Fool

Fool,
a lightly edited version, apart from one passage noted in the text, of an open letter sent to Dr. Havidán Rodríguez, president of the University at Albany, State University of New York, and George Hearst III, publisher of the Albany Times Union, on July 3, 2026

Image: Photo depicts the UASBIG habitat, the headquarters of the University at Albany School of Business Investment Group, and was taken June 17, 2026, by James Lyons Walsh.

Dear Pres. Rodríguez and Mr. Hearst,

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, I recall a famous adage: You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. What do think this means, and who said it?

Pres. Rodríguez, I was very pleased to see that a large fraction of the lawns at UAlbany had been permitted to revert toward their polyculture nature. This was wonderful to see and an important step in promoting biodiversity, not to mention the financial health of your university, which, presumably, is now spending less on weed poison and groundskeeping labor than it had. I sent my compliments in a couple of videos to which a link is posted at the top of www.momshair.org/collins. In one of the videos, I talk to a rabbit! The rabbit didn't reply in words, but I hope you’ll check the videos out anyway.

I was displeased, Pres. Rodríguez, to find no Pride flag flying at Collins Circle during Pride Month at the alma mater of Harvey Milk, one of the most effective and famous gay rights activists of all. Your university is in Albany, New York, USA, where the progress flag, the pride flag that celebrates people of color alongside LGBTQIA+ people, flies downtown over the state capitol, the Empire State Plaza, city hall, and Washington Park. Why not fly it uptown, too, next year, at Collins Circle?

Why not also rename Livingston Tower, which currently appears to honor the Albany-born slave trader Philip Livingston, who did sign the Declaration of Independence and help finance the United States' Revolutionary War but also participated in the slave trade? Such evil as makes the soul cringe is, after all, inherent to the occupation of slave trader. I made a series of videos about the situation at Collins Circle, to which I linked at www.momshair.org/collins, just below the top of the page. I think the last four videos make a strong case for flying the Pride flag at all universities, in support of their intellectual mission ((1) Physics Needs LGBTQ+ Perspectives #pridemonth - YouTube). 

Incidentally, if it hasn't been done already, you might persuade Mayor Applyrs to remove the tourist placard on State Street that, when last I checked, still commemorated the momentous historical significance of the planting of a tree near that placard by that slave trader. I'd love to see the placard replaced with a placard commemorating the removal of that placard commemorating the planting of that tree by that slave trader, a removal which will be a significant event in the history of Albany, just as was the closing of Philip Livingston Middle School, where my maternal grandmother taught remedial reading in a building named for a slave trader. Would she have been better to me if that school had been renamed during the height of the civil rights movement?

Last year during Pride Month, I became attuned to the absence of Pride flags at Collins Circle because I had unsuccessfully begged you, Mr. President, to issue a statement on the recommissioning of the USNS Harvey Milk, a slap in the face from the Trump administration to everyone who understands the value of nonreproductive sexuality. You did post the following statement (Statement about Harvey Milk’s Legacy at UAlbany | University at Albany) on your Presidential Communications page on June 3:

"Harvey Milk has an enduring legacy at the University at Albany, where he has inspired generations of students with his public service. We are proud that UAlbany’s Harvey House has and will continue to celebrate his important contributions to civil rights."

You mention Milk’s “public service” and “contributions to civil rights” but say nothing about the insult that no doubt prompted the statement. More importantly, your pointed omission of praise for Harvey Milk’s example as a proud gay man who was famously out shows a failure to comprehend the need for social, and not just legal, acceptance of nonreproductive sexuality. On rereading the statement during the editing of this message, I noticed that you didn't even mention that he was g-a-y. To illustrate my point about the need for appreciation, not just tolerance, of nonreproductive sexuality, I’ll share portions of an email I sent my twin cousin in response to a message he sent me the day after Father’s Day. His stated intent was to renew our connection, which had lapsed in the past year. He may surprise me, but I don’t expect a reply to my message any time soon.

“My sense is that your faith is not expecting new revelation for several hundred years, but the rapid advance of science might indicate the wisdom of updating your beliefs soon. I am well placed to be of assistance with this. For example, I don't know your creed, if any, on the nature of the universe, but I am an expert in the field. I can tell you that science cannot tell you anything about what the universe fundamentally is. Given my decade plus of research on the subject, I find considering us and everything else as thoughts in the mind of God to be an especially useful model, particularly in assigning meaning to existence.

“As a complex systems scientist, I can tell you that among the updates to Darwinian evolution is an understanding of kinship breeding [my own term for kin selection, explained below], whereby an organism propagates their own DNA into the future by promoting the survival prospects of the children of their close relatives, who, obviously, share their DNA. In fact, all humans share enough DNA to make helping others an act contributing to the propagation of one's own genetic material, regardless of consanguinity. I think greater awareness of this model could provide comfort and a sense of their own quite genuine genetic reproductive prospects to childfree folk.

“[I omit a sentence concerning a person my cousin knows who is apt to encounter many LGBTQ+ folk in an educational setting.] I don't know what your personal beliefs are, but I can tell you that the Baháʼí teaching is poison on the subject of nonreproductive sexuality. People [, among whom Baháʼí folk are, in some respects, exemplary,] who pride themselves on their open-mindedness in other respects, and nevertheless firmly hold that legal sexuality oriented away from direct breeding is somehow incorrect, are attacking kinship breeders and other LGBQA+ folk far more viciously than people who lash out with bigotry in more directions than this one. I suggest you work to change the teaching in your faith on queer folk.

…

“I've developed quite a lot of theology for discerning religionists seeking progressive revelation, should anyone up the chain of command in your faith want to get in touch. I have links to some recent pieces at Found Physics Museum, Albany, and my latest project is at Found Physics Museum, Albany - Kibitzing Physicist

“I hope that all continues to go well, but I suggest you throttle back on providing advantages to your children and on building community, working instead to change your own heart to promote the survival prospects of our species and so many others we threaten. Thinking that promotes community must be complemented by thinking that seeks truth without regard to community. You might take a look at http://www.godispoor.org. In any case, please recall when promoting your children's well-being that any advantage for one purpose is a disadvantage for another, and vice versa.”

One of the big, lingering problems with science, Mr. President, not to mention with religion, government, and economic systems, is that so much of science was created by imperialist sacks of filth. I know myself well enough at this point to understand that I enjoy pejorative terms commencing in “sacks of” because these two words remind my Irish self of “Saxon,” an imperialist group of whom Darwin was one and which, since at least the 1970s, has included humorists like Douglas Adams and the Pythons, who helped to teach me my loathing for their group’s history and inspire my yearning for reunion with them and their brethren, once cleansed, via payment of reparations, of the guilt they inherit with the money their ancestors stole.

How did Darwin’s origin among imperialist sacks of filth interfere with his scientific reasoning?

Darwin, who popularized the notion of natural selection, was unable to comprehend what he thought of as altruism. How did animals propagate their own genes into the future by sacrificing resources for the benefit of their kin, rather than directing those resources to their own offspring? In the most extreme examples, how could the trait of refraining from creating offspring possibly survive the process of natural selection? The answer is obvious: The animals share genes with their kin and can promote propagation of their own genes, so shared, into the future by promoting the reproductive prospects of their kin via what is now known as "kin selection." (Kin selection - Wikipedia)

I should note that I'm not a biologist, but I did sleep for a month at the Complex Systems Summer School of the Santa Fe Institute, where I worked with three biologists and a naval submariner on a project, using the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment, to elucidate natural selection mechanisms by which the trait of synchronization of firely flashing might evolve. (Holly Arnold, Bryn Gaertner, John Litherland, Rebecca Mease, and James Walsh, “Evolving synchronous flashing in fireflies using an agent-based model of natural and sexual selection,” (2013), a talk presented at the Santa Fe Institute Complex Systems Summer School)

Darwin’s own mind was tuned to resonate best with minds impaired not merely by their nature as imperialist sacks of filth but furthermore by their membership in the upper class among imperialist sacks of filth, making these minds the worst of the worst among sacks of filth. Let’s contemplate the fact that the hypercapitalist economic system evolved under the philosophic pressure of Darwin’s ideas, themselves informed by the rapacity of nascent hypercapitalism during the Industrial Revolution, and came to its present terminal condition under neoliberals, including the recently departed Alan Greenspan, who worshipped at the altar of Ayn Rand, another opponent of altruism.

Who is John Galt? John Galt is an imperialist sack of filth. At least, so I assume. I'm finally forcing myself to watch a miniseries based on Atlas Shrugged--the things I do to address the global polycrisis!--but I'm still waiting for Galt to arrive as what I expect to be an emergency accelerator in the white, adolescent, God-complex-themed philosophical train wreck I'm witnessing.

You see part of the source of my rage against your administration, right Mr. President? As you are, no doubt, aware, 30% of New York State’s economy consists of the finance industry (fcr-2022-20b-economic.png (650×499)). The apotheosis of finance characterizes the end stage of hypercapitalism, wherein the big money no longer flows from making things or extracting things or renting things out but flows in circular fashion, coming into existence purely because the latter-day sacks of filth need it to do so and therefore will it into being. Your administration has been captured by the spirit of finance, which is held up for worship at the front door of the university to people arriving by bus and wishing to keep out of the elements by walking through the tunnels. The UASBIG habitat, the headquarters of the University at Albany School of Business Investment Group, is an abomination and an insult to every physicist who declined to make big money by taking a job in finance, a defection physicists call "going over to the Dark Side."

Mr. Hearst, as owners of Fitch, your family drinks blood by generating faith in pieces of paper. That’s a key driver of profitability for the Hearst business empire now. The newspapers and the magazines underpin the financial hocus pocus and lend it credence. Your problem is that the disciplined vampires of your family, among others, have been joined by raucous pirates who drink blood as fast as they possibly can, alerting the parasitized organism to its peril. That organism is waking up. Did the movie One Battle After Another remind you of anything? I recommend that you sell your possessions, give the money to the poor, and join the Franciscans at Siena University in Loudonville, New York, USA, to reclaim that institution from the neoliberals.

The opposite of a good thing is another good thing. Bad things are extremes of good things. Both the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Hearst family are examples of bad things, and the spirit of the former is returning as your family and others, burdened by the chains of baronial wealth, look after yourselves and some fraction of the populace whom you, Pres. Rodríguez, and the miasma of surplus marketers deem worthy, instead of ensuring that all people worldwide get their daily bread. Please contact me if you’d like details of what I see, though I expect that you see it, too.

It’s not just assassination attempts; it’s a general bloodthirstiness, exemplified for me by extremely graphic video, of dubious newsworthiness, recently shown on NBC Nightly News, of people being killed or badly injured, including a screaming man being attacked by a shark and a woman shown from multiple angles being thrown to her death off a bridge by companions who had forgotten to attach a bungee cord. I used my remote control to limit my exposure to a few still images in the latter case and to skip over the rest of the clip, once I heard a scream, in the former case. This level of callousness or pathological schadenfreude goes far beyond the principle, “If it bleeds, it leads.” The time has come for your lot to repent for a few decades, Mr. Hearst, especially if your goal remains the perpetuation of your wealth, or even of your genes. My goal is to avert vain screams from Anastasias and child deaths generally, which requires that everyone get their daily bread. Advocates for the poor are the best friends of the rich.

I’ll share this in the clear: I see people on YouTube discussing a study that calculated the current death toll from the destruction of USAID. One cannot argue that because one is doing charity, whether in generous or miserly fashion, one is morally permitted to cut off that charity without warning while capable of continuing it. Vast numbers of people are dying from the USAID termination shock, as everyone knew would happen. Did either of you do anything about that? Are you doing anything about the dire food shortages occurring, and expected to increase, as a predicted consequence of the disruption of fertilizer shipments by the Iran War, a war of choice for the aggressors, including the country we celebrate tomorrow?

And New York State is poised to re-elect a governor who vowed to dominate the next chapter of human history, an intrinsically evil project against which, Mr. President, you raised no objection, even though you were in the room (https://youtu.be/MbuqQXaupfc?t=900). Evil begets evil by making us accustomed to it, and New York State is far gone in the evil—really, the stupidity—of loving money, which even St. Paul could bring himself to condemn. Minds too strait to hear what Jesus said or see what Jesus did, or to understand St. Francis’ emulation of the life of Jesus, may at least embrace the wisdom that Hearst CEO Frank Bennack promulgated in the title of his memoir: Leave something [of value] on the table [so others might eat and the system might be preserved].

So, what was your answer concerning the meaning and origin of “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”?

To understand the adage, let's analyze it. "You can fool some of the people all of the time," means that at least one person can always be fooled. “You can fool all of the people some of the time," means that at least once, all of the people can be fooled. "You can't fool all of the people all of the time,” means that at least once, not all the people can be fooled, or, stated another way, at least one person will not be fooled at least once. [This paragraph and the first sentence of the following paragraph were edited heavily, to correct for the author's use of an exclusive sense of some, i.e., of "some" to mean "at least one but not all."] 

Do you think Abraham Lincoln said the equivalent of, “You can fool people, but at least one person will not be fooled at least once”? Bill Clinton, sure, but Honest Abe, no. In fact, there is no substantial evidence of Lincoln having said that (Did Abraham Lincoln Really Say You Can Fool All the People?).

According to the Time article linked above, the adage was common in late 19th-century marketing. Do you see how Lincoln’s name got firmly connected with the saying? Believing that Honest Abe said it made the meaning clear to me: Eventually, most people will see through most lies. In fact, the saying means exactly the opposite--there's no guarantee that lies will be exposed. When we read and listen, we understand what we think we’re meant to understand, what will cause our minds to resonate with the minds around us. Only through a painful process can we open our ears so as to hear and open our eyes so as to see.

Quote Investigator traces the saying to Catholic apologetics in France during the century before that nation’s revolution (Quote Origin: You Cannot Fool All the People All the Time – Quote Investigator®). Can you imagine how quickly a revolution might erupt in a place where faith is based on statements that mean the opposite of what people think they do? How many authors in France, enraged at being shut out of a decent life, or out of what they saw as their proper station, by hereditary wealth, wrote so as to dry out the faith of their countrypeople in advance of the conflagration? The rage is hot today, too, and people are once again protesting in knit caps.

My maternal grandmother, who was many things, among them a political operative for the Roman Catholic Church, had a saying I now understand to be related to what French folk were, perhaps, meant to hear in the precursors to the adage about fooling people and very likely heard, to lethally opposite effect, once they'd all flipped their state into open-eared flammability: “Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.”

I think my maternal grandmother saw her adage as support for her religion. The thing is, there aren’t 50 million Catholics in France any more.

But there could be.

Best wishes,
James, a kibitzing physicist

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Resources:

LinkedIn post circa 2026/07/01

On June 28, we celebrate a violent insurrection against the New York City Police Department. On July 4, we celebrate a violent insurrection against the British Empire. On July 14, French people celebrate a violent insurrection against rich folk. Fraternity, liberty, equality. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/james-lyons-walsh-92409b56_stonewallday-activity-7477011224639995904-6iEG?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAvCSGwBNdta609loxk2-qqGUBu5iGWm0ZY)

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LinkedIn post circa 2026/07/01

Huzzah! Psychology has discovered a new personality type, the otrovert, who is less common than introverts and extroverts, who has empathy and forms close personal relationships but doesn't like to join large groups, who doesn't like noisy gatherings, and who has deep personal convictions. Meanwhile, back at the Shaolin temple, Master Khan explains to Caine why Caine doesn't feel lonely when he enjoys solitude, why he doesn't want the things others want, and that the monks taught him because he already knew. For other examples of otroversion, maybe consult Catholic hagiography or consider Lightman, the principal hero of the movie _Wargames_. The discovery of otroversion is like the discovery of the "New World" by Columbus. Lots of us who are otroverts have been clear on who we are for a long time. We're overrepresented in literature because, guess what, otroverts may overrepresented among writers. We are truth-oriented because we don't blur our minds in order to resonate with the minds of others. This doesn't make us better than others, especially since excessive concentration of otroversion tends to degrade the social fabric. However, we're not worse than others, because we offer clear analysis of what's happening, enabling social groups to course-correct. We are the salt of the Earth, for too little salt brings rapid peril and too much salt inflicts gradual destruction. (1) Kung Fu: Master Kan Tells Caine Why They Accepted Him Into the Temple - YouTube (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/james-lyons-walsh-92409b56_kung-fu-master-kan-tells-caine-why-they-activity-7476961770365009920-cthp?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAvCSGwBNdta609loxk2-qqGUBu5iGWm0ZY)

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LinkedIn post circa 2026/07/01

I see the same issue in fundamental physics, the deprecation of philosophy, which could produce a conceptual path forward, in favor of byzantine math; in economics, where values are thrown out the window in pursuit of maximal velocity of money and GDP growth; and in business, where the wisdom of complex systems science, which teaches that too much of a good thing is bad, as a special case of the principle that more is different, is tied up and gagged by people monomaniacally pursuing growth, often measured via preposterously sparse sets of metrics. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/james-lyons-walsh-92409b56_quantitative-research-and-qualitative-research-activity-7475908568014290944-X8nR?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAvCSGwBNdta609loxk2-qqGUBu5iGWm0ZY)

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LinkedIn post circa 2026/07/01

The message of the post below is crucial: Large amounts of fundamental research, frequently taxpayer-funded, is done before any commercial product is "invented." Too often, credit for "inventions" goes to the capitalist who decides what colors its commercial version should come in, rather than the teams of engineers who built it or the legions of scientists who brought humanity to the point where it was possible. The massively collaborative nature of technological advancement cries out for the sharing via guaranteed basic income of the wealth it generates. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/james-lyons-walsh-92409b56_what-would-healthcare-look-like-without-the-activity-7474158153769607168-hB8o?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAvCSGwBNdta609loxk2-qqGUBu5iGWm0ZY)

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Excerpt from an email of 2026/06/30:

Incidentally, I don't send messages like this to play gotcha. For example, the death of John Carlos Garcia-Mendez at UAlbany in 2019 was an opportunity to hash out some truly toxic aspects of physics culture and of academia broadly. His death, the loss of a state university student in a process that started on campus, prompted only a statement of condolences, but when a forest ranger is found dead, we're told that investigations are automatic when state employees die on the job: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/safety-reforms-demanded-new-york-ranger-found-20765795.php

Tragedies are opportunities to save lives in the future if analyzed by people with the courage to change their ways.

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Moderation is a good thing.