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.

Kumbaya Democratic Party!

Posted on 12 Jul 2016 by Frank Moraes

Bernie Sanders Camps I have come here today not to talk about the past but to focus on the future. That future will be shaped more by what happens on November 8 in voting booths across our nation than by any other event in the world. I have come here to make it as clear as possible as to why I am endorsing Hillary Clinton and why she must become our next president.

During the last year I had the extraordinary opportunity to speak to more than 1.4 million Americans at rallies in almost every state in this country. I was also able to meet with many thousands of other people at smaller gatherings. And the profound lesson that I have learned from all of that is that this campaign is not really about Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump, or Bernie Sanders, or any other candidate who sought the presidency. This campaign is about the needs of the American people and addressing the very serious crises that we face. And there is no doubt in my mind that, as we head into November, Hillary Clinton is far and away the best candidate to do that…

In these stressful times for our country, this election must be about bringing our people together, not dividing us up. While Donald Trump is busy insulting Mexicans, Muslims, women, African Americans and veterans, Hillary Clinton understands that our diversity is one of our greatest strengths. Yes. We become stronger when black and white, Latino, Asian American, Native American — all of us — stand together. Yes. We become stronger when men and women, young and old, gay and straight, native born and immigrant fight to rid this country of all forms of bigotry.

It is no secret that Hillary Clinton and I disagree on a number of issues. That’s what this campaign has been about. That’s what democracy is about. But I am happy to tell you that at the Democratic Platform Committee which ended Sunday night in Orlando, there was a significant coming together between the two campaigns and we produced, by far, the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party. Our job now is to see that platform implemented by a Democratic Senate, a Democratic House, and a Hillary Clinton president — and I am going to do everything I can to make that happen.

I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years. I remember her as a great first lady who broke precedent in terms of the role that a first lady was supposed to play as she helped lead the fight for universal health care. I served with her in the United States Senate and know her as a fierce advocate for the rights of children.

Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president and I am proud to stand with her here today.

—Bernie Sanders
Speech Endorsing Hillary Clinton

The Meaning of Costello’s Moral Collage “Motel Matches”

Posted on 12 Jul 2016 by Frank Moraes

I got a line from a song stuck in my mind, “I struck it lucky with motel matches.” Elvis Costello’s early work was filled with this kind of word play. But usually, it is more of the straight pun variety, like in “The Only Flame in Town” where he sings, “You’d be less tender and more tinder” — a pun that is almost impossible to get unless you have a lyric sheet or listen to the song a hundred times. But it got me thinking about the meaning of “Motel Matches” that this clever line comes from.

It’s a fascinating line. The set up line is typically evocative, at least for men of my age, “Boys everywhere, fumbling with the catches.” The truth is, I really don’t know: are bras still the same? Can a man’s sexual experience still be gauged by how effortlessly he determines if the clasp is in the front or back? Regardless, that line sums up the awkwardness of youthful sex. And strangely, I find that I can remember early sexual encounters far more than later ones.

“Motel Matches” Is Incoherent

The song itself is typical of Costello in making very little sense. According to Costello, on his first American tour, he was told that he was staying in the motel room where Sam Cooke was murdered. Sam Cooke was shot at a Los Angeles motel, but not in a room. Although there is much that isn’t known, it’s pretty clear to me that he was murdered by the motel manager in her office. Regardless, this little lie or joke told to Costello explains the inexplicable first line, “Somewhere in the distance I can hear ‘Who Shot Sam?'”

At no point does he come back to this. The song seems to be more or less about one-night stands. I’ve always heard that clearly in the lines, “And you know what I’ll do; When the light outside changes from red to blue.” If you have spent much time in motels, you know that outside, it is always kind of red because of car tail-lights and neon signs. And what he will do, which she knows, is leave in the morning.

More than most artists, I don’t think much of what Costello himself thinks of the meaning of his songs. A lyric, sure. And clear songs like “Ship Building” and “Let Him Dangle.” But what is “Motel Matches” if not a kind of indictment of men never getting past their teen years trying to remove bras from their girlfriends. There is a strong moral repugnancy toward sex in the British popular music of that period — a feeling of great shame. And that’s very clear in a lot of Costello’s work like “Watching the Detectives” and “Pump It Up.”

The Meaning of “Motel Matches”

So the meaning of the song, if “meaning” is the right word, is that it is a kind of fever dream of sexual humiliation. Sam Cooke, after all, was murdered while almost completely naked — I assume he was killed because of a sexual act that went wrong for one reason or another. And ultimately, what is art but a great cry for help? Costello combines Cooke’s murder, his own one-night stand, and the memory of awkward youthful sex and creates a kind of collage that seems more like something you would say to a priest in a confessional.

“Giving you away like motel matches.” That’s the refrain. That’s Elvis Costello at 25 on the subject women. It’s heartbreaking, which may be why the song woks so well despite never being able to get to the truth but rather just dance around it. “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned… original sin.”

Album cover licensed under Fair use, via Wikpedia.

Noam Chomsky on Hillary Clinton

Posted on 11 Jul 2016 by Frank Moraes

Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.
The exclusive consequence of the act of voting in 2016 will be (if in a contested “swing state”) to marginally increase or decrease the chance of one of the major party candidates winning.
One of these candidates, Trump, denies the existence of global warming, calls for increasing use of fossil fuels, dismantling of environmental regulations, and refuses assistance to India and other developing nations as called for in the Paris agreement, the combination of which could, in four years, take us to a catastrophic tipping point. Trump has also pledged to deport 11 million Mexican immigrants, offered to provide for the defense of supporters who have assaulted African American protesters at his rallies, stated his “openness to using nuclear weapons,” supports a ban on Muslims entering the US, and regards “the police in this country as absolutely mistreated and misunderstood” while having “done an unbelievable job of keeping law and order.” Trump has also pledged to increase military spending while cutting taxes on the rich, hence shredding what remains of the social welfare “safety net” despite pretenses.
The suffering which these and other similarly extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalized and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency.
[The previous point] should constitute sufficient basis to voting for Clinton where a vote is potentially consequential — namely, in a contested, “swing” state.
However, the left should also recognize that, should Trump win based on its failure to support Clinton, it will repeatedly face the accusation (based in fact), that it lacks concern for those sure to be most victimized by a Trump administration.
Often this charge will emanate from establishment operatives who will use it as a bad faith justification for defeating challenges to corporate hegemony either in the Democratic Party or outside of it. They will ensure that it will be widely circulated in mainstream media channels with the result that many of those who would otherwise be sympathetic to a left challenge will find it a convincing reason to maintain their ties with the political establishment rather than breaking with it, as they must.
Conclusion: by dismissing a “lesser evil” electoral logic and thereby increasing the potential for Clinton’s defeat the left will undermine what should be at the core of what it claims to be attempting to achieve.

—Noam Chomsky
An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting)

Image of Noam Chomsky cropped from one by Duncan Rawlinson, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Just Deserts or Just Desserts

Posted on 11 Jul 2016 by Frank Moraes

Just Desserts Writing is unnatural for humans. What we are good at is speaking. And that is why we so often get messed up when writing and why there is a whole subculture of people who get their kicks out of noticing errors. Some people thrill to see a self-published book that starts with a “forward” rather than a “foreword.” In matters grammatical, I feel very much the way I do in the Democratic primary: I do take a side, but I’m very sympathetic to the other side. Let us consider, for example, the phrase “just deserts” — meaning deserved consequences.

Most people think the phrase is spelled “just desserts.” And why not?! That is, you may have notice, the way it is pronounced! And it makes sense. If you eat all your dinner, you justly get dessert and if you don’t, you justly get nothing. This is one of the great charms of language. There are so many instances like this. My favorite example is the phrase “beat red.” It is supposed to be “beet red” — in reference to the root vegetable. But “beat red” makes its own sense, given that a good beating will tend to turn the skin beet red. And given the term is used almost exclusively to describe the color of a human face, “beat red” really does make more sense.

Humans are wonderful at this kind of thing. I even think of humans as little more than pattern matching machines. Show a human something meaningless, and they will find meaning in it. When I was a young child, it bothered me that we used BC and AD for dates. Okay, BC stood for “Before Christ.” But what’s with AD? I asked a lot of adults, and the response was always pretty much the same: a shrugg of the shoulders and the question, “After dead?” Well, it’s actually just Latin, anno Domini — year of God. But we try!

The Two Deserts

So what’s up with “just deserts”? Well, when the word “desert” entered the English language around the 13th century, it did it in two ways. First, there is the desert that we all know from nature shows, but generally try to avoid. It comes from the Latin word desertum, which means roughly wilderness. And it comes from an earlier Latin word deserere, which means leave. It is where we get the soft e-sound as in “edible.”

The other “desert” comes from the Anglo-French word deservir — or the past participle of it. Regardless, it means deserve. And it is from this Anglo-French word that we get the soft-i sound as in “dessert.” And thus, “just deserts” sounds exactly like “just desserts.” Merriam-Webster defines this version of “desert” as “the quality or fact of meriting reward or punishment.” I’m sure it would be marked “archaic” if it weren’t for a bunch of moral philosophers and the single construction “just deserts.”

Just Deserts or Just Desserts, That Is the Question!

The phrase creates a bit of a problem in writing. It is about as likely to be spelled one way as the other. And I dare say that if you asked one hundred reasonably literate people to spell the phrase, 90 of them would spell it “just desserts.” If you spell it that way in your writing, you are wrong historically. That is not the way the phrase has been spelled and I dare say there is no style guide that would accept it. On the other hand, if you spell it “just deserts” you come off as a bit of a prig.

Luckily, there’s really no reason to use it. “He got what he deserved” works as well as, “He got his just deserts.” And there’s nothing terribly colorful about the phrase. But if you have to use it, I’d stick with history, and use “just deserts.” But if you want to use “just desserts,” I completely understand.

Death Valley image cropped from one taken by “Riley.” Cupcake image cropped from one taken by Unsplash. Both are in the public domain.

The Truth About the GOP Can No Longer Be Denied

Posted on 10 Jul 2016 by Frank Moraes

Brian Beutler Sometimes it’s difficult to conjure a clear memory of US political life before Donald Trump. But one of its most salient oddities was that the establishment elite considered it crass (if not outright slanderous) to suggest, in ideologically mixed company, that only one of the two major parties drew upon the support of bigots for political power.

In quarters where racism wasn’t denied or diminished, it was regarded as a diffuse problem, delinked in most ways from the biggest political flash points of the day. Homophobia, while more identifiably political, was frequently characterized as misunderstood religiosity, or as an eroding anachronism of well-meaning but old-fashioned geriatrics. Vitriol toward Mexican immigrants was interpreted as a response to labor competition from unskilled, undocumented workers — an outgrowth of zero-sum economics rather than of xenophobia.

This was true until about a year ago. That’s when Trump, who makes a habit of repurposing neo-Nazi propaganda for messaging on social media, began his march to the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, and Occam’s razor finally sliced through the more strained explanations.

—Brian Beutler
Conservatives’ Silence After Trump’s Anti-Semitic Attack Is a Bad Omen

Image of Brian Beutler licensed under Fair Use.

Ann Coulter Christians and Easy Salvation

Posted on 10 Jul 2016 by Frank Moraes

Ann Coulter Christians Almost ten years ago, Ann Coulter was on The Big Idea and she got into trouble for saying, “We just want Jews to be perfected.” In that sentence, “we” means Christians. It is a bigoted thing to say and so entirely typical of Ann Coulter’s pointedly offensive and submental act that you may wonder why I’m bringing it up. Well, it’s what she said afterwards that really struck me. And the fact that she was not burned in effigy by Christians says a lot of really bad things about American Christians.

To justify her statement (which doesn’t really mean anything — so whatever), she added, “That is what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express. You have to obey laws. We know we’re all sinners…” She gets to clarify her remark later and then just makes matters worse. What she was getting at was that in the old testament, God was always angry at the Jews because they kept screwing up. But then God came up with this one weird trick that made it all better! This is what I call Christianity on the cheap. And those who practice it should rightly be called Ann Coulter Christians.

The Great Pumpkin and the Ann Coulter Christians

It’s funny that Charles M Schulz was raised Christian and maintained his faith far into adulthood. You see this quite clearly in A Charlie Brown Christmas. But less than a year later, he created the perfect parody of American Christianity in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. In that show, Linus is like all the Ann Coulter Christians. If only he believes sincerely in this mythical being, he will be rewarded. His pumpkin patch has to be sincere and so does he. But nothing else is required.

Ann Coulter — and the millions of Christians just like her — believes she can commit adultery, bear false witness, actively encourage murder. It doesn’t matter! She knows that one weird trick. Just believe! God will reward her just because she believes the fables she was told as a child. I am personally offended for the hundreds of millions of Christians over the centuries who actually took their religion seriously.

There is an aspect of Christianty of allowing Jesus into your heart. But this was not meant to be the whole deal. And certainly the loony morphing of this into a “personal relationship” with God has effectively destroyed the religion for millions. It is the height of hubris. God as pal?! Whatever.

Is Jesus in Ann Coulter’s Heart?!

But could anyone mistake Ann Coulter as someone who had allowed Jesus into her heart? If you slapped her on the right cheek, who she offer her left to you? Of course not! She’d take one of her bony hands and smash you in the face. And I’m fine with that. But then, I don’t pretend to be a Christian.

It’s funny, because I was listening to a lecture by Terry Eagleton yesterday. It wasn’t about Christianity, but it touched on it. Whenever he talks about Christianity, I find it appealing. That’s generally true when I hear serious people discuss the religion. The problem is that there are so few of them. When I see Ann Coulter Christians, it just makes me sad.

I’ve been strongly effected by this quote from a Muslim scholar in the middle ages:

If one could combine Arabic faith and Jewish intelligence, with an Iraqi education, Christian conduct, Greek knowledge, Indian mysticism, and a Sufi way of life, this would be the perfection of humanity.

Yes, Christian conduct. Because, I assume, the religion meant something to them. Instead, I’m inundated with with the Ann Coulter Christians who think that just to believe in Jesus gives them license to be some of the worst people on the Earth.

Image of Ann Coulter by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia.

American Charity… For the Financial Industry!

Posted on 09 Jul 2016 by Frank Moraes

American Charity Most Americans have never heard of donor-advised funds and would be surprised to learn that, measured in donated dollars, the second-most-popular “charity” in 2015 (just behind the United Way) was not the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, or Harvard or other universities. It was Fidelity Charitable, an organization created and serviced by Fidelity Investments for the purpose of holding charitable donations. Fidelity Charitable acts as a middleman, attracting its customers’ charitable donations and managing them in separate client accounts. Money in such donor-advised funds is invested and held until the clients give instructions (“advise”) about distributions to operating charities.

Because of a 1991 IRS ruling obtained by Fidelity (and similar rulings obtained by other commercially sponsored DAFs), clients get the same tax benefits when they transfer property to their donor-advised funds that they would get by making outright contributions to a museum, soup kitchen, university, or any other federally recognized charity. But no deadline is imposed for the eventual distribution of these funds to an operating charity. If a donor fails to distribute the account during her lifetime, she can pass on the privilege of making distributions to her children or grandchildren or anyone else she chooses. The effect of these rules is that assets that have been given the tax benefits of charitable donations can be held in a DAF for decades or even centuries, all the while earning management fees for the financial institutions managing the funds, and producing no social value.

—Lewis Cullman and Ray Madoff
The Undermining of American Charity

Besides and Also and the Redundant in Writing

Posted on 09 Jul 2016 by Frank Moraes

William Faulkner - Verbose, Not Redundant Okay, I rail against grammar pedants around here a lot. But there is something that drives me crazy. Here’s an example, “Besides medical care, Shady Brooks also offers a free euthanasia program.” But I’ll bet that almost no one sees the problem with this sentence. Certainly the many professional writers I work with don’t — despite my explicitly telling them about it. The problem is that “also” is redundant.

Once you say “besides” you make concrete that there is something else. So you could write, “Besides medical care, Shady Brooks offers a free euthanasia program.” Or you could write, “Shady Brooks also offers a free euthanasia program.” With the original construction, you are smoothly, but no less annoyingly writing, “Shady Brooks offers other things besides medical care. Besides medical care, Shady Brooks provides a free euthanasia program.” It makes me long for my very own euthanasia program.

From Repeated to Redundant

Now, I get it. Writing is about more than simple clarity. And the sound of the language is really important. But we often train ourselves to like the sound of noise. That is what that redundant “also” is. I assume that it, like so much else that is annoying in the language, comes from advertising. Repetition is highly effective in advertising and rhetoric. “How much would you pay for this knife? Don’t answer yet!”

There is a well known phenomenon in chess. A new player will improve over a period of time and then plateau. In fact, I remember reading a book about this phenomenon and how to break out of it. This sort of thing is true of almost everything. I think it is more a matter of interest than anything. Like me on the guitar. I’m fine with how well I play. I don’t actively work to improve anymore. But for whatever a reason, I have never found that I plateaued as a writer. I’m constantly learning new thing and improving.

Writing Better

But so much of writing is simply a matter of pulling out the crap — the redundant stuff. And this doesn’t mean that everyone needs to write like Hemingway and Steinbeck. Faulkner is a wordy writer, but I task you with finding a redundant word in The Sound and the Fury. I find that day by day I write less and less. When we start as writers, our work is filled with literary tics because we are just talking on the page. But slowly, we notice and expunge them.

It’s not my intention to look down on any writer. My own writing is highly intuitive. Most of the time, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. For me, writing is more about hearing than grammar. In college, music majors spend their first two years struggling with “ear training” courses. English majors do too, but they are called “literature” classes. Listen to it again, “Besides medical care, Shady Brooks also offers a free euthanasia program.” It isn’t so much that it is redundant. And it certainly isn’t wrong. But it sounds to me like a middle school band grinding its way through the Allegretto of Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony. Yet it sounded fine to me just five years ago.

One final note: I doubt you will find this complaint mentioned anywhere else. Grammar pedants tend to get annoyed by constructs like, “Besides, he was a jerk!” But the fact that the grammar pedants haven’t glommed onto this obviously redundant expression is part of what I’m getting at. You’ve got to hear the language — not memorize rules.

Afterword

Days after writing this, I came upon the following sentence, “It notifies you if your server is not configured correctly, and also scans for viruses and malware.” This is case where the “also” is essential to the meaning of the sentence. Without it, the sentence would imply that “it” only scans for viruses when the server is not configured correctly. Personally, I’d rather have two sentences, but this one works well enough.

Image of Faulkner is in the public domain.

It Wasn’t the EU; It Was the Conservative Government That Screwed the UK

Posted on 08 Jul 2016 by Frank Moraes

Dean Baker The UK, by its own volition, has been the route of austerity… They voted for it themselves. You know, similar outcomes, not as bad as you`ve seen across the eurozone [eg, Greece, Spain], still their economy`s not been great. Most people have very little to show over the last eight years, nine years. You`ve had cuts in public services. National Health Service has been a big issue. People are talking about older people. Older people need health care.

By a lot of accounts, the National Health Service has deteriorated because of budget cuts. Hasn`t been forced by Brussels but nonetheless, people may not realize that. You know, the Brexit people are blaming that on immigrants. It wasn`t an immigrant story. The fact is people they voted for
chose to make those cuts. They should have realized that but they didn`t… they blamed Brussels.

—Dean Baker
On All In With Chris Hayes

Image of Dean Baker taken from Center for Economic and Policy Research, licensed under CC BY 4.0. The image was cropped.

The Two Bernie Sanders Camps

Posted on 08 Jul 2016 by Frank Moraes

Bernie Sanders Camps I had a brief interaction with Ramona Grigg at her blog the other day. She playfully chided me for referring to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Party.” It was a typo. I’ve dealt with the issue before (In 2013!) What’s With “Democrat Party”? But she said something about the Democratic Platform and Sanders not having much of an effect on it that made me think that she is perhaps weary of the Bernie Sanders movement. And it got me thinking that there really are two Bernie Sanders camps.

Some have said I am very rare among Sanders supporters in being so ecumenical. Maybe so. The truth is that I genuinely like Hilary Clinton. I think she will make a fine president — probably much like Obama. Now that doesn’t mean that I’m thrilled with that. It probably just means that I’m in my fifties and I don’t have the highest of expectations of American presidents — especially when it comes to foreign policy.

But I am also very practical, and if Donald Trump picks Scalia’s replacement, it will be terrible. If, on the other hand, Scalia is replaced by Merrick Garland, we are looking at a starkly better court for at least a decade — one that will make the lives of regular Americans better. In this way, I am entirely typical of what is by far the bigger of the two Bernie Sanders camps. People in this camp range from people even more positive toward Clinton than I am to people who consider her barely acceptable and may even hate her personally (in as much as they can actually know anything about her personally).

Hillary Clinton The second of two Bernie Sanders camps are those who really do want a political revolution. I like them. I salute their idealism! But far too many of them have bought into tired lies about the Clintons brought to you by the Conservative Book Club in the 1990s. I’m pretty sure this comes after the idealism. It is a natural reaction to vilify whoever stands in the way of your noble goals. So it’s understandable but not acceptable.

Naming the Bernie Sanders Camps

I think it is pretty clear what to call the two Bernie Sanders camps: the Pragmatists and the Idealists.

Many of the people in Camp Idealist think that four years of Donald Trump will cause a political realignment. But as a member of Camp Pragmatist, I am certain they couldn’t be more wrong. What would most likely happen is what happened with Ronald Reagan. The economy would tank after he got into office. But it would come back by 2020 and Trump would win re-election. Americans don’t do political revolutions. Even our own Revolutionary War wasn’t what we now think of as a revolution. Before and after the war, the same people were in power; the British had simply been pushed out.

Quick question: which of the two Bernie Sanders camps is Bernie Sanders a member of? Camp Pragmatist.

The best examples of the two Bernie Sanders camps are the internet shows Majority Report (Camp Pragmatist) and The Young Turks (Camp Idealist). I don’t want to denigrate Camp Idealist, because there are many members of that camp who I greatly admire. But The Young Turks seem to just get more stupid as their popularity increases. But this may explain why Camp Idealist is so much louder than the much bigger Camp Pragmatist.

The Loudest Mouths

The Analyst sent me the following video clip from The Young Turks a couple of weeks ago. It isn’t about Sanders, but it is typical of why I haven’t watched the show much at all for a few years:

The Analyst wanted to know what I thought about it. I responded:

I don’t like this kind of reporting. I think it acts as societal apologetics. We live in a deeply racist society. So we freak out when some idiot starts spewing out racial stereotypes. I’m far more concerned about my own unconscious racist biases than I am that someone hired to be eye candy on Fox Sports thinks that Jews are cheap.

And how can anyone say that she isn’t good at her job? Does anyone think she was hired because of her depth of knowledge of sports and its history? Again: we come back to the same thing: the problem is the society that puts her in a position of power; not what she does with the power. Not that I care that she’s lost her job. And not that she’ll have trouble finding work: she’s pretty and she speaks well.

In general, I think the analysis of The Young Turks has gotten much worse over the last five years. Cenk Uygur is the only one on the show
who ever surprises me with a good point. (Not that I watch much.) I couldn’t believe it when they hired Wes Clark Jr — a man who has never had an interesting idea in his life.

My Fredrik deBoer Moment

He responded, “I think it was horrendous and filled with self-righteousness, showcasing a lot of the “moral meritocracy” [Fredrik deBoer] talks about in the context of modern American liberalism.” That’s quite right and interesting that he should mention deBoer — certainly a member of Camp Idealism. But it isn’t deBoer like minded intellectuals who make Camp Idealism seem so big.

But that highlights my point. I’m not as interested in the differences in the camps as I am their very existence.

I feel similar to Fredrik deBoer who recently wrote about his annoyance with people saying he was against Hillary Clinton because of some kind of pathology. I’m sick of Sanders supporters being seen as a monolith, when they are overwhelmingly strong supporters of the Democratic Party. Now you can make the case that there are more than two Bernie Sanders camps. What you can’t say is there is just one.

Oh, by the way, Camp Pragmatist just keeps growing. So maybe one day it will be a monolith — just not one that Clinton supporters can complain about.

Permanent Revolution of the English Language

Posted on 07 Jul 2016 by Frank Moraes

Matthew Parris The English language is in a dreadful mess. It always has been and always will be. That is its great splendor. At least since the arrival on our shores of a ruling class who spoke a different tongue from the common poeople, glorious civil war within the language has been a permanent condition.

Indeed “civil war” exaggerates the tidiness of the conflict. “Permanent revolution” might better describe a creative chaos in which pronunciation is at war with spelling, suffixes and prefixes at war with the roots and stems which bear them, slang at war with formal speech, grammatical logic at war with common usage, and new meanings at war with old. There are hostilities in which teachers are pitted against their students, newspaper readers against their journalists, and columnists against the editors who hire them. The air is thick with the cries of wounded sensibilities and offended rectitude, and literary landscape peppered with the bullet-holes of misplaced apostrophes.

—Matthew Parris
Introduction to The King’s English

Image of Matthew Parris taken from frame in Matthew Parris Worries UKIP Could Oust Tories in 2015, licensed under Fair Use.

Beyond Hillary Clinton’s College Plan

Posted on 07 Jul 2016 by Frank Moraes

Emmanuel College We think about society all wrong and that is nowhere as clear as our thinking on the issue of education. Hillary Clinton brought out a plan yesterday to make college far more affordable, and I am largely in agreement with Corey Robin on it: it’s overall a good thing. But the problem we have right now with education is not that it is unaffordable; it is that it is a scam.

The big neoliberal idea is that everyone will get a college degree and then everyone will have a good job. Cue “Kumbaya.” But there are lots of things wrong with this. The most obvious is that if everyone has a college degree then what good is it in getting a job? All you’ve done is require young people to go to school for four more years so that they can do the modern equivalent of the jobs high school graduates did in the 1960s.

Technology Is No Excuse!

Or think about this! The justification is that technology is improving so fast that a more educated workforce is necessary. Wrong! For one thing, who are the idiots who think that going from operating a typewriter to a computer is anything close to as big a jump as going from farming to manufacturing in 1830? A major con has been perpetrated on the workers of America. All this does is make the lives of young people harder while keeping wages down.

In the 1990s, young people were told that the way to a secure, middle-class life was through university. And 20 years later, we see that no, it really wasn’t.

But I really do wonder about the elites who think that modern life is so very complicated that it now requires 16 years of school. In another century, you’re going to be in a wheelchair before you are “qualified for the jobs of today”! It’s all such nonsense.

Pretend to Solve a Problem

What really bugs me about it is that what this is all really about is doing nothing. It’s the same with education “reform,” although there, destroying teacher unions is also important. The real purpose of all this obsession with education as the solution to all our economic problems is simply to push the problem off for a couple of decades. It will take a while to see with education “reform,” but we see it today with college.

It was Bill Clinton who talked about the information economy and lifelong learning. In the 1990s, young people were told that the way to a secure, middle-class life was through university. And 20 years later, we see that no, it really wasn’t. And all these kids have tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

In that way, Hillary Clinton’s plan is good. If we are going to trick kids into getting degrees that won’t do them any economic good, the least we can do is not force them to pay for it. But it remains the case that the Big Brains of the nation are still pushing this fiction.

College Is Great! But Not for the Economy

Don’t get me wrong: I think college is great! I think everyone who wants to go to college should be able to do it — for free. But college shouldn’t be job training. College should be about opening up the mind. And there are lots of other — and for most young people, better — ways to do that. They could travel — maybe do some work in Africa — or Mississippi.

There are an infinite number of ways to expand a mind. But a small percentage of people going to university are there for that reason. And that’s not an attack on the students. They’re just doing what we told them they were supposed to do. And what good has it done? Lots more people with college degrees. Lots more debt. I just don’t see the good.

Colleges should have been outlawed the very moment someone suggested there be a major in business.

Image of Emmanuel College by Diliff (own work), licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia.

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Author Archives: Frank Moraes