‘You Can Close Your Eyes’—A Number Of Issues

We first have to talk about the George Floyd killing in Minnesota, and the riots that followed.  Accurate information is difficult to get, but I have yet to see any reason for why this policeman took the actions he did.  Meanwhile, there are rumors that the rioting and looting was led by people from outside Minnesota.  I condemn police brutality, and the repeated instances of Police using deadly force, and certainly unnecessary force, on blacks who are unarmed.

The number of COVID deaths has passed the 100,000 mark, and as many news commentators point out, the nation must mourn without official recognition.

Donald Trump was the Republican nominee for many reasons.  For one thing, he had a powerful GOP Fringe following that was impossible to oppose, and which marginalized the slightly more mainstream candidates in 2016: Cruse and Bush and company.  Once the core GOP folks saw that Trump had a strong campaign, they sat back and let it happen, because (1) there was always a suspicion that the country could be better run with a businessman in the White House.  I’ve written about this before.  (2) There has also been a theory that with a really great economy, and with a President and a Senate that has its knee on the neck of what they call the Democrat Entitlements, life would be better for the members of the GOP and those in Big Business, who paid “Too much Taxes.”  Be that as it may, the GOP is now discovering that the peculiar kind of brute force methods that Trump adopts: bullying, lying, demeaning the opposition, hollowing out the Department of Justice and the law courts; are prices that decent Republicans are not willing to pay.

Trump’s dissembling includes posturing as a religious man.  It seems that a vast majority of his followers are easily satisfied with a token show of religiosity and/or faith.  As a non-religious person, I am not so easily satisfied.  Many people I know are not; those among them who are Republicans are willing—have been willing thus far, anyway—to let it slide, in order to allow the larger Trump agenda to continue.  However, there are consequences.  The cause of honest religion has been harmed for a generation; leaders of Mega Churches who take Trump’s part will be tainted for a long time.

But Republicans are now realizing that much more is expected of the president than merely shepherding the economy along, and watching the stock market go up higher and higher.  Many Democrats desperately want a moral leader; other Democrats want a leader who will re-create a social safety-net (something Republicans think of as too expensive, and encouraging laziness among the poor, completely ignoring that most wealthy businessmen lead quite indolent lives) in case of a sequence of crises such as COVID-19 in the future.

As most of my readers know, I am an atheist.  I have many moral principles in common with most liberal Christians; in fact, I consider myself a follower of Jesus, except that most followers of Jesus are very narrow in their definitions of what other followers they will permit to label themselves thus!

Of late, I have been thinking of death.  What music will they play at my funeral; will there be a funeral?  What literature will be read?  What consolation will be offered to the bereaved, to those who survive me?  I will leave them a few dollars, and lots of CDs and books, but it seems to me that there will not be the comforting words of the scriptures.  Maybe they will all get together and decide to pretend that I was a Christian anyway, just to listen to the poetry of the bible.

I’m sure many authors have written inspirational prose and verse just for this purpose, but I don’t know where to look for it!  We atheists are not an ‘organized church’ of any kind; the closest thing to an organized church is The Rationalists Society, which flourished in the sixties, but may still be around.  It is difficult to find what those who were once called Rationalists are doing now.  There were a couple of articles written in Australia, one of which was called Rationalism: a 21st Century World View, to which I provide a link.

There is a twisted kind of rationalism—which the author of the previous link refers to—which he calls economic rationalism, which (like it does in the US today) supports economic principles which are argued to be the only public good, without references to human or moral values.  I am not happy with Rationalism of this variety, and if that dooms me to be criticized as inconsistent or irrational, so be it.

When a Christian family loses a member, they have no right to mourn, because it ought to be their belief that that deceased goes on to a more blessed state, with less pain, and fewer cares.  But when an atheist family loses a member, we have every right to mourn and rail, because that friend or lover or partner or spouse or child is gone, leaving only mortal remains from which we can obtain no consolation.  Religious folk view the corpse and think: the essential person is gone.  This is just the dross matter, from which the divinity has been taken away.  But for us, the mortal remains only remind us of the wonder of the living person, with all their faults and their genius.  It is a machine that is irreparably broken.  It was not an unanticipated failure of health, possibly; but we know that life is a condition that must be supported by a myriad things working together perfectly.

It appears that this lady from the Harvard Divinity School is interested in what atheists do to find meaning as they approach death: Facing Death.

There is a Web page that focuses on writings and quotes appropriates for eulogies and epitaphs.  How utilitarian!!  Some of the items listed there are merely flippant and trite, while others are thought-provoking and heart-warming.  Here is a selection.

Death is much simpler than birth; it is merely a continuation. Birth is the mystery, not death.
--Stewart Edward White

The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost.
--Arthur Schopenhauer

Quite by accident, I came upon a performance of a song, by James Taylor, by the two-person team of Kami Maltz, and Josh Turner.  Miss Maltz has a lovely voice, and plays an autoharp, an instrument commonly used in folk music in the sixties.  Josh Turner is a personality well known on You Tube, and is a skilled guitarist.  The song was You can close your eyes.

I have known James Taylor’s music for decades; the first song I knew was you’ve got a friend, the Carole King song which was his first hit.  Many other songs followed: fire and rain, and so forth; in fact James Taylor’s songs were ubiquitous while I was in grad school, but I had never heard this one.  Apparently it has great significance for James Taylor, and Joni Mitchell, who was with him when he wrote it.  There is a video on YouTube about the writing of the song.

The chorus of the song goes as follows:

I don’t know no love songs,
and I don’t sing the blues anymore;
But I can sing this song,
or you can sing this song, when I’m gone

What does it mean?  I’m almost certain that the phrase ‘when I’m gone’ does not have any connotation of death; the song is essentially a lullaby, but to an adult.  It says: ‘You can close your eyes, it's alright.’  It is safe to close your eyes, the song says; tomorrow is going to be a good day; we’re going to have a good time; nobody can take that away from us.

Having ambiguous meaning is the hallmark of the lyrics of a good song, and so we cannot insist on a clear interpretation of these words.  But to use this song in a funeral gathering might be to tag it with the aura of death, and spoil it for other uses.

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Traveling Around the US, and—Unrelated—Militarism

Well, readers, I hope you had a wonderful Memorial Day, and suitably distanced yourselves from those crazy, hyper-enthusiastic people who may have tried to affectionately involve you in various contact sports!  Under ordinary circumstances, I'm right there, hugging and kissing people left and right; I'm a touchy-feely sort of guy in a modest way, though I don't love mouth-to-mouth kissing too much.  I bet there are a ton of people out there who are just plain frustrated by not being allowed to go out and give certain people a hug.  It is a normal human urge, especially to hug kids.  Kids, of course, are not up for hugs very much, as child psychologists and ultra-feminists have been at pains to let us know.  So, though I think hugging a little miss is one of the few consolations that are available for free to humans, thus far, apparently it is no longer available.  And now, with Covid 19, it is completely out of the question.

Memorial Day is about two entirely different things: it is about remembering those who have lost their lives in wars, and the opening of the Summer Season.

About War Dead: I am of two minds.  Many of the wars the US has fought have been wrong-headed.  Starting with the Vietnam War, I think these modern wars should have been avoided, not least the 2nd Iraq War.  I must admit that the dead of these wars must be mourned, because it was no fault of theirs that they were sent out to fight battles that were not wholeheartedly supported by the populace.  (Unfortunately for those of us who do not support wars in general, the populace at large tends to be eager to be up and at almost any nation that even looks at us askance.  Also unfortunately for us, the political leadership tends to believe that if they engage in a war, their electorates will approve of them almost certainly.  Most often, this suspicion is borne out by polls.)  On the other hand, we must remember that these soldiers killed in war were volunteers, and they and their families pretty much signed on to the possibility that they could lose their lives.  I suppose that them's fightin' words for the families of defunct soldiers, but look at it from our point of view: they joined the military for their own reasons, but many of us do not want anyone to join the military on our behalf, and do not want to have to mourn them when they die.

I do not feel as strongly about this as to argue it at length, but I never have been given the opportunity to complain about personal militarism anywhere else, and so I put it here.  It's my blog, and I'll not cry if I want to.

About the opening of the Summer Season, the whole idea of distancing has been understood by many people.  Now, once even the little folk among us know all about distancing, there can be gradual getting into sort of activities with friends and relatives, keeping a little distance, but enjoying the fellowship all the same.  Remember: outdoors gathering is much safer than gathering indoors.  The breeze blows away the virus, but it is difficult to force kids to refrain from touching each other.  I don't know what to advise; allowing them to touch each other is definitely very bad, and much worse in places where the adults do any traveling, which might bring them in contact with those who carry the virus.  In my neck of the woods, nobody travels much at all.

I have a lot of friends who think that these lockdowns are silly.  Some of them have to travel in order to ply their trades.  They also have young children.  There is a small chance that they will come in contact with the virus; there is a small chance that the virus will survive the cleaning procedures that these people will adopt, quite conscientiously.  There is a small chance that any surviving viruses will be transmitted to the kids.  There is a small chance that the kids will develop the disease.  And there is a small but significant chance that they may not survive the disease.  And, if one of these little ones passes away, I will once more be in the position of having to mourn a death caused by activity against which I would have advised.

Well, now for something completely different!

One of my friends got hooked into a social-media chain in which people were encouraged to publish a list of those of the 50 states that they visited.  Doesn't that sound like a fun thing to do in these boring days of cloistering?  Well, I jumped in to play, and I discovered that I have visited forty of the fifty states!!

According to the information that accompanied the instructions for the Name the States You Have Visited game, we were told that the average number of states visited by Americans is 8.  Well, this is pathetic.  And now, the conditions are no longer favorable; for environmental reasons, everyone is encouraged not to drive around for pleasure.  Even Greta Thunberg does not travel needlessly, and she certainly does not fly.  We have a hybrid that does around 40 miles per gallon in the summer, so we don't feel too guilty about driving around.  But we do feel a little guilty.  My wife keeps mentioning just how much she would like to drive out West; well, I'm too feeble to ride a bike out there, and so is she.  What does that leave us?  No; we have to drive.  She doesn't like to camp, either, so we have to live in motels, and eat out; this is going to be expensive.

I close with a plea to everyone: once the virus is under control by some objective measure—and I don't trust the ad-hoc declarations that the president makes, using his gut feelings which have a poor record of being correct—if we all make an effort to visit various states in which we have family, or which are home to some entertainment that we look forward to sampling, that we should eat in the local restaurants!  One of the most awesome meals I have enjoyed was in a hole in the wall in Amarillo, Texas, served by a poor family of Mexicans, who practically blinded us with their smiles of welcome!  I hope they have survived and thrived since then—1999, that's some 20 years ago—in order to give many visitors the benefits of their cuisine.  What are the chances of that?

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Advice to New Graduates

As I have written recently, I began to subscribe to the New York Times about a year ago.  (It costs something like $15 a month; which is more than Netflix.)  There was a request for Advice to New Graduates there, which they later published as part of one of their newsletter.

A couple of years, I have posted on this Blog my own advice, just as an opinion piece, with no expectation that it would be go over big with anyone!  I'm going to do it again, in the hope that someone sees it and recommends it to a new graduate.

There is some advice, but, unfortunately, it is advice for someone in their Junior year at college; it is almost too late now to do anything about it.

Advice

The Trivium.  Most colleges make you take courses in composition, mathematics (or something numerical, anyway), and something like history or literature.  I think the main idea is for the students to be able to write fairly effectively, read effectively, including skimming as needed, and do calculations if they have to.  Most people have to do all three.  The higher up you go at any job with a large number of employees, the more you have to do of these things.  I leave that there; you should ask your parents, or your older siblings, whether this is true.  (Don’t ask your idiot siblings; they may not recognize that they are writing, even if they are.)

Money.  Save a little money with each paycheck, starting right with your first paycheck.  Even $5 a paycheck for the first year is fine; increase it by 50% each year, and round up to the closest multiple of 5!  You won’t be rich, at the end of it, but you will survive retirement, ideally.  If your employer has a retirement plan, join it.

Attitude

These next few items is for when you graduate, and are looking for a job.

Flexibility.  Be ready to do anything reasonable, even if it isn’t in your specialty.  My wife’s training was in archeology, but her first real job was as a writer for an engineering association.  My daughter’s degree was in graphic art; her job is as the technology maintenance manager for a print company.  See what I'm getting at?  If they had insisted on waiting for an opening in their exact fields, neither one would be making as much money now as they are, though of course we have to admit that money isn’t everything.

Be a Team Player, but Leave an Unhealthy Environment At Once.  Don’t be one of those people who are always Looking Out for Number One (an Eighties way of saying don’t think of anyone except yourself).  On the other hand, if the workplace atmosphere is truly poisonous, leave.

Leisure.  Don’t make your employment your life.  If you’re a teacher, of course, it is tough not to make teaching your entire existence; the students and the administration, and society, push you to thinking that teaching is all there is.  You will be a better teacher if you have a life.

Frugality.  The Seventies were a tough time.  Studs Terkel, an interesting character from the Sixties, has written a book called Better Times.  If your paycheck is small, and your expenses are high, this book has advice for you.  There is a common belief—which I subscribe to, incidentally—that the Baby Boomers are conspiring to keeping the Millennials in a state of poverty.  Well, keep an eye on the people around you, and assess the power dynamics dispassionately.  Align yourself with those who have reasonable plans to make things better, not least of who are the so-called Alt Left.  Universal Child Care, College Loan Forgiveness, Medicare For All; these things will make life better for everyone at the bottom of the 'Food Chain'.  Of course it will make life harder for those at the top; but they’re taking care of themselves, by reducing taxes, electing Trump, trying to destroy Obamacare, etc.

Don’t sink your hard-earned money into showy things like fancy automobiles, or big houses, etc.  Stay away from high-maintenance partners; a good partner will pull his or her weight, including emotional weight.  You can compromise your economy to wear decent, well-constructed clothes; wearing scruffy clothing to a workplace is a kind of disrespect that you should not show, even if all the fellows there are a*&$*les.  It is better to just leave.  Hint: buy your clothes at a used-clothes store, like Goodwill.  They often have clothes that are better made than department stores.  Conversely, if you strike it rich, and outgrow your fine threads, give them to Goodwill and return the favor.

Eat Healthy.  Cooking for yourself is a brilliant strategy; it prevents you blowing all your cash on eating out.  If you just can’t do without pizza, save your craving for one day a week.  Learn to cook real meals; select some standard recipe you haven’t tried before, every Saturday, and expand your cooking skills.  One thing I did, which you might not think practical, was to join with a friend for supper.  I cooked, and he helped with the groceries, and sometimes he cooked, and I helped with the groceries.  With two of us thinking about the menu, we found it easier to avoid eating junk.  (When we did eat junk food, it helped that he ate half of it.)

Keep a positive attitude.  Nothing is more attractive in a person than a positive attitude.

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P.S.:  I’m just five clicks short of a lifetime readership of 190,000 views!  I don’t write posts intended to lure people into reading this blog; giving advice is an occupational hazard of being a teacher, and being old!  Readers: a blog is a wonderful thing; you get to talk yourself down, and you get to dispense your wisdom without putting it on Facebook, where it clutters up other people’s news feed.

To My Bubble: A Variety Of Thoughts

Greetings to everybody!

I was reading my daily dose of—what I call—Actual News, when it struck me that those in my bubble might be interested in a lot of these ‘stories’.  Big question (which I must address very briefly): what is my ‘bubble’, and won’t everyone in my bubble also be reading my daily dose of actual news?

Early last year, they would not have, because I started subscribing to the New York Times only after the President started denigrating them, along with other news sources.  My innermost Bubble, at that time therefore, resided within the group of my friends who did not read the newspapers, but got its news, like me, from Fb!!!  I know; that’s terrible.  That was terrible.  Now my bubble has started reading the actual news.  So it’s a slightly different bubble.

And then, the New York Times began to make its COVID-related news available for free to anyone.  This was a great step, I think.  I haven’t aggressively worked at disseminating the COVID articles; linking to them, etc.  Today’s general information article is excellent reading, but I am going to discuss the points that interest me right here, if you’re either too busy or too lazy to read it yourself.  (The paper NYT is intimidating, and a burden on the landfills.  The digital version is much smaller, and has wonderful content.  I apologize if the link I provided has some tag in it related to me, specifically, and enables the NYT to link you to me.  I wouldn’t put it past them, whoever they are, the people to whom the NYT has outsourced their digital intelligence operation, and you just know there is such a group.)

Apparently, experts are pushing Get Out suggestions.  After having supported Stay At Home for several months, it appears (according to some people; you’ll have to read the article to learn who) that—under certain circumstances—it is a good idea to go out of doors:
* The risk is small, provided you’re not in a crowd.  If your neighborhood has very few people outside, it might be an excellent risk (very small probability of getting infected) to go outside to just walk around the block.  You must wear a mask.  Get your sister-in-law to make you one, especially if she happens to belong to a group that makes hundreds of masks to give away free.  My wife has several older friends who are staying home quite aggressively (i.e., with great determination,) and one of whom lives alone, and is naturally feeling stir crazy.  She decided to have a distancing get together on the concrete seats of our city band shell.  I went along; we brought our own lunches from home (actually, we got our sandwiches from a neighborhood deli that does take-out), sat one bench away from each other, and had a great old time for about an hour.  Outdoors, the air blows any virus-laden droplets away, and they presumably end up on the ground.  We put our wrappers back in the bag we brought the food in.  When you get home, you must quickly wash your hands and your masks—twenty seconds at the sink—and you’re safe again.  The article also reminds us that you need to clean your doorknob; both before you leave the house, and after you return.
* Meeting outdoors might be a solution for all sorts of meetings, provided everybody doesn’t rush to do it all at once.  In fact, my wife, who is (among other things) the zoning manager for her county, meets citizens who want zoning permits signed, etc, outdoors at a picnic table.  Interesting, huh?  She goes to the meeting armed with a little sterilizing bottle, with which she cleans the pen she takes, for signatures, and she wears a mask.  The citizens she meets with have been very good about wearing masks, she said in her first couple of days at work; maybe standards have fallen off.  She herself, of course, wears a mask.  A complete professional, is my wife.  Ahem.
* Some cities, we are told, are closing down certain streets, to make it safer for people to be outdoors.  Cafes can expand distanced outdoor seating, for instance.  Pennsylvanians love to get drunk at bars; I wonder whether they might take to distanced drunkenness, if the Governor advises it.

Keep your common-sense radar on.  Going outdoors is all well and good, but there’s always your witless neighbors who might engage in risky behavior around you.  The breeze can only do its thing in keeping you safe if you take distancing seriously when you’re outdoors.

Education.  It is beginning to look as though the Fall Semester is going to be most of a bust, at colleges and universities.  I want to—quite hesitantly, but sort of defiantly—put forward the suggestion that under certain circumstances, classes could be conducted out of doors.  Let me explain.  (This has nothing to do with the article, per se.)
* I think—and I’m not an expert in education, education administration, or public policy, and I defer to their judgement, though I’m convinced that people who consider themselves experts in those areas are not much of experts either—that, at least briefly, that the curriculum has to be changed: some topics taken out, other topics put in.  It is better, temporarily, to have a little educational activity at this time than no educational activity at all.  Some kids (using the term broadly) submit to classes reluctantly, and would take a hiatus as an excuse for jettisoning all the progress that teachers have made in the days preceding the hiatus.  These are the fellows who come back from the summer with their minds a (true or pretend) perfect blank.  This is an enormous opportunity to bring these kids back into the fold, even temporarily.  Some of these kids might absorb these Shutdown-time educational experiences much better than they have ever absorbed anything.
* If it is decided to bring students in, even in small groups, into a highly-supervised, spaced-apart, brief, meeting with the teacher, they may actually absorb a great deal, as long as the teacher does not try to force-feed them a ton of material.  The usual repetition can’t be done, and some of us know just how much repetition and drill is required to enable students to perform at the levels we used to perform in our day.  And one of the greatest techniques we used in mathematics—group work—will be impossible.
* A class of twenty, say, would need to be split up into four classes of five, meeting outside in a corner of a stadium, on the bleachers, for anything from half an hour, for young kids, spaced widely apart, to an hour, for college kids, also spaced widely apart.  Necessarily, up to a quarter of the time could be taken up with talking them down, and discussing the rules, and relaxing them.  Then, five to ten minutes of instructions could follow.  Then more relaxing pabulum, a little reflection on the material.  Then five minutes of drill, perhaps?  Applications?  That would end the session for very young students; for college kids, another cycle could take place.
* Larger groups of college kids can be taught in the corner of the stadium, I'd say up to ten.  I don’t know whether modern college kids can be relied upon to stay away from each other when instructed to do so; I would imagine that they cannot.  A threat that offenders would not be invited back might help.
* Living in dorms would be almost impossible—I could be wrong, but if a desperate Administration were to try this, they would have to put one kid per room, and heavily supervise the living conditions; e.g. keep them out of their dorms until very late at night, with distanced activities the entire time, only one person per toilet at a time, etc etc.  Then, around midnight, they can be sent into the dorms, and the hallways patrolled, to prevent impromptu parties, etc.  It would be a nightmare, especially with the culture of disobedience to authority that obtains today in colleges.

More Energy from Renewable Sources.  This year, apparently, the ratio of renewable energy / coal energy has passed the halfway mark.  One of these days, the renewable/non-renewable will also pass the halfway point, and we will all die of happiness—at least those in my bubble will.

Bookstores.  The article reminds us that, while bookstores were recognized as places to buy the mythical objects called Books, they have also been places where people met and socialized.  Some people have found that a large proportion of their closest friends were actually bookstore employees and owners!  (Is this sad, or is this great?)  With the shutdown, little, independently-owned bookstores have experienced unbelievable suffering, we are told.  The article advocates that if you’re ordering digital reading-materials, order through your local bookstore.  They may even order the NYT for you, incidentally.

All this has made me wonder what constitutes anyone’s bubble, really.  We have an intuitive understanding of the term, based on how it has been used in the media.  Primarily, I think, it is the set of people who influence me.  Secondarily, it could be the people whom I influence.  There could be a small overlap—or a quite large overlap—between the two groups.

Obviously, the second group could be a lot larger for a blogger, simply because not all of those who read the blog can influence the blogger, except in the—wonderful—case where all the readers make comments!  Interestingly, not all of those in my innermost bubble are liberals or democrats.  I have family members who are conservatives, and family members who have friends who are conservatives, whom we meet on a regular basis.  Sometimes we avoid talking politics; we usually avoid talking party politics, which is not the same thing.

Conservatives, and Republicans, and die-hard supporters of the President, are not all the same thing.  I read increasingly frequently in the news, that long-time republicans, many of whom are still republicans, and some of them the dreaded RINOs—those accused of being Republicans In Name Only by doctrinaire conservatives, on Fox News, or Rush Limbaugh, or other conservative outlets—that they are repelled and disgusted with the tweets and the thoughts emanating from the administration, the White House, the Senate, and so on.  Many of them are those who have worked in various branches of the government under Democrat administrations.  These folks, though they continue to think of themselves as Republicans, or at least conservatives, decidedly do not fall into the Trump Camp.  Many of them, moreover, are in my bubble, in the sense that some of the things they say actually do influence me.

Er.  I might have had something to say about these bubbles, but . . . I have forgotten what.

So, see you later, as the saying goes!


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Time Off for Good Behavior: How to Respond to Tara Reade's Complaint Against J. B.

I have to be honest: I do not like Joe Biden's campaign for President.  Given that only a few voters think like me, or have the values that I have, I have to reluctantly consider Joe Biden to be the default nominee for the Democrat Party, since this is the democratic choice of the party (small 'd').  (Sometimes the Party gets hijacked, as happened in 2016 to the Republicans; when the party beats the bushes for all the support it can get, you end up with very strange people, and it was these denizens of the Republican Woodwork that elected Trump, not what we could call the nucleus of the party.  But then, the Republicans were never about finding a nice gentleman to be president; they were about electing conservative judges, reducing taxes, controlling what they considered to be the power-hungry among women, and the de-criminalization of abortion---which many of them still hate with a passion---and clamping down on the runaway success of marriage rights for gays.  They don't want decency if it means decency for everybody.  They don't even want the right for everybody to be able to jog through a white neighborhood, and they're willing to kill to hold it down.)

Unfortunately, I find it quite easy to believe that Joe Biden's affection might have been focused on an unwelcome target, namely Tara Reade.  I find it just as easy to believe that Joe may have groped the poor woman, and then forgotten about it.  This sort of harassment is going to be an ongoing thing all through the next few decades, until the coded messages that men and women exchange about their willingness to participate in intimate behavior becomes clearer and clearer, and finally unambiguous.


The Senate is a disgusting place.  If young ladies are expected to run errands which place them within the range of the eager paws of oversexed senators, and the young ladies have no option but to go, putting their reputations at risk, we must do something about that.  It may have been OK at one time, but it is no longer OK for the Senate to establish rules that coerce unchaperoned intermingling of senators with their young defenseless staff in this day and age.  Men are going to continue to blame the women for putting themselves in awkward positions, but we have to find ways of making it easier for the women to say 'no'.

From the political point of view, I wonder whether it might be enough for Joe Biden to confess that he might have been too affectionate with this young staffer.  I doubt it; all of Joe's friends and his advisors would have told him:  Be absolutely sure.  Deny everything.  You don't even know her.  You've never even seen her.  The great diversity of characters who usually vote Democrat, including the registered Democrats, are too titchy on these matters; they could all run and vote for Trump, for whom molesting women is part of his platform.  As a nation, we're far too immature to be able to deal with something uncertain like I can't remember.

What a mess.  Only those who have led faultless lives, like Obama and Bernie Sanders need apply to be the Democrat candidate.  The Republican candidate is a whole different thing; they're a very forgiving crowd.  Let's face it: The Democrats look at all their candidates through a very suspicious microscope.  This desire for perfection is what might hand the election to Trump.

Working with "Geniuses"

A lot of people talk carelessly about 'geniuses'.  In a world where stories are passed around quickly and easily, and where anybody can add to the hype about anything, via a blog or a facebook post or what have you, claims of genius status for all sorts of people are common.  Our president, for instance, is a self-proclaimed genius, and there are millions who would support that claim!  I'm not going to deny it; as you will see, I think it is a condition to which we should attach a lot less reverence than we do, but that is not the thrust of this post.

I, like many of us, felt rather a mental klutz, until I hit somewhere around grade 5, I think.  At that point, I began to be a little more confident about how smart, or clever I was, compared to my classmates.  A couple of them were really good at their schoolwork, and I felt naturally frustrated at my inability to beat their scores on tests.  But I was also noticing that they weren't as efficient as I was in certain areas.  But those areas were few, and minor.

The older I got, the more I was certain that intelligence was often specific to particular aspects of life and study.  Some fellows (I attended boy's schools for my entire school career until I went to college) were naturals at extracting information from books, which was a huge advantage.  Others were naturals at understanding the meaning of a question, even if it was phrased differently from how we had usually heard it asked.  Yet others were brilliant at connecting two ideas that we had learned at different times, and putting them together.

I had a few things going for me; for instance, I could remember things.  I also had an honest and kindly face, and many of my classmates and friends---who were not recognized as worthy of cultivation---would be glad to help me understand something, if I happened to be struggling with some assignment.  (Matter of fact, I owe an enormous debt to these sorts of friends throughout my career.)  Often, these guys had latched on to the importance of some principle that the smarter fellows had accepted and moved past, sometimes a principle that ended up being almost the most important one that we were to be taught that marking period, say.

Then I changed schools, because my parents got different jobs in a different area, and this was a sort of magnet school, where they offered huge scholarships to kids who were at the top of their classes in other schools.  I did not quite understand this, so when I went in to class on the first day of the year, I found myself surrounded by quite friendly boys.  But pretty soon over the course of a couple of weeks, I discovered that these fellows were a lot cleverer than I was, knew a lot more, and picked up stuff very fast.  They were also very interested in all the new material, and eager to share their insights with the new boy in class.

It was about this time that I began to realize that, contrary to what I was reading in fiction, geniuses were rarely snooty or standoffish; they were usually eager to share their insights with anyone who was interested.  Interested, that's the secret.  They often had no time for people who wanted to know something for some stupid purpose---such as for an test of exam, for instance---and were frustrated with people who really weren't interested in whatever the topic was.  In contrast, some of these chaps were amazingly patient with even plodders who were trying to understand something, even if their level of interest did not really come up to the high standards that this genius usually expected.

Once I went to college, there was the initial excitement of doing classes with girls!  I was one of the few students who had gone to all-boy's schools all through; and there were a few girls, too, who had gone exclusively to girl's schools.  It didn't take us long to change gears, and buckle down to learning the new material, in the new subjects that college invariably lays in front of freshmen.

Here, people who knew what they were doing were the norm, both among the students and the professors.  There were a few duds, but they had all got into our fairly exclusive college because they were good at something.  Again, there were a few geniuses scattered about, but we learned to get along with them.  Four years later, we were ready to go on to graduate school; some of us, anyway; at lot of the people found jobs, and I never saw them again.

In graduate school, things got more extreme.  I knew a wide variety of people, mostly people who were interested in music.  A lot of these people were unimaginably bright in their various subjects, but most of their energy went into music.  This is an interesting phenomenon: there were brilliant chemists, brilliant language specialists, physicists, mathematicians, etc, but they were at least as interested in music as they were in their specialty.  So geniuses are sort of quirky.  Actually, they are very quirky!

Well, there's not a lot more to be said in that vein.  One of the invaluable things that college did for me, to a different degree than high school, and graduate school, was to make me comfortable in rubbing shoulders with very intelligent people.  In many ways they're very much like anybody else, but you have to be prepared to deal with their frustration at being unable to get the sort of response from you that they think the subject deserves.

Another problem is that they tend to overestimate the abilities of whoever they're dealing with.  Very few of them tended to regard everybody else as an idiot; this was a tendency only among people with a very narrow expertise, especially if they weren't good at communicating.  Some people with a higher than usual ability in some area, who initially have trouble communicating, acquire certain communication crutches, for example constant repetition, or the use of certain basic words to emphasize points.  Unfortunately they go on to overusing these superlatives, and people learn to ignore them, which means that every idea takes a long time to come across, because of the constant interspersion of these superlatives and the repetition.

By the time I got out of graduate school, I knew that, though I was no genius, there were some areas where I was more capable than most other people, but there were no areas where I was more capable than everybody else.   This is quite a humbling situation: to be aware that there were always people smarter than you in every area in which you were at all an expert.  But I could say that I was close to being an expert in a huge number of areas.

To summarize: we often need to work with people who are very good at what they do.  They need to be respected, but most of all, they need to be appreciated.  You can disagree with these people, but you should be able to justify your position; simply insisting upon it will not get you anywhere.

One sort of genius is a synthesist.  They can listen to a number of presentations by several people, and then splice them together to create something new and powerful.  It is highly useful to have people like this around.  They are not only good at synthesis, they are usually really good at understanding what they're being told.  They're highly motivated, and they're very patient, but they have their limits.  When they feel they aren't getting anywhere, they'll just quit.

So remember: geniuses don't really want adoration and worship; they want to be understood and appreciated, and they want an interested---and informed---audience.

Arch

Re-opening, and Common Decency

Have you noticed the number of things that we take for granted, which are not heavily enforced?
For example, we normally expect that people will not throw trash in public places, on the street, in playgrounds, in rest areas, public toilets ... ?  But people do throw trash.  Some of this behavior is deliberate.  It may be an expression of defiance, or it may be a result of being brought up in poverty in tiny homes, where it is imperative that you get trash out of your space as fast as possible.  Or having tiny babies around, always underfoot, so that Trash becomes a sort of personal enemy.  Or that, walking through a neat neighborhood, you feel so angry at the oppressive tidiness that you want to crap it up a bit.

Anyhow, people will be streaming out like bats out of hell---at least in some localities---but our Governor has instructed that only one public restroom per parking lot is to be opened.  What are the chances that, by about midday, the users crowding these public parks and rest areas will make these restrooms too crapped-up to use?
Many of us are entirely unfamiliar with the habit of certain parents of beating their children (or their wives, or their pets).  Yet, it takes place.  The security forces will interfere only if there is a complaint.  There are fellows riding noisy vehicles around, just for the fun of it.  People set off fire crackers.  Others drive around with their car stereos going full blast.

What drives some people to be public nuisances?  Our first, knee-jerk response is to blame the upbringing of these people.  But that just slightly changes the question to ask: what makes some parents bring their kids up to be anti-social, while others think that it is simple common decency to, for example, pick up after yourself.  Why do people in, say, Finland, keep their cities spotlessly clean, while Americans trash their cities with all their energy?

One of the sources of public feeling against immigrants is the suspicion that it is immigrants, and people of color who are the sources of litter.  Is this perception justified?  I have certainly noticed little black kids throwing their hamburger wrappers on the street.  But I have also noticed people of other ethnicities doing the same, or worse; I have seen big white guys toss box springs and mattresses off pickups onto the highway shoulders.  When adults indulge in this sort of behavior, I would suspect that there is some family policy, some recurring rhetoric running through the family discourse, that justifies anti-social behavior.

Is it at certain times that this sort of thing happens?  Good times?  Bad times?  Democrat times?  Republican times?  During hard times?  Prosperous times?  I'm sure there are many theories about this phenomenon, but I'm also sure that many of these theories are likely to be wrong, because they must depend so much on the habits of the people in the environment of the authors.

In particular, when times are bad for everyone, as they probably are now, irresponsible public behavior hugely escalates everyone's dissatisfaction with their lives and their constraints.

One interesting thing I found was that, early in the Social Distancing times, people were defiant about not wearing masks.  I live in a particularly distancing-schmdistancing sort of area.  The staff at the grocery store did not wear masks, except for the clerks in the pharmacy.  A little later, customers did begin to wear masks, even if as a token gesture.  Then the official instructions from the Governor said: from today, masks must be worn in public.  People immediately began to wear masks, and grocery store employees began to tape spacing distances in checkout lines; but the checkout clerks still did not wear masks.

Generally speaking, I think I'm satisfied with the response to the distancing instructions from people and businesses in our area.  They clearly do not believe that the virus is a threat to their safety, but for whatever reason, they make at least a show of covering their faces some of the time, keeping their distances, and of course, schools and restaurants are closed, as are gyms and barber shops, etc.  Certain businesses are due to open up soon, and I'm wondering whether the number of cases of infection will immediately shoot up.  At the moment, the number of cases is still around 100, with just 2 deaths so far.  If the response to a sudden rise in the number of cases or deaths results in an immediate increase in careful behavior (distancing, face covering), I will be satisfied.  This is a community of doubting thomases, and Trump has succeeded in convincing many of my neighbors that they have been extraordinarily gullible for too long.

One lesson we can learn from all this is that, when Democrats overstate their case for any course of action---even a reasonable course of action, such as recycling, or protecting the environment, or lowering emissions---there is a backlash.  "Hey, with all these jokers buying hybrid cars, how come the weather is still warming up?"  This is the sort of drivel you might expect Trump to spout.  Many laymen have no idea of the enormous inertia of physical systems, and still more, of biological systems.

A gadget for picking up things

To come back to littering: I used to make it a habit of picking up litter when I took my walks in the afternoon.  (So did my wife.)  But now, we're fearful about picking up something from the litter.  Usually, it is bacteria that you contact from litter, and generally, our bodies can defeat a bacterium or two; they're simply destroyed by our stomach acids, or our antibodies.  This virus, unfortunately, being new, we have no resident antibodies to deal with it, which is the problem.  Anyway, there could be viruses on litter on the street.

Well, I don't have any enormous wisdom to offer about the problem of irresponsible public behavior.  Social psychologists may have suggestions, but I would suspect that few of these will have experimental support, outside of maybe a small experiment in a limited area.  What I would do---without any proof of efficacy---would be to set a good example.  If I want to pick up trash in my neighborhood, however, I will have to walk around with a pail or a small trash can, and one of those picker-upper things ---we got one on some occasion, but they're a lot of fun to use---and pick up the trash with that.

Arch

What 'College' Has Turned Out To Be

I recently read an article in the New Yorker, which addressed how the expectations, and the lives, of college students have been completely turned upside-down by the Coronavirus epidemic.

The author goes on to describe how far these students' expectations have been blown off course by the events of the past few months.  But behind all these upheavals—and certainly these upheavals have been massive, and I don't wish to minimize them—there is the problem that higher education in the USA has never really been defined to my satisfaction.  All the broken promises that the author of the New Yorker piece conveys to us from the broken-hearted words of a large number of undergraduates that she interviewed, over the phone, for the most part, were not made by anyone qualified to make them.  They were made by marketing specialists, and consist of hype that has been sent down for a century, about what college does for a person.

Back in the days when the efficacy of a thing was sort of open-ended, people were accustomed to buying it on faith.  A cough mixture, a wart remover, an umbrella that would last forever: we were accustomed to buying these, with a nagging suspicion at the back of our minds that the purchase would not deliver.  We still have these with us; they are particularly noisome in politics, as we have found in the last four years to our acute frustration.

But, over the decades, we have become accustomed to the concept of false advertising, and now either the manufacturer of a new product must deliver a product that meets its description, or must obtain insurance, so that if a consumer files a claim of unsuitability, at least the manufacturer can offer some cash against the shortfalls.

College, though—one of the most expensive commodities that a students and his family can invest in—has no tangible product description.  Its cost, too, is open-ended, and the student can be paying off college loans for decades.  And often, a graduate can be an incredible success in college, but end up in a career that has nothing to do with their undergraduate training, and be a remarkable success.  Just as often, a graduate with a fabulous undergraduate career could be a dismal failure at several different types of jobs.  A graduate who scrapes through with a bare pass in college might be a brilliant success.  Or an abject failure.  What do these outcomes have to do with college?  How can we think about a thing with such a variety of effects on people?

Before I mislead you readers, I want to make clear that I believe in the college experience, because it worked for me.  Am I special?

College is almost the only place where certain things can happen to the right student.  Having taught in college for 35 years (and as an amateur for 10 years before that), I know that there are some students who benefit enormously from the college experience.  They come into a college from having spent 12 years in various schools in their home areas, and meet their fellow-students, and something happens!  I don't know what it is.  Within a year—or maybe four years, if their circumstances are not perfect—the world becomes their oyster.  Would the same thing have happened if they stayed at home?  We don't know; it depends on their hometown, on their neighbors, on their teachers at school.

Next, they get a taste of a number of different disciplines.  English.  History.  Chemistry.  Art.  Philosophy.  Economics.  Some students want to get their teeth into all of them!  Some of them don't want to have anything to do with any of them.  This depends on their genetics, on their home backgrounds, on their professors, on what is happening in the world outside.  No college can guarantee that a student will be attracted to any discipline that will lead to a major that will interest the student.  The capacity of being interested in something is not always innate in a student.  Sometimes a brilliant professor can inspire an undergraduate to become interested in something, but there is no guarantee that our student will encounter one.  And, most dishearteningly for some families, there is no guarantee that the area that interests that student will lead to a lucrative job.  Nevertheless, colleges market themselves with blissful confidence that every student will meet his divinely ordained career match within their institution.

In the post-pandemic world in which our college students will have to live, in addition to the problems I describe above: the problems of whether a youngster is suited for college, and if he or she is, whether or not he or she will find their intellectual niche in a given school; whether, once they graduate, they can afford to repay the horrible student loans they must take out; in addition to these problems, the student will also face a vast array of employers, viewing prospective employees with deep suspicion, and viewing the post-pandemic economy with even deeper suspicion, and wondering whether medical insurance, which they have been required (or expected) to provide makes any sense.

While I still resolutely believe that colleges do have something to offer, I do not believe that they have something to sell.  Colleges are a pearl of great price, but not the sort of price that their marketers have in mind.

Do colleges have training programs that can help a student qualify for a certain job?  In some cases, yes.  Perhaps colleges should not offer these kinds of courses; it gives the wrong impression about what they are for.

The community, however, needs people with this type of training.  Accounting.  Teaching.  Art.  Marketing.  Writing.  Computing.  People need to know how to do these things, often at a professional level.  But sending a kid to college to learn these things seems to me the wrong thing to have to do.

I am talking about a different kind of educational structure.  Maybe it is time to have these practical things taught in practical schools, where specialized teachers offer classes in them; kids will get tested at the end of the course of classes, and get certified.

Perhaps, at the same time, kids can attend different institutions, which offer what college was designed to offer: an insight into the edifice of knowledge and thinking that is not designed to lead to an occupation.

Unfortunately, also, education has been tied to the high status of graduates.  As long as students pursue the more abstract aspects of their college experience out of their search for status, they will have limited success.  I can't quite figure out what to do about this problem; I was probably as driven by the desire for status and respect as anyone.

I have no real expectation that these words will persuade anyone.  But I'm convinced that the efforts to get qualified, and to get an education, are different things, and should take place in different locations.

And the economic problems of education—problems for the student, not the institutions—may get solved by an incoming Democratic administration, or they may not.

Arch