Author Archives: Frank Moraes

About Frank Moraes

Frank Moraes is a freelance writer and editor online and in print. He is educated as a scientist with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics. He has worked in climate science, remote sensing, throughout the computer industry, and as a college physics instructor. Find out more at About Frank Moraes.

Burmese Pythons Are Destroying the Everglades

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Burmese PythonThe Burmese python is a massive snake native to Southeast Asia that arrived in South Florida in the 1980s, possibly released into the wild by careless pet owners. There are now as many as 300,000 of these invasive creatures slithering through the state, and they’ve been known to eat alligators, bobcats, rabbits, and birds.

Now scientists have discovered that Burmese pythons — which can reach 18 feet in length and swallow a bobcat whole — are even more ravenous than they realized. In a new paper in Bioinvasions Records, a team of researchers describe slitting open the intestine of a dead 14-foot python and finding the remains of three different white-tailed deer. The snake appears to have gobbled them up, an adult and two fawns, in just 90 days.

The implications are disturbing. “If this was just one snake that ate three deer in isolation, that’d be one thing” says Scott Boback, a biologist at Dickinson College and lead author of the study. But the incident comes alongside growing evidence that the Burmese pythons are ravaging native wildlife in South Florida’s Everglades. “When you put that all together, you’ve got to say, okay, something serious is going on here.”

–Brad Plumer
This 14-Foot Python Was Caught With 3 Deer in Its Gut. That’s a Bad Sign.

Image cropped from Burmese Python by Skeeze. It is in the public domain.

Tonight’s Don Quixote Talk

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Cervantes - Probably Fake ImageI was asked to give a talk to a small reading group this evening. They are reading Don Quixote and for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, I’ve become known as something of an expert on the subject. Now I’m not really an expert, but I do know a whole lot more about Don Quixote and Cervantes than any reasonable person does.

I agreed to do this a couple of months ago, but now that it is upon me, I’m a little freaked out. The woman running the reading group told me not to worry. They don’t much know anything and it is all relaxed. But I’m not the kind to walk into such an event unprepared. So this is going to serve as my lecture notes. It should be useful for anyone thinking about reading this masterpiece.

Two Novels

Because of the size of what we have come to think of as Don Quixote, the group will have only read Part 1. I was told that many people end up not finishing novels. In a sense, there is nothing wrong with this. I don’t finish Don Quixote a couple of times a week. That’s one of the great things about it. It is episodic, and you can pick it up any day, read a chapter and be satisfied.

But I hope that everyone will read Part 2. Because Don Quixote is not a novel. It is two novels. And those novels are quite distinct. To be honest, I’m kind of bored with Part 1. To me, its greatness is that it laid a foundation for Part 2.

Part 1

This isn’t to say that Part 1 isn’t great. It’s just that I’ve spent so much time with it. Also, I’m something of an iconoclast and so of course I’m going to move away from the novel that has the the windmill scene in it. But since I mention it, let’s talk about it.

The Windmill Scene

If there is only one thing that people know about Don Quixote, it is the windmill scene. But what is it that we are to take from this scene? I’m afraid that in the popular imagination, there are two characters in it: Don Quixote and the windmill. This is not it at all. If that were all it were, it would be little more than a modern story of a senile man wandering into traffic and getting hit.

The Windmill scene is important because it is the first real scene between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. And it is a scene that the two of them will replay over and over throughout both books, but especially the first. The formula for these scenes are quite simple:

  1. Don Quixote sees something bizarre (giants)
  2. Sancho tells him there is no such things (windmills)
  3. Don Quixote attacks his delusion
  4. Quixote and Sancho discuss what just happened

In the case of the windmills, as in almost all, Don Quixote will not admit that he was wrong. Instead, it was Freston, Don Quixote’s evil nemesis who turned the giants into windmills thus depriving the great knight of the glory that surely would have been his. (Personally, if you can’t defeat a windmill, I’m not sure you’d do much better with giants. But as we see throughout Part 1, Don Quixote’s insanity goes a long way in helping him.)

My favorite example of this happens sometime later when a most unfortunate barber is riding down the road with his wash basin on his head. Don Quixote mistakes it for Mambrino’s helmet. After gaining the “helmet” and terrifying the barber, Don Quixote first claims that it is what he sees. But eventually, he comes around to seeing things Sancho’s way. Someone must have taken Mambrino’s helmet, melted it down, and turned it into a wash basin.

No one can say that Don Quixote is not clever.

The Denouement

What works really well in Part 1 is how Cervantes takes what seems to be little more than an episodic tale and pulls it all together as we find most of the people who Don Quixote has harmed back together at the end. For example, the farmer boy who Don Quixote “saves,” leaving it to his the farmer to do what is right. At the end, we find that what later happened was exactly what we expected. And the boy begs Don Quixote that should the boy ever be in the worst trouble in the world to leave him alone. There is nothing so horrible that Don Quixote cannot make it worse.

There is also the story arc of Sancho who starts off by believing Don Quixote’s folderol, but slowly learns that the great man is just crazy. This transition is not completed in the Part 1. It takes us until Part 2 for this to become complete, even while Sancho remains as true to Don Quixote as any squire in an Amadís de Gaula book.

Part 2

I don’t want to say a great deal about Part 2 since you haven’t read it. But I do want to tell you why it improves on Part 1. The first Don Quixote is about a man who has been driven mad by literature. But the novel was a bestseller. And its major conceit is that it is true. Indeed, Cervantes didn’t even write it. He’s just paraphrasing a translation of Hamete Cide, a Muslim historian who wrote about this crazy man. So in Part 2, a number of the people who come upon Don Quixote and Sancho Panza already know them. Indeed, much of the second novel is taken up with the Duke and Duchess who play terrible pranks on our two heroes. Although their actions only makes us admire Don Quixote and Sancho all the more.The Duke and Duchess also set up an “island” for Sancho to become governor where he turns out to be quite a good ruler.

But in Part 2, Cervantes takes his discussion of literature to a new level. In Part 1, characters are affected by literature. In Part 2, literature itself becomes reality. It is a shockingly modern novel. I know of no writer who did anything quite so brilliant for at least 300 years. I usually tell people that while Part 1 was the first modern novel, Part 2 was the first postmodern novel.

So for those of you who have read the first part of Don Quixote, I highly recommend that you pick up part two as a whole new novel — even if it is filled with characters you already know, and hopefully love.

(There was a time when the novels were published as two different books. I wish they still were. Unfortunately, you have to go back rather far. And the only translation I can really recommend that you can find in two volumes in the Putnam translation.)

The First Modern Novel

The reason that most people read Don Quixote today is because it is considered the first modern novel. Unless you are an academic, I think this is a terrible reason for reading it. The reason I first read it — and the reason I continue to read it is that it is a a very funny book. There are a lot of similarities to it and another of my very favorite books, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. And this is why I recommend that people read the John Rutherford “Penguin Classics” translation of Don Quixote. Rutherford wrings every bit of comedy out of the book. I find I still laugh while reading it.

But it is interesting to consider what it means for Don Quixote to be the first modern novel. After all, weren’t their novels before it? I’ve already mentioned Amadís de Gaula. There were a number of books written about him. But they were different in an important way. They were really no different than The Iliad and The Odyssey — written over 2,000 years earlier. What they all have in common is that they are Romantic.

What I mean by that is that Hector is Hector. He’s the same man at the beginning of The Iliad as he is at the end. (Well, not completely; he’s dead at the end.) But Hector is not a real human; he’s a hero; he doesn’t grow and change. And I’ll go further: do we see much in terms of growth in Shakespeare? It’s always bothered me that Hamlet never does manage to lift his father’s curse. Yes, he kills Claudius, but not for the sake of his father. He does it for the sake of his mother. As far as I’m concerned, Hamlet’s father’s ghost is still roaming the chilly nights of Denmark.

In Don Quixote, the two major characters make enormous changes. That’s especially true of Sancho, who I think is the character that modern readers are most attracted to. He starts as a simple farmer, but one with big aspirations — the only kind of man who could be fooled by Don Quixote’s lunacy. And does he ever live through an odyssey! But by the end of Part 2, he has lived his dream and come to the conclusion that he is happy just being the man he always was.

Yes, I understand: you’ve read that before — many times! But before Don Quixote, you never read that. In the limited sense that you did, you never read it with such richly drawn characters.

There are a number of things that I would change in Don Quixote. In particular, writers since that time have greatly improved structure. Cervantes is no master at telling parallel stories, for example. But apart from this, I don’t see much different from a modern novel and either Don Quixote (but especially the second).

Cervantes: Failed Writer

I want to make a few remarks about Cervantes. We all have an answer to Barbara Walters question, “Who in all of history would you like to interview?” For me, there is no question. I’d probably have more to talk about with David Foster Wallace (because of his interest in math), but Cervantes is who I would most want to spend an evening with. He lived such an interesting life.

He was in the Spanish navy during the Battle of Lepanto, where he was badly wounded, losing the use of his left hand. On his return home, he was captured by Ottoman pirates. Because of a mix-up, they thought he was rich and held him for ransom for five years. During that time, he tried to escape multiple times — one of those attempts was quite elaborate and probably would have succeeded. Unfortunate, Cervantes was ratted out.

After returning to Spain, he spent most of his life as a tax collector. But that probably gives you the wrong idea of the job. Things were different then. Basically, he’d come to a village and say, “The king wants you to pay your taxes.” And so he would spend months negotiating with the town leaders trying to make a deal. The job wasn’t made any easier in that Cervantes had to pay for everything upfront. The King would only pay him (and his expenses) later — sometimes years later.

On at least one occasion, Cervantes found himself in prison for embezzling. But it is more likely that he was just a lousy accountant. Regardless, he managed to make it to the age of 57 when he published Don Quixote Part 1, and his fortunes changed quite a bit. That’s not to say that he hadn’t been writing before that. But nothing was successful. And there was a very good reason for that.

Cervantes always saw himself as a poet. So he wrote lots of plays and lots of poetry and no one really cared. I’m a big believer in reading books all the way through. But if you want to skip the poetry in Don Quixote, I can hardly blame you. He just didn’t have the gift. But he had two gifts that came together spectacularly in Don Quixote: a sense of character and a great wit.

Other things worth reading of his, if you get the chance, are Novelas Ejemplares (“Exemplary Novels”) and Ocho Comedias y Ocho Entremeses. One of my dreams is to translate that collection of 16 plays into English. I’ve only been able to find one of them in English, The Cave of Salamanca. It’s very funny.

It’s hard not to see Cervantes as Sancho: it took him into his late 50s, but finally, he figured out who he was. And the world is so much greater a place as a result.

The Portrait

I plan for this article to be printed out for the members of the readers group, so I expect you be able to see that portrait of Cervantes at the top. Sadly, that is not Cervantes. It is almost certainly a Victorian fake. In the preface to Novelas Ejemplares, Cervantes wrote, “This friend might well have caused my portrait, which the famous Don Juan de Jáuregui would have given him, to be engraved and put in the first page of this book, according to custom.” But the painting clearly states that it was made in 1600, when Jáuregui was just 16 years old. It was clearly meant to be a joke. However, we do know what Cervantes looked like, because he describes himself in that same preface. Part of it, has a special resonance for me: “teeth not much to speak of, for he has but six, in bad condition and worse placed, no two of them corresponding to each other.” Again, undoubtedly comedy. But there is doubtless truth in both claims: Cervantes’ teeth at 66 were probably bad and he probably did know Jáuregui (who would have been almost 30 by that time).

Conclusion

This has already gone on quite a while, so I will end it here. I’ll refer you to the following articles that are of some interest:

Purported portrait of Cervantes is in the public domain.

Hebron: You Have Entered Apartheid

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Hebron: This was taken by Israel. You are entering ApartheidThe first time I visited Shuhada Street in Hebron, a city of 200,000 in Israel’s West Bank, I felt as if I’d stepped through a looking glass. For most of the past 12 years, the once-bustling market street has been under lockdown to protect 800 militant Jewish settlers who’ve seized part of the old city. Aside from soldiers and a few orthodox Jewish women pushing baby carriages, Shuhada Street is empty and silent; in the parlance of the Israel Defense Forces, it is “completely sterilized,” which means that Palestinians aren’t allowed to set foot on it. Most of the Arabs who once lived in the area have left, but the few who remain are virtual prisoners in their apartments, where cages protect windows and balconies from settlers’ stones. Palestinians who live on Shuhada Street aren’t allowed to walk out their front doors; if they must go out, they have to climb onto the roof and down a fire escape into a back alley. My tour guide, an orthodox Jewish IDF veteran who’d become a fierce critic of the occupation, described what happens if the Palestinians get sick. “The Jewish subset of the Red Cross doesn’t treat Palestinians here,” he told me. “What you see a lot of times is Palestinians carrying people by foot to an area with an ambulance.”

The disorientation of Shuhada Street comes not just from the moral horror, but from the near-impossibility of conveying that horror to most Americans without sounding like a crank. Before that first visit, I was someone who rolled my eyes when left-wingers described the occupation of Palestine as apartheid, a term that seemed shrill and reductive and heedless of a thousand complexities. Afterward, I realized how hard it is, within the cramped, taboo-ridden strictures that govern mainstream discussion of Israel, to talk about what’s happening in Hebron. If I’d never been there and someone had described it to me, I wouldn’t have fully believed her.

–Michelle Goldberg
The Smearing of Keith Ellison Reveals the Warped Priorities of the Israel Lobby

Image cropped from Hebron Sign by Keith Ellison. Licensed under Fair Use.

Confessions of a Mean Editor

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Mean EditorNot long ago, a client asked me to write a newsletter about something ghastly. It is the kind of work that I think of when I tell people that I’m a whore — that I’ll do anything for money. The client, who is a good writer himself (at least when it comes this this kind of soul-crushing, ad-copy, the only thing that matters is making a buck, writing). So when he got my final version, he changed it quite a lot. But given that he’s actually a nice guy, he apologized for it.

It wasn’t necessary. I’ve been writing professionally for coming up on 30 years. And there are a few things I’ve learned. One is that writing like this is about making money, not expressing myself. Another is that writing is a collaborative enterprise. Think of Finnegans Wake and Naked Lunch. Now you might think those were written by Joyce and Burroughs, but they were not. They were group efforts, that make quite a bit more sense because they weren’t left solely in the hands of their supposed authors.

Writing Is a Team Effort

I told my client that there was no reason to apologize. I understood that I was part of a team. And frankly, I did the hardest part: writing the first official version. It’s so much easier to take someone’s writing and improve it than it is to stare at a blank screen and come up with something new to say. But I understand why he apologized. Many writers would incorrectly think that what they wrote was thrown out and the whole thing was written from scratch. That almost never happens.

Writers too often think that they have a mean editor — people who take joy in destroying their great works of art. But editors are a writer’s best friend. Do a little experiment. Find a writer you really like. Then find them published in magazines and websites where you don’t normally read them. You will likely find that they seem rather different — in some cases like a completely different writer. This is the effect of a good editor.

The Real “Mean Editor”

There is a real mean editor. In my professional work, I just don’t have the time to be one. But I’ve been one in the past. I’m even one from time to time here at Frankly Curious. Such a mean editor really doesn’t care what the writer wrote — or even what the writer intended to write. What the writer created is used only create something that the editor feels they can use.

I ran into this some 15 years ago when a writer gave me an article for a popular website I was running. The article was totally unacceptable for the website. It was too simple for the audience. So I savaged it — totally rewrote it so that it was in a form where it fit. The writer was, to put it mildly, displeased. He demanded that I take it down. I understand now, but then I was flummoxed. I thought I had done him a major favor.

But now I think I was a mean editor. This was not, after all, a professional writer. And I was not paying. Just the same, I was offering him a huge audience that he could never have gotten otherwise. But I should have just sent the article back and explained why the article would not work and what I needed. Just the same, he did end up with an article that was far superior to what he wrote and he would have received a byline for what was mostly my work.

Helping Writers — Even When It Hurts

When dealing with professional writers, it’s much easier. No one pays for work that they can’t use. So if something is unacceptable, I just send it back. This is kind of mean, but writers seem never to see it that way. Sadly, “professional” writers don’t usually do much of a better job on their second try than they do their first. And that’s usually where I stop. I make a note that this is not a writer worth using in the future. And even if I have to make substantial changes to the work, few of these writers will think me a mean editor — because they can’t be bothered to read what gets published.

I do understand why my client apologized to me. At the same time, it was slightly offensive. He showed that he didn’t understand that I was a good and experienced a writer. I suppose he doesn’t want to be seen as a mean editor. And in a sense, he is. He could have sent it back to me and asked that I write it more in his style. But I now know his style and shouldn’t require much editing in the future.

But the truth is that all writers need a mean editor. The best editors help writers to develop their own mean editors — internal voices that tell them, “This sucks; let’s savage it; let’s start all over.” Otherwise, you’ll never be much more than a mediocre writer.

The mean editor: destroyer of the medicore writer.

Image cropped from Editing a Paper by Nic McPhee, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Happy Birthday: Noam Chomsky at 88

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Noam Chomsky 1977Today is Noam Chomsky’s 88th birthday. It’s remarkable to see him these days. We know that the human brain deteriorates distinctly around the age of 70. Yet Chomsky’s certainly doesn’t seem to have. Now part of this is no doubt that he was operating at such a high level before that he’s still sailing above most of us.

Noam Chomsky vs William Buckley

But it’s not that I don’t see it. I don’t think he is quite as quick as he was in 1969. Watch him debating William F Buckley. He was 40 years old at that time. It’s interesting in that Chomsky flails Buckley effortlessly. But it is clear that Buckley (no intellectual slouch) is working very hard and losing to a man who seems to be preoccupied with something else — perhaps a linguistics question that came up at the graduate seminar that day. It’s only because of Chomsky’s passive speaking style that conservatives think of this confrontation as something of a tie rather than an embarrassing defeat, which it obviously was.

After all these years, this exchange is well worth watching. It isn’t just because nothing has changed in a categorical sense. It’s also just wondrous to watch Chomsky at the peak of his powers (full debate):

I can’t speak to Chomsky’s work on linguistics. The basics of it are clear. I even put “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” into my most recent book to make a point about the lack of editing from certain small presses. But that is a subject for another time. For the last fifty years, Chomsky has been known for his political work. And it is the reason that he’s been important in my life.

Chomsky at 88

It is still amazing to listen to him or, even better, read him. He’s probably been the biggest influence on my thinking about foreign affairs. That has, in turn, changed how I’ve thought about domestic matters. But this interview he did with Mehdi Hasan is probably the most insightful thing I’ve seen about the post-Trump world. Given that I’ve highlighted it twice already, you’ve probably seen it. But if not, you really should take the time.

The down side of Noam Chomsky is that he can make you feel hopeless. His insights are so clear that it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that those in power know. That’s what is so devastating in the Buckley interview: that it shows that Buckley understands what Chomsky is talking about, but that he just doesn’t care because all the pain that the country causes results in much better lives for people like Buckley — and let’s be honest: Chomsky and me as well.

Chomsky Still Has Much to Teach

The one thing that I can get almost no one to understand is the biggest thing that I learned from Chomsky: that all the stuff we tell ourselves about being a force for good in the world is a lie. That’s not to say that we kill innocent children for pleasure. But it is to say that killing innocent children would only get in the way of our policies if it might create an unacceptable level of blow-back.

The world — my world — is a far greater place because Noam Chomsky is in it. And even at 88 years old, he continues to improve it. I hope I can wish him many more happy birthdays.

Noam Chomsky by Hans Peters / Anefo. Licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0.

Democratic Party: Don’t Change! Keep Moving Left!

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Democratic Party - Corporate LogoLast week, Jonathan Chait wrote an article, The 2016 Election Is a Disaster Without a Moral. The argument that it makes is that there really is no lesson for the Democrats to learn from this election except, “Don’t nominate Hillary Clinton for president again.” Now I think this is wrong. I think that Joe Biden and Martin O’Malley would have lost — and likely in exactly the same way. But Chait couldn’t leave it at that and focus on the idea that the Democratic Party doesn’t really need to make any big changes. He had to spend a third of the article attacking Bernie Sanders.

Now if you read Chait regularly, you know why this is. Chait spent much of the primary talking about how it would be ridiculous to nominate Bernie Sanders because he would lose. Hillary Clinton was the smart choice. But now, she’s the dumb choice (in Chait’s mind). So he has to spend a bunch of time talking about how she was the dumb choice — just not as dumb as Sanders would have been. But this statement was hilarious, “Reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who saw the Republican Party’s opposition research on Sanders, called it ‘brutal’…”

Funny Opposition Research

Why do I find this funny? Because I’m sure that Reporter Kurt Eichenwald would have said the same thing about the Democratic Party’s opposition research on Trump. So it’s kind of hard to see how this makes any sense in an article that claims that, with a hat tip to William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.” After all, Sanders could have lost the popular vote — getting 5 million fewer votes than Clinton — and still have been the next president. Brutal opposition research isn’t apparently as important as it used to be. (Actually, Bill Clinton showed that back in 1992.)

I’m not saying that Sanders would have won the election. I tend to think he would have lost for the same reasons that Clinton lost. I’ve blamed the loss on 1992 and the Democratic Party’s hard right turn. But I could as easily blame it on Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and their total disregard for organized labor over the past eight years. I think the Democratic Party has a branding problem. Was Hillary Clinton a bit too cozy with Goldman Sachs? Sure. But would that really have mattered if she had been running in the party of FDR? I don’t think so.

The Future of the Democratic Party

Of course, something is going on that isn’t being stated. There are a lot of people like Chait who really don’t want this election to be seen as a reason for the party to move to the left. And I really don’t want this election to be seen as a reason for the party to move to the right. I agree with Chait’s overall argument: there is nothing major to change in the Democratic Party. It has been moving to the left on economic issues and this is good. So we lost an election (even though millions more people voted for us)? So what?!

Now is not the time to go running home to the corporate “New” Democrats. They are not the future. All those black and brown people and all those followers of minority religions have something in common: they are mostly workers — and not terribly well paid ones either. The next time we get power (and it will be soon), we need to start producing for ordinary Americans. And guess what? They aren’t white; they’re brown. Welcome to the new America. Old white America: enjoy your last gasp.

Afterword

Step one: get rid of that damned corporate logo and bring back the kicking ass!

Ian Millhiser: Constitutional Amendments Ranked

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–Ian Millhiser
Tweet, Expanded by Me

Image of Ian Millhiser cropped from one taken from the Center for American Progress. Used by permission.

Army Says No to Dakota Access Pipeline Crossing

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Dakota Access Pipeline ProtestThe Department of the Army will not approve an easement that would allow the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under Lake Oahe in North Dakota, the Army’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Works announced today.

Jo-Ellen Darcy said she based her decision on a need to explore alternate routes for the Dakota Access Pipeline crossing. Her office had announced on November 14, 2016 that it was delaying the decision on the easement to allow for discussions with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose reservation lies 0.5 miles south of the proposed crossing. Tribal officials have expressed repeated concerns over the risk that a pipeline rupture or spill could pose to its water supply and treaty rights.

“Although we have had continuing discussion and exchanges of new information with the Standing Rock Sioux and Dakota Access, it’s clear that there’s more work to do,” Darcy said. “The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing.”

Darcy said that the consideration of alternative routes would be best accomplished through an Environmental Impact Statement with full public input and analysis.

–US Army Press Release
Army Will Not Grant Easement for Dakota Access Pipeline Crossing

Image cropped from Protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline by Fibonacci Blue. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

How Carrier Played Donald Trump

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Bernie SandersToday, about 1,000 Carrier workers and their families should be rejoicing. But the rest of our nation’s workers should be very nervous.

President-elect Donald Trump will reportedly announce a deal with United Technologies, the corporation that owns Carrier, that keeps less than 1,000 of the 2,100 jobs in America that were previously scheduled to be transferred to Mexico. Let’s be clear: It is not good enough to save some of these jobs. Trump made a promise that he would save all of these jobs, and we cannot rest until an ironclad contract is signed to ensure that all of these workers are able to continue working in Indiana without having their pay or benefits slashed.

In exchange for allowing United Technologies to continue to offshore more than 1,000 jobs, Trump will reportedly give the company tax and regulatory favors that the corporation has sought. Just a short few months ago, Trump was pledging to force United Technologies to “pay a damn tax.” He was insisting on very steep tariffs for companies like Carrier that left the United States and wanted to sell their foreign-made products back in the United States. Instead of a damn tax, the company will be rewarded with a damn tax cut. Wow! How’s that for standing up to corporate greed? How’s that for punishing corporations that shut down in the United States and move abroad?

In essence, United Technologies took Trump hostage and won. And that should send a shock wave of fear through all workers across the country.

–Bernie Sanders
Carrier Just Showed Corporations How to Beat Donald Trump

Image cropped from Bernie Sanders by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Could Trump Go to China?

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Donald Trump - HopeI have a love-hate relationship with the saying, “Only Nixon could go to China!” What it means is that only a total Cold Warrior who was utterly anti-China would have the political clout to do that. An internationalist like myself would never be able to do that because people wouldn’t trust me. (Also, I would never be president for all of Sherman’s reasons and for the fact that no one would ever elect me.) The reason I love the statement is because it is true. The reason I hate it is that it is true.

I don’t think of it in terms of Nixon and China, I think of it in terms of Clinton and welfare “reform.” A Democratic president managed to screw the poor in a way that no Republican had ever dared. Oh, ain’t democracy grand! So it with this in mind that I hold out a long-shot hope that Trump might do something good. What? I certainly can’t say. But you never know. And I’m just trying to get through this month, much less the next 8 years. (Sorry folks, I give Trump an 80 percent chance of winning re-election — something I wrote about long before the election.)

The reason I bring this up because of something that Noam Chomsky said in an interview. Mehdi Hasan asked him about something Slavoj Žižek had said, “Trump would shake up the system and could be a positive force in terms of undermining the status quo.” It’s the first time that I’ve ever thought of Žižek as a useful idiot. I thought he had said that after the election. But he didn’t. Hasan asked Chomsky if Žižek had a point. Chomsky’s response was quite right, “Terrible point. It was the same point that people like him said about Hitler in the early 30s… He’ll shake up the system: in bad ways.”

We Can Hope Trump Will Do Good

But at this point, I’m afraid that we are left with Žižek’s hope. A Donald Trump presidency is not something I wanted. For the first time in about a decade, I have had serious suicidal thoughts. It’s pathetic, really; but it does indicate just how bad I think a Trump presidency will be not just for the nation but for the world. Still, I think we have to have hope. And there is one reason to have hope: Trump is a narcissist. And narcissists want to be loved.

Of course, it doesn’t look good. He has decided that Tom Price should head Health and Human Services (HHS). And I’m not sure that the crowds will stop cheering if 20 million people lose their health insurance — at least for a while. But like I said, we’ve got to have hope.

But that doesn’t mean that we should be idiots. The truth is that Trump’s total lack of experience in politics means that he will be a mark for the Republican establishment. The pick of Price to run HHS actually shows this. It is not the kind of pick of someone who is actually outside the Beltway. Tom Price could just as easily have been picked by Mike Pence.

And Trump might be different in exactly the way that we don’t want. Despite what most people think, presidents do live up to their promises. Maybe that’s how Trump will be different. When he said he would protect Medicare, maybe it meant nothing.

So I’m not suggesting that we should be too hopeful. But we’ve got to stay hopeful enough to keep fighting.

Donald Trump image by Michael Vadon via Wikimedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

You Really Don’t Know Nerds

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Nerds StereotypeFor the last couple of months, the most popular article on Frankly Curious is, This Is Not a Math Joke. I assume it is being passed around on reddit or something. I really have no idea if people like it because they agree with it or because they find it amusing that people like me exist. It is about a “math” joke that appeared on an episode of The Simpsons. And I claimed that it was not a math joke but a joke for non-nerds to laugh at what they think of as the kind of thing nerds think of as funny.

I’m more idiosyncratic than most nerds. And I’m definitely not a “science nerd.” But I’ve spent most of my life in and around science, so I can pass. And when I came upon the following bit of computer code, I was amused:

int i;main(){for(;i["]<i;++i){--i;}"];read('-'-'-',i+++"hell\
o, world!\n",'/'/'/'));}read(j,i,p){write(j/p+p,i---j,i/i);}

A Computer Science Joke

Now a true computer science nerd would probably be able to explain all of this little bit of C code. But I can’t. I do, however, understand it enough to find it hilarious. For example, it pretends to increment through i and do nothing but decrement i. That is very funny. But it’s even more funny that it doesn’t actually do that. To even start to explain what I think it does would require knowledge that 99 percent of my readers don’t have. And it would take a long time to explain.

This was one of the winners of the first (1984) International Obfuscated C Code Contest. And part of the problem with this bit of code is probably found in the README about that year’s contest, “Restrictions against machine dependent code were not in the rules in 1984.” You see, one of the great things about C is that it is basically just a micro-step above assembly language. And compilers do allow you to take a normal variable and use it as a pointer to the memory address of that value. Hence, i["]<i;++i){--i;}"]. And where exactly "]<i;++i){--i;}" would point relative to the original memory address would indeed be machine dependent. (I told you that you wouldn’t understand.)

What Nerds Are Really Like

The thing is, when I was in graduate school, people were crazy about the Obfuscated C Code Contest. It’s similar to the way that grammar geeks love the sentence, Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. This is what nerds do. Actually, this is what nerds are. Popular conceptions of nerds are based largely on what children who were into science acted like. It’s equivalent to assuming boiler techs must all punch women they like in the shoulder, because that’s what they did when they were six years old.

It’s this idea that has always made me hate films and plays about mathematicians: where’s the math?! Because, you know, for mathematicians, it really is all about the math. That’s not to say that they don’t have regular lives too. But the math is the reason anyone wrote a script. These things are like a film about Jacques Cousteau where he’s never on a boat.

All I’m asking is that society give nerds their due. I suppose that The Simpsons can be forgiven, because that particular “math” joke involved kids. But let’s be very honest: “i 8 sum pi” is what society thinks of us. And I hate society for it.

Image cropped from Belime in his Nerd Character by Churbi. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Dying Dragon

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Reverend James GertmenianIn my closing minutes, I want to address a few, more focused words to those in our congregation who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered — and to your family members and friends.

A number of you have written or spoken to me in the last few days to say how dismayed you were to see amendments against gay marriage and, in some cases, even gay civil rights, being passed by large margins in eleven states. Some of you spoke of feeling frightened, imagining, as well you might, that a new wave of hatred and fear is about to wash over you. You feel betrayed by a country that promised to value every human being equally… and perhaps even more damaging, you feel betrayed by representatives of a religion that claims love as its foundational value.

I understand your fear. Many of us here at Plymouth do.

But I want to remind you that this spasm of hatred is the lashing out of a dying dragon. This dragon, homophobia, is angry because it is dying. And it is frightened because it is dying. And in its anger and its fear it may even seem stronger than it really is. But it is dying. What is being born is the love of God which will show forth in a time in which your God-given value will be recognized by all.

In the meantime, though, I want you to know this: whatever happens anywhere else, in this place, and in this family, you need not be afraid. Even if every state in the union were to pass an amendment, these walls stand to protect you. This is a sanctuary where your lives will be celebrated, and your loves blessed, and your relationships honored. And from this place we will go out and fight together for human rights for all. That is a solemn covenant which we here make with one another. And woe to this church if it should ever break that covenant, for in so doing it will have broken its own heart.

–Reverend James Gertmenian
Quoted in Words Escape Me

Image of Reverend James Gertmenian cropped from one by the Plymouth Congregational Church from SouthwestJournal. Licensed under Fair Use.