The Religious Lobby, Creating Decent Citizens: Why, and How

Most of my readers know that I'm an atheist (even if not an "evangelical" one); I have posted about it often.  (I'll insert a link when I find the posts.)  I have long maintained that people are naturally moral; in other words, you don't need a supernatural disciplinarian to keep you in line.  Of course, there will be a large minority (I used to think) that would have no compunctions about hurting their fellow-man and the world at large, for fun and profit, but the typical human being (so I said) would naturally tend to do the right thing.

Well.  Let it not be said that I can't see the obvious.  In recent months we have seen some eye-openers.  We have seen those who have deliberately refused to do the right thing.  We have seen those who have abused the offices to which they were elected in order to promote their own ends.  We have seen those who have victimised numerous people steadily throughout the years, just for their personal satisfaction.  We have heard people lying about their past in order to be elected to office.

Of course there have been more subtle sins, such as reneging on election promises, gratuitously aggravating foreign governments, exacerbating the existing disparity between the economic conditions of various sectors of the population, and encouraging the expression of mean-spiritedness in those who do not know any better.  But this can be put down to a sort of ignorance.  But the behaviour mentioned earlier is unforgivable.  So we have both immorality due to a sort of moral myopia, a kind of inability to understand moral issues, and certainly an inability to think through the consequences of certain actions that are clearly immoral to the rest of us, on one hand, as well as a deliberate turning away from actions that are unquestionably immoral.

In sum, I have to give up on considering that morality is innate in people; that they're born knowing to do the right thing.  But the opposite extreme is to assert that only religious teaching can create a moral individual.

Interestingly enough, it is often those who are political conservatives who are most anxious to bring people to religion, and (something that's puzzling) who are eager to punish, or call down divine retribution upon, those who are atheists or agnostics.  (So members of the present administration who are not particularly religious must maintain a facade of religiosity in order to appease the religious police, but it seems that the religious police is extremely tolerant of the practices of their close friends.)

Why is this?  From a cynical point of view, it seems that conservative Christians want everyone else to be kind and gentle and religious, while giving themselves the license to be ruthless when necessary.

Coming back to the question of morality being innate or not, I grant that certain values must be imparted to a child before it can become a moral individual.  These need not be religious values; they simply need to be human values; this was recognised long ago, when the Humanist movement started.  Arguably Humanism is many millennia old; some eastern religions are simply Humanism in eastern garb.  The basic ideas of fairness and justice and kindness are probably self-evident to children; they will often challenge their parents if they sense unfair actions.  But to blend ideas of fairness and kindness with reason and responsibility, to consider the long view, to support the idea that the highest morality implies a degree of self-negation, that requires additional effort, and requires that the child respects and even admires the adult.  This is a tall order, and almost the opposite of the situation where morality is innate.

Well, it is inappropriate to reject a long-held belief because of a few examples that appear to contradict them.  We must beware of flip-flopping too easily.  So I'm going to assume that morality exists among the members of the Administration, but that it is being suppressed in favour of political expedience.

Arch

I finally composed something!

First off, I thought I'd mix in blogs about various topics of interest, to relieve the monotony of politics all the time.  Incidentally, this is a good plan for everyone out there: politics is about structure, and daily life is about content.  Structure is useless without content.  But remember: this does not mean that you must forget to get out and vote.

Well, I certainly have composed short pieces of music, such as the various themes I used for my radio program, in particular the little march with which I ended the show each week.  But that little march was based on a fragment I remember from when I was a kid, and, as I said, I found the original thing on YouTube, sung by the late famous Richard Tauber: Starlight Serenade.  Other things I have written are a little more original, but enough of that.

I had always wanted to write an extended piece, that is, something that is more than a few minutes long, perhaps in multiple movements.  I thought hard about what sort of thing I could write, and I decided to write a String Quartet.

For those who aren't acquainted with the genre, a String Quartet is sort of a sonata (an essentially stand-alone instrumental piece, typically in three movements) for a string quartet.  This is a group (or ensemble) consisting of two violins, a viola, and a 'cello.  Because the instruments have such similar construction, the combination sounds very homogeneous, in other words, there is little contrast in the tones of the four instruments, which is in some ways a good thing (but in others not, because sound variety does help to relieve the boredom).

I decided to write the First Movement of the string quartet first.  (I need not have; it is quite possible some people write other movements first.)  I needed the so-called first theme, which is just a tune, or even a tune-fragment.  When the first examples of this sort of First Movement was written back in the 18th Century, this first theme was called the masculine theme.  First themes are vigorous, energetic things, and, incidentally, tend to be the tune that everybody remembers as the one that represents the entire sonata, or symphony, or whatever, like The Theme of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Well, as much as I would have liked to invent a theme as memorable as that one, I realized that this was my first effort at this, and I would be lucky to write any useful theme at all.  It only must be highly recognizable, because when anyone hears it, they have to go "Aha!  I know that tune from somewhere!")  Somehow, I wrote one.  Instead of a short little tune, I wrote a whole, complete tune, with accompaniment and everything, in fact, it contained what I could have used as my first theme several times, in different instruments.  (I get into minor trouble with this departure, but, I hope, not so much trouble that a real live set of string quartet players will refuse to play the thing.)

The next thing to do is to write a second theme, which, as you might guess, would be the feminine theme.  By this time I had forgotten all about this gender stuff, and I wrote a fairly generic theme, but shorter than the first theme.  I had learned my lesson.  But then, I got carried away, and repeated this second theme at a number of different pitches, and brought things to a sort of temporary close with a few big chords.  Actually, enough big chords for the end of a movie.  I told myself: I have to re-use this bit as the ending of the whole movement; it was almost like sailing off into the Grey Havens.

What usually comes next is the development section, where the two themes are combined in various ways, creating more and more excitement, like the middle part of a novel, where the villains take over and mess up everything.  But, to my dismay, I had already developed the first theme right at the beginning, and when I was introducing the second theme, I couldn't resist putting the first theme in the bass, and so I was baffled as to what to do.

I took a deep breath, and started off with the second theme, and alternating it with another little fragment from somewhere, and at different pitches (which implies different keys), and somehow led up to: stating the first theme again.  This is correct; this is called the recapitulation section.  Both themes must be stated.

An interesting twist that the First Movement Founding Fathers had strongly indicated is that the first theme and the second theme had to be in different keys.  I had done this: the first theme was in C major, and the second in A minor.  Now for the second part of the twist of the Founding Fathers: in the recapitulation, the two tunes must be in the same key.  Now, it isn't difficult to do this, especially with short themes, and I did it.  But, what comprised my second theme was this long story that wandered all over the place!  So I was forced to modify the whole thing, to satisfy at least the letter of the law of this twist of the Founding Fathers, and it happened that this resulted in a much more complex development section (built into the recapitulation, I realize; but others have done it, so why not me?) and I realized that this twist of the FF's had a purpose, namely to give deadbeats such as myself an opportunity to redeem themselves by requiring some creativity in handling the keys of the themes.  (For those who want details: the second theme started off in A minor, and then wandered into C major.  In the recap, it starts out in C major, and found itself subsequently in E minor.  That was interesting.)

I'm still tinkering with it, but this is how it sounds at present.

Added later: Here is the result of a little more tinkering.

String Quartet, 1. Allegro

A Clear Study of the Split among the Democrats

a writer of whom I have not heard before: Pete Davis, has an interesting article in the Guardian, one for which we should be thankful.  Democrats of all shades of blue should try to read and understand this--luckily, it is not hard to understand.  Still, I'm going to try and paraphrase some of the most interesting points for slow readers out there.  (You know I love you, but face it: you don't read very difficult prose.)

Davis's article is about the fact that the Democrats are divided into two groups: the traditional Democrats, the Party Loyalists, who mostly voted for Clinton in 2016, whom he calls the Liberals; and the rebels, the Bernie followers, who were mostly disgusted with the 'business as usual' attitude of the Party Loyalists, and who kept asking 'But what are you going to do about **?'  He calls this group the Leftists, and so the article is about the Left / Liberal Divide.

The various ways in which the two groups contrast with each other makes fascinating reading.  For instance, the Liberals are concerned with the nuts and bolts of getting the Dems back into power, and resisting the evils of the Republican agenda.  The Leftists are more concerned with the finer issues-- which remain in the periphery, because of Liberal platform control--and moving them into the center of the conversation.  The Liberals are the ones who go door to door before an election, getting out the vote.  The Leftists are often furious with the party leadership by that time, and won't have anything to do with the election.  It goes without saying that unless there is some cooperation between the two groups, elections can't be won.

But, even before reading Pete Davis's prescription for a strategy for both groups to cooperate as needed, it is interesting to read the different characterizations of the two groups, and recognize their behavior.

The Liberals, for instance, he says tend to adopt Republican rhetoric.  Remember, rhetoric is patterns of speech that have a particular intention.  If we adopt the rhetoric of Republicans, we run the risk of supporting conservative intentions, and, as the Left declares, end up being pulled to the right.  Something Davis does not mention is that Bernie Sanders brought up the issue of income inequality, something which the Liberals have abandoned as being too "socialist" for America.

Another interesting point is about the implied strategy of the two groups.  To put it simply, the Liberals are all about winning; once they have won, they feel they would have some flexibility about how to proceed, to focus on various initiatives post-election.  For the Left, he says, the ideology comes first; if they cannot win the immediate election, they're resigned to waiting until the party has come round to their way of thinking.

How the Democrats respond to these conditions, whichever group they may happen to be in, will influence how things turn out.  And the Dem response, I believe, will depend on clearly understanding what this article explains.

Homework for you!

Arch

D. Trump and his Sleepover with the Republican Kids

In a recent article on HuffPost, reporter S. V. Date conjectured how members of the Republican core feel about how things are going.  Two members of the party had opposite views.  (If you want more Trump disasters to relish, read the article.)

White house staffers, Ms. Huckabee Sanders, and those close to Trump state that Trump is doing what his voters wanted from him, and they feel that "America is winning."  Obviously, we're all going to disagree about what sorts of things can be considered to be signs that America is winning; to us moderates and liberals, both America and the World seem to be losing fast.

Others, including senators Bob Corker, Jeff Flake and John McCain, are disgusted.  "Win what?" said someone; saying that the party is in such sad shape that they don't know how to proceed.

This brings us to a major issue about party politics.  In times past, each party needed to win in order to put through some legislation that was intended to point the country and the government in some direction.  But now, because of voter polarization, partisanship--the enthusiasm of a person for his or her party--has gone beyond any interest in the political principles or even the programmatic elements of the party's platform.  Many in both parties are more preoccupied with winning, rather than with what to do once they have won.  The only thing that Trump has succeeded, which is a major setback for liberals and for the nation, is appoint a supreme court judge who seems to be blindly loyal to conservative principles, and has little if any empathy for the concerns of common people.

National politics must stop being all about winning; this must be recognized by both parties.  The GOP, sad to say, despite their 8 years in power, has taken on a sort of victim mentality, focused on winning at all costs.  (In contrast, supporters of Bernie Sanders, to Bernie's own disappointment, have taken the view that it should be Bernie or bust, which led to this disaster.  What can we say?  They must have lots of people whom they can blame, and I hope that gives them comfort!  Any Democrat would have done infinitely better as President than Trump, and so would have a number of Republicans, but there's no point in crying over spilled candidates.)

[Added later:]
This post about Jeff Flake has some interesting follow-up questions for Jeff Flake and Bob Corker (the two Republican senators who announced that they will not run again with Trump in the presidency). Again, they articulate rather well many of the things I have been struggling to say.  A thought that stands out strongly about the obsession with winning is: "My reelection before America."

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Are Pro-Hillary Speakers at the National Democratic Convention to Blame for Donald Trump?

First of all, for those of you who don't have the patience to read most of this post, the answer is: No.

Anyway, Sarah Silverman recently posted a video in which she sings about all that she's feeling about the current state of affairs: <https://www.facebook.com/ILYAmerica/videos/1870297263299554/>.  I was impressed; she encapsulated most of what was depressing me when I saw it.

This afternoon, I noticed a commenter had dismissed her, claiming that she had stabbed Bernie in the back at the national convention.

Listen bud (though this fellow probably doesn't read, and only watches videos; someone will have to make a video of this blog post for him.  He should love the president, who is supposedly firmly in the non-reading camp): you can only logically blame Sarah Silverman for the election of Trump if she was instrumental in sabotaging both the Democratic Candidates.  Now, let's talk about what you did.

1. You were persuaded by Sarah Silverman, and reluctantly voted for Hillary Clinton.  In this case, I will humbly accept that you had a point.
2. You were pissed off at her, and since you hated Ms. Clinton, you voted for Trump.  Well, let this be a lesson to you; voting out of anger puts you in an unpredictably messy position, and you only have yourself to blame.  It's tough to make us believe that Sarah Silverman was at fault, if there were more than a couple of hotheads like you!  Turn from your evil ways, and vote the GOP out at the earliest opportunity.
3. You went ahead and wrote in Bernie Sanders.  I don't know if this was allowed where you vote, and if it was, what the conventional wisdom concerning such a vote could be.  My suspicion is that it was a wasted vote, and again you have only yourself to blame.  Blame Sarah Silverman if your mental health requires it, but if possible, cast a more useful vote next time.
4. You stayed home.  I think this is the most likely case.  We can't take you seriously.

If Sarah Silverman had persuaded more Democrats last year, we would not be in this position.  I have my doubts about how effective a president Hillary Clinton would have been, but she would probably have been far more effective than what we have now.  Of course, we would have had the GOP hyperventilating, trying to get her convicted of security breaches, and so on; this is the traditional approach of the GOP.

I have to wonder whether the GOP got a majority in the House because of Bernie Sanders boys sulking.  That would be pathetic.  At any rate, unless there is protracted and relentless sulking among the Alt-Left, there is an excellent chance that the House will go Democrat next year, and the Senate will eke out a narrow Democrat majority, and they will filibuster the daylights out of every reasonable bill that they get sent.

Arch

A Summary of Government Environmental Rules and Procedures Attacked by the Current Administration

Here is an entire article on which rules and regulations that were set up under the Obama Administration have been tossed out by the Trump Administration, which are under threat, and which are being considered to be removed.  The source is the New York Times (a newspaper that Trump deplores).  We don't notice these things until they're gone.  It is good to be aware, so that we can take steps for our protection.  I'm only commenting on those whose effect on our lives might not be obvious.  I apologize if you feel insulted.

01.  Removed stronger flood standards for new Federal funded construction projects.

This is a matter of saving money in the long term by building carefully in the short term.  Building in a flood plane plain is asking for trouble, and not always for the obvious reason.  A major building in a flood plain makes the flooding worse for homes and businesses nearby.  My wife works for the government of a nearby rural county, and businesses absolutely hate flood-related building restrictions.  It costs more money to put together a project that satisfies flood rules, and they feel as if the engineers soak them for all they're worth.  [Nasty remarks about engineers removed.  My sources said that the business, and the government agencies that are anxious for economic development to proceed at the greatest possible speed, just by themselves are enough of a force to handicap cautious best practices proceedings.  "We just don't have the time to slow down to take careful precautions for floods."  We will have even less time to rebuild after floods.]

02.  Tossed out restrictions on an insecticide that the (Obama-era) Environment Protection Agency had classified as dangerous to developing fetuses.

Scott Pruitt has said 'It needs more study.'  Normally, if it is possibly harmful, we would ban the chemical while we study it.  But conservatives, who do not like taking the life of a fetus, do not mind taking the risk that its brain development would be hurt.  Is it that wealthy folks can invest in private water filtration systems, while poor folk who live near farms and field that might use these dangerous chemicals . . . Let's not forget Flint.  Lead and Chlorpyrifos are not the same, but some of the issues are the same.

05.  Revoked a rule that prevented coal companies from dumping mining debris into local streams.

This will raise more red flags to those of you who live in coal-mining country, such as we, than for most people.  The crap that comes out of coal mines are highly toxic.  Please do your own research; I hate the very thought of that stuff being put in streams.  The sight of water stained bright orange coming out of coal mines makes lots of people sick, and the smell makes you even sicker.  Bear in mind that the coal from these places kept people warm for centuries.  However thankful we are, it makes absolutely no sense to turn our back on safe practices that prevent poisoning the water that eventually flows into, for instance, the Chesapeake Bay.  Angry coal companies could take the position: screw the Chesapeake.  But only the Trump Administration would consider going along with them.

10.  Proposed the use of seismic air guns for gas and oil exploration in the Atlantic.  (The Obama Administration had refused permits to do this.)

These are loud sound blasts that map the ocean floor by tracing the sound waves that radiate from essentially a super loud air horn [which has been, I think, clamped to the ocean floor].  The loud noises [high-energy sound waves] can harm whales, fish, and turtles.  A bunch of whales with ruptured eardrums seems a small price to pay for lots of gas that we can keep burning, but each of us has to decided exactly how upset we are at this permission.

12.  Repealed an Obama-era rule regulating royalties for oil, gas and coal on government and tribal lands.

The Trumps have decided that these rules cause confusion and uncertainty. Remember that the poor gas companies have millions of lawyers. This is just another way to make sure that native tribes and the Federal Government do not get a reasonable royalty fee for the oil, gas or coal. Royalties are a percentage of the value of the material, a few cents per pound, just like musicians get a few cents each time their recordings are played (in a for-profit venue).

14, 22.  Relaxed the Environmental Review Process for Federal Infrastructure Projects.

This is worth understanding, though conservatives will probably not sympathize with it.  I only know about it because of my wife's work as a county planner.

When a large project is put forward for approval by the county, the plan must contain a chapter that says how the building project will deal with the environmental impact of the construction.  If there is a huge building with an enormous roof, how will the runoff water be dealt with without destroying the stream into which the gutters disgorge?  How will they prevent erosion with runoff from the driveways and parking lots?  If the project is to be build on top of a stream, or even an underground stream (there are such things) how will the building 'pad' be designed to disrupt the water flow as little as possible?  (I'm not an expert, so I'm winging it here.  It can only be more complicated, not less.  It is on the same lines as dealing with the flood plane.)  If the project is subsidized by the Federal Government, the rules are even stricter.  Well, the review process has been relaxed by the Trump Administration.

Not all conservatives are happy with this.  Some of them, those who have been involved with local, county and state planning in Pennsylvania, know the issues.  It does not need an actual flood for bad project design to pop into public attention.

20.  Stopped discouraging the sales of plastic water bottles in national parks!

Hmm.  Whom does this profit?  Clearly, the water bottle lobby is powerful, and has sent a lot of really, really great water Trump's way.  Or the fact that Obama set this policy in place has really got their knickers in a twist.  Fragments of plastic water bottles, over a decade or two, find their way into the oceans, and into the lungs of whales and other sea mammals.  Conservative congressmen hate aquatic mammals with a passion.  Jesus is not going to be happy with them.

The entire list has 48 items; this is only a few of them.  Not all of these are the children of Trump's own genius; some of them are the pet ideas of various congressmen and senators from the GOP.  Read the article for more, but take some tranquilizer first.  They make me mad.

Arch

Dealing with Massacres

“Dealing with massacres” seems too ambitious a title for this post; it seems to imply that I’m going to give you a course of action.  No; it’s only that I have been thinking about them, and I’m reporting the most obvious conclusions I have arrived at.  Actually, there’s only one major conclusion.

A massacre such as happened in Las Vegas on the night of October 1^st is ultimately an act of communication.  This man is telling us something.  Unfortunately, what he is trying to say is, at the moment, completely unknown.  Some light may be shed on it if he has left behind something, but until that happens, the whole thing is an act of communication that never succeeded.

The (missing) statement could be something like: “I hate [blank],” where blank could be almost anything: country music, or young people enjoying themselves, or the government, or people who wave the confederate flag, or people who have unprotected sex; who knows?  It is possible that a suicide note has been found, and that the law enforcement people are keeping it a secret until the public is less interested in it, and (hopefully) less likely to act on the information.  The man has been said to be mad, but everybody calls everybody mad, to make it appear that only insanity causes people to resort to violence.

Acts of communication of this magnitude are probably planned and executed by those who feel insignificant.  They probably feel that they’re neglected or disrespected, or dismissed or ignored.  We all feel that way at times, but we don’t take the trouble to acquire a score of deadly weapons, and spend all our savings on shooting a pile of innocent people.  I’m not a psychologist, but it seems to me that an important task we have to address is to teach our citizens how to put feelings of insignificance in perspective.

Increasingly, looking around me, I see that our society is becoming one in which only people of higher than average intelligence can function satisfactorily.  A college education enables even those of modest intellectual gifts to function to a certain degree, for a few years.  They know where to look for answers, and the point of the old adage: “It isn’t what you know, but who you know” becomes clearer: If you’re an idiot, it helps to have smart friends, who can explain things to you.  As time goes on, and most of your smart (and attentive) friends begin to die off, you’re left high and dry, and ignored, confused, and disrespected (and you begin to acquire automatic weapons).  This problem is going to get worse, and nobody is causing it intentionally; the world is getting steadily more complex, and there are all sorts of complexity.  Some of us can handle some sorts, others can’t handle much of any sort of complexity.

Education is the best tool for teaching younger people how to handle complexity.  Of course, it cannot teach them how to handle an emergency situation in progress*, but it will go a long way toward preventing our children from becoming the causes of such a situation.  The NRA, which started out as a group of hunters and gun users who were appalled at the lack of safety training of their fellow-gun-owners, ended up being a collection of frightened men manipulated by gun manufacturers, and the women who love them.  Perhaps they view those of us who do not own guns as idiots living in a fool’s paradise, but I strongly believe that, except for children, the ones most often hurt by gun violence are gun owners.  [I never finished this thought, but here goes: the NRA started out being a force for gun education, but became a club for anxious men.  Perhaps I should never have drawn the NRA into this . . .]

I hesitate to bring up this next thought, because it smacks of religiousness.  Let me cover my bona fides before I lay it on you.  We are all very angry with drug users and drug dealers.  In our minds, the entire business of drugs is accompanied by the image of a suspicious-looking foreigner lurking at a corner, waiting for someone.**  I was never shy of declaring that drugs and those who use them were despicable and senseless things that I would never associate myself with.  And, unfortunately, some individuals close to me were listening carefully.  It happened unexpectedly that I learned that members of my family had become addicts, and had been frightened off from coming to me for help and support, because of my stated anti-drug stance.

The way back from addiction is a long, long road.  I watched with horror, and admiration, as the young people involved tried to fight their way back, and failed many times, suffering horrible physical pain, and mental agony, before there appeared any promise of success.  And the fact that saved us all was that these were my people.  I could not turn my face from them.

If we can choose to understand the perpetrator of a heinous crime, it doesn’t make things better for the victims, but it makes things better for us.  Nursing hatred towards the man gets us absolutely nowhere.  Of course, nobody I know personally has actually been killed in a massacre.  You could hold that up as a fact that invalidates my idea.  But, at least those of my readers who have thus far escaped the experience of having a friend or loved one mowed down, you could start out by adopting this attitude.

When you see members of your community able to empathize with and reach out to those trying to recover from addiction, you have to strongly suspect that they have been touched personally by addiction—themselves, or members of their families, or loved ones.  Taking a long step away from the scene, one begins to understand the message of The Beatles: All you need is love.  It is almost impossible to misunderstand that sentence;  Love enables you to understand, and understanding enables you to forgive, and forgiving enables you to stop feeling the pain.

So, remember, it isn’t just Christians who own the idea of Universal Love.  Perfectly ordinary people, including atheists and agnostics, can choose love, as a principle for living in the world we have, rather than the world we want!

Well, after that, I suppose I should give up blogging; it sort of says it all!

Arch

*Any techniques for dealing with an emergency situation in progress, except for the most minor ones, is likely to be as scary as the situation itself.  Just saying.
**Or this sleazy-looking muppet on Sesame Street who tries to sell Ernie a Letter N.  "A LETTER N?"" he screams, and the panicked muppet tries furiously to shut him up.  (You had to be there.)

Dealing with Frustration

Something I learned late in life is how to get angry without losing my temper.  This is something we have to do daily, with the onslaught of foolishness that Donald Trump unleashes on the —now far from unsuspecting— public.  I need not list the matters that are in the news du jour— kneeling for the National Anthem, hurling invective at Korea, responding to foolish behavior from children and in-laws, being befuddled with the continual attempts of the majority in Congress and Senate to repeal the ACA (Obamacare), repatriate children of immigrants, and destroy protections for National Parks and wilderness refuges.  (Well, I listed them anyway.)

Of course, like most Americans, I sneak a peek at faceBook every day, and since most of my friends are either die hard liberals or moderate conservatives, there is a lot of hateful posts ridiculing the president and his gang.  If one of my friends cannot invent a vicious meme him- or herself, he/she finds one on the Internet and links to that.

I don't think our hate really has any good effect.  All it does is incite us to steadily worse behavior, while the president (who does not read the posts on my wall) simply ignores it.  My conservative friends ignore them.  Only my liberal friends read all this poison, and it gives them a bellyache.  We hurt no one but ourselves with all this vitriol.

Of course we can't help being angry.  But how can one actually hate someone with a cognitive disability?  In addition to cognitive disability in the White House, there is poor behavior, loose morals, lack of empathy, ignorance of history, obliviousness to the best examples of Presidents of the past, lack of being able to interpret the words of others, and so on.  We needed a leader with intelligence, tact and subtlety, and a sense of fairness, and we got . . . that.  But hating . . . him . . . is totally useless.  It's like hating a mosquito.  We certainly do, but it doesn't do the mosquito much harm.

Arch

Repost: Education, Values, and Bringing Up Children

I often re-read my own posts.  Actually, I don't, but I saw the file that goes with this post from 2013 that I could not remember having written, and I read it.  Forgive me for being shocked and impressed with my own writing, but I simply must post this again.  [Warning: there is absolutely no relevance to the present disasters we are facing.]

The America that we know is so diverse that almost any generalization anyone makes is likely to be largely untrue.  This is particularly so with statements about Education, and about bringing up children.  There are thousands of people out there who have what I think is the right attitude towards Education, either because it worked for them, or because they brought it here from The Old Country: Education is good.  But for many, their belief is that Education will make me rich, maybe, and that's all they care about. 

Modern America is based on two principles: Simplification, and Generalization. These principles have worked well for such a long time that when they stop working we’re not really able to recognize the fact. Precisely because they do work in so many instances, applying the generalization principle, we go on the assumption that they work in all instances. Yet it is only human to try and simplify one’s dealings with a variety of things, be they situations, people, or produce: we sort them into broad categories, and use rules of thumb.  This is called stereotyping, when people want to denigrate it, but who can do without it?

So when I say that people today do a very poor job of bringing up their kids, I’m making a big generalization, and I’m sure practically every parent will claim that he or she is an exception.

When I say that education today is (somewhat of) a failure, that too is a broad generalization that is likely to have just as many exceptions, but people are likely to agree with that sentiment, simply because it is human nature to point the finger at another culprit rather than to take some of the responsibility ourselves!  But, in my opinion, the failure of education is partly a result of our failure in child-rearing.

Why have things come to this pass?  It all began in the early part of the twentieth century, with the introduction of the assembly-line, mass-production, and the economies of scale.  Standardization is a good thing in many ways —consider that we can use any compact disc in any stereo— but, again, the weaknesses of generalization rears its ugly head. Using industrial methods to mass-produce educated citizens has negative consequences.

What do we expect out of education? Clearly the expectations vary wildly from person to person. The most common expectation is that education will result in a well-paying job. That may be true, but actually, it is the converse that holds: if you have a well-paid job, you’ve probably had a good education. (Or your dad might own the business.)  A moderately good education certainly increases the chances of a young person being suited to a more responsible position, which in turn might bring a higher salary. Another expectation of education is that it fits a person for a productive role in society. Unfortunately, this doesn’t resonate with (parents who are) rugged individualists. They don’t want their kids fitting into anything; they’re not happy with society, and they don’t want a bunch of commies making their kids just like every other kid in the country. But some of us realize that the world is a complex place, and whether one likes it or not, a person’s interaction with society is complex, and cannot be reduced to a simplistic equation of dollars and cents.  Which means that building a better citizen is likely to require the effort of a team, as Hillary Clinton got laughed at for saying some years ago.

As far as I’m concerned, education is also about values; all parents want their children to learn certain values. And they want those values taught in school: don’t have unprotected sex, learn how to drive safely, learn how to eat sensibly. Be respectful to people that matter, and don’t get tossed around by hoodlums. As you can see, all these expectations are very relative, and in extreme cases, rather crass. These values are better taught at home. There are other more important values that must be taught by both parents and teachers in concert: how to work well with teams and groups; how to lead where needed, and how to graciously take instructions from competent peers.

The job of a school, and of teachers, has evolved greatly over time. As society’s expectations of schools changed, their methods changed, to process a larger number of mediocre students quickly and efficiently. This has not been all bad. From a high-school drop-out rate of around 70% in the decade of the 1950s, we now have a drop-out rate of practically less than 10%, depending on how you count it. But we have given up a great deal to achieve this: for instance the needs of both exceptional students, and particularly difficult students, tend to be neglected in favor of the needs of students of average ability. But, of course, every parent insists that his or her child must be taken care of first, and this demand is backed up by administrators, and so a teacher’s job is very difficult. To top everything, teachers are usually poorly paid.

Let’s turn now to the question of values and bringing up children. We don't anymore consider sex to be a mere means of conceiving children; rather, there are those who regard children as a somewhat regrettable by-product of unplanned sex. No matter what our conscious opinions are, we’re hardwired to take pleasure in children, both our own, and those of others. In recent times, it has become fashionable to consider children a sort of property, and therefore to consider other people’s children absolutely none of our business.  People such as teachers, therefore, find themselves living a sort of contradiction: the children in their classroom are, on the one hand, none of their business, and on the other hand, entirely their business.  As far as I’m concerned, all children are everybody’s business, but obviously I’m not going to waltz into someone else’s home and tell them what to do.  I’m doing it here, instead.

The five day week was a tremendous victory; one would have expected that with the progress of society and more efficient means of production, we would have come to a four day week sometime in the twentieth century. It didn’t happen. In fact, people are working harder than ever, working overtime, and working second jobs. Many of the necessities of life have become so costly that we need to step up our rate of earning more than the increase in the cost of living would explain. (One reason for this is that it is better business sense for a company to hire a few people, and work them hard, than to hire a large number of people to work shorter hours, even if they’re paid less. Another reason is that Business and Industry has decided that there must be a small leisure class —wealthy stockholders— and the working population must work very much harder to support them.)

The consequence of this is that we do not know how to bring up our kids, most of all because we haven’t had the time to figure it out. Bringing up children is not entirely an instinctive skill. It has to be learned. In fact, it has to be taught. But it is too important an enterprise to be left to the tender mercies of school teachers, wonderful though they might be. We must regard our own children as future parents from the word go. Every interaction must be something that that child can draw on in the future, when interacting with his or her own children.

The most important things a parent can convey to a child are: (1) Be willing to take on unpleasant things, for the sake of the good it might bring. (2) Be considerate. (3) Set a good example to the younger people in your circle. (4) Value education, even if the benefits of particular aspects of it are not immediately obvious. (5) Be respectful of your teacher, even if your friends regard her as an idiot. She’s working under almost impossible conditions, because she believes in what she’s teaching. (6) Stay away from anything that will endanger your long-term health.

(Additional values, such as being involved in the betterment of your community, must come from example.)

As you can see, a lot of what has to be conveyed is what anyone knows, but it is also precisely the sort of stuff that we have been conditioned not to talk about, so in this very article I’m violating a whole lot of conventions!

It used to be the province of the local priest or minister to lay this sort of thing on the people. Once religion got seriously discredited, people jettisoned the priests and ministers, but had nowhere to go to be reminded of the commonsense axioms that they had to fall back on in the heat of the daily battle. Parents began to insist that teachers should do this. This means that education experts would have to come up with a new subject, like Sex Education, which might be called something like Not Being an Idiot. It is not the business of teachers to impart family values! A teacher who is a preacher as well loses a lot of credibility with the kids. Teachers do it, even if they get little thanks for it. But it is the responsibility of parents, regardless of how overworked they are. If you are a parent, remember you’re teaching for two: these lessons are needed for your kids. But they’re also needed for your grandchildren. They’re both content, and methods, in Education jargon.

Some extremists believe that Education should start at home, and end there as well.  I don't believe that.  Education is a social endeavor, and that is its glory.  But some things are best taught at home, not least among them being how to bring up children.  A child is never too young to learn the art of conveying values, by example, and with delicacy and imagination.

Afterword: I got so carried away I almost forgot to emphasize one of my main points: one thing that must be taught at home is to value and respect school, and teachers.  A child must not be taught that a teacher must earn his or her respect.  The respect must come first, both from the child and the parent, whether or not the teacher has demonstrated that he or she "deserves respect."  One must start with respect, and only proceed to loss of respect under desperate circumstances.  A teacher simply cannot function if he or she is faced with an array of skeptical faces.

Arch

Another Winter of Our Discontent (Actually, it's Fall)

This material might not float your boat; don't let this post sour you on our Blog :)

I have been observing what college kids do.

It used to be the case that college was where most young Americans began to relate to those who were not all white and middle-class.  You met blacks, and then Europeans, and then Latinos, and kids from working-class families, and for the most part, you learned that they were not as different as you may have imagined: just regular folks.  A very few kids, usually from somewhat more sheltered backgrounds, stuck to certain cliques, and that was how they survived: by creating for themselves what we nowadays call a bubble.  They paid a price; if their future occupations needed them to be comfortable with minorities, immigrants and people of a poorer stratum of society, they had to work hard to acquire that comfort, or they had to pretend a comfort they did not feel.

These days, I'm noticing that kids seek out their bubbles very quickly.  It could be a fraternity or a sorority, which only admitted a few selected upper-class people.  It isn't just viciousness; it is seeking a level of comfort.  Colleges are admitting increasing numbers of foreign students, and some kids just can't handle that, especially if they come from the suburbs and their parents never allowed them to mix with poor kids while in school.  This was, to some extent, always the case.  But it is getting more extreme.

A lot of people notice other things happening.  For instance, you might go to a favorite store, and look for your favorite store clerk, and she or he is gone, and there is some foreign person working in their place.  This could make some people unhappy and uncomfortable.

It has to do with middle-class Americans gradually fading from view; the people with whom the middle-class is comfortable are either leaving jobs, such as sales or service jobs in the cities or suburbs, or going back to school, or moving to other areas where the cost of living is cheaper.  Businesses are cutting down on workers and worker hours.  They usually claim that it is higher taxes, but it is probably higher rents in the malls (because store landlords just can't tolerate reduced incomes, or even the same income!), and they cut down overtime, and pretty soon you have an immigrant taking the place of someone you've known all your life, because typically an immigrant or minority is happy with smaller wages.  (This is why we build cars in Mexico, so that the car manufacturer can make a bigger profit.)  It appears that this is precisely what prompts some conservatives to deplore what has been called the browning of America.

Let's look at what people say is the cause of all this.  Conservatives will immediately say that it is higher taxes (and more expensive benefits; it so happens that I agree about the benefits being a needless burden on employers).  But, according to my reasoning, higher taxes get paid to somewhere: either Federal or State employees, or construction companies, or poor people on Social Welfare, or whatever.  In turn, that money gets spent again, and it can get sucked in by various businesses hungry for profits.  If nobody has money to buy anything, of course businesses will feel it.

In contrast, if taxes are lowered, each person sits on his income, especially the most wealthy.  It stays in the bank, a great comfort to the individual, but of course it is no help to other businesses who would like this wealthy individual to come shopping.  But the wealthy notoriously never go shopping.  If they ever do, you can trace where the money goes: usually to another super wealthy individual, or abroad.

Lowering taxes keeps money out of circulation.  Fiscal conservatives will contest this statement, based on tradition and ignorance.  But there is no doubt that raising taxes puts money back in circulation.

Pretty soon I'm going to expand on a plan whereby you could lower taxes, but a lot of people won't like it.  I'll give you an example: you notice that highways get crapped-up every winter.  Well, there are these enormous trucks that barrel along them, and there just so much trucking traffic--and traffic, generally--that weak spots on a highway can take, before it starts needing attention.  But we all use stuff brought to town by trucks; someone has to pay for it,right?  But why should a poor person who subsists on a diet of baked beans for every meal have to pay the same taxes to support highways as a commercial farm, that is constantly sending out products by truck, getting farm machinery by truck, buying fertilizer by the truck-full, and so on?  Shouldn't the supplier, who gets a profit from the can of baked beans pay more than the poor consumer?  (No, the consumer usually pays; it's a tradition.)  If we think about it, we should be able to make only those who benefit from the highways pay for their upkeep.  Similarly, we can convert community swimming-pools into paid-admission swimming pools: $15 a day, to pay for the equipment, the wages, the materials, and maintenance.  (Or $14, if you can manage on that income level.)

Think about it.  The citizens with higher incomes will love this idea, since they probably have their own pools anyway, and can certain afford $15.  But can we all support this sort of idea?  Of course it won't work for hospitals, because a sick person is hardly likely to bring his piggy bank to the Emergency Room.  I believe in subsidized health care for all, but then you probably think I'm a communist.

Arch

All-Or-Nothing Rhetoric, and Why I Dislike It

PC enthusiasts are a danger to society.  Let me explain.

As we have all seen, Homosexuals and Bisexuals fought long and hard to earn a few important rights for decades, and won those rights, which we call LGB rights.

Soon, the media and minority rights proponents insisted that those same rights should be extended to Transsexuals, Queers, and other members of the alphabet soup, and today, LGB has been replaced by LGBTQI....  This tendency to piggyback these issues on top of issues that were decided favorably is something I deplore.  This is not the time to examine the cases for extending whatever rights were given to LGB individuals to Transsexuals; I personally feel that the jury is yet out on those questions.  But there's no doubt that there is a tendency to go from zero to 100% in these matters, which unscrupulous politicians and lobbyists exploit, to their detriment. 

Consider the current uproar over the lack of condemnation of NAZIs from the White House.  What I'm hearing in the media seems to carry the subtext that the NAZIs are guilty whatever they're accused of.  Those of us who are reasonable know that this is not the case.  But the rhetoric certainly seems to suggest that.

What do we mean when we call someone a NAZI?  Obviously, if they call themselves NAZIs, we're allowed to do the same.  To be definite, they may want to eradicate all non-whites from a particular geographic region.  They may want to destroy all non-whites from a region.  They may want to deport all non-whites from a region.  They may want to incarcerate all non-whites.  They may want to reduce all non-whites to a second-class citizen status.

Unfortunately we seem to have given over all our important thinking to a few uneducated morons, who will conveniently lump all those groups into one.  "You know what?  Anyone who wants to reduce non-whites to second-class status is a Nazi!"  Clearly, though, while certain sectors of the population, such as the KKK and other bloodthirsty murderers may want to purify the nation by any means necessary, others merely deplore the erosion of the privileges they enjoyed when whites were the absolute majority, and all others were here on sufferance.  I mean, there are those who even resent women being permitted the vote.  It is misleading to call these people NAZIS.  It is propaganda.

Painting everyone by the same brush, though convenient, is wrong.  Just as we should not grant all privileges to everyone thoughtlessly, so must we not condemn everyone who does not want illegal immigrants to have all rights that citizens have.  This is why there is so much resentment against liberals among the members of the population whom the Alt-Right seeks to provide leadership for: Liberals have for decades run headlong into sociological china shops.

Someday, I am sure, all this LGBTQIJZ nonsense will become irrelevant, just as genetically modified corn will be accepted.  But that day is not today; there are issues that need to be ironed out.  Similarly, it is by no means obvious that illegal immigrants deserve all rights that citizens deserve--anyone who asserts this is not thinking clearly, and may not actually mean what they say--but we can agree on some aspects of that extreme position: for instance, we could agree that immigrant children, have many more rights than adult immigrants.  The case of immigrants is strengthened by the fact that American industries enjoy the lower wages paid in Mexico, which is what drives Mexicans across the border in the first place.  We can't have it both ways.  We cannot exploit the depressed economy of Mexico, and at the same time morally impose draconian measures against illegal immigrants.

Having said all that, I suspect that Trump may have set out to appease die-hard white chauvinists with a few anti-immigrant sops.  He has quickly found out that being president is not as easy as declaring a casino bankrupt.  He probably doesn't quite understand the seriousness of his position, but he certainly knows that it is humiliating.  Unfortunately, the humiliation initiative is overshadowing serious steps that need to be taken to halt the chaos that is slowly overtaking the nation.  Liberals and Democrats are too easily satisfied with ridiculing the president.  Ridiculing Trump is no great achievement.

Let me finish with a plea for (1) careful use of language, (2) careful adherence to law and logic, and (3) a focused, responsible, patient approach to politics and leadership.  The Democratic party was on autopilot this last election, and now it's time for actual thinking.

Arch

Words: Another Argument for a Real Education

We were talking about Education for several years, and I was limping along, trying to explain why some things I was doing were not working, and why both teachers and students are frustrated by the process of education, with the education system we have.  And then Trump happened.

You see, one of the most enormous problems we have in explaining things to each other is words.  A lot of the time, if we're talking about recipes for Strawberry Pie, or something relatively simple like that, there is no difficulty.  What you mean when you say Strawberry is probably pretty close to what I mean by that word, and what I mean when I say pie is pretty much what you probably mean.  (Even here, there's some room for confusion, especially if you've never really made or eaten a Strawberry Pie, but more on that later.  Much later!)

Many of those who have gone to college are likely to suspect that the reasons why being President so confuses Donald Trump is probably education.  But wait; he has had a college education: a Master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania, if we're to believe the news reports.  What has gone wrong?

Why did such a large number of people jump on board the Trump Wagon?  Again, the culprit might seem to be education.  But are we sure?

A significant skill one learns in a quality education is to use words with precise meanings.  What does education mean to you?  The obvious answer is that in college one learns a lot of things, and so it depends on which of those things we're focusing on.  We have to have a major, and we could have a minor, and any number of general education courses, and we could take all sorts of electives, which are neither for your major or your minor, but just for the heck of it; and we could play varsity athletics, and so on, and so forth.  Which of these does one mean when one talks about someone being educated, and someone else not being educated?

The skill that the Trump Administration and all its beleaguered members seem to trip over, is that of using the right word in the right place.
They read the Constitution, and they don't understand the words.  Of course the Founding Fathers meant different things than we do when they said "The right to bear arms," or when they use the words "All men are created equal", or similar expressions that must be understood in context.  Even experts in constitutional law disagree in how these terms should be applied: whether we must take them as they would have been understood in the 18^th Century, or whether we should use them in some sense that has been translated to the 20^th or the 21^st century, where Arms could mean anything from a Flintlock to a Bazooka.  But there appears to be confusion in understanding the meaning of even quite unambiguous language.
Then, they look at an understanding that does not have the force of law directly, but does so indirectly, such as the proscription against retaining control of a business that can profit because of the owner being President; it does not seem illegal.  This is a different kind of blindness.

Almost more important are the words that are needed to exactly explain what the administration is thinking.  Trump thinks of speaking as merely spewing advertising copy.  He is accustomed to addressing an audience that has, up to now, been perfectly satisfied to take at face value his words that "It's going to be great.  It's going to be the best you ever saw."  But at least a few of his followers are now ready for two things: One: How exactly is it going to be great?  and two:  Can we have some input into it?  The hallmark of a great administration is its ability to explain to the public what they're planning to do, and why.  And How.

A third sort of skill, and unfortunately many college graduates never quite get this, is that a good education should make it easier for a young person to understand and deal with ever increasing levels of complexity.  Every year, the kids are able to tolerate less and less complexity, until colleges are driven to stick simply to the syllabus of high schools.  Unfortunately, the area of Business Management is notorious for being one in which there is no real penalty for those who want to oversimplify things.  This is especially true if one has a lot of money to throw around, because one can always buy one's way out of trouble.  Trump's numerous bankruptcies send up a red flag to those who know: Trump has not taken into account where things could go wrong.  Things could go wrong when trying to set up a casino.  How much more can things go wrong when trying to set up health care for a nation of 350 million people?

There is very little that stands in the way of Medical Insurance Companies raising their premiums as high as they like.  This is America; businesses are allowed to make profits, and Health Insurance companies are businesses.  But yes, there are a few regulations (far too many, in the view of the Insurance Industry) that hold back the rates to levels that just barely make it possible to afford them.  Big businesses must find ways of paying the ridiculous premium rates that the Insurance Industry demands, to allow them to take home the profits to which they have become accustomed, and now everyone must pay the premiums, under "Obamacare", not just the chronically sick folk.  Then there is the pre-existing condition problem, Medicare and Medicaid, and prescription drugs, and the Death Committees, and so on.  And of course, Family Planning.  It is complex.  But to someone who has merely a business degree, almost any complexity is too much complexity.

What about the complexity of International Relations?  Once a bunch of politicians (whose only claim to fame is that they have wealthy friends) take control of any government, they get into a spiral of systematic oversimplification that leads to (1) reduction of services, (2) escalating racism and xenophobia, and maniacal nationalism, all in the name of (3) reducing taxes, all of which is supposed to (4) give business a shot in the arm, but which instead leads to cultural chaos and civic unrest and general alienation.

Almost any time Trump says something to a foreign leader, it seems to cause unhappiness somewhere else, not least right here in the good old US.  What is this, he's probably thinking, I can't hardly say anything without bothering somebody!  Nobody seems to be happy with his banning Islamic visitors wholesale.  Nobody seems to be happy with his choice of Secretary of State.  Nobody seems to be happy with how he deals with Russia, and those jokers seem to want to fool around with US elections, something that seems never to have happened before.  And though the fooling around was in favor of Trump, the president is not happy with all that.  Every time he pokes the balloon on one side, it pops up on another.  Welcome to international diplomacy.

What exactly is alienation? It is a condition where a person does not understand the motivations of another person.  A lack of empathy of frightening proportions.  Back in the early fifties, when McCarthyism was in high gear, half the people empathized with the socialists, including those who viewed Franklin Roosevelt's social and economic reforms as lifesaving, while the other half considered any sort of social welfare as driven by communist influences.  Over a decade, half the population was determined to go into Vietnam and do some serious communist butt-kicking, while the other half was aghast at the prospect of having to go into a foreign country and kill people who seem to have a perfectly good right to choose a communist government if they wanted to.  What we ended up with was acute alienation, where personal values were so different from person to person that young people simply could not subscribe to the values of their parents.  Today, too, the Democrats are preoccupied with Trump and his offspring meeting with Russians.  These meetings, in my view, are really insignificant.  The important things are the new Health Care bills.  They cannot be any better than the existing ACA a.k.a. Obamacare, which does not prevent the Insurance Industry from ripping off the people anyway.  But I can hardly conceive the GOP being any tougher with the Insurance Industry than Obama was.  We cannot have decent affordable health care until Insurance Companies are all shut down, and obviously replacing their services with a government-run agency simply means Medicare for all, which nobody minds, except that the GOP would view that as total defeat.  However, though many of us have difficulty subscribing to the values of Trump supporters, we do not elevate this phenomenon to the point of calling it alienation.

There are other things that education provides apart from an appreciation of language, and a degree of comfort with complexity, but sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof, as a great man once said.

Arch, exhausted.

Computer Education for Everyone, Part 0: History

When I first went to college, I had four interests: physics, mathematics, computer science, and music.  These are still my interests, but I want to focus on two of them.

Mathematics has been around for millennia; I mean, the Egyptians (whoever they were; they might or might not have been the ancestors of those hanging out in the UAR today) used it, and so did the Arabs, for instance to cross the desert.  We know that the ancient Greeks knew a lot of mathematics, and we also know how they taught it.  The art of teaching mathematics is also several thousand years old, so there are new fashions in how to teach mathematics, but they have a tough job competing against ancient methods.  In contrast,

Computer Science only arrived in our midst about a century ago, but since then, the techniques of programming, and teaching computer science have changed furiously, so it is incredibly difficult to keep up.  Back when I first started working, I taught the first several courses in computer science using methods and tools that seemed very simple to me.  But in 1995, everything changed.  When Windows was created, and shortly afterwards, the Windows_95 operating system that was native to the newer PCs, the programming game had to change.  This is, in retrospect, not hard to explain, though I was never happy with these changes.

The elements of Programming
The computer is a clever device that has two aspects to it.  Firstly, it has storage, which is a huge number of places on the computer chip that can remember numbers.  Secondly --and this is the clever part--it has a unit that can obey instructions.  This is the part that boggles the mind of non-computer people: how can a computer obey instructions?

(By the way, the storage (or the memory locations) are numbered from 1 to 1,048,576 (or something like that; it depends).  It's an enormous block of apartments, each of which holds a number.)

Back to instructions.  Essentially, the basic computer chip obeys instructions such as: "Go put this number in location 3."  More interesting instructions are like: "Check the number in location 7; if it is 0, go to step 8,  otherwise, continue with the next instruction."  The wonderful thing is that, with a little work, several hundreds of this sort of instruction can play a Netflix movie for you, or solve an equation, or put an astronaut on the moon.

Back when I was teaching computer science (we were already past the punched cards stage), the only way to get any instruction into the computer, at the level at which we were teaching, was through the keyboard.  The only things you could get out of the computer, was on the screen.  This made things simple.

Still, many fun things could be done with these simple tools.  By packaging large sets of instructions together, we could make our own super-instructions.  For example, we could set it up so that the computer could sort a list of numbers in increasing order!  But if we got tired of having it do that, we could have it sort 25 lists of numbers, and sort each one.  Okay, that's pretty tame, but the interesting thing here is that once you solve a basic problem, like sorting, you could package that solution into what is called generically a module, and use that module in a more complex program.  You could call your module sort, and use it as if sort was an instruction, just like Put this number in location 3 was.  You could add to the language.

Objects.  In addition to these super-instruction modules, we could invent various gadgets.  For instance, using numbers, we could make gadgets called characters!  Remember, the basic things a computer uses is numbers.  But making characters is easy; we basically say something like 65 stands for A, 66 stands for B, and so on.  So, as long as the computer knows that you're interested in characters, when you say 69, it knows you want E.

A second ago, we were talking about lists of numbers.  Well, we can really do nice lists of numbers; it only takes a bit of careful organizing (which, mercifully, the programmer does not need to do; the programming language easily takes care of it); it only needs to know how big your list is.  We can do better.  For instance, I could invent a gadget called a student record, which has a mixture of different sort of simpler gadgets: A name, a homework score, four test scores, a final score, and an average.  Now, you have seen things very much like this: this looks like a row in a spreadsheet, if you've used one of those.  Well, a spreadsheet is pretty much a huge rectangle of multi-purpose gadgets, set up so that each place can be one of several sorts of gadgets.

When Windows came along, the gadgets aspect of programming completely took over.  The new generation of gadgets were far more complex than just a name, or a score, or a list.  For instance, Microsoft programmers invented a thing called a Window that had various parts: the title bar, the width, the height, the position on the screen, any boxes in the window into which you might want to type things, how you move the window, what color the background is, and so on and so forth.  Further, Microsoft provided the gadgets it wanted you to use: it was called the Windows API,  which is short for application programming interface.  At that point, students were taught to use built-in gadgets (objects), and learn how to solve various problems with the objects that were available.  They could advance to creating their own gadgets, and fairly soon.  But now the gadget tail, or the objects, were wagging the programming dog, which was a little difficult to adapt to.  Many computer science teachers have made the transition with ease (and I, too, have taught a few courses using the new object-oriented paradigm for special purposes), but the added layer of Windows seems, to me, to obscure the transparency of the programming process.

I must be one of a small minority that rues the progress of the computer science environment.  The proportion of people going into programming has fallen off, it seems to me; most people are satisfied to just use computers, and not program them.  So millions of people are able to use word processors, such as Word or WordPerfect.  (There are others, and for free, too: Open Office Write, for instance.)  Or browsers, or spreadsheets, or PowerPoint.  I'm not even sure what the generic word for software such as PowerPoint is; something like slide show, no doubt.)

Peripherals.  The programming setup of Windows changed other things as well.  The output was still the screen, but instead of being set up to show just letters of the alphabet, it could now show pictures.  Pretty soon, it could play music, and send out messages along the lines: email.  All this could have been handled with basic object-oriented programming, but once the fully-object-oriented paradigm came to dominate the programming environment, and the accompanying languages, C, C++ and Java became the only games in town, you had to come to terms with the vagaries and peccadilloes of those languages.  Among other things, this encouraged bad programming habits among weaker programmers, because there were short cuts that they began to take en masse, which made it difficult to repair broken programs, and upgrade programs to keep up with user and hardware demands.

Operating systems did not impinge on the attention of the average citizen until a few decades ago.  These were initially supervisor programs that allowed a number of users to use the same mega-computer.  You "logged in", and used the same computer as several dozen others around you.  The operating system ran programs for you on request, such as an email program, or an editor, or a browser, or whatever.  Nobody paid much attention to what it was called.  Then, the innovators at Bell Labs designed a highly flexible operating system called UNIX, which was practically a program language on its own; you could chain together UNIX commands to make it do more interesting things.  For the record, as per Wikipedia, it was designed and implemented by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna, and intended to be a sandbox in which they played at Bell Labs.  But somehow, UNIX began to spread throughout the computer science university community, becoming something of cultural artifact; nobody could call himself a computer scientist back in the later decades of the last century and still be ignorant of UNIX.  Teaching UNIX to sophomores was important, because it could be used to illustrate problems with file management, security systems and passwords, and so on.  For some reason, almost all operating systems began to look like UNIX, for example the DOS operating systems of Microsoft, and later, the Apple operating systems.  It was always considered open source; in other words, anyone was permitted to port it to their computers, within limits.

Today, of course, we are familiar with Android, the operating system developed by Google, which is a descendant of UNIX, via Linux, which is an adaptation of UNIX to the PC architecture.  (In fact, UNIX has been adapted to most computers available today.)

The task that computer educators face today is to find a balance between (*) teaching the cultural environment of programming versus programming, (*) general principles of programming problem-solving versus specific solutions, (*) applications in a peripheral-rich environment versus those in an environment of a simple set of outputs and inputs, (*) choosing between a programming environment specifically designed for beginners, and a trivial application for real-world hardware, such as a smart phone.

It used to be that, at my school, we taught basic programming to even nursing students.  The board that accredited nursing degrees required that every graduate nurse had to have a certain minimum of exposure to computers, since they could not anticipate in which direction medical technology would advance over the next few years.  Today, of course, nurses would never consider learning programming, but would settle for experience with hospital software of various kinds.  Regrettably, programming is evolving into a game for specialists only, and I am rooting for this process to be slowed, halted, or reversed.

Finally, women in computer science are increasingly alarmed at the drop off in the proportion of women going into the math and computer science area.  It has been found that women make excellent programmers.  In fact, some of the earliest applied mathematicians and computer scientists were women, at a time when we would not have expected women to go into any technical field at all.  (In fact, Hedy Lamarr, a well known Hollywood actress, invented a method for disguising the control signal of torpedoes in WW2.  Aspects of her work is said to be used in wireless security technology, but I might have misunderstood this piece of information.)

Into this environment comes the Raspberry Pi, a tiny computer you can buy for around $35, which was intended to encourage British kids to get interested in computer programming.  The very fact that it was an absolutely stripped-down piece of circuitry made it completely flexible.  It was to hardware what Linux was to software.  Now, four years after the first model was introduced, the third generation has even Bluetooth built in.  So much for basics!  On the plus side, more people are likely to get into it (already 8,000,000 Raspberry Pi devices have been sold, worldwide), which means that interest in programming could rise.

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Klass: Grata and Non-Grata Personae in the New Order

In the chaotic world of the current calendar year, some patterns are emerging.

President Trump's hallmark is apparently inconsistency.  At one time I sincerely believed that it was a signature characteristic that was carefully engineered, but it appears that it emerges naturally; in the Brownian Motion of Trump's responses to media reports, the randomness of the editorial angle on the news of the day is amplified by Trump's irrational understanding of those angles.  But another characteristic property is also emerging: prejudice.

There are blocks of the population that Trump likes, and those he does not like, and he is not shy about being found out.  We know he prefers what he views as Traditional Americans : White, Anglo-Saxon citizens (in contrast to immigrants and blacks).  He prefers men around him in the White House, except for departments that he thinks of as being inessential, such as Education.  In fact, he prefers people who stick to any prejudices similar to his own, and if they do not care to defend those prejudices, so much the better!

But, on second glance, there are a good many Hispanics and other ethnicities not considered traditionally WASP in his circle.  What has qualified these people to work for him?  They're affluent.  So you can be a member of a minority, as long as you're rich.  In a recent statement he said that he preferred to put people with money in charge of social services because they're accustomed to handling money.  Unfortunately, his phrasing of this criterion was somewhat tactless.  It boiled down to: do you want to have someone who's never handled a lot of money being in charge of these things?  Of course you don't!

How can we simplify this sorting of people into two groups: those allowed to take government responsibility, and everybody else?  It appears to be based on his assessment of some kind of class. We all have our own idea of what constitutes class in the sense of "That guy has class."  Of course we're talking about president Trump here, so many of us use the word differently than he does.  He has the class of an oil sheikh making a cash offer for your wife.  "How much?  How about $1000? No?  $10,000?  OK, $100,000, and I'll throw in a Mercedes."  So, if you have money, you automatically have class.  Let's spell it Klass, to distinguish it from the usual kind.

People who need Medicaid, evidently, are of the No Klass kind.  In fact, if you don't have a job, you're Low Klass.  If you had to actually apply for a job, you're probably Lower Klass than if you got one from your dad.

Politicians of the last several decades have tried very hard not to appear to be influenced by class politics (except of course economic class politics, which is impossible to avoid; Reagan and Romney had to dog-whistle-ize economic class politics).  When prejudice becomes an open issue in any campaign, the tone of the campaign goes right through the floor, and we've seen that happen.  Even many of president Trump's supporters are not happy with race politics, which gives me hope.

This is all very confusing to me, because I was brought up Methodist (though I am not one now), and according to our trade union rules, gambling was a sin.  This makes it very hard for me to take any sort of Casino King seriously.  Every time I see Trump in the news, I immediately see a slot machine. But I'm trying; this is serious stuff.

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Practical Suggestions for Improving Things

This post is going to draw together a number of different ideas from a variety of subjects, so it's going to look pretty scattered, but ultimately, it is a common sense way of thinking.  The conclusions are also applicable to many different situations, so stay with us, in case the application that's relevant to you doesn't pop up right away.

Whenever anyone goes into a new job, or undertakes a new task that has to be done repeatedly, such as, for instance, a new teacher who has to teach some low-level class every semester, or a programmer who has been assigned to churn out an entire pile of little programs, all of very similar type, (the similarity aspect is not really pivotal,) there is a tendency to make little adjustments to the task, to make it easier on the worker.

Often, junior employees get assigned the less interesting jobs, because (for obvious reasons) the other jobs have been long desired by more senior workers, and they jump on them the minute they become available.  Initially, the new worker takes on his or her new task with some enthusiasm, but fairly soon the tedium of it sets in, and presently all s/he wants to do is to get the job off his/her desk, get the item off the agenda, get the idiot kids out of his/her classroom.  S/he'll never see them again, and good riddance!

But life is unfair, and one fine day, the employee gets to work on a new task, where the old work, shoddily done, suddenly reappears.  "Who taught you guys Trigonometry?"  You did, teacher.  Or "Who wrote this crappy piece of code?", or Who passed this zoning ordinance?  Or Who set this fracture?  You never expected that shaving that little bit out of the unpleasant task long ago would affect your future performance.

It's not just that shoddy work is, well, shoddy, which is obvious.  But rather that a new employee does not realize that shoddy work is not only bad in principle, but that it is a liability for him or her in an immediate way.  A new teacher might fall back on tweaking the details of a course to make things easier for herself.  But the consequences of the tinkering affect those who inherit the same students in future courses, that is, downstream.

The same principle holds, even if the tinkering is a well-meant improvement.  In actual fact, the phenomenon is part of a larger picture and a larger problem: How can one improve an entire multi-step process, without precipitating a domino-effect serial catastrophe?

Most people are not familiar with the idea of computer programming, except in the most general way, but, you know, it is such a useful concept that it should interest everybody.  Just a few examples will get the idea across.

A central idea of a program is the sequence of steps.  Not every segment of code proceeds sequentially (one step, followed by the next step); sometimes the sequence has to be changed in response to some situation that crops up, and a good program anticipates these, and has these responses built-in.  But ultimately, sequential code is the backbone of programming.  Here below is an image of a pseudocode program that does something symbolic, I believe.  (Many programming languages have a somewhat common design, so that generic programs in a sort of fictitious language can represent a solution to a programming problem.  This language is called pseudocode.)

As you can see, the program proceeds in steps, though some steps are compound instructions that require repetition (such as Step 6, for instance), and other steps are also repetition steps, where that loop has been manually set up with jumps, such as Step 5 through Step 12.  (It could have been done with a FOR instruction, as you might have guessed.)

A junior programmer might only need to dash off a short program, and never see it again.  But depending on various circumstances, the program may need to be tweaked.  In fact, most experienced programmers will tell you: tweaking is almost all there is.  By this they mean that the vast majority of programs need to be adjusted, either to improve efficiency, or handle outmoded hardware being replaced with new hardware, or obscure faults in the code that were never revealed for years (or many days, anyway).

Imagine a programmer staring moodily at a long program, which has to be modified to do the same job in a slightly different way.  As you can easily see, changing the last few steps of the program is much easier than changing the first few steps.  The downstream steps can be more easily changed, and in fact the code can be trial-run.

[Note: we are not advocating just changing the last few steps only.  If the changing is to be done a little at a time, changing the last few steps first, and then checking that the whole program works, makes sure that at least that last segment is fault-free, after which you can go on to look at the earlier steps, incrementally, working backwards to the beginning of the program, or block of code.]

Another analogy.  Suppose a school or college has decided to do away with a certain course.  Before the course is actually removed from the catalog, it is best to modify the most downstream courses to respond to the planned removal.  If you start at the lowest-level courses that depend on the course that is planned to go away (the upstream courses), the downstream courses must respond not only to the course targeted for axing, but the other altered courses as well!  Particularly, if the changes are to be made one course at a time, you have to start at the highest level course.  In fact, the highest-level courses can be changed without any domino effect, as is obvious.  (Changing the highest-level course, the last course in that stream that a student is likely to take, could certainly change the overall effectiveness of the curriculum, but it will probably not interfere with the preceding courses.)

Now for something slightly different.  A decision can be made on either theoretical grounds, or based on experience.  Experience, of course, is the greatest teacher.  If you lie down on the railway tracks, just for fun, and get run over, you're obviously never going to do that again.  But we can be taught to avoid risky behavior, and that is what we call education.  Education gives us a tool chest of theoretical principles that obviates the need for experience.  Unfortunately, when it comes to making changes, the experienced worker is in a better position to figure out in what sequence changes can be safely made, because the theoretical analysis of the situation can only work if every possible factor is taken into account, something that an inexperienced worker will find very, very difficult.

An area in which it is very difficult to see all the factors that impinge on a decision is, surprise: local government.  In fact, any sort of government.  Suppose it is desired to save money by reducing the services provided to abused women.  (Presently, at least in Pennsylvania, many counties provide temporary housing for abused women and their infants, until arrangements can be made for them to find secure homes for themselves.)  If the number of shelters are gradually reduced, abused women in the future will need to live in the abusive relationship for lack of a place to go to, and if the abuse escalates (as it often does), firstly, police officers will be called upon, to defend the victims; secondly, hospital emergency rooms will see an increase in the incidence of battered women needing treatment, thirdly, school truancy officers will need to investigate whether children are not attending school for truancy or for a parent unable to get them ready for school.  So it is very possible that a change intended to save money, actually results in an overall increase in costs, possibly placing more of a burden on other departments somewhere else.  (Some politicians are perfectly satisfied with this Moving Expenses To Other Departments game, but it is foolish and immature, and such politicians must be removed speedily.)

Those of us who have no occasion to be familiar with these matters have no inkling of how, for example, issuance of zoning variances could affect the noise level in a neighborhood (of course, the plutocrats who can afford homes far from the industrial zone do not care, and they expend great effort to ensure that they control the decisions of whose consequences they are immune), or how industrial effluent can hurt fishing streams, unless it is carefully treated, or how rural roads can be degraded by heavy trucks going to and from the industry.  The big picture is important.  But some big pictures are really too big, because the smaller pictures are more complicated, but the big-picture dreamers are very intolerant of complexity.  Some of the "small stuff" does need to be sweated.

Lots of things to think about.

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Wonder Woman: Multiple Thumbs Up [Note: A Few Tiny Spoilers]

Yes, we went to see Wonder Woman last night, and had a spanking good time.

Don’t get me wrong: I could see spots here and there that I felt could have been done differently, and better.  But man, it was just a lot of fun!

I’m not going to spill a whole pile of spoilers, but I need a little something on which to base my explanation of the features of the movie.

Firstly, the star of the movie is Gal Gadot, who has already played Wonder Woman in an earlier movie, Batman vs. Superman, or something like that.  The interesting point is that she has a slight Israeli accent, but she exaggerated it a little for the role, and all the actresses who played Amazons (a legendary —or mythical— tribe of women) adopted a slightly exotic accent, which made beautiful sense, because the one thing we could say with confidence is that Wonder Woman would not have an accent from the American Midwest!

Gal Gadot, secondly, is a beautiful woman, neither annoyingly slim nor dreadfully muscle-bound.  She did not look like a body-builder, nor an athlete (which would probably have been fine), but rather like a dancer.  She was supposed to look like a typical woman, who was of course a trained fighter, without any obvious physical peculiarities.  She had medium-short hair, the bright eyes you find in someone who is confident and aware and curious about the world around her.  But you discover very soon that she is not a genius.

Mini Spoiler No. 1:  The Amazons live in an island (or cluster of islands; traditionally Atlantis, but I think they changed its name for the movie) which is magically hidden away from the rest of the world.  After Zeus, father of the Gods, created the world, and mankind, and his fellow-gods, in the course of time, apparently, mankind and the other gods unleashed destruction on the Earth, the chief agent of which was War, the god of which was Ares (which they pronounce “Aries” in the movie).  Ares was unstoppable, and, says the narrator, things got so bad that Zeus had to create a tribe of women with special powers, to guard against the eventuality that Ares would arrange for the destruction of Mankind through cataclysmic wars.  (Of course, just as the Amazons were hidden from the rest of the world, the World was hidden from them, so it was unclear how they would find out what that bastard Ares was up to.  But they do . . .)

Mini Spoiler No. 2:  The story is set in the last weeks of World War I, which was called “The War to End All Wars” at that time.  A plane crashes into the water just offshore from where the Amazons lived, and our girl Diana is, as always, prowling around, exploring in the night, and sees the crash, and that there is a person entangled in the wreckage.  Unable to get free, the occupant and the remnants of the plane sink into the water, and Diana  fearlessly dives in to rescue the pilot.

Mini Spoiler No. 3:  Against the wishes of the Queen of the Amazons (Hippolyta), Diana’s mother, Diana sets out to escort the rescued airman to his people.  She is clothed in typical Amazonian gear, basically boiled leather armor (or perhaps some magical armor), the golden lasso, a magical sword, called the God-Slayer, and a headband, which Hippolyta gives Diana at the last minute.  On this journey, the airman explains to Diana what is going on: some bad guys are unleashing death and destruction on vast numbers of innocent people.
Wide-eyed Diana gasps, and says that this has to be the work of Ares.  “You must take me to him,” she says seriously, and declares that she will fix matters right up.

This is the charm of this movie.  There is a minor clash of cultures: the bronze age environment that still pervades the island of the Amazons, versus the machine-gun, airship culture of World War I.  Rather than the tribal wars that ravaged the world of the ancient Greeks, ostensibly orchestrated by Ares, there is modern warfare with huge collateral damage and civilian casualties, with groups of nations arrayed together against other groups, with fighting forces on each side numbering a thousand times the entire population of the Greek world.

Diana blinks, but she clings to the belief that the principle is the same.  People would not fight if Ares would not incite them to violence.  Ares is still orchestrating the war.  If Diana destroys Ares, the war will fizzle out.

Straightening this out is the sub-plot of the movie, or perhaps the main plot.  The airman brings Diana to London, which is the center of civilization as far as he is concerned, and Diana must deal with the cultural dislocation head on.  It begins with having to equip Diana with late Victorian clothing that is appropriate for a woman of her rank and habits, a way of covering up the enormous long-sword that she tends to constantly brandish, and the magical gauntlets that go up her forearm.  (The movie manages this with style, though the calf-length dress skirt is very innovative for the times, outside a playing field.)

It is fascinating to watch Diana’s expression closely as the Origins of the Amazons is drilled into her.  She looks frankly a little skeptical, I think, and even a little amused.  But when she sees the horrors of the front line first hand, her dismay is absolutely unfeigned.  That alone, I believe, qualifies the acting in this movie as either brilliant acting, or the directing as brilliant directing.  Diana is not a fool.  But the audience is always a couple of steps ahead of her, as it should always be in good drama.

The airman, Steve Trevor, puts together a team of specialists to get them to the front, where Steve wants to destroy an armaments factory, and, of course, Diana wants to confront Ares, whom she is confident about finding where the fighting is thickest.  While they lie and cheat their way to no-man’s land, the men browbeat her into doing it their way, but once they get close enough, Diana is not having any more of these namby-pamby war conventions.  She wants to get in there and have a confrontation with the real problem boys.

Ultimately she must conclude that war is a human thing.  The tales of the Greek Gods are ponderous attempts to anthropomorphize human tendencies, strengths and failings, and Diana must confront the fact that even if she destroys the embodiment-of-war-of-the-moment, war continues.  Steve tries to explain that fighting for peace is a lifetime commitment, but he does not have the time.

However, even when she is kicking serious butt, Diana is all fluid grace, even if it is very determined fluid grace.  Perhaps real wars cannot be fought like that, but man, if we had a choice, and if the cameras are on, that would certainly be the way I would like to kick butt.  Whoo!

If there is going to be a sequel, sell me a ticket.

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