Elections are coming, the Geese are . . . well, no.

All my friends, and many of my acquaintances are contemplating the forthcoming elections with distaste and bafflement.  Except for a few, everyone wants major changes, but they're not clear about what those changes should be, exactly.

In the past, there have always been pundits who suggested what each sort of person should do, but in the past three years we have learned one thing for sure: the pundits are going to get it wrong; they have thoroughly discredited themselves.  I too got it wrong, and I ... well, let's forget about that.

I want to remind my readers of things they might forget, and things they should consider carefully, but I have no prescriptions, except for the obvious ones.

Many astute observers, including the conservative commentator David Brooks, says that he sees polarization dominating the psychology of the voting population on both sides.  In other words, it appears that people are voting against whom they hate, rather than for whom they want elected.  In yet other words, people are getting emotional (and facebook and twitter are amplifying these feelings, and maybe Putin is not entirely to blame; we're sitting ducks when it comes to mob psychology), which is not good.

Why?  Because the issues are even more complicated this time, and nobody does well with complicated matters when they're mad.

I know for a fact that many conservatives---regardless of whether they voted with the GOP or whether they were Libertarians---are not going to vote Democrat, simply because the Democrats, mostly young Democrats, are so furious that they have been manufacturing memes blaming the entire spectrum of conservatives for the spectacular missteps of the president.  So these frustrated conservatives may well stay home, or vote for, say, Green Party candidates, or what have you.

Of course, that's their right.  But it is quite possible that they may add their vote to those moderate Democrats who are coming forward to run for office, if they did not feel so shunned by the sharp-mouthed liberals, and my readers probably know a few of those.

There are young liberals pouring out ridicule and humiliation on conservatives, blaming everyone for electing Trump, when the fault lies in the readiness with which Democrats were incited to believe the negative stories about Hilary Clinton.  Sure, there was a lot of help from Russian propagandists, but we liberals swallowed the propaganda wholesale.  There is a point where we can't point the finger anywhere except at ourselves.

Wage propaganda war, if you think that's going to help.  But we're never going to win any votes except the few that the more energetic among us will bestir ourselves to cast, if we make any potential crossovers feel stupid.

I say: make nice for the next few weeks, and if crossover conservatives help us remove the Trump fans in Congress and the Senate, we will have to graciously grant that conservatives helped to ease Trump out of the White House, and point him towards the Big House, because things are looking very, very bad.  (Not good, to be perfectly clear.)  Trump has no clue about what the consequences of his actions are.  He pretends not to care, but in fact he is simply surprised at the fallout of everything he does and tweets.  We have been taught to be gentle with mentally deficient people, but let's make an exception in this one case.

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Out of the Mouths of Professors / A Freshman Seminar

Some years ago (don't ask how many), colleges across the country were finally driven to do something about the perceived gap between what the faculty was ready to teach incoming freshmen, and what these freshmen were equipped to, well, absorb.  Freshmen seminars were created, to help faculty and freshmen make the transition to the patterns of college instruction and thinking.  This blogpost is not about freshman seminars, but it was sparked by an event at one.

In the institution to which I was indentured, there was, one year, a newly-designed Freshman Seminar, and one of the components of this week-long program was a Forum; a panel discussion in an auditorium, with some of the most celebrated faculty of our school seated on stage, each of whom had a few minutes to give their best advice to the freshmen.  The rest of us faculty sat in the audience, prepared to be disgruntled (after all, the thing we professors hate most is to be deprived of an audience).

I am surprised that now, a couple of decades later, I still remember at least two of the professors, and their advice.  I won't keep you waiting.

1.  One of our most illustrious faculty members was a professor of religion.  He was a respected author in his area of expertise, which was basically comparative religion.

He said that the basis of Judaism was hospitality to the stranger.

The professor went on to say that, despite a multitude of details that confuse the issue, the bases of Christianity and Islam too, were exactly the same.

I hardly need to say that this floored many in the audience, some of whom must have never even thought about any sort of basis for their belief (except perhaps John 3:16, and I invite all those who subscribe to this belief to hurry on to the next part of our post; remember Jesus himself offered a summary of "All the laws and the prophets," and this verse was not it).

I certainly have thoughts about how the rules of conduct of Judaism evolved into the moral system of the early church, but more on that later.  One thing is clear, though.  If one has read anything at all about Islam, through the pens of European commentators of around the 1700's and earlier, one sees a confirmation of the opinion that hospitality forms a central core of the Islamic moral code.

That alone would have given anyone much to think about.  But the suggestion given by the next speaker was just as interesting (but of course, not being related to religion, did not have the sheer shock value of the previous one).

2.  One of the panelists was a celebrated political scientist, who had also earned much respect as an author.  His advice was a lot more personal, as befitted an occasion in which he had been invited to participate not as a specialist in his area, but as a member of the faculty at large, and a successful scholar.

I always, he said, keep a notepad by my bedside, to record those crazy ideas that come to me in the middle of the night.  (The wordly-wise freshmen must have thought this plan eminently worth ignoring.)  Often, he said, he would read what he had jotted down while half asleep, and laugh.

However, he said, some of his best ideas had been among those he had written down while half asleep.  In other words, those were the ideas that had not been filtered out by pragmatic considerations, or the cynicism of his waking moments.

Something to think about.

I believe that we have been a little too strongly influenced by the pragmatism of Business.  It is rarely that a successful businessman gets a wonderful idea in the middle of the night, which survives the censorship of his business sense.  I see this insight—recognition of the value of ideas that bubble up through our subconscious minds—as part of the college experience, and as part of the very sort of thinking that ignorant citizens (who want to squelch any ideas that do not profit business) find so repugnant in colleges.  We are sadly headed towards a sort of idea-free system of education, which would seem ideal to those who think of college as merely a place in which to efficiently manufacture docile middle-management.  (Upper management, of course, requires no education.)

Those DNA ancestry tests you get in the Mail . . .

It isn't surprising that millions of people are interested in learning about their ancestry.  I certainly am, so I assume most people are. For those who are new to this idea: numerous companies now offer (online, mostly, or sometimes in junk mail) to give you an analysis of your ethnicity; that is, where your ancestors probably came from, based on the genes in your DNA.

DNA is a protein-like molecule that lives in the nucleus of every cell in your body.  All the DNA molecules in any one person are identical, and essentially unique to that person, unless he or she has an identical twin, or something like that.  (Triplets, Quadruplets, and so on.  If you're one of Octuplets . . . just kidding.) 

It is a long strand, organized into 23 chromosomes, which we can think of as a list of 23 smaller lists.  As far as I know--I'm not an expert--these lists, which are lists of genes, actually, together define how your body is built, and how it functions.  For instance, in some one of these 23 chromosomes, in some specific place in its list (remember, each chromosome is itself a list!) there is a gene that specifies what shape your right ear is, for instance.  Unless I'm mistaken, that gene, in that position, in anybody's DNA, specifies the shape of their right ear.  Another gene specifies sensitivity to the sun, let's say.

Many genes have functions (they specify things) that are not known.  Many characteristics (such as ear shape) might be specified by several genes.  But the essential fact is that if two people have a segment of their DNA string identical, they will share some characteristic, or several characteristics, but of course, they might be very minor characteristics.

Now this whole string comparison thing falls plumb spang in the middle of the discipline of Mathematics, specifically in the area of analytical topology, so naturally I was curious about how they went about doing this ancestry business.  And, to make it more interesting, they were reporting to their clients the places from where their ancestors probably came!  How did they do that?

I went on the Internet, and without trying very hard, found this web page entitled Pulling back the Curtain on DNA Ancestry Tests.  Exactly what I wanted!  Of course, I was not so naive as to expect a detailed description of the process, but it turned out to be a lot more useful than I had expected.

First, a warning.  The article states that these companies get far more money by selling their information to commercial companies that can use the information (e.g. medical research outfits, or perhaps even companies that have less worthy objectives) than they get from you.  So the $100 or so that you pay for the service hardly compares with the money they get in other ways, and they might as well give you the service for free, for supplying them with a data point.  Also, the privacy agreement they make with you will not be valid if, for instance, they sell the company, or it is acquired by another company somehow.  So you have to be prepared for your genetic information to be compromised almost certainly.  For instance, if your DNA string information falls into the hands of a company that is investigating a certain variant of a gene to see whether it is a useful indicator of some horrible medical condition, and if they discover that you have it, well, they're sort of morally obliged to let you know that you're at risk for this condition, and depending on the laws of your state or the country, disclosing this information to, say, a medical insurance company, which is obliged to raise your insurance rates!  None of this might happen, but then, it might, especially in the very business-friendly political climate in which we try to live.  (And think: the company that buys the DNA information might be a subsidiary of an insurance company in the first place, which could have reciprocal agreements with who knows how many other insurance companies?  But most people will have nothing to hide, and I do not want to chill your possible interest in discovering the various skeletons in your ancestral ethnicity closet.)

From what I understand, these companies mostly check genes, in the sample you provide, for genes that are common in certain regions, and which are uncommon in other places.  It all depends on how they decide that this gene (gene variation, actually; everyone has to have all the same genes, or they would not be human.  Everyone has to have a WX67 gene of some kind, but that gene could come in different varieties.  I just made up the name of that gene, but you get the idea.  Some people will have WX67, variant 1, and others will have WX67, variant 2, and so on, all the way to variant 4796.  Yes, there are thousands of variants, called mutations.  Viruses, it seems, have the most types of mutations).  For example, a company will get hold of a number of samples of DNA from native Americans from some tribe, and study the sample for genes that are common to all the samples, and particularly uncommon in almost any other DNA.  (This is a big undertaking, and if the company takes this job seriously, they have to be given credit.  Still, the idea is simple.)  Now, if you send in a sample of your DNA (basically a little saliva), and that gene is present in your DNA, they would conclude that you have some ancestry within that tribe of native Americans.

If they have identified, say, 100 different gene variants in that tribe of native Americans, and you have every single one of those, then the probability that you have that type of native American ancestry is very high indeed.  Honestly, it won't be necessary for you to have all 100 gene variants for them to declare with 100 certainty that you have that ancestry.

In addition to telling their clients that they have some ancestry: say, Middle Eastern ancestry, these companies tell their clients what percentage of their ancestry comes from that region.  Again, we can only guess how they arrive at those numbers.  They look at large numbers of genes (remember there are a vast number of genes, so they're still looking at less than x% of your genes to make these conclusions.  But that alone is no reason to doubt the validity of the conclusions; the tests used could be very subtle and delicate indeed; we just don't know how hard they have worked on these tests, and we have to trust them.  So, we have to take the results of these tests with a dash of ketchup.  Furthermore, there is the possibility for checking sets of genes, which will provide a more subtle analysis, a finer sieve of results.  (Maybe that last observation was redundant; we were talking about the possibility of 100 different genes in a given tribe, after all.)

By this time, you have to have concluded that I'm trying to explain something that I'm not entirely qualified to explain, and you would be right.  But you would certainly have some information on which to hang your reasoning now, and against which to assess the documentation they provide, if you choose to go through with the test.  Remember, there are several companies you can get the service from.

No matter what you do, you should think clearly about your potential heredity.  If you're black, you could still have Viking ancestry, because at least a few of the plantation owners could have been from the Scandinavian countries, and they were known to make free with the female slaves they owned.  (However, it is also well known that not all plantation owners were cruel to their slaves, though the ones who were humane were probably largely in the minority.)  You could watch YouTube videos of those who got the service, and see their reactions.  The responses are initially surprise, but in hindsight, every instance that I saw was absolutely plausible.

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The Beatles

One of the most important parts of my identity as a teenager was that I was a Beatles fan, but oddly enough, I never got around to writing about them, now that I have a platform: this blog.  (Actually, I might have done a post on the Beatles, but it ended up being a sort of survey of lots of groups and musicians that I like.)

I all along liked both classical music, and pop music, even if I might not have recognized some of the music I liked as belonging to the pop category.  But by some accident, I was taken out to see the movie A hard day's night, and I heard the music of the Beatles for the first time, and I was immediately a fan.  I realized that other songs I was hearing on the radio were earlier Beatles recordings, e.g. "She loves you," "Love me do," and "P. S. I love you," and so on.

It's tough to recall my thinking as a teenager, but it might be interesting.  I felt that classical music was more sophisticated harmonically, (and contrapuntally, though that came later), while pop music was more vigorous rhythmically.  (Again, it was a year or two before I realized that classical music could be pretty interesting rhythmically, too.)  And when I heard the songs in AHDN (A hard day's night, if you couldn't guess,) I realized that they were playing pop music with far less noise than I was used to hearing in pop records.  Ironically, their live concerts were almost pure noise, and at certain times, the four of them did not really like the racket, though it was a symbol of their popularity.  Furthermore, they were trying interesting harmonies, that flowed from classical music.  Pop music had many sub-genres, and certainly jazz, and big band music, and easy listening tunes used almost every sort of harmony there was, but in the rhythm 'n' blues tradition, you never heard chromatic harmonies, such as the Beatles (well, okay, Paul and John) squeezed into If I fell, for instance.  Of course, there were still the hard-driving songs like Can't buy me love, which was firmly in the mid-stream of RnB, and took me a long time to appreciate, but they kept sneaking in songs slow enough to support interesting harmonies.

Even after they had stopped touring, they never slowed down in looking for new harmonies, or rather, using old classical harmonies, but new to pop.  (They did overwork certain sequences, such as the sequence in While my guitar gently weeps, which was a distant cousin of a couple of songs in Sgt. Pepper, but McCartney can be forgiven much, because firstly, he was producing such lovely songs, and secondly, in some ways they were--unconsciously--educating their audience, and education always requires repetition.

I was watching a video (actually, a sequence of about five videos) in which famous musicians talk about the Beatles.  Most of these people were excellent musicians, and what they say is useful to us.  A word they use repeatedly is permission.  They declare that the Beatles would try things that were unthinkable to do, which gave other youngsters who aspired to be musicians, permission to do the same things: use the studio creatively, or even present themselves in creative ways.  (I'm not really interested in how the Beatles presented themselves, today, though at the time, I was all about growing my hair, and wearing bell-bottoms, and so on!  I'll post a photo when I find one.)  But some musicians stumble against the problem of viewing these interviews, and the questions to which they're responding, as questions about them, rather than about the Beatles.  Honestly, if I were to have met the Beatles, or even one of them, it would have been such a huge moment, that it would have been a defining moment in my life, and so it clearly was with many of these people.  But those who admired the Beatles, or any of them in particular, did so for good reasons.  They mention many of the points I bring up above, as well as that (1) they suited each other almost perfectly; they weren't really outstanding instrumentalists, but George, for instance, was just exactly the lead guitar that John and Paul needed.  (On the other hand, perhaps John and Paul needed George precisely because he was available; it's hard to say.)  (2) They feel that the Beatles came along just at the time that they were needed.  Pop music was ripe for being raised up a notch in sophistication, and the Beatles provided just the sophistication that was sufficient, and necessary.

All this can be summed up by saying that the phenomenon of The Beatles was of historical significance.  They were helped immensely by coming around at that time in history, to energize the concept of the minimal four-member band, initially, to be which any four moderately talented kids could aspire, and then to show how the studio could be used creatively.  (And other record producers could see, looking at George Martin's contribution, how much a creative producer could help make an album memorable.)

In the video, I don't remember in what context, Steve Wonder made the point that black music grew from the soil that was Gospel Music, while white music, of which the Beatles' music was squarely in the center, grew from 'White' church music.  (They were Catholics, except for Ringo, but their musical tradition could certainly trace its roots to protestant hymnody.  Also, many tunes by soul musicians were adopted by the Beatles, e.g. Long Tall Sally, and Mr. Postman, to name just two songs.  Still, it was unmistakably white music.)

Paul McCartney is highly regarded as a superior bass player, and a wonderful tunesmith, and John Lennon has been recognized as a talented poet.  John's writing was fantastic at the time when he was younger, and was dealing with marital problems, aggravated by the strain of the group needing to spend so much time with each other, to the detriment of John's nuclear family life.  There was an edge to his poetry, which reached its zenith when his mother died, and he wrote some amazing songs, including Mother, and A working class hero.

But, as I said, there is a sort of consensus that they were not amazing instrumentalists, compared with some of the amazing talents that were being discovered at the time.  But their musicality was incredible.  It is a mistake to try and rank musicality in different people, and in groups.  All you can say is that a lot of what I admire in the Beatles comes firstly from their group musicality, and secondly from the historical factor, that they came at that particular time.  And I should probably add: from the genius of George Martin, who contributed significantly to many of their songs, though I doubt whether he could have come up with an album such as Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, though there is absolutely no doubt that the Beatles could never have pulled it off so well without George Martin.

The group and George Martin must share the blame for some of the biggest weaknesses in the recordings, as well.  One of these is the stereo sound.

Stereo had been invented a decade or so earlier, and the idea is that if you record an instrument, say a piano, with two well-placed microphones, and then play back the two-channel recording through two sets of speakers spaced an appropriate distance apart, you can almost reproduced the feeling of having been there.  Now, you can say, if you use a really good single microphone, listening to the recording, it does feel like you were there.  Well, it is a matter of degree.  You can only be convinced of the phenomenon by a side-by-side comparison with excellent equipment, and even then, some people would be perfectly satisfied with the single-mike technique (mono).

When the Beatles went into the studio, and they began to record, each of them had his own mike, and then each instrument had its own mike, and John and Paul thought it was just a matter of putting some of the tracks on the Left channel, and the rest on the Right channel, and you were done.

What audiophiles today would prefer would be to record each track with two microphones (Paul gets four mikes: two for the voice, and two for the guitar, John gets four, and so on), so that any one of these stereo tracks makes you feel you were in the room with that performer, or that instrument!  Of course, that would take double the number of tracks, and back then, it would have taken more tape than their budget allowed.  So the boys thought the true stereo idea did not deliver the bang for the buck, because they were already layering tracks, to enable, say, the first verse from one take, to be layered with the chorus from another take, and so on.  Today, with digital recording, there isn't any tape at all, it's just gigabytes on some enormous hard drive in the basement somewhere.

Anyway, if they had recorded every track (or layer) in stereo, stacking them together would give the impression of having the group right in front of us.  Instead, what we have is the fake stereo of (for instance) all the voices on the left channel, and all the instruments on the right channel.  You can hear this clearly in Nowhere man, one of my favorite Beatle songs.

In future posts, I will give you my favorite Beatle songs, and the reasons why I like them, if any.

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Does Business Experience Make one Suitable for Public Office?

Frequently, people who feel that money in government is being mismanaged set up a clamor to elect a public official with extensive business experience.  Someone with business experience, they claim--and probably sincerely believe--would not mishandle public money as has happened in some recent instance.  Well, we have to think about this issue, certainly.  But there seems to be overwhelming evidence, after watching a couple of presidents who had business experience in action, that business experience alone is certainly no guarantee that money will be handled competently, or properly.

There are certainly those who would point out that neither of George W. Bush, nor Donald J. Trump was a competent businessman.  In order to be fair, when analyzing the relative merits of businessmen versus candidates with other sorts of experience, we should compare a competent businessman, judged by some objective measure of competence.

What does a competent businessman (who wants to run for office) bring to the table?  Let's see:

• knowing how to oversee expenditure,
• keeping an eye out for fiscal problems,
• an interest in greater efficiency, and elimination of unnecessary red tape,
• being able to manage the interacting finances of numerous sub-systems,
• experience in hiring employees, keeping a firm hold on salaries,
• knowing how legislation affects the business,
• knowing how to use advertising to the benefit of the organization,
• knowing how to develop your product to maximize profitability,

and possibly other expertise of a minor nature.

Already, you will begin to see the roots of failure in the training and the conceptual framework of the businessman.  Unlike an autonomous business, a government department is a unit in a larger structure, and the income and the expenses, though they certainly have to be managed, cannot be tinkered with with the same latitude as in a business.  You can't cheat the customer.  I suppose you can, but the customer can vote you out, whereas in business, your custom base can't vote you out of business; you can always wriggle out of trouble, or at the worst, declare bankruptcy.

Part of the problem is that businessmen are trained to view the world and their circumstances in terms of profit and loss, an antagonistic relationship.  It's customers versus the business, the business versus competing businesses, the business against the tax man.  This world-view makes the delivering of services very difficult, because there is no one who can play the role of the antagonist.  But the mindset needs an antagonist, and we see today the administration needlessly antagonizing parties that ought to be allies.

It may make sense to look at those who have headed non-profits as being particularly qualified for public office.  A non-profit or charity is faced with the task of delivering as much as possible, using whatever resources are available in a given period of time, and one expects that this is, most of the time, what the government has to do.  Then, of course, there is the delicate negotiation with the taxpayer, balancing what services are possible, versus what tax burden is reasonable.  A conservative administration would--normally--seek to reduce services, while trying to reduce taxes.  A left-leaning administration would--normally--seek to increase services, while urging increased taxes.

Businesses, usually, try to do several things.  They try to sell their product or their service for the highest price they can get, without charging a price so high that they lose their customer base.  This is accomplished by spreading information about the desirability of their product or service, and attempting to persuade the largest number of people that they need this product!  This only makes sense because each sale gives the businessman a little money (because, of course, the product costs a little less to create than the price it is sold for).  In a government department, it is often the case that the 'products' actually cost more to create than the public can be charged for, so that the fewer the numbers of members of the public avail themselves of the service or product, the less expense the department has to absorb.  A businessman would look at that situation with horror, and insist that the public should be charged enough to break even, or possibly to make a profit.  Businessmen urge this sort of behavior frequently, eagerly suggesting that the profit be used to subsidize some other product or service (since obviously, the department cannot keep raking in a profit without causing alarm).

A businessman--whose world, I believe, is really small--can quickly become bewildered when transplanted into government, where the pressures are numerous and complex, and not necessarily adversarial.  Because the dynamics of adversarial behavior are thought to be well understood, government has been set up with adversarial relationships, to encourage moderation.  A person arriving in the world of government fresh from the battlefields of business is likely to feel comfortable when he or she identifies one of these adversarial relationships.  This is not always good; ultimately these relationships which, though adversarial on the surface, are ultimately collegial, and both parties ultimately have to cooperate for the good of the people.  In the business world, of course, often this sort of cooperation is forbidden, because it discourages competition, and is recognized as frequently driving up prices.

Most of all, businessmen are eager to have one of their own running for office, because in their simple worlds of cutthroat competition, life is simple, and they hate the more complex world of public service, because it is so alien.  They would much rather deal with the known competitor than the unknown bureaucrat.  They want someone who speaks their language.  They like having someone in office with whom they can deal.

[Added later:] Finally, some businessmen achieve a certain degree of success by ruthless practices.  This is especially true of landlords and landowners, and owners of commercial real estate.  Ruthlessness in a businessman perhaps endears him to other wealthy businessmen, and those who view impoverished citizens as mere nuisances.  But it does not endear businessmen to everyone; not every businessman needs or wants ruthlessness in those who seek elected office; people need a certain degree of compassion in government workers, who, after all, must take over the administration of the social safety-net, and not all Conservatives want the safety-net destroyed, or made ineffective.
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What the GOP does Better than the Democrats

Frankly, nothing; the Democrats run the government better than the GOP in every way.

Most of the time, the Democrats provide services better than the GOP.

Most of the time, the Democrats run fairer elections than the GOP.

Most of the time, the Democrats run a more humane Prison system than the GOP.

Most of the time, the Democrats are fairer to women than the GOP.

Most of the time, the Democrats understand science better than the GOP, and science education.

Most of the time, the Democrats are less hostile to foreign countries than the GOP, which they don't understand.

Most of the time, the Democrats understand workers' issues better than the GOP.

Most of the time, the Democrats are more protective of the environment than the GOP, though sometimes they go overboard.  Clean energy, Global Warming, all come under this heading.

The Democrats try harder to balance the budget than the GOP.

The Democrats are more reluctant to initiate wars abroad than the GOP.

Why then even bother about the GOP?  Because Big Business is running the country, and the GOP is more friendly to Big Business.  Hillary Clinton, though, is friendly towards Big Banks, and this is a problem.

In a not entirely unrelated piece of news, one of our local Little League teams from a rural county quite unexpectedly won their first game in the US Little League playoffs.  Then they won their second game.  Then they won the third.  Then they lost a game, which meant that they had to keep winning all their games from then on.  They won one, and then they lost an innings in their most recent game.  Lost another innings.  Lost another.

Little Leaguers, being teenage kids, once they begin losing, get so demoralized that they continue losing.  Adults coaching them also get demoralized, because they just know the kids are demoralized, and so it seems a waste of time to keep pumping them up to keep going.

Are the Democrats emulating Little League behavior?

Generally, the Democrats of the past that are beloved of their constituents have not been the bullies in the Democrat party.  There are some bullies who have pushed their way into high offices in the party through ruthless power politics and dirty pool.  But these are despised within the Democrat party (though the GOP probably regards them with awe and admiration ).  But all around us, in this season so ripe for a change, among the earnest, altruistic new candidates are a few vicious pit bulls.  We are in a quandary; should we support the Democrat Doves or the Democrat Hawks?

Winning this next election is important, but Trump has left us huge debt, and what are the Democrats going to do once they win?  Raise taxes, and lose the next election?  It isn't a foregone conclusion that raising taxes will make them unpopular, but honestly, it will be raising taxes in order to afford the big handouts Trump gave his friends.  Unless the taxes target specifically those who got enormous tax breaks in 2017-2018, the money will flow, ironically, from the Middle Class to the Super Rich.  Trump effectively borrowed the money for his tax breaks from the future Democrat government.

We should pass legislation that allows anyone with a personal worth of more than a billion a one-time opportunity to emigrate to wherever they please: Jamaica, or Grenada, or Mexico, or wherever.  It is better to get rid of them, despite losing the trillions of dollars they take with them, than to let them stay here, spreading their poison, and continually looking for hucksters to run for president for the GOP.  And they can take their guns with them; hopefully they won't hurt anyone but themselves.

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Nuanced Positions on Issues

I, for one, certainly choose how seriously to take an article on the Web based on the opinions of an author on various issues.  Possibly some of us perform a similar test based on the opinion of an author on a single issue.  Fine.  But let's talk about this.  Many of my own attitudes are conditional.

Abortion.   I'm putting this one first, despite the risk of losing most of my readers right here.
I really don't like abortion at all.  I think it is an expensive and inefficient and accident-prone method of contraception.  But I support Planned Parenthood simply because of all the other services they provide.  Not being a woman, the men having been largely marginalized within the Abortion, For or Against Forum, I'm going to leave this right here, and I know all supporters of a woman's Right To Choose do not all feel the same way on this issue, even if they agree on almost every other political issue.
Electricity Producing Plants.  Recently, a post on Fb by the ever popular George Takei contained a meme, and a video that purported to set us straight about various attitudes that are common with tree-huggers.  One is that electric vehicles are cleaner than gas-fueled vehicles.  No, said the video; where does the electricity come from?  Polluting coal-fired plants.  Well, if there is to be a future for us at all, I can't see where our power would come from, except from central power stations, and we hope that someday, they will all come from renewable and non-polluting sources, e.g. wind turbines, and even nuclear plants, for the lack of other alternatives.  Does it make sense to disparage electric vehicles at this point?  I don't think so.  High-efficiency hybrid vehicles are an excellent temporary solution (which we could have implemented in the 90's, except for the hostility from the gas companies and the auto industry).
Gerrymandering.  The record seems to show that this practice was supported by the Democrats in the early 20th century, so that the scattered North Carolina black community could have at least one black representative (either in the State House, or in Congress, I don't remember which).  From where we sit, in 2018, it seems pathetic that only a black could be trusted to represent black minority interests, but back then, it was probably the only way, judging from the political history of the Carolinas even today.  So if I was asked back then whether Gerrymandering was a good thing, I would probably have thoughtlessly said yes.  Well, this is a lesson to everyone.  Things that seem wonderful at one time are sometimes proved to be terrible in hindsight.  Today, I would support a destricting method (redistricting sounds too complicated) based on population distribution, local governments, and mathematics, and possibly geography.
Biodiversity.  Some progressives regard biodiversity as necessary to guard axiomatically.  From the point of view that the ecological contribution of many species is poorly understood (yes; scientists don't know absolutely everything, which is why it is so frustrating when science haters reject all science categorically, even on well-understood issues), species extinction is bad.  But I do not think that we need to become paranoid about extinction.  I agree we do not have a basis for distinguishing between major species and minor species based on the influence on the ecology, but we cannot put every species on life-support; we must make choices.  People judge the importance of particularly threatened species based on their estimated environmental impact, but good judgment has to be used.
Socialism.  Socialism and Freedom / Liberty are sort of dog-whistle terms today, used in sort of "weaponized" ways, than as a description of the politics of an issue.  Many of us have no idea of what others are thinking; if everyone thought clearly, we would really need them to carefully state whether or not they like socialistic principles, or whether they're opposed to them.  The problem is that many who say that they hate socialism will be horrified if all socialistic programs were to be dropped; and many who support socialism would be aghast at some suggestions that a socialist might put forward.  There is a spectrum of positions on how government should be structured, and how communal services should be organized.  Many services are categorized as private, and others as public.  Public transport is clearly public, and personal transport is clearly private.  People expect that taxes would pay for public transport, but the very rich dislike the idea of sharing public transport with ordinary people, and the idea of bankrolling it.  On the other hand, until they get the idea of putting helipads in their homes, they're going to need to use the same roads as the rest of us, so sure, let's fund the roads--just the roads I use, one of them would say.  If you went around your local community, you would see that certain roads are maintained beautifully, but others are not.  If all the roads are maintained, you have socialism; otherwise I don't know what we have; probably corruption.
Trucking.  Another of the memes that George Takei--rather thoughtlessly--put on fB (I usually agree with most of his positions; this is sort of an exception), is that Big Agriculture might have some saving graces.  Big commercial farms are more efficient, says the video; small farms may use more fertilizer and agro-chemicals, and this is bad for the environment.  Who are they kidding?  Certainly small farms could fall into the trap of deploying insane amounts of agro-chemicals, but corporate farms are yet to moderate their use of polluting materials.  Over-farming on large tracts of lands depletes the soil, and depleted it for decades.  They do have the potential of changing their techniques so that they restore the land, but I don't think they do it.  On the human level, they are highly mechanized, and have been the source of huge unemployment.  Mechanization is inevitable, but it did not need to be inevitable so long ago.  Finally, Big Agriculture produce has to be trucked thousands of miles to their supermarket chains.  At the moment, trucking is a highly polluting business (correct me if I'm wrong), and taken in sum, small farms seem by far a better way to go.  This is not to say that small farms will continue to use the low-impact methods for which we favor them.  Even little farms use inhumane procedures in chicken and livestock farming, and veal, for instance, comes from facilities in which the cattle are treated very cruelly.  (My wife knows all about this, but is powerless to influence it, since Pennsylvanians love their meat.  From the point of view of livestock, this is a terrible state.)
Box Stores.  This is the term they use around here for chain stores such as Walmart and Lowes, and similar multi-outlet corporations.  At first, they were able to sell things at low prices because they could negotiate favorable terms because they bought in bulk.  Today, they get their goods from China, and similar countries where wages are low.  (Of course, tariffs change the dynamics of this dramatically, and it will be interesting to see how it ends up, if we can survive a season of buying substandard goods at high prices until the administration chooses to make a deal with China.  Eventually, the Chinese Government must begin to take the interests of Chinese Labor seriously; at the moment they do not.  When that moment comes, we will need to pay prices that the goods are really worth.  Modern economic theory says that Worth is in the eye of the Buyer.  It will be interesting to see what an Iphone, for instance, will be "really" worth, if trade unions are tolerated in China.
Trade Unions. Do you really know what trade unions are?  They are organizations that sprang up in the early years of the last century to protect workers: the Teamsters, the United Auto Workers, the Lady Garment Workers, and so on.  Until these unions were established, workers were paid peanuts.  Gradually, as legislation was passed that enabled these unions to legally negotiate with management for higher wages and better conditions, workers in unions became more affluent, and workers had a certain amount of pride.  Now, of course, management (some of whom belonged to what we call, today, the 1%, but back then they were about 5% of the population!) hated unions, because so much had to be paid to the workers, which could have gone to the shareholders instead!  Gradually, over the seventies and the eighties, a lot of furious propaganda vilified Labor, blaming it for the 'Low' living standards of everyone.  Unions lost a lot of their power, and today the garment industry in the US is practically dead, and Far East factories make most of our clothes, even Trump ties; car makers build their plants abroad, etc, etc, and unions are unable to provide their members with a good wage.  Teachers Unions still exist in the state of New York, for instance, and New York teachers have a love-hate relationship with their union, which has been saddled with the responsibility for maintaining academic standards.  All in all, unions have done a lot of good, but being under the control of labor legislation, depending on the laws governing them, and the burdens placed on them, they can no longer be depended upon to carry out their responsibilities, and labor management tends to become increasingly cynical.  A political candidate who declares hostility towards Labor is a bad bet, because he or she automatically takes the side of management in labor disputes by definition.  Labor unions are no longer able to negotiate incredibly high pay rates for workers; management (and conservatives) simply capitalize on past hostility towards labor, and I, for one, do not approve of this attitude.  A political candidate who supports Labor is a better bet.  Big Labor is a weak instrument for progress, but it is the only instrument we have.

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