Religion Without Miracles And A Few Bolts Of Lightning Is No Religion At All - The Disappearance Of Climate Change

Religious people look for miracles everywhere, for if God remained an illusory promise and nothing more, then faith would certainly disappear.   

The Catholic Church has always been on top of this issue, and every decade or so the Pope canonizes someone, granting him sainthood and a place at the banquet of heavenly hosts.  This honor is not conferred willy-nilly - the candidate must have performed a miracle, not necessarily changing water into wine or multiplying a few loaves and fishes into more food than a hundred Jews at a banquet could consume, but more likely ones. 

The Vatican archives are filled with magical cures - the blind can see, the lame can walk, etc.; but the prelates in the Office Of Holy Miracles, the wing of the Church responsible for finding, vetting, and approving sainthood, are no fools and have picked low-hanging fruit.  There are enough cases of hysterical blindness, psycho-motor paralysis, and tomfoolery to keep the ball rolling. 

Long-hidden records discovered by reformist cardinals exposed the 1374 collusion between a priest of Notre Dame and an Ile de la Cite mendicant.  The canny beggar feigned blindness and recovery after the laying on of hands by Father Aloysius, a dying man and former philanderer who had been refused absolution, but hoped to see Jesus however oddly stamped his ticket of admission. 

At the priest's death, the beggar came forward and hopeful of repaying the priest who had given him 50 gold sovereigns for his collusion and later testimony, told the Parisian envoy to the Holy See of the miracle, and until 1994 when the scandal was exposed, the Catholic faithful had prayed to Saint Aloysius de Paul. 

Mysterious, apparently unexplainable events are all fodder for secular belief.  So, without much ado, Chicken Littles believed the world was in the throes of self-destruction. 

The climate, they said, was warming rapidly, and in a few short decades, warned former Vice President Al Gore turned climate Cassandra, coastal cities would be inundated, Iowa soybean crops would be burned to a crisp, and mortality from malaria, dengue, and schistosomiasis would outstrip cancer. 

Climate change was the issue that political progressives had been looking for, one that was all encompassing, universal, and inescapable.  Capitalism their bugaboo was at the heart of the crisis.  Without Wall Street robber barons seducing Americans into an energy free-for-all - big cars and trucks, gelid air conditioning and toasty winters - profits would be stagnant.  

Wrapped in patriotism and Wild West individualism, the message was that no Washington bureaucrat was ever going to abrogate rights of free choice, and the oil business boomed, the Pyrrhic promise that would doom the nation. 

Knowing they were on to a good thing, progressives turned the issue into a holy crusade - climate change denial was apostasy, worse than Holocaust denial, automatically and absolutely called out and apostates guillotined. 

Words, threats, and intimidation were not enough - something visible and substantive had to be done - so billions were spent on wind farms, solar panels, and bike lanes.

The folly continued and j'accuse fingers were pointed at every neighbor who defied reason and filled up at the pump.  The hysteria and vigilantism was worse than the early days of COVID where neighborhoods were turned into gulags, infiltrated by informers and secret police.  

However, the dire predictions of Al Gore and other climate change believers never came to pass.  The seas did not engulf South Beach, Manhattan, or San Francisco; the Antarctic gained ice, and average annual temperatures hovered, dipped, slid, and recovered just as they always had.  The winter of 2025-26 was bitch and even temperate Washington, DC suffered weeks of unseasonably frigid temperatures, ice and snow. 

More immediate concerns dominated the news - wars in the Caribbean, Europe, and the Middle East, dealing with the flood of unwanted illegal aliens crossing the southern border, the impact of AI on the labor market, and Donald Trump's unmitigated roll through the bureaucracy all put climate change, already discredited, on the back pages. 

Bob Muzelle, a lifelong progressive and on the climate bandwagon since the beginning of the affair, was disconsolate as he scoured the Washington Post for some record of the climate change which, despite naysayers and faux, invented evidence to the contrary, was more than ever real and existential. Nada. The catastrophe of the millennium was being ignored, dismissed, and forgotten. 

Bob, although schooled thoroughly in Methodism as a boy, had become thoroughly secular during his progressive journey.  Religion was more than just the opiate of the people - it was an obstacle standing in the way of progress.  As long as Americans continued to believe in the Second Coming, a fatalist, inane, hopelessly ignorant idea, the road to a better world would be narrow and difficult. 

Yet for the first time in decades, his eyes turned upward.  If only there were a sign, some indication of the imminent disaster facing mankind.  

The recent hurricane season had been a complete bust.  Despite his earnest wishes and dutiful tracking of Atlantic storms, nothing but fair weather.  Despite the promise of continued drought in the West, pictures of a dry Grand Coulee Dam had been replaced by emergency sluice gates open to relieve water pressure. Reservoirs in California were overflowing, and crops in the Midwest had never been more productive. 

Bob remembered the derecho of a few years back.  The skies over Washington turned as black as midnight and then out of the darkness came a violent shearing wind that tore the tops off all the trees along Wisconsin and Massachusetts Avenues, downed power lines, and blocked streets with debris.  A climate change event if there ever was one, but that kind of violent atmospheric disruption hadn't happened since, especially now that we needed it. 

Of course Bob was not so callous and self-centered to wish disaster upon anyone, but still what was religion without bolts of lightning?

Never once did he question the received wisdom of Al Gore or any of his fellow climate activists.  He was as much of a true believer as ever.  It was just that his job of prophet and advocate was becoming harder and harder without the kind of lowbrow physical proof that the unwashed needed to jolt them awake.  A derecho, a hurricane, a line of tornadoes tearing up the Midwest one after another. 

He never actually prayed for climate-induced disaster - that would deny both his spiritual center and his belief in secularism (God has no part in all this) - but he came close one brilliant May day, the air redolent of apple blossoms and lilac, the sky blue and a light breeze ruffling the new Spring leaves. This was the kind of day that set back the movement by years if not decades. 

Almost hysterical with an inchoate anger, he started pounding his feet and waving his arms in wild frustration, until he realized that he was quite unintentionally doing a rain dance, the very image of Run-With-Wolves, a Comanche chief immortalized by Frederic Remington in a painting hanging in the Renwick Gallery. 

A little girl, hand in hand with her mother walking in Lafayette Park, pulled away and pointed at Bob. 'Mommy, what's that crazy man doing?', and it was then that Bob had his epiphany.  Time to hang 'em up and retire to Florida. 

Fraud, The Chief African Export - How Nigeria And Somalia Conned America

President Trump has called Somalia a shithole - an unruly barbaric place without civil institutions, rule of law, or any semblance of order - and from now on no Somali would be admitted across our borders. 

Yet you have to give Somalis credit.  With no more than twin Johnson 350 outboards, a few AK-47s, and a handful of rickety country fishing boats, they managed to engage in a successful piracy operation that reaped millions and reshaped commercial commerce around the Horn of Africa. 

'Intrepid little buggers' the President went on to say, and fearless they were indeed, attacking the likes of the 175,000 ton 24,000 container Maersk Bridgewater and making off with 100 containers of Braun refrigerators, 500 containers of peanut butter, and 500 containers of Volvo SUVs among other things. 

The governments of the EU and the US were reluctant to deploy navy convoys to protect their shipping, actions which would set a tricky legal precedent for public-private partnerships; and they were hesitant to use deadly force to protect cargo.

As a result cargo ships plying the lanes off the coast of Somali were sitting ducks.  By the time countries agreed on the use of limited force and joined together in strong defensive partnerships, Somali pirates had made millions and retired for greener pastures. 

Ahmed Abdi had done well in piracy during his tenure as chief gunner of his boat dubbed by colleagues 'Master of the Seas’ for its seaworthiness, speed, naval agility, and strategic offense .  Maersk captains when they saw the Jolly Roger flying on the small country craft headed their way immediately called on hands on deck, deployed power hoses, lowered spiked nets over the side, and made mayday calls to Gulf Port Operations in Mombasa. 

Abdi was particularly talented at marksmanship.  Hitting a moving target from a small boat pitching and yawing in heavy seas is no easy feat, but Abdi had some mysterious interior gyroscope which kept his aim steady and true.  

Piracy was an occupation and joy for the young Abdi, a man who had always had an adventuresome spirit, had become bored with fishing and fish mongering, jumped at the chance to be a mate on a fast boat plying the waters off the coast.  He quickly proved his mettle and was moved up in rank, seniority, and position.  As crude as this Somali piracy operation was, it had order, discipline, and a chain of command. 

As piracy was increasingly curtailed, Abdi looked for other opportunities, and found it in Minnesota where a wealthy uncle, recognizing his fearlessness, skill, savvy and courage, recruited him for the now infamous daycare scandal in Minneapolis. As on the high seas, Abdi proved himself a loyal crew member and a well-trained soldier. 

So what was it that made Somalis, natives of the worst place in the world, a true African shithole ruled by bloody militias, a lawless, tribal place of primitive violence and internecine conflict, able to have developed, engineered, and profited mightily from piracy? 

Think about it - four or five men in a leaky boat, powered by outboard engines, armed with assault rifles and grappling hooks to board captured vessels, able to do what they did. 

And then shifting gears, sussing out and quickly understanding the intellectually corrupt political ethos of Minnesota and the gullibility of progressive idealists, and engineering a fraudulent scheme that bilked millions from the taxpayer. 

It was all done with great elan and chutzpah.  There was no attempt to disguise these storefront 'daycare centers' which were nothing more than empty buildings with a placard or painted sign on the front. It was not only a brilliant, Enron, Bernie Madoff quality operation, it was a big fuck you to those pouring money their way.  The con was so obvious, so out in the open, so brazen and brass-balled that you had to admire the Third World machismo of it all.  

Arthur Olatunji, Nigerian and longtime resident of Lagos, had a similarly modest upbringing, but thanks to his ingenuity, fearlessness, and uncanny ability to evade the law, he became a trusted member of one of the most powerful crime rings in Lagos.  The ring operated much like the old Chicago Mafia - prostitution, numbers, theft, and drugs - and like them had civil and judicial authorities in their pockets.  They ruled with impunity until someone had the bright idea of making ten times the profit without having to move a foot from a computer screen, and the great Nigerian fraud began from a nasty, ramshackle hut perched over Sunshine Canal, the most pestilential neighborhood in Lagos.  

It didn't take long before the fraud went viral, international, and reached into the hundreds of millions and then billions of dollars of revenue. 

'We can't catch them', said an official of the Treasury Department in the early days of Nigerian operations. 'They're too smart'; and smart they were.  There was no pattern to their victims who came from august institutions like the World Bank to the US post office, managers and clerks, ordinary Joes and Nantucket sailors. 

In a matter of a few years, the Nigerians had penetrated and corrupted the two major credit bureaus enabling them to gain access to thousands of private accounts. Using that privileged identity, they went on a buying spree, taking advantage of eager, credulous lenders and leaving individual credit accounts at D- and F ratings. 

They were master impersonators, clever and canny infiltrators, masters at disguise and concealment.  It was brilliant. 

Taken as a whole, Africa is a failed continent.  From east to west, north to south, Africa is corrupt, crime-ridden, fraudulent, exploitive, tribal, and violent.  Big Men rule for life robbing their people blind, giving them nothing of the vast mineral and energy wealth beneath the ground, taking billions in loans and grants from myopic idealist European and American donors and siphoning it off to offshore accounts and homes in the south of France. 

Yet if you look at it another way, each and every one of these dictatorships is a marvelously ingenious scam.  The World Bank alone has lost billions of investment dollars.  Governments willingly took the money, promised to abide by 'conditionalities' - reform of the judicial process, democratic elections, etc. - and to use the money wisely and efficiently.  

The smoke and mirrors were so elaborate that international bankers and foreign assistance managers never saw what was really happening. They were being taken for a ride and didn't even know it. 

So there is talent, entrepreneurial savvy, even genius in Africa; but because it is the kind we would prefer not to acknowledge, it gets lumped into broad, catch-all categories of misuse. 

It took more than just ambition that kept Mobutu, Idi Amin, Kagame, Deby, Cyril Ramaphosa and a legion of other dictators in power for so long.  It took more than opportunity to turn Nigeria and Somali into champion exporters of fraud.  The Lagos connection was so universal, so successful, and so impenetrable that the name 'Nigeria' automatically had world citizens checking their credit.   The name 'Somalia' while less potent than that of its African neighbor, still makes people take notice, watch out, and close their shutters. 

'Give credit where credit is due', noted Phillip Orkney of the Brookings Institution who wrote extensively on what he calls 'the bell curve of cultural success'.  Success, he contends, is all too often regarded through lenses of European morality and ethics.  Brilliance occurs equally in all cultures; you just have to look in the right places.

While most Africans might fall under the apogee of the curve and are a generally unimpressive lot ('Just look at the diaspora', he wrote to much criticism), those at one asymptote are as endowed, brilliant, and intellectually superior as any.  It's just that they use these talents in less than acceptable ways. 

Nigeria seems to have more of these talented entrepreneurs than most countries so the shape of the bell curve there is quite different.  Most savvy international travelers have a No Nigeria clause in all their contracts, for the minute they step off the plane they are accosted by touts, thieves, crooks, conmen, and common criminals all with a scheme, a plan, an operation to get ahead.  Nigeria is a horrible place, but as the man said, 'You've got to give them credit'. 

The same for Somalia - a shithole country no doubt, but look at the ingenious schemes for which they are responsible. Not only the lucrative business of piracy, but the more profitable and universal world of scam. 

No one in their right mind would go either to Nigeria or Somalia, but still, all in all, you've got to give them credit. 

Inuit Cuisine - Whale Blubber, Seal Liver, Michelin Stars, And The inevitable Demise Of Food Chic

Rene Philippe was chef and owner of Le Hibou, a boutique restaurant in the Mission, recently given a Michelin star for its 'unique Pan American fusion, an eclectic but creative blend of tastes from the North Slope of Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.  

 

Philippe was born and raised in Santiago de Chile, son of a renowned chef who was one of the first in the South American capital to forage for ancient Indian roots - a cuisine of the Mapuche, Aymara, and Diaguita Indians who had inhabited the Pacific coastal regions of South America more than a millennia ago.  He and ethnologist Jose Miranda de Cabeza de Vaca with support from the Department of Anthropology of Isabel La Catolica University in Santiago, carried out extensive research into the culinary culture of the early Indian tribes of the pampas and coastal waters. 

Not surprisingly, Philippe and his team came up with little - only the ordinary forager's wild sea grasses and lichen, the primitive hunter's sea rat (rattus maris) and Paleolithic fish wader's brackish cockles. Nevertheless, the wealthy, sophisticates of San Francisco always looking for something new, unusual, and unique, flocked to Le Hibou.  Wine Advocate gave it special mention in its edition on Chilean wines saying that it 'broke the barriers of old and new, ancient and modern, indigenous and popular'. 

Now, much of the attraction had to do more with cultural cachet than the cuisine itself.  The Mapuche coraille de mer, basically a barnacle ceviche with low tide undertones and served with an ocean fluke puree, would have been inedible to anyone wandering off the street looking for a filling supper; but the clientele of Le Hibou, aware of provenance and food history, far from being put off by the nasty bits, tough mollusk cartilage, and randy sea innards, raved about them.  They were, after all, eating something of uniquely indigenous origin. 

 

Philippe had spent time in the Amazon jungle, hoping to find some traces of early Jivaro cuisine, but the forest cui - a wild muskrat-sized rodent grilled over hibiscus root and banyan coal - just wasn't up to his standards.  No matter how he prepared it, forest cui never lost its peculiar gaminess, said to be derived from its fondness for bat ordure.  This species of cui was more scavenger than forager, and its diet was noxious. 

In any case, Philippe had had enough of South America and turned his attention to the far north and the Eskimo populations above the Arctic Circle.  There, in the harsh, spare, inhospitable environment of the ice, there was only whale blubber and seal meat to eat with the occasional Spring-foraged and -cured seaweed. Far above the tree line, fire was an impossibility, so everything was eaten raw without seasoning; and so making a palatable entree for patrons in San Francisco would be a challenging affair. 

Yet Philippe knew his clientele and how mind-over-matter was the ethos of American haute cuisine. It mattered less what the offerings tasted like than what they looked like and more importantly their history.  To enjoy the same meal that the Inuit ate in Inukjuak their farthest north Arctic settlement was a particular treat. 

Now, eating a slab of whale blubber straight would not be in the cards, no matter how much its indigenous origins prevailed, so Philippe took some liberties and his presentation was worthy of Rene Redzepi, the Danish forager and culinary innovator par excellence.  Philippe carved the blubber into geometric shapes, arrayed them in designs reminiscent of the whalebone scrimshaw carvings of the Inuit, and garnished them with sprays of early sea grass sprouts.  Salt was offered as a garnish, to be taken lightly before each mouthful of blubber and offsetting the dense fat taste of the 'meat'.  Vodka was obligatory. 

Le Hibou was so successful that reservations were taken only three months in advance with the caveat that no menus would be published until the day before dining.  Diners would have to trust Phillipe and his growing reputation. 

Few diners were disappointed and willingly spent the $300 for the standard prix fixe menu.  The cadre of the restaurant added to its appeal.  Never trendy or kitschy in a tribal way, Phillipe's art director collected the most exemplary pieces from Amazon and Alaskan tribes mixed in with Hopi, Ute, and Apache traditional beadwork.  It was an ensemble of cadre, atmosphere, ornamentation, presentation, and history that kept patrons coming back. 

Coincidentally at the same time of the rise of Le Hibou and other imitative restaurants in the Bay Area, there was a counter-revolutionary movement called Back To Basics - comfort food, home cooking, and the fragrance of Mom's kitchen and baking bread. 

Tom O'Neill of the independent Bay Area Journal set the table, i.e. lambasted the pretentious, absurdly priced, nonsensically crafted offerings of San Francisco's nouvelle cuisine in a recent article:

Foraging is no more than a high pretense charade fueled by gullibility, credulousness, and ignorance.  The tomfoolery at Le Hibou is vaudevillian, popular bottom feeding worse than blackface, the Three Stooges, and Freaks all put together.  Who could possibly fall for the gross, inedible offerings of the place?  Holding back gullet spasms and involuntary retching is the most one can hope for at $300 a pop.  You can fool all of the people all of the time, said P.T. Barnum of 'a sucker is born every minute' fame, and Le Hibou and its host Rene Philippe were prime examples.  

Following in a series on a return to home cooking, O'Neill went on to praise meatloaf, mac 'n' cheese, pot roast, Salisbury steak, butterscotch pudding and much more.  A new restaurant in the Mission, Dot's Kitchen, featured these and other familiar items from the Fifties and became the retro hit of the year.  The decor was Formica counters, steel-and-plastic chairs, plastic tablecloths, friendly service and no fanciful preambles about provenance or animal history.  

No 'My name is Bruce and I'll be your waiter tonight', no miniscule detail about garnishes, coulis, or chef's inspiration.  Just plain meals on plain plates in a homey atmosphere. 'Finally', wrote San Francisco Chronicle food critic, Abel Nikken, 'a restaurant we can all enjoy'. 

Foodies sniffed at the very idea.  They had left the soggy, floury, bready, unappetizing meals of the Fifties far behind, or so they thought; and were surprised at a) how successful Dot's kitchen and its spawn had become; and b) how the patronage of Le Hibou and its ilk dwindled to almost nothing. 

'Fickle', said one Sausalito foodie who had recently redone her kitchen with a six-burner Viking stove, a walk-in refrigerator, two spacious food islands, track lighting, two bakery-quality ovens, a sous vide cooker, and a Japanese fermenter and spent thousands in the process. 'Food connoisseurs will be back' but the return never happened.  Le Hibou went out of business, Rene Phillipe went to upstate New York  to work at his American family's lumber company, and Dot of Dot's kitchen turned her small SF enterprise into a national chain.  

What goes around comes around, goes the old saw; and after years of exploring the outer reaches of the food culture, Mom's pot roast and apple pie were back.  It was about time, but also predictable. Classic Renaissance cuisine turned Baroque and then in a final paroxysm became Rococo.  After that overdone, excessive, self-indulgent period, food returned to normalcy, or at least some semblance of it. 

American cuisine followed the same trajectory and although Rene Philippe did not know it, he was the last of the Rococo restaurateurs.