How to Get Someone Elected President

This is not the subject I wanted to write about, but if I spend too much time thinking about the perfect title, I won’t get started in time to finish the post.

First, you have to select a candidate.  If you have a particular favorite in mind, then you’re that much further ahead than if you don’t.  But what if the reports you get of which candidate is trending to win the nomination make you change your mind?  It seems to me that it’s better to keep an open mind until the party convention makes an irreversible decision to select the party nominee.  (Otherwise you get mad, emotion rears its ugly head, and you waste a lot of energy adjusting to the nominee.)

What do we look for in a nominee?  As our friends and fellow party-members get their knickers in a knot trying to figure which candidate to support, let’s try and get our criteria lined up.  (A lot of this is stuff I have been posting for more than a year, so be patient with stale information.)

Criteria for a Candidate.  These are in no particular order.  In addition, some of these items only make sense in special circumstances; for instance, this time around, because we’re more dissatisfied with how Trump is doing than we were with how George W. Bush was doing in 2008, some of our criteria* are going to be specific to this election.  But it is quite possible that, from now on, every election is going to have special problems.  Once again, these are in no particular order, at least not intentionally.

Presentability.  I mean, how the candidate conducts him- or herself.  I suppose my thinking about the charisma and the conduct of a candidate or nominee could be quite different from those of others.  I would like a candidate/nominee who tends to understate matters rather than exaggerate.  I would like a candidate who doesn’t carry on like a maniac, though honestly there are matters that would drive anyone insane.  And remember: a lot of foreign friends (and, I suppose, enemies) are watching reports and video of our candidate, and our nominees, and our president; and though they ought not to influence who wins the vote, their attitude towards our leader is an important consideration.

Rhetoric.  The manner of speech—something hinted at in the previous item—is important.  Perhaps the cautious, learned, measured speech of presidents through the years have struck the Alt-Right as the speech of an insider.  But when you come right down to it, there are big problems with a figurehead who talks like a child with a vocabulary of a Labrador Retriever, repeats themselves, and has no concern for veracity.

Intelligence.  I’m not suggesting that our president needs to be a genius; in most matters that need careful thinking, there will be people who can help figure things out.  But the president needs to have the intelligence to spot (a) which problems are important, (b) realize that they actually are problems, (c) see at least some of the implications of those problems, and (d) accept possible solutions from among those that are presented.  And, it remains true that at least a part of Intelligence is the ability to gather round them advisors and specialists that can really help to put good and imaginative solutions together, and the wisdom to sequence them in the most effective order.

Prejudice-Free.  This is a matter both for us, and for our candidate.  We cannot ask that our candidate (or nominee or our president) adopt all of our prejudices.  Obviously, we would prefer him or her to have our prejudices than some other prejudices; and there are some attitudes that we would like our candidate / nominee / president to have that we would consider to rise above mere prejudice.  For instance, we would not consider a candidate who took a stand against fossil fuels to be ‘prejudiced against fossil fuels.’  There are reasons why we would like our administration to take a strong stand against fossil fuels in the long run, even if they allowed limited use of particularly clean fossil fuels in the short term.  Fareed Zakaria has a video on this.  It is appropriate for a candidate to have strong feelings about certain things: justice, equality, fairness, decency, etc.  Hostility to a particular industry, e.g. Exxon Mobil, or Amazon, or Coal, or Verizon, is less attractive in a president.  He or she could be critical, but not hostile.  Bernie Sanders has had it in for Medical Insurance.  So have I.  But I don't think it is seemly to bring up that hostility onto the podium.

Ethical.  I don’t think a lot needs to be said on this issue; not that it is unimportant.  Anyone who thinks that ethics need not be a big deal in this election, or any future election, is obviously not on my wavelength, and may stop reading right now.

Attitude to Fellow Candidates.  This is one thing I liked about various of the younger candidates, and even Elizabeth Warren: they seldom lashed out at their fellows.  The candidates have coaches, who instruct them on what to say, and when to say it.  I’m not sure which of these have done this, but some of them are encouraging their candidates to attack their fellow candidates with a little more edge.  They believe, apparently, that the voters like to see a little blood. I for one do not.  I hope that Andrew Yang, and Eric Swalwell, and Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, did not need to drop out for not having attacked their opponents strongly enough.

A sense of Humor.  Honestly, all our candidates have a sense of humor.  The best of them apply their sense of humor to their speeches.  (Deplorably, some of the moderators appear to need to take their humor vitamins a bit more regularly.)

Perhaps the most important attribute of any leader in US politics for the next decade or two is a sense of urgency about the climate.  But there are other things that are just as important, because, among other things, they could delay or derail climate action.  The chief among these is the problem of corruption, or money in politics.  It is the power of the Fossil Fuel Lobby and the Automobile Lobby that together have destroyed past plans to curtail the destruction of the environment, and the Greenhouse Effect**.  As soon as these lobbies are de-fanged, climate legislation can proceed with all deliberate speed.  To the extent that these lobbies have the power to influence weak-minded congressmen, Congress will find itself powerless to make laws that are unpopular with the Fossil Fuel Industry. Even worse, these lobbies will undertake to write legislation on the behalf of Congress, which will end up with Congress enacting legislation that will be actually ineffective.  There are a myriad laws that exist to make the job of gas exploration as painless for the Fossil Fuel Companies as possible, and these must be unraveled decisively and completely.  But it is folly to expect these lobbyists to do it on our behalf.

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* "Criteria" = Standards.

** "Greenhouse Effect" = A tendency for certain gases in the air (e.g. Carbon Dioxide, which is what is released when we burn paper, gasoline, wood, etc) to send back heat down to the surface.  The earth maintains a steady average temperature only if the extra heat is allowed to escape out to space.  If the heat is reflected back due to the Greenhouse Effect, the earth will continue to heat up.

Desiderata for the Environment and the Home

The delicate balancing act which we need to learn to do, requires lots of judgement.

Should we recycle everything, knowing that there will surely be a point where the recycling guys at the landfill will be tempted to throw up their hands, and simply toss everything into the trash?  This happened at least once at my place of work, and it could easily happen even in the waste-recycling centers, if supervisors just happen to relax their vigilance.

Should we urge our friends to recycle everything, to the point where they begin to avoid us?  Those who do not recycle as aggressively as we do ourselves, probably continue blissfully along, until someone reminds them that they ought to be recycling.  You can imagine that they probably hate to be reminded.

Should we be doing our laundry so frequently?  (Should I be reminding you that this is a thing, and risk having you not read my blog?)  Every load of laundry means more detergent in the sewer, and more warm (or hot) water going into the water treatment plant.  On the other hand, if we get our clothes too dirty before washing, it might take more detergent to get them clean.  I just don't know.

I recently found that there has been discovered a way of extracting Lithium from frack-water.  You probably know that Lithium is a central resource in using battery-powered equipment; hybrid cars and all sorts of wireless equipment is powered by Lithium, and Lithium-ion cells.  I don't think this technique alone will result in an increase in fracking, but it certainly makes one think.

Notice, though, that despite the value of Lithium, nobody seems to be offering us any incentive for recycling our old battery-packs, from cellphones and laptop computers.  Those puppies are worth a lot, but the Lithium jockeys out there are cannily keeping quiet, because they want these old cells and battery packs for free!  Once they begin to have to pay a dollar for each battery, or whatever, their costs will begin to skyrocket.  One imagines that it will be cheaper than extracting Lithium from frack-water.

It is important to keep a sense of humor with regard to recycling.  Of course, anyone (like us) who regards recycling a deadly serious business is not entirely wrong.  But dealing with our kids, or our spouses, or our friends, and discussing recycling alternatives requires a gentle and delicate hand.

For instance, we know that it is bad to throw waste cooking oil into the sink.  (It ends up clogging the sewers, and is a load on the water-treatment system, as far as I know.)  So in our house, we put it in bottles, and once the bottles are full, put them in the trash.  Now, that's a load on the landfills.  But which is worse?  I know friends of friends who would rather not put anything in the landfill; they would rather recycle everything.  If there is an easy way to recycle household cooking oil, we really owe it to ourselves to do it.  If there is a biodiesel collecting point in our neighborhood, someone should tell me.  We have family in Missouri who are in the biodiesel business, but what are we to do, mail them our waste oil?  (Humor, don't forget!)

The other day I told the check-out clerk at the supermarket: no bags!  No bags, please!  I was buying just a couple of items, and I could easily put them in my pockets.  But I should have done it with a smile, without scaring the heck out of the poor young lady.

Our area is just backward enough that we cannot afford a full-time recycling Czar, who would function as the official reminder to let everyone know where the recycling centers are--for instance, the Friends' Fellowship (the Quaker Meeting) used to help recycle batteries at one time, but now, though such stores as Best Buy ought to do it, they occasionally confess to customers that they just throw certain sorts of batteries right in the trash, so we may as well do it, too.  Who collects used engine oil?  Who collects used tires?  Metal?  Wood?

People thought of burning wood as a service they performed for the environment.  (If anyone cut down a tree for any reason, they would ask for the discarded wood, to use for home heating.)  No more wood rotting all around the property, and they were saving their dirty, coal-burning electric plant from generating the electricity (or the gas company from having to deliver gas, or the oil company from having to deliver heating oil) for their heating system.  But times have changed, and we want to get away from burning anything.  We desperately hope that the electric company is releasing less CO₂ per calorie than anything we can achieve at home.  (If it isn't, we can all focus our attention on the electric company and urge them to improve, which would be the biggest bang for the buck, environment-wise.  The economies of reducing pollution using electric or hybrid cars, public transportation, every sort of improvement pivotally depends on electric generation plants reducing their pollution output.  Unfortunately, these plants are occasionally managed by people less interested in these goals than almost anyone else.)

The point is, because our attitudes towards waste management are evolving so rapidly, as the years go on, our conversations with our friends about what we do, and what they could be doing, are likely to become increasingly awkward, because our practices are going to diverge rather strongly, the more the state- of-the-art keeps changing.  This is where the Desiderata poem comes into play: we need to learn to talk to people in such a way that *they don't get mad, *they aren't embarrassed, *we aren't embarrassed, and *we don't discourage future conversations.

Not least, we have to keep an eye on maintaining our own equilibrium far more aggressively, the more that ignorant other folks out there deliberately try to destroy our peace of mind, simply because the sight of us Libtards, quietly going about recycling stuff--which of course, is to their benefit as well--is so terribly repugnant to them!  It makes me smile.  (Which shows that I'm a terrible person.  Sense of humor.)

A few months ago I wrote about guys in trucks who hated to see hybrid, low-emissions cars on the road.  Some of them would roar by, blowing horrible exhaust smoke at the vehicles they so despised.  Often certain types of conservatives, and certainly Alt-Right folk who really have no ideology at all, behave in highly puerile ways, which they cannot defend with logic, but which they do try to defend in various logic-defying ways, to the embarrassment of anyone who uses logic, and subscribes to the axioms of scientifically knowledgeable people.

For more of my thoughts about Desiderata, read on.

George Carlin

Greetings to all!!

Well, this seems a strange topic to begin the New Year with, but I have to catch these opportunities as they come, because my memory is not as good as . . . What was I saying?

Oh, George Carlin.

Just this morning, my stepson happened to have left his tablet on the table open to faceBook, and someone had posted a link to a George Carlin clip on YouTube.

My stepson was quick to declare that he did not take these sorts of links seriously anymore, because he was getting a lot of conservative spam.  I assured him that George Carlin was anything but, and he looked at me uncertainly, and I repeated my assurance, and went off and indulged in an orgy of George Carlin, which kept me chuckling for a whole hour!

Introducing a twenty-something young liberal to the late George Carlin might not be a kindness.  I will elaborate presently.

Not everyone is familiar with George Carlin enough to be able to recognize all his moods, and the background to some of his comedic "pieces" -- for lack of a better word--and some might not know about him at all.  If our species survives this generation, we could hope that Carlin recognition is built into the genes by Darwin, or whoever is in charge of evolution these days.

I have it in for Capitalism.  I tolerate the Capitalism of the old Pre-Reagan days, but the most recent flavor of uncompromising Capitalism is evil and misguided.  George Carlin explains why it is so.

I have it in for Nationalism.  Nationalism made sense in the world when new nations were struggling against colonial powers.  Today, emerging nations are still fighting against paternalistic restraints--c.f. Catalan politics--but to say that America is fighting against colonial powers is so funny that whoever says so should not be allowed to speak henceforth.  Carlin explains this beautifully.

Carlin described fake news long before fake news was cool.  If you learned to recognize it then, you would know how it has evolved to what it is today, and how fake those who habitually use the phrase today are.

Advertising is a pet peeve of George Carlin, as it is mine.  It isn't very different from fake news; in fact, it is the friends and relatives of fake news mongers who craft and disseminate advertising copy.  I would nuke Madison Avenue (or whatever is the address of contemporary hype), and if George Carlin were alive, he would probably nod approval.

He opposed stupidity.  He opposed US militarism.  (Oh, you should definitely check out his video clip on American military adventurism; one listens with amusement, and anger.)  Golf courses.  Religion.  Materialism.  The Real Estate business.  (It isn't obvious, but it is there, hidden in his commentaries on modern US culture.)  Racism.  I'm not sure he was particularly close to blacks and people of color, but he could certainly spot racism at any distance.  Economic inequality.  Education.  Parents.  And finally: politicians.  (But he lays the blame squarely where it belongs: on the electorate.  That is, the US Public.

Unexpectedly, or rather, not unexpectedly, if you knew the reason: George Carlin is cynical about the environment.  He laughs at Save the Planet rhetoric.  The planet, he says, is going to be around long after we're gone.  This is undeniable, but how are we to think about both our anxiety to preserve the environment, and George Carlin's shrugging it off?

Well, what exactly do we mean by preserving the environment?  We mean to keep the planet the way it is, as much as possible.  Why?  So that future generations can enjoy it (or that we can enjoy it a little longer).  But Carlin takes the view that the human species will not last forever.

One doesn't need to think too hard to conclude that this is absolutely true.  While we may not embrace the rapid deterioration of human living conditions with great glee as Carlin does, we have to realize that, from an objective point of view, our ecological efforts are merely a desperate rearguard action against the inevitable.  As modern Ecological agnostics must believe, saving species from extinction for a few more decades in the face of their vanishing habitat is an exercise in futility.  Whether or not the GOP thinks that way, it makes it easier for them to balance the budget without raising taxes, and as we all know, what the GOP loves is money, far more than the beauty of nature!  Gotta love 'em.

How did George Carlin get this way?  If you watch enough of his videos on YouTube, he explains it.  It is a psychological defense mechanism.  The best way to avoid soul-eating disappointment is to give up all expectations.  He says that he never voted; he just stayed home.  Cynicism, in the end, is a crude form of self-preservation.  This was not Carlin's invention; it is the main principle of Buddhism!  More about that another time.

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How to Cherish the Earth, Save the World, and Spread Peace and Brotherhood Throughout the Universe

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Think big!!  After you’ve spent most of your adult life trying to be helpful one blade of grass at a time, you have to seriously start thinking big.  Just keeping my lawn mowed is not going to make much of a difference to the neighborhood, you’re telling yourself.  Taking home one little pup from the animal shelter doesn’t begin to make a dent in the hundreds of pets who are destroyed every day across the nation.  More aggressive action is needed.  (But you have to take the pup home.)

Seriously, though, someone must keep an eye on the big picture.  You’ve done your share for twenty years, but when you look around, things are actually getting worse.  You pick up a hamburger wrapper one evening, but there’s a million kids out there throwing out hamburger wrappers with great determination.  It’s as though they’ve told themselves: this place needs more hamburger wrappers on the street, to be just perfect.

It’s time to step back, and write down some basic principles; some Axioms for doing everything that needs to be done.

We can’t stop doing our part.

• There’s no point in retiring early, liquidating all your assets and giving it all to charity, if you give up steadily doing the right thing at the local level.  You’ve got to keep on with minimizing your resource footprint, leave alone your carbon footprint.   You’ve got to keep grinding on.
• We have to keep alert for what others are doing that’s good.
• Isolation is counterproductive.  Anything that anyone else is doing is worth commending, and worth encouraging.

We must keep alert for new dangers of all sorts.

• New fires must be spotted, and put out.  We have to keep a lookout for large movements by people, businesses or governments that need studying.  In the long run, will they be destructive?  Will they use up resources that will be to the detriment of everyone? 
• We have to keep educating ourselves, because new threats must be countered with new knowledge.  With every advancement in science and technology, the potential for destructive exploitation multiplies, and we must be in a position to act knowledgeably.  It is no longer a time for knee-jerk reactions, if there ever was a time for it.

We have to pass on our attitudes and information to others, especially the young.

• Education is a huge part of the total program.  One of the biggest frontiers is how to mobilize the most effective PR techniques to forward the program of conservation, preservation, protection, and education.  We spoke about the organization called TED, which features exciting and effective speakers to address a carefully selected and influential audience.  They have stumbled onto this idea of making creativity in problem-solving sexy.

We have to recognize that we are not in this alone. 

• The feeling of being in a partnership with everyone is probably a bigger force for peace, generally, than other initiatives for promoting peace for its own sake.  Certainly peace needs no reasons for being a goal: if ever there was a null hypothesis, peace was it.  But in a world that takes conflict as a given, partnership for conservation is good motivation for peace.
• No one is too mean or too young or too anything to be enlisted in the war against senseless consumption of resources.

Identify all resources.

• Some are focused on fiscal resources, especially those who are chained to the dominant economic paradigm in which everything that is done has to be paid for with money that comes from somewhere.  All that they do is designed around how to stimulate certain activities, perceived by them as desirable, with money; how to stifle other activities, perceived by them as undesirable, by denying funding.  These people have to be taken seriously for the moment, because their paradigm will continue to be in force for a long time.  But not forever.
• Some are focused on energy resources, especially economic planners.  This is an industrial mindset, where early in the last century automobiles were the dominant industry, and it took a fair degree of energy to keep the production lines working.  Later in that century, the lack of gasoline threatened the health of the auto industry, reinforcing the belief that development and energy were inseparable.  This mindset is becoming a hindrance, though clearly we cannot do without energy.
• Some are focused on time resources, especially those who believe that time is of the essence for various programs, such as addressing global warming, or developing alternative energy sources.  The elderly are always conscious of their limited resources of time, for obvious reasons.  Busy individuals who are constantly battling the tendency to be given additional responsibility are naturally preoccupied with how much they can do effectively and well in the time they have.
• Some are focused on environmental resources, which is the one resource that cannot be restored easily.  Once an environment is destroyed, not much can be done about it.  Businessmen and traditional politicians tend to ignore the Environment because it is a paralyzing constraint, and highly inconvenient.
• Food resources preoccupy those who are concerned with world hunger.  We have been aware of food resources versus population for so long that we are fatigued.  But it is a real need, and if a sufficient stream of high-quality natural food is not going to be available in the future, as a result of depletion of environmental resources particularly, and the annexation of land resources for more lucrative deployment as industrial real estate or business premises, then we’re going to be faced with food shortages.  As long as business interests are trusted with decisions about land use, land will be funneled towards creating money for businesses rather than growing food for those who cannot afford to pay a lot of money for it.  If land availability gradually evaporates, we will have to make do with low-quality artificial food, and the present uproar about genetically modified foods will be laughable in retrospect.  We will have to start eating foods that are good for us but taste terrible, or food that tastes wonderful and kills us off fast.  If land is used wisely today, we can have food that is both tasty and nutritious.  We had better be careful of where this is going.
• We must not forget human resources.  Businessmen think of human resources as low-wage employees who can be treated like dirt.  But the real issue is how to make use of the human talent that is available to solve the important problems facing society, rather than enlisting them to entertain the bored masses.
• Cultural resources.  This is probably the one that is least thought about by most people.  But we are at one end of a vast chain of humanity, the memory of whose challenges and achievements and joys have the potential to encourage and inspire us.  It is easy to sacrifice priceless historical artifacts for the purpose of locating an office building, or entertainment, or personal glory.  Most of us are accustomed to regarding our own culture and its achievement as the epitome of refinement, and to disregarding the triumphs of other societies and peoples.  But this mindset is self-defeating, and at the least will alienate potential allies, and at the worst will destroy something that we can learn to be inspired with ourselves.  The richness and the diversity on this single planet is the greatest marvel in a marvelous universe.

Oil Spill

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I'm beginning to think that this oil spill might be the true disaster of the decade.  It could easily happen that British Petroleum cannot, and will not, contain the leak.  Because of the precarious state of the national economic situation, the federal government cannot ask the oil company to step aside, and get the big engineering companies and the universities to work on the problem; one has to think that the cost-conscious oil company is going to be very cautious in spending money on the gusher.

The more everyone delays and takes a cautious approach towards the containment problem, the more destruction there will be before things get better.  The political opposition is licking its lips in anticipation of some serious finger-pointing.  This could easily be worse than Katrina.

One also sees the incredible richness of this particular well.  BP would have raked in the dollars on this one for years.  As it is, they might be completely destroyed by the cost of the clean-up, if the rest of the country has the guts to insist that it should be done right, and done quickly.

It is stunning to think that the downfall of the Obama government might just be not a war, but a stupid oil spill.  We can speculate that BP is forced to pull out their biggest clean-up guns sometime at the end of, say, 2011, after the oil has had a chance to work its magic on the gulf coast, and after more than a year of miserable mop-up efforts, the executives of BP will probably be rewarded with the biggest bonuses in history!

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