To Brian Greene:

Regarding your refutation of free will in your book, Until the End of Time,  I am 86 years old, and sometimes when I do things, I do them according to the probabilistic (Quantum) and Newtonian combination you describe in your book.  But then I realize what I just did unconsciously, and I go back to check if it was done right.  Sometimes I was right, sometimes I was wrong.  That checking was, sir, my free will.

Free will is not an ever present condition; it gets its opportunity at strategic moments in life.  It helps to establish habits which take advantage of your probabilistic-Newtonian combination so we run our lives with a minimum of confrontational moments.

In the end, free will still dominates our lives, and determines the outcome.  Not everything in our lives runs along a Quantum-Newtonian physics string, if I may use “string theory” in a new way.

A friend of mine wanted to make his honeymoon the best ever, so he booked a week at the Elbow Beach Country Club in Bermuda, and the second night there they went swimming on the starlit beach, though she didn’t know how to swim.  He went in, briefly, and for them it was a lark.

But disaster spoiled further plans.  They rented two bikes, and she gouged her right calf on the pedal, and was bedridden for the rest of their stay.  He went alone on a schooner outing, but it was nothing without her.

There is a kind father who takes care of his children.  When they came home to the environs of their New York City apartment, she found she was pregnant with a girl.  Later they had three boys in a row, and the family prospered.  A bad start does not prevent joyful days, a good career, nor a terrific marriage.

I made some dear friends in Manhasset, and so when I got an email from one of the first, taking apart some of my conservative political views, I thought, what have I done wrong?  I have no time to check the emails I forward for veracity, and usually take them at face value.  Sure, Trump has no manners, but he was God’s gift, and you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth (count his teeth), especially if it comes from Him who decided where I’d grow up.

I usually vote with the Catholic-Evangelical bloc (there was none before the last presidential election) and I’m sticking with them.  What this president has endured makes him worthy of something, but certainly not defeat.  Not at the hands of those who mock what I stand for.

I may tolerate bad manners, but not slighting of my values.  Those who espouse what looks like Communism, justify murder, and denigrate the values of Western Civilization while posing as champions of justice can’t look to me for help.

The stars that existed before our sun (also a star) were several hundred or a thousand times bigger.  But they didn’t last as long.  Before a star dies, it experiences a final conflagration known as a supernova, and then it collapses in on itself, taking all those atomic particles with it.  That forms the black hole, with a gravity so strong that it cannot even emit light.

Can I compare this phenomenon to a person with overweening pride and love of self?  He oversteps his bounds and makes a fatal mistake.  The end result is he gets a lot of pity and people avoid him.

 But to get back to the black hole.  It becomes what holds a galaxy together, and is one of the marvels of our universe.  These things took billions of years to happen, and when people say you are stardust, they’re right.  Those atoms, formed in a sun, became part of our solar system, and were infused into you as early as when you were in your mother’s womb.

Although I am an immigrant myself, I sympathized with few things in Kamala (the daughter of immigrants) Harris’ speech.  We are going through a pandemic, and that has caused economic, social, and health problems in this nation, and she blamed them all on Trump.  She’s a woman, but has the sympathies of granite.  She speaks of Barack Obama, whose Marxian and Islamic tendencies she admires, if there’s any truth in her words.

The Left, which thanks to Bernie Sanders is Marxian and has learned nothing from Cuba and Venezuela, is full of promises, all with the money they don’t have.  No wonder they talk about taxes; that’s not their money, it’s how they get ours.  And their emotional values!  Oh sure, I’m against slavery, but I don’t subdue a Seattle neighborhood to show it.

I like reasonableness, yet I don’t make a god out of reason. (That’s the secular tendency.) I realize there are things in this world, like QM (Quantum Mechanics) that don’t follow reason.  I know immigrants bring good things to this nation, but Kamala shows little of that.  Oh, yes, what do I bring to this nation?  I bring the heritage of the world’s oldest (1315) still existing democracy, Switzerland.