huh??” Not being ready to give up on useless pondering, as the trees become visible in the pre-dawn light I got to wondering about the nature of life on earth. I have already discussed my revelation that all existing life has always been alive and thus was never “born” or created except when it all started 3 billion or so years ago. Of course a lot of things have died since that time, but none of the things that are alive now have died yet. The thread of life is continuous, and apparently arising from the same event all those billions of years ago. We (every current life form) are all “cousins”.

But I wonder if that is actually true. It appears to be true, but I keep wondering about two other possibilities. One possibility is that there were initially many different starts of life, but only one survived to the present. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of this happening, but it certainly seems like a reasonable possibility. However, to me the more mysterious question has to with whether it all started with a single molecule randomly achieving the kind of self-replication that resulted in the ability to replicate, mutate and diverge into the splendid diversity we enjoy, or did it start with a lot of pools of gunk (molecules) all of which acquired the necessarily characteristics.

A thought experiment might help clarify my question. Consider a lab experiment where a bunch of precursor molecules were mixed in a vat (or a test tube) in such a way that “the beginning” life molecule was formed. Would we have billions of “the beginning” molecules that then go on to create billions of new threads of life (albeit all of them identical, or nearly so), or would only one such molecule form creating just one thread of life? If it is the former, then my idea that life all goes back to a single beginning is false – it goes back to billions and billions of single beginnings. If so, then life comes from billions of beginnings, and we are not cousins at all. We are all based upon complex crystals (DNA and RNA) formed by the reaction of similar chemicals like two grains of salt – very similar because of the chemistry involved, but not related to or sharing a very long chain of reactions. If this is the case, then I wonder when and how often life has started afresh.

I was once again left with “huh?” – not even knowing if there is a sensible question to be asked. Am I once again pondering another “pseudo-question”?

For the few of you that read my blog, I apologize for the long delay. My wife had a seizure at the end of July that ended up with a few days in the hospital. There was no diagnosis at that time. We went home, things were stable for a couple of weeks – and I went to Cincinnati to attend a conference. While I was at the conference, there was a repeat causing me to find a flight home ASAP. This time there was a diagnosi of inoperable brain cancer. That was another stint in the hospital followed by about 10 days in a rehab center. Then home again for a couple of weeks, and then another “event” and another week in the hospital.

I spent much of the time in the hospital with her, going home late at night to get a few winks and take care of pressing things on the home from. It was exhausting to say the least. During all of this I was unable to find the time, or the brain power, to do much of anything except take care of the things that needed immediate attention – mostly my wife’s adventures. We are finally home once again, wondering when this will all repeat. She is getting daily radiation treatments and chemotherapy, which really makes her exhausted. It is still very difficult, but right now a little calmer (partly because she is so exhausted).

This week we are trying a new process of hiring a care giver to be with her for the mornings, giving me time to catch up on other things – including writing this blog. I finally had time to dig through the pile of papers that have been growing on my desk and see a number of past due bills and things like that. Hopefully I will be able to get to some of those tomorrow or the next day. It seems like there isn’t much going on, but the day is full of things to do – video appointments with doctors, two hour trips to get radiation therapy, meals, once a week in-home visits from the physical therapist, the occupation therapist, the speech therapist, a nurse, trips to get weekly lab tests, difficult and time consuming medication taking because she can barely swallow the many pills each day, visits from friends and neighbors (wonderful, but exhausting for her and time consuming). We have action packed, full days of doing nothing.

I am beginning to write a short paper on the system safety aspects of the hospitals that I noticed while hanging out with my wife for hours and days at a time. This paper is going to be published in the next issue of The Journal of the System Safety Society – I’ll post is here also for those that might find it interesting. I write a short (2 or 3 page) article for each issue of the journal. The topic varies depending upon what has caught my attention at the time – this time it has to do with some problems that I identified with the hospital system(s).

Mainly I am writing this blog just to let people know I am back (perhaps – depending upon the future events concerning my wife’s illness).

I just read The Genesis Machine by Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel. I found it one of the most difficult reads that I can recall. I don’t mean that it is poorly written, it is not. I don’t mean that it is hard to understand, it is only mildly difficult to comprehend. What I mean is that I can’t stand the topic and the implications. Reading the book felt a little like watching a horror movie where you know that it is just going to keep getting worse and worse, finally ending in total disaster. Unfortunately, the disaster that seems to be at the end of the story involves the human race.

The book discusses the wonderful things that gene editing (via CRISPR and other tools) is accomplishing with regard to medical and agricultural advances. Truly amazing things are being done in the benefit of mankind (such as Golden Rice that was created by inserting chrysanthemum genes into rice dna to create rice that is high in vitamin A) – but with that amazing power for good comes an equally amazing risks. Not only are these tools being used to create new vaccines, to prevent genetic diseases before birth, “cure” a vast array of genetically related diseases but it is being used to create new organisms that would never come to pass through “normal” breeding processes because genes are being introduced from other species that would never be in the gene pool.

There is an amazing amount of “mix-and-matching” between species being done in laboratories around the world, and many new traits being introduced into species germ lines of species (including humans) that will propagate and mutate into the distant future. Brand new organisms are being created using artificial intelligence techniques putting together entirely new sequences of genetic codes – not cobbling together parts from difference species, but starting from scratch and making new life. Currently, all life seems to come from a common ancestor from billions of years ago. Now scientists are starting all over again, with a new man-made germ line. What could possibly go wrong?

Throughout the book there are comments along the lines of “this is great as long as it isn’t released into the wild”, or “we know the potential risks well enough to understand the cost/benefit assessments”, and “great harm could be done so we have to have regulations to keep people from doing these sorts of things.”

What could go wrong with something that has great power (including devastating bio-weapons)? All that there is between catastrophe and amazing benefits is people’s willingness to “play by the rules” instead of achieving great wealth and/or power, with the understanding that this all has to be error free with people never making any mistakes. The history of humanity isn’t very good with regard to abusing power, understanding all of the implications of a new development, and working error free. Over the past decade, there have already been many abuses, poor decisions, and mistakes with regard to gene editing activities. They will continue – there is zero chance of controlling them.

So now that we have let that particular genie out of the bottle, we can only wait to find out just how bad things can become when “what could go wrong” – does. I see no possible path around multiple catastrophes at an ever-increasing frequency. It is easy to predict some of the “what could go wrong” scenarios (such as release of a new super-covid type pandemic), the accidental destruction of entire species that turn out to have important beneficial roles in the environment, and many others. However, there are also many unknown unknowns that we will discover – with the disclaimer of “who would have thought of that?”, or “nobody would do a thing like that.” We are going to learn a lot of new lessons – I really hope it works out for our descendants, but I think they have yet another earth shattering set of problems to attempt to solve.

These kinds of true stories really leave me in a gloomy state of mind. What idiots people are. The list of mankind’s insanity just keeps getting longer as we get technologically more “advanced”.

I recently purchased a new “golf cart” (actually a low speed vehicle for transportation, not golf). It is kind of fun to drive around in, fun for us oldsters and grandchildren alike. However, the first thing that I noticed is that it comes with an absolutely obnoxious, and unnecessary, back up alarm like you hear on construction sites. It is really, really load – totally ruining the quiet riding experience for me and anyone in the neighborhood.

Because it is so obnoxious I decided to disable it. That sounds easy enough, it must have a couple of wires that can be disconnected – assuming you can find the speaker. So I went on a hunt for a very load speaker on a very small vehicle. This was far from easy because I could not determine where the noise was coming from, there was no directional cues whatsoever. I couldn’t tell which end of the cart it was coming from, couldn’t even tell if it was from the overhead canopy or perhaps under the vehicle.

I thought I must be getting really bad hearing, so I asked my wife to come listen to it and help me know which end of the cart I should be looking to find it. She had no clue either. Others tried to help, but nobody could just distance or direction. I finally looked it up on the internet and found that it was under the passenger seat. As I expected, it was simple to unplug it to shut it up.

However, as a safety engineer this made me really wonder about all of those backup alarms used on construction sites and elsewhere. It appears that the particular sound frequency and volume that they selected for this function makes many (perhaps all?) people unable to judge distance or direction, meaning while they can hear that there is a danger somewhere in the vicinity, they can’t judge whether or not THEY are in danger. Given that there are often many alarms going on at the same time, and that all of the alarms sound the same, I am pretty certain that they just get ignored. They irritate, but my guess is that they don’t do much good as “safety devices”. I suspect that they become just another annoyance to be ignored.

I have seen some advances where people ware warning devices that tell them when they are in a danger zone – specifically for them, and specifically when there is actually danger near by. This sounds much better, but I don’t know enough about the details to be able to judge. Mainly I was just surprised how difficult it was to track the direction of that alarm – clearly it has something to do with the way that the human ear works. Figuring out how to make jobs safer is MUCH more difficult than it seems like it would be because there are so many of these kinds of unexpected situations. Testing in laboratory and field use is key, and those tests have to actually test safety – not the functioning of device that is assumed to be safer.

Today’s Jan 06 hearing was rather terrifying in many ways and made me wonder what it is about people that cause them to blindly follow along with the group. Perhaps the scariest part to me was the short testimony by the guy that got wrapped up in the event and barged into the capital building. He said that he is a “normal” American citizen with a job and family doing normal things with family and friends, but that he had become a “social media” junky. He was comfortable with what he found there, and found no reason to disbelieve Trump’s statements – so when Trump asked him (along with millions of others) to “come on down” to the Jan 06 demonstration in support of patriotism and Trump, he got all fired up and headed out at the last minute with some friends.

When asked if he believed all of the lies at the time, he said he did and really hadn’t considered any other option. Asked if he still believes them, he said he no longer does because he had done a little independent research and realized that they were not only lies, but essentially impossible. In summary, he said that he had been living with blinders on and that he hopes that others will find it within themselves to take them off and look around – it isn’t what they are being told. Perhaps it should be that we should look around because it isn’t what we are being told. I think he represented a million or so people that either don’t want to, or don’t know that they can, remove their blinders and look around. This is extremely scary to me because we have many historical examples of what happens in that situation – very few of them good.

Letting that be for a minute — last night I watched the first episode of the documentary about Patagonia on CNN. It was pretty cool, nice photos, interesting discussion – but what caught my attention was the bit about the sea lions and their harems. The big boy sat in the middle of a circle of his “ladies”, just sort of luxuriating in his domain. All the ladies seemed quite content with the situation, perhaps being protected. Then a challenger came along and there was a big fight, which the challenger lost so he slunk away – leaving the family group as before. However, had the challenger won, the “girls” would have been just as content with the new guy. It wasn’t about the personality of the “boss”, loyalty or love – it was about something else, more about an inherited way of acting. Elk herds do a similar thing, with the possible exception that apparently few of the offspring from the harem are children of the main guy- there is a lot of “hanky panky” going on beyond the fringes of the group.

The juxtaposition of the documentary and the testimony at the hearing were striking. Is there something going on here that is “built in” to people through our millions of years of evolution? Is there something built into us that in certain situations forces us to put on our blinders and follow like a herd of sheep? Some relatively recent examples are of course Hitler, maybe Kennedy, and now Trump. Is it possible that there is something about these people that is almost irresistible to us?

When I was in college during the “hippy days” I took a “speech” course to meet my general education requirements. It turned out that the class was not a normal speech class but instead a class on interpersonal communications. This was much better than what I had expected because we didn’t have to write speeches and present them in front of people, we just had to talk to each other (while paying attention to what was going on). I excelled at this, so much so that I was allowed to assist the Dr. Dennis Winters in future interpersonal communication classes. I don’t recall any money for doing this, I guess it was just for fun. In retrospect, this arrangement was kind of odd for a physics major.

This particular teacher was the campus superstar, speaking at large “peace/anti-war” rallies and all kinds of things like that. He was always in demand for most anything that required a charismatic speaker, everyone that I knew was sort of in awe of him. All of a sudden I was connected to a widely popular guy – and made “important” because I was his aid. I never came under his influence, but it was interesting to be a tiny bit popular with the transferred adulation. It didn’t hurt that all of a sudden I was “something” with a lot of cute girls that would normally have ignored me.

The thing that I found most interesting was his teaching me how to be that kind of a charismatic speaker. I failed at picking up the skills, but remember the story about how he did it. He grew up in Butte Montana, making friends with Evel Knievel and Jesse Jackson. Dennis told me stories about the three of them hanging around together, discussing how to make a “big” hit in the world, especially how to be positive influences in the world In retrospect, I am not sure how it worked out for them but Evel and Jesse certainly made a name for themselves. I haven’t heard much about Dennis. According to Dennis, they spent a lot of time analyzing the details of what movements, facial expressions, voice modulations, etc makes a speaker irresistible. Basically, what do you have to do in order to become charismatic! If this is true, all three of them exceeded in doing so.

Dennis offered to share his findings with me, so that I too could become a charismatic public speaker. Being the independent type, I unfortunately declined the offer – assuming that if I were destined to be a charismatic “leader” it would happen naturally. Of course that never happened, so I continue to stumble along the best that I can when I am unable to weasel out of speaking to a group. What I found interesting was that he claimed that this is something that you can learn to do – and if his popularity is a result of that, he succeeded. Jesse Jackson also became an iconic, and important, liberal leader. He is an example of the good a person can do with the power of smarts, dedication, compassion and charisma.

So now back to my original thoughts – do people with this kind of “magnetic” charisma tie into something that is deeply embedded in us from millions of years of evolution? Can we put on faces, expressions, body movements and other physical attributes to “connect” with this hardwired instincts, sort of like a peacock spreading its splendid tail feathers? Is this something that we can learn to do? (Dennis Winters claimed that he had, and that I could too.) If that is the case, is there something here that we can take advantage of in the quest for making the world a better place, one that is not ruled by people such as Hitler, Trump, and a long list of other leaders that are followed blindly, everyone with their blinders on?

I wonder if perhaps if we clearly understand that we are responding to wired in instincts instead of “truth” perhaps we can learn to take off the blinders and look around. As usual, I offer no solutions here, just something that I find curious. Maybe if we can learn to identify the triggers we can also learn to look beyond them.