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.

Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson and Convenient Science

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Johnny IsaksonGeorgia Senator Johnny Isakson wants to do something about the Zika virus. Because scientists have said that it is very dangerous. But like a lot of people, Johnny Isakson only thinks science is important when it doesn’t get in the way of his dogma. A lot of those convenient science believers are in my family.

My mother’s side of the family was made up of a bunch of conservative Christians. In fact, by family lore, my aunt gave Oral Roberts $5,000 or more. The reason we believe this is because she received a hand written note from him. But it was one of those things where a Christian is going through a bad time and think if they can just give a big pile of cash to “God,” then all their problems will work out. But they were definitely more interested in talking about abortion than feeding the poor. But the thing they most liked to talk about was the evils of science — evolution specifically.

My parents were both the black sheep of their families, so I didn’t have to worry about this. My parents believed in science. But whenever we would visit this part of the family, I would hear them scoff at the idea of evolution. It’s was curious, because in many ways they knew more about it than most people. They could give you reasons for why carbon-14 dating didn’t work and holes in the fossil record and stuff like that. It was just because they listened to people like John Morris Pendleton. Normal people just assume that scientists know what they are doing and don’t get into the weeds.

Science Is Often Inconvenient

When I would listen to the arguments made against evolution, I would get angry. To me, even as a teenager, science was something you either accepted or you didn’t. It wasn’t a la carte — something you could accept when it was convenient and reject when it wasn’t. That’s not the way that science works.

I even remember a conversation that I had when one of my physics professors when I was in college. I was still struggling with quantum mechanics — not in a scientific way, but in a philosophical way. I told him that I just didn’t like the fact that reality seemed to not be deterministic. He told me he agreed with me. It sucks that the universe is not the way that we want it to be.

Johnny Isakson wants more money to fight the Zika virus since the CDC “convinced him that Zika could be more dangerous for the US than Ebola.” I wondered if Senator Isakson was also as accepting of the scientific consensus on global warming.

But our job is to uncover the universe, not to define it. My professor, Joe Tenn, didn’t say that last part because he didn’t need to. It was enough that he shared my discomfiture. Of course, we weren’t alone. Einstein felt the same way, and that’s what his famous line is all about, “God does not play dice!”

What bugged me about this side of the family is how they picked and chose what science they were going to believe. They were more than willing to take the good things that science gave them: air conditioning, automobiles, MRIs. But they weren’t willing to take the science that demanded anything from them. They didn’t believe evolution, even though it being wrong would have ripple effects throughout all of science. And this offends me.

In all areas of science, they just accept without thinking much about it. But when their pastor tells them that this or that bit of science is not true because it appears to disagree with their religious dogma, they are suddenly experts on science. It’s offensive to actual scientists — and to the entire civilization that has been built on science.

Of course, it isn’t just religious people who do this. On many occasions, I’ve had conservatives tell me that global warming is a hoax. They try to set me straight. They get their information from Fox News and Breitbart. And that makes them more qualified than I am with my ten years of study the subject as a graduate student and then physics professor. But again, these same people accept all the other aspects of science that don’t get in the way of their preferred policy positions.

Johnny Isakson Thinks Science Is Useful This Time

And that brings us back to our good friend Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson. On Thursday, I heard a story on NPR, Southern Lawmakers Lead Fight Over Funding To Combat Zika Virus. In it, I learned that Johnny Isakson wants more money to fight the Zika virus since the “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta convinced him that Zika could be more dangerous for the US than Ebol.” I wondered if Senator Isakson was also as accepting of the scientific consensus on global warming.

Well, Johnny Isakson is not a Stage I Global Warming Denier. He’s at Stage II: there is global warming, but humans aren’t the cause! And the truth is in 2015 (when he cast his vote to this effect), that’s the most intense level of global warming denial. The only people who say it isn’t happening at all are those who claim there is a conspiracy.

What I wonder is why it is that Johnny Isakson is willing to believe the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We know far more about radiative forcing of the atmosphere than we do about the spread of the Zika virus. But it’s the same thing as with my conservative Christian family members: it doesn’t require that he do any intellectual work and counter his dogma to accept science when it comes to Zika. But when it comes to global warming any other science that isn’t convenient, well, that’s a whole different thing.

Bob Bennett’s Last Wish: To Be Misremembered

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Bob BennettI’m not big on honoring the dead when I wasn’t inclined to honor them when they were alive. I mean, I would never go to the door of a grieving family and say, “You know, your father was an awful man who made the world worse when he had the power to make it better.” But that doesn’t mean that I will join in on the “What a good man!” chorus that’s going on. It’s all about Bob Bennett’s death bed wish to apologize to Muslims for the fact that Donald Trump will be the head of the Republican Party — Bob Bennett’s party.

Tim Mak reported on the story for The Daily Beast, Dying GOP Senator Apologizes to Muslims for Donald Trump. And it ends almost as poignantly as The Grapes of Wrath, “But even as he was passing away, Bennett struggled to press the issues — to ensure that though his life was ending, the ideas he held dear would not go with it.” But instead of a starving man being breast fed by a woman who just gave birth to a dead baby, it is the story of a multi-millionaire bigot who wants to be remembered as a Good Guy™.

Bob Bennett: Bigot

Bigot?! Was Bob Bennett a bigot? Well, when it came to the LGBT community, he sure was. When it came to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, the Human Rights Campaign gave him a 0% rating. That was when 103 of 535 members of Congress got a 100% rating. And another 69 got a 90% or greater rating. So one-third of Congress got 90% or better, and Bob Bennett got 0%. He voted against legislation that would make it illegal to fire someone because of their sexual orientation. What a kind and accepting man!

I appreciate that he didn’t want to be remembered as a bigoted war monger who really only cared about the rich. But that doesn’t mean we should change history and remember him as something he never was.

But none of that matters because, “He would go to people with the hijab and tell them he was glad they were in America, and they were welcome here.” Now just to be clear, this kind of ostentatious personal outreach is actually creepy. And it puts the person approached in an uncomfortable position of being simply a member of a group. The act isn’t about them feeling welcome but about Bob Bennett feeling good about being welcoming. Imagine if I stopped Native Americans on the street to express my regret for the Trail of Tears. That’s what he’s been doing but Muslims are so actively discriminated against in the US today that his act is seen by many to be noble. It isn’t; it is just a different kind of racism.

Bob Bennett: Typical Republican

Meanwhile, Bob Bennett did so much for corporation and so much to individuals. He voted against getting rid of the tax subsidy for companies that offshore jobs at the same time that he voted to make it harder for individuals to file for bankruptcy. He also voted multiple times to make it harder to sue corporations. He voted to further limit appeals on death penalty cases. He voted against taking racial statistics into account in death penalty appeals. And he was, of course, a big drug warrior. And he was against doing any rehabilitation in our prison system. He was, in other words, an entirely typical Republican.

When it comes to Donald Trump, it is hard to see how he’s all that much different. In 2006, he voted to build a wall along the US-Mexico border. He’s been against any kind of pathway to citizenship. So what we really see from Bob Bennett is your typical intolerant Republican who is upset that Donald Trump is so explicit about this stuff. It isn’t that he disagreed with Trump’s bigotry; it’s just that he doesn’t want to be associated with it.

There is another issue, however. Bob Bennett in general wanted to do whatever it was that big business wanted. So in general, he was pro-immigration — not for the sake of the individuals, but for the sake of the corporations that wanted to get low-cost workers. So even in his substantive disagreement with Donald Trump, Bob Bennett was still on the wrong side — for corporations and against humans.

So Bob Bennett is dead. He was 82 years old, so it isn’t that big a deal. And the man was very pro-war. He supported the Iraq War. And had he been in office, I’m sure he would have been against the Iran nuclear deal. He was one of many war enablers who allowed lots of Muslim children to never get the chance to live to 82 years. I appreciate that he didn’t want to be remembered as a bigoted war monger who really only cared about the rich. But that doesn’t mean we should change history and remember him as something he never was.

Update

Martin Longman wrote a great article that is similarly unmoved, On Bob Bennett and Donald Trump. It goes into Bob Bennett’s association with Nixon’s Plumbers. Longman sums up, “But it’s a sad testimony that the party is now too awful for a guy with Bob Bennett’s moral compass.” That is to say: Bob Bennett doesn’t have much of a moral compass.

“We Loved Sanders — Until It Mattered!”

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Bernie SandersA lot of the liberal blogosphere is dumping all over Sanders — and this has largely been true since the beginning. This is partly because, as an older guy, I read a lot of older bloggers. And being older, they tend to be Hillary Clinton supporters. And that’s great! Bravo! I have no problem with people supporting Clinton. But let’s be honest about the reasons.

My prime example is PM Carpenter, who has spent the last decade telling the world that he’s a democratic socialist. But the moment Sanders became an actual threat, Carpenter posted, Why This Democratic Socialist Opposes Bernie Sanders. The short answer: because America is not ready for a socialist. Well, maybe one particular American whose initials are PMC. But he isn’t alone and it’s gotten to annoy me.

I’ve decided their slogan should be, “We love Sanders — as long as it doesn’t matter!” Because that’s the thing. As long as no choice had to be made, he was great. But the moment it was a decision between actually standing against our unjust economic system and just going along and treating it as a problem no more pressing than same sex marriage, their decision was clear.

As Matt Bruenig has pus it: the Baby Boomers just don’t like the idea that they are the conservative ones now. Here’s my usual caveat: I like Clinton. I don’t have a problem with people supporting her over Sanders. But I think it’s about time that these Clinton supporters admit that they prefer her because her policies are more to their liking — not because he is unrealistic or some of his supporters are jerks. Or because America isn’t “ready.”

When Clinton Was Sanders

It is, of course, ironic that when Clinton was in Sanders’ position in 2008, she acted very much like he is now. Of course, things are different between then and now: things were closer then. But they certainly weren’t categorically different. And just as Clinton claimed it was a good idea to stay in the race in 2008 because Obama might be assassinated, Sanders could certainly argue that he should stay in because she might be indicted. As far as I know, he hasn’t said anything that vile.

Sanders is very likely to get the Jackson treatment. Will he be offered the VP spot if he drops out after the last primary and endorses Clinton? I rather doubt it.

I’m not thrilled with some of the things Sanders is doing right now — just as I wasn’t thrilled with Clinton in 2008. But the main thing is I feel that yet again, the liberals in the Democratic Party are being told they must get in line or else the boogeyman (insert whatever Republican is running) will be elected and the world will end. And I’m tired of hearing it.

Sanders Is Jackson

Also, other than 2008 when (as I said) Clinton behaved very much as Sanders is now, we have to go all the way back to 1988 to find a Democratic primary that was anywhere near this close. In that primary, Dukakis won 1,792 delegates (42.4% of the popular vote). Jesse Jackson won 1,023 delegates (29.4% of the votes). And my recollection is that Jackson was treated very badly. And I say that as someone who worked on Dukakis’ campaign. But Jackson played nice and in the end got… nothing. There’s a history of this. The left is just supposed to remain silent and show up to vote for whatever candidate the establishment wants.

Clinton had a far better reason for (finally) playing along in 2008. I mean, hell, it got her a party elite that wanted to just give the nomination to her in 2016. But Sanders is very likely to get the Jackson treatment. Will he be offered the VP spot if he drops out after the last primary and endorses Clinton? I rather doubt it. And I wonder if this hasn’t already been made clear to Sanders.

The main thing is that it is hard to believe that Sanders will be treated well in the end given that the main complaint I’ve heard against him since at least January is that he isn’t a real Democrat and he refuses to raise money for other candidates. Because, you know, that’s what voters care about the most: the party’s fund raising problems. Actually, I think the conservative wing of the party thinks what it always thinks of us liberals: we have nowhere else to go.

Honesty About Sanders

But getting back to our liberal blogging friends, my complaint continues on because everything done by Sanders is always painted in the worst light possible. I think this is what you get when years of writing makes you someone who ought to support Sanders. You can’t make the policy argument, so you make the argument that he is unfit for the office. Josh Marshall has determined, apparently based on a polyp in his anal cavity, that all the negativity in this campaign comes straight from Sanders himself.

Personally, I’m willing to wait and see if Sanders will refuse to endorse Clinton as Steve M claims at No More Mister Nice Blog. But that’s probably because my belief about policy goes along with my support of Sanders. I don’t have to troll around looking for any excuse to not support the candidate who I always claimed I would support should they been on offer.

Afterword: It’s Personal Too

I also don’t like the fact that Sanders supporters are painted with such a broad brush. I do not think that I’m an outlier in terms of Sanders supporters. I think the people misbehaving are the outliers. And it bothers me that this is exactly the same kind of thinking that reinforces racist steteotypes. Over ten million Democrats have voted for Sanders and they are all just like those idiots in Nevada. With one or two exceptions, of course.

Update

I just saw Krugman’s newest, “Questions of Character.” He really is the king of the anti-Sanders filter. And I think he’s done great damage to his reputation. On Economist’s View, he is hounded in the comments for his knee-jerk Sanders slamming and for his stupid new claim that, “Reality has a well known center-left bias.” It just shows that Krugman now believes that he is keeper of Reality™. It’s sad, but it isn’t surprising. Great fame and wealth drives people crazy. It’s one of the under-appreciated aspects income inequality. But at least Krugman isn’t drugging and raping women — as far as we know.

Update 2

I haven’t read Krugman’s newest column. But I saw Mark Thoma’s edit of it. Apparently, in “Obama’s War on Inequality,” Krugman spends a good deal of time bashing Sanders. But as Thoma removed all the Sanders stuff. He’s done it lots before. And what you see is how easy it is to edit the Sanders slams out — because they aren’t central to what he’s writing about. Krugman just can’t help it. This is what we in the editing business call “bad writing.” I run into it with my own writers all the time where they get sidetracked about something they care about. Krugman is the new Jonathan Chait: if anything is more to the left than he is, it’s Wrong™.

Update 3

I found this article by Steven Attewell very interesting. Just as an aside, he mentioned that moderate Democrats “were happy enough to be for single-payer when it wasn’t going to pass.” This is what I’m talking about. There’s a big group in the Democratic Party that claims to be liberal for purely rhetorical purposes. If it were 1965, we’d find out suddenly that all their support for the Voting Rights Act vanished as soon as they were expected to vote on it.

NPR’s Pledge Drive Challenge Grant Scam

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NPR Pledge Drive ScamAh, the NPR pledge drive!

The only time I listen to NPR is when I’m driving. And since I hate driving and don’t own a car, I don’t often listen to NPR. And I’m glad, because it always annoys me. It is a parade of typical, biased, American media. If the reporting is on an official US enemy, the reporting will be distinctly negative. And so on. Today, I heard a report on the US military bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. And it was just taken as given that the US military was totally without any culpability and they were simply duped by those cunning Afghani forces. Really: it was that bad.

But it seems that every time I am forced to drive and end up listening to NPR, there is a pledge drive going on. One thing that’s interesting about this is how much NPR (and PBS, of course) are like the American government itself. The lower and middle classes pay for the vast majority of the operating costs. But both the US government and NPR do the bidding of their wealthiest members. I am given a guilt trip in the pledge drive to give money, but the rich actually get return on their investments.

The Challenge Grant Scam

There is an illustration of this that really bugs me because it offends my sense of math: the pledge drive “Challenge Grant.” This is when we are told that if there are (usually) $1,000 in pledges during the current break, that amount will be matched by some business. Here’s the thing: it doesn’t add up. Let’s assume that there are two pledge breaks per hour for 12 hours of each day. That’s 24 pledge breaks per day.

“Challenge Grants offer your company valuable exposure on KQED… During a KQED pledge drive, your company is recognized as the provider of a Challenge Grant.” —KQED

And the pledge drives are generally two weeks long. So that’s a total of 336 pledge breaks. (I’m certain that it’s less than that, so this gives NPR the benefit of the doubt.) There are also a lot of $500 Challenge Grants, and almost none above $1000. So the $336,000 in Challenge Grants is probably way high. It’s probably less than half of that.

But the KQED pledge drives generally raise about $2 million. Or at least that’s what they used to raise when I listened to the network more regularly. If that’s the case, then Challenge Grants make up at most 17%. Now that’s interesting, because that is suspiciously close to the 19% of NPR corporate funding. So I wonder if these are just contributions that would be given regardless.

Pledge Drive Math Doesn’t Add Up

The bigger issue, however, is that at 17% (At most!) of pledges, the Challenge Grants are always met. If even half of them failed, NPR wouldn’t come close to reaching its goals. So the Challenge Grants are just a lie to get people to pledge right now. But clearly, they would work a whole lot better if they were $10,000 instead of $1,000 — or the every more pathetic $500. So why aren’t they?

Well, KQED tells you why in its webpage, Pledge Challenge Grants, “Challenge Grants offer your company valuable exposure on KQED.” Indeed they do. The company name is mentioned at least three times and it is often accompanied by extra verbiage about how the company has been supplying fine whatever to the Bay Area since whenever. It is, in other words, straight advertising to a relatively affluent audience. And it doesn’t sound like an advertisement; it sounds like the company is just socially responsible.

The Big Lie

I find it really annoying because the hosts lie about it. They talk about how they will have to send the money back if the challenge isn’t met. And that’s true; it’s just that the challenge isn’t ever not met during the pledge drive. In fact, I assume that during a 10 minute pledge drive, the challenge is met within two minutes tops.

I know a lot about NPR pledge drives. If you want to know more, check out June Thomas’ article, Let’s Get Those Phones Ringing! The Cunning Genius of the Public Radio Fundraising Drive. But they are still effective. Yesterday, I decided that I really should send them some money. And then I stopped myself because that is crazy!

Instead, I went over to Democracy Now! and donated the money to them. There are two reasons. First, they need it a lot more. Second, it’s a really important news outlet whereas NPR provides better but not qualitatively different news coverage than CNN. And that reminds me, I need to give to FAIR too!

Remember: the Koch brothers don’t give to Democracy Now! and Fair. But you know who they do give to, right?

Cornerstone Content Begins

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Cornerstone ContentI finally started my first project to create cornerstone content. This is a fascinating thing about the internet and search engines. Having a hundred small pages on a subject does not get you to rank nearly as high as having a single substantial page. So given that I have at least a couple dozen pages on various aspects of Don Quixote, I’m in the process of creating just such a page. But it will be months in the making. I just wrote the beginning of it. The article is called, Don Quixote in English Language Translation.

Thus far, it is all original content. In fact, the article is worth checking out. I talk about what Don Quixote is. People think of it as a novel, but it’s actually two novels. And they are rather different. It’s too bad that the first novel isn’t published alone any more. As it is, I think the thickness of the book puts people off. And the first novel stands all by itself. In fact, there really is nothing in the second book that is part of our cultural identity. And I say that as one who thinks that second novel is superior. Anyway, check it out. Even though it is a page (as opposed to a post, which is what this article is), you can still leave comments.

Eventually, I will get to the point of doing a summary of the stuff I’ve written about on the blog. This is actually kind of backwards. The idea of cornerstone content is that you are supposed to start with that. But who thinks about such things when you start a blog? In fact, even after all my work with Quality Nonsense (where I always have to think about SEO), I didn’t think about this kind of stuff on Frankly Curious. My thinking started to change when I installed the Yoast plugin for WordPress.

Yoast is a bit of nag software that reminds you of things and alerts you to things that you do wrong. For example, it has you assign a “focus keyword” for each post. For this article, it is “cornerstone content.” And then it is very unhappy if it constitutes less than 0.5% of the words you’ve written. At the same time, it doesn’t like it if it represents more than 2.5%, because apparently Google will think that you are “keyword stuffing” and would potentially see the page as spam.

How Cornerstone Content Will Make Us Famous!

Another big thing that Yoast does is keep track of the focus keywords that you’ve used in the past. If you’ve used the focus keyword once before, it warns you and mentions that you might check out it’s page, Using Cornerstone Content to Make Your Site Rank. But if you’ve used the focus keyword more than once before, it complains. It’s complained a lot about “Donald Trump” and “Bernie Sanders” and “Hillary Clinton.” Which, makes me think that the next election cycle I might start a page for the election itself. That’s undoubtedly what smart and experienced bloggers do.

In addition to this, my “boss” Toni thinks that Frankly Curious gets half the traffic that it ought to considering the quantity and quality of the content. And I would definitely like to get more traffic. And that’s especially true when it comes to something like Don Quixote. the truth is that there aren’t really any sites that answer the common question, “Which Don Quixote should I read?” And given the fact that I’m also a big advocate for the book, I’d like to have more people ending up here.

But using cornerstone content has a good aspect to it that has nothing to do with making the site more popular. I do want to put together all my thoughts on Don Quixote and other subjects. Just the same, most people are not interested in reading 20,000 word articles. So this is perfect. People can get here because Google likes these long articles, but then they can quickly find links to specific information that they are looking for.

Of course, I don’t know how well this is all going to work. The experts claim this is the way you are supposed to do things. Right now, a search of “don quixote translations” brings up my very old article, About to Read Don Quixote in the top ten. It’s a clever idea for an article but I know infinitely more now. And I’m keen to share that knowledge.

Shall Become the Cornerstone by Nerissa’s Ring, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Why Republicans Can’t Do Oppo Research in Primaries

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Donald Trump and the ReformoconsBrian Beutler wrote a very good article on Monday, The Wackiest Donald Trump Conspiracy Theory Yet. But the headline (which I’m sure he didn’t write) is misleading. Rather than “wackiest” it should be “most predictable.” Republicans are now getting very excited about the idea that the media held back on Donald Trump during the primary, only to open up on him in the general election. The Liberal Media™ strikes again! Apparently, we are supposed to believe that Republicans don’t know how to do oppo research.

For those who don’t know, oppo research is what campaigns do to each other — looking for dirt. A great example of this is in Primary Colors where Libby and Henry head out to Florida to dig up dirt on Fred Picker. Also in that film is what I can only call reverse oppo research, where the campaign investigates its own candidate to know and prepare for anything that other candidates might dig up. I’m sure all modern campaigns do both of these things. I’m also sure that Trump’s campaign has not — or at least not much. That’s one of the most amazing thing about Trump: that he managed to dominate the primary without really having much of a campaign.

Silly Conspiracy Theory

This conspiracy makes no sense, because so much of the dirt that reporters find is fed to them by campaigns. As Beutler noted, campaigns “have more resources, no daily print deadlines, and no need to worry about impartiality.” So if the media didn’t dig up enough dirt during the primary, the fault lies not with the media itself, but with Trump’s pathetic opponents. Regardless, why would the media start dumping on Trump now — before he’s locked up the nomination? It would make the most sense to wait until after California.

Primary Colors - Oppo ResearchOf course, I don’t really see that there is any greater amount of scandal now than there was before. Trump is a scandal machine. What’s going on is that Republicans are looking for something to blame. None of the pundits who are pushing this conspiracy are so naive as to not know about oppo research. They are just pretending for the ignorant conservative masses who might be slowly realizing that they are on the verge of nominating a scandal plagued fool.

Republicans Can’t Do Oppo Research!

The real question is why is it that over a dozen major Republican presidential candidates had campaigns with oppo research that couldn’t dig up any dirt about Trump? Well, in part, that’s unfair; they did dig up dirt; it’s just that none of it stuck. But the bigger problem is that much of what Donald Trump has done that’s bad is not considered bad by Republican elites.

Trump contracted with undocumented workers? So what! He’s just being a Randian Übermensch. He was a “job creator”! So he seems to have sexually harassed every woman he worked around? Since when has the Republican Party thought that women should be anything but subordinate to powerful men? “Sit quietly while I talk about pubic hair on a Coke can!” That sums up Republican outreach to women. And the fact that his tax plan was fantastical didn’t matter when the rival Republican tax plans were only less fantastical in level. It’s like saying, “Those Harry Potter books are fantasy, but Lord of the Rings is…” What?! Fantasy written for slightly older people?

Democrats Can Do Oppo Research!

There is no doubt that the Clinton campaign has a small library of dirt on Trump. But why would any Democrat let fly with their best material until after the general election starts? As Beutler put it, “It isn’t the media that’s been strategically holding fire — it’s the Democrats.” Actually, as much as we hear that we don’t want to hurt candidates in the primary, the truth is that we do: because the other party certainly will release any damaging information once the general is on.

This is where the Democratic Party has a distinct advantage. Democratic policies are generally popular. So Democratic candidates don’t have to hold back on criticisms that would be effective. Republicans have to twist themselves into knots in order to attack each other. Of course, I’m not certain that it would have mattered. There is at least a third of the Republican Party that wants nothing more (And I mean that literally!) than a charismatic authoritarian. And now they’ve got one.

“Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore” by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Primary Colors poster licensed under Fair use, via Wikipedia.

Liberals’ Disregard for the White Working Class

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White Working ClassMatt Bruenig wrote a very interesting article recently, Demonizing, Not Engaging. In it, he highlighted an interesting inconsistency among liberal pundits. The African American community is overall quite homophobic. The white working class is overall quite racist. Yet liberals pundits have decided the best thing is to engage and find common ground with the African American community. They mostly want to demonize the white working class as hopeless racists. Why is this?

Bruenig presents one idea from Emmett Rensin: it’s all about who is likely to vote Democratic. African Americans are part of the Democratic coalition and the white working class is not. But this strikes me as question begging. If the liberal pundit class vilified the African American community, the Democratic Party would quickly see its coalition shrink by one. We are still left with the question of why it is that the pundit class finds it so easy to vilify the white working class.

I think the issue is quite simple: shared bigotry. Although I’m sure that liberal pundits are as racist as anyone else, explicit racism has been taboo long enough that there really is no liberal pundit who has to feel queasy about having made racist statements — or even have much of a memory thinking explicitly racist thoughts.

We on the left like to laugh at the fact that the Republican Party doesn’t do much to reach out to any non-white groups. But the truth is that the Democratic Party has the same problem — just with different groups.

But being in favor of same sex marriage is really quite a new thing. So even if a liberal pundit has long been in favor of equal rights for members of the LGBT community, they no doubt have many friends who have only recently seen the light. For example: their friends Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Thus, it just doesn’t seem as much a sin to be anti-gay as to be anti-black.

All of this is quite understandable. The reason I find it troublesome is that it is part of a broader tendency among pundits of all stripes to be nothing more than representatives of their classes. This is why the Democratic Party managed to degenerate into what was once considered a conservative economic stance. The Democratic Party’s main claim to liberalism is on social policy.

A great example of this is on MSNBC where economic liberalism is relegated to the sidelines. There’s Chris Hayes when he can sneak it into his show in his desperate attemp to keep his job. And there is “crazy uncle” Ed who seems about six decades out of touch with MSNBC‘s sense of itself: young, urbane, and The Economist reading!

We on the left like to laugh at the fact that the Republican Party doesn’t do much to reach out to any groups but the white working class, religious conservatives, and the affluent. But the truth is that the Democratic Party has the same problem — just with different groups. And it is reflected in the liberal pundits and all those involved in what Bruenig calls The Discourse. Clearly, there are those who push back against this — most notably Thomas Frank. Although in this election cycle, people like Frank seem particularly marginalized as any criticism of Hillary Clinton or the Democratic Party is seen as an attack on liberalism itself.

Liberals should try to make common cause with the white working class. I try, as I have written about a lot. It’s frustrating to see weeks of conversations go to waste because of one inflammatory Fox News segment. But it is worth doing. Note, however, that liberals don’t in general reach out to the black community on same sex marriage; they just accept. When it comes to the white working class, they just reject. And this just happens to align with the upper class sensibilities of the Democratic Party and its apologists.

Image by RIA Novosti archive, image #633872 / U. Ivanov, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia.

Aging and the Dignity Society Offers

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Haile Selassie and the Aging ProcessI wish I believed in God. If I did, I would have constant conversations with him like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Except that I wouldn’t be so respectful. Here’s the thing: God is either not all that nice or a total incompetent. I could deal with God being Jacques Clouseau — an idiot who bungled his way into getting a universe to exist. But I would tend to think of God as not nice. What’s more, any evidence that exists indicates that God would be something of a cruel practical joker. I’ve been thinking about this with regard to aging.

For me, aging has been overall a good thing. But I haven’t gotten old enough to hit the cliff of cognitive decline that is likely coming my way in two decades. We all see certain types of gradual cognitive decline as we age. I’ve very much seen it. I’m not as crisp a thinker. But I’ve become a far better “fuzzy computer.” And given my natural gifts have never been in the area of raw computation, this hasn’t been bad. But a sudden drop in my ability to suss out a passage of Kant would be horrible. But oh, how I can image it would make God laugh!

Dealing with my father’s illness over the last few days has gotten me thinking more about this. My father has always been a proud and independent man and aging has only made him more so. I know that it bothers him to find his body rebelling against him. In this case, there is something wrong with his kidneys — perhaps an infection — that is causing him great pain. But otherwise, he is, at 83 years, more healthy than I am. Pain and neglect should not be the reward for putting up with this universe for eight decades.

The Aging of Haile Selassie

As I sat at the San Francisco VA Medical Center late last night, I read Peter Schwab’s Haile Selassie I: Ethiopia’s Lion of Judah. I’ve become a bit obsessed with Haile Selassie recently. He ran Ethiopia from about 1916 to 1974. He was Emperor from 1930. And he was kind of like a god. And to the Rastafari, he is literally so. But Schwab described how Haile Selassie was deposed. He was 82 at that time, and I’m sure that his age had something to do with him losing his grip on power. Now Haile Selassie wasn’t a perfect man, but he did do much good, and it is hard not to find this description poignant:

It must have been devastating. This proud, noble man, used to having his orders followed and being in total control, comfortable with all the major leaders of the twentieth century, now surrounded by troops and being escorted away from all the power and authority he knew. Ramrod straight, dignified, peering into the distance past the horrors of the moment, he did as he was told. With his cape over his shoulders he walked outside. There in the driveway was an old blue Volkswagen. Told to get in, he adamantly refused. How could the emperor, he thought, get into this car when he was accustomed to solid gold horse-drawn carriages, Rolls Royces, and Mercedes-Benzes? The symbols of monarchy must be retained. But choice was no longer an option. At gunpoint he placed his five-foot-four-inch frame into the back of the car and sat as erect as ever.

Obviously, one can see the fall of Haile Selassie as simply what happens to powerful people. He was, after all, an emperor in exile during the Italian Fascist occupation of World War II. But I see it about aging mostly. Life is an arc and we end it much as we start it: helpless. But as a civilization, we have the power to push back against whatever you want to call it: the lack of God’s competence, goodness, or existence. We have the power to allow the old to have the dignity they have earned throughout their lives — whether they be Haile Selassie or my father.

The Second Post of the Day About Why There Is Only One Post Today

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Writer: Second PostUnder normal circumstances, I would not be writing this second post today. I would just let it go with the single post. In fact, I discussed the fact that I might only post one article in a day when I announced the new schedule, Goodbye Morning Music and Anniversary Posts. And if ever there would be a day in which I should get away without doing a second post, it would be today — at least in a case where nothing terrible happened.

My 83-year-old father started urinating blood while doing some construction work for a lady friend of his who lives about an hour and a half away. But because my father is very much a Great Generation man, he said nothing until the work was done. Then he drove himself to the emergency room — an hour and a half away back at home. But after 5 hours at the hospital, he looked terrible. They had put a catheter in him, which was filling bright red. And they sent him home with a referral to a urologist. But he was sweating and his hands were shaking wildly.

Back to the ER

I tried to get him to go back to the emergency room. But he insisted that it only hurt when he urinated. But after 24 hours, even he couldn’t take it any more. This is a man who gets dental fillings without novocaine. In one way, I’m really impressed with this because I’m a wimp when it comes to pain. On the other hand, this “real man” nonsense bugs me. But if he admits to pain, I know it’s bad.

When I got him to the hospital, he could barely walk. He was hunched over, breathing hard, sweating profusely.

When I got him to the hospital, he could barely walk. He was hunched over, breathing hard, sweating profusely. They got him in very quickly and I hung out in the waiting room. At that point I felt great because I knew he would be taken care of. But the hours ticked past. It was time well spent. I got to read a number of long-form articles that I haven’t had time for. The internet connection at the hospital was great! I suppose I could have worked on my second post, but I find writing on my phone to be pretty hard.

Finally, I asked what was going on and they told me that they were preparing for his release. That was good, because I had been worried that they were going admit him. Anyway, they let me go back and I talked to the doctor and nurse and they told me that they were just getting the catheter installed and that I was welcome to come into the room. I said, “No, no, no!” But given that my father is hard of hearing, I asked that they call me before releasing him, because he often leaves without knowing what he’s supposed to do.

This Is Not the Second Post

It was still over another hour. And, of course, they didn’t call me in. But when he burst through the doors, I could see that there was nothing to be concerned about. The change was so stark and I knew it wasn’t due to any drugs that they had given to him. He was clearly ill when he walked in and he looked liked his normal self when he came out. Apparently, there had been three blood clots in his bladder, and that was undoubtedly what was causing all of his pain.

Interestingly, after telling me repeatedly that he only had pain when he urinated, he told me that when the doctor asked him what his pain was like on a scale of 1 to 10, my father said, “Ten when I urinate; five otherwise”! Thanks for all the honesty, dad!

Anyway, this is the second post today that would have been about something else if all this hadn’t happened. But I’m glad it all worked out well.

How We Make Education Worse Than Random

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Education: Boy Studying - Lewis Hine

There are a lot of aspects of education that that are complicated and that we don’t pay enough attention to. Commenter Colin Keesee brought my attention to a curious fact about sports. Since there are date cutoffs for which league a child will play in, those who just miss the cutoff will be up to 12 months older than those who just make the cut off. Thus they will be up to 12 months bigger and more physically and mentally developed. This is all discussed in an interview Malcolm Gladwell gave with ESPN, Q&A with Malcolm Gladwell.

The result of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The older students get more playing time and attention, thus making them even further ahead of their younger competitors, who would often have as much if not more talent. In the interview, this is applied in terms of hockey and the NHL, but the data do not show what they claim (the correlation is in the opposite direction that the theory would indicate). But the point is a valid one.

I remember in little league baseball, there was a huge difference in the size of the boys. I’m sure some of this had to do with the ages of the boys. But another issue is just that some boys mature faster than other boys. It doesn’t really matter what the reason is, they are all arbitrary. Just because a boy is small an uncoordinated at 8-years-old does not mean that he won’t be big and graceful at 14.

We have a great problem with focusing on early bloomers. Mozart was an early bloomer but Beethoven really wasn’t. And Einstein wasn’t. And certainly Cervantes wasn’t…

But what I noticed in my very limited experience with organized sports was that far more coaching time was spent with the boys who needed the least help. And the reason for that is obvious enough: people think that greatness is something you are born with. Thus, why waste your time coaching an incompetent given that they are never going to be any good?

Education for Those Who Don’t Need It

Throughout my life, I’ve been shocked that this attitude is everywhere. I don’t really care about sports. But this is applied to math and writing and every other human activity that involves education. Because I do have a knack for systems and analysis, I’ve look back in horror at the way people “taught” me to write and play chess — two things I’m rather good at, but only because I taught myself in adulthood.

It’s especially true with chess education which is concrete. When I teach a child to play chess, I first teach them the moves, but then we go on to basic tactics like combinations and forks. And I teach basic strategy from the beginning. What’s so frustrating about all this is that the way chess is normally taught goes entirely against the march of human progress. We don’t expect each generation to rediscover the entire intellectual history of humanity. But we do when teaching chess.

Interest Trumps Natural Ability

The way I learned to write was very interesting in that it shows someone with mediocre talents can become pretty good if they are obsessed with it and work on it a lot. I know lots of people who used to be better writers than I am and who still know a lot more about the mechanics. They were born with more talent. I was born with more interest. And interest trumps talent.

My favorite example of this is Mozart, because everyone thinks of him as the ultimate example of intrinsic greatness. But it just isn’t true. He was trained from the youngest age. And he worked very hard. After he studied counterpoint in France, his compositions took a great leap forward. None of this is to say that he didn’t have natural ability, although I do wonder how much of that was in the genes and how much of it was being surrounded by music even before his birth.

Education Often Makes Things Worse

We have a great problem with focusing on early bloomers. Mozart was an early bloomer but Beethoven really wasn’t. And Einstein wasn’t. And certainly Cervantes wasn’t — having written his only great works starting in his late fifties — and mostly in his middle to late sixties.

The universe is a cruel and fickle place. The problem I have is that as a species, we haven’t learned to push against that. In fact, in education, we have a strong tendency to reinforce it, or even make what would normally be random be distinctly unjust.

Lewis Hine: Boy Studying, ca. 1924 from trialsanderrors, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Imperative Programming to Start: Please!

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Imperative ProgrammingNormal people don’t even know what imperative programming is. Even most programmers are at most vaguely aware of the different classes of programming languages. But there are a lot of programming paradigms.

For example, there is logic programming, which is unlike what most people even think of as a programming language. You can get an idea about it by checking out Prolog. In it, you don’t say, “Do this, then do that.” You define relationships and then ask the system questions. It’s pretty far abstracted from what a computer is actually doing. And the same is true of the object-oriented programming paradigm. And this is why people should stay away from these kinds of paradigms when they first start coding.

My big boss sent me an article recently, 30 Years Later, QBasic Is Still the Best. In it, Nicolas Bize talks about how he introduced his son to programming with QBasic and how easily his son picked up on it. So QBasic rocks, am I right?! But he doesn’t dive into why QBasic worked so well for his son. Because the issue is not QBasic or the Basic programming language at all. The issue is that it is easiest to learn simple imperative programming languages: languages where you tell the computer, “Do this, then do that.”

The reason is that they model the natural way that we go about solving problems. Here’s an example of a bit of imperative programming that pretty much everyone has written:

IF "Man on sidewalk ahead is having angry conversation with himself"
THEN "Cross the street."

In more traditional code, it would look like this:

crossStreet = 0;
crazyBehavior = 1;

if crazyBehavior = 1
  crossStreet = 1;

In object-oriented programming, it’s far less direct. The man would be an object. One of the object’s characteristics would be crazyBehavior. The object would have functions for setting and reading crazyBehavior. There are lots of reasons why this is a better way to code. And one of those reasons is that it makes the code more abstract. But that also makes it that much more difficult for someone new to programming to learn what’s actually going on.

When I first learned to program for Microsoft Windows, it was in the imperative programming language, C. The basis of every program was running a function that returned any messages that had been sent to the program. Then, the program would loop through all the messages that it was interested in. Is the message to redraw the window? Then I’ll do that! Is the message to resize the window? Then I’ll do that! And so on.

But later, I wrote everything with C++, an object-oriented language. In that, these was no checking for messages. Instead I just wrote functions for objects to do the things that needed to be done, and all that messiness of checking messages was gone. Sure, it was still in the code somewhere. But it didn’t involve me as a programmer. And if I had never coded the old imperative programming way, I wouldn’t have had much of an idea what was really going on.

Computers are stupid. So the closer you are to how they really work, the easier it is to understand. It just so happens that the closer you are to how they really work, the more work you have to do. So there is a very good reason to program using high level abstractions. But it is no way to learn.

Yet Nicolas Bize is in the minority when it comes to programmers. If you ask most programmers what language you should learn because you are just starting out, they will usually scoff at things like Basic or Fortran or even C. Personally, I think people who want to learn programming should start with some form of simple Basic. Then they should learn assembly language or take a course in digital electronics. Then they can branch out into other languages where they can be more productive. But by that time, they will understand how computers work.

Kitty Genovese and the Myth of the 38

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Kitty GenoveseKitty Genovese was the young woman who was stabbed to death in New York in 1964. She became famous in death because of reporting by The New York Times and later by Times‘ editor AM Rosenthal’s book, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case. The story was that as she was attacked 38 neighbors watched and did nothing. I’ve long known that the story was largely a myth, but it was only today when I listened to CounterSpin that learned just how much of a myth it was.

The show interviewed Marcia Gallo, who last year published the book, “No One Helped”: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy. The main thing I knew about the case was that when Genovese was first attacked by Winston Moseley, a man opened his window and yelled at the perpetrator — who then ran away. It’s just that she had already been stabbed; Moseley came back later and finished her off.

What I did not know was that after Moseley first ran away, she then went around the corner and collapsed inside a vestibule where the door was locked. When Moseley again attacked and attempted to rape her, she was yelling for help, but feebly (for obvious reasons) and out of sight. A friend of her’s in the building opened his door, scaring away Moseley again. As the friend called for help, another neighbor held Genovese in her arms until the ambulance arrived. It’s actually a touching scene all around with tenderness as well as the horror of it all with neighbors trying to hold themselves together enough to be helpful. Unfortunately, Genovese died of her wounds on the way to the hospital.

All of us can get behind the idea of individuals being nice to each other. But this is a traditional conservative dodge — used effectively to limit solidarity.

So where does the this notion of 38 witnesses who did nothing come from? Well, the police. In trying to find her murderer, the police were frustrated by neighbors’ lack of interest in helping them — in many cases, refusing even to open the door. But this got morphed into the idea that there were all these people who just sat by and watched Kitty Genovese be murdered. It’s certainly true that some number of people saw or heard some part of one or the other of the attacks. But as we see: at least three of them did do something.

Kitty Genovese’s Murder as Ideological Fodder

What I got from the interview with Gallo was how the case was used for other purposes. In particular, AM Rosenthal was very interested in how individuals allow bad things to happen by not speaking up. He was particularly interested in the rise of Nazism and so on. But he also seems to have been fundamentally conservative. He did not like the social movements that were rising at the time. So he used the case (probably without knowing it) as a way of putting down social movements in the name of individuals treating each other well.

Now, all of us can get behind the idea of individuals being nice to each other. But this is a traditional conservative dodge — used effectively to limit solidarity. It is very curious in the Kitty Genovese case, however, because even had he been right, the issue wouldn’t have been the lack of one-on-one care, but the lack of social cohesion — the lack of solidarity.

Interestingly, we know Rosenthal to be conservative in a couple of ways. For one, he was very keen on the Iraq War. But the other is that he was highly homophobic and this resulted in The New York Times being slow to report on the AIDS epidemic. But Kitty Genovese was a lesbian herself. And I wonder if that fact didn’t contribute to his more easily using Kitty Genovese as simply a means to his ideological ends.

Afterword

Winston Moseley was caught six days after the attack, because his neighbors turned him in for a burglary they had witnessed. This whole idea that city people lose their sense of community is just ridiculous.

Image of Kitty Genovese licensed under Fair use, via Wikipedia.