A number of different concerns: Just Cleaning Up

Trump
Democrats and progressives everywhere are going berserk with hostility, disparagement, annoyance and fury against, Trump.  Some of the hate--yes; make no mistake, it is hate--is downright inexcusable.  Don't get me wrong; the GOP as a party deserves a lot of angry dressing down.  But Trump's failings are all about (1) listening to bad advisers, (2) selecting bad helpers, (3) taking the bad objectives of the GOP seriously; and, of course, being insincere about treating women and minorities fairly and equally, and (4) being unable to disguise his shameless pandering to whites who despise Latino and Middle Eastern immigrants.
To people of little imagination (and possibly little education), an enormous wall across the border seems like a no-brainer.  Just so do people in any neighborhood think that a big wall around their property would keep them safe.  I can only laugh.  But it won't be funny, five years from now, if the biggest money-spinner is going to be a company that builds walls around the homes of wealthy people.  (And some not-so-wealthy people, too; you'd be surprised just how many middle class folk think they are plutocrats!  Sad.)  A big wall could make things harder for simple, law-abiding immigrants, true; but my guess is that the drugs will still come in, and the really big felons will also sneak in.
Mean-spirited responses to GOP actions can easily backfire.  At the moment, the Democrat-dominated Congress is grinding along with determined obstructionism.  There are a few Congressmen and women who want to serve notice on the President.  In my opinion, abuse of Emergency Powers is strong enough to warrant impeachment.

Education

I recently saw a British youth holding up a placard which read: Why should we go to school if you won't listen to the educated?
Let's leave that aside, for a while; people ignore the 'Educated' for various reasons.  But no one can really understand the value of education except through a distorting lens.
People who have received a certain amount of education--and bear in mind that being put through the education machine is no guarantee that a person is educated.  It suits the purposes of an educational institution to push a student through and out as quickly as possible, because unsuccessful students spoil the profile of a school--have all sorts of distorted views of how much their offspring can benefit from this process of 'being educated' by a college or university.  In the end, the view of a student's parents, the view of the student's institution's administrators, the view of the teachers, the view of the students themselves, are all different, and all distorted.  Even more distorted are the views of the government, of prospective employers, everyone.  Some people are lucky; they're interested in what they're taught, and they have teachers who're interested in what they're teaching.  (That last is largely true; very few people take on teaching as a last resort, or as a means of getting rich.)
I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed my education.  I just loved every minute of it, which is part of the reason I ended up as a teacher.  How hard can it be, I told myself, to teach a bunch of kids something they're probably going to love?
It took a while for me to realize that a few kids did love the material; others hated it, but they endured it because they felt sorry for me!  Others pretended to like the material, hoping I would give them a good grade.  But what a waste of time.
There's an expectation that teachers can make students like the material.  You can only expect this to work so far; it is called motivation, and it is rare to find a teacher who has the art of motivating students, but who also know their material thoroughly.  And, after a while, they burn out; motivating students is a joy-sucking way of life!  These days, especially, students have a "Go ahead; make my day!" attitude towards being motivated; it's sad.
But education is actually about enjoying life.  Life has many aspects; the more of these aspects a young human being can relate to, the less he or she is going to be bored.  What about specialized education, such as in STEM fields?  They enable students to possibly find jobs in occupations that will earn a lot of money for their future employers.  Will the students themselves earn a lot of money?  Probably.  But probably not as much as the employers are going to earn!  As the last year or two has demonstrated, those who make the most money are not the cleverest and best at what they do!  Learn as much as you can, and focus on the things that are interesting to you; that's where you're going to do well.  Don't neglect the basics: reading, writing, math, computers, and little bits of everything else.  If you don't understand those basic things, you won't be useful to anyone for very long, and you're going to have to fight to stay alive.

More later.

Arch

Good Writing: A Video by Steven Pinker

The actual title of the video is "Linguistics, Style and Writing":  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV5J6BfToSw and it gives an amazingly concise (as concise as an hour-long talk could be) explanation as to why bad writing is so prevalent.

From sitting through that video, what I gained most was the point of view of a writer, and what a writer is trying to do.   On the way, Steven Pinker dealt with a vast number of little pieces of conventional wisdom that perplexed me, (and, to be honest, will continue to do so,) and put them in perspective.

The takeaway was that languages evolve, and words that Victorian authorities despised, become essential words in later centuries.  One such word was finalized, for which I did not quite catch the superior replacement; I suppose it was finished.  But these days, of course, finalizing is an essential technical term in a number of areas, while finished remains a general-use word that could never replace it.

There are numerous aphorisms that we are saddled with, which, incidentally just can't be jettisoned, because they are often useful :  Always use the active voice, for instance.  Using the Wikipedia description of the story of Oedipus, Steven Pinker showed how using the passive voice kept the continuity of the description, so that the reader was not distracted by agents who were entirely incidental to the story.  It was about how the infant Oedipus was delivered to his foster parents, despite his father's belief that Oedipus would someday kill his father.  (Let me say, as an aside, that the Wikipedia article as it now stands, is an example of the worst kind of writing.  Perhaps before my readers look it up, miraculously someone will get into Wikipedia and improve it, but it is certainly a disaster at this moment: 1:35 p.m. on Wednesday the 13^th of February.)

Another issue he touched upon (Pinker, not Oedipus) is the use of the singular they.  Some people object to the modern tendency to strain to be gender-neutral.  Now, I long to write a diatribe against Politically Correct Speech, but it can make me so many enemies that I have to think carefully about it.  But I believe gender-neutral expression is a good thing.  Males have had ascendancy in so many infinite ways up until the present, that we can hardly object to a sentence such as "The sole heir indicated that they would prefer to give the effects to charity."  This makes it unnecessary to determine, or to convey, whether the heir was male or female.  (That was my example, and Steven Pinker should not be blamed for its weakness.)

This is a video very much worth watching; there are many pieces of practical advice, and much attitude adjustment.  Language is important, and clear, effective writing is important.  There is a lot of humor, and it is politically neutral, so everyone can watch it without being annoyed!

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Books versus Reading!

A lot of--certainly well-read--people are up in arms against digital media.  They praise paper books to the skies.  They deride non-paper media.  They consider themselves a cut above the rest for having read books; they measure their worth by the size of their own (paper) book collection, and praise great and famous men whose (paper) libraries filled out enormous cathedral-sized rooms.  (In the past, not in these days of digitized cathedrals.*)

Well, OK; I myself cannot remember reading more than, say, a few hundred books.  Most bibliophiles would snort, saying that they have read many more books than that, though they would be hard pressed to recall their titles, or even the contents, of these fabulous books.

You would gather, by the paragraphs above--which have the makings of starting off a diatribe--that I didn't think much of paper books.  This is not the case.  I'm just against the idea of thinking of paper books as the only game in town; I'm not for digital books exclusively.

I think that those who are passionately fond of paper books are largely those not educated in a technical field; their collections are probably weighted towards books that dispense wisdom, that contain literature and poetry and memoirs, for those of a contemplative disposition.  That's fine.  But it irks me when people express admiration to books nicely bound in leather, over against books that are cheaply bound, because they're necessary books for someone in a technical field, and those books would not be affordable if they were to be leather bound.  So, unconsciously, these people are expressing their class biases.  I don't hold it against them (at least not very much), because the veneration of books is characteristic of a classical education, which society is realizing is expensive, not least because of its price in timber.  The recent, misguided emphasis on Scientific, Engineering, Technical and Mathematical (STEM) education is an overreaction to historic preference of citizens to study subjects "for gentlemen", which did not include the STEM fields.  After a few years, one hopes, those (technical) fields will take their rightful place alongside other subjects, and not ahead of them.

The important thing is to be able to read and write, and read and write well, not just like some of the more notorious graduates of the University of Pennsylvania.  (Evidently, a requirement for being President in the future is the ability to Tweet effectively and accurately.)

If the physical medium were to be taken out of the discussion, the point is well taken that being widely read, is certainly an important skill in navigating these confusing times.  It is a great disadvantage in trying to understand, for instance, issues of immigration, or of closing down the government (recall poor Wilbur Ross, trying to--either understand the positions of citizens who live a hand-to-mouth existence, or trying to think of diplomatic ways of advising them!) or responding to violence and chaos abroad.  (Of course, it would help even more if certain heads of state could read, and yet more if the US were to stop helping to destabilize their fragile economies.)

I think the situation in Venezuela deserves a paragraph.  They had a corrupt head of state, who mismanaged the economy; then the election that seemed necessary at that moment was not called.  (The existing administration has power over whether an election is called, so it appears that they though they could stay in power indefinitely by not calling elections ever again.)  The most popular politician in the country declared himself Prime Minister (or president, I'm not sure).  At this point, Donald Trump's administration chose to recognize this un-elected politician as the legitimate national leader of Venezuela.  In my humble opinion, this was a serious misstep.  And, to make matters worse, a number of foreign governments followed, recognizing this other gentleman.  Think, if this had happened here.  If China, and Russia, and Britain and Australia had recognized Hillary Clinton as President, instead of Trump.  Not even Hillary Clinton would have appreciated the gesture.

One of the important benefits of reading is its ability to enhance our capacity to think like someone else; to put ourselves in the place of others in our imaginations.  This is not exactly empathy; it is not about feelings, necessarily.  It is about seeing another point of view.  Going back to the Venezuela example (which I had not planned): if by some chance, Mr. Juan Guiado's new government were to become--temporarily--legitimized, it will have to live with the accusation that it was set up by the USA, and therefore beholden to it (which is a great burden); and that stigma could eventually end it's life, possibly in a bloody uprising.  Mike Pence is reported as saying that this is no time for dialogue, but that it is time for the Maduro regime to end.  Washington should not be deciding whether such a time has come, and certainly Pence should not be doing so.

Anyway: in any time, having read widely in one's youth stands one in good stead.  Another thing we hear too little about is that travel too broadens the mind.  But it is all too common for one's tourist experiences to wash off of one, like water off the back of a duck.  It is reading that prepares one to take full advantage of one's travel!

Arch

*This is an attempt at a joke, of course; digital cathedrals are not expected to get here before 2020.

The Friendiverse

Early this morning, one of my closest friends died (passed away, as they say in super-polite circles).  It is death that puts me at the greatest disadvantage; I tend to think of some deaths as a personal affront to me, especially deaths of very young people.  I tend to think of other deaths as a relief; but it is difficult to tell how other people would react to the death of even someone who has been suffering for years with a terminal illness.  Many would say: just say what you feel, and if any idiot is affronted, just ignore him/her.  That's easy for you to say; some of my closest friends (not the one who died, thankfully) are idiots, and have been for most of their lives.  And yes; I have given up trying to give them up.

For several years after we met, I was rather intimidated by him and his family, so while I tried not to give the impression that this intimidation was working, I did stay away from them.  Then various misfortunes befell him, and his family, and I watched things unfold without comprehension (because I had only partial information), and with horror, until various events encouraged me to offer to help, without careful planning.  At the same time, I was getting into trouble, and my friend offered to help me, and pretty soon we discovered that we could not really get through the day without a lot of help from each other.  This brings us to our first lesson: erecting a fence of intimidation around your very private life simply delays receiving--and giving--help, sometimes by many years.

Well, I anticipated scores of lessons we could draw from our friendship, but I'm going to have to stop with that one.

Actually, I might have another.

My friend did not suspect, nor did I suspect, that so much support would come from each other.  Stumbling on someone on whom you can rely is such a hit-or-miss thing, isn't it?  On one hand, you just can't go about broadcasting your state of helplessness; it just isn't done.  Though I gave the impression of being quite satisfied to manage by myself, (perhaps not entirely successfully,) I was barely keeping my head above water, and my colleagues had to pacify my students at times, for lashing out at them (the students) because they had not done something or another, or for doing something or another.  For instance, one student was indignant at being kept in class for a minute past the end of the period.  I had told the student that he could leave, but he preferred to stand at the back of the classroom, winter jacket on, focusing hostility at me, as a gesture that I should let the rest of the class go.  Each person, of course, was at liberty to leave, but this man wanted a formal dismissal.  Evidently I was exceeding my bounds.  Unfortunately I swore at the man at the back.  I got a visit from the Dean.  I had to apologize.

These sorts of incidents were a clue that all was not well in Archimedes Land.  Pretty soon, everyone knew that my friend and I were a mutual aid society.  We were both presently bachelors, and we would shop together and fix meals together, and soon some folks jumped to the conclusion that we were an item.  When I was asked, my instinct was to deny it vigorously, but the cultural climate was such that to be too vigorous in my denial could be construed to be admission of guilt, or even denigration of people of alternate lifestyles!  (I wish I could indicate a smirk, but you just have to imagine me wearing a sardonic look and shrugging.)

Eventually, my friend retired, and moved very far away.  Everyone wanted to know how he was doing, as though I had an inside line on his every move!  One thing he had learned, perhaps unwittingly from me, was that he just could not keep everyone satisfied as to the reason that he chose one course of action over another.  That was a lesson that came easy for him, he being a child of the Sixties.  Over the years, I learned through him, who were the good guys--in terms of the people who were most helpful, and kind, and active in charitable work and service, and in support of the Arts, and I tried my darndest to encourage them.  But I had been in financial debt for a few years, and it was more than a decade before I was debt-free, so I could not support all those whom I wished to support, with money.

The Bible says: By their fruits ye shall know them.  This is especially true regarding children.  In my experience, admirable parents often have admirable children.  Unfortunately, some of the best-behaved kids have parents who were martinets, and not entirely admirable.  So this observation has to be taken with a pinch of salt and a glass of Coke, because there are many exceptions to the rule.  Some of my best friends have kids whom you wish had been strangled at birth, and I have always been insanely curious how that came to be.  Luckily, as the years go by, some of those progeny who were absolute terrors up to the age of about 25, settle down to be decent, even wonderful, human beings.  In a country such as this, where everyone guards their prerogatives with almost desperate jealousy, you cannot take any sort of action towards being the village that Hillary Clinton is so fond of talking about, that raises a child, without the enthusiastic and implicit support of its parents.  But you are, even if you do nothing.  Just being a visitor, or a friend of the family, is sometimes all it takes, to supporting certain sorts of values that become a part of the young person's environment.

This friend, about whom I set out to write, was not a low-profile person by any means.  He was, in fact, one of the most influential faculty in the history of the school, and he was an elected leader, whose tenure was fraught with problems.  Solutions that were hammered into shape one year, evolved into a worse problem another year.  But, if not for the guidance of my friend, our school would be a very different place today.  Not necessarily a worse place, I have to admit; just a different place, and possibly a place we would not have liked as much.

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It's Time to Stop Looking to Big Christianity to Adhere to its Moral Foundation

Just like Big Oil, Big Coal, and Big Milk, we now have Big Christianity.

In a recent post, some folks who have studied Big Christianity, some of them from the inside, explain why It is becoming increasingly inured to fielding people who seem to have moral values to which the Christian Conservatives should not be able to subscribe.

It seems that it is impossible to find decent people to run for the GOP (which is where Christian Conservatives have traditionally looked for leadership), so they make do with weirdos, some of whose objectives coincide with those of Big Christianity.  They think of it as a war, where you sometimes have to compromise.

So there you have it.  They're making pacts with the Devil, only I think it is too harsh to say that You-Know-Who is the devil.  He just looks for self-aggrandizement, avoiding taxes, and retaliation against friends who betray him.  Foolishness is not a sin.  It is only a crime.

One of these days, we're going to have to address the morals of our immigration policy.  The Democrats carry on as if it is a simple thing, and as if the Republicans are doing it all wrong.  Unfortunately, everyone in Congress adheres to various immigration principles that are difficult to articulate diplomatically, and if we were to list them, everyone would see what a can of worms it is.  So all immigration policy discussion is based on euphemisms and dog-whistle rhetoric.  If you think about this long enough, and if you separate the principles from each other carefully enough to reduce the issues into a dozen or more independent ones, you could probably arrive at reasonable conclusions without my mediation.

To Be Continued.

Archimedes.

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.

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