Greetings from Post Electoral College America

If there's any Trump supporter reading this, please stop reading now!

(Well, it was worth a try; after all, these people did what they were told, namely to vote for Trump, despite common sense.)

It's just a little too early to muse on the demise of the United States of America as we knew it; we really don't know exactly what is going to happen next, after all.  The conservatives and the big business leadership got what they wanted: a businessman at the controls.  But things are not as simple as they seem.

The GOP (and the Libertarians) wanted to win the White House, Congress, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, and they're about to get what they wanted.  Now, the cheerleaders will turn to the coaches and the quarterback and say: OK, what do we do next?

The GOP strategy has been, in many ways, reactive.  In other words, they don't understand what is going on, but they have absolute faith that everything the Democrats do is bad, and they have to get rid of it.  (They just might re-brand the things and put them right back, but that's another story.)  The Fiscal Conservatives don't like high taxes; they don't like a budget deficit; they don't like Federal Spending.  These things are articles of faith; most of them being businessmen or industrialists, or flunkies of these things, simply cannot tolerate money going into the Treasury (even though a lot of it finds its way right back into the hands of Big Business anyway).  The Neoconservatives like to bully foreign nations into accepting American political leadership (hegemony, a word I have always hated), which in the present situation means being nasty in every possible way to ISIS (or ISIL, or whatever).  Most liberals are disgusted with bullying for its own sake, and have been for decades, but the GOP has not outgrown that phase.  The GOP also wants freely and cheaply available energy.  (The Energy companies would prefer to control the flow of energy, just to skim off the profits, but the rest of the GOP had cheap, clean energy available in vast quantities tomorrow, and it if could be used for transportation (e.g. in trucks and planes), they'd happily take it, even if the Koch brothers are unhappy.

So now, here is the opportunity to (A) roll back so much that the Democrats got done over four years, and (B) loosen all controls on business craziness, except those few controls that give the GOP darlings the tariffs that make them rich and influential.  (For instance, I can see how the highways might be privatized, so that everyone has to pay tolls to get anywhere, but the GOP pets get to take the tolls home!  Sounds like a good racket to me.)

Donald Trump is gradually becoming aware of the messiness of Government, which is why he has simply handed over the management of Government to the fellows who are probably most pushy about policy.  The Steve Bannons and the Rex What'is'names probably gave him no peace, and so he gives them the keys to the Land Rover and says: you drive; I want to take a nap, and maybe get off a few tweets.

Liberals have historically been protective of the poor, and women and minorities of all sorts, because, well, they have been those most in need of protection.  The ultra-rich, suffering with a lingering sense of persecution, has only the GOP to run to their aid.  But they are just a little too confident that they can make wealth out of thin air.  There is a belief that money just multiplies, like bacteria.  No; wealth is extracted from the rest of us.  At the moment, we're still not penniless enough for us to disappoint the businesses; though some of us are starving, we still postpone paying the rent to make sure Disney makes a killing.  As long as we have credit cards, we add to the wealth of Wal-Mart and those other guys.  Even if we owe the hospitals big money for the last time we got sick, we still pump gas into our cars, to make sure the Koch Brothers have a good Christmas!

But the fact is that the Capitalist Class needs the middle class and the working class.  We're the geese that have thus far laid the golden eggs.  Actually, more like plastic eggs, but still eggs.  Without buyers, the sellers have nothing.

So I'm advocating that we wait until it becomes clearer what can be done to obstruct the Trump machine; the strategy of delegitimizing Trump is sort of a marginal thing; the people who want Trump in the White House are not particularly upset that we're upset about him shooting his mouth off at the wrong time.

Some of the silly things they're saying that they will do, though, such as occupying both the White House and their big house in Manhattan, at Government expense, is going to annoy some people on their own side.  I don't know the relative size of the expense, but it has to worry the fiscal conservatives (but I must admit that the fiscal conservatives appear to have taken a holiday since Trump's great victory this November).

Arch, settling down to watch.

A Darker Take on Trump's Lies

A blogger called Tom Resnikoff has an interesting--and very convincing, and rather scary--point of view on Donald T's ostensibly silly utterances.

Let's take a minute to recall the sort of thing that Trump has been saying; then let's take a look at how Mr. Resnikoff interprets this, and finally consider how we should react to it.

Throughout the campaign, D. T. has said various things that are lies, or at the very least, spreading rumors:  "I don't know.  I just heard that ..."  And then he goes on to either (a) deny that he ever said it, or (b) come up with a new rumor that actually contradicts the old rumor, or (c) when challenged, assert that the lie is the truth, or deny, or ignore the accusation.  Especially to those who are already predisposed to looking favorably on anything D.T. says, this is all fine, and it has trained them to disregard facts, and furthermore, left them thinking that he himself is the only source of truth, or at least, palatable truth.  We certainly have some evidence to believe that Trumpies are immune to logic; they seem to feel (and feelings are all that they trust, especially if Trump gives them their jollies) that logic is some twisted invention of the liberals whom Trump hates.  Since the Liberals (Trump says) always argue from "logic", logic must be untrustworthy somehow.

Resnikoff proceeds to make a case for believing that Trump has set out on a campaign to actually erode the people's trust in their own reason.  Once you have the public believing that the Liberals are capable of all sorts of evil, and the only reason we don't understand why this is going on is because the Liberals (or Democrats, or what have you) are hiding all sorts of secrets, you (Donald) can persuade them that only you (Donald) are trustworthy, and the opposition just lies all the time.  Simply because you (Donald) set yourself up as the arbiter of truth.  (Resnikoff goes further, and states that this post-modern brand of conservatism is out to destroy democracy, which is on the face of it rather preposterous, but it paves the way for the Rule of Business, or at least the Rule of Certain Favored Businesses.  It is a dystopian view of the future.  (This state of affairs is not going to make life much more pleasant for the WWC--the white middle class with working-class origins.  Since they have been taught to not use their reasoning, it will be a long time before they realize that they're in the pot, getting cooked with the minorities and the women.  By then, about fifteen years from now, it will be normal for everyone except the very wealthy 1% to just suffer all the time.  That small sliver of society will not like how things go, either, but they too are convinced that this libertarian philosophy is good.  Unfortunately, they're going to run out of poor people to exploit, in about another 20 years!)

More worrisome is the information that there is some Russian fellow who is an adept at this sort of psychological warfare.  DT's team might not be bright enough to dream up this sort of disgusting strategy, but the russkies certainly are.

What is in it for these Russians?  What game are they playing?  I hate these super conspiracy theories, unless there is some tangible advantage in the outcome for whoever is being accused of doing the dirty; it has been far too convenient to make the russkies the scapegoats for everything, for at least 50 years.  So keep your eyes and ears open, but panic doesn't make a lot of sense, because panic is what (it seems) they want.

More later.

Thomas Piketty: The consequences of inherited wealth outweighing earned wealth

This is an unusually heavy topic for those of us who are not economists.  If you search on YouTube --wait; I'll find it for you: What the 1% don't want you to know-- you will find this video by Bill Moyers.  Bill Moyers, a liberal political commentator, but a fair one, and a very thoughtful one, interviews Paul Krugman, a leading economist.  Being an economist, Krugman could be expected to be more centrist than most liberals; that goes with the territory of being an economist.  But here, Krugman is explaining some of the bad consequences of the fact that inherited wealth (that is, money that has remained in a family for more than a generation, and I mean big money) is now growing significantly faster than the economy itself is growing.

We all know that there are two ways to make money: you work, or you invest.  It used to be that both ways earned you roughly the same rate of growth; in other words, the rate at which you got raises at work was more or less comparable with the rate at which a rich person's wealth grew.  (We're not talking about dividends.  We're talking about how much more valuable the holdings are.  Growth.)  But a French author, Thomas Piketty, has done statistical analysis of the flow of personal wealth in several countries, and concluded that the growth of inherited personal wealth is now faster than the growth of the economy.

Here's a simplified example.

Suppose A works at his job, and earns roughly $100,000 a year.  (Not many people do, but let's pretend.)  Meanwhile, B has investments in the Stock Market, and does not work.  But he is constantly watching the stock market, and and his stocks generally earn, say, $1000,000 a year.  That's not surprising.  But suppose A gets a 3% raise at the end of the year.  This means, roughly, that the company that A works for, has grown about 3% over the year.  On the average, we can expect that all American companies grow, and suppose they do so at an average rate of 3%.  But B's stocks, says Picketty, would be expected to grow at the rate of about 5%.  This means that, next year, A would make $103,000 dollars.  But B would earn dividends of $1050,000.  See that?  Income from work grows at a slower rate than investment income.

Most people whose wealth is in the top 1% have got their money from their parents.  Some have increased their wealth significantly (let's not mention names here), but it is difficult to become a multi-millionaire with money that you earn from an honest job.  This is why we're talking about inherited wealth here.

This is big news.  Not only are the wealthiest people in the country much richer than a typical person, they're constantly getting further away from the rest of us, and are impossible to catch up with.  Impossible.  None of us is ever going to catch up with people of the class of Warren Buffett, or any of the high-profile 1-percenters we hear about.  (Interestingly enough, it is generally agreed that most people don't even know who the wealthiest people are, or where they live.  They live hidden away, where their fabulous toys are not visible to the greedy eyes of ordinary citizens.  Many of our rich friends are nervous, because they feel that they're probably in the top 10%, or at least the top 20%.   They can relax; they're probably not even close.  To get into the top 10% club, you must earn $120 thousand a year.  I'm still trying to find how much a family has to be worth, to be in the top 20% of households in the US, by family wealth.)

I don't begrudge these people their ill-gotten gains.  (Well, their ill-inherited gains.)  What I do begrudge is the fact that they can control the government.  The government usually dances to the tune of the most wealthy.  This is why the Federal Government, and all the State Governments conspire to actually reduce taxes on the most wealthy.  While we pay anything from 10% taxes to 25% taxes on our salaries, they pay about 6% on their dividends.  Why are state legislatures and Congress so kind to the most wealthy taxpayers?  Because the wealthiest families not only control the government, they also control the Newspapers, radio and television, and start a huge hue and cry about Socialism as soon as anyone stands for election who has the guts to raise taxes.  The rich see taxes as eating into their personal wealth.  But only the rich can use a lot of what the government pays for: the armed services, highways, medical research facilities, airports, seaports, the coast guard.  Most of us cannot even afford the fancy drugs that they come up with, helped with government grants.  Some politicians propose a flat 15% tax for everybody.  But you can be sure that the most wealthy will never pay anything close to that rate, even if such a tax plan is made into law.  They will find creative ways of saying that their incomes from their investments are not really incomes.

The video explains much more.  Why is it less painful to live with a low income in such countries as Germany and France, than in the USA?  Because most of the expenses on which poor people --I mean the working poor, who earn around, say, $30,000 a year, which is not terrible, and certainly would not be terrible in France-- blow their incomes are paid for in many European countries.  As we know, basic health care, basic transportation, basic education are either paid for or subsidized in Europe.  (The British upper class rebelled against this, and now British poor are in terrible shape.  America has taught the fat cats around the world how to scrounge up every last penny, starving government services that used to make life tolerable for the working class.)

Indirectly, the political power of the wealthy is also increasing every year.  That is the scariest part of the story.  This is why Donald Trump ran for election.  If he had not, his kids would not get his little fortune when he dies, it would be taxed.  Even if it was taxed, the kids would still get a fortune, but not as big as they want to inherit.  This is why they want to be in control of the government: to keep an eye on the legislation.

It all becomes clear.

Arch

Vi Hart's Take on the 2016 Election

It looks very much as though I was wrong.  Repeating my standard warning not to jump on any bandwagon without suitable thought, I have to say that the analysis of Vi Hart, a young musician, commentator, mathematician, and Net personality, is very convincing, an worthy of considering.  Her article can be found here, or watched here.  She tries to understand the election in terms of a generational divide.  [Added later: In my opinion this, too, is somewhat of a simplification, and I explain after the break.]

Put that way, it does seem as though it was the older voters who voted for Trump, for various reasons, because they did not grow up in a world with Global Warming, they did not grow up in a world where the environment was a problem (and who did row up in a world where white males had a complete dominance over society).  What Trump was saying made a lot of sense to them, because he simply denied those problems, and expressed his opposition or hostility to various conditions that are new to the older generation, and simply facts to the younger.

Apparently the younger generations voted for Hillary Clinton.  They understood the complexities of the issues, and had their thinking in place (most of them), and while grandpa and grandma were rejoicing in the company of others who were turning a blind eye to the new America, they knew that only Hillary had plans for dealing with reality.

Always compassionate, Vi Hart describes her theory in terms anyone can understand.  (She is a great original in many ways, and her delivery is always dramatic.  For the older reader, I recommend the print version.)

If she is right, it seems as though there is hope, because any election won by an aged demographic is doomed in obvious ways.  These septuagenarians may survive another four years, but if Trump overplays his hand, and if we take Vi Hart's suggestion that we engage with the older generation in order to explain the science and the logic of what has taken place over the last few decades to our seniors, and present it in less threatening fashion, we could change how things go.  Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton may not be willing to run again, four years from now; and if she did, she may not have the energy to work with whatever ruins Trump may leave her.  (Of course, we can't expect any understanding of Entropy from Trump, let alone any remorse for being its agent.)

Life Goes On — Sort Of: Polar Bears and Cheap Gasoline

There is a British comedian —called Jonathan Pie, I believe— who makes videos, usually ranting about something or other.  A sort of British Lewis Black.  In his most recent rant*, he talks about why it is obvious that Hillary would have lost the election.  Well, in hindsight it does seem pretty obvious; the trick is to see these things before they happen!
[*Be warned, he swears.]

Anyway, for a week I have simply been trying to make sense of what happened, but now it is time to get into a mindset of carrying on, and trying to be effective in a political way.  For various reasons, I have ways of not getting very angry when things go horribly wrong, e.g. after the election of 2010.  Garrison Keillor sang the weekend after, on his Prairie Home Companion show: “Democracy is fine for me, but I don’t know about you!”

Go ahead and listen to what Jonathan Pie has to say.  He basically says, in more colorful language, that The Left sabotaged itself.  Listening more closely, there are really two points he makes.  The first is that The Left has lost sight of reality so much that it thinks Hillary Clinton is progressive.  The second is that The Left keeps spouting precisely the sorts of things that horrifies “The Plebs,” as he calls them: the common people.  And it was the common people, obviously (aided by the conservative leaders, ever eager to win the White House at almost any cost) that gave Trump the election.  The same thing happened in Britain, with BREXIT, their referendum to leave the European Union.  It appears that The Left in both countries is unable to take a lesson from what happens.

Where was Bernie Sanders, Pie asks.  This is the same question Michael “Fahrenheit 911” Moore asks.  Unfortunately, the strategists behind the Democratic Party (and it’s time to distinguish between the various components of the Democratic Party: the so-called brains of the operation, which however seems to have lost its right to be called that, and the people on the left) have decided that we need a centrist, someone who could compromise with the Right.  Bernie would not compromise, but Clinton has, and would; that’s what they thought would appeal to voters.  This sort of makes sense, because it has been the absence of compromise that has characterized how the politics of the last decade has gone.  Everybody was calculating their strategies based on the elite on both sides (if that word can be used for idiots like Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz and Chris Christie, and so on).  Suddenly, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and the “disenfranchised” Greater White Working Class showed up.  These are people of a wide range of income levels, but who are not college educated, by and large, or at least effectively not college educated, and hostile to professionals and those who they perceive to be intellectuals.  These are the people, the White Working Class** who tend to think that the nerds and the geeks make things way too complicated.  And, it appears, that they feel that the hated lawyers, and economists, and scientists, and teachers, and atheists and foreigners, and uppity women and minorities have had it their way for far too long.
[** And those who have started out working class, but are now business owners, fairly well off.]

The difference between people like, say, Mit Romney and Carly Fiorina on the one hand, and Donald Trump, on the other hand, is that the first two are college-educated nerds and intellectuals, while Trump is just a regular idiot who says anything that pops into his head.  Now, you and I know that Trump is not just a regular idiot: he is a very affluent man who has terrible taste.  But he won.  Half the reason is that many voters wanted to screw up Washington, for having being screwed by Washington for so long.  The other half of the reason is that they have bought into the axiom that a businessman can handle government far more efficiently.  This is something that the Greater White Working Class truly believes in, because (as I blogged yesterday) some of these people in the GWWC are not working class.  They are self-made rich folks, who own their own businesses, and perceive that there is a lot of waste of money in Washington.  They believe that someone who has had to be careful with money in his business will be careful with tax money, like Trump, for instance.  Not.

Jonathan Pie fumes that The Left got its message wrong.  It just so happens that Bernie Sanders’s message was a little more on point, and Hillary Clinton’s message, which resonated with the Party Faithful, did not resonate with everyone outside of the Democrat Convention hall.

The question I struggle with is: how much can you dilute the message to make it palatable to people who want all the wrong things?  We have to realize that a lot of the time, it is campaign bullshit that wins the election, and then the winning side can stop pretending, and has two short years in which to deliver whatever goods they’re going to deliver, in time to get another two years in which to build on it.  (Recall how the Democrats were mowed down in 2010.)  But is it worth the bad taste in the mouth to promise all sorts of things that you had absolutely no intention of doing?  Should the Democrats pander to the GWWC the next time around, promising lower taxes, no agreements with Iran, bombing the heck out of the Middle East, no support of Planned Parenthood, lower gasoline prices, and higher wages for coal miners, if we just can’t, and won’t, deliver on those promises, just because they would be totally wrong?

That’s the choice when the next election rolls round, and we can be sure that more pressing issues will raise their ugly heads before campaign season begins.

My theory is that we have to go back to the stage where we were trying to educate the the public on the reasons for the progressive agenda.  Why does the environment matter, and what is the evidence?  Why does reproductive choice matter, and what is the evidence?  Why does health care reform matter, and what is the evidence?  Why does controls for Wall Street matter?  Why is multiculturalism a good thing, and what is the evidence?  What are the points in support of equal pay for equal work?  Just because anyone with a brain takes these things as given does not mean that our work is done: most of our population does not care to think deeply about anything; they have to be forced, encouraged, cajoled, or bribed into thinking deeply about these matters.  That’s going to take longer than a mere four years.  It makes me mad.

The WWC and Trump

This article on the Harvard Business Review website explains fairly effectively why Trump was supported so enthusiastically by such a large proportion of voters.

The blogger, Joan Williams, took her father-in-law's personal history into account, and has come up with a very persuasive theory.  It is that many working-class men were able, over the years, to start up their own business, with no help from the Government, and no college education.  These people are now very middle-class, but by no means part of the white-collar Republican Elite.

They distrust professionals, but they respect the Rich.  This unfamiliar pair of values: Rich Yes, Educated No, describes many of our conservative acquaintances; it was just that we did not realize that it describes such a huge population.  Democrats, of course, are, by and large, educated, professionals, many of us actually teachers, many of us liberated women, many of us lawyers, and though we hate the banks and Wall Street, when Wall Street is in a bind, we tend to rush to their rescue.

The White Working Class hates every single demographic on that list: Professionals (who are often managers in businesses owned by white men who never went to college), teachers (who keep trying to teach good American kids "stuff they don't need to learn"), liberated women (who are a shame to society, who "keep getting abortions"), lawyers ('nuff said), Stockbrokers (moneysuckers and crooks), and foreigners, minorities, and tree-huggers and those against good old fossil fuels.

The moderately affluent business owners, though from an socioeconomic point of view are not considered working class, nevertheless identify with the working class, which is why all this ranting about Obamacare did not make sense for the longest time.  When liberals think of the working class, they think of the black working-class, and the Latinos, and Native Americans.  Well, that's a mistake we're not going to make again very soon.

It is emerging that the Conservative Christian Right is divided about supporting the president-elect.  That's something they have to figure out for themselves: it is hard to advise people who have mythological beliefs from a rational point of view; they have to consult their fairies and come to some sort of conclusion within their cosmology.  All we know is that Trump is furiously walking back lots of his campaign rhetoric, and pumping up the apologetics on behalf of his team.  That's all very entertaining, but one thing we can be sure: no lessons will be learned.  Americans will not lay the blame for anything that goes wrong on Donald Trump and his ignorance; it will all be blamed on Barack Obama.  On the GOP side of the Aisle, the only mistakes are mistakes in public relations, period.  They have their eyes on the only prize: re-election.

Arch

Post-Apocalyptic Landscape, The

Well, I've seen these sorts of disappointments before, and so have you, and we've built up a lot of scar tissue to handle them.  If the crop of Republican people in Congress at this time were as concerned with legislation and governance as they are with retaining their blasted seats, we would see a certain amount of remorse and anxiety.  Any congressman who had an electorate with numerous voters under the poverty line, would not be perfectly cavalier at seeing the social welfare apparatus being dismantled.  Perhaps the President Elect will permit the so-called Social Safety-Net to remain in place at least for a while, as a special birthday present for those penniless idiots who voted for him.  Remember: those who want taxes cut the most, and the government handouts for the poor taken away, are not the Trumpets, rather it is the Big Business-funded traditional core conservatives, the Koch Brothers and their like.  Trump will settle for reduced taxes for himself and his immediate family!  I don't really know that; Trump was elected despite our total ignorance of the principles behind his candidacy.  Like any mediocre businessman who runs his business based on paranoia and rules of thumb, Trump is likely to outsource his administration to Indian kids in Bangalore, who can only be reached at night!

Looking at the Media Machine that Trump had put in place, we have an inkling about the people who will play a role in a Trump administration: Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, and Mike Pence, and a few shameless sycophants who will crawl forward to take some of the responsibility for keeping Washington running well enough to serve the interests of the Trump financial holdings.  (Trump certainly thinks he can continue to make money without Washington, but he doesn't have a clue.)

My best guess at the Trump "plan" is as follows.  My comments are in plain text; when I'm channeling the Donald, it will be in (what else?) orange:

1.  I think he will not rock the boat for a few weeks, just to keep everyone guessing, including the GOP.  In actual fact, he will be going over the playbooks of his predecessors, looking for easy words that he can quickly read, so if there were to exist a publication such as "Presidency for Idiots: How to take the Country through your first Presidential Term without Really Trying!" that's what he will have his kids read to him at night.  Meanwhile he will wait for the GOP leadership to send a courier or two, nice guys, who can tolerate some nonsense from Trump, and leak to him a step or two that he could take, while still keeping his options open.

2.  I don't think Trump is interested in doing anything the way the GOP would expect him to do, and certainly not exactly how they want it.  If Congress has leaders who are willing to work with him (and some of they are very unhappy about the prospect), he will start to work at putting through legislation that directly affects monied families, e.g. the so-called Death Tax.  That's terrible; that's the worst, in his opinion.  That has got to go.  That. has. got. to. go.

3.  We need oil.  We need gasoline.  We need energy.  We need everything: coal, gas, everything; oil, coal, gas, wind power.  Everything.  We'll reduce their taxes, we'll give them incentives.  And you know what?  We have tons of oil stored away in bunkers.  Tons!  Open them up.  Bring the price of oil down.  Frack, baby.  (Just not anywhere near Trump Tower!)

By the early summer, it will be clear that the White House is not really interfering with the running of the country very much; at least I hope not.  Pence and the other social conservatives in government might start pushing to repeal or reverse the marriage equality amendment, and at that point we will have some idea concerning to what degree the Supreme Court is willing to jump on the Trump bandwagon.  They may be ideologues, but they're also lawyers, and not in the habit of suffering fools gladly.  But I suppose, it depends on which sort of fools.  My bet, however, is that until and unless a new Supreme Court judge is appointed, there will be little cooperation with Trump.  But I could be wrong.

I do not want to make any guesses about Republican appointments to the Supreme Court.  Except for Scalia and Thomas, the justices have not ruled as predictably along party lines as we could have expected.  We can expect anything at all from Trump.

We would expect that Education takes a beating.  But Trump probably does not know too many people who have an educated opinion as to how the education system (for lack of a better word) should be steered.  If Trump realizes that without indigenous educated talent, he would forced to import foreign educated labor to service the one-armed bandits, he will know to support education at least enough to service the technology that we have.  As long as we have the money, he probably thinks, we can buy the talent.  This is the implicit point of view that has held for the last several decades.  If all our best students fly off to work for the Chinese, then we can begin to worry about Education.

If things go kaplooey in every direction, then we could invade Iran.  Trump has learned from somewhere that Iran is dangerous.  He doesn't have any ideas about how to approach that problem, but whatever it is, we're not going to like it, and Iran will like it even less.  ISIS is another potential target, and which target Trump chooses will be based entirely on its potential for scoring points with the American public, and any other parties that Trump is courting; perhaps the people he wants to sell condominiums to.  But I forget: he is not allowed to keep his eye on his financial concerns; at least not without changing the law.

Finally, I have a hope that Obamacare will be left largely alone, unless he thinks of a way to twist the arm of Insurance Companies to get them to concede some points that have been the basis of rather punitive deals that some customers have been forced to accept.  The Insurance Industry spends an enormous amount of money on lobbying Congress; Trump doesn't really care about those sorts of things, unless he can drive a deal whereby he gets more money than the others!!  Hey, that's how you make deals.

All this has to happen in between remodeling the White House to come up to decent standards, and other important things that Trump has to do to keep up his world image as a successful businessman, and now, world leader, which is important.

Jennifer Lawrence has written a brief post-election opinion piece which you can see here.

Michael Moore, of Fahrenheit 911 fame, has put forward a 5-point plan to fight back!  First of all, let me say that getting mad and fixing things with violence in your mind is sort of destructive.  When Michael Moore does it, it gives a little extra punch to what he has to say, and people are likely to pay attention.  It's part of how he delivers his message: anger and indignation.  But for private individuals, a little simmering anger is not bad, but it has to be moderated with the fact that we don't really know everything.  People act in various inexplicable ways for various reasons that they do not have the skills to explain accurately.  The art of using language effectively is dying (and I do not know as much of it as I would like to know, and as much as my old teachers would have expected me to know!) but, instead of trying to guess, we can work towards a political climate that is more conducive to a balanced approach to government and social welfare.  If you're reading this, you're probably interested in social welfare, and civil discourse, a sane foreign policy, but you're probably beginning to think of civil disobedience and Occupying this, that and the other thing.  Let's look at Mikey's 5 point plan with an open mind.

 1.  Take over the Democratic Party.  They have failed the people.

This is certainly true.  Unfortunately too many Democrat officials have taken their professionalism just a little too seriously, and forgotten what the party is about.  They have looked at the GOP, and begun to think that lying, cheating, and vilifying the GOP is enough to win the White House.  Unfortunately, in their roles of kingmakers, they decided to tinker with the Primary campaign, and alienated their own people, because they felt that Bernie Sanders simply could not win.  Why?  Because Bernie was a little too non-establishment.  So on this point, I think we can agree with Michael Moore.

2.  Fire all the pundits, pollsters, and other media experts who hung on to their narrative long after the facts made it clear that their reasoning was flawed.  (I paraphrase.)  They're probably urging you to "heal the divide."

Okay, so this is, in a sense, following on on point 1, and including the people on TV and the Internet whose occupations are to be professionally enthusiastic about politics, and who use various oracles to indicate how to proceed.  It is certainly true that there is a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo that political specialists have come up with, especially the pollsters, who confuse the stream of information with insights that, in hindsight, do not always work.  Fine, let's jettison them all; I never liked them anyway.  But if anyone says to "heal the divide," I find it difficult to turn my back on them.  As someone said, a lot of our friends were in the other camp, and not all of them were racists and bastards.  So: yes, and no, on that point.

3.  Any Democrat in Congress who doesn't obstruct the Republicans at every single step of the way should get out, and allow a serious obstructor to do what is necessary.

Well, this would certainly give the Republicans a dose of their own medicine.  Do we want to be mindless obstructors like Mitch McConnell?  This is the tactic that the Republicans who resented Obama's popularity settled on: unable to fight Obama's suggestions based on their own merits, they simply decided to obstruct everything.  It is a strategy intended to deliver political victories, but neither policy victories nor legislative victories.  It is what you do when you're so frustrated, you can't think of anything to do to further your cause, but to give setback upon setback to your opponent.

But the problem here is that not everyone in the GOP is united in Trump's agenda.  In the weeks ahead, it will emerge how the GOP plans to salvage a few objectives given the Trump framework, but knowing the puerile mindset of both the core Republicans and the President-elect, turning against them might just succeed in uniting them.  I do not know to what extent to support point 3.

4.  Trump is just a media star.  His plan was to destroy both parties, and to tell them: You're Fired!  He was created by TV, but TV will not admit it.

Well, this is an analysis, and does not give us something to actually do.  We did not realize Trump was a danger, but I don't think anyone is confused any more.  We need to think how to * hold onto our gains, * resist changes to our laws and our government what will make it harder for the weaker and least powerful members of our society, and * resist attempts to fragment our population, but pull in the opposite direction whenever possible.

5.  Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.  It was the Electoral College that destroyed our chances of electing the best leader for this time in our history.

Well, there are many reasons why the electoral college will continue to survive.  One commentator from Prager University give several good reasons for its existence.

More as I find out.

Arch

Is this a revolt against education?

I have a suspicion that the underlying phenomenon driving the conditions of this election cycle is the anger of the uneducated (and the marginally educated) against the stranglehold that they see the college-educated people as seeming to have on everything.

This stranglehold is mostly illusion.  There are vast numbers of people like Trump himself that have attended degree factories, who have gone on to terrorize their city councils, their boards of educations, their County governments and their chambers of commerce, and possibly their Lion's Clubs and their Rotary Clubs.  None of these institutions require very much education to take over.  Many of them are run by perfectly well-educated guys, but not all of them.

Perhaps working-class whites are sick and tired of being given the runaround by (ostensibly college-educated) minor bureaucrats at various levels of government.  They must hate the fact that in order to put in a huge new restaurant on a piece of land that they bullied somebody out of, they must make sure that they are not in a flood plane, that they're not going to adversely influence the water flow through the ground, and the runoff during a rainstorm, blah blah, blah blah.  Who gives a ^%$# about runoff, anyway?  There you go.  You gotta go to school to understand what that is, and why it is important.

Trump types (we've got to come up with a name for them) probably look at Hillary C, and shudder.  There's a ton of paperwork waiting to be created, they're probably thinking.  They really, really want the olden days back, when you could make a buck for a few years, before someone realizes that you're serving crap in your new restaurant.  All the lessons they have learned, about making a fast buck, all for nothing.

I have learned a great deal about how an honest County government saves foolish citizens from themselves.  It's like the people say about Obamacare: PLEASE allow me to get sick.  I don't need insurance, never did, never will.  The miserable fact is that the number of those who do need medical insurance are difficult to predict.

Actually, they're not that difficult.  If the insurance companies knew * who drank to excess, * who smoked in excess, * who had a unhealthy body weight, etc, they could easily set differential premiums for people based on their lifestyles.  But you can easily imagine that Congress would disallow that practice, just as it has declared that different car insurance rates should not be allowed for guys and girls, despite the fact that girls are evidently much safer drivers.  I do not know the details, but under pressure from consumers, Congress tends to prefer equal rates for everyone.  (Perhaps it is set state by state.  I don't know.  But it is very, very bad.  It is terrible.  It is rigged.  You know something?)

The word ignorance has many meanings.

* Someone who does not know how things work, and why things are done.
* Someone who does not know how to behave in complex situations.
* Someone who does not know the reasons why certain rules and laws exist.
* Someone who does not know the benefits of having certain members of society.
* Someone who does not know how to respond to a statement that makes them mad.
* Someone who does not know how to show a little class.
* Someone who does not know how to bring up their kids to be decent human beings.
* Someone who thinks that it is nobody's business how their kids behave.

I can't pretend that a few years in college can rectify seventeen years of parental neglect; in fact, I know that they cannot.  On the other hand, I do know some classy kids who transcend the limitations of their subhuman parents, and I can only marvel.  But there is a lot more good in the world than the ignorant can recognize, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Arch

Teen Suicide

Recently, I read in the news that a teen couple had made a suicide pact, and carried it out at an idyllic location not far from where I live.  Certainly, people commit suicide all the time, even if often it is not made a fuss of in the media; at one time, TV news never hesitated to make hay with such incidents, and kept it in the limelight for weeks.

I don't know who the young people in this incident are, but I am sorrowful in the abstract, and that's the way I want to keep it.  How are we to console the parents?  Wouldn't the parents feel that all their friends and neighbors would be critical of them as a matter of course?  Wouldn't we be critical; wouldn't we suspect that there must have been something someone could do to head this crisis off at the pass?  This horrible sense of being out of control is getting to be a dull roar in the background, and here we are, thinking that a dull roar is preferable to a howling alarm.

First of all, we have to remember that in 2016, the diversity among our friends and neighbors, even in our almost comically racially homogeneous region, is far greater than ever before in its history.  Even in a little township that consists entirely of white, middle-class families, the family cultures vary widely from one family to the next.  In one home, the family lovingly brings up their kids, but places high expectations on them.  In another, the kids grow up without much interference from their parents, but they place high expectations on themselves, determined to do better than the old folks.  It's almost impossible to get a feel for the psychodynamics of the home environment of a given family; I can hardly describe the psychodynamics of my own home objectively.

More, young people these days have a difficult time handling the difference between how they deal with modern technology and life, and how their parents do it--or don't do it.  Some kids are patient with the dysfunctionality and the technophobia of their parents, others are the opposite: they deplore how their parents interact with technology.  But even the seeds of how a child responds to new problems with culture and family, are found in the way they were brought up as infants: how they were handled when they threw a tantrum in the grocery store; how the parents responded to "unreasonable" requests from the kids, for a car at age sixteen, or new sneakers, or whatever.  And not least, the way the self-worth of a young person influences his interaction with his peers, especially romantic prospects, and how a young man responds to emotional demands from someone he loves is very complex.  And also, our desire to be generous with our support is at war with how much we feel we can offer without being irresponsible in financially hard times.

No parent can be certain that they have brought up their kids in such a way that the kid, or kids, can be comfortable with coming to them with a problem under all circumstances.  If that is the case with you, just be happy; you are very lucky.  If that is not the case, you have to try to move the situation in the right direction, but I have no words of advice!  You have to learn this from your own parents, and if you survived your childhood in spite of your parents, then it will be a supreme effort to develop a better model of parenting on your own.  On the other hand, if you were lucky to have a good model, you must ask yourself whether your children were enough like you and your siblings for this model to work!

Those who think seriously about being effective parents are probably not the ones whose children face tragedy, but we live in troubled times.  Part of what we have to do is to suffer tragedy gracefully, which is a tall order.

Arch

Let's Not Be Quick To Judge

The news on NPR this morning included that in many workplaces, tension was mounting over political differences among the employees.  Perhaps because a college is largely stratified in such a way that people of wildly different political opinions are rarely thrown together to the point of arguments arising, here at our institution things have not got out of hand.  We academics love to argue, certainly, but we've also learned, over the years, to avoid being unnecessarily harsh in our political criticism.

At the outset, of course, when the GOP was still working on selecting their candidate, I was so certain that Trump patently did not have the credentials to be given the nomination that I ignored the entire primary season, except to entertain myself with ridicule for the GOP field.  At that time, all Republicans, their candidates for nomination, and the horses they rode in on were all equal recipients of my scorn.

But now, as you know, everyone has his back against the wall: many Democrats and liberals, who bought into the anti-Hillary propaganda funded by the Koch brothers, and other conservative die-hards of the My Party, Right or Wrong persuasion.  Hillary Clinton is too friendly towards Wall Street for the comfort of many liberals, certainly for the comfort of those who supported Bernie Sanders.  Bernie wanted to reduce Income Inequality, which is something that is apparently not a priority with Hillary Clinton.  Clinton wants less gun violence, better education and health care, she wants to put limits on what sorts of tricks Business pulls on the population and the environment, but she appears not to be interested in Income Equality per se.  If I were a conservative, this would be great news for me.

Meanwhile, Trump does not offer any specifics to fiscal conservatives.  He promises drastically reducing certain sorts of Government services, but it is difficult to be confident about his ability to do so without any hints about how he would proceed.  But he's a businessman, and he does not want to give away his strategy at this point, for fear of precipitating pre-emptive moves from his targets.  He pretends to be a populist, and most low-income conservatives are buying into it, but thus far he has not shown any actions in support of workers, or the small businessman.  This is the problem with Competition: it's each man for himself.

Trump has certainly, however, shown support for racism and prejudice, and lots of Republicans seem to be saying: Now, that's what I REALLY like!  But others seem to be less enthusiastic.  After several decades of waning racism (during which we were all tricked into making friends among those of other races!), in many quarters it must feel uncomfortable being overtly racist.

There are many conservatives who will vote for Trump next week who will do so extremely reluctantly.  Many decent people among our friends will do so (i.e., vote Trump), not because they have adopted Trump's values, but because of party loyalty, and residual suspicion of Clinton's motives.  Because of the power of the financial resources of the far Right: the Koch Brothers, and others who are too clever to get their names into the media, in addition to shallow idiots trying their best to support the conservative cause, there have to be some very clever people working alongside them, but more subtly.  Despite the missteps of the Fox Newsniks, there is a certain amount of headway they have made, which make things very difficult for Hillary Clinton.  At this time, particularly, it is probably not worth the cost to turn our hostility against everyone who displays a Trump sign on their lawn; some of them really have no alternative, at least in their own minds.  The more hostility we encourage this season, the worse the emotional and psychological and social damage we will have to endure for years to come.  Whether Hillary Clinton wins or loses, we're going to have to stockpile tons of Prozac to survive the rest of this decade.  And alienating all our conservative friends is not going to help.  It's time to give up aggravating those whose politics are odds with ours, just to make us feel better; it's going to make us feel worse very soon.  Just my opinion.

Arch

Smoke, Mirrors, Ineptitude, Misdirection, Disinformation, and General Foolishness

Keep calm, and—this is not something I would say every day—ignore the news for the next week.

Intentionally to confuse people, or unintentionally because they're getting excited, various people are shooting news stories from the hip.  The most recent one is that a congressman, Anthony Wiener Weiner, who was disgraced a couple of years ago, has happened to mention Hillary Clinton in some of his emails.  The FBI had gotten permission to impound his personal computer, on which there were records of inappropriate sexual communication with underage kids at the time he was under investigation.  And now some of the hyperactive zombies in the Justice Department want to look through these e-mails to see whether there has been more wrong doing.

So a Federal Judge must now decide whether to allow the FBI to go prospecting in this dubious source of information, to see whether there might be some little juicy morsel that might discredit Hillary Clinton.  Oo, might she have been a party to Anthony Wiener Weiner's sexual escapades?  Remember how the media wallowed in the Monica Lewinsky scandal?  It appears that some people—not friends of Hillary Clinton, for certain—want to make sure that they can dig up some dirt on the Democratic Presidential nominee, so that she can compete with Donald Trump at the same level.  Leveling the playing field, as it were.

Now, this is unfair, but I can't really see anything popping up that could change my mind about which candidate to vote for; I could say the same for most of my liberal friends, and most Democrats: not only is Hillary a more moderate, and a more dependable candidate for President than we have fielded for many years—and we have fielded some amazing people—but Trump is somebody that even the GOP does not want.  But a few conservatives are out of the loop, and they are in a panic about what four more years of Democrats in the White House would do for the Conservative Cause.  They think the Democrats would plant some rabid liberal on the Supreme Court who would destroy the country.  The only liberals on the Supreme Court who were that determined to make changes succeeded in desegregating the schools, and making the social reforms of the Sixties, which gave all minorities the same rights as Whites.  Reading between the lines of the Trump campaign, these reforms are perceived to be the roots of everything that conservative, racist white males in the Trump camp do not like about America today.  These reforms give teeth to the human rights campaigns that America nags other nations with, or has, in the last several decades.  If they were reversed, racists and sexists throughout the World and at home could rest easy, and male bullies everywhere could get back their own, and we would not have to fight any wars to liberate the oppressed.  We would be back to the 19th century, when things were a lot better, according to the Neanderthals in the Trump Camp, and secretly the slimy underbelly of the GOP.  Progress never sat easy with people of low intelligence.

Some kooks, of course, are upset with marriage equality, transgender rights, etc.  More people are anxious about the prospect of higher taxes for Businesses.  And still others are in a tizzy about the various oil pipelines whose construction are being fought.  Shell wants to dig under the Ohio River.  So, like never before, desperate conservatives and big businesses are probably leaning on their moles in the FBI to hurry up and do something.

I really don't care at this point.  My sanity is worth more than any heroic efforts to get to the bottom of this sort of rumor mongering.  I for one am ignoring all this nonsense, though other liberals out there are hyperventilating!  My advice to my readers is: chill out.  It's going to be a crazy seven days, but we hope that the canvassing has proceeded as planned.  It is possible that the people who would normally have gone door-to-door were the Bernie supporters, and so the get out the vote effort is going to be a little feeble.  So, whatever you do in the direction of keeping calm is good, provided it doesn't keep you from mobilizing your friends to go out and vote on election day.  If everyone votes, Hillary will defeat Trump.  If the democrats stay home, anything can happen.

Arch

A detailed opinion and lots of information about the Clinton Emails

This post by Ken Crossland goes through a lot of detailed thinking about Hillary Clinton's e-mail controversy.  The information is from the FBI, but his analysis is sympathetic to Hillary Clinton.

If you hate Clinton quite apart from the e-mail problems, this information is hardly likely to make you change your mind.  On the other hand, if the e-mail scandal is the only reason you're suspicious of her, this might alleviate your annoyance.

There is some information about her speeches at Lehman Brothers.  At a quick look, it seems as though she said that with the changing times, new legislation is needed to address new problems and potential abuses on Wall Street, and knowledgeable people from Lehman Brothers should be involved in creating it.  Whether she invited them to write this legislation is still not clear; that would be exactly what we deplore: lobbyists writing legislation for lazy lawmakers.

Arch

More about keeping healthy

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I'm a member of Consumer Reports, so they occasionally put clickbait on my Facebook page; but as you can imagine, Consumer Reports clickbait is more like Kale than Dessert.

This particular post was about how to keep healthy as you grow older.  But, reading through, many of the pointers they give make sense for everybody.  I want to draw your attention to some of these that are particularly important, or particularly easy to do.

Vitamins.  These substances help with a lot of body tasks, and among them fighting infections, and bouncing back from being sick.  However: do not take mega-doses of vitamin supplements.  Some of these vitamins only work in tiny quantities.  Having said that, if you have terrible eating habits, by all means take a vitamin supplement.  But select one that gives you the Recommended Daily Allowance, or less.  If they say: "200% of the US RDA!!!" run away!

The better thing to do is to eat a variety of vegetables and fruits.  In these days, experts are recommending that you eat foods with a variety of different colors!  It so happens that this plan gets you a good variety of vitamins and minerals.  (If you can afford it, choose organic veggies, but not all of us can.)

Alcohol.  A drink a day is all that is recommended; and don't start drinking just because it is supposed to be healthy.  A drink a day is probably too many for smaller-built people.  You can easily check out why too much alcohol is bad for your health.

Smoking.  There are two reasons for quitting: saving your lungs, and lowering your nicotine intake.  Smoking in your youth makes your older years a torture.

Sleep.  I should have mentioned this earlier.  Getting at least 6 hours of sleep a day is said to vastly increase the body's ability to heal and bounce back.

Friendships.  As you grow older, your friends move away, some of them to the great Ranch In The Sky, and it is important to make new friends, and keep up with them!  (That's one advantage of Facebook, but unfortunately Facebook is more interested in things that aren't so useful to us...)  The article also talks about hugs.  I totally believe in hugs, but it is kinda difficult to talk about hugs with people you don't really know; like you can't walk up to, say, Joe Biden, and ask for a hug.  Or you can, but ... I am not suggesting that you go overboard, and try to make friends 24/7.  The art of friendship cannot be learned from a single blog-post.  Cultivate the art of being interested in subjects that might interest your future friends and acquaintances, but be honest about topics that leave you completely cold.

For my older readers: keep engaged with the world around you, and avoid getting too upset at every little social change.  The less engaged you are, the more upset you're going to get when you do learn something unpleasant about what's going on in the world.  Television, of course, is not the best way to keep engaged at all, unless you're very selective.  After having had no television for close to 15 years, we decided to get Cable, just to watch the Olympics.  And now we still have Cable, but we find ourselves watching very little TV; less than 3 hours a week.

[Added later:
These pieces of advice may seem as though we--our family--are sort of model citizens.  Actually we're pretty average; it's just that I blog about everything.  I strongly advocate blogging as a means of staying on the straight and narrow, especially if you're a teacher.  Writing about things go a long way towards clarifying ideas for the writer, regardless of whether the writing is being read by anyone.]

Arch, in a good mood this morning.

Your guide to getting sick

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Now, bear in mind that I'm not a medical professional.  But in these days of information overload, people get intimidated into outsourcing all their health decisions to experts.  If only you knew just a little about how these things work, you could head off a lot of simple health problems before they get serious.

Bacteria.  These guys have been around a lot longer than we have; millions of years.  They're one-cell creatures, and they increase by dividing in half, and growing.  Bear in mind that they are already in your body, and on your body: your face, your hands, etc, and do not cause a problem under ordinary conditions.

Luckily for us, they tend to multiply fast only when conditions are right.  On your face, for instance, they're not multiplying; for various reasons they're growing too slowly to bother you.  They usually multiply like crazy when we have been weakened by something: e.g. the body is concerned with an injury, or we've been weakened by another infection, or you're allergic to something, which triggers off a behavior that makes it appear as if your body is sick.

The times when we have to worry about bacteria is when they begin to grow very fast.  This happens usually in the mucous membrane: inside your throat, your alimentary canal, your eyes, your nasal passage, and other places where your skin is like the inside of your cheek: smooth and moist.  Oh, and don't forget your sinuses. These are just holes in your skull, lined with mucus, and connected with your nose, and if they get stuffed up, they become a sort of Woodstock festival for bacteria.

Mucous membrane.  All our orifices are lined with this stuff, which continually sheets outward, carrying bacteria and dust and other particles out of the body.  When it is healthy, the slimy layer is thin and wet.  In contrast, when we've got a cold, sometimes the slimy layer gets thick and sluggish, and that's not good.  Bacteria can get comfortable in thick, sludgy mucous membrane, and multiply like crazy.

Viruses.  These are things very much smaller than bacteria, and they don't even have cells, and they don't have proper DNA.  They're short-lived.  And they multiply by forcing our own cells to make copies of them, because they don't have cells.  Viruses do not live on our bodies normally (as far as I know); they waft in on some evil breeze, or we pick them up on some store counter or bathroom faucet, and without thinking, carry them to our eyes or mouth or nose, and they start to work bullying our cells into making copies of them.  Usually, this makes the victim start sneezing and coughing, because viruses have taken over the mucous membrane, and initially the body tries to shake them off by increasing the flow, which is great, as long as you get rid of the virus-laden mucus safely.  Incidentally, if it gets down into your stomach, that's usually fine.  The stomach has a lot of acid, which is pretty good at frying the viruses and bacteria.  (Some unfortunate people have very sensitive stomachs, and too much mucus gives them indigestion, so look out for that.)

The important thing is to keep getting rid of the mucus.  But all that moisture is leaving the body, and you're getting dried out.  If you don't drink a lot of water at this stage, your mucous membrane is going to get: what?  Thick and sludgy.  Now this thick, clotted mucous membrane is a great place for bacteria to move into.  They've been watching the progress of the virus with great interest, and like carpetbaggers, they come in and start multiplying in the slow-moving mucous membrane.

Another phenomenon that takes place after viruses and bacteria, or an allergy, has been going on for some time is that you get a cough.  Sometimes coughing is caused by the body trying to get rid of mucus in your bronchial tubes (the tubes leading from the nose to the lungs).  Other times, it is caused by mucus dripping on a sensitive spot in the back of your throat, called post-nasal drip.  (In all cases, a cough syrup that (a) thins the mucus, to make it easier to cough, and (b) raises the trigger level that makes you cough, is a good thing.)

So, the take-away is: drinking sufficient water keeps your mucus layer thin and flowing, which is good.  If your mucus starts getting thick and clotted, drink water to help thin it down.  If you have a very aggressive heating system, such as with a forced-air central heater, drink water to offset the drying-out of your nasal passages, or the bacteria already there will start to multiply.  If you have a cough, by all means take a cough mixture, and back it up with a steady flow of water, to help the cough syrup thin your mucus.

A long hot shower helps most people to thin the mucous membrane.  During a cold is a time when you're least interested in a shower, but take one anyway; most people feel better after one.  Brushing your teeth also helps thin your mucous, I don't know why.  A visit to the seashore, or to the foot of a waterfall, helps make your mucus flow.  Be considerate, and blow your nose, and get rid of your phlegm somewhere it will not bother other people!

If you have a cough, drink a lot of water (within reason, of course; drinking gallons can make you throw up).  Keep water by your bedside, and sip it all night long, and a little hard candy might help.

In case you get the impression that I'm pushing water in all circumstances, well, you would be right.  As I said, gallons and gallons of water is not needed.  But a little more water than you would normally drink is good.  And a lot more water is better!

If you have medical conditions that need keeping an eye on, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, and even a heart condition, these all affect what things make sense to do and what things don't.  For instance, certain cough syrups should not be taken by those with any of those three conditions.  Anything with too much salt is contraindicated if you have high blood pressure, which is a pity, because salt makes bacteria unhappy, and unable to multiply rapidly.  So if you have some medical condition, check with your doctor, and remember how he or she responded, and much the same advice you were given this time should work in the future.

Arch

The communication gap is revealing itself

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For close on half a century, the phenomenon of men bullying women, starting from the egregious physical abuse some men inflicted on their women: wives, daughters, and sometimes mothers, and occasionally, quite unrelated women, to the sneaky innuendos thrown back and forth when men talk about women behind their backs, sexual abuse has gradually come to the forefront of public discussion, thanks to the casually effective methods of Donald Trump.

It's unfortunate that all these actions and activities are classified under the same heading.  To many women, all this is objectionable, and should carry the death penalty if convicted.  I personally believe that some of these behaviors are deplorable, but it would get a lot more deplorable if it is raised to the stature of a felony.  Without embarking on a war-of-the-sexes style diatribe, I suspect that women make fun of men behind their backs, and though this is deplorable, we have to face the fact that some girls will be girls, just as some boys will be boys.  The refusal to bring the level of abuse into the discussion, and the insistence on taking every perceived instance of abuse into equal consideration is threatening the whole concept of abuse.

Many of the antics that have emerged as escapades that Donald Trump reports, (some of which are probably wishful thinking, simply the sort of imaginative bragging that sixth graders indulge in while watching some of their buddies smoking behind the garden shed) can be dismissed as simply fantasies. At one time, he was rich enough for people to believe that perhaps he was able to grope women the way lots of guys imagine themselves groping famous actresses or models.  But now, having listened to Trump describe his fantasies, it becomes increasingly clear that the number of ladies that fell under his spell were fewer than a couple of dozen.  Some of the escapades involving unwilling women, if true, should make anyone think twice of considering Trump's candidacy seriously.  Either way, the machine of the GOP nominating process is clearly and utterly broken.  After several months of the core members of the Republican Party choking on their endorsements of Mr. Trump, the worms have turned, and they seem to think that the Party has suffered enough humiliation.  The candidacy is now supported exclusively by Trump's own campaign machine, and the GOP appears no longer to participate in trying to enable their Presidential candidate to move forward to Election Day.  Being a party which places a premium of matters of "honor", they undoubtedly feel this embarrassment keenly.

In a recent interview with Democracy Now, Noam Chomsky, the legendary linguist and political commentator, explained what has happened to the GOP.  Over the decades since the Sixties, the GOP has gained the support of sufficiently many blue-collar workers to win elections once in a while.  But now they have been unable to get enough support for the main political interests, and so they have gone with a candidate who focuses on peripheral issues of racism and sexism, and white identity politics.  The ideologically fragmented leaders of the GOP have been mixed about their core values; racism, sexism, white identity politics, xenophobia have never been core values of the party leadership, even if they were occasionally taken out for an airing when expedient.

I was surprised to see Donald Trump's apparent softening stance on certain divisive issues, and even more surprised to hear how one of his spin doctors explained it.  He hasn't changed his position, I think she was reported as saying, but rather that he only changed the language he was using.  That was too funny; Trump's somewhat uncritical fans would probably find that amusing!  Trump is learning to use euphemisms.

Asking Trump whether he had abused women is probably not appropriate.  I understand that Anderson Cooper was probably frustrated by Trump's refusal to answer the questions, and his casually insolent attitude on the debate floor, but if we continually put Trump on the spot about things that have little to do with taking on the Presidency (but admittedly, a lot to do with impeachment opportunities in a later year), Trump is going to keep making the debates sound sillier and sillier.  Trump does not want debates; he's terrible at them, and he knows it.

All parties seem to be bent on escalating the circus factor in this election, which unfortunately plays into the hand of the political outsiders, namely Trump and his followers, who view the prospect of destroying Washington with gleeful anticipation.  But it looks very much as if they will not get the opportunity, provided people actually vote against him.  (That is sort of a tautology, but the enormous number of people who do not want Trump in the Presidency is one number, but the number of people who will vote for Hillary Clinton is another number entirely.  A smaller number, unfortunately.)

Arch

Where have they gone? Calculators

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Modern 4-function calculator

Back in the good old forties and fifties (and no, I wasn't around, he asserted defensively), people could do mathematics in their heads.  My grandmother, for instance, knew her multiplication tables up to 16× for example 16×12 = 192, and so on.  In school, my generation learned up to the 12× tables, but now I believe the standard is to teach up to 10× in around Grade 3, and stop.  Multiplication is viewed by a large proportion of people as the worst thing in mathematics, and among some American citizens, "I can't do math!" actually means "I have trouble multiplying."  (They will deny this, but that is true.)  Some elementary school teachers, however, still teach multiplication tables beyond multiplying by 10, under the mistaken belief that they're teaching higher math.  It's certainly better than just teaching up to only the 10-times table, and getting kids onto calculators right away.  But it certainly isn't higher mathematics.

Scientific Calculator of 1980s vintage

Then, in the eighties, inexpensive hand calculators began to find their way into the classroom.  There was some resistance, because calculator use was considered to get in the way of learning multiplication.  In about half the cases, students who used calculators exclusively for multiplying didn't suffer much conceptual shortfalls.  To explain: in math, some ideas don't really get through into your brain (your cognitive structures, as we say) unless you have some special mathematical experiences.  It was long thought that having a lot of multiplication facts to draw on was important.  But some kids sailed through not having these.  (They still don't know what 9×7 is, but that doesn't get in their way.)  But other kids do seem to keep stumbling around forever, never being able to really connect with the math they're being taught, or until they practice doing mental math.  So we don't know whether it is a matter of confidence, or some cognitive principle.  (I am not an expert.)

Graphing Calculator

By the time the nineties arrived, there were not only those little arithmetical four-function calculators that you could get for free, but there were graphing calculators, that could get you quick approximate calculus results.  They could find the area under a parabola, etc.  They could actually sketch a parabola, or a sine curve.  Just at about this time, smart cell phones were becoming affordable to everyone, and, to add insult to injury, some of the better ones actually had built-in basic calculators!

From the point of view of math teachers, these sophisticated calculators were a hindrance to testing.  If you're trying to find out whether your students could use some basic, important methods to sketch a certain type of graph, letting them use a clever calculator to sketch the graph defeats the purpose.  At this point it is as well to dispel some confusions about this whole thing.  Some parents (and some silly teachers) ask the question: when will students need to sketch so many damn graphs?  The answer is: the curve-sketching we test them with tells us whether they have understood the connection between certain calculations they do, and their geometrical implications.  It is a low-level skill that paves the way for fluent use of calculus and algebra.  A truck driver need not know how to replace a brake pad.  But there are certain benefits to knowing those things.  A common Texas Instruments calculator that had some of these capabilities cost merely around $90 at about this time.

My own solution to this problem was to split the test into two parts, and have one part completely without any sort of electronic aids, and the other part with free use of basic calculators.  Other teachers have gone a different route: they allow calculators on every test, but make the tests computationally challenging.  Yet other teachers use other approaches; they all have their advantages and their disadvantages.

A few years later, calculators were invented that could actually do symbolic mathematics.  Symbolic mathematics is what you do when you're factoring a polynomial, or solving an equation exactly; for instance finding x if you're given that x³ + 35x = 12x².  (The answer is that x could be 5, 7, or 0.)  The techniques for programming calculators to solve problems like this, and far more sophisticated problems, was developed in the eighties and nineties first for large computers, and then for even sophisticated handheld calculators.  Some of these calculators (that cost around $200) are amazing, but few students know how to use them, and I had quite a difficult time trying to figure out how to test students in upper-level courses, when they insisted that they needed to use their nuclear-powered calculators on their tests.

Then, of course, the Iphone and Android phones made an appearance, and Google (who are the driving force behind the Android system) opened up their system to anyone who wished to create application programs to install on the phones.  People stopped calling them application programs, and called them Apps, and anyone with a phone could actually create them.  Many of them are free, but of course they (the apps) try to sell you all sorts of merchandise, which you could easily buy by accident, if you're not careful.  So now, phones were becoming able to perform the sorts of graphing calculations that expensive calculators could do in the nineties.  Furthermore, Casio began to release a truly inexpensive Scientific Calculator that could do most sorts of calculations, including trigonometric and logarithmic calculations, for just about $12.  The expensive Texas Instruments, and Casio programmable calculators could still do some calculations that involved matrix algebra and other fancy math that the inexpensive Casio could not quite handle, but the fact that most of what a Casio Scientific could do, a phone could also do, brings us to the next giant leap.

Several Internet sites, notably Google and Wolfram Mathematica, offered the service of doing any calculation on demand.  You could just go on the site and ask: Solve x^3 + 35x = 12x^2, and it would actually give you the answer!  Let's try this now:

On Google, too, the query Solve x^3 + 35x = 12x^2 takes you to a website or two where the problem is solved in great detail, which is certainly impressive.  (Other suggested websites are places where x^3, and 35x, and so on are present in various paragraphs, which is obviously useless.

In other words, if you have Internet access, it appears that you don't need to have a scientific calculator, most of the time.  I'm not going to chase down some of the chains of implications that that observation could lead to.  But there certainly are some interesting observations we can make.

Doing mathematics is a skill.  People who are good at it have learned procedures, and seen examples where various problems have been solved, so they're able to solve a variety of new mathematical problems by joining the dots.  A calculator does the same thing, and in addition is able to remember various mathematical bits of data: for instance, how to find  sin(17π) exactly.  This is all programmed permanently into the electronic chip that is the heart of the calculator, and it will never forget it.  So this could come in handy for someone who happens to need that information.

But now, even if these capabilities are not programmed into smart phones, you can access the Internet through them, and get the information via a search engine, or a mathematical website.  Communication is taking over some of the tasks for which we used computational technology.  It is a distant cousin of "It isn't what you know, but who you know!"  To be absolutely precise: it doesn't matter if you don't know the information, provided you can find it on the Web.

As you will have noticed, the development of new, sophisticated calculators has ground to a halt.  New fancy phones, however, and being put on sale every five minutes.  Most people use the phones for entertainment (e.g. texting a friend while they're bored riding an elevator--and the boredom tolerance of young people is pretty low).

So, the most fancy calculators available today are not much more capable than calculators of 20 years ago.  (There might be a few, but something tells me that if they're not being aggressively marketed, they probably don't exist, or are out of the reach of typical citizens.)  On the other hand, if you have a conventional computer, e.g. a Windows 7 or more recent type, it is possible to get software such as Wolfram Mathematica, or Maple, for around $700, which is very, very powerful.  I mean that they can answer questions that most of us don't even know how to ask.  For instance, Wolfram Mathematica attempts to answer almost any question, e.g. what is the latitude of Tegucigalpa.

This is, in principle, a distant cousin of Distributed Computing, where a problem is solved by a system of several interlinked computers, each working on an aspect of a computation, and requesting intermediate results from whichever computer has obtained it already.  As long as there are locations on the Internet (the Internet is basically a network of computers; everything you get from it is sitting on some hard drive somewhere) that are willing to share their information, you could ask for it, instead of owning a little piece of hardware that will figure it out as needed.

For the specialist, however, dedicated mathematical tools are still useful.  But there's no real need, presently, for having mobile devices that can compute for you; most of the time, you can do the calculations at your desk.  Field engineers, I suppose, could use a combination of mobile browsers and conventional pocket calculators for their needs, so we can expect that pocket calculators will continue to not be developed very aggressively in the foreseeable future.

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We all need to calm down. It's embarassing, but not the end (yet)

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Wherever I look on the Internet, once again I see posts (1) vilifying Trump, (2) vilifying Hillary Clinton, (3) vilifying Jill Stein, (4) vilifying Gary Johnson, (5) Vilifying Barack Obama, (5) vilifying Mitch O' Connell, and so on.

Talking about low bars, this is easy, folks; it doesn't take a lot to vilify all these people, because they have been acting foolishly for a couple of years, and it's sort of Click Bait, really, to offer yet another diatribe against people who have been nihilipilificated umpteen times (without showing any embarrassment, withal; it has become too common).

But there is a new troublesome tone to all this private (and commercial) propaganda: people across the USA are actually getting nervous about (1) the outcome of the elections, and (2) how much damage each of these supposedly dangerous people can cause.  Well, certainly our checks and balances are not perfect, as 20 years of Republicans in the White House have shown us: if the Supreme Court supports the GOP, it can get away with quite a lot.  But still, it is my suspicion that Trump has sought the Presidency for just a few reasons, chief among which is that he wants to repeal the (to him) burdensome estate tax that will wear down the value of the inheritance that Melania and the kids will get.  To this end, he is enduring all these insults, and he's probably telling the family, "Don't you forget it. I ate a lot of $#!+ to make sure you guys get to keep my ill-gotten gains!"  Unfortunately, Trump's reading level and attention span is probably a little too low to actually understand some of the writing that has come through reviling him.

Once again, ---and if I'm wrong, I will edit this post in retrospect--- politics should not be made into an exhausting, expensive, frustrating responsibility that doesn't go away 24-7.  It should be something we can do thoughtfully, discussing with our friends and acquaintances, with whom we can disagree without raised voices, okay, maybe even blog about it at leisure.  If I get my hands on the people who made politics into this train wreck in slow motion, I will inflict a slow, painful death on them.

Talk to those who feel like you do.  Be open to the arguments of those on the other side, who are honestly just as unhappy as you are, because their champion is AWOL.  Give them just one or two arguments why you do not support their man (or woman).  Here's why I do not support some of these other candidates.

Gary Johnson.  This fellow sounds like a very reasonable man, but I do not like his plank to privatize public education.  I also do not like the general principle of eliminating taxes altogether, or even establishing a flat tax rate.  I could be made to support simplifying the tax code, but Johnson wants to go much further.  This will simply stand in the way of legislation that is far more urgent.

Jill Stein.  If not for the vaccination problem (go look it up) and her lack of politically experienced advisors, she might get my vote.  But those important tiles are missing from her space shuttle.

So, panic does not seem to be a useful road to take.  It is undignified, and unproductive.  Relax, and help with getting the vote out.  The larger the turnout, the less likely we're going to get an idiot in the White House.  We have about a month.

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The Election Business

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Oh Jeeze.

It used to be so much simpler to stand for election.  I wonder how much Lincoln spent on his campaign, or how much Woodrow Wilson spent.

Consider how much anguish we feel about this election, the drama, the vitriol, the stupidity, the videos, the inanities we must deplore, the numerous polls so assiduously deconstructed for us, the rumors about poor health, the complaints about being unfriendly to the pestilential press.  The debates, the blogs, the ...  AAAAAAAAAARGH!

The money is almost the least of it.  Every succeeding election is presented as the election that will perhaps allow future elections to be held.  The war to end all wars.  A referendum on whether the political process is dead.  A desperate poll on whether the American Way is The Right Way.  Whether the American Dream has died.  Whether This Planet Will Survive.

Listen kids.  The quadrennial Presidential Election is simply one about who will be the President, and Vice President, for the next four years.  It should not be about the future of the planet.  It is not about the future of the planet.

Having said that, I have to observe that the systemic changes in the political process by the GOP has given a sense of desperation to the process, which has actually backfired on them.  By various means (not least that of pretending that being sophisticated about national politics was something that the crafty Democrats do to misguide the population), gerrymandering, stacking the Supreme Court, fooling with the tax code, enabling money in politics via the People United thing, all these things have brought us to this escalating sense of desperation that we feel today.  And brought the GOP a presidential candidate that they do not like.  Ironically, we're not in a position to savor the irony, because the joke is on everyone.  We now have to get out and beat the bushes for those who will vote in November.  Why can't we just peacefully vote, and then come home and have a beer?  Why must we all be active members of the political machine?  Why must we all chip in $15 to help defeat ... whomever?  But no.  Even Al Franken wants us to work like hell until November.  But he doesn't realize that we can't stop then either.

And it isn't as though the desperation will subside after the election is over.  It will be strife for the foreseeable future.  There will be no weekend.  It will be election season from now until forever, AND WE WILL LOSE EVERY TIME.

Only one force could bring us to this state.  That force is Business.  It is in the interest of some business or other---very likely many businesses---that the political process should be in permanent overdrive. Not a day goes by that the Media does not whine that Hillary Clinton doesn't provide them with more sensational fodder.  Business is considered a powerful force for good.  But it is a powerful force for anxiety and fear.  And a powerful force for pissing me off.

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This Could Ease Your Tax Resentment

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Almost all the conservatives I know (Libertarians, and former Republicans) have their anger about paying taxes as their central gripe.  In other words, almost all conservatives are fiscal conservatives, and they encourage each other with various tropes (I'm not absolutely sure what that means, but I believe that they're common misconceptions), such as ... OK, I deleted that, so as not to set off my easily distractible readers.

You rarely learn about the resources the various levels of government provide unless --and until-- you work in the public sector, or you have a wife who works in the public sector.  So here's a brief crib sheet for all of you.  My wife (shh, don't tell anyone) is the grants manager of a rural county, and so she is more familiar with federal grants that may be applied for by deserving municipalities, to help them with their numerous projects. This list will be heavy on things that help the poor.  Keep track of how many of these things a wealthy citizen could do by himself, or with the cooperation of like-minded fat cats!  Not many, you will find.

One thing poor municipalities need help with are roads, bridges, water and sewage.  These are probably the sorts of projects that even Rush Limbaugh would agree has to be done communally; no one is going to take care of their own sewage, except to link it to a public system that has been paid for with . . . what?  Taxes.  (If we did not pay taxes, we would have to send our sewage directly into the closest stream, rather than delay it by a few decades.  I can see even now some libertarians indignantly protesting that of course they would pay some taxes.)

Waste management is an important social responsibility.  Not everyone can afford a private landfill on their property; the local government has no alternative to using public lands for this purpose, and managing it as carefully as they can afford to.  This is often a bone of contention with many conservatives.  They would prefer that the waste facility should be located as far from their homes as possible, in which case they would also prefer that the least amount of public finances should be spent on them.  This is where Libertarians really have no fair answer to the problem: should the waste facility be located closest to the citizens least able to protest?  Another approach is to give it to some private business to handle, and in order to make money, they would do a good job of it!  But monopolies are dangerous, and that would seem to be a major point against such a solution.  So it falls to the government.

Every municipality has building codes, and zoning ordinances.  Conservatives are generally opposed to these sorts of restrictions--for themselves.  However, they're usually in favor of some sorts of controls over the crap that people on the wrong side of the tracks are allowed to put on their lots, especially if the said lots are visible from the roads that they travel on.  But enlightened conservatives are generally agreed that zoning is a good thing, even if particular ordinances might not really result in the environment they would prefer to have.  It is the municipality: the county, city or state that pays for the labor and the time of those who design the zoning ordinances, and those who enforce them.  There are rules about how a property may be divided up, to prevent a neighborhood from degenerating into a mass of fences separating miniscule* lots.  In which neighborhoods commercial development is allowed, and so on.

A major concern is emergency shelter.  Women fleeing spousal abuse, sometimes with their children, need both temporary shelter, and possibly long-term housing.  People being released from prison need shelter, and an address to give if seeking employment (and of course, we're rooting for them to find a job, and nobody wants to rent to them, and they're sometimes not welcome at home).  Elderly folk whose former employment was not sufficient to provide a home in their advanced old age need shelter, or housing assistance.  It could happen to anyone.

Drug addiction rehabilitation is now becoming an issue with so-called bipartisan support.  It is gradually emerging that addiction to Heroin can only be treated by prescribing precisely controlled doses of another related drug, which is only chemically addictive (but not psychologically addictive), and reducing the dose incredibly gradually.  For some patients, the expected treatment time is close to three years, during which the patient has to be constantly steered away from either total despair, or sometimes overconfidence, with demands to step up the rate of reduction, a bad step that invariably leads to relapse.

The legal system, in the case of the weaker members of society: women, children, and the elderly, must work in tandem with social services.  Restraint orders, parole, child abuse, foster care, all require full-time staff, who must be paid, supervised, and evaluated.  It is difficult to imagine the attitudes of moderate conservatives to these issues; some would like these problems to be handled by religious organizations, which I think is completely inappropriate, and would ultimately lead to proselytization of a particularly unhappy sort.  Others would blame the problem on general social malaise, claiming that the welfare state encourages the need for these services.  When affluent families unexpectedly find their members in need of these services, they're embarrassed, and keep it quiet.

Emergency Services need an enormous amount of coordinating.  Every year, new technology enables more efficient approaches to firefighting, emergency medical services, so that upgrading facilities and equipment is a major expense for each county.

Many of these projects are funded by Federal grants.  The grants are sent out through the State governments, which demand an opportunity to influence the flow of Federal money, after which they trickle down to the county level, after which the county assesses which of the numerous proposals they have received deserves funding.  Once the applications are written, they are sent back along the tube, to the state, and then to the Federal agency.  If a grant is approved, the state representative for the county usually rushes to announce the award, and to take credit!  (It is particularly embarrassing if the representative concerned is a fiscal conservative, and is opposed to paying for such projects with tax money in the first place.)

One of the problems with older cities is the proliferation of unsightly electrical lines along streets.  Relocating cables underground is usually effected by a partnership between private individuals and businesses, and city and county governments.  In principle, there is nothing to prevent private individuals from forming a consortium to negotiate with the utility companies to undertake the move, but one would expect that the County has a little more ability to negotiate a lower price for the project that a consortium of individuals would have.  The county would also have the resources to supervise the design of the project from the point of view of safety, and future planning.

Finally, planning is something the county does on behalf of numerous constituencies.  Water supply, schools and education, waste management, security, arts and entertainment, traffic management, rivers and pollution management, flood planning, geological survey, emergency management and evacuation plans.

Numerous other esoteric--in the sense of being far removed from public consciousness-- initiatives fall into the lap of county and local governments.  When money is tight, some of the most important initiatives are put on hold, because they are so far from the public eye that they are the ones least likely to be protested, and to have the least impact on the elected officials who must decide how to allocate the reduced funds.  This is fine, unless an unexpected emergency takes place, which would usually result in the officials losing their seats, and new, completely inexperienced replacements being elected in their place.  It is a tricky world in which we live.

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*Yes, I looked up the spelling.