Reserve Noon on The Day After Inauguration Day

On the day after inauguration day, January 21st, at noon, in Sonoma County, relatively decent people will assemble at Santa Rosa City Hall to protest on behalf of democracy. We live in a nation ruled by minority Presidents who finished in second place. Our welfare programs have been repealed and shredded. We lack fundamental equality when it comes to race, gender, education, health care, life expectancy and income. I intend to protest.

Lest We Forget

"In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, obliterating six decades of federal social welfare policy “as we know it,” ending federal cash payments to the nation’s poor, and consigning millions of female heads of household and their children to poverty, where many still dwell 20 years later. Today, nearly half a century after Nixon trashed national child care, even privileged women, torn between their underpaid work and their kids, are overwhelmed."

----Ann Jones

Trump's Red Face

Mike McGuire, state senator from Healdsburg, California, is going to introduce a bill that will require a Presidential candidate to disclose his or her tax returns before getting a place on the state's ballot.

I don't know who came up with the idea, but what if it catches on in other states?

You can see how unfair this will be to con men like the tiny-handed Minority President-Elect Trump. He has to hide his financial past. When he runs for re-election in four years, he might have to skip California entirely. No matter. He lost California in 2016 by four million votes. But think of the drag that will be on the down-ballot California Republicans who will have no candidate for the top office.  It's like the Republican party will be slowly disappearing from the West Coast, self-erasing many faces red with shame. 

Me and Bobby McGee

I remembered when one of my aunts looked at me in surprise and said, “You like our music?”

Country music is looked down on. It originated at a time when enslaved blacks and indentured whites worked side by side and invented blue grass (blues plus ballads). It’s rural and not urban and not civilized. It’s the simple music of the poor. Even worse, it’s the music of unlettered white people. It’s very white, and I need say no more. It’s not elite or educated or diverse. It’s didactic, expressing in songs the social rules of the Scotch-Irish (as we called them until recently) or Scots-Irish or Orange Irish or Ulster Irish. It is, some say, Southern and quick to anger, the sounds of frontier folk, armed to the remaining teeth. At its best, I say, it is a direct and moving expression of things we experience. 

Irish Boston Guys

Have you ever seen ten movies about drunken Boston Irish guys who err and then feel guilt and lead useless lives of self-punishment, hoping for death? Maybe the first such film was THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, starring Robert Mitchum. The latest is MANCHESTER BY THE SEA, recent hit and one more pointless Boston bummer, two hours of despair I will never get back. Yes, the acting is strong, so strong you may want to suck the tailpipe of your car when you get home.

The best acting, by the way, is not by the guy but by his wife. 

I’m mostly Irish myself. I want to say, look, Boston guys, the examined life is not worth living, so forget about examining and punishing yourselves and try to have fun. Move to New Mexico or something. Meet new people. Eat new food. Eat a mushroom. Pound sand! What’ve you got to lose? 

The Electoral College Succeeds

Has the Electoral College begun to fail in its purpose?  

The Electoral College has one purpose, which is to prevent ordinary people from electing a progressive President. Back in the 1800s, the rich feared that the untrustworthy, uneducated majority might elect a progressive who would come and take their money, disrupting the young capitalist economy. They set up a system to thwart that possibility.

The Electoral College failed when FDR was overwhelmingly elected four times, but it has worked perfectly in the Bush-Gore and the Trump-Clinton elections. I’m not claiming that Gore and Clinton are dyed-in-the-wool progressives, but they are more progressive than the minority winners. The Founding Fathers would understand.

ARRIVAL

My wife and I did not go to see ARRIVAL because of my interest in Amy Adams but because of my interest in three basic matters. The first was the translation of nonhuman languages into English. Wittgenstein famously wrote that if a lion could speak (in a full blown lion language), we would not understand him. Wittgenstein’s reasoning was that languages develop from forms of life. I believe that that is true. Humans can translate from English to Spanish easily because we are biologically and socially similar (the same form of life), and so are our languages. I can point to an orange and name it. A Mexican can do the same in Spanish. Translation (somewhat imperfect) is accomplished.

Could we translate an imaginary but sophisticated lion language into English? Lions don’t point to things. Do we understand some of the current primitive language of cats and dogs? Yes. They even understand one another in some ways. If the cat hisses, the dog backs off. We have in common with cats and dogs the need for food and drink, sleep, procreation, etc. We can get angry, and so can they. So, yes, we could, over time, find enough in common to begin to put together a lion vocabulary list. (We’ve seen claims that we have mastered the language of bees.)

ARRIVAL presents an attempt to learn the language of total aliens from outer space, and I thought the process shown was plausible.

The second problem is that the film contains a lot of sci-fi stuff like time travel, based on moving faster than the speed of light. That’s currently considered difficult. Here’s a curious thought. I’ve always believed that the speed of light is a constant. I suppose I was taught that in high school a hundred years ago. Recently I learned that a woman working in the science of very cold things sent light through a space that was inconceivably cold, and the light slowed down to a crawl. We need a movie exploring that.

The third is the question of what aliens might look like. On this planet there is another intelligent creature whose form of life is utterly alien: the octopus, whose development of intelligence took a path so foreign to our form of life that we can’t even imagine it. 

(also on Facebook)

The Defecarchy Begins

Minority President Trump's cabinet is shaping up as the most feculent in American history, composed mostly of sociopathic tycoons and loony generals plus certain political idiots. It's what a large minority of voters wanted and deserve. They demanded that someone defecate on their heads.

Let's call this form of government a defecarchy.

In many cases what Trump has done is eliminate the middleman. Instead of a Secretary of State who works hard to please Exxon, just make Exxon the Secretary of State.

This is going to be fascinating to witness but not much fun for young people who will have to work for decades to repair the damage the defecarchy hopes to do.

Life Is Harder If You're Stupid

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by the use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.“  —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer was pointing out that you can't prevent or cure stupidity. As Hillary Clinton learned ("basket of deplorables") it's dangerous to bring up the matter. Half the population is below average in its use of reason in the decision-making process. If you bring this up, you'll be labeled an elitist. Stupidity is almost impossible to discuss in public. 

Cognitive science might be telling us that even people who reason well make their complicated decisions based on emotion, not much influenced by rational thought. (I'm still trying to find out what cognitive science is doing.)

There is no humane way to convince stupid people of anything. They don't grasp or care about their own self interest. Or they define self-interest as doing something that feels good at the moment. They smoke cigarettes or vote for Donald Trump. Then they suffer the consequences.

“Life is hard. It’s even harder if you’re stupid.” --John Wayne

How To Think Badly

Bad thinking doesn’t change. If you recall, at the start of the second war against Iraq, we were told that Iraq was amassing weapons of mass destruction. The fact that we couldn’t find any weapons was presented as proof that such weapons existed and were well hidden.

The UN had inspected Iraq and found no such weapons, according to my newspaper, so there was no rationale to attack Iraq (if you could read). Nevertheless, the Republican and Democratic establishments supported bad reasoning and a new and idiotic war.

Jumping back to the start of World War Two, we imprisoned Americans of Japanese descent in California (but not in Hawaii) on the grounds that they might be saboteurs. As one general wrote at the time, “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”

In short, the lack of evidence that something is going on is proof that something is going on.

Why Trump Will Be My President

Garrison Keillor has stated that Trump will never be his President because Trump doesn't read books and so on. I wish I could say that. Unfortunately, Trump will be my President, because I'm not lucky or wise. 

Here's the deal. I don't vote in Presidential elections because my vote matters. It has never mattered in the least. Presidents are chosen by electors. In this last election, the person I voted for won by about three million votes and came in second. The vote that matters is cast by electors in an imaginary Electoral College, which was designed by our founding fathers to prevent people like me, unlucky and unwise, from electing Presidents.

Many of our elections are democratic. For example the governor of my state is elected by a vote of the people, unwise as many of us are. That's a poor system but one I can support (barely).

Voting in a Presidential election serves only one purpose, which is to say, "I participate in this system and thereby accept its outcome." I voted in the system, so Trump will be my President. I committed myself to the system that produced him. (I'm wondering if I should make that mistake again.)

The Cursive Wars

Listening to the car radio, I found out why cursive matters. As you may know, cursive had been phased out of many schools. Children are taught to keyboard instead. That’s a mistake.

Experiments have demonstrated that students in class taking notes in cursive do significantly better on tests than students typing notes onto a computer. The reason seems obvious. Writing down notes in cursive is much slower than typing notes into a computer. As I recall the cursive process from my days as a note taker, I had to process what I was hearing, leave out what wasn’t vital and shorten everything in order to keep up. I was engaged with the material. Fast typers can get a lecture down word for word. But they aren’t evaluating. A second edge develops when the student goes back to study her notes. The cursive student studies the significant parts (the rest being omitted). 

Students typing notes on a computer have been asked to slow down and process, but so far they seem unable to do it. 

Riddle Me This, Children

Here are two riddles I'm promoting.

1. For whom is the town of Morgan Hill named?

If you haven't been there, the town is flatter than a blue corn pancake. It's named for Mr. Hill.

2.  Who invented German chocolate cake?

All of you pastry chefs know about Mr. Sam German. 

And so on.  These are useful if you want to annoy your children.