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person of the year, Popular Probaway posts, Predicting the future, Probaway blog overview, What to blog about?
Most of Probaway.wordpress page views come from my personal medical observations. Currently the most popular have been, 1. How to cough to get stuff out of deep into one’s throat or even in the lungs. 2. How to drink foul-tasting purging fluids for colonoscopy has also been popular, and during the flu season, 3. How to cure the common cold, gets a goodly number of visits. 4. Poison Oak itching still gets some and 5. Preventing Alveolar osteitis 6. How to cough when you have a broken rib gets a few. But, what bothers me is that posts on what I spend nearly all my time creating get very few hits. 7. Jack the Ripper was Conan Doyle is usually squeaking into the top ten but for me at least that is stuff I discovered even before the AAAS 1987 presentation in San Francisco, although I only revealed 8. The Drake Plate of Brass, 9. The Kensington Stone, and 10. The Piltdown Man hoaxes at that time. See page 157-9 of Scientific Sherlock Holmes by James O’Brien for flimsy arguments that I’m wrong about these documented proofs.
11. The Probaway Person of the Year is coming up, which is in part a rejoinder to TIME magazine’s usually short-sighted and forgettable picks. A college kid wouldn’t recognize half of their picks of the last eighty years. I could test that by printing up the list and showing it to some acquaintances of that age group. The Probaway picks are intended to be memorable in five-hundred years. That is a problem for modern people because the Probaway strategy permits people who might be little known to the popular press at the moment like 12. Jennifer Doudna, of UC Berkeley the creator of CRISPR, to be listed, although George M. Church of Harvard, even though he didn’t publish for a year after her, might get the credit for his upgrades to the whole CRISPR process. He is more of a TV personality than she is, but that is a detail in the long run. The main point is that CRISPR will transform what is known as life! Nothing can be bigger than that! TIME has almost missed the significance of their discoveries, even though they have written articles about both of them.
What direction should Probaway take in the future? What are the major events of the next few years that should be addressed? It might be Palmer Luckey, for Virtual Reality (VR), or Albert Einstein for LIGO, or will Trump be so disruptive that he will once again be the TIME Person of the Year? He might use atomic weapons, or provoke the use of them by others, or do other things that resound through my 500-year memorability time horizon, and thus make it to Probaway Person of the Year.
I have been arguing for years that the world has been living in a period of astonishing peace, the Pax Obama. Everyone instantly disagrees and will bring up individual police shootings as examples of societal trouble and its fundamental dysfunction. I mention Genghis Kahn, or WWII and the two hundred thousand or so people that my personal friends in the USAF killed in Viet Nam the 1960s, but those historical facts are discounted as ancient history.
I have been saying to my current friends that if and when Trump is inaugurated on January 20, 2017, I will support him in all he does, but when he attempts to shut down the First Amendment freedom of speech and of the press I will do what I can to maintain those rights. He will probably attack the late night comics first, and they will probably fight back furiously. If they are pushed off the air, it means that the 1st Amendment is gone. Most people don’t think he will do that, but other countries are already limiting free speech when it disparages the leader, so it isn’t a new thing for our modern world.
There is an old saying and I don’t think I made up — “Too much peace and there will be war, and too much war and there will be peace.” Or perhaps stated more assertively, “Excessive peace brings war, excessive war brings peace.” If that is a historical “law” the depth of the Pax Obama will usher in a horrible depth of war. If that comes to pass it will be the event of the year. In the 500-year time frame of Probaway Person of the Year, a major war is probably inevitable, and the seven decades since 1945 without the military use of atomic weapons will be seen as an astonishingly lucky period.
January 20, 2017 will be the end of Pax Obama and may be the end of Pax Americana.