Soon the national news will be covering the murder trial of a young fellow who sneaked behind an unarmed businessman in New York and shot him in the back.
Some old people oppose back-shooting on principle.
My father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather held certain principles. You never hit a woman. You never voted for a Fascist. You never shot a man in the back, if you didn't know him.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect, as many know, is the observation that some Americans are too stupid to notice they are stupid. They vote against their own interests. They've elected Trump twice.
In Trump's first term, more rational people, including key Republicans, managed things around the Orange Face in ways that partly mitigated his incompetence and cruelty. The consequence was that Trump got elected again.
The voters had learned nothing from the first term.
Should we try to mitigate the second-term disaster by opposing his cabinet choices? A few people argue that we should stand aside and let nature take its course. How else will voters learn?
Americans chose a stupid, degenerate fascist to lead western civilization. He's staffing his cabinet with know-nothing, brain-wormed drunkards.
Given Trump's choices, innocent people will suffer. Of course, that will happen anyway.
Disaster--maybe a sweeping climate or economic collapse--seems possible. But no one knows what is coming at us.
"The future is a curve that is constantly changing."--Wittgenstein
The dutch oven, invented in the Netherlands, was first mentioned in print in 1769. It took several forms, but today it is mostly a large metal or ceramic pot with a tight lid.
The flat lid was an innovation by Paul Revere. A dutch oven with legs (to stand in the coals) is called a camp oven.
The Dutch name for the oven is "braadan."
Yesterday two friends dropped by. Susan, an excellent cook, served them spaghetti for lunch. They ate several portions each.
In the process Susan used three Dutch ovens. Is that too many?
Explanations of when human language first developed have not lent themselves to conclusive testing. Estimates range from two million years ago to fairly recently. Languages left little trace until we invented writing about 5,000 years ago.
Our complex language separates us from other mammals. Humans alone can use language to make things up. We invent belief systems and then believe them.
Consider the following: animal rights, paper money, the 33 Hindu gods, Portland's governance structure, baseball rules, western civilization, human rights.
These things exist because we used words to make them up.
My wife summed up the weakness of the Democratic Party in one sentence: They don't know how to get the support they need from morons.
Consider a fact. Half of the people in the United States are below average in reasoning skills, and Trump got slightly more than 49% of the national vote.
I'm not claiming that all Trump voters are idiots, but many are as incapable of sustained rational analysis as a starving bear.
When I was born (1934) stupid Americans were divided between two major parties. The Republicans had small town Babbitts. The Democrats had Alabama. But, later, as Nixon developed his southern strategy, he gathered most of the stupid voters into one formidable party.
In democracies it is not unusual for resentful dumbbells to ally with the super rich and do combat with the educated middle class. Something like that has happened here.
This much is clear. To succeed in two years, the Democrats need to win back their fair share of imbeciles.
Carlos Cipolla, an Italian economics historian who taught at Berkeley, wrote "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" in 1976.
What Cipolla meant by "stupid," my wife would call "irrational." Cipolla did not mean someone slow witted (who might be slow but rational).
The first law of irrationality, applied to elections, is that we always underestimate the number of irrational voters in circulation. Always.
Irrational people, by definition, make decisions harmful to others and often to themselves. That's how we discover they are irrational.
For example, a man dependent on social security and Obamacare may vote for candidates pledged to end both programs. A woman may support a sniggering rapist for president.
The actions of irrational people cannot be predicted or understood by rational people, Cipolla argued.
Cipolla is not the first to point out that stupid/irrational people do more harm than evil people, who are, at least, predictable.
In the last century, linguistic philosophers and linguists focused in part on how language itself can mislead us.
In Genevieve Guenther's recent THE LANGUAGE OF CLIMATE POLITICS, I found an example I understood.
Suppose Susan Goss said, "We are all responsible for climate change." I've said that myself hundreds of times.
"We caused climate change." But did we?
Americans do contribute to climate change. I eat pears shipped from Mexico. The shippers use fossil fuels.
Pear-eaters created climate change. Or did they?
Guenther points out that when we agree that all of us are to blame, we support an ideology that protects the deeply guilty, the fossil fuel producers and their employees and their vast network of supporters. If we are all guilty, then no one is really at fault.
But we are not equal offenders. That gets hidden by the "we."
Human scum, the oil and gas people driven by greed, are making parts of the Earth uninhabitable. They do it for money. They block needed changes. They buy all the support they need to keep drilling.
Steve Maass founded a small supermarket chain called Oliver's in Sonoma County in 1988. He started with 13 employees. Today the chain employs about 400 people, and as of November 1, they own the whole thing.
Maass arranged for his employees to buy him out. He could have sold to a major chain. He chose to keep the chain local and part of the community.
Part of why American voters elected an idiot to lead western civilization was anger at our social/economic system, which has partly failed them and their children. The idiot, of course, will fail them more profoundly.
About ten percent of Americans own 95% of our wealth. The oligarchs suck up the profits. Maass has shown us one door we could open. Let employees benefit from committed work. Let them profit, too.
What science tells us about Irish DNA keeps getting updated. Some years back, experts told us that the Irish ended up culturally Celtic but had little to no Celtic DNA. So where did the Irish come from?
One answer is that they came from almost everywhere. The original settlers had dark skin. Four or five big waves of newcomers came after them. The lasting DNA core of the modern Irish came from a migration from the steppes of Ukraine, scientists say.
