Greek words are a nerd’s downfall. I’m a nerd, therefore felled by epistemic hubris. Whenever I encounter “epistemic,” as in Maggie Jackson’s essay, I have to mentally re-solder its connection to epistemology, which I barely retain has to do with what we can know.
Jackson’s paraphrase for epistemic hubris is “unwarranted certainty about complex policy issues.” She cites gun control as one such issue. That issue is common as dirt, which triggers three questions:
(1) Doesn’t every issue involve “policy” of some kind, private or public? (A policy of mine is to stifle a belch after sipping a fizzy beverage.)
(2) What’s an even thornier complex issue than gun control?
(3) What’s one non-complex issue about which certainty is warranted?
As I drove her home to Pecos from Odessa in the late ‘90s, my elderly aunt said to me, “I believe with all my heart that when the end times come every person who ever lived will be resurrected to judgment.” She was devout Church of Christ. I’m lapsed Disciple of Christ. Christ figured divergently in our lives, hers and mine.
Earlier that day my aunt and I had stood holding hands and weeping while her brother, my uncle, breathed his last in the hospital. Her affirmation came from out of the blue as the sere West Texas plains slipped past our silent selves on the empty highway. I nodded with a dutiful nephew’s noncommittal respectfulness.
The answers are: (1) Yes. (2) Life after death. (3) There is none.
(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
Just Say Right, It’s Only Weather
As long as the nation’s fleet of private jets can take to the skies there’s no call to whine about so-called climate (the Dems’ name for weather). There’s a right way to think about it, just do a thought experiment. Imagine the Rio Grande frozen by some flukish Arctic blip. Poison blood can just walk across the ice straight into Texas — steal your Evinrude, peep at your wife, whatever. Crazy, right?
First of all, flukes happen. Welcome to life as we know it. Old Mother Nature can be uppity — she’s a woman! But there’s a come-to-daddy moment when the chips are down, and that’s when the private jets go airborne, from Boca Chica to Belarus, from Dallas to Davos. They carry the right fellas doing the right thing in the right places for the right people to make the weather great again.
As long as gushers outnumber dusters, wealth is protected, the lobby’s good-’n-greased, the dark money flows, and there’s a firm hand on the till, the world can count on right guidance in all weathers. You can take that to wherever you hide your stash, pardner.
(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved