Writing in Word, and Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and anyone else who chooses to run

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I just got started learning to use a program called Scrivener, which is a sort of add-on to --apparently-- a number of other word-processors, such as Word.  Most of the features of Scrivener echo what's available in Word, and it struck me that most people really don't know how to use Word with all its features, so I'm writing this little introduction.

Meanwhile, down at the farm, the Presidential "race" is gearing up.  First the Democrats have to have their own private bloodbath, with Republicans sniping from the sidelines, and then the Republicans get to have their bloodbath, while the Democrats laugh themselves silly, or get furious, depending on what goes down.  Fortunately we've already heard a lot of the nonsense spouted by the Republicans, and they will have to come up with a newer and more preposterous lie to get me really angry.  Unfortunately, the Dems have succumbed to pressure, and begun to use the same sort of clever tactics, such as telling the electorate any sort of lie it wants to hear, just until they get elected.

One of the truly original American inventions is, as a great man said several times: advertising.  The concept of advertising has now developed into a finely-tuned plan for propagating as many lies as possible without getting caught, and having a good story ready, just in case you do.  More money seems to pass through the hands of advertising companies and consultants than through any other industry.  For instance: you've heard about college fees skyrocketing.  You know why?  Because private colleges are in a race to make their campuses look as attractive as possible, which means: more buildings, more sports facilities, more athletic teams, more coaches, more team-mascots-related sportswear in the college bookstore.  Why?  Advertising.  Every student, therefore, has to pay more tuition just to attract more students, to pay more fees.

In Politics, the game has become advertising, all advertising, all the time, and nothing but advertising.  All these conservative antics, and the complete circus to which they have reduced the electoral process, are, broadly viewed, an advertising game aimed simply at the next election, to denigrate their opponents, and persuade the public to vote for their candidate.  So, okay, I'm lumping all sorts of propaganda under the general heading of Advertising, but the word advertising gets across how cheap the whole thing is, in a way that the sophisticated word propaganda fails to do.  Propaganda seems, in its tone, something subtle, subversive, intelligent, sophisticated, and worthy of indulging in, to defeat a clever enemy.  But what we have here is a cheap, expensive effort to confuse the fact, and put someone in place in the White House and in Congress so that Business can continue to run roughshod over the poorer members of Society.

There is an element of fear in politics, from the point of view of the most wealthy members of society, the so-called One Percent.  No one ever got into the One Percent by working.  The only way into that select few is to be born with money.  If you're born with money, or you can steal it, or talk a lot of people out of it, this society has ways to enable you to steal more of it from poor folks.  This is the so-called American Dream: to get on the thieving side of society, rather than to keep working so that you can be stolen from.  Remember that.  If you're already rich, you can stop reading now.  All you can possibly be interested in is to steal more money from the poor by overvaluing your services to mankind, and to prevent the government from returning it to the poor, via taxes.

If you're not rich, you have two choices.  Work hard, and subsidize Big Business: Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Big Media, Big Automobiles, and Big Military; or organize together to change the system to be more friendly towards workers.  Don't let the One Percent, and it's media slaves, and your idiot poverty-stricken friends who imagine themselves "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" persuade you that being a worker is stupid.  Being a worker makes sense, provided the affluent end of the spectrum pulls its weight, and pays its fair share of keeping the country running.

The One Percent should pay at least 90% of the cost of rebuilding roads.  Why?  Because they own the trucks, which bring goodies to them in their enormous homes hidden away in Connecticut (or Texas, or wherever).  The same goes for practically everything.  If the One Percent gave 1% of their wealth to fix the roads, that would give the working poor a living wage for a year, which would boost the economy like you would not believe, and bring WalMart so much income they could probably start a shuttle service to the Moon.  Excuse me, while I go try to find out how much the One Percent owns ... roughly 2 million a year per person.  That's obviously an income, not wealth.

Let's suppose that the population of the US is 300 million.  That means there are 3 million members of the One Percent.  Suppose they donated 10% of their annual income.  That's 10% of $2 million per person, multiplied by 3 million people: $600 billion.  Divide that up among the 15% unemployed or underemployed people out of the 300 million population: that's

$600 billion / (15% of 300 million) = $600 billion / 45 million = about $13000.

$13 thousand a year would not get a large family very far, but the poorer, single members of my family could sure as heck use $250 a week, no kidding.  Right now, some of the younger members of my family have no income at all, and they would dearly like to contribute at least a little bit towards their room and board.

"Why I want to be President."
One of the harder things a presidential candidate --who is for real-- will have to do this year is to persuade the public that they have good reasons why they want to be President, because the more thoughtful among us knows that the job can bring nothing but misery to anyone whom we trust.

1.  I want to push legislation through that reduces business influence in politics.
This is going to be almost impossible to accomplish, because Congress, by and large, is in the pocket of Big Business.  I want to restrain and restrict lobbying practices in Congress.  Lobbying is a type of corruption.

2.  I want to get people employed repairing the US infrastructure: roads, bridges, schools, water systems, and parks and preserves that have been destroyed by energy companies, electric cables, airports, waterways, and the coastline.

3.  I want to force streamlining of the automobile industry energy standards.  At present, car companies can get away with not improving gas mileage for some of their vehicles by promoting the model line to a larger-sized one.  Larger cars are allowed lower economy, so car companies simply make the car larger, without making the engines more economical.

4.  I want to liberate schools from tying their financial support to student performance on tests, or at least make the rules a little more reasonable.  (Don't get me started.)

5.  I want to alleviate the tax burden on lower-income people.

6.  I want to continue to withdraw troops deployed abroad.

7.  I want to remove the tax subsidies to Big Energy.

8.  I want to regulate Banks and consumer credit.

Word

Man, I'm pooped.  This will have to wait.

Hilary Clinton Announces that she will Announce her Candidacy

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Hilary Clinton, former Secretary of State finally announces her candidacy, and indicates that she will make a formal announcement via a video around midday today, and already there are a half-dozen YouTube videos denigrating her character, and giving reasons why she should not be made President.

I was just complaining about this to my wife, when she coolly pointed out that we liberals do the same thing; as soon as someone throws their hat into the ring, there are ten liberal experts who point out why they would make a terrible president.  To our minds, they’re all jokers who’ve thoroughly discredited themselves, and we cannot even conceive of one of them occupying the White House, and we start going into deep depression over it.  Likewise, to us it seems that Hillary Clinton in the White House would be fabulous.  In the first place, she would not dismantle the machinery of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, The National Science Foundation, the Nation Foundation for the Arts, the National Foundation for the Humanities, National Public Radio, and numerous other institutions that have come under fire from both extremely wealthy conservatives, and dirt poor conservatives.

A decade or two ago, we were not reduced to horror when contemplating the installation of a Republican administration, though they were indeed pretty bad.  But now, with the strange denizens one finds among them, they cannot be trusted further than we can sling a piano.

Let’s be honest: as those on the far Left often observe, the political leadership of the USA has always rested in the hands of the educated elite, and to all intents and purposes, those who elected them were also members of the educated elite, albeit fringe members.  But today, the elite has resolved into two groups: the wealthy elite, who are educated in name only; they may have credentials from various Ivy League institutions, but these credentials are due to family influence and affluence, and not to mental acuity or academic excellence.  They have taken over the reins of enormously successful businesses, banks, investment companies and so on, and have put their friends and families and running dogs in Congress.

The other group is the truly educated elite, teachers, writers, members of academe, working mostly in second tier companies, occasionally in the government, and in social services.  It is this group that continues to hold onto the attitudes of social responsibility.  They believe that high taxes are the lesser of the two evils, the other of which is abandoning social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the remaining items on the blue list.  In the old days, the elites on both sides of the aisle would not dream of abandoning social services.  But now the uneducated elite has adopted the rhetoric that we’re forced to give up these services, because the pesky liberals, and Democrats, have spent more than they raised in tax revenues.  Never mind that it was the Conservatives who constantly oppose taxes.

There is very little to be gained in running for President; I have no idea why Hillary Clinton wants to do it, except, perhaps, the compassion liberals have for the poor and the indigent, and even for the undeserving penniless members of the Tea Party.  (I know a little of what drives them; we were just doing the taxes of our son, who has just entered the work force, and even his meager income is being whittled away by unforgiving local and state taxes.)  Perhaps it is for the fame of being the first woman President of the USA, and who better than she, who tried her level best, when she was only the First Lady, to bring true Health Reform to legislation?  Barack Obama succeeded to pass Health Reform legislation only by keeping it in the private sector.  (The country as a whole has only hearty contempt for both the health care, and the health insurance industry, from the way they have responded to the legislation.)

Mark my words.  If a conservative is elected, with this Republican Congress, they will raise taxes, and blame the Democrats.  And none of it will be used for social services.  It will all go to the military, for higher salaries for Congress, for huge tax incentives for the largest corporations, e.g. Exxon and BP, aid to Israel, and a tiny bit towards paying off the deficit.

[Added later:  I have just seen Hilary Clinton’s video.  It is at times like this that the teen texting abbreviation “OMG” is so useful.  “When families are strong, America is strong,” she says, stealing the utterly empty rhetoric of the Tea Party and other people who natter inanities at times, including, I’m sorry to say, Elizabeth Warren.  If she had said “When poor, hardworking families get the support they need,” that would make total sense.  But let’s face it: there is nothing that the Federal Government can do to make families strong, dammit.  Families are weakened by poverty, unemployment, drugs, lack of education, and general stupidity, encouraged by business and its marketing machine, in turn abetted by the Media, ever hungry for advertising revenue.  The government can’t do anything about that; that ship, as the saying goes, has sailed.  There are very few strings left that the government can pull, to make things better in a social sense.  In contrast, the Supreme Court has decreed that the government cannot interfere with “string pulling” by the Private Sector.

Arch
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My most unfavorite word: RELAXING

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I live in either the tiniest big city in the world, or the biggest small town in the world: Williamsport, Pennsylvania.  Because it has a unique history, namely that it lies on a point on the Susquehanna River at which it was convenient to locate saw mills, to process the quality lumber that was being harvested from the old forests of Pennsylvania, and so became home to a score of enormously rich lumber barons, it is a town (well, a city, now) with many unusual resources.  Once the old growth was mostly gone, and sails were giving way to steam*, and oak paneling gave way to plasterboard, the town reinvented itself as the home to a small aircraft engine company (Avco-Lycoming), and then to smaller industries (including Pajamas, of course), forklifts, garage doors, and wet/dry vacuum cleaners, and, not least, a library supply company.

The population has always been small, but there is an excellent public library, James V. Brown Library.  When I first moved here, I used to borrow a boxed set of records called, if I remember right, ‘The Time / Life History of Western Music, from Plainchant to Stravinsky,’ or something like that.

I was already interested in music of all eras, but this collection introduced me to older music, such as that by Dowland, and Palestrina, and even older dances, such as those recorded by Michael Preatorius (yes, the fellow who is credited with the tune of The Noble Stem of Jesse was an amateur folk musicologist, long before the term had been invented).  But, with the inevitable march of progress, the library replaced its vinyl collection with CDs (and its VHS movies with DVDs, of course), and when I realized that my favorite compendium of ancient music was gone, it was too late to do anything about it.

In this Saturday’s edition of Archie’s Archives (the weekly radio broadcast that I present for the local community radio station, WXPI FM 88.5, with its radio tower in Jersey Shore, PA, broadcasting with an amazing power of 6 milliwatts, in case you didn’t know), I featured a tune by the real Von Trapp Family Singers, played on recorders.  It was one of those fabulous Renaissance tunes, or even from the Middle Ages, which I had first heard on an LP from the Brown Library.  (It’s more Beige, now.)  On that LP, it was performed on an authentic Renaissance instrument which sounded essentially like a kazoo, and I wanted my listeners to hear that version, rather than the buttoned-down recorders version of the Trapps.  But no; I don’t know where to look for it.

A theme for tomorrow’s show is contrasting versions of the same piece.  So, for instance, I have Pictures at an Exhibition in both the piano version, and the orchestrated version.  So, to contrast with the version by the Trapp Family, on recorders, I wanted to play that tune on the kazoo-like instrument, but I just don’t know where to look for it.

I went on Amazon, looking for titles such as ‘A History of Western Music,’ but there was nothing.  On Amazon UK, I found a very promising-looking CD collection, called ... wait, let me get the title right ... A History of Classical Music in 100 CDs.  But, as I should have expected, the performers are from the late 2oth Century, which means that it cannot be the same collection I was interested in, which dated from, I imagine, the 1960's and 1970's.  Obviously it was going to be expensive to get the item all the way from Britain, so I headed back to good old Amazon US, and looked for that item.

All I got was things like The 100 Most Relaxing Pieces of Classical Music, or Relax with Classical Music!  100 Minutes of Relaxing music from your Favorite Classics!  If I hear the word Relaxing one more time, or even read it, I take no responsibility for what will happen.

[More whining to follow.]

*So that white pine for the masts of ships was no longer in demand

What’s all this I hear, about “Written By Mrs Bach?”

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I feel like Mrs. Latella when I see references to the conjecture by one Mr. Martin Jarvis that some of J. S. Bach’s compositions were actually written by Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena [Wilcke] Bach.

Anna Magdalena is most certainly known to have been a close collaborator with Bach (let’s call him Sebastian Bach, just for today, as that was his name within his family, which had numerous other Johanns).  Though we know her best as his amanuensis and his most important copyist (as far as I know, anyway), Jarvis is now engaged in portraying her as a composer in her own right.  Not only a composer, but the actual composer of several important works thus far considered to have been by Sebastian Bach.

I do not have either the experience or the materials or the skills to have an independent opinion one way or another.  Most Bach lovers love Anna Magdalena for various reasons: she was the beloved companion of Sebastian Bach, considered to be a greater soulmate than the composer could have expected to have, at that time in history.  The marriage was evidently largely a happy one, for which fact posterity should be thankful, and Anna Magdalena’s excitement about all things musical was ostensibly the direct cause of the view that we in the 20th and 21st centuries have of the musical activities in the Bach home.  It is difficult to explain to those who are indifferent to Bach and his music how great a joy it is for the rest of us to know that this wonderful family lived and worked in 18th century Leipzig.  If Anna Magdalena were to be definitively ascertained to be the composer of some of the works currently ascribed to Sebastian Bach, no one would be more delighted than I, and I’m sure I would not be alone, despite the inconvenience it would cause to those who are interested in the artifacts of Bach and his bequest to the world from a financial point of view.

Confusing all of this is the fact that it is entirely possible that Anna Magdalena contributed significantly to the actual composition of quite a lot of Bach’s opus.  The paradigm of “one creation, one creator” is difficult to defend.  Sure; for various practical reasons, legal and commercial, it is good to identify a single creator for each work.  But anyone who has witnessed creativity in progress knows that it has collaborative elements that cannot be denied.
“That sounds terrible!”
“Why?”
“I don’t know ... too dominant-ey!”
“I want it that way!”
“No, it’s too much.  I think it could go ...<singing> or <more singing> ... you know?”  

Ruth Tatlow

Who’s to say that sort of thing didn’t happen in the Bach household?  I would say that it did, to the extent that Bach was patient with his family.  It cannot be denied that there might have been family input into many of his compositions.  The legalities of giving authorship to a work precludes the documentation of any sort of collaborative aspect to the creation of the work.  But Martin Jarvis’s claim is far more crude and simple: Anna Magdalena composed the Solo Cello Suites, and possibly many other works besides.  This link takes you to an article by Ruth Tatlow who puts forward a reasoned refutation of Jarvis’s claims.  Read, and draw your own conclusions.

Arch

Luther Standing Bear's Writings

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Luther Standing Bear

Someone recently posted to my  faceBook  wall an article about the writings of this Native American leader, which (if you don't mind a lot of Adobe Flash Video-based advertising) you can look up here: higherperspective.com/2015/01/standing-bear.html.  I was expecting the usual sound-bite-like fortune cookie sayings I had been conditioned to expect from Native American philosophers.  Instead, it was a nuanced, sophisticated description of the point of view of at least a large part of the Native American people.  Here is a large block of it:

• Praise, flattery, exaggerated manners and fine, high-sounding words were no part of Lakota politeness. Excessive manners were put down as insincere, and the constant talker was considered rude and thoughtless. Conversation was never begun at once, or in a hurried manner. Children were taught that true politeness was to be defined in actions rather than in words. They were never allowed to pass between the fire and the older person or a visitor, to speak while others were speaking, or to make fun of a crippled or disfigured person. If a child thoughtlessly tried to do so, a parent, in a quiet voice, immediately set him right.
• Silence was meaningful with [a] Lakota, and his granting a space of silence before talking was done in the practice of true politeness and regardful of the rule that ‘thought comes before speech.’…and in the midst of sorrow, sickness, death or misfortune of any kind, and in the presence of the notable and great, silence was the mark of respect… strict observance of this tenet of good behavior was the reason, no doubt, for his being given the false characterization by the white man of being a stoic. He has been judged to be dumb, stupid, indifferent, and unfeeling.
• We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild’. Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was it ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.
• Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them. And so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.
• This concept of life and its relations was humanizing and gave to the Lakota an abiding love. It filled his being with the joy and mystery of living; it gave him reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all.
• It was good for the skin to touch the earth, and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth… the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly. He can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him.
• Everything was possessed of personality, only differing from us in form. Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds and animals that shared, alike with us, the storms and blessings of earth. We learned to do what only the student of nature learns, and that was to feel beauty. We never railed at the storms, the furious winds, and the biting frosts and snows. To do so intensified human futility, so whatever came we adjusted ourselves, by more effort and energy if necessary, but without complaint.
•  …the old Lakota was wise. He knew that a man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So he kept his children close to nature’s softening influence.
• Civilization has been thrust upon me… and it has not added one whit to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity.

Can't quarrel with any of that.

Arch

A look ahead at the dismal political picture

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I must make clear that, despite the gloomy title of this post, it is imperative that everyone takes as positive a view of the future as possible, merely as a survival strategy.  If you don't want to do that, you may as well stop reading!

Understand the situation
I, together with a lot of other liberals, have been going on autopilot for a long time.  We often look at others and deplore how they use rules of thumb to make most of their decisions.  It's often harder to stop doing that when we're doing it.  The two-party system encourages this Us/Them view of the political landscape, but unfortunately, multi-party political dynamics are less stable, and creating coalitions of several small parties, and holding the unwieldy coalition together is an art that takes a long time to learn, and seems to give very little return for the effort.

The present-day Republican and Democrat parties are also unhappy coalitions that are battling decades-long prejudices and misperceptions in order to hold together.  Just imagine these problem being aggravated by the coalitions reconfiguring themselves every new election!

Let's look at the Republicans.  It is the home to a large number of groups:
Fiscal Conservatives: these are opposed to big government spending, and high taxes.  Conceivably there are those who are only opposed to high taxes, and others who are only opposed to big government, but let's not worry about them.
Christian Fundamentalists: these are very confused people, on the whole, but there are some who are quite moderate and balanced in their outlook except that they insist on Biblical principles, protecting the Holy Land from infidels, they're against using artificial contraception (some of them), opposed to government sponsoring of abortions (some of them), opposed to teaching Evolution in science classes (a few of them), and opposed to the strict separation of Church and State (most of them).  So this is not a unified category of people, but they support each other and make common cause.
Hawks: these are the ones who want a very aggressive foreign policy.  Some of them are willing to pursue diplomacy a little further than others, but they take the fundamental position that the rights of Americans trumps the rights of all other groups.  They may not realize that this is what their various principles amounts to, but logically that is where it all flows from.  Some of these are driven by Business interests: we must back our economic interests with military might whenever necessary (or convenient).  Some of these are simply convinced that American supremacy is good for the whole planet, because we're the sanest, most enlightened nation on Earth, and everybody knows that.  We give women the most rights of any nation, etc, etc.
Libertarians: I'm lumping the Gun Enthusiasts, the Legalize Marijuana lobby, the Business First folks, and the Anti-Health-Care-Reform people into this group.  They not only want little or no government control over anything, but they don't want to pay any taxes either.  They are openly hostile to the Republicans, but they vote with them, because they view Democrats as generally favoring more government than the GOP.

Now let's look at the Democrats.  We don't often do this, but the time has come.
Pacifists: These are those of us who want to avoid military action at all costs.  The Democrats have often started wars; in fact, they have arguably got the US into more wars than the GOP.  But generally the Democrats have been viewed as more friendly towards pacifists.
Pro Choice Lobby:  Since the Christian Fundamentalists and the so-called Pro Lifers are in the opposite camp, the Pro Choicists have sought a home with the Dems.  This makes sense because the Democrats have generally stood for
Gender Equality: The GOP has traditionally opposed the progress of equal rights legislation (and they're opposing it now).  Gender equality should not be an issue in this day and age, but tragically, it is.
The Social Safety Net lobby:  Of all the principles of the Democrats that I support, this one is chief.  The basic requirements for life must be provided to everyone, regardless of how productive they are.  I will be satisfied with lower levels of support than most others, in terms of financial welfare payments.  But I support higher levels of free housing, education, food subsidy, healthcare, etc.
The Environmentalists and the Conservationists.  This group, too, should not have to exist today, but the Business First group keeps wanting to exploit energy resources at the cost of air and water quality, and the pro-environmentalists have nowhere to go but the Democrat Party.
Pro Gun-Control lobby.  The NRA has traditionally supported the GOP.
Rationalists.  These are the people who strongly favor separation of Church and State, teaching Evolution in school, supporting Historians in their attempts to revise traditional biases in US education, even at the price of embarrassing the White Majority.

In addition to the groups whom we can expect to vote with the two major parties fairly consistently, there are other groups who are less predictable.

Apoliticals. Many young friends have told me that they do not vote because they are confused about the options, or disgusted with the parties, or with particular personalities who dominate the political landscape at the local level.

Anti-intellectuals.  There has always been a stubborn group of people who are suspicious of anyone whom they regard as highly-educated.  They get confused by big words, and by political sophistry, and are suspicious of their local religious leaders, so they stay aloof from politics, unless they can be persuaded at the last minute.  Leaders from the two parties often make a deliberate play for these folks by using down-home language and ideas, though of course our political leaders are usually moderately well-educated, except in obvious cases like George W. Bush.

Be aware of the changes in the political process
One of the hugest changes we observe is the rise of apolitical political professionals.  They are found in the rank of pollsters, campaign managers, spin doctors and media specialists, lobbyists, and independent think-tanks.  It is not rare to find a campaign manager in one party leave it to join the campaign of another party.  I particularly detest the professionalization of politics, the increase in the size of Political Science departments in colleges and universities.  Students are increasingly viewing political science as a discipline which could lead to quick money right out of college, and possibly a lobbying job after that, and then an early retirement.  A significant majority of these are not particularly interested in the public welfare, as a political leader should be, in my mind.

The upshot of all this is that the political process has become objectivized and cynical.  We accused cynical politicians as adopting an attitude of The Ends Justify The Means.  But now it seems almost a universal attitude.  Let's face it: professional politicians are being viewed more unfavorably than at any time in history.  Decent politicians are getting out of politics, and rascals with get-rich-quick ideas and Fool-all-the-people-all-the-time ideas are getting in.  The kids who come forward in college as student leaders are tending toward slimeballicity.  Used car dealers are looking good, compared with politicians at any level.

Voting is just one major responsibility.  There are others
It is no less important today to vote than it was in the past.  But, since trustworthy candidates are so hard to find, and since media consultants are so effective at besmirching the name of anyone who they oppose, few people are willing to run for office.  We must come up with a plan to combat this; the simplest plan is to get better at training young people at candidacy, and at resisting the efforts of hostile media attacks.

This post is at least in part inspired by a recent video clip by Jon Stewart.  He was responding to an attack by Fox News that he distorted the facts and lied so often that he was beginning to make inroads on their viewer base.

In contrast, Jon Stewart is one of the most reliable news sources, and one who is most astute at discerning the implications of a particular event or action.  Unlike Fox News, I do not regard the political implications of events and actions as being in the eye of the beholder.  Some statements and actions are self-serving, and Jon Stewart has been effective at pointing these out.  He is consistent.  He is accurate.  He is generally moderate in his denouncements.  Compared to the excesses of the Fox News crew and Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, Chris Christie and other Republican jokers, Jon Stewart is as decent and straight arrow as they come.  But Fox News accuses him of lying.

Other spin doctors are more subtle.  But one can easily see that the relentless onslaught of Fox News can succeed in intimidating any liberal from running for office.  So all altruistic young potential political leaders are running from office.

Money In Politics
The more money is allowed to pervade the political process, the more unscrupulous spin doctors can distort the facts, and distract the public away from issues, towards personalities.  The (GOP-voting) public has notoriously been forgetful of GOP gaffes, and gone on to worship their questionable candidates.  Mit Romney appears to be offering to run again, despite the statements he made that were video-recorded at a fundraiser, which one would have assumed would knock him out of politics for good.  But the sheer money brought to bear on the media distorts the facts; it becomes all about how skillfully the message is put together, not the core factual contents of the message, which might be vacuous.  The Supreme Court, to its everlasting shame, approved unlimited funds to be spent on Campaign Finances, which is a ruling that must be repealed.

[To be continued, if I have the energy, which I probably won't.]

A mathematical look at interpersonal interaction

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This article: <http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/18/hannah-fry-the-mathematics-of-love/> is an interesting, and very plausible, attempt to model the sequence of interactions between two parties.

It is conceived of in terms of a pair of linked responses.  Let's look at it from the point of view of an interacting couple, H for husband, and W for wife, though no stereotypes have been applied, so the analysis is absolutely gender-neutral.  (In fact, they claim that the analysis applies even to the relationship between two nations.)

Suppose the husband has just said something, H(t) at time t, to which the wife replied with W(t).  Here H(t) and W(t) are not actually what they said, but the degree of positivity of the remark.

The husband next responds with H(t+1), to which the wife responds with W(t+1), and so on.  These sorts of things are well studied in mathematics, and the author quotes a pair of theoretical equations that define H(t+1) and W(t+1) in terms of the earlier H(t) and W(t).  The interesting question is what makes the sequence of remarks ---the conversation--- head upwards in tone, versus what makes it head downwards, into a spiral of negativity?

There is another interesting observation that I don't quite understand (because I did not read it carefully enough): that if you're looking for an assistant, for instance, and you're considering 100 applicants, the recipe is
(1) Reject the first 37 applicants.
(2) Accept the next applicant who is better than any of the ones you have seen.

If you only plan to consider 10, you would reject the first 3.7 applicants, and so on.

Happy reading!!!