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.

Fowler on Feasible

Posted on 17 Oct 2016 by Frank Moraes

With those who feel that the use of an ordinary word for an ordinary notion does not do justice to their vocabulary or sufficiently exhibit their cultivation, feasible is now a prime favorite. Its proper sense is “capable of being done, accomplished, or carried out.” That is, it means the same as “possible” in one of the latter’s sense, and its true function is to be used instead of “possible” where that might be ambiguous. A thunderstorm is possible (but not “feasible”). Irrigation is possible (or, indifferently, “feasible”). A counter-revolution is possible: that is, (a) one may for all we know happen, or (b) we can if we choose bring one about; but, if (b) is the meaning, “feasible” is better than “possible” because it cannot properly bear sense (a) and therefore obviates ambiguity.

The wrong use of “feasible” is that in which… it is allowed to have also the other sense of “possible,” and that of “probable.” This is described by the OED as “hardly a justifable sense etymologically, and… recognized by no dictionary.” It is however becoming very common…

—H W Fowler
Modern English Usage

Image of frontispiece of Fowler’s Modern English Usage is in the public domain.

We’re Cutting HFCs? Great! But Don’t Get Too Excited

Posted on 16 Oct 2016 by Frank Moraes

Over at Vox Brad Plumer wrote, The World Just Took One of the Biggest Steps yet to Fight Global Warming. It is about last week’s amendment to the Montreal Protocol that will limit the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). And it is good news! Just the same, don’t think that it represents some turning point in the fight against global warming. Like the Montreal Protocol itself, this is just another example of how easy it is to get good environmental deals made when it will increase (or at least not hurt) corporate profits.

People focus on carbon-dioxide, because it is the biggest direct human caused force heating the atmosphere. But it isn’t the only greenhouse gas. In fact, it isn’t the most important. Roughly half the effect of increases in carbon-dioxide are due to a feedback where the temperature rise causes there to be more water vapor in the air. That water vapor then increases the temperature more.

Replacing CFCs Was Good Business

There are other important human created greenhouse gases: methane, nitrous oxide, and the two big chlorofluorocarbon: CFC-11 and CFC-12. Well, both those last two were banned in the Montreal Protocol. And if you know the history of the ozone hole, you may have wondered why it was so easy to address that problem but not global warming. The answer is simple: the patents were running out on those chemicals and DuPont et al had some brand new patents that they could replace the CFCs with: HFCs!

But call me cynical, I can’t help but notice that 20 years after we banned the CFCs, we are now going to phase out the HFCs, which just happen to be going out of patent.

The problem is that greenhouse gases are not all created equal. For example, there is only about 1/200th as much methane in the atmosphere as there is carbon-dioxide. But methane is still important because it has about 25 times the heat trapping ability of carbon-dioxide. The CFCs and the HFCs have a far higher heat trapping potential. CFC-12 traps almost 20,000 times as much heat as carbon-dioxide. The HFCs are in the same area. So it is really good that we are getting rid of them. (See the IPCC’s Direct Global Warming Potentials for details about this stuff.)

Replacing HFCs Is Good Business

But call me cynical, I can’t help but notice that 20 years after we banned the CFCs, we are now going to phase out the HFCs, which just happen to be going out of patent. But not to worry! There is a replacement: hydrofluoroolefins! What are they? According to Wikipedia they are “‘fourth generation’ refrigerants with a thousand times lower global-warming potential than HFCs.” And again: that’s great! But these compounds are only now being developed, meaning their patents haven’t even started.

Getting rid of HFCs is necessary. I’m not putting down this recent deal. I just want people to understand that it can’t be generalized. This was a case where corporate financial interests intersected with the public good. When that happens, governments (specifically the US government) find it politically possible to make changes.

Still No Clear Way Forward

The government should be looking out for the public good. That doesn’t seem to be the way that it works. The government looks out for the corporate good. So we can applaud the ends of this amendment to the Montreal Protocol. But the means are a real problem. We aren’t going to get deals like this when it comes to the fossil fuel industry.

Image of HFC-23 cropped from one by Mario58; licensed under GFDL.

Trump’s True Patriot Quotes

Posted on 16 Oct 2016 by Frank Moraes

True Patriot If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it. We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take… I would do whatever I can for my country. —Dan Bowman, a true patriot who would do anything for his country except support its system of government.

Trump said to watch your precincts. I’m going to go, for sure. I’ll look for… well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American. I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous. —Steve Webb, a true patriot who don’t need no stinking English.

We’re heading toward North Korea, without a doubt. —Grant Reed, a true patriot who knows more about the Dunning–Kruger Effect than anyone.

If people are offended by the sexual stuff, what do they think is going to happen when Muslims come here, implement Sharia law, and start raping our women? —Joe Cecil, a true patriot who is absolutely not a racist because he didn’t say “white women.”

We’re going to have a lot of election fraud. They are having illegals vote. In some states, you don’t need voter registration to vote… We can’t have that lying bitch in the White House. —Jeannine Bell Smith, a true patriot who knows you can trust Alex Jones.

All I know is our country is not going to be a country anymore. I’ve heard people talk about a revolution. I’ve heard people talk about separation of states. I don’t even like to think about it. But I don’t think this movement is going away. We don’t have a voice anymore, and Donald Trump is giving us a voice. —Judy Wright, a true patriot who sees that whites are totally marginalized in this country (which is not going to be a country anymore).

All quotes taken from Trump’s Supporters Talk Rebellion, Assassination at His Rallies by Matt Viser and Tracy Jan. Image is an altered poster from the US Food Administration during World War I.

Why Polls Still Give Trump a 20 Percent Chance

Posted on 15 Oct 2016 by Frank Moraes

The other day, I was reading something where Nate Silver wrote (roughly), “Clinton has ‘only’ an 80 percent chance of winning the presidency.” His point with the scare quotes was that 80 percent is huge. Still, most people find the idea that Donald Trump has a 20 percent chance of winning the presidency absurd. After all, if you look at the polls, Clinton is winning everywhere. And there are only 24 days until the election. Surely, Clinton has more like a 95 percent chance of winning. Right? Wrong.

There are two major reasons why Donald Trump will never manage to get down even to a 10 percent chance of winning. Let’s start with the more obvious one: the polls could be wrong.

Polling is a science. And the people who do it professionally are really good. If you want to know how many adults support Clinton vs Trump, they can tell with with a high degree of accuracy. But no one cares how many adults support Clinton. We care about how many registered voters will actually go to the polls and vote for her. And figuring that out is really hard. As Sasha Issenberg explained of one pollster regarding the 2008 election:

It turned out that something like 87% of people who said they were likely to vote ended up voting. 70% of those who said they [were] pretty likely voted. But 55% of people who said they were unlikely to vote, and got kicked off polls because of that, ended up voting.

How Much Are Polls Off?

Is it likely that the polls are off by that much? No. But with fundamental unknowns about who will actually vote, we have to say that Trump has some chance.

The bigger reason that Trump will always have what seems like a bigger chance than seems reasonable is just that something might happen. The Trump campaign has pushed hard on Clinton’s recent illness. If she fainted on stage a week before the election, it could propel Trump into the presidency. Stranger things have happened.

Random Acts of Voting

Matt Yglesias wrote a very interesting article yesterday, This Is the Best Book to Help You Understand the Wild 2016 Campaign. The book in question is Democracy for Realists by Achen and Bartels. And what it shows is just how dependent voting patterns are to totally unrelated things.

An old example of this is how shark attacks affected the 1916 presidential election in a New Jersey coastal community. But a new example is how NFL games affect voting. So if the Pittsburgh Steelers win the Sunday before the election, it might give Clinton an extra percentage point of the vote in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, if they lose, it will likely help Trump.

And you know: that is crazy.

Things Are as Good as They Could Be

But that is the nature of elections. I believe in democracy, but only because I don’t know of any system that is even as good, much less better. What’s important to know is that we really don’t know what’s going to happen. And that is terrifying. Donald Trump even having a one percent chance of becoming president is terrifying.

What’s important to remember is that Hillary Clinton is doing as well in this election as could possibly be expected. She almost certainly will be our next president. But there are so many things that could happen that we just can’t say. I’ll be worrying until the votes are counted.

Donald Trump image via Wikimedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Hillary Clinton by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Odd Words: Bruit

Posted on 15 Oct 2016 by Frank Moraes

Lots of interesting words on page 33 of The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words: Revised Edition. Today, we have a cool little verb: bruit.

Picking Bruit

I’ve taken a different approach today in picking a word. I found an example sentence first. This is often the most time consuming part of the whole exercise. For example, I really wanted to use the word “brulé” today. It means “a forest region destroyed by fire.” But there are so many people with that last name that finding the word in a sentence was difficult. Actually, “bruit” turned out to be too; but I found something that worked out well just as I was about to give up.

I thought it was interesting that “bulimia” was in the dictionary. This edition of the book was published in 1985. That’s just two years after Karen Carpenter died. But to stop thinking about that, you can listen to “Superstar” by The Carpenters. It’s not the best version. But it does have a naiveté that works for it and makes it special.

A word that brought back a lot of memories was “buccal,” which describes something related the cheek. One doesn’t normally need such a word, but in a dentist office, it is critically important.

But on to bruit:

Bruit verb \brüt\

1. to spread a rumor

Date: early 15th century (but as a noun).

Origin: late Middle English from Old French bruire meaning “to roar.”

Example: Sleazy headlines bruit about that Labine was slain in a gangster’s love nest. —Kenneth Tucker (Eliot Ness and the Untouchables: The Historical Reality and the Film and Television Depictions)

Image cropped from Rumors by MethodShop.com; licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Return to Glennascaul and the Vanishing Hitchhiker

Posted on 14 Oct 2016 by Frank Moraes

Right now in my free time, I am working on a play called, “This Actually Happened to my Sister’s Best Friend’s Cousin.” I generally refer to it simply as, “The folklore play.” It is structured around a couple in a parked car where he is telling her “ghost stories” he has learned in folklore class. One of those stories is the Vanishing Hitchhiker.

Vanishing Hitchhiker

There are endless versions of it but it always has the same elements: the narrator picks up a hitchhiker. At some point, the hitchhiker vanishes. In trying to find them, the narrator finds that the hitchhiker was a ghost. In the play, I use the version where the hitchhiker leaves behind a book. The narrator takes it to the house where the hitchhiker claimed to be going. Once there, he meets the hitchhiker’s father who take the book and returns it to the open slot in a book shelf.

It’s a perfect story. Folklore tends to be that way because it gets refined in the millions of tellings of it. So it isn’t surprising that many writers have grabbed onto it. I’m personally interested in it as folklore in my work. Just the same, having first heard the story when I was perhaps only eight, having heard and read it numerous times in numerous forms since, and having worked with it, I still get chills when I think about it. It’s wonderfully spooky.

Return to Glennascaul

It occurred to me the other day that years ago I had seen a short film with Orson Welles that involved the Vanishing Hitchhiker. So I went looking and I found it, Return to Glennascaul. Before I present it, I want to note that it is produced by Micheál MacLiammóir and written & directed by Hilton Edwards. Most people don’t know them, but they are legends. They founded the Gate Theatre in Dublin, and ran it their whole lives. They are, however, best know for giving Welles his first professional acting work.

Before I discuss it, it is worth watching. It’s just 22 minutes long.

What’s Bad

As cinema, it isn’t great. I assume that Hilton Edwards was a great theater director. The success of the Gate Theatre would indicate this. And the film is shot very much the way that someone who thinks in terms of the theater would shoot it. It’s almost all medium-long shots. And it bugs me! The film would be so much more engaging with some close-ups. Also, the editing wouldn’t be so stilted. The film was made in 1951, and it looks hardly more advanced than D W Griffith’s 1911 short, What Shall We Do with Our Old?

What’s Good

Just the same, it is really engaging. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that Hilton gets good performances out of his actors. Another is that the base material is irresistible. But perhaps most of all, Hilton’s screenplay is wonderful. Let me mention a few things that I think are clever.

Return to Glennascaul is a double version of the Vanishing Hitchhiker. Hilton manages this by making it a double frame story: Orson Welles tells the story of picking up a hitchhiker who tells him the vanishing hitchhiker story. The story is also highly meta. Orson Welles is supposedly Orson Welles. This allows for two rather good jokes — especially the ending. And it is the ending that really does cap the story and send the viewer off in exactly the right frame of mind.

I’m pleased to find Return to Glennascaul again. It certainly isn’t a great film. But it is a most enjoyable one — and a fine take on the Vanishing Hitchhiker.

Image cropped and distorted from one at Pixabay. It is in the public domain.

Bad Biography: Shakespeare Edition

Posted on 14 Oct 2016 by Frank Moraes

Gary Taylor - Bad Biography - Shakespeare Why do people read a biography of Shakespeare? Either as a substitute for or as a supplement to a reading of his work. I may read about Byron or Orton because the life itself is both well-documented and well worth watching; but Shakespeare’s life is neither. How he behaved, what he endured, who he knew, where he went — such information does not expand or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works — various and ambiguous as they are — tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far more often, we must apply our pre-fabricated theories about the world and the human in order to interpret the artifacts and ambifacts before us.

So why write about the life, instead of the works? The life is a cover for an interpretation of the works; it gives the pretence of objectivity and the pleasure of narrative to a few hundred pages of critical fiat. Russell Fraser’s Shakespeare: The Later Years contains 88 pages of notes (the text itself is only 280 pages); but the overwhelming majority are simply line-references to phrases culled from Shakespeare’s plays and poems, verbal glitter with which Fraser decorates his own rococo prose. Some pages of notes (290, 296, 300 …) consist entirely of such citations, and some pages of text consist largely of such quotations (pages 50 to 57, for instance, contain 80).

This is the second half of a two-part biography; Young Shakespeare, published in 1988, is now in paperback, and we can probably look forward to a boxed set, which ambitious grandparents will bestow upon thousands of helpless teenagers. Both volumes give the impression of serious documentation, and quite a few people have taken the biography as a serious piece of scholarship. But Fraser’s apparatus tells you almost nothing that you could not find yourself, assisted merely by a concordance, and the same is true of Fraser’s text, a recitation of numbingly conventional interpretations of the works, dangling from a thin, dirty-from-overuse string of biography. For anyone at all familiar with this subject or this period, having to read both volumes is like being forced to eat, hour after hour, mouthful after mouthful of stale cake.

The moral — or premise — of Fraser’s story is that Shakespeare is the greatest: “he had no rivals, ancient or modern.” Admirers of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe or anyone else, see ye the error of your ways, and repent: abandon your idols, and worship the one true god. Fraser devotes three and a half pages (pages 170-74) to the whole of Jacobean drama, brusquely dismissing Webster and Jonson and Ford, not even mentioning Middleton — except to dismiss The Revenger’s Tragedy, which he continues to misattribute to Tourneur — apparently as uninterested in the last two decades of textual scholarship as he is in the first two decades of 17th-century drama. Shakespeare stands alone. Good monotheism, but bad biography.

What, in the gospel according to St Fraser, makes Shakespeare so great? He is unfailingly impartial. He has no opinions, and expresses them beautifully. St Fraser, by contrast, is full of opinions, which unassisted readers will often have difficulty distinguishing from facts. On page three alone, he asserts, without qualification, that The Comedy of Errors was Shakespeare’s “first attempt at comedy,” that three of his first plays were printed by “pirate publishers,” that by 1594 Shakespeare was already known for “kingly roles and old man’s roles.” The first claim is at best debatable, the other two simply wrong.

—Gary Taylor
Ambifacts

Image cropped from one at Florida State University. Licensed under Fair Use.

Who Killed the USFL? Donald Trump

Posted on 13 Oct 2016 by Frank Moraes

When I recently read David Cay Johnston’s excellent new book, The Making of Donald Trump, I learned about his involvement in the United States Football League or, as it is normally referred to, the USFL. I did know that Trump had something to do with the league, but not much else. I did not know that he was likely the single biggest reason for the failure of the league.

According to Johnston, the USFL was formed largely to appeal to the vanity of rich men. It was a way for rich men who weren’t rich enough to buy into the NFL to have their own professional football teams. But that doesn’t mean that the project itself wasn’t financially viable. The USFL was set up to play in the spring. It didn’t directly compete with the NFL. So for people who just couldn’t get enough football, it was there. Also, ticket prices were cheaper, so that was good. Games averaged about 25,000 people in attendance in the first year. That’s shockingly good.

What’s more, the league was formed at roughly the same time as ESPN. So they were able to get television contracts worth millions. There seems to me no doubt that had the USFL taken things slowly as it was originally conceived, it would either now be huge or have merged with the NFL. Instead, the league existed for only three seasons.

This is shocking given that the first season had been so good and the future looked so bright at that point. There was just one problem: Donald Trump bought one of the teams, the New Jersey Generals, after the first season. It’s amazing to me that so many people think Trump is good at business. As most people around here know: I don’t think that much of supposed business acumen in general. I think there really are only two things: competent management (which can easily be learned) and dumb luck. Trump has none of former.

Trump started his ownership as you might imagine. He immediately crushed the salary cap. He wasn’t the first to cross it but he really accelerated it, making what should have been a conservative business (at that point anyway) into a high risk gambit. At first, this helped attendance. And certainly having Trump around didn’t hurt the profile of the USFL. But by the third season, some teams were losing money.

This provided a great opportunity for Trump. You see, he wasn’t interested in the USFL. He later claimed that it would always have been “small potatoes.” He appears to have only been interested in using it to get into the NFL. So he convinced a number of team owners to sue the NFL. They claimed that the USFL wanted to play in the fall and that they couldn’t because the NFL had them frozen out because it had a lock on all the television contracts.

So they were making an antitrust case against the NFL. And they won! The jury claimed that the NFL did indeed have a monopoly. And they awarded the USFL $1 in damages. That’s not a typo. Apparently, the jury wasn’t too happy about the case. And when the USFL appealed the award, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it and indicated that it knew the case was just a cheap attempt to use the courts to get into the NFL without having to earn it.

Note: such an antitrust case might have worked after 10 or 15 years when the USFL was bringing in 60,000 in attendance. But this was a case where the league had just started. As it was, attendance went up in the second season, but it was back down to where it started in the third season. So there is the answer to question in the headline: Donald Trump killed the USFL.

USFL image taken from Wikipedia. Licensed under Fair Use.

Quantifying the Cost of the War on Drugs

Posted on 13 Oct 2016 by Frank Moraes

The War on Drugs may have failed, but it certainly hasn’t ended: every 25 seconds in the US, someone is arrested for drug possession.

Arrests for the possession and personal use of drugs are boosting the ranks of the incarcerated at astonishing rates — with 137,000 people behind bars for drugs on any given day, and 1.25 million every year. Possession of even tiny quantities of illicit drugs is criminalized in every state, a felony in most, and the No 1 cause of all arrests nationwide. And while marijuana is now legal in a handful of states and decriminalized in others, in 2015 police nationwide made over 547,000 arrests for simple marijuana possession — more than for all categories of violent crime combined. These arrests are feeding people into a criminal justice system that’s rife with inefficiencies, abuse, and racism, and compounding drug users’ substance abuse with the lifelong impact of a criminal record.

The staggering numbers, detailed in a report released today by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, shed new light on the colossal impact of the criminalization of drug use, as well as on the discriminatory impact of its enforcement. These laws have done nothing to stem the public health problem of drug addiction and in the process have destroyed countless lives and cost incalculable amounts of public resources in arrests, prosecution, and incarceration, the report charges.

—Alice Speri
Report: Every 25 Seconds, Cops Arrest Someone for Drug Possession

Image of Alice Speri cropped from her photo at The Intercept. Licensed under Fair Use.

Alfred Hitchcock and the Joke of Film Criticism

Posted on 12 Oct 2016 by Frank Moraes

I’ve watched two Alfred Hitchcock films this last week: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Foreign Correspondent (1940). In the past, I’ve said that Hitchcock was a great genre filmmaker. I think that is a case where my friends are right: I do overuse superlatives. Watching both of these films was depressing.

Foreign Correspondent is the better of the two. It can be forgiven its propagandistic character. But in terms of pure cinema, it’s boring. D W Griffith was doing far more interesting work 25 years earlier. And that’s to say nothing of Sergei Eisenstein. It’s a by-the-numbers directorial job. But overall, the film reminded me of nothing so much as what Howard Hawks would produce if he lacked the talent and care. And as much as I love Hawks’ work, film critics (rightly) don’t pick over his films for deep meanings.

The Man Who Knew Too Much is typical of Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s and 1960s. I think it is fine to use rear projection. But I can’t think of a major filmmaker who used it so obsessively and so badly. Every time it is used, it pulls me out of the story. And that’s especially true here where much of the early second unit work from Morocco is gorgeous. But it doesn’t too much matter because the story itself is so anemic, it could almost be an episode of Leave It to Beaver.

Greatest Film Ever

But it was Foreign Correspondent that really got me thinking. It was made less than a year before Citizen Kane and the contrast could not be more stark. Whereas Correspondent told an utterly predictable story in a totally conventional way, Kane presented a modern tragedy if a revolutionary way.

This turn toward thinking of Alfred Hitchcock as a great film director has everything to do with fetish made of him by the French New Wave.

But okay, Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever blah, blah, blah. That’s always been a bit hard to stomach, but sure: Kane is a spectacular film. But where does this business of it being the “best” film come from? It’s a silly idea, so it should surprise no one that it comes from polling of film critics. It comes specifically from Sight & Sound magazine. Since 1952, they’ve been asking every ten years.

In 1952, Citizen Kane didn’t even make the list. The film was, of course, hugely influential among filmmakers. But critics had not yet been told that they should admire the film. It wasn’t until the 1962 poll that Kane showed up on the list at all — and at number one no less. It stayed there until the 2012, when it dropped to number two.

Alfred Hitchcock Becomes “Great”

What was the new greatest film ever made? Vertigo. That’s right: not only an Alfred Hitchcock film, but not even one of his better films. But I guess the critic community had to pick some Alfred Hitchcock film. And it couldn’t be an obvious one like Psycho. So why not Vertigo? It works as well as any other.

The interesting thing is that the critics who would now have us believe that Vertigo is the greatest film ever are only doing so because they’ve been taught to. Hitchcock didn’t even show up on the list until the 1982 poll, when Vertigo tied for 7th place with two vastly superior films: Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.

This turn toward thinking of Alfred Hitchcock as a great film director has everything to do with the fetish made of him by the French New Wave. And the modern critics just can’t get past that. They’ve all read Hitchcock/Truffaut. François Truffaut thought Hitchcock was great, so not only is Hitchcock great, but everything he touched is a masterpiece. It’s just sad. Of course, the same thing happened to Welles. But at least Welles was a brilliant and important filmmaker. The more important point is that it’s just not quite so cool anymore to obsess about him. Trust me: in 2032, Vertigo will not top the Sight & Sound list.

Where Are the Greats?

What’s absurd is that nowhere on the list is anything by Griffith (although Intolerance was number five in 1952). Eisenstein suddenly disappeared in 2012. That’s not to say that the 2012 list is a bad one. It’s a list that contains nine great films. And at the top of list is an odd, moderately entertaining film by Alfred Hitchcock. It shows what a joke film critics are.

For the record, I think The Searchers is an odd film to pick for John Ford. And there are lots of Fellini films I like more than 8½. For that matter, many of these films are odd selections. But they are all important films — all except for Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock was not an important director.

Image of Alfred Hitchcock taken from Wikipedia. It is in the public domain.

Clarinet Practice, Mental Health, and Life’s Meaning

Posted on 12 Oct 2016 by Frank Moraes

I hope they let me practice the clarinet.

As I write this, it is Tuesday night. And I can’t bear to write anything coherent — certainly not an Odd Words post. I’m just not up to that kind of thinking. So: rant.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” As you may recall, Bartleby is really good at his job. The narrator describes how even with Bartleby’s refusal to do the copy checking that is critical to their profession, his work is pretty much perfect. This is part of why the narrator doesn’t get rid of Bartleby earlier.

I feel a lot like Bartleby: useful but fundamentally out of sync with the world. And I imagine that the only end for me is starving to death in some loony bin.

Or let’s take a more modern reference: Rantés in Man Facing Southeast. In that case, I effectively get murdered. I like that idea more.

Meaning Beyond Clarinet Practice

What have you got for me universe?! Will I be destroyed by my own dysfunction or by forcing someone to murder me because of my own dysfunction?

I realize: to most people these seem pretty much the same. But Rantés strikes me as heroic whereas Bartleby is just tragic.

It seems to be that I deserve the tragic but I wish for the heroic.

And it is doubtless a good sign that I still wish. But it has gotten to the point where the wish is vague. What is the point of all this?

I’ve discussed Sudoku Meaning before. That’s the kind of meaning one gets from being pleasantly occupied. I’ve put it down in the past. But I have the terrible feeling that there is nothing else.

So I imagine my end in the only way that makes sense. The only fundamental meaning in life is death. That’s the only real meaning life has to offer.

But as I work my way to death in the mental hospital, I hope they will let me practice the clarinet.

Image taken from Pixabay. It is in the public domain.

Paul Ryan Wasn’t Helping Trump Anyway

Posted on 11 Oct 2016 by Frank Moraes

The New York Times reported what is supposed to be big news, Paul Ryan Won’t Defend Donald Trump, Upsetting Trump and GOP Hard-Liners. It starts with the absurd claim, “House Speaker Paul D Ryan dealt a hammer blow to Donald J Trump’s presidential candidacy Monday, dashing any remaining semblance of party unity and inviting fierce backlash from his own caucus by announcing that he would no longer defend Mr Trump’s candidacy.” How is this a hammer blow?

Is Ryan a big Trump surrogate? No. Their relationship has been, at best, strained. It took him until June to endorse Trump’s candidacy. And then Trump paid him back by waiting until August to finally endorsed Paul Ryan’s re-election. And when he did so, Paul Ryan didn’t even show up.

Paul Ryan Hasn’t Been Good for Trump

Ryan has been more well known for things like calling on Trump to release his taxes. And calling a Trump statement “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” And most recently releasing a statement saying, “I am sickened by what I heard today.”

So again: where is the hammer blow? All that has happened is that Paul Ryan isn’t going to campaign for Trump for the next four weeks. Instead, he’s going to campaign for down-ballot candidates. But you know: that’s the same thing. Trump supporters don’t want to see Ryan at Trump’s rallies anyway. I suppose that more reasonable Republicans (ones that don’t show up to Trump rallies) might see Ryan with Trump and feel more comfortable voting for him. But after last Friday’s video? And what seems likely to be more embarrassments to come? I just don’t see Trump being harmed by this. It could even help him.

Now Paul Ryan Could Help Trump

So this is not going to change things for Trump. Even with a clear commitment to Trump, I don’t think Ryan really helps.

One way it could help Trump is by stopping Paul Ryan from having to respond to every new Trump outrage. This is where the “defend” comes from in the headline. So let’s suppose that the police arrest Trump when they find the skeletons of dozens of adolescent boys buried at Mar-a-Lago. Paul Ryan won’t need to demand an investigation. He won’t need to say that it’s a textbook case of pedophilic serial killing. He won’t be required to release a statement about how sickened he is. Instead, Paul Ryan can say, “I told you: I’m not defending Donald J Trump anymore!”

This whole article in The New York Times is typical of the press thinking things are important because the press thinks they are important. Paul Ryan certainly has maintained a high approval rating among Republicans. But we certainly haven’t seen any polls recently. The last one I could find was from back in July when he had an approval rating of 71 percent. But note: Donald Trump had an approval rating of 65 percent. And here’s the key: what do Republicans really know about Paul Ryan?

Ryan’s Soft Support

I think this is key. Paul Ryan knows that his support among Republicans is soft. That’s why he won’t come out and rescind his endorsement. He also knows that his grip on the House speakership is loose. According to Vox, after leaving the conference call yesterday morning where he laid out his decision, “He had to get back on the call to address accusations that he was abandoning the nominee.”

So this is not going to change things for Trump. Even with a clear commitment to Trump, I don’t think Ryan really helps. So this is really nothing to Trump.

What Paul Ryan Cares About

But it is a big deal to Ryan. In the call yesterday morning, Ryan reportedly said, “You [Republican House members] all need to do what’s best for you in your district.” That’s all that Ryan is doing. As Fortune noted, “Ryan’s message appeared to signal his disbelief in Trump’s ability to turn the campaign around with four weeks until election day.” This is all tax cuts and deregulation. If Ryan thought Trump would win, he wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Frankly Curious

Everything interesting for everyone interesting…

Author Archives: Frank Moraes