Making AI Safe for Humanity: A Matter of Ethics or Religion?

AI, or models of computer machine-learning, may piggy-back on ongoing risks to humanity, such as from nuclear bombs, cyber-attacks, and biological weapons, including unleashing new pandemics, to render any one of them more likely. That firms in the private sector develop advanced models without a financial incentive to protect the public good exacerbates the risk. To be sure, tech-firm executives were sounding the alarm most significantly in 2026. However, in reaching out to religious scholars and clergy for insight on the ethics of AI in order to make the models ethical so their output would be only ethical, certain executives incorrectly conceived of religion in terms of ethics, and thus its criteria rather than those that are innate to religion. This category mistake could result in advice that results in unethical computer outputs.  Anthropic is a case in point.

 
The full essay is at "Making AI Safe for Humanity."

On the Transition to Clean Energy: Heedlessly Modest, Hardly Draconian

Spurred on by the myriad inventions from the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the related consumer demand for the conveniences, the Industrial Revolution itself played a major role in what would come to be known as global warming or climate change. In 2015, the Paris Agreement stipulated, notably without any enforcement, a global temperature rise of 1.5C as a ceiling. Just a decade later, scientists were saying that the threshold would be exceeded. Even amid the searing heat in the E.U. during the summer of 2026, the fear around the world in halls of government was less oriented to the what the new normal climatically would bring than to whether Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz, which was known as an oil checkpoint through which over 20 billion barrels of oil were being transported per day. It was as though our species no longer had any control over how far global warming would go.

Just after that summer, “the UN warmed that it is no longer possible to keep global warming below 1.5C.”[1] Simon Steill, of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), pointed to what he called the “spiralling costs of the climate crisis caused by humanity’s addiction to burning coal, oil, and gas.”[2] A report by Climate Central had recently “found that nearly nine in 10 Europeans experienced a month’s worth of ‘risky heat’ during the June-August period, making [Europe] the most ‘unusually hot place on the planet.’”[3] Whether from this, or that “hundreds of millions [of people were] impacted across Asia and Africa,” or the “relentless record-breaking temperatures in North America,” it was clear, at least to Kristina Dahl at Climate Central “that “human-driven warning is pushing communities beyond safe physical limits.”[4] The Paris Agreement had not plucked 1.5C arbitrarily out of a hat; that governments had not taken the threshold seriously enough in terms of quickly shifting from fossil fuels to clean sources of energy was already taken a noticeable toll on the species. As the E.U. was warming at double that of the planet as a whole in 2026, a report by the UN Environment projected “a best-case 1.8C of warming and over 2C in other scenarios. ‘Overshoot, peak and decline’ is now our best bet,’” the report states.[5] Electorates and government officials around the world had not stepped up to the (baseball) plate to make hard political choices, and the parts-per-million of carbon in the atmosphere were still increasing as if there had not been an agreement in Paris in 2015.

Even though in 2025, “wind and solar generated more EU electricity than fossil fuels for the first time, marking a major milestone in the transition to clean power . . . green power only [met] around 40 per cent of the increase in [energy] demand” due in part to “energy-intensive air conditioning and the boom in artificial intelligence.”[6] That same year, a consultant with BP told a small group at Yale that even with the increased use of clean energy sources worldwide, the year’s increase in the demand for energy was greater.

At the very end of the summer of 2026, U.S. President announced that the U.S. had majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven Venezuelan oil reserves. The deal was oriented to reducing the price of gas for Americans; the supply disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz had driven up the global price of oil, and Americans were paying the price in driving and flying. Lower oil and gas prices would translate into more demand for and use of fossil fuels, and thus more carbon emissions; an even warmer atmosphere and oceans could be expected. The deal marks a clear divergence from the urging by scientists that the world should transition as much and as soon as possible to clean energy. That summer had showed Europeans and even the world hearing of heat wave after heat wave in the E.U. just what putting off a transition that would at least cover the annual increase in the world’s energy demand looks like.

It would be ironic were the large and increasing energy-draw from AI computing and data-storage putting our species’ survival at risk. Securing access to more oil and building AI data-centers as if they were popcorn represent gross negligence, given the “intel” coming out of the UN and Climate Central in 2026. As a species, we can develop technology by leaps and bounds, adding great convenience and sheer fun to living, but if our species goes extinct, the fruits of our innovativeness will be for naught as our descendants struggle to survive or die outright at some generation. The summer of 2026 suggests that the bill from our species’ penchant for instant energy-gratification was already coming due, and yet more AI centers were being built especially in the U.S., and President Trump scored a lot more oil for the American consumers, whose sight was narrowly fixed on the weekly price increases at the pump and to fly.  

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1. Liam Gilliver, “Europe Was the ‘Most Unusually Hot Place on the Planet’ This Summer. Can Renewables Cool Us Down?” Euronews.com, 17 September, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid. “Researchers defined ‘risky heat’ as days that were hotter than 90 per cent of what a local area experienced between 1991 and 2020 for this time of year, representing the point at which health risks from extreme heat begins to rise.” This metric may, however, be flawed with respect to the E.U.’s northern states such as Finland and Sweden because of their relatively low 1991-2020 bases. Being hotter than those may not be so hot for the human body, whereas hotter than the bases in the E.U. states of Greece and Spain could be expected to have adverse biological impacts. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Anti-Social Facebook Managers Addicting Children on Social Media

Rowan Williams, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke out repeatedly on the innate social nature of human beings. Before we can talk, we are talked to. Social interaction is firmly rooted in human nature as well as how we are constituted in groups and societies. Whereas Williams called for more compassion to emerge out of our social nature, a political realist might point out that we don’t have to look very closely to find a power-dynamic existing in practically any group. Nietzsche argues in Genealogy of Morals that exploitation naturally exists in how we as a social species are constituted because the will for power is the strongest human instinct. This motive can operate stealthily as compassion and even altruism. The Jansenist priest, Pierre Nicole, wrote an essay in 1677 to point out that what we moderns call enlightened self-interest is nonetheless rooted in self-love even when it is extended in acts of compassion that appear to spring solely from other-regard. On August 26, 2026, a landmark settlement was announced to end a trial in which 47 U.S. member states sued Meta, which owns and operates Facebook. Regardless of whether Meta executives agreed to pay $17 billion just to get rid of the bad publicity or because the accusations were true, the dollar figure alone suggests that Facebook’s management had indeed been intending to manipulate children by addicting them to feeds.  In other words, the company had been short on compassion even under the rubric of social media. Nietzsche would not have been at all surprised at such power being played to extract value from human beings under stealth.

Speaking on the settlement, Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said, “For years, Meta intentionally deceived the public about the addictive and harmful design features that have wreaked havoc on youth mental health.”[1] The design features, such as unlimited “scrolling” and “likes,” were intentionally put in place to addict kids; that did not come about as an unintended by-product. Although Meta was not required to admit guilt formally, it is reasonable to assume that a business would pay such a hefty penalty as $17 billion were there not something to the case against the company in terms of evidence even of intent. So besides protecting “children from online harm,”[2] the settlement has value societally in exposing the intent to addict at the detriment of even children. The operative perspective at Facebook was likely one oriented to viewing humans for our use-value alone.

It is no accident that extracting use-value from human beings was part of a secret seminar at Stanford University. Also in 2026, Theo Baker, a student at Stanford, publicly exposed the seminar, which was being taught by Justin Lewis-Weber, a CEO in Silicon Valley. In his book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, Baker reports that the course explicitly taught students how to extract value from people. Gaining utility from people without regard to how they are impacted, whether mentally or physically, stems from self-love manifesting narrowly as selfishness even if under the subterfuge of helping children to be more social with their peers. In other words, the students were learning manipulation tactics that could be used under the subterfuge of altruism. Phoebe Gates, founder of Phia, used the course to recruit employees. In 2026, wire fraud charges were filed against that company.

The upshot from all this is that the public (and elected representatives) knew very little of the sordid mentality underlying Meta’s corporate culture; even just from the $17 billion settlement we can only infer guilt because why else would a company agree to settle at such a cost? Many years earlier, Facebook had been found to have sold user-information to Cambridge Analytic, a political organization, but that was treated as a “one off” rather than as indicative of the way Facebook executives actually did business—and Facebook (or Meta) is a business; it is not social even though its industry is social media.

In terms of business ethics, intentionally or even unintentionally but continuing to addict young users of Facebook and Instagram violates Kant’s “kingdom of ends,” wherein rational beings are (ethically) to be treated not just as means (to one’s own self-interest), but also as ends in themselves. It is by the use of reason, Kant argues, that we assign value to things, so reason itself must have absolute value. A being that has reason thus has absolute value and should not be used merely as a means. This does not exclude using other people for one’s own ends, but this should not be the end of the matter, for other people should also be treated as ends in themselves. Addicting kids does not fall under “ends in themselves,” and so Meta can be held to have acted unethically. As much as business ethics focuses on ethical decision-making, ethical theories provide the real grist for the mill. Furthermore, the continuing negative impact of corporate culture is very relevant, as the case of Enron illustrates (e.g., “burn baby burn.”).  Even a highly squalid (ethically speaking) corporate way of doing business can be hidden from the public and regulators, and managers can dismiss ethical concerns very easily. So as in the case of Facebook (Meta), an episodic approach is typically assumed by external stakeholders; connecting the dots would take more effort and insight into the way corporate decisions are really being made.

Finally, we can pause for a moment to glance at the sheer pathos of distance that exists between Williams’ claim that the inherently social human nature can easily afford being more compassionate and the selfish addicting of kids at Facebook. Religion and business management seem to be disparate domains, and the easy compartmentalization by business managers who identify themselves as Christian renders the separation all too ubiquitous. The distinctively Christian divine command of love as universal benevolence, especially to outsiders and even enemies as selfless (or self-in-abeyance) compassion, runs counter to the firm-centric perspective and profit-centric rubric in business. The contrast is so distinct, even severe, that it is no surprise that business practitioners who self-identify as Christian have resorted to compartmentalizing their work from even themselves as human beings. The statement, “I’m a manager,” supports the construction of a “manager compartment,” but look at the underlying assumption: that a person’s essence is solely a matter of one’s functionality. It is easy to extend from this perspective to viewing social-media users solely in terms of their functionality, and thus use-value, as if value is a function of use.

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1. Barbara Ortutay and Kelvin Chan, “Meta Reaches $17 Billion Settlement with States in Landmark Trial over Teen Social Media Addiction,” APnews.com, August 26, 2026.
2. Ibid.

The E.U. on Chinese Online Marketplaces: Different Business Cultures

It is perhaps just human nature to assume that the attitude towards ethical (and unethical) business is uniform from culture to culture around the world, with one's own culture being definitive and thus the default as a standard. But just as far-away cultures can be very different than one's own, so too can far-off business practitioners and even regulators have different beliefs, values and thus expectations concerning how ethical business norms should be than do such people in one's own culture. The E.U./China trade interface provides a case in point. 

In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith does not exclude a role for government in regulating markets and addressing the externalities of market competition. The emphasis lies in maintaining competitive markets and making up for any societal costs, such as unemployment and even homelessness. What about “mopping up” unethical business practices to protect consumers? Is there a role for government here or is “buyer beware” sufficient because competition in a market will put unethical suppliers out of business? A business strategy of stealth and denial can delay the accrual of negative reputational capital, especially if the pool of potential and likely buyers is not stagnant. The management of a coffee house or lunch place near a large university, for instance, can get away with a lot of unsavory practices without the annual incoming crowd having any knowledge of the sordid mentality of the management or its rogue retail employees. Similarly, nonsupervisory, uneducated employees working at a major retail company’s customer-service telephone room can get away with lying even in telling aggrieved customers, “The managers here don’t talk with customers” and even “We don’t have supervisors in this department.” This assumes that an automated answering “menu” even has an option to speak with a live person rather than with AI, which may not grasp the concept, complaint. Nietzsche’s claim that the will to power is the primary motive even for weak people who are like herd animals and so cannot master their own instinctual urge to dominate applies in spades to retail phone-banks, even at least in appearances to AI answering-machines. The unilateral, even rogue “power trips,” or power-aggrandizement, whether by an actual, small employee or a human-programmed AI phone-system (i.e., machine learning applied to a switch-board), give rise to emotional harm and thus are unethical because such treatment is not justified, especially to paying customers. Paying to be dominated is perhaps another line of business beyond the reach of the present topic. In a competitive market, presumably companies with rude, even hostile customer-service employees get enough of a negative reputation that even repeat customers eventually go elsewhere, but what if rude customer service is the norm in a given industry? A new potential supplier may not be motivated financially to enter the market based on customer-service as the primary basis of competitive advantage. Of course, the intentional (or, looking the other way) sale of illegal, unsafe, and counterfeit products can benefit from the deceit, especially on e-commerce platforms. Furthermore, if unethical business practices are the norm in the host country of such a seller but not where the customers are located, the reputation may be too light for sufficient notice to be taken by potential (and repeat) customers for them to buy from other sellers. This differential, and the typical erroneous assumption that the business ethics in one’s own culture is universal around the world and therefore one is not vulnerable to extremely unscrupulous sellers elsewhere, may be behind the €550 million fine that the E.U. slapped on AliExpress, an online marketplace based in China, on 20 July, 2026.

Even though I have no data to suggest that business practitioners in China were generally less ethical than their counterparts in the E.U., both the magnitude of the fine and the broadness and substance of the Commission’s accusation that AliExpress managers had failed “to adequately assess and mitigate risks linked to the sale of illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products” may be indicative of a very unethical business culture, not only in the company, but also in the general business culture in China.[1]  It may have been that at least as of 2026, even blatant unethical conduct was considered as a regular part of doing business in China, as in the statement, everyone here sells counterfeit. Two years prior, the E.U. Commission had “found that AliExpress failed to establish an effective system to detect and remove illegal products, while underestimating the gap between the number of human moderators available and the scale of the workload.”[2] Failure to establish a system that worked can be interpreted as an active decision to allow, or tolerate, illegal products on the “selves.” So too can the intentional understaffing of monitors in the company. The management need not have admitted to the mentality, for it is possible that its fingerprints were all over the choices actually taken by the managers. The “platform’s product compliance checks were also found to be vulnerable to abuse, with malicious traders allegedly misclassifying products to exploit less stringent requirements.”[3] Establishing an insufficient number of checks can itself be interpreted as being too comfortable with product-negligence and even the existence of malicious sellers. That “large volumes of illegal products—including unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics—continued to circulate on AliExpress despite moderation efforts, in some cases remaining online for weeks after being flagged” may point to a managerial acceptance of squalid sellers on the marketplace platform.[4] In fact, the E.U. found “that AliExpress failed to properly enforce its penalty policy, allowing stores selling illegal products to remain active on the platform even after receiving sanctions” as if they would suddenly reverse an unethical mentality and organizational culture.[5] Sellers were even “able to bypass safeguards and list fake products” because the company’s brand authorization system “was deemed ineffective and insufficiently robust to stop abuse.”[6] Even the company’s public statement that the company had invested a lot in risk assessment and mitigation, product safety and consumer protection does not touch on how those investments were used, or even whether they were in fact used sufficiently. In fact, spending a lot of money can act as a smoke screen. The failure to acknowledge lapses can itself be viewed as unethical, or at least as not serious. In other words, mendacity can be like smoke indicative of a hidden fire if unethical people are habitually so, especially in covering up their own unethical decisions. Confessions are not necessary.

A company’s foreign direct-investment renders a foreign country’s beliefs and values concerning business ethics (and integrity in general) relevant. Even international trade—even at arm’s length—can cause two different ethics cultures to clash. The people in the more ethical business culture may be vulnerable to worse, and thus unforeseen or unanticipated, unethical practices such as selling illegal or counterfeit products under false pretenses (i.e., lying) rather than merely charging too much or having rude, power-hungry, or product/policy-incompetent customer-service employees.  To be sure, the latter two unethical practices are worthy of disrepute, but then how much more severe, and thus indicative, are the former two. As an admittedly rouge gauge, the difference between the ethical norms in the E.U.’s business sector and those in China’s can be grasped. Cultures around the world can be said to differ even substantially in terms of tolerance for unethical volition, mentality, and conduct and thus societal expectations for ethical conduct. A very large fine may be a quantifiable indication that two cultures differ substantially.

To go beyond compensation, the matter of whether as a penalty such a fine can actually change, or uplift, the relatively sordid business culture by somehow incentivizing practitioners in it to behave honorably rather than continuing with corner-cutting expediency seems too idealistic, and thus unrealistic because humans tend to be habitual creatures in conduct and mentalities are not likely to change, given their sheer gravitas, especially if they are oriented to sneaking around a new barrier. A river’s dam that has many holes is not likely to fix itself. Accordingly, the Commission would be wise to set fines as compensation for all of the harm to European consumers, rather than to teach the Chinese a lesson in order to mold Chinese business after European business. To be sure, the temptation to penalize and manipulate towards one’s own culture can be very strong, but being realistic can work wonders in satiating the desire to mold others who are different in one’s own image. Knowing the otherness of the other, for example, and publicizing this domestically in the E.U., could potentially do a lot to facilitate the mechanism of market competition in the weeding out of the squalid sellers in China by informed European consumers. The Commission has a loud-speaker with which to more closely link a company’s reputational capital to the actual business practices that may even be hidden from view.

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1. Vincenzo Genovese, “EU Slaps €550 Million Fine on AliExpress over Illegal and Counterfeit Goods,” Euronews.com, 20 July, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Transgendered (Male) Athletes in Women Sports

While the 2026 World Cup was underway in North America, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling, which is to say, a judgment rationally argued, siding with member-states that did not permit “Y chromosome” students in public schools to play in on “XX chromosome” sports teams. Not being a writer who fecklessly evades controversial topics for fear of turning away some readers, I will attempt to tackle the jurisprudence and ethics of male athletes who self-identify as women playing in women sports such as American football in public schools.

Because gender language had become so muddled by enough people in at least some member-states even just for ideological purposes, which is to say, to impose, I resort to reductionism in highlighting chromosomes, which, after all, are empirical facts, and, at least as of 2026 when the Court’s opinion was announced, the “Y” chromosome stays for life. This is not to castigate or dismiss individuals whose respective mental states include a close affiliation and even a group-identification sense of self with the other gender. The cultural stereotypes of the widths of masculinity and femininity had arguably contracted too narrowly since at least the eighteenth century in the West that a young, slender man with long, straight hair and a high-pitch voice in 2026 would likely conclude that he is not masculine and even feminine even though everything about him that is natural/biological would by definition be masculine (i.e., consistent with male hormones and the related Y chromosome). This point should not be taken as reductionistic concerning gender-identification, but I submit that the point is often overlooked.

In ancient Greece, unlike in Rome, bisexual or gay men who felt sexual pleasure in submitting in being penetrated by a penis were regarded as just as masculine as men who penetrate anally or vaginally. Perhaps Carl Jung would say that for the ancient Greeks, both genders were regarded as containing animus and anima, albeit proportioned differently. I contend that a man who is conscious of his anima has a fuller sense of himself than a man whose self-awareness only consists of animus. Again, this is not to explain or account for every transexual person, but, rather, my intent is to widen the discussion even if doing so is beyond the tolerable narrow limits of some ideologues who presume themselves and their partisans alone as entitled to proclaim opinion as fact in contradistinction to the mere opinions across the aisle.[1]

In terms of the U.S. Supreme Court, the anima in a male person and the animus in a woman, is like a dissent to a majority opinion. As a society, we ignore dissents at our peril, especially as several majority opinions, such as “separate but equal,” have been overturned. In her dissent in West Virginia vs. Becky P. Jackson, Justice Sotomayor claims that the majority was “wrong to reject Jackson’s equal-protection” (14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) claim.[2] Sotomayor admitted, however, “We just simply do not know scientifically that transgender students pose dangers,”[3] meaning that such students have physical advantages athletically over biological women in playing in sports like (American) football, where body-size and muscle-mass do matter at the line of scrimmage. According to the Huffington Post, Sotomayor writes in her dissent that the facts show that transgender “women” do not have an “inherent athletic advantage” over (biological) women, but a strident ideology is indeed capable of inventing facts for itself while accusing the other side of ignoring facts.[4] That the X chromosome has over 1,000 genes, whereas the Y chromosome carries only 50-200 genes, including the SRY gene, which furnishes instructions for the development of distinctly male genitalia, suggests that women and men are indeed biologically different in a myriad of ways, so the claim that biological males do not have advantages in the conduct of sport may be dogmatic rather than based on fact. This is not to say that every man is physically stronger, as the 1970s tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billy Jean King demonstrated.

Perhaps the Court’s decision comes down to the prime facie assertion that people with penises and testicles are by definition exogenous to women sports. Furthermore, the equal protection clause is not violated because nobody who was born with a penis (and still carries the Y chromosome) can be on a women-only (XX chromosomes) team. Just as in labeling a film’s lesbian sex-scene as homosexual, or gay, rather than heterosexual because two vaginas and no penises are involved and the mental states of the persons in the scene go only so far and thus do not alter the label, so too do such states go only so far in terms of whether a person qualifies to play in women sports. Not even if one person in such a scene has had her female breasts (“boobs”) removed and is taking testosterone and sports a mustache—neither boobs nor facial hair counting as sexual genitalia—is such a scene heterosexual, for the sexual genitalia of the two people are the same, which is to say, homo rather than hetero. Similarly, women sports includes only people who were born with the same (XX) genitalia, regardless of how the people have decided to appear externally and what mental state they have. The underlying culprit is ideology, as per its inherently expansive propensity at the expense of even legitimate constraints.

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1. A week before the Court’s decision, while I was volunteering to work at the 2026 Gay film festival in San Francisco so I could include some examples of “gay cinema” in a forthcoming book I was writing on philosophy and theology through the medium of film, I casually mentioned to two young women that the film shown had a lesbian sex scene. “That’s heterosexual sex!” one of the young (presumably lesbian) women angrily declared to me as if her fact trumped what was merely an opinion on my part. “No,” I retorted, “a sex scene with two vaginas is not heterosexual.” To my shock, the two women dismissed this fact by stating, as if declaring a fact of their own making, “No, it doesn’t work that way.” Translation: two vaginas as a sex act can be heterosexual if one of the women self-identifies as a man. This simply is not true; a person’s mental state is not sufficient to change the label. What surprised me the next week was how many young people pushed back against my rather obvious claim that a sex scene involving two vaginas is not heterosexual, as if the claim were suddenly disputable without regard to the definitions of the words, homosexual and heterosexual. One young man even repeatedly shouted at me at a coffee shop, “You’re an idiot!” To be so dismissive of definitions may involve an underlying troubled mental state, as well as arrogance and narcissism. Ideological angst and anger do not trump definitions. The sheer presumption, even more than the flashes of anger unleased on me, shocked me, for such presumption is like arrogance on stilts during a flood. Ideology itself had become a problem in the far left quarter of San Francisco by 2026 as evinced by the presumed entitlement to not only overreach, but also lash out in spiteful anger in verbally attacking anyone who is an obstacle to the overly expansive sense of self and the presumption to declare facts out of what is actually ideological opinion as a fact. Postscript on the Gay “Frameline” festival in San Francisco: the vengeance of the two young lesbians led Cicily, who managed the festival’s operations that year to write a hostile email to me accusing me of having spoken inappropriately. She had not even contacted me first to ask what I had actually said to the two complaining, vindictive lesbians. “The film contains a lesbian sex scene” is in no sense inappropriate, especially at a gay film festival! Besides accusing me of having spoken inappropriately during my first shift, Cicily was stupid enough to send me the harsh email as I was en route to my last shift. Accordingly, I was able to write a brief rebuttal and turn back (to my own work!) rather than continue on to the theater to freely give my labor to such a sordid, resentful, and too ideologically-driven group. Saying that a sex scene is not heterosexual because it involves two vaginas and no penises is not inappropriate; in fact, it is an accurate statement. San Francisco “pride” had gone too far, moreover, in its ideological intolerance and vindictiveness against anyone objecting to the "Castro norms" so I voted with my feet the next week by not watching its parade downtown. In the Castro, for example, tips at bars, fast food places, and even at coffee shops were, according to several gay men and at least one harsh employee, required by the very employees who receive them. “It’s the Castro standard,” a young man sitting at a table near mine scolded me before he dismissively walked away from the Poesia coffee shop with his friend while making it clear to me that he was laughing at me for having complained about a barista there who had angrily demanded a tip. Self-righteous immaturity would likely continue in that district. Another “Castro standard” callously and selfishly imposed by many gay men there on their boyfriends and even husbands was the presumed right to have separate sex with other men even with romantic attachment because, as one jejune gay man told me, “everyone here does it.” But even common practice is not itself an ethical rationale according to David Hume; the sub-culture reigning in the Castro (gay) district could simply have been dysfunctional, sustained in its narcissistic pathology by unresolved psychological issues prolonging self-absorbed adolescence. Bad air!

2. Mark Sherman and Lindsay Whitehurst, “Supreme Court Upholds State Laws Banning Transgender Girls and Women from School Athletic Teams,” APnews.com, June 30, 2026.
3. Ibid.
4. Sebastian Murdock, “Sotomayor: ‘Facts Do Not Matter’ to Supreme Court after It Upholds Trans Athlete Ban,” The Huffington Post, June 30, 2026.

On the Startling Pace of Global Warming: Calculus Applied

I went to Yale to study for four years (and then to Wisconsin for four years for post-doc study under a Harvard scholar), after having completed a Ph.D. program elsewhere (and decades later I went to Harvard (including auditing coursework at Yale for one term) for 1.5 years of continued study in comparative theology and ethics, and independent research) because my education at my first university, that of Kansas, was so bad; that university, run by sophomoric Jayhawks, did not heed the value of retaining faculty financially once promoted from the assistant level, and the graduate students who were teaching undergraduates were not trained in pedagogy. Significant to my unsatisfactory education at the University of Kansas was my decision to switch to business administration and accounting “mid-stream” without any regard to the opportunity cost of foregone coursework in the humanities in the liberal arts. When I was teaching accounting on the side while studying at Yale a decade later, I finally received confirmation that I had indeed made a significant educational mistake at KU, for when some Yale College students petitioned Dean Brodhead to create a major in business, he replied in the Yale Daily News, “Let us educate you first; then go out and get trained.” This priority and sequence are both severely eclipsed at “state” or public, universities in virtually every U.S. state, whereas the E.U. does a better job of distinguishing institutionally knowledge from vocational skill. Even the teaching in the liberal arts at the University of Kansas was lackluster, though I probably would have still made the move to business had the teaching been good. In calculus, for example, the graduate-student instructor did not think it necessary to explain that a derivative refers to the changing rate of acceleration rather than to acceleration itself; his exclusive orientation was to calculating so as to get us to arrive at correct answers. We were like trained seals. The graduate-student instructor of Physics, who could barely speak English (but that didn’t matter to the department’s receptionist), also did not feel obliged to explain what the formulae mean. Why does force equal mass times acceleration? Missing from E=MC² was the point that energy can become mass (Higgs would not be discovered for decades though). Whereas questions of physics have remained less than pressing through my adult life, climate change has turbo-charged the significance of the derivative, for the rate of acceleration of climate change, as evinced in the heatwaves in the E.U. during the summer of 2026, had already been positive and was increasing both as a number and in value qua significance. The melting glaciers in the Alps indicated then that the pace of human-caused climate change was much faster than previously expected. My inability to “see the forest” instead of individual “trees” at Kansas regarding my own college education can be likened to our species’ inability (and refusal) to grasp the true significance of climate change as a threat to our species’ very survival, and certainly comfort.

Regarding the impact of human-caused carbon (and methane) emissions on the heat-waves gripping Europe in the early summer (at least) of 2026, Dr. Theodore Keeping of Imperial College London said at the time, “The science of how climate change is worsening heatwaves is settled. Continued fossil-fuel emissions are directly responsible for the disruption people are experiencing this week in their homes, schools and workplaces. The speed of change is startling. Every few years we are seeing heat records shattered in Europe. This year it has been in consecutive months.”[1] That the speed was startling can be taken as a red flag, or very significant warning, that, as an old proverb states, the chickens are coming home to roust. In other words, humanity could no longer pretend that climate change is only an abstraction without “real world” consequences.

Science from World Weather Attribution (WWA) “found that both the daytime highs and overnight temperatures seen during the heatwave in late June, 2026] would have been ‘virtually impossible to occur at [that same] time of year’ as recently as 1976—just 50 years ago. A similar heatwave occurring in that historic climate would [have been] 3.5C cooler.”[2] In that year, in early July, I was a mere boy using tacks to pin an American flag I had made to the wood-front of my parent’s house for the bicentennial, and I don’t recall the heat (other than that which was released by my parents) being all that unbearable then in Illinois, which admittedly is a U.S. rather than an E.U. member-state. Even though the expression, virtually impossible, is itself startling, so too is an increase rate of acceleration, as was evinced in the melting of glaciers in central Europe in June, 2026.

Due to the heatwave that was holding on in Europe, the snow and ice accumulated over the previous winter on existing glaciers in the Alps was expected to have completely melted away by 29 June, 2026. In other words, from that day on, “every additional day of melting” would “shirk the size of the glacier[s].”[3] Since 2000, that point, known as glacier loss day, has usually not been until mid-August. Matthias Huss, the director of GLAMOS in Europe, warned that the glaciers were “shrinking at an unprecedented rate, accelerated by the ongoing heatwave.”[4] Huss stated, “We are three months too early compared to a healthy state” of the glaciers.[5] This all points to, or suggests, that the rate of acceleration of climate change was increasing; the derivative was positive as of 2026. Indeed, the melting of the glaciers had been “relatively modest until recent decades,” and the melting during the first month of summer in 2026 in turn made the rate in those recent decades look relatively modest.[6]

Among the many implications of an increasing rate of acceleration is the likelihood that the climate-change models being used to forecast warming going forward were in need of being adjusted, with dire impacts being predicted as coming sooner than had been expected even in the early 2020s. Another implication is that the continuing increase in carbon (ppm) in the atmosphere really needed to be stopped sooner rather than later. As of 5 June, 2026, the atmospheric carbon dioxide level was at 432.34 ppm, according to the NOAA (measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory), whereas the corresponding figure had been 429.61 ppm a year earlier. Besides the increasing global population, part of the reason for why reductions in overall fossil-fuel usage continued to be so difficult was that not every continent was facing extreme heat, and thus the dire consequences already, so sufficiently broad-based political will was still lacking even though virtually every European in June of 2026 was doubtlessly convinced that global warming is real and that carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere had already reached unacceptable levels. Similarly, not every place on the planet was at risk of increased flooding from sea-level rise. Italy, California, Greece, Florida, the Netherlands, and New York, for example, can easily be distinguished from Czechia, Illinois, Poland, Colorado, Luxemburg, and Arizona with regard to probable impacts from higher oceans. Fundamentally, both democracies and autocracies are vulnerable to not acting sufficiently in anticipation of yet-unfelt dire consequences; our species is not as rational as we may suppose, and this weakness “comes home to roust” especially amid increasing rates of acceleration.

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1. Liam Gilliver, “Climate Change is Running Rampant: Europe’s Heatwave ‘Virtually Impossible’ 50 Years Ago,” Euronews.com, 26 June 2026, italics added for emphasis.
2. Ibid.
3. Evelyn Dom, “Swiss Glaciers Melting at Alarming Rate in June as Europe Faces Extreme Heat,” Euronews.com, 28 June, 2026.
4. Ibid, italics added for emphasis.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

El Nino as a Distraction as the E.U. Swelters

It is likely due to natural selection having formed our present-day species overwhelmingly in the hunter-gatherer very, very long period of our species 1.8 million years of existence (agriculture just having begun around 7000 BCE!) that we tend to take notice of a foreground and leave the background along because any threats it holds are immediate. Tigers, for example, become particularly dangerous when they are up close rather than several fields away. During the (Northern hemisphere’s) summer of 2026, as the E.U. was sweltering in successive heatwaves, the El Nino current event in which warm equatorial water in the Pacific Ocean moves eastward readily became a target as the culprit producing the heat far away in Europe. In actuality, according to scientists (but what do they know?), the gradual (i.e., background) warming of the planet’s atmosphere, especially in the Artic as well as in Europe, was behind the heat breaking records in the E.U. as well as in bordering sovereign states like Britain, where on 25 June, presumably in London, an all-time-high temperature for the month of June was recorded. Global warming, once safely in the background, was coming home to roust in the foreground.

Earlier in June, NOAA in the U.S. had declared “that El Nino conditions are officially underway in the tropical Pacific.”[1] Even though “Super El Nino” was not a scientific category, this did not stop the media coverage of “a so-called ‘Super El Nino.’”[2] At the  time, Ioanna Vergini, founder of the global weather-forecasting platform, WFY24, stated, “The Pacific isn’t in a strong El Nino state now, and even when it is, its direct influence on European summer heat is weak and poorly constrained.”[3] Referring to the successive heatwaves, she added, “This is a classic jet-stream blocking event acting on a record-warm background. The dome is the mechanism; long-term warming is the amplifier; El Nino is a distraction.”[4] Disruption from El Nino is largely in the tropics. Moreover, El Nino tends to temporarily increase global average temperatures by just 0.2C. According to Euronews, “this impact “is not as significant as human-made climate change, which” by the summer of 2026 had “pushed the global surface temperature up by approximately 1.3 – 1.5C compared to pre-industrial levels.”[5] The human-made impact was warming the E.U. “more than twice as fast as the global average, with temperatures up by around 2.5C compared to pre-industrial levels.” In fact, the northern reaches of Europe “extend into the Arctic, the fastest-warming region on Earth, where temperatures [were] rising at three-to-four times the global rate. As snow and ice melt, less sunlight is reflected by the Earth’s surface [back into space], while the darker surfaces that are exposed absorb more heat, amplifying the melting.”[6] In short, Europe, in its successive heatwaves breaking temperature records, was demonstrating for the rest of the world why an increase of 1.5C was selected in 2016 at a climate-change global conference in Paris as the threshold not to surpass. It is not as if delegates had stood by at that conference as someone flipped a coin.

Running up against a threshold that has been reasonably thought out and thus determined effectively moves climate change from the background to the foreground. To be sure, scientists working to ferret out the impact of climate change on a current weather-event face difficulties, but this does not mean that human-made warming of the atmosphere has not become a major factor. The shifting of climate change from a “back burner” to the front of the proverbial stove can be taken as a negative verdict on how governments around the world did in implementing the Paris Accords to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. So, part of the motivation to blame El Nino could be to avoid self-blame, which includes not only government officials, but also voters, at least in the world’s republics. In other words, recognizing that climate change has moved to the foreground does not come cost-free. Indeed, quite a verdict goes along with the species risking its own survival.

Even so, perhaps we should not be too hard on our species, for the vast majority of natural selection occurred when a focus on the foreground at the expense of background was necessary for immediate survival. That so much of our species’ natural selection in evolution took place in such a different environment than our own today, together with the glacial pace of evolution, may be why our species goes extinct sooner rather than later if the planet establishes an atmospheric equilibrium that is uninhabitable for humans.

To be sure, we are homo sapiens, the wise species of homo (man), and as of the summer of 2026, the jury was still out on whether technological invention would save the day in reducing carbon and methane from the atmosphere (and the warming oceans). Already, technology was in operation, albeit at too small a scale, to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Additionally, energy from renewable resources was increasing, though not as fast as the increasing global demand for energy so as a consequence the use of fossil fuels was still increasing, at least as of 2025 according to a consultant to BP whose talk I attended at Yale. Our species hope lies not with government officials standing up to the fossil-fuel industry and profit, and not even in evolving to be more attentive to what is in the background; rather, our savior would have to be technology, as per the already extant technological society. The question even in 2026 as the E.U. sweltered as never before was whether the massive scale of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans could be impacted (fast) enough by technology that, at best, was only in the beginning stages of development. This is not to say that human rationality could not have been applied, with sufficient political power, to reduce carbon emissions more since the Paris Accords were adopted.

Resisting slavish attachment to instant gratification is, according to Nietzsche, possible for our species and can even be viewed as the completion of mankind. Whereas a person who is slavishly devoted to momentary pleasure cannot be trusted as a promise-keeper, “the man who has his own independent protracted will and the right to make promises” has “a consciousness of his own power and freedom, a sensation of mankind come to completion. Is emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign man—how should he not be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he arouses—he deserves all three . . .”[7]  We are capable of promise-making and promise-keeping—the human will is strong enough for that, at least in principle, and not by relying on a supporting lattice-work of moral constraints issuing out in “Thou shalt not!”  We have seen how shallow mere political protest has been as up against the power that governments have nonetheless had to protect fossil-fuel industries under the subterfuge of saving jobs.

Rather than looking to moral pressure, humanity can look for its fulfillment at the human will as sovereign and thus as capable of self-confident assertion as a dominating instinctual urge (i.e., pride in being able to take oneself, and by others, as a promise-keeper rather than a weakling enslaved to momentary pleasure). Hence the negative verdict; as a species, we have not looked to the strength of the human will to make up for the glacial pace of natural selection. Perhaps the question is whether mankind will reach completion, or be completed as in being made extinct.

Even with respect to people being dreadfully uncomfortable in the European heat and humidity in June, 2026, humanity itself could be seen as having blood on its hands, and yet news of its self-inflicted wound will not have reached the culprit, like light from the farthest star that has not yet reached Earth. Nietzsche uses this imagery on the self-inflicted discrediting of the Abrahamic concept of God, so I adapt the language to apply to the discrediting of our species as yet another self-inflicted wound committed as if the human will had been deactivated and put on auto-pilot.

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1. Liam Gilliver, “’El Nino Is a Distraction’: Why Europe’s Deadly Heatwave Isn’t Down to a Natural Weather Phenomenon,” Euronews.com, 24 June, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5.  Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Sect. 2, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 495.