Insights into Trump's Small Business Mentality

I was watching Morning Joe on MSNBC a few hours ago, and they were talking about some of the basic reasons why Trump could not get his head around his role as President.

Trump still thinks like a small businessman.  A small businessman has to view the world through the lens of cash-flow.  Cash-flow, that is, short-term income and expense balances, are usually not pressing concerns for large companies, but they are for small companies, like those Trump owns.  In those sorts of businesses, it is a zero-sum game; for someone to win, someone else has to lose.  If you're negotiating agreements with other countries, that mindset obviously will not work; all parties have to be convinced that everyone came away with a win.  Furthermore, Trump seems to feel that even if the US has succeeded in negotiating a wonderful win-win deal, that he has to convince his 'people' that he's the winner, and the other countries are losers.  This makes for unhappy relations with numerous foreign nations, that will come home to roost.

Trump is a very ungracious, mean man.  The small businessman in Trump comes naturally, because he always acts like a cornered raccoon, even if he isn't cornered (and he isn't a raccoon).  It could be a pose, in which case it is a very ungracious pose.  He must have viewed the international agreements of his predecessors, and thought to himself: They (the foreign governments) know that we're going to be nice.  We're too nice.  He thinks he's doing us a favor by showing the various regimes we have to negotiate with that we're not nice, and we're unreliable, and we do not keep our word, and we're capricious, changeful, and inconstant.  That helped him intimidate his antagonists when doing business: take this deal, or there might not be another one.  In foreign policy, in contrast, no president is forever; all any foreign government needs to do is to wait.

Watch the episode for yourselves.  I did not watch the whole thing, and there might be other insights that are helpful.  They're helpful in understanding Trump, and to see why Trump cannot grow out of his incompetence.  The habits and characteristics that have made him successful, in college, in business, and on TV, are not ones that help the US.  They will continue to ruin us.  He depends on disguising his fails with a glamorous scintillating cover.

Arch

A Look at Economics, Music of the Season, The Increasing Silliness of Washington

This post will be in three entirely separate sections, mostly unrelated.

Economics: A report of some thinking on this subject
I don't talk about Economics much, except to hurl insults at the discipline.  I have to confess that I have never studied the subject; I just peek in through the windows of it, and make faces.  But a recent article sheds a little light on where these fellows are coming from.  It gives a brief summary of the history of the subject, which helped me, and might help you.

Up to the time of the first Great Depression (The Great Depression), the article says, it was the so-called Marshallian Economics that held sway.  (I assume that this was the same Marshall of the Marshall Plan, which had something to do with --at least--American policies on foreign aid.) Added later: No, this was a different Marshall.

Around the time of the Depression, John Maynard Keynes's economic theories started receiving increased attention.  It was the ideas of this fellow that forms what is, to my mind, the dynamics of conventional economic thinking: how government intervention results in the response of the markets :  labor, goods, and money.  It remained the standard economics, and, the article says, continued to give good results until the Seventies.  Bear in mind that various things influence the interaction between the raw materials of economics: laws about the way banks are allowed to operate; invention of credit cards; the way gasoline is used, and so on.  Every once in a while, an economic theory can be expected to stop working the way it had been.

Around 1975, there were some new thinkers: Milton Friedman, who won a Nobel Prize, and a little later, Robert Lucas.  These guys pointed out some mistakes in the thinking of how the actions of individuals are sort of aggregated to predict how particular conditions will influence conditions in the future.  The main ideas are the same: changing a set of factors changes how they will increase and decrease, via a set of equations, or general principles.  It seemed that the connections were not quite accurate, and depended more on the government policies and the banks than was realized.  This was made clear in 2008, when the interaction of the banks and the insurance companies resulted in a serious crash.

Recently a whole lot of economists got into a huddle and produced, we are told, a set of fourteen papers, presented by Oxford University, called Rebuilding Economic Theory.  There are some basic ideas that we can understand vaguely, and I try to describe them below.

A major basic idea is to recognize every possible entity that affects economics: each consumer, each bank, each business, each stock, each economic policy decision, and so on, and consider them as sort of molecules in some container.  They are called agents.  This seems to borrow from the physics idea of statistical mechanics, which uses the individual motions of molecules to predict the gas laws, e.g. the behavior of pressure under temperature changes and compression.  We would have expected that this would be the obvious approach, but apparently they never got it right.

One theorist has pointed out four major problems with the way economists have been thinking, and he calls these The Four Horsemen of the Econocalypse.  The first is that the interaction between the agents cannot be simplified.  In physics, for example, we develop the gas laws by using a cubical box; then we divide the the molecules into exactly three equal groups, and assume that they go in three perpendicular directions, and then start using mathematics, and taking averages; a sequence of simplifications.  Anyhow, apparently the sort of simplification that they have been accustomed to doing will not work.  The second is that we cannot completely understand the world, just because new and unpredictable things are always happening.  The third is that the entire system will grow properties that the individual parts of the system do not have; for instance, even though individual drivers act in perfectly reasonable ways, their actions can add up to a traffic jam.  The fourth (and last, thank goodness) is that you can't use calculations that worked before, to solve the same problem when it happens again.  Assuming that this problem does not exist is called expecting ergodicity.  This is kind of obvious; people remember how things went the previous time, and opportunistically act in their own interest to take advantage.  If only people would behave like molecules, it would be a better world.  People are always figuring out the angles, such as buying stocks with their credit cards . . . have they no decency?

Some of the economists questioning the bases of economic theory and their methods point at the lack of insight into economics from other rational disciplines.  This has been my personal beef with it: I agree with these people, that economics has become more insular.  They point at the very small number of citations from other disciplines in economics journal articles (see chart at right).

Finally--and this is not going to give you much usable information; it just tells you what the recognized difficulties are--there is the notion of equilibrium, which is heavily used in physics, and even more heavily used, apparently, in economics.

For instance, suppose you take a sample of air, and then force it to occupy twice the volume.  (You have to imagine that it is in a piston, and then you pull the piston out to make the volume contained larger, which is a little counter-intuitive.)  What happens?  Of course you have to wait until the molecules of air stop fussing around and settle down, but this happens almost instantaneously.  Yes, the pressure is roughly halved.  But the point here is that we don't think twice about waiting until the molecules settle into a steady state.  Similarly with the water flowing down a stream: suppose the level upstream rises, and then stops rising.  For a while, while the stream waits for things to settle down, we notice only random sorts of things, and no real patterns.  Then, the situation starts settling into a steady pattern.  That's a quick outline of what we call equilibrium in physics.  In everyday parlance, equilibrium simply means balance; 'Please let me catch my breath, and regain my equilibrium!'  In physics, it means that the system has arrived at a steady state.

In economics, say these economical heretics, things actually never arrive at a steady state.  This throws the usual thinking of economists into a cocked hat.  Actually, a lot of economical argument I have heard is in terms of various things increasing and decreasing, which is definitely not a steady state picture, but, there is usually a background assumption of other things being equal.  This is all of a piece with that first unsimplifiability "horseman."

So, conventional economics is kind of broken.  But, as a particularly authoritative lady economist in the UK states, we are not trying to perfectly predict outcomes using economics; rather, we're trying to get some ballpark idea about how to respond to economic conditions just enough to avoid crises.  (Actually, this might not be what the woman said; I think I'm conflating a couple of different opinions from different people.)

But I expect that these economists will pretty soon come up with some approach in which they have great confidence.  Though I don't believe in the economic religion, I grudgingly admit that, however misguided they are, they are imaginative and clever fellows; their one major fault has, at least heretofore, been that they haven't taken advantage of ideas that originate from outside economics.  But I also know of the towering confidence in themselves that economists have, so it won't be long before we have a new approach from them, which will work well for at least a year.

Music of the Season!
I do not believe in Christmas in the sense that God yakkity yak blah blah.  Even my belief that Jesus was a historical figure is pushing the bounds of rationality.  But I have always enjoyed Christmas music and traditions, not because they make sense from a scientific point of view but because they are fun, and it doesn't make sense to reject something that makes for innocent fun.  (Bear in mind, though, that belief in Santa Claus in young children can pave the way for their adopting various other myths such as that ours is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.  Haha.)

When I say Christmas Music, I used to mean the Baroque classics such as Handel's Messiah and Bach's and Schutz's Christmas Oratorios, or even The Infancy of Christ, by Berlioz, from which I am only familiar with a couple of pieces.  Add to these some well-established Christmas hymns, and that formed my musical world for Christmas.  But, over the years, I have absorbed a taste for Christmas music by various celebrities, such as Julie Andrews, Leontine Price, Robert Goulet, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, and so on.  Then, eventually, I also adopted crazy gag Christmas music, of which the authoritative collections came from Dr. Demento.  Then, finally, I have added choral groups such as Chanticleer, the King's Singers, and the Osmond Family.

The question is how to sequence these songs; they don't all do equally well if Tom Lehrer's Christmas Carol is juxtaposed with something from Schutz.  (I mean, they do, if you want to surprise yourself, but not otherwise.)  So my strategy is to listen to the pop versions early in the season, around December 1st, because my spouse despises Christmas music any earlier, and certainly at other times of the year.  Then I listen to collections of carols, from the Robert Shaw Chorale, and so forth.  Then come carols from King's College, Cambridge, and other serious carol collections, and finally Messiah and other classical Christmas works, and on Christmas Eve, medieval and Elizabethan carols.

This year, I broke with this orderly plan, and just put five CDs in my changer, which dates from around 2000, and have it playing in random mode.  The problem with this is that you can't resume from where you stopped, and I don't like to put the thing on pause when we have to leave the house.  Also, the spouse dislikes not being able to hear an entire disk, because we're always interrupting the music.  Still, there is no particular pattern to my listening.

Most alarmingly, I don't seem to listen to music very much anymore, because it involves actually walking to the music system, loading it, and turning it on, etc.  I love music, but I love indolence even more.

Silliness of Washington: no signs of settling down to a steady state
I hate to comment on what comes out of Washington, (I mean D.C., and not the westerly state that borders Oregon to the North), simply because I don't want to influence my readers' take on which matters to take seriously, just in case it is based on some disinformation from the White House.

I think it is safe to assume that the Trump Administration does not take seriously the need to be factual about either its information, or its reasoning.  We have to depend on the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other sources of news, which are fairly reliable.  We can take a peek at CNN occasionally, but unfortunately they resort to spin, which is not a good thing to do in these miserable times; it is hard to tell what is fact, and what is opinion.  NPR and PBS are a little more reliable, but their tone of objectivity has disappeared, and we're hearing some very partisan reports coming out of there.  Sometimes it is difficult to give an objective report, because at a higher order of reportage, background assumptions have to be factored in.  If the reporters suspect that there is deliberate intention to deceive on the part of the White House, especially since the President is under investigation, that suspicion, unfortunately, destroys the objectivity of the report in an essential way.

The general information we get is that the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, has succeeded in completely destroying the credibility of the Trump Campaign, and hence the Trump White House.  In my mind, hiring Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer is tantamount to an admission of criminal activity, while also being an attempt to distract attention from himself, since Giuliani is such a caricature of a crooked lawyer.  Giuliani went so far as to admit that Trump would be allowed to testify under oath over his dead body, which in turn is to say that Trump cannot be depended upon to tell the truth, or even to not contradict himself.  This is a sad time for America, now that we realize that a White House that lies systematically creates a condition in which law cannot be effective.  Everybody knows now that if we want the law to be ineffective, all we need to do is to elect a President who lies all the time.  Or even some of the time.  I have some admiration for Bill Clinton, despite the embarrassment of the Kenneth Starr investigation.  That whole investigation was only intended to embarrass Clinton; Clinton was just too successful for the GOP to tolerate.  Here, the electoral process is at stake.  I believe that there was no foreign (i.e. Russian) interference with the actual mechanics of the election (but I could be persuaded otherwise).  But as the scale of the Russian propaganda onslaught through social media is revealed, we have to admit that it is of such a massive level that is criminal. Additionally, James Comey said that the FBI was concerned that the Trump indiscretions know to (and possibly arranged by) the Kremlin could have exposed Trump to the possibility of blackmail.  Again, this is another of the liabilities of electing a businessman to be President, especially a crooked businessman.

The Trump voting base had those who were sick and tired of the highly-educated Democrat elite that seemed to dominate Washington.  They were tired of environmentalists.  They were tired of what they perceived as self-righteous Politically Correct liberals, and were only too happy to troll them with rude statements.  They were sick of Feminists.  They were sick of the editorializing of the Press, which they perceived as Left-Leaning.  They were sick of the anti-pollution, and the Global Warming folks.  They thought they could live with a little lie or two from the White House, just to annoy the goody-goody Leftists, and the PC crowd.  They were tired of the concessions that the Democrats had granted to Iran, and they wanted lower gas prices.  And, of course, they hated the increasing power that Blacks, Hispanics and Immigrants were getting.  Apart from that, there was not a lot that those in the Trump Camp had in common.  Now, once the lying out of the White House grows beyond some unknown critical level, to the point where the Trump Camp itself can't quite believe what they hear, they begin to suspect that Trump and his friends are not just lying to the Democrats; they're lying to the Trump Camp as well.

The Democrats (and other left-leaning, intellectually unimpaired people) knew all along that Trump was lying.  Now the Trump Camp is in the process of learning at whom the lying was aimed.  Fooled me once: you know how it goes.

Looking at the election outcomes, anyone can draw their own conclusions why the Senate gained Republican seats, while the House gained Democrat seats.  Trump is persuasive in person, and on TV, on the campaign trail; that's Trump Camp enjoying Democrat-baiting.

Why the Democrats had so much success with the House is still not clear.  Why did the same people who elected Anti-Trump congressmen not elect Anti-Trump Senators?  One reason could be that they were in different states and areas; that's something that anyone who has access to the political maps can verify.  Even I, but indolence is a problem.  It can't be loyalty to a particular congressman, because such a large proportion of them are freshmen.

Anyway, let's brace ourselves for more silliness.  The Democrats are planning, using the familiar tactics of cornering committee seats and chairmanships, and all those strategies that are totally opaque to ordinary citizens.  Democrats have to work on a variety of fronts: effective functioning of the government which had previously gone berserk with Conservative objectives; restraint of the President, and oversight of questionable uses of Government power; and damage control.  Keeping a balance is going to be very, very hard.

Arch

Figuring Out Socialism: Do We Have To? (Yes.)

When Bernie Sanders began to talk about Socialism at the beginning of the 2016 election season, I thought to myself: oh no; they are totally wasting their time; anti-socialist propaganda has been bred into our DNA by business interests for too long.  Businesses (and their owners) are obsessed with keeping a share of their profits that they themselves decide, usually arbitrarily.  Taxes cut into their profits, so they hate taxes.  Minimum wages cut into their profits, so they hate the minimum wage.  Regulations cut into their profits, so, naturally, they hate those, too.  When an unemployed person applies for a job, the employer, usually a businessman (or his flunky) offers the applicants a wage rate.  In theory, of course, the applicant can haggle about the wage rate, but in practice, the rate must be accepted.  Being the employers, the businesses/employers wield a great deal of power, and they resent any attempt by the government to restrict this power.  Of course we do, they say; we take the risks, so we get to set our prices, and your wages!  In actual fact, the workers share the risks, which everyone knows, in particular, GM workers.

In conventional (old-time) Socialism, the government owns all the 'businesses', and hires all the workers.  That's the broad outline of Socialism, but the devil, obviously, is in the details.  Furthermore, just like economics, Socialism also has a lot of technical terms (a.k.a. jargon) which is a problem when we have to understand what people like Hilary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, and Nomi Konst start talking, which Tucker Carlson found out when he started trying to interview her (Nomi Konst).  Some of the jargon is essential (otherwise, every sentence will take about a week), but some of the jargon is actually unnecessary, so just having seen the words is probably enough; we can always come home and Google them.

Some hard-ass Socialists, when asked about how they would proceed, would say that they would confiscate all the businesses, and run them efficiently for the good of the country.  That will be totally repugnant to almost everyone; we would naturally think that the government will next come for our stuff.  (Business owners would probably sneer when we talk about our stuff, but hey, it's just as important to us as their damn factories and oil rigs are to them.)

That's---probably---not going to happen.  But I'm willing to bet that things like oil companies, (which are the certified big polluters, as well as major recipients of government subsidies), perhaps the Internet, electric companies, those will be likely prospects for takeover.  Or maybe the government will not takeover anything.  There are more delicate ways in which the government can take control of key business---including the most polluting businesses, and deal with retraining the displaced labor.  GM, for instance, does little more than token rehabilitation of their former workers.

Let's halt the speculation (which might be completely out in Left Field), and go straight to the source.  Here is an NBC report of the Democratic Socialists, right after the election.  The article is very clear; there are some five bulleted items, ranging from abolishing ICE (the border police), to opposing war.  Note: historically, socialists have identified with working-class people everywhere.  American Democratic Socialists might be different, but typically, a socialist in any country would consider every worker a brother.  The folks coming in across the Mexican border are our brothers, and so keeping them out by force would be something that is anathema to socialists.  Bear in mind that the USA is partly responsible for the failed governments in Central and Latin America; the CIA interfered with the governments of those countries since the nineteen fifties.  You cannot do that without those problems coming home to roost.  It is too late now to go back into South America to help make those nations stable; for evermore, fed-up Latinos will head here for a better life, just as those from former British Colonies head to London, which is one reason why they tried BREXIT.

Some things to think about.

The mentality of left-leaning Americans, and socialists everywhere, is that they're aligned with workers, that is blue-collar folks.  It always puzzled me that the typical American seemed to regard blue-collar workers with some suspicion.  But it's time to get over that; blue-collar folks are just as likely to help anyone as your supposedly friendly neighborhood white-collar worker; it's just that college-educated folk are uncomfortable with those who have not had a college education.  (This is a major problem with college education; a situation which has to be corrected in some creative way.)  It is these workers who suffer the brunt of business hostility, and so when the Democratic Socialists say workers, you have to think: that's us.  If you're a business owner, I suppose, you will probably think: oh, that's THEM.  Well, what can we do.

Going straight to the website of the Democratic Socialists of America, you get to a sort of FAQ about them, and I'll try to paraphrase the ones that I was most interested in.

Doesn’t socialism mean that the government will own and run everything?
Their bottom line is that Socialists have long given up the idea of running everything centrally ("from Washington").  Supply and demand methods work best with consumer goods, such as food commodities, clothing, etc.  (In contrast,) Public Transport, Housing, Energy, and things like that are best administered by the government.  (In other words, the time of the real-estate barons is going away; which makes sense, because they made insane profits, and then the Banks stepped in to crash the economy.)

Won’t socialism be impractical because people will lose their incentive to work?
"We reject the idea that the only reasons for people to work is either greed, or starvation.  People enjoy their work if it is meaningful and enhances their lives. They work out of a sense of responsibility to their community and society. Although a long-term goal of socialism is to [get rid of] all but the most enjoyable kinds of work, we recognize that unappealing jobs will always be there. These unappealing tasks would be spread among as many people as possible rather than assigned on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, or gender, as they are under capitalism. And this undesirable work should be among the best-paid, not the least-paid, work within the economy. Temporarily, the burden should be placed on the employer to make work desirable by raising wages, offering benefits and improving the work environment. In short, we believe that a combination of social, economic, and moral incentives will motivate people to work.

(I thought that was a wonderful paragraph; it tackles a central problem of the economics of labor, which Capitalists have never dealt with properly.  Work is a sort of take-it-or-leave-it thing in the Capitalist world-view; oligarchs never believe that workers need to enjoy their work.)

Aren’t you a party that’s in competition with the Democratic Party for votes and support?
No, we are not a separate party. Like our friends and allies in the feminist, labor, civil rights, religious, and community organizing movements, many of us have been active in the Democratic Party. We work with those movements to strengthen the party’s left wing, represented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

There are many other Q & A items, all chosen very well, which do address a lot of the questions that people have, from: Isn't "Socialist" too discredited a word to call yourselves? and questions about the failed Russian Communist experiments, and the European Union, and the absence of established successful Socialist governments elsewhere.  There is no core 'manifesto' anywhere; which makes me sad, because as a mathematician, I like to have my axioms where I can lay my hands on them.

But bear in mind that in the US, the Media is very powerful, and clever.  And easily won over by money.  The onslaught from the Media against Democratic Socialists has already begun, with people trying to pick apart what the spokespeople for the DSA say; them being attacked both from the ignorance of the attackers of the reasoning behind their statements, as well as the newsmen's innate resistance to anyone who even calls herself or himself a socialist.  Prejudice is going to be hard to overcome.

So, at least for the moment, Amazon and other monopolies are not going to be interfered with, but the specter of regulation is very real.  Similarly for banks, which includes credit cards.  Just because a citizen is not very clever does not give banks and credit-cards the right to swindle them.  Financial organization have taken it to be axiomatic that if you don't read the fine print, it's open season.  Elizabeth Warren fought this, and it looks as though the Dem Socs of America are in her corner.

Arch

The Beatles, Live: The Rooftop Concert

I have never seen the Beatles perform live; it was always a video (or film, or a telecast of a film) of a live performance.  These days, "Live" seems to mean a performance before an audience.  (Even that seems a little ambiguous, because there are always people listening in while a studio album is being recorded, but I don't consider that a live performance.)  Perhaps a "live" performance is one where there is no possibility of re-recording any part of the performance.

Coming then to the video recordings of live performances, hardly any of the Beatles performances I have seen are anywhere as pleasing as that last crazy performance on the rooftop of some recording studio (you can Google it, if you want; it's probably Studio 2, or something like that) in London.  We know now that it halted traffic on the street below, and ended with the Police coming onto the rooftop to negotiate with the Beatles people to stop the performance.

Evidently it was a cold day, and John and George refused to go out onto the roof initially, but they later did, wearing cold-weather outer-wear, which someone called women's coats, and they may well be.  John and George were wearing furs, Ringo was wearing a parka of some sort, but Paul seemed to wear only a woolen jacket.  Amazing, especially since in the US, certainly, a rooftop would usually be a windy place.  Still, the video of this performance is still my memory of the Beatles as they were in the last several months of 1969, a fabulous year for many, many reasons.

If you've been a Beatles fan, especially if you had been one in the sixties, you would have realized, (assuming you'd followed popular music before the Beatles were famous, and seen their competing acts on TV) that the Beatles were super tailored; cut and pressed and neatly turned out (one of the contributions of Brian Epstein).  However, though initially their true personalities were held under control by their 'handlers', only bursting out of their cages intermittently, by 1969 we knew what they were really like (to the extent that it was possible), and the Rooftop Concert was them, being themselves; amused no end at the quandary the Police were in; pleased at the number of people who had stopped everything to watch them; probably pleased that their impromptu performance was coming off so well, though they had rehearsed it pretty well, and some of the songs were ones they had sung for years, e.g. 'One after 909,' and so on.  What a wonderful way to bring down the curtain!  I would not have it any other way.  (On YouTube there is a set of videos where the Beatles had evidently tried to do a complete concert on the roof of the Liverpool Central Library; I didn't watch them all through; I think perhaps the mood was not as exciting as the original performance in London.  Must find out more.)

The performance list is:

00:11 Get Back
03:22 Don't Let Me Down
06:57 I've Got A Feeling
10:39 One After 909
13:42 Dig A Pony
17:36 Get Back (reprise, and John announcing "We want to thank you on behalf of the Group and Ourselves . . .")

One of the things that delighted me the most was to see John playing lead guitar on Get Back, and the tiny glimpse of Billy Preston, freezing in the cold (around 18:47).

There is a lot more information about the circumstances surrounding the performance at
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/beatles-famous-rooftop-concert-15-things-you-didnt-know-58342/
many of them not having to do with the music.

Archipelago

Education for the Individual

Now that I’m no longer a teacher, I’m beginning to look at Education differently.  There are two ways to look at Education.  Firstly, it is an organized human activity.  All social animals—in the case of mammals, they tend to be the more evolved, usually—have a certain degree of social education; though in the case of elephants, it is more like pre-school, or daycare.  Secondly, it is important, I feel, to look at Education from the point of view of the child, or the student.

If anyone were to say: Nobody can teach anything to someone who does not want to learn anything, most of us would agree, though of course some would say, too bad; there are things kids have to know, even in those evil years when they don’t want to do anything.  As the Bible (that much abused book) quotes Jesus as having said: Nobody is as blind as those who don’t want to see.

This is sad, but interesting: some schools steadily turn out kids who are eager to learn, others turn out kids who want to get out of class as quick as possible.  I know this.

Our school had a brilliant program that gave a total free ride to the Valedictorian from every school in the local area.  Why?  Because they were a good bet.  I have had students from certain local schools for decades, and they were invariably a good bet.  There was something in those schools that made their students not prone to reject formal teaching as authoritarian.  They sailed through my courses, and it was too much of an effect to simply dismiss as coincidence.

Now, of course it is possible for an ultra-authoritarian teacher to turn off the most receptive students; some teachers do have a gift for it.  (I mean, I have insisted, for instance, that my students do not wear earphones during class, which might have come across as needlessly draconian, but I felt affronted by their attitude.  But if I was ultra-authoritarian, I have to admit that as a fault.)

I have said often: all children are born curious and receptive.  To some of them, just the usual stuff we teach in class is interesting and magical!  But there are at least two sources of the jadedness that seems to eat away at their natural receptivity to learning.

Firstly, the social pressure to regard formal schooling as essentially boring.  This is a consequence of the fact that the kids who dominate classes early on are those who are backward educationally, and it is a way for them to continue to dominate their classmates even when they arrive at grade levels where they’re intellectually out of their depth.  This is a sort of bullying, but it is hard to see in that light because it does not have any associated physical violence, and it very successfully proceeds by persuasion.

Secondly, it is the parents.  Without being helicopter parents, I think parents—especially if they themselves had never bought into the belief that learning is boring, but such parents are probably a small proportion, after centuries of anti-learning propaganda!!—can effectively, and tactfully, convey that the material their kids are learning was interesting, and useful.  My mother used to do this; she would say: have you come to compound interest yet?  Oh, that is fascinating!  She showed me how to do problems using algebra, long before we were supposed to use algebra.  (This would never work these days; the kid would bring home a strongly-worded reprimand to the parents.)  Parents often don’t realize what a huge influence they are, because the kids often learn from their peers how to keep their uppity parents in line by expressing scorn about their parents’ mental capability.  You can’t “thump it out of them;” it has to be addressed indirectly.

There certainly are a large number of people around us who have been totally successful in school, certainly in the lower grades.  But unfortunately, this success of these individuals is bad for education, because teaching being such a low-paying job, these people (who could make all the difference in our schools) get more lucrative employment, and forget to even inspire their own children to have a positive attitude towards learning, let alone a good attitude towards school (which is also important, obviously).  But because of human nature, we’re more likely to hear the negatives, rather than the positives.  There certainly are some young people who loved their teachers, love school, who go into the teaching profession, and resist all the negative influences in their schools, and resist the tendency for the administration to draw successful teachers into the administration as well.  I don’t know how that works, not having taught in secondary school.  But individuals with great attitudes are all around us, but they’re smothered by others who simply hate school, and hate everything.  At least 10% of the time, try to hang out with friends who have a good attitude towards things, including a good attitude towards kids, and learning.

One last thing.  Of course it is important to get a good general education; to learn to write well, to be able to make a presentation to a gathering of your peers; to explain some new thing that you have figured out, for instance, but your friends have not; to be able to manage the finances of at least a small charity, say.  Apart from this, it isn’t really important what branch of knowledge a child or youth wants to pursue, provided he or she doesn’t choose to pursue it to the exclusion of everything else.  This is a tricky point to make, because of the professionalization of the hiring process; HR people do tend to depend too much on surface qualifications, because they deal with such large numbers of applicants, and the people who will actually work with the new hire are only allowed to give token input into the process.  But in my humble opinion, the value of the pursuit of an area of knowledge that a student is genuinely interested in is too much to sacrifice in the name of employment.  Perhaps the thing to do is to allow your student to major (or minor) in the area dearest to her or his heart, and let her or him minor (or major) in some area perceived to enhance her or his “employability” such as engineering, or accounting, or (god forbid) business, or accounting.  Why should idiots have all the fun tanking the stock market?

Arch
‘’—“”

Cursed with Interesting Times

Nobody said that life would be easy, but nobody said it would be such a disaster as this, either.

I, for one, have been as restrained as humanly possible (given that I'm a blogger, bloggers being a population not well known for restraint), except for occasional bursts of . . . non-restraint.  Things that seem straightforward to us, appear to be highly complex to those in the parliamentary war-zones (or at least, so it appears to us).

This whole Russian thing seem silly to me; was there illegal hacking of our election equipment by the Russians?  That would be bad, but that does not seem to be what the Mueller investigation is about.  Was any attempts to compromise our election equipment instigated by our president, or on his behalf?  If there was, it seems clear grounds for getting rid of the president.  It does appear that the laws make it very difficult to get rid of a president who is determined not to be gotten rid of; in all previous cases of impeachment, it seems that the president in question simply resigned.  That isn't going to happen, as far as I can see.

But now we have a majority of Democrats, and I live in fear that we will squander that majority with senseless actions that waste our resources, and actually deliver the government into the maniacal hands of people such as Mitch McConnell, and others who ought to be placed in line for the guillotine.  We have replaced one set of agonizing circumstances for another, though this second set has more potential for re-delivering some sanity than the previous one.  Most of the freshman class of Democrat representatives are decent people with compassionate views.  I don't know whether to pray that they hold onto their compassion, or whether to pray that they become as ruthless as Madame DeFarge.  Even we atheists believe in compassion, but it seems that we ought to make a few exceptions to this prison reform initiative, and deliver Trump to the Taliban when the time comes.  (Actually, he may do very well with them.  Unfortunately.)


Arch

Washington Reverberations

At one time, however reluctantly, I considered the Republican Party (of the eighties and the nineties) as a bunch of wrong-headed fellows, but with honorable intentions.  The relentless hounding of Bill Clinton annoyed me, but I clung to the belief that they were decent guys, just a lot more interested in lowering taxes than was good for everyone.  Now, I have given up; regarding the present leadership of the GOP as a bunch of wrong-headed good guys is a stretch that I cannot undergo, without snapping my elastic.  Someday, I suppose, the GOP could ride again, but playing dirty has become a way of life, because as they understand it, their political base is incapable of understanding the gentility of old-school politics; but it does like crude behavior, and taunting the liberals, (they assume,) which probably explains the boorish behavior of the Trump-influenced GOP.

It is, I think, a big mistake to assume that T-GOP boorishness is going to be the norm for henceforth.  To assume that might be what will keep us sane, but it will paint us out of any possibility of even flashes of civility in any branch of Congress.  Balancing the budget, restoring environmental protections, none of these things are, IMHO, as important as holding out the promise of a return to civility.

That is not to say that we consider bad behavior as something in which a president can indulge with impunity.  All this reckless golfing, all the blatant promotion of Trump's businesses at government expense, all the maneuvering to obscure obstruction of justice, and to load the administration with Trump loyalists, is bad, but so is the rudeness extended to foreign heads of state, and the encouragement extended to racist organizations at home.  The latter strikes me as cowardly; Trump may not be himself a racist, but he indulges racists in the belief that they are friends and family of the Alt-Right, and they are a means to an end.  Or rather, chastening them might be a possible beginning to his possible end.  Many of the essential flaws of Trump, (laying aside his essentially flawed character, to begin with,) have to do with the flaws of businessmen turned politician in general.  They are unethical.  I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise, but this is the lesson we can take away from the poster boy of Business: Donald R. Trump.  He has ruined the reputations, in the eyes of the Democrats, of everyone who associates themselves with Business.  And Democrats are not just those in Congress whom he considers to be "losers".  There are Democrats everywhere, and as long as Trump and the GOP orchestrate the flow of our money to the haves, the number of Democrats are going to rise, and the GOP may have to re-think the wisdom of alienating the Working Class.  We may have thought of ourselves as The Middle Class, but, haha, it is looking more than ever as if we're becoming the proletariat.

Meanwhile, I sincerely hope that the vast number of women elected to Congress will be received with civility and respect by their Republican colleagues.  Just as importantly, I hope they are able to deal with their outrage at the overreaching of the Congress of 2016 with stern control and moderation.

Arch

Some Thoughts after the Mid-Term Elections

After a sleepless night—actually, I slept like a babe; I cannot lie—I tried to get some straight information about what happened; a summary of the election outcomes, but unlike in earlier years when I went to the TV or YouTube this election, I got only some vague hysteria.  I fairly soon learned the main facts: the Democrats had gained a majority in the House, and the Republicans had got a couple of extra seats in the Senate; an absolute majority, in fact.  Well; I like the House gaining a majority, though the days when the House acted predictably and reliably seem to have gone—had gone some time ago.  A few years ago I would have thought that the Republican majority in the Senate would not be anything to worry about.  But no; these days, even the Senate is running scared before Trump.  I now understand: it appears that when Trump campaigns for his favorite members of congress, they tend to win; when he does not campaign for Republicans, they lose.  So by selective campaigning, Trump appears to have weeded out those who do not support him implicitly.

Before I try to guess what the implications are, beyond the obvious ones, I would like to say that Nancy Pelosi, in her press conference a couple of days ago, came across as someone who was capable of dealing with the situation much more competently than I had thought.  She struck what I thought was the appropriate tone; she did not seem to seethe with anger, but she gave the impression of being very determined; she drew the lines in the sand that hardly anyone could argue against: she would not tolerate interference with the oversight of the other branches of government with which Congress has been charged.  All the time, she was cool and polite, and did not indulge in any sort of incendiary rhetoric at all.  But she did come across as very old, but hardly decrepit.

For those who want to see Nancy Pelosi in a more informal setting, here she is with Stephen Colbert.  Stunningly confident, but not worrisomely so.  I was delighted to hear her occasional chuckles, while Steve Colbert cringed, thinking her prediction of success would precipitate a bad turnout.  (It is possible that the outcome might have been better if halfhearted Democrats in the southern states had not taken Ms. Pelosi's blithe confidence to be permission to sit out the election, but it is a free country, even if some of us wish it wasn't.)

To summarize: Trump gave a rare press conference the day after the elections, and he deplored the fact that those Republicans who had not embraced him with open arms had not won their seats; he hurled insults at those who accused him of being racist; he refused to answer (or answered vaguely) questions about what he would do, now that the Democrats had a majority in the House; he did not answer questions about his cabinet.  Soon afterwards, he banned a particularly aggressive CNN reporter from the White House Press Corp (Jim Acosta), though I personally believe that Jim Acosta was at fault for not surrendering his microphone, and thus hijacking the press conference.  What is Trump to do: just patiently wait until Acosta thought he was done?  (Sarah H. Sanders played a video—which some Democrats insist has been altered—to support their claim that Acosta wrestled a female intern for the microphone.)  Next, he asked Jeff Sessions for his resignation, and then appointed a fellow called Matt Whittaker as acting head of the Justice Department.  There is some belief that such an appointment had to be approved by the Senate.  (But of course, now the Senate is running scared that without Trump's willing support and campaign, they may never win an election again.)

Among the freshman congressmen/congresswomen are two Islamic women, two Native American women, and two openly gay women, not all of whom are distinct; for instance one of the Native American ladies is openly gay.

 One article on the Internet (Atlantic Monthly) suggests that the divide between the Left and the Right is based on attitude towards education.  This was reported by at least two scholars.  Looking deeper at the effect, using exit polls, some scholars concluded that behind the "Diploma Divide" were uglier attitudes expressed as follows:

If you look at white people who voted for Trump—both those with college degrees and those without—and identify everybody with a high level of resentment toward minorities, women, and Muslims, as well as those who want an arrogant, assertive leader, there’s almost no one left. The vast majority of Trump voters share those sentiments, the researchers found, regardless of education level.

Sad as this makes us feel, we must remember that these attitudes are not permanent.  The article goes on to say that this seems to flow from nostalgia on the part of less educated white voters for a time in the past when blacks and immigrants did not share the rights and privileges that were exclusive to whites.  But whites with education appeared to have less distaste for the increased equality of more recent times.

Education.  Not related to the elections as such, I'm wondering what we can expect from the Federal Government in the area of Education.  Of course, personally knowing fellow-students of other races and colors is likely to make college youth more comfortable with the society we have.  But what can the Federal Department of Education (currently headed by Ms. Betsy De Vos) do for the country?

I have written numerous blogs on this subject, but I know I have failed to be clear, mainly because I was a teacher at the time, and I was too close to the facts to be entirely objective.  (I had taken the view that students had to learn all that was in the curriculum, because it was good for them.  And many of them needed all that, because they were certifying to be high-school teachers themselves.  But the culture that it was necessary to sweeten the deal with entertainment was gradually overtaking our institution, at which point I chose to depart.  But if some clever young fellow would be able to teach the syllabus as well as keep his students entertained, then he should be allowed to do it!  However, there was a simultaneous tendency to sacrifice some of the more difficult topics in favor of more entertainment, which seemed perverse.  The question is: are those last few difficult topics worth the effort?  If the objective is to be better at anything that Japanese, or Finnish, or Chinese students, then, yes.  But if teachers in high school are not really expected to cover all the topics that they covered in the past, then no.)

Everybody seems to be confused about the Federal role in Education, despite the fact that primary and secondary education is controlled by local governments.  Some people think that it is an economic issue: the nation needs educated labor if it is to compete economically with other countries.  But in the face of increasing globalization of manufacturing and commerce, the role of government needs to be re-thought.  It is more expensive to manufacture practically anything in the USA because life is more expensive, and education is more expensive here, because the kids must be entertained, too.  So our young people are going to be at a disadvantage in jobs that require actual hard knowledge, whereas they're going to be excellent at jobs that involve low-level thinking.

I was watching news programs where investors were discussing what to do in the event of a Blue Wave vs. a Red Wave, and they were talking about the S&P 500, and what it did on such-and-such a date, and how some investing firms focused on selling stock, while other firms focused on buying under-priced stock, and so on and so forth.  In certain quarters, this sort of knowledge is given a premium, and some of this is taught in Business courses in college.  It seems to me that the training (if you can call it that) received by a investment manager makes him or her useless for anything else.

However, if the Department of Education were to focus mainly on an excellent elementary education for all, they can't go wrong.  I think carrots are going to be more useful than sticks.  I have not studied the problem, but I have gathered that elementary education responds well to Federal support, provided they do not push it too hard, and provided elementary teachers do not respond too wildly.

To improve the level of high school education would be the greatest thing the Federal DOE could do, but I think it is going to be a tough undertaking.  There is more push back at every level, and hardly any success in the past on which they can base a successful program.  On top of all of this, the Alt-Right probably contains more than its share of education-haters, and parents of high-school kids are more likely to resent Federal supervision or influence than parents of elementary school kids.

Arch

Many Ways to Be a Girl, but One Way to Be a Boy: The New Gender Rules

This article: Many Ways to Be a Girl, but One Way to Be a Boy: The New Gender Rules is on a topic that has lots of relevance to something that I am concerned about.  But let's look at the main point first.

Because of the tireless efforts of feminists, girls are gradually being liberated to present themselves in a variety of ways: all the way from being ultra-feminine to being almost ungendered, in the sense of having interests and dress preferences that are neither feminine or masculine, and personal styles that do not fit into those of their parents' generation.  Make no mistake: not all of these are endorsed with equal enthusiasm in every location, or by every society.  In some conservative hell-holes, a girl who wants to be a fireman or a police officer would be looked at with some concern, or even scorn.  But a boy who wants to dance ballet, or wear a dress, is regarded with almost universal distaste.

To make myself perfectly clear: it isn't literally true that there is only one way that boys are permitted to present themselves. There are increasing instances of boys who have creatively found ways of presenting themselves differently than the athletic, masculine, taciturn, "man of action" type of guy.  The beer-swilling, football-playing type of boy who claims to be uninterested in school is a stereotype that has had its day, certainly.  But this is, in some ways, the central stereotype from which boys dare to diverge in some ways, but usually not too far.  Depending on where you live, there will be young fellows who reject this 'norm' utterly.  They can be uninterested in athletics, perfectly articulate, interested in school, and satisfied with almost any drink but beer, and also depending on the locality, they may be called nerds, or some other uncomplimentary term, invented by the morons who find the old stereotype comfortable, and probably the only one they can aspire to.  But the point of the article above is a rather relative thing: girls can safely stray much further from the feminine stereotype norm, and with fewer negative consequences, than boys can stray from their stereotype; and this is what is being talked about: why not boys as much as girls?  Why isn't the spectrum of tolerated personality styles as wide for men as for women?

Now, boys who would like to wear feminine dress are not rare at all.  For example, Ronald Reagan's son, Ron Junior, who wanted to dance ballet, was often humiliated, but as anyone who has seen him recently will agree, is a man with a personality that will probably satisfy the most bigoted sexist.

Now here's my point: first of all, I deeply dislike the rush of some parents to gender modification of underage children.  A boy who wants to present himself in a more feminine style should simply be allowed to do so.  Often the parents are horrified by this situation, but more often it is the classmates and the school administration that is more uncomfortable with it.  Until we take a more aggressive attitude towards freedom of gender expression,  (I don't even know whether that is the proper term for what I want to talk about, but it ought to be clear) there are going to be kids---and some overenthusiastic parents---who want to settle the problem once and for all, but replacing the poor guy's genital apparatus with those of a little girl, or hitting him with hormones, with the intention of surgical 'improvements' later on.  And the same goes with girls who want to present themselves in the style of boys.

There certainly are children who are hermaphrodites by birth, where the gender assignment is ambiguous.  Not being one of those, or even knowing one closely, I don't know how traumatic that is for the child, though it is doubtless deeply problematic for the parents, especially in a society that views gender as a very dichotomous thing.  But those are the exceptions; the vast majority of children who feel themselves to be gender fluid in the sense of (a) not comfortable with their assigned gender in every regard, and (b) not satisfied with their assigned sexual orientation, should be permitted to express themselves in terms of personal style (clothing, hair, personal presentation, etc) any way they wish, without it being considered imperative that they should have surgery at the first opportunity.  In fact, they should not be permitted to have (and their parents should not be permitted to encourage) gender reassignment surgery until they're old enough to marry, for instance.  This is obviously an arbitrary choice of age, but considering that the surgery is not easy to reverse, this can be considered something that society should enforce for the protection of the minor.

If there was a way for a child to experience what gender reassignment is like without the actual surgery, (assuming it is not permanent,) it would be ideal, and that could be tried when the child is young, and not yet in a calcified gender state.  (In fact, it might be a good thing to moderate tendencies in certain young males towards sexual harassment, to let them experience what it feel like to be at the receiving end.)

These problems are very First World, admittedly.  For that very reason, unless we in the West do not address the issue ourselves, it is unlikely that anyone else will.  (Except, of course, that Japan might take the lead in this one, since their traditions seem to be more flexible in these sorts of matters.)

I'm still thinking about this problem, but for lack of a forum in which to talk about the issue, my thoughts on it are slower than molasses...

Arch

P.S.
On a related note, perhaps it is time to insist that whenever an instance of pedophilia is discovered in clergy, that a huge fine be levied on the church, which must be given to state controlled charities.  I'm talking a fine of millions of dollars, which should not go to the victim, certainly not all of it.  Ultimately, I believe that the blame has to be placed on the church, for requiring or encouraging celibacy on the part of the clergy.

News and Opinion: Another Look

Dear Readers:

One of the major problems we are facing is the fact that there is widespread distrust of the news media.  You know as well as I do that the president has disparaged most of the mainstream news sources, resulting in the so-called Alt-Right completely rejecting everything originating from anywhere except their own certified news sources.

Many of us, too, have become alarmed at the escalation of name-calling, and all such symptoms of the polarization between the Left and the Right, or at least those leaning towards the Democrats, and those leaning towards the GOP.

Late night comedy show hosts---and I certainly confess to watching at least some of them---do go over the top with their mocking of the administration, and their very pointed style of presenting summaries---or even details---of the events of the day.  But they are not intended to be trusted news sources (even if people sometimes do get their news from those comedians).  For some reason, many comedians seem to lean to the Left, though there is nothing intrinsically funny about being a socialist of any stripe.  I used the word Left, because the word liberal really does not mean anything except in the highly specific context of the US.  (In Australia, for instance, the Liberal Party is the party of the conservatives.)

What I want to state is that News Programs are expected to deliver the news, objectively and impartially.  In addition, there is an editorial function, which is merely a commentary on the news.  It is intended to make the readers or the listeners think, and not necessarily either agree with or disagree with.  They are intended to point out possible repercussions of the events of the day: the fallout, as it were.  But today, the commentary has been given so much importance that it becomes easy for the alt-right to disagree with it, and throw out the news with the commentary.

The question is:  Is there some way the news media can gradually regain some of their lost ground?  Is it possible to make the tone of the news objective, dispassionate, unbiased?  Admittedly, it is a lot more fun to editorialize on the news than to just deliver it.  But that's what creates a useful news bulletin, and over time, a trusted source of news.

To do this is very important in this last week before the elections.  People of all stripes will be watching a wider variety of news sources than they usually do, especially those who are beginning to view highly biased news programs with some distaste.  Not tightening up the quality of news programs now, not trying to present the news with as even a tone as possible, amounts to declaring that the elections have really been settled long since, and that there's nothing more to be done in terms of helping the electorate understand the issues, and make up its mind.  Minds will be made up gradually, all the way until the last second, and the greatest thing the news media can do, in a time when everybody is doing the wrong thing, is to take newscasting seriously.

Meanwhile, the commentators, whose job is seen as providing informed opinion, can help by calming down, and presenting reasoned argument, rather than heated condemnation.  Some viewers among the Alt-Right may not always have been as "Alt" as they are now; they may long for the old days when news commentators did not wallow in hysteria as they do now.  If hysteria is all every news source has to offer, we may as well watch the cartoons.

Despite all the name-calling, many on both sides long for simple, basic information, and I hope some news sources will deliver this much-needed thing without coloring it with opinion.

Arch

Two things we're puzzled about

The first is:  Why does Trump do and say the things that he does?
The second is:  Why aren't conservatives and MAGA people upset about them?

The second question has to remain unanswered for the moment.  Perhaps they are turned off by careful speech, tact and diplomacy:  "Why can't 'people' just say what they mean?"  ('People' do, but there are many who don't recognize it, and can't quite interpret what they hear.)

As to the first question, there are several possibilities.

(1)  Trump tried, in the early days, to be just a little more reasonable, but pretty soon his advisors (for lack of a better term!  I mean those who piped their reactions back to him, and gave him their best sense of how his fans were receiving his speeches and / or Tweets) perhaps gave him negative feedback, saying that toning down his flamboyant talk wasn't going down well.  Soon afterwards, the Press started ramping up their condemnation of his lies and inaccuracies, and Donald might have thought: what does it matter?  I'm gonna get blasted anyway, so I might as well get back on the rhetoric, regardless of whether it contains true or accurate information.  That approach probably did go down well with the home boys.

(2)  Not being accustomed to having to answer for everything he does, Trump tried his best to think on his feet, but simply kept tripping over himself.  This is probably the most plausible explanation.  There are some attitudes and beliefs that he holds that would make sense only to conservatives, businessmen, and most of all, conservative businessmen.  They are based on the mysticism of business, which boils down to a sheaf of rules of thumb that don't always work.  But businessmen always believe that business has risks, so they've gotta expect a few fails.  They don't see that some of the fails could have been spotted a mile away.  As long as we keep electing MBAs as presidents, (and boy, does the Wharton School have a lot to answer for,) the administration is going to depend on these failed rules of thumbs on which to base their governing of fiscal policy, and foreign policy.

(3)  A view held by many is that Trump is being given bad data by his homies.  Pretty soon, he probably does not believe any data, and thinks that all news is fake news.  It is possible that gaslighting is happening in the white house, but it might not be originating from Trump.  GIGO*, as the computer guys say.

At one time, I thought the entire business community--at least Big Business--was all of one mind with Trump.  But then, on thinking a little further, I began to realize that that was not the way Big Business operates.  Big Business is a mass of suspicious entities, viewing their competition with great hostility.  They may cooperate on a limited basis for a while, but then they relapse into their fighting stance.  They play their cards close to the chest, and they might give Trump some slight gratitude, on a play-by-play basis.  I haven't watched the Godfather movies, but I imagine many of the elements of those movies will feel familiar to those who have watched the Administration pick its way through the last two years.  We might not be seeing Chess, exactly, but it might be something similar, like tic-tac-toe.

Big Business would have to be fools to accept Trump as The Messiah.  A few decades or so ago, no CEO would have been fooled by Trump for a minute.  But who knows; Big Business isn't what it used to be . . .

All I can say with certainly is that this is no way to run a country, not even Saudi Arabia.  I wonder whether there will be a drift of moderate Saudi individuals and families out of that country, which might leave it with only Trump-like goons who shoot from the hip.  This is sad and worrisome, but what can we say?  Some things are best left to trained professionals.  I don't mean surgical implements; I mean diplomacy and policy.

Arch, castling furiously

*Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Elections are coming, the Geese are . . . well, no.

All my friends, and many of my acquaintances are contemplating the forthcoming elections with distaste and bafflement.  Except for a few, everyone wants major changes, but they're not clear about what those changes should be, exactly.

In the past, there have always been pundits who suggested what each sort of person should do, but in the past three years we have learned one thing for sure: the pundits are going to get it wrong; they have thoroughly discredited themselves.  I too got it wrong, and I ... well, let's forget about that.

I want to remind my readers of things they might forget, and things they should consider carefully, but I have no prescriptions, except for the obvious ones.

Many astute observers, including the conservative commentator David Brooks, says that he sees polarization dominating the psychology of the voting population on both sides.  In other words, it appears that people are voting against whom they hate, rather than for whom they want elected.  In yet other words, people are getting emotional (and facebook and twitter are amplifying these feelings, and maybe Putin is not entirely to blame; we're sitting ducks when it comes to mob psychology), which is not good.

Why?  Because the issues are even more complicated this time, and nobody does well with complicated matters when they're mad.

I know for a fact that many conservatives---regardless of whether they voted with the GOP or whether they were Libertarians---are not going to vote Democrat, simply because the Democrats, mostly young Democrats, are so furious that they have been manufacturing memes blaming the entire spectrum of conservatives for the spectacular missteps of the president.  So these frustrated conservatives may well stay home, or vote for, say, Green Party candidates, or what have you.

Of course, that's their right.  But it is quite possible that they may add their vote to those moderate Democrats who are coming forward to run for office, if they did not feel so shunned by the sharp-mouthed liberals, and my readers probably know a few of those.

There are young liberals pouring out ridicule and humiliation on conservatives, blaming everyone for electing Trump, when the fault lies in the readiness with which Democrats were incited to believe the negative stories about Hilary Clinton.  Sure, there was a lot of help from Russian propagandists, but we liberals swallowed the propaganda wholesale.  There is a point where we can't point the finger anywhere except at ourselves.

Wage propaganda war, if you think that's going to help.  But we're never going to win any votes except the few that the more energetic among us will bestir ourselves to cast, if we make any potential crossovers feel stupid.

I say: make nice for the next few weeks, and if crossover conservatives help us remove the Trump fans in Congress and the Senate, we will have to graciously grant that conservatives helped to ease Trump out of the White House, and point him towards the Big House, because things are looking very, very bad.  (Not good, to be perfectly clear.)  Trump has no clue about what the consequences of his actions are.  He pretends not to care, but in fact he is simply surprised at the fallout of everything he does and tweets.  We have been taught to be gentle with mentally deficient people, but let's make an exception in this one case.

Arch

Out of the Mouths of Professors / A Freshman Seminar

Some years ago (don't ask how many), colleges across the country were finally driven to do something about the perceived gap between what the faculty was ready to teach incoming freshmen, and what these freshmen were equipped to, well, absorb.  Freshmen seminars were created, to help faculty and freshmen make the transition to the patterns of college instruction and thinking.  This blogpost is not about freshman seminars, but it was sparked by an event at one.

In the institution to which I was indentured, there was, one year, a newly-designed Freshman Seminar, and one of the components of this week-long program was a Forum; a panel discussion in an auditorium, with some of the most celebrated faculty of our school seated on stage, each of whom had a few minutes to give their best advice to the freshmen.  The rest of us faculty sat in the audience, prepared to be disgruntled (after all, the thing we professors hate most is to be deprived of an audience).

I am surprised that now, a couple of decades later, I still remember at least two of the professors, and their advice.  I won't keep you waiting.

1.  One of our most illustrious faculty members was a professor of religion.  He was a respected author in his area of expertise, which was basically comparative religion.

He said that the basis of Judaism was hospitality to the stranger.

The professor went on to say that, despite a multitude of details that confuse the issue, the bases of Christianity and Islam too, were exactly the same.

I hardly need to say that this floored many in the audience, some of whom must have never even thought about any sort of basis for their belief (except perhaps John 3:16, and I invite all those who subscribe to this belief to hurry on to the next part of our post; remember Jesus himself offered a summary of "All the laws and the prophets," and this verse was not it).

I certainly have thoughts about how the rules of conduct of Judaism evolved into the moral system of the early church, but more on that later.  One thing is clear, though.  If one has read anything at all about Islam, through the pens of European commentators of around the 1700's and earlier, one sees a confirmation of the opinion that hospitality forms a central core of the Islamic moral code.

That alone would have given anyone much to think about.  But the suggestion given by the next speaker was just as interesting (but of course, not being related to religion, did not have the sheer shock value of the previous one).

2.  One of the panelists was a celebrated political scientist, who had also earned much respect as an author.  His advice was a lot more personal, as befitted an occasion in which he had been invited to participate not as a specialist in his area, but as a member of the faculty at large, and a successful scholar.

I always, he said, keep a notepad by my bedside, to record those crazy ideas that come to me in the middle of the night.  (The wordly-wise freshmen must have thought this plan eminently worth ignoring.)  Often, he said, he would read what he had jotted down while half asleep, and laugh.

However, he said, some of his best ideas had been among those he had written down while half asleep.  In other words, those were the ideas that had not been filtered out by pragmatic considerations, or the cynicism of his waking moments.

Something to think about.

I believe that we have been a little too strongly influenced by the pragmatism of Business.  It is rarely that a successful businessman gets a wonderful idea in the middle of the night, which survives the censorship of his business sense.  I see this insight—recognition of the value of ideas that bubble up through our subconscious minds—as part of the college experience, and as part of the very sort of thinking that ignorant citizens (who want to squelch any ideas that do not profit business) find so repugnant in colleges.  We are sadly headed towards a sort of idea-free system of education, which would seem ideal to those who think of college as merely a place in which to efficiently manufacture docile middle-management.  (Upper management, of course, requires no education.)

Those DNA ancestry tests you get in the Mail . . .

It isn't surprising that millions of people are interested in learning about their ancestry.  I certainly am, so I assume most people are. For those who are new to this idea: numerous companies now offer (online, mostly, or sometimes in junk mail) to give you an analysis of your ethnicity; that is, where your ancestors probably came from, based on the genes in your DNA.

DNA is a protein-like molecule that lives in the nucleus of every cell in your body.  All the DNA molecules in any one person are identical, and essentially unique to that person, unless he or she has an identical twin, or something like that.  (Triplets, Quadruplets, and so on.  If you're one of Octuplets . . . just kidding.) 

It is a long strand, organized into 23 chromosomes, which we can think of as a list of 23 smaller lists.  As far as I know--I'm not an expert--these lists, which are lists of genes, actually, together define how your body is built, and how it functions.  For instance, in some one of these 23 chromosomes, in some specific place in its list (remember, each chromosome is itself a list!) there is a gene that specifies what shape your right ear is, for instance.  Unless I'm mistaken, that gene, in that position, in anybody's DNA, specifies the shape of their right ear.  Another gene specifies sensitivity to the sun, let's say.

Many genes have functions (they specify things) that are not known.  Many characteristics (such as ear shape) might be specified by several genes.  But the essential fact is that if two people have a segment of their DNA string identical, they will share some characteristic, or several characteristics, but of course, they might be very minor characteristics.

Now this whole string comparison thing falls plumb spang in the middle of the discipline of Mathematics, specifically in the area of analytical topology, so naturally I was curious about how they went about doing this ancestry business.  And, to make it more interesting, they were reporting to their clients the places from where their ancestors probably came!  How did they do that?

I went on the Internet, and without trying very hard, found this web page entitled Pulling back the Curtain on DNA Ancestry Tests.  Exactly what I wanted!  Of course, I was not so naive as to expect a detailed description of the process, but it turned out to be a lot more useful than I had expected.

First, a warning.  The article states that these companies get far more money by selling their information to commercial companies that can use the information (e.g. medical research outfits, or perhaps even companies that have less worthy objectives) than they get from you.  So the $100 or so that you pay for the service hardly compares with the money they get in other ways, and they might as well give you the service for free, for supplying them with a data point.  Also, the privacy agreement they make with you will not be valid if, for instance, they sell the company, or it is acquired by another company somehow.  So you have to be prepared for your genetic information to be compromised almost certainly.  For instance, if your DNA string information falls into the hands of a company that is investigating a certain variant of a gene to see whether it is a useful indicator of some horrible medical condition, and if they discover that you have it, well, they're sort of morally obliged to let you know that you're at risk for this condition, and depending on the laws of your state or the country, disclosing this information to, say, a medical insurance company, which is obliged to raise your insurance rates!  None of this might happen, but then, it might, especially in the very business-friendly political climate in which we try to live.  (And think: the company that buys the DNA information might be a subsidiary of an insurance company in the first place, which could have reciprocal agreements with who knows how many other insurance companies?  But most people will have nothing to hide, and I do not want to chill your possible interest in discovering the various skeletons in your ancestral ethnicity closet.)

From what I understand, these companies mostly check genes, in the sample you provide, for genes that are common in certain regions, and which are uncommon in other places.  It all depends on how they decide that this gene (gene variation, actually; everyone has to have all the same genes, or they would not be human.  Everyone has to have a WX67 gene of some kind, but that gene could come in different varieties.  I just made up the name of that gene, but you get the idea.  Some people will have WX67, variant 1, and others will have WX67, variant 2, and so on, all the way to variant 4796.  Yes, there are thousands of variants, called mutations.  Viruses, it seems, have the most types of mutations).  For example, a company will get hold of a number of samples of DNA from native Americans from some tribe, and study the sample for genes that are common to all the samples, and particularly uncommon in almost any other DNA.  (This is a big undertaking, and if the company takes this job seriously, they have to be given credit.  Still, the idea is simple.)  Now, if you send in a sample of your DNA (basically a little saliva), and that gene is present in your DNA, they would conclude that you have some ancestry within that tribe of native Americans.

If they have identified, say, 100 different gene variants in that tribe of native Americans, and you have every single one of those, then the probability that you have that type of native American ancestry is very high indeed.  Honestly, it won't be necessary for you to have all 100 gene variants for them to declare with 100 certainty that you have that ancestry.

In addition to telling their clients that they have some ancestry: say, Middle Eastern ancestry, these companies tell their clients what percentage of their ancestry comes from that region.  Again, we can only guess how they arrive at those numbers.  They look at large numbers of genes (remember there are a vast number of genes, so they're still looking at less than x% of your genes to make these conclusions.  But that alone is no reason to doubt the validity of the conclusions; the tests used could be very subtle and delicate indeed; we just don't know how hard they have worked on these tests, and we have to trust them.  So, we have to take the results of these tests with a dash of ketchup.  Furthermore, there is the possibility for checking sets of genes, which will provide a more subtle analysis, a finer sieve of results.  (Maybe that last observation was redundant; we were talking about the possibility of 100 different genes in a given tribe, after all.)

By this time, you have to have concluded that I'm trying to explain something that I'm not entirely qualified to explain, and you would be right.  But you would certainly have some information on which to hang your reasoning now, and against which to assess the documentation they provide, if you choose to go through with the test.  Remember, there are several companies you can get the service from.

No matter what you do, you should think clearly about your potential heredity.  If you're black, you could still have Viking ancestry, because at least a few of the plantation owners could have been from the Scandinavian countries, and they were known to make free with the female slaves they owned.  (However, it is also well known that not all plantation owners were cruel to their slaves, though the ones who were humane were probably largely in the minority.)  You could watch YouTube videos of those who got the service, and see their reactions.  The responses are initially surprise, but in hindsight, every instance that I saw was absolutely plausible.

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The Beatles

One of the most important parts of my identity as a teenager was that I was a Beatles fan, but oddly enough, I never got around to writing about them, now that I have a platform: this blog.  (Actually, I might have done a post on the Beatles, but it ended up being a sort of survey of lots of groups and musicians that I like.)

I all along liked both classical music, and pop music, even if I might not have recognized some of the music I liked as belonging to the pop category.  But by some accident, I was taken out to see the movie A hard day's night, and I heard the music of the Beatles for the first time, and I was immediately a fan.  I realized that other songs I was hearing on the radio were earlier Beatles recordings, e.g. "She loves you," "Love me do," and "P. S. I love you," and so on.

It's tough to recall my thinking as a teenager, but it might be interesting.  I felt that classical music was more sophisticated harmonically, (and contrapuntally, though that came later), while pop music was more vigorous rhythmically.  (Again, it was a year or two before I realized that classical music could be pretty interesting rhythmically, too.)  And when I heard the songs in AHDN (A hard day's night, if you couldn't guess,) I realized that they were playing pop music with far less noise than I was used to hearing in pop records.  Ironically, their live concerts were almost pure noise, and at certain times, the four of them did not really like the racket, though it was a symbol of their popularity.  Furthermore, they were trying interesting harmonies, that flowed from classical music.  Pop music had many sub-genres, and certainly jazz, and big band music, and easy listening tunes used almost every sort of harmony there was, but in the rhythm 'n' blues tradition, you never heard chromatic harmonies, such as the Beatles (well, okay, Paul and John) squeezed into If I fell, for instance.  Of course, there were still the hard-driving songs like Can't buy me love, which was firmly in the mid-stream of RnB, and took me a long time to appreciate, but they kept sneaking in songs slow enough to support interesting harmonies.

Even after they had stopped touring, they never slowed down in looking for new harmonies, or rather, using old classical harmonies, but new to pop.  (They did overwork certain sequences, such as the sequence in While my guitar gently weeps, which was a distant cousin of a couple of songs in Sgt. Pepper, but McCartney can be forgiven much, because firstly, he was producing such lovely songs, and secondly, in some ways they were--unconsciously--educating their audience, and education always requires repetition.

I was watching a video (actually, a sequence of about five videos) in which famous musicians talk about the Beatles.  Most of these people were excellent musicians, and what they say is useful to us.  A word they use repeatedly is permission.  They declare that the Beatles would try things that were unthinkable to do, which gave other youngsters who aspired to be musicians, permission to do the same things: use the studio creatively, or even present themselves in creative ways.  (I'm not really interested in how the Beatles presented themselves, today, though at the time, I was all about growing my hair, and wearing bell-bottoms, and so on!  I'll post a photo when I find one.)  But some musicians stumble against the problem of viewing these interviews, and the questions to which they're responding, as questions about them, rather than about the Beatles.  Honestly, if I were to have met the Beatles, or even one of them, it would have been such a huge moment, that it would have been a defining moment in my life, and so it clearly was with many of these people.  But those who admired the Beatles, or any of them in particular, did so for good reasons.  They mention many of the points I bring up above, as well as that (1) they suited each other almost perfectly; they weren't really outstanding instrumentalists, but George, for instance, was just exactly the lead guitar that John and Paul needed.  (On the other hand, perhaps John and Paul needed George precisely because he was available; it's hard to say.)  (2) They feel that the Beatles came along just at the time that they were needed.  Pop music was ripe for being raised up a notch in sophistication, and the Beatles provided just the sophistication that was sufficient, and necessary.

All this can be summed up by saying that the phenomenon of The Beatles was of historical significance.  They were helped immensely by coming around at that time in history, to energize the concept of the minimal four-member band, initially, to be which any four moderately talented kids could aspire, and then to show how the studio could be used creatively.  (And other record producers could see, looking at George Martin's contribution, how much a creative producer could help make an album memorable.)

In the video, I don't remember in what context, Steve Wonder made the point that black music grew from the soil that was Gospel Music, while white music, of which the Beatles' music was squarely in the center, grew from 'White' church music.  (They were Catholics, except for Ringo, but their musical tradition could certainly trace its roots to protestant hymnody.  Also, many tunes by soul musicians were adopted by the Beatles, e.g. Long Tall Sally, and Mr. Postman, to name just two songs.  Still, it was unmistakably white music.)

Paul McCartney is highly regarded as a superior bass player, and a wonderful tunesmith, and John Lennon has been recognized as a talented poet.  John's writing was fantastic at the time when he was younger, and was dealing with marital problems, aggravated by the strain of the group needing to spend so much time with each other, to the detriment of John's nuclear family life.  There was an edge to his poetry, which reached its zenith when his mother died, and he wrote some amazing songs, including Mother, and A working class hero.

But, as I said, there is a sort of consensus that they were not amazing instrumentalists, compared with some of the amazing talents that were being discovered at the time.  But their musicality was incredible.  It is a mistake to try and rank musicality in different people, and in groups.  All you can say is that a lot of what I admire in the Beatles comes firstly from their group musicality, and secondly from the historical factor, that they came at that particular time.  And I should probably add: from the genius of George Martin, who contributed significantly to many of their songs, though I doubt whether he could have come up with an album such as Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, though there is absolutely no doubt that the Beatles could never have pulled it off so well without George Martin.

The group and George Martin must share the blame for some of the biggest weaknesses in the recordings, as well.  One of these is the stereo sound.

Stereo had been invented a decade or so earlier, and the idea is that if you record an instrument, say a piano, with two well-placed microphones, and then play back the two-channel recording through two sets of speakers spaced an appropriate distance apart, you can almost reproduced the feeling of having been there.  Now, you can say, if you use a really good single microphone, listening to the recording, it does feel like you were there.  Well, it is a matter of degree.  You can only be convinced of the phenomenon by a side-by-side comparison with excellent equipment, and even then, some people would be perfectly satisfied with the single-mike technique (mono).

When the Beatles went into the studio, and they began to record, each of them had his own mike, and then each instrument had its own mike, and John and Paul thought it was just a matter of putting some of the tracks on the Left channel, and the rest on the Right channel, and you were done.

What audiophiles today would prefer would be to record each track with two microphones (Paul gets four mikes: two for the voice, and two for the guitar, John gets four, and so on), so that any one of these stereo tracks makes you feel you were in the room with that performer, or that instrument!  Of course, that would take double the number of tracks, and back then, it would have taken more tape than their budget allowed.  So the boys thought the true stereo idea did not deliver the bang for the buck, because they were already layering tracks, to enable, say, the first verse from one take, to be layered with the chorus from another take, and so on.  Today, with digital recording, there isn't any tape at all, it's just gigabytes on some enormous hard drive in the basement somewhere.

Anyway, if they had recorded every track (or layer) in stereo, stacking them together would give the impression of having the group right in front of us.  Instead, what we have is the fake stereo of (for instance) all the voices on the left channel, and all the instruments on the right channel.  You can hear this clearly in Nowhere man, one of my favorite Beatle songs.

In future posts, I will give you my favorite Beatle songs, and the reasons why I like them, if any.

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