Dave Endorses Elizabeth Warren!

Last presidential election, I was so frightened by a Donald Trump Presidency that I broke from my normal silliness of always voting for the Green Party and endorsed Hillary Clinton-- I listened to a great interview with her on The Weeds and tried my best to contrast her policies with Trump; I wrote all this down and I'm certain my thoughts had absolutely no effect on the election or anyone's voting choice-- if you're reading this, I'm probably preaching to the choir, and the few people I know that did vote for Trump did so because they loathed Hillary Clinton and couldn't separate the person from the policy; now The Weeds has done an in depth interview with Elizabeth Warren and I really like everything she says: she wants to fight corruption and lobbying; she wants to tax the biggest fortunes in the country and use the money for childcare and college debt and early childhood education and the opioid crisis; she truly believes that there is an enormous wealth gap and that a thinner and thinner slice of the population is being represented by political power; she is critical of Wall Street speculation; she promises to stop mining and frakking on federal lands and believes that climate change is something needs to be addressed; she believes in the power of government agencies-- the agencies that Trump has crippled and gutted-- such as the EPA and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency she is interested in Medicare for all; she does not lean Democratic Socialist, in fact she identifies herself as a Democratic Capitalist-- which makes me happy-- Warren believes in the power of markets as long as there are clear rules and arbiters; but Warren does not believe markets belong in public education and healthcare; she has ideas about zoning and redlining and housing; she's a nerd (her book recommendation is Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty . . . which I enjoyed but never finished, it's voluminous) and basically I thought she was super-smart, well-spoken, has a real purpose and plan, and reflects the ideas and values that I respect and that should work for the vast majority of Americans . . . of course, I thought the same thing about Hillary Clinton's policies, so take this with a grain of salt, but I'm giving her my full endorsement and not going to bother learning about any of the other twenty-three Democratic candidates (and I suggest you do the same . . . and I wish I could just blithely vote for the Green Party, but that ship has sailed).

Donald Trump Stars in "Risky Business" Sequel (Michael Lewis and The Fifth Risk)

If you really want to hate Donald Trump-- but you don't want to get on your moral high horse and repeat a bunch of stuff everyone knows-- then the new Michael Lewis book The Fifth Risk is for you.

First let's state the obvious. There's no question that Trump is morally repugnant, a racist who hates folks from "shithole countries", a laughingstock and a pussy grabber; Trump used campaign money to pay off a porn star and he has a twisted infatuation with Vladimir Putin, a leader that meddled in our election and is rumored to kill journalists and political opponents. His toxic tweets undermine the mission of our government, his lies foment discord, and he believes he's above the rule of law. He struggled to condemn white supremacists and Nazis, and he had trouble praising the recently departed John McCain. He separated families at the border. He's not loyal to anyone (including U.S. intelligence agencies). He mismanaged a crisis in Puerto Rico, and his version of Yule Tide cheer is to shut down the government. He's a gross human. You can go on and on with this kind of character assessment/assassination, but where does it get you?

Michael Lewis does something different in his new, rather short and slightly fragmented book. Lewis gives us a number of factual, quotidian, and concrete reasons to hate Trump. While it might not be as groundbreaking and perfectly written as his classic works (e.g. Moneyball, The Blind Side, Flash Boys, and The Big Short) it's probably more important. First of all, it's timely (the book sprang from articles he wrote for Vanity Fair). It takes a fairly apolitical look at what's happening right now in several departments in the United States Government (The Department of Energy, The Depart of Commerce, The USDA, and the NOAA).

Do Conservatives Think Michael Lewis Is Part of the Liberal Media Conspiracy? Maybe Not?

The second reason the book might be bigly, hugely, and powerfully significant is that Michael Lewis is so well regarded-- both as a journalist and as a writer-- that conservatives might actually read this book. If they do, they will learn something: the American government is great. Not the bipartisan political side of the government, but the mundane departments within the government and the people within these departments. The people who do the things that markets will never do. The people that insure the safety of our electrical grid; the people that contain and monitor all the nuclear waste we've created; the people that collect data on weather and soil and oceans and tornadoes; the people that fight wildfires; the people that concern themselves with the nutrition and health of our impoverished children; the people that monitor the safety of our food and livestock.

Donald Trump, mainly through incompetence and corruption, has managed to severely undermine these departments. And Michael Lewis doesn't even write about the EPA. This might be for political reasons-- the EPA seems to strike a really nasty chord with many conservatives (mainly because many conservatives-- especially in the energy sector-- don't believe externalities should be monitored, they want to do as much damage to the environment as possible, especially if it helps them to make more money . . . and then, they espouse, someday in the dystopically flooded and polluted future, the market will magically clean things up). It's impossible to be apolitical when you start talking about Trump, Scott Pruitt and the dismantling of the EPA. It's egregious. I think Lewis wanted this book to be politically palatable so he avoided this truly hot button stuff. Or he's writing another book.

Anyway, here's what Lewis does explain. When you take over the government, you are legally required to prepare for the transition. You need to appoint 700 people to very important government positions. Many of these positions aren't particularly political. They are positions involved with health, disease preventions, pandemic readiness, data collection, wildfires and nuclear waste, and R & D project management. Trump has done an utterly abysmal job with these appointments. He's appointed business people with conflicts of interest, unqualified friends, Trump loyalists, and-- disturbingly, in hundreds of positions-- no one at all.

You need to read the book to get the full ramifications of this very measurable, very factual incompetence. Lewis doesn't need to get into Trump's character all that much. He simply portrays his brash idiocy in contrast with the professional dedication of these often brilliant, mission-driven government employees; these people who make America great despite Donald Trump. The people who keep our technologically depend infrastructure working. If you think you're some kind of Ron Swanson-esque rugged individualist, then get real. Our government employs 9000 people to keep a glacier sized underground mass of nuclear waste from poisoning the Columbia River. Your gun, your tools, and your wood stove can't protect you from that.

Here's are some highs (and lows) from the book.

The Unlikely Hero: Chris Christie . . .

I'm a public school teacher, so I hate Chris Christie as much as the next guy, but juxtapose Christie with Trump and Christie comes off looking like a gentleman and a professional. Christie took on the responsibility of convincing Trump that in the unlikely case that he won the election, he had to actually prepare to run the government. It was his legal responsibility to create a transition team, and the Obama administration had prepared the best government transition protocol in history (although Lewis commends the Bush administrations protocol as well). Trump-- who apparently had no victory speech written and didn't really believe he was going to win-- told Christie that he was "stealing my fucking money" because Christie used it for the transition team, which investigates potential appointees. Trump told Christie that if they won, they could leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition themselves. Then Trump fired Christie, probably because Christie prosecuted Jared Kushner's father in 2004.

Trump was quite determined to not learn anything about running the government, and also determined to not hire anyone who could help him with this task.

The Chief Risk Officer's Take on the Risky Business

John MacWilliams, DOE chief risk officer during the Obama administration, outlines the top five risks that government agencies monitor and maintain.

1. Theft, loss and/or detonation of a nuclear weapon
2. North Korea
3. Iran's nuclear program
4. Failure of the electrical grid (through disaster, attack, espionage, etc.)
5. ??????????

The fifth risk is the one we can't conceive. The unknown unknown. The problem with these risks from a cognitive perspective is that we can't accurately measure their probability. Trump's lack of appointments may increase the likelihood of a nuclear disaster from one in a million to one in 10,000. That's an exponentially huge increase, but most people will shrug their shoulders at it.

What's the difference? They're both big numbers.

Humans are awful at judging risk. We're more afraid of sharks than we are of french fries. And we have no heuristic method to add up all these small increases in risk and understanding the overall implications. But the truth of the matter, is that every day that goes by without some sort of major disaster in our infrastructure is a testament to our government.

MacWilliams explains the consequences of Trump's proposed budget cuts: ARPA-E loans, climate research, national labs, and the security our electrical grid will all suffer.

All the risks are science based. You can't gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the DOE, you gut the country.

This is the part of Trumpism that's most disturbing and difficult to conceive: the dismissal of science. I know it's tied in to the hatred of elites and Hillary Clinton, that trusting scientific results is somehow akin to trusting the government and the liberal media conspiracy and the deep state, that trusting science will grant the pointy-headed social engineers the power to tell people what to do and how to live. It's true that science may occasionally do these things. Science now tells us that smoking and soda and having a gun in the house are really bad for us, that factory farming is an environmental disaster, and that cows and coal are contributing to global warming. Economists tell us that immigrants are good for the economy. These are inconvenient truths. It's fun to smoke and drink soda and eat burgers and shoot guns and hate immigrants. So Trump supporters don't want to hear it and they cover their ears.

I also understand that science is bringing the robots and factory automation. Destroying traditional industry. It's also measuring the externalities that businesses don't want to deal with. And it's increasing the distance between the haves and the have-nots. The nerds are winning. The Trump supporters struck back at this. So I get it.

Big Pharma is big science, and Big Pharma certainly contributed to the opioid epidemic. Many people in this country feel they have no control over their life, and they are probably right to think this. They might be addicted to opiates, or in an area that has been left behind. Most American don't have one thousand dollars socked away in case of crisis. These same people have access to the internet and see everyone surpassing them, and wonder: what has science done for me? What has the government done for me?

These are the people that need to read this book.

Weirdest Trump Appointee: Brian Klippenstein

To head up the USDA transition team, Trump appointed one man: Brian Klippenstein. A really strange choice. Klippenstein ran an organization called Protect the Harvest, which basically "demonized institutions like the Humane Society." Klippenstein's group worried that if people got too concerned about animal welfare, we would stop eating animals.

Here's what Lewis has to say:

One of the USDA's many duties was to police conflicts between people and animals. It brought legal action against people who abused animals, and it maybe wasn't the ideal place to insert a man who was preternaturally unconcerned with their welfare.

After Klippensteins's appointment, data disappeared. This has been the case in several departments. The USDA suddenly purged all the animal abuse records. There was public outcry and some of the data has been re-posted, but the most important and specific stuff seems to have gone missing. And to access this data, which was public and accessible, you now need to submit a Freedom of Information Act request.

National Geographic reports:

The restored records represent a minuscule portion of the 17-year database, and they exclude thousands of inspection reports on puppy mills, private research facilities, and zoos that constitute the public record of commercial animal abuse. Since February 3, those reports have been accessible only by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request, a byzantine process that can take months or even years.

What the fuck?

Does Trump Understand Irony?

No way.

Here's an example:

But the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you might think that Trump, when he took office, would do everything he could to strengthen and grow the little box marked "Rural Development." That's not what happened.

Do rural Trump supporters understand irony? I hope so. Because they fucked themselves.

Does Barry Myers Understand Irony?

Probably less so than Trump. Or he's an amazing actor. No section of the book will make you angrier than "All the President's Data."

Barry Myers is the CEO of AccuWeather. AccuWeather is the Myers family business. Lewis explains that since the 1990s, Barry Myers (with a "straight face") has argued that the National Weather Service should be "with one exception, entirely forbidden from delivering any weather-related knowledge to any American who might otherwise wind up a paying customer of AccuWeather. The exception was when human life and property were at stake."

And even when human life is at stake, Myers is hesitant to let people rely on the National Weather Service.

This should piss you off. What should piss you off even more, is that AccuWeather bases all its forecasts on data it receives from the National Weather Service. Data it receives free of charge.

Rick Santorum, a recipient of Myers's family campaign contributions, tried to codify this inanity into law in Pennsylvania. Lewis starts to lose his generally objective tone:

Pause a moment and consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.

The lesson here is to get your weather from weather.gov. That's what I do. No ads. Same information. Straight from the source. If the law Myers lobbied for would have passed in Pennsylvania, then the website would have been blocked there.

Barry Myers is the ultimate symbol of Trump's bizarre business forward political corruption. Everything about what it is to be a Trumpian conservative is rolled up into this appointment, and this part of the book-- while not quite as exciting as the possibility of a nuclear disaster-- is really educational and really really ire-inducing. Don't read it before operating a motor vehicle.

The Takeaway

The end of the book focuses on the people who collect and utilize data for the government, how incredibly valuable this data is for everyone-- citizens, researchers, scientists, and private businesses, and how a new conflict greater than bipartisan tomfoolery is jeopardizing the system.

The NOAA website used to have links to weather-forecast. Now those links have been buried. This is why:

The man Trump nominated to run NOAA thought that people who wanted a weather forecast should pay him for it. There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn't between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.

I'm a public school teacher. I'm in it for the mission. I generate a lot of good ideas every day, and so do my colleagues. I can't tell you enough how smart, dedicated and professional most of them are. We share these ideas with each other. There's no reason not to. We don't get paid more for having better ideas, but it feels good to have them. It feels good to be a better teacher. It increases your status in the eyes of your friends, colleagues, and students. America has grown so cynical that a good number of people don't believe that people like this exist any longer. They view the government as a stupid bloated nefarious system that begets and pays itself. This book might remind them otherwise.

Comedy = Women to the Rescue/ Tragedy = Just Men

If you're dismayed by the state of the state, I highly recommend you read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, a conservative classic from 1987 that open-minded liberals and conservatives will enjoy because of the tone, it's quaintly intellectual (and quite crotchety and moralistic) by today's inanely polarized realpolitik standards of political discourse; Bloom is not afraid to actually say something and then back it up logically . . . and even his dated attack on the raw power of rock music will ring true to those old enough to remember when rock music meant something; I'll do a full review once I finish, but I was struck by his analysis of sex roles and Shakespeare-- Bloom pragmatically discusses the costs of feminism, of making both sexes the same, of stripping them of their mysticism and their courtship contrasts-- we know the benefits of feminism, of course: more brains in the economy and higher education; more empowered women; women that don't have to depend on men; women that can pursue a career as ambitiously as they can motherhood and childbirth; women that can participate fully in politics-- not just behind the scenes-- but Bloom also describes what it lost when we blend these worlds and these sex roles, and he uses Shakespeare to help; he explains that the difference between a Shakespearean comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy is that in the comedies, when the men are inadequate at restoring a civilized and peaceful order to things, the women dress as men, leave their feminine world, sort things, and then return to their feminine roles-- but with a sense of delicious irony in that these roles are simply there to make civilization operate and sometimes they need to be broken by clever women that can play the part of men better than men can (Portia from The Merchant of Venice is the perfect example) but once the sexes are mixed together and uniform, whether as soldiers or lawyers or pilots or statesmen, then there is no civilized feminine world to come to the rescue (Hillary Clinton is the perfect example-- she needed some savvy woman to edit her "basket of deplorables" speech) and this is incredibly evident in Hamlet . . . if Ophelia was a bit zanier and clever, instead of depressed and broken, she might have disguised herself as a man, befriended Hamlet and Horatio, exacted a less violent revenge on her meddling dad, and mopped the rottenness right out of Castle Elsinore . . . but woe is me (and her) as that was not to be . . . and now that I've expressed myself fully, I'll get back to cleaning the sink.

Trump Sez the Chinese Curse is a Hoax

The Chinese Curse is devastatingly simple: may you live in interesting times, and-- unless the Chinese Curse is a Chinese Hoax-- there is no question that we have entered The American Era of the Chinese Curse . . . and I've exhausted myself thinking about the implications of this, and I've been trying to process and digest everything I've seen, read, heard, and thought before I posted on the election, but now that I've heard Trump's pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, things have hit close enough to home and I need to vent about it all . . . and so here are some of my thoughts:

1) Betsy DeVos is a union-busting proponent of charter schools and vouchers, and she'd like nothing better than to privatize the most venerable community democratic institution in America, the public school . . . this causes me a great deal of anxiety, both for my job and the future of funding for the public school my children attend . . . and DeVos has ties to Amway . . . yuck;

2) I live in a wonderful liberal enclave where the kids walk to school, play in the streets (and occasionally get hit by cars) and enjoy a fairly safe, often wonderful, multi-cultural, friendly community . . . in my town, the vote tally was 3900 for Clinton and 1100 for Trump, and most of the Trump support seems to have come from the Orthodox Jewish population, who held a Trump rally at a synagogue, and who were probably voting for Trump for the reasons outlined in number one-- they pay Highland Park taxes, but they send their kids to private schools, and Trump would be their best bet on saving some money in this regard;

3) I was excited by Trump's infrastructure promises because I thought I might get air-conditioning in my classroom, but since Trump's infrastructure plan is to incentivize private companies to do infrastructure work and he'd like to appoint someone who wants to dismantle the public education system, I'm not going to hold my breath;

4) Clinton didn't get people out to vote the way Obama did-- perhaps because she was an establishment candidate in an anti-establishment campaign, and the Ohio and Pennsylvania counties that flipped are the ones plagued by heroin and opioid epidemics, so while I thought America was Pretty Great and Addressing Some Issues So It Might Get Greater, the people in these towns really think America Sucks-- they are uneducated, jobless, angry, and addicted to drugs or surrounded by people addicted to drugs, or working a crappy job, or working a decent job but surrounded by people working crappy jobs and addicted to drugs and watching their town go to shit-- and so while I liked some of the policy tweaks Clinton was proposing . . . maybe they would make college cheaper, or provide more pre-K and childcare, or help working mothers, maybe she would strengthen Dodd-Frank, etcetera-- and while she wasn't overtly proposing things I really care about-- she wasn't promoting unionization and radical environmental protection and carbon taxation, at least she wasn't completely opposed to them . . . but my life is generally great, and so while I fear massive change from the status quo, a bunch of people that I don't know or live near were really angry and wanted any kind of change, especially one that would make things worse for immigrants and minorities and terrorists and women, because if you can't find a way to improve your life, the best way to feel better about yourself, is to make someone else's life worse;

5) the best best case scenario of Trump's term (which will probably be eight years, unless he does something really really egregious, because he'll be able to create some short-term-- but very costly-- windfalls in the economy in order to get elected again) is that he fosters some diplomatic ties with Russia, remains a bit isolationist and doesn't get involved in some awful militaristic adventure, doesn't go too nuts with the wall and immigrant thing, and doesn't dismantle too much of the Clean Air and Water Act and other environmental regulations, figures out a way to revise Obamacare without making 22 million people lose healthcare, and basically doesn't get much done . . . but the more typical scenario is that moderate Republicans like John McCain reign him in a bit and we just have a typically terrible Republican term . . . so you can expect tax cuts that will drive up the national deficit, cuts in government programs, a stupid purposeless expensive adventure in the Middle East, a weakening of organized labor, a super-conservative Supreme Court, the return of torture, environmental deregulation and devastation, but a bit of a windfall from tearing all the coal from the mountains and fracking all the gas out of the earth and drilling for oil everywhere, financial deregulation followed by a financial bubble followed by a recession . . . for more on this, just read about the eight years under George W. Bush . . . yuck;

6) Myron Ebell, the climate change contrarian leading Trump's EPA transition team, is a scary motherfucker . . . while the education stuff hits close to home, nothing scares me more about Trump than his belief in conspiracy and hokum, and his lack of understanding of the scientific method . . . he's an anti-vaxxer, for Christ's sake;

7) if you're a guy like me, and just can't understand why anyone would vote for Trump, and would consider him a populist here, then you need to read this great post my friend John sent me . . . it's written by a guy who grew up in a white Jesus-fearing red community, and he says stop trying to understand the rural Christian voters because they don't understand themselves-- they are angry and brand loyal and would never let any "facts" or "critical thinking" or argument or logic sway them otherwise . . . Clinton is a socialist crooked politician and God is a white guy with a  beard who controls the weather and the best news source is the post that makes you happiest on Facebook-- whether it's fake or alt-right propaganda  and white people are superior and no elitist coastal bastard is going to tell you otherwise . . . and these people have been voting against their best interests for quite a while, Thomas Frank fully explains it in his masterpiece What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America . . . it's a moral choice that's about brand loyalty, not critical thinking or policy, and if you're brand occasionally talks about grabbing women by the pussy, well, you can put up with that;

8) even if Trump said the things he said purely in order to win the election, the hate and vitriol he spewed against women, Mexicans, immigrants, and Hillary Clinton should never be forgotten and the pussy grabbing remark should be mentioned at every press conference . . . despite blind conservative brand loyalty, I'm surprised that any father with a daughter or any woman at all voted for this crass idiot, and I am ashamed for them . . . and I know that these people who voted for Trump hate me because I pity them for their ignorance and provincialism, it's an ugly dynamic;

9) worst case Trump scenarios are really scary: he's capable of bullying, intimidating, and coercing the press; he might really screw up banking regulations and trade deals; he might hurt the U.S. diplomatically for many years to come; he might start a nuclear war; he might intern all Muslims; the First and Second Amendment will be under attack; he might spend tons and tons of money building a wall; he's angry, petty, and he's been the butt of the joke for decades and now, in the ugliest and weirdest "underdog" victory ever, the butt of the joke-- the Ugliest American-- has become the most powerful man in the free world . . . it's best not to think about these situations and just concentrate on the stuff he will definitely fuck up, and scrutinize him constantly;

10) the press really dropped the ball-- they were vetting Clinton as if she won, and not doing story after story about Trump's crazy conspiracy theories, his lack of core principles, his corrupt business practices, his lack of tax information, his insane business conflicts, and the very real possibility that he might end up running an autocratic kleptocracy . . . he won't be doing political favors for people, he'll be directly enriching himself with his policy moves . . . this one is too depressing to continue;

11) I was trying to explain to my wife why we still have the electoral college, and I was really having trouble-- I know the Founding Fathers wanted to give rural states enough power to have some say and they wanted to promote a more stable two-party system, and the electoral votes make this possible, but it's gotten to the point where there are two Americas . . . and there are a lot more of us progressive city folk, who would like parks and good schools and clean air and water and green energy and multicultural tolerance and more Northern European style policy such as single payer healthcare and better family leave and help with college education and a progressive Supreme Court, and then there are these smaller states that are holding us hostage, and I'm not sure what they want-- and I don't think they know what they want either-- and I don't want to be stereotypical, so I'll refrain from speculating, but if there are any red state Trump supporters who read this blog (not a shot in hell) then please explain in the comments what policy you expected from Trump . . . anyway, we're getting to the point where we should be two separate economic entities, which would be nice, because the blue states are far less reliant on the federal government, and would do much better without the baggage of the red states-- who are incredibly thankless for the money we send to subsidize them;

12) some folks voted for Trump because he'd be tough on terrorism and ISIS, but I can't understand why people in rural America-- the least likely place for a terrorist attack-- are far more fearful of Muslims than the folks on the coasts, and some people voted for Trump because they see him as a bastion of law and order, a voice of reasonable justice wearing "the mantle of anger" amidst the gun violence, flood of immigrants, city riots and kowtowing to minority groups like Black Lives Matter . . . and while I don't agree with any of this, and think these people received their information from fake news on Facebook, at least it's a reason;

13) I'm not saying Trump is like Hitler . . .  that would be hyperbolic, plus Hitler was organized, a compelling speaker, and Hitler actually had a plan of action-- joke stolen from David Cross-- but Hitler promised jobs, Hitler promised revenge for the deals that Germany had made with the world (The Treaty of Versailles) and Hitler was an intimidating bully who hated immigrants and promised to make Germany great again . . . those are just some interesting parallels, but I'm not comparing the two leaders because I don't want to get put on leave, like this teacher;

14) and so that's what it's come down to . . . the majority of the country, myself, included, can't believe what has happened, and many of us would have no problem leaving the red states to fend for themselves-- I would gladly vote to secede from the crap that's going to happen in the next 4-8 years . . . the red states can pollute themselves to hell, cut all the government services, privatize everything, dismantle the schools, ban gay marriage, make kids study Creationism, do lots of heroin, carry semi-automatic weapons everywhere, refuse to vaccinate, insult women and the disabled, deport immigrants, build walls and do whatever insane shit they want to do, with a spray-tanned game-show host as their beloved daddy-leader . . . just don't touch my America, because my America is Pretty Great . . . it could use improvements, but it's certainly never been better than this . . . so all I can hope for is that the political forces in my town and state can keep the political forces of Donald Trump and his ilk at bay, and maybe that's why we have the electoral college and why we are a loose federation of states . . . and readers who voted for Trump, perhaps you could explain yourselves in the comments, because you folks are an angry apocalyptic cipher to me . . . I still haven't gotten to have an actual conversation with a real Trump supporter, which makes me pretty sheltered-- I guess I live behind my own wall of elitist coastal intellectualism, which I've erected out of brain cells and books, but maybe someday soon some folks from Trump's America will make their way over my wall and explain things to me.

The Wu Tang Claim Helps Dave Understand the Election and More

I'd like to assure Zman that yes I am working on a post about the election results, but I'm taking my time and trying to process and digest everything before I  put it on wax, and-- oddly-- one of the things that's helping me think about what happened is Tim Wu's new book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads . . . the book is ostensibly a history of advertising in America, from snake-oil salesmen pitching addictive spurious cure alls to the first fake news stories created purely to garner attention (my favorite is a report in the New York Sun that Sir John Herschel had discovered four foot tall hairy bat men on the moon . . . people were surprisingly willing to accept this as fact) to Lucky Strike's brilliant campaign proposing that the secret ingredient in their brand of cigarette protected your throat from cough and irritation (It's TOASTED!) and then Wu moves on to things more recent and familiar: radio advertising, product placements, TV commercials for the masses, TV commercials for the unique individual, email, Oprah, clickbait, data harvesting, Google Adwords, Twitter, Facebook, ad-blockers, etcetera . . . as advertising gets more modern, more data-driven, more insidious, and more fragmented, Wu gets more severe in his warnings-- he frames the epic battle to get our attention as a series of technological leaps, which the advertisers soon harness for their own purposes, followed by a revolt of the masses against that particular kind of advertising . . . but we may have reached the end of the road: Wu sees Buzzfeed, essentially clickbait on "the fourth screen," and social media sites like Facebook as the purveyor of "news" as particularly egregious forms of media and while there is hope once more-- for those willing to find it, Netflix and HBO offer some of the best ad free content ever created-- but you've got to pay for it . . . and if you want to learn about it, you can find something of quality on Youtube or in the podcast universe . . . if you're willing to do some research; now I'd like to bring this back to the election and make my Tim Wu Tang Claim: that the media-- driven by clicks and views-- totally dropped the ball with their coverage . . . they focused on speculative poll clickbait instead of doing on the ground journalism-- talking to Trump supporters and doing in depth coverage of the policy and issues that these supporters desired and imagined could Trump deliver, and contrasting this with Clinton policy promises . . . but instead they focused on scandals and silliness; of course, there is a better alternative to mainstream media: I'm quite proud of how I analyzed the race and what I learned about the issues; I avoided internet clickbait for the most part and listened to high-quality long form podcasts like The Weeds, Slate Money, Waking Up With Sam Harris, Radiolab, Common Sense, This American Life, and Planet Money, and I even did my due diligence and listened to Dan Levin and Rush Limbaugh (who were both repetitive blowhards pushing the mainstream media to be less about policy discussion and more about clickbait scandal) and I became something of an expert on the major issues and policies: healthcare and jobs and trade agreements and immigration (and even the spurious email "scandal") and if you like, you can find media that is not fragmented and not totally driven by clicks and views-- there is an alternative to the Facebook/Twitter style news platform, which propagated fake news and bite-sized weirdness (and while some would argue that the podcasts I've listed have a left-leaning slant, if you listened to the many many episodes about the election, they took a much more empathetic and sincere analytical look at the Trump phenomenon than anything on the right di with Hillary Clinton . . . Dan Levin simply chanted "crooked Hillary" and "lock her up" on his show . . . so the mainstream media went right along with this internet model, casting the election as a horse race, with this scandal or that scandal affecting the polls, someone is up, someone is down-- the kind of reporting that could be done without getting out of bed-- and there was no discussion of global warming-- an existential threat-- or the actual implications of repealing NAFTA, or the pros and cons of allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, or how unionization might help the jobs we still have in America or anything of substance) and Wu ends with a quotation from William James, who believed that "our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we paid attention to" and I believe this too, which is why I make my students park their cell-phones at the door and pay attention to me . . . because I truly believe I'm paying attention to and what I'm making them pay attention to is better  than the things the vast majority of the American people pay attention to, and that might be elitist and judgmental, but it's also true . . . I spend my attention reading books written by people smarter than me and listening to long, intelligent podcasts presented by experts in various fields; Wu also reminds us of this by quoting the ironically named James Williams: "Your time is scarce, and your technologies know it," and I think the ultimate lesson here is that we all need to remember this (myself included, while I generally use my attention for critical thinking and creative enlightenment, I still occasionally get sucked in to my stupid fantasy football team, which is great on paper and finally peaking, but it's too late . . . I'm 2 - 9 and I could have spent that time reading or practicing the guitar, instead of shuffling players around an imaginary line-up).

Last Ditch Effort

This will be my last political post about the presidential election (unless have a Bush/Gore situation) and I already did my best to summarize the policy positions of each candidate, and now I must concede that if you are one of four kinds of people-- listed below-- then you should stop reading this and just vote Trump, but if you are NOT one of those four kinds of people, and you are still on the fence and might vote for Hillary Clinton, but feel some trepidation because of the email "scandal," then please take the time to listen to the new This American Life: "Master of Her Domain . . . Name"  or, if you're feeling more ambitious and want something more nonpartisan and much more comprehensive, then go ahead and read "What the FBI Files Reveal About Hillary Clinton's Email Server" in the magazine Politico . . . Garrett Graff read 247 pages of interview summaries of the FBI investigations about Clinton, and while there is some incompetence and some technological bumbling, there is absolutely nothing scandalous in the entire narrative . . . I've decided that Clinton's policies are in line with things I want in our country, and so I'm not going to throw my vote away and support Jill Stein (although my heart is with the Green Party) and so this is it, my sad last ditch effort to convince all you swing voters . . . as I stated earlier, disregard this you are one of the following four types of people, as nothing is going to change your (narrow) mind:

you should vote for Trump, if . . .

1) you are greedy rich person who wants a tax windfall . . . just make sure you're rich enough that you won't need any of the social services that will be cut to generate this handout;

2) you are an angry white racist and/or misogynist; who is also scared of immigrants and thinks we should build a wall to keep them out;

3) you are someone who truly believes Trump will bring back shitty non-unionized manufacturing jobs from China, isolate the U.S. economically and diplomatically, so that-- like North Korea-- we are forced to buy our own crappy products, and this will Make America Great . . . Just Like North Korea is Great;

4) you are a crazy conspiracy theorist who believes everything is rigged: the election, the FBI, and even the scientific method-- which is why you also don't believe in vaccines and would prefer the return of the plague rather than a society based on rational thought, logic and progress;

happy voting!

Just The Policy, Ma'am

Though I know this is a stupid waste of time, because most people are voting based on what scandal has piqued their ire more-- mishandling email or pussy grabbing-- and apparently network TV has all but abandoned policy discussion . . . but for those few, very silly folks that actually care about what might happen to the country once the scandals are over and done with, I've tried to summarize Trump and Clinton's actual visions for America; I listened to The Weeds episode The Massive Policy Stakes of 2016, and though the folks at The Weeds lean liberal, they are also total policy wonk-nerds, and do a good job of discussing Trump's plans and promises as rational thought, unlike how my friends view his opinions (the random demented rants of a stupid crazy clown-haired racist/misogynist menace) and I also refer to the recent NPR interview with George Packer, who wrote The Unwinding (an incredible account of the gradual unraveling of America's political and financial systems) and now on to the main event:

1) you should vote for Trump if you are anti-immigration, worried about Syrian refugees and Mexican racists and various brown people stealing your job, he's also up your alley if you would like a libertarian deregulation of banking, business, and environmental rules inside our country, and less free trade and more regulations and tariffs for doing business outside our country, you'll probably also like Trump if you're rich, as he's proposing massive tax cuts, mainly for the rich, and a consequential scaling back of social programs for the poor, he also promises to bring back the blue collar factory and manufacturing jobs, which will make his special interest minority group (white folks without a college degree) the backbone of America again, because Trump loves "the poorly educated" and though George Packer thinks his promise to the less-educated white folks is fraudulent and impossible, he also wonders whether Clinton's promise to spend money retraining these workers would work either . . . and nobody is proposing unionization, which makes me sad;

2) if you're a dual earner family, you'll like the fact that Hillary Clinton wants to make our childcare, maternity, and family leave policies more like Northern Europe . . . because America has the worst family leave policies of any developed country, and Clinton wants to bolster our pre-K program and generally make it easier for women and families to work . . . Clinton is tougher on banking regulations than Trump-- though, ironically, she has closer connections with the big banks (I've heard speculation that Trump, who has been denied loans in the past, doesn't want this to happen in the future) and she wants to provide free state college tuition for lower middle class families; reform healthcare and provide it to more people; enact comprehensive immigration reform that provides a path for immigrants to obtain citizenship; she promises she won't raise taxes on the middle class; and she wants to invest tremendous amounts of money into infrastructure, both to create jobs and provide avenues for economic growth . . . Clinton's policies and white papers are detailed and wonky, Trump's are broad, vague, and very short, and while Trump is a typical product of our fragmented media-driven echo-chamber, a polarizing figure that George Packer views as "catastrophic," the problem with Clinton is the reverse, she's a classic backroom politician who wants to make deals and compromises between the two parties using her knowledge and connections, but the country has moved beyond any sort of good-natured diplomacy between the Republicans and the Democrats; the Republicans vow to block all Democratic legislation, deny all Democratic Supreme Court nominees, and to investigate Clinton forever, to obstruct her power-- and the Democrats, view Trump supporters as a basket of deplorables, and can't consider the perspective of this special interest group-- uneducated white blue collar voters-- a group that was once unionized, galvanized and potent, and is now marginalized and lost . . . so whatever happens on Tuesday, half the country is going to be incredibly unhappy, and the other half will be more relieved than inspired, and that's not going to change any time soon.

Dave Should Be a Future Leader (According to Obama)

I was pleased to learn that Hillary Clinton agreed with me on the importance of Robert D. Putnam's new book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, but President Obama trumps her with his reading list for future leaders . . . I've read four of the ten:

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert;

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman;

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo;

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari;

and these were definitely some of the best books of the past decade (read my reviews if you're in need of some hyperbole) and so Obama either really loves to read, or he reads my blog and respects my reviews, or perhaps he's got really good reading advisers-- it's probably a combination of the three-- and I realize that this is a political "signal" to release this list, as it indicates that the President values high quality non-fiction, just as Donald Trump could never admit that reading books is necessary, as it would alienate his constituency and mark him as an elitist intellectual communist, which is why he gets his information from "the shows."

Ira Glass, Futility, and Politics

The new episode of This American Life preaches to the choir, and will definitely not be heard by people that need to hear it (like the people who live behind me-- they are proudly displaying a Trump/Pence sign on their lawn, the only one I've seen in Highland Park) but the candid sincerity in which Ira Glass investigates the lies propagated by the Trump campaign and sad, almost futile conclusions he arrives at will make you wonder what happened to facts, the truth, and the general knowledge of your average American; the show starts with Trump's claim that Hillary Clinton started the birther movement and he ended it, which is so patently ridiculous that it seems to belie further exploration-- aside from the fact that now 1/3 of Americans believe this "fact"-- and worse than this is Trump's assertion that NAFTA was the worst trade agreement in the history of the universe, because before Trump both Democrats and Republicans believed that trade agreements were good for the economy, created new markets, put money in everyone's pockets (because of lower priced goods) and strengthened diplomatic relations between countries . . . but now, despite the fact that 95% of economists (polled by the University of Chicago) believe that NAFTA is good for our economy and 5% are undecided and zero point zero percent of economists believe that NAFTA is bad for our economy, despite this, Clinton has backpedaled on trade agreements and has entertained the idea that manufacturing jobs might actually return to the U.S. (and I'm sure this is just a public position for debating Trump, but it's still disturbing that he could have that much influence over a policy discussion that anyone with any expertise regards as a no-brainer . . . certainly trade agreements cause some specific economic pain, but it's actually far cheaper to pay-off and retrain the people who lost their jobs than it is to punish the entire economy) and so now you've got both major parties taking a contrary position on trade agreements, when that was usually only a radical maneuver-- remember the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle? . . . anyway, the episode doesn't even get into the email "scandal" and the fact that the Bush administration lost five million emails (or 22 million . . . it doesn't make it right, but politicians get rid of emails and politicians use private emails to communicate to avoid the public records act, so unless you're going toss George Bush and Dick Cheney and Colin Powell and lots of other people in jail, Hillary Clinton does not belong in jail) and the episode also didn't discuss the thing that out-trumps all the other Trump stuff, his anti-vaccine stance: this indicates a complete disbelief in the scientific method, peer reviewed experimentation, and logic in general . . . and while disbelief in global warming is typical right wing silliness (Dan Levin just said that there is NO proof whatsoever that there is global warming . . . pretty bold and incredibly dumb, but who cares) not vaccinating children is extremely dangerous and a possible return to plague times is as good a reason as any not to vote for Trump; I'm considering voting for Jill Stein, despite the fact that the Green Platform is against trade agreements, but that's for environmental reasons-- which just might be the right reason to be against trade agreements (despite the fact that trade agreements help foreign countries, though they often use environmentally unsound methods of manufacture, and while helping foreign economies doesn't make America great,  that doesn't mean it's an awful thing) but then I heard that Jill Stein is an anti-vaxxer, but it seems the accusations that she's against vaccines were taken out of context so she's still a viable choice for me . . . I don't think I'm going to decide until I get behind the curtain, but the super sad thing, the thing that made Ira Glass so depressed in this episode (especially when he's talking to his Uncle Lenny, an 81 year old plastic surgeon who has consumed a whole host of right wing conspiracies and lies about President Obama and thus will vote for Trump) is that even if Trump is crushed in this election, it isn't going to help the cause for truth, logic, the scientific method, and the facts . . . social media and niche journalism have made it so people on the left and the right (and everywhere in between) can find exactly what they want to hear and then believe it.

Ambiguities and Aesthetics (of Bumper Stickers)

I apologize for the tardiness of this sentence, and all I've got is more bumper sticker stuff, but, as they say, better late than never: I was driving behind an oldish Hyundai Sonata that was sporting a Hillary '16 bumper sticker, which was artfully placed over a Bernie Sanders 2016 bumper sticker; the Hillary Clinton sticker didn't completely obscure the Bernie Sanders sticker-- which was definitely an option, because the bumper stickers were the same size-- instead it was placed solidly over most of the sticker, in diagonal fashion, as if to indicate that the person was a realist and knew that the realpolitik play was to run Clinton (despite her many flaws) but there was certainly enough of the Bernie sticker left to illustrate that the Hyundai owner lamented Sanders' loss to Clinton and did not want to erase what Bernie had accomplished (he certainly moved the Clinton platform to the left) and while I applaud this person for conveying all those political opinions with two stickers, this person had a third bumper sticker (why does everyone have a third bumper sticker?) which said Stop Bigotry and this text was accompanied by a weird yellow and tan blob, and I googled this one and it turns out the weird yellow and tan blob is a stylized caricature of Donald Trump's head . . . and I'm not sure if the sticker means "Stop Being Bigoted Towards Donald Trump" and is encouraging us to just love him for the irascible racist blowhard that he is, or if it means "Stop Being a Bigot, Donald Trump," but I'm guessing this driver interpreted it as the latter and didn't even consider the former possibility.

The Upside of Genocide

Sentence of Dave does not endorse the act of genocide (although Dave occasionally endorses arachnicide, particularly in the film Starship Troopers) but that doesn't mean that the aftermath of a murderous apocalypse can't have some benefits; in Rwanda, after Hutu extremists slaughtered more than a million people (mainly Tutsis) in 100 days, there weren't many men to be found-- the population was now skewed to 70% women, and so while a typical feminist movement takes time, and goes from Rosie the Riveter to Gloria Steinem to Hillary Clinton, in Rwanda, things moved at a breakneck pace and women's participation in the legislature is mandated; the result is that Rwanda is the only country in the world where more women than men serve as elected officials . . . and this doesn't make everything perfect for women, while they've moved into many typically male professions, they still suffer discrimination at home-- but this may be a last ditch effort for men to preserve traditions that are on the way out (e.g. Donald Trump) and once women enjoy a few generations of economic success and political clout, even those rather sexist Rwandan norms will erode; for more on this topic (and theme) and a compelling story about an all girl Rwandan debate team, listen to Invisibilia: Outside In.

Taking the Purple Pill: Trying to Step Outside the Moral Matrix

This sentence is going to be a random, stream-of-consciousness mess, but I think (for once) my form fits my function: lately, I have been trying my damndest to understand the polarization between liberals and the conservatives in our country, and how this is shaping the current economic policy and the election platforms . . . I've been doing my homework and listening to conservative talk radio-- some Rush Limbaugh and plenty of Mark Levin, and in between the overblown rhetoric, the ranting about Hillary "Rotten" Clinton . . . how she is a felon and a serial liar and the devil incarnate, the disgust with poor people and immigrants, the lack of empathy for people of color, the absolute hatred for the government and its programs and the possibility that our liberties might be curtailed (guns!), the fear of socialism and any redistribution of wealth, the paranoia that taxation and public works projects will just allow the government to get its dirty hands on our money, and like the mafia, take its cut-- as a public school teacher, it's hard to listen to this-- but in between all this vitriol, there is a kernel of an idea that these conservative blowhards are trying to espouse . . . that the government should be smaller and taxes should be lower and regulations should be less and that the best way to produce wealth is an unfettered free market-- and while is think this is true in a limited sense, for certain goods and products, I also think a free market is expensive and volatile with certain things, especially things that we wish to flow: electricity, water, health care, infrastructure . . . we just want these things to be reliable so that other things can work on top of them, and I also think there's a question of externalities, which the conservatives rarely mention . . . but underneath all the hatred there is something to talk about, and I find it interesting that the conservatives don't agree with all Trump has to say, especially on jobs and government infrastructure spending and protectionism and minimum wage . . . meanwhile, the liberals want a revolution-- free college, free healthcare, higher living wages, alternative energy, restrictions on corporations, control of externalities, and equal treatment for all people: rich, poor, immigrant, native, white, black, gay, transgender, and don't mind some redistribution of wealth to encourage this, and I've been listening to the ultra-liberal and fairly funny Citizen Radio to get a bead on some real radical left wing logic and emotions, and while I have more in common with those ideas, they can be really annoying and idealistic and insular and obnoxious as well . . . and it doesn't seem like any of these candidates or their followers are going to do what Jonathan Haidt suggests in his TED talk and "step outside the moral matrix" and actually look at what some smart people have figured out, which is that it's a combination of free markets and regulations that make economies work, and no one knows the exact balance . . . read some Ha-joon Chang to understand "kicking away the ladder," which is how many developed countries arrived at economic stability and wealth through complex and strategic protectionism, tariffs, regulation of foreign investment, regulation on imports and exports, and subsidies-- but then once these these nations (and he uses America, Britain, and his home country of North Korea as his prime examples) have reached a position of economic power, they use institutions such as the WTO and the IMF, treaties, embargoes, copyright law, and tariffs to force impoverished nations into adopting extreme free market policies despite the fact that these countries are not ready to compete in a free market . . . in other words, there's no magic bullet for an economy and it takes a mixture of ideology to understand this, which is what Jonathan Haidt's TED talk is about, his research shows that while there is some consensus between liberals and conservative on fairness/reciprocity and harm/care as valid moral concerns, conservatives tend to be much less open to experience and thus much more concerned with three moral traits that liberals don't interest liberals: purity/sanctity . . . so the strict interpretation of the Constitution . . . in-group/loyalty . . . so "real" Americans and patriotism and military jingoism and Ronald Reagan as God . . . and authority/respect . . . so law and order and belief in the police and a more traditional patriarchy and Christmas and religion and all that . . . and Haidt points out to the mainly liberal crowd (he polled them, and it's a typical TED talk audience: open to progress, science, and new ideas and almost entirely liberal) that BOTH of these mentalities are required to create a great society . . . there needs to be some revolution and progress, but order is also delicate and hard to maintain and actually requires the three moral traits that liberals tend to ignore . . . now Trump throws a bit of a monkey wrench in this because he doesn't seem to be concerned with some typical conservative values-- purity and respect for authority-- and so his economic and policy plans might be something entirely new (and unpalatable in some respects to the "true" conservative) while Clinton certainly can be more jingoistic about the military and more loyal to her group (the Democrats) than a typical rebellious, progress-minded liberal might like and while I know that these two sides are never going to love each other, or even see eye-to-eye . . . conservatives work on a five-channel moral system while liberals work on two-channels, so conservatives will always be annoying to liberals because they care passionately about more stuff and seem angry, and liberals will always seem to be amoral libertine radicals because they don't care about enough things, but we are going to have to embrace the fact that what makes America great is diversity, and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Ronald Reagan are part of that diversity, and those conservative views-- which I often find hateful and ranting and humorless-- are important, just as important as the stereotypical diversity most liberals embrace: multi-cultural, multi-gender, pan-religious, multi-ethnic diversity . . . diversity that appeals to people who are open to all kinds of experience, the diversity that leads to a wide-variety of good restaurants, many of them quite cheap . . . such as the new Tacoria in New Brunswick . . . and that's what this is all about, right?

Dave Endorses Hillary Clinton!

I normally waste my presidential vote on The Green Party-- because biodiversity is our planet's only interesting asset . . . and I think the Green Party might be in favor of biodiversity-- but this November, due to the special threat of Donald Trump, I'm actually going to make my ballot count and vote for Hillary Clinton-- I was skeptical about her at first, but I listened to Ezra Klein's interview with her, and she was smart, logical, funny, empathetic to the plight of the American worker-- especially in light of globalization, job loss to immigrants, and foreign competition-- and she had nuanced and reasonable ideas about childhood poverty, immigration reform, healthcare, and the media . . . plus, she actually talked about books, including one I read, which is always a good move when you want my endorsement (and obviously she did, or she wouldn't have mentioned a book that really moved me) and so my advice is this-- you think you have Hillary Clinton pegged, but you don't, so listen to this interview, read Robert Putnam's Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, and maybe you'll decide to vote for Hillary Clinton as well . . . the problem is that I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, I strongly doubt that any Trump supporters read my blog . . . but if you do, then tell me why I should change my mind (but you should probably listen to the interview and you should also read the George Saunders piece in The New Yorker about when he attended a Trump rally).

Political Paradox of the Week!

American conservatives tend to be against abortion, but they also tend to be against paid-maternity-leave . . . if there's anything upon which bizarro-world candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should debate, it's this bizarro-world American paradox-- America has some of the strictest abortion laws in the world, yet we are on the short list (with Oman and Papua New Guinea) of countries which offer no paid-family leave . . . from a logical standpoint, these two policies shouldn't exist in the same country . . . America . . . love it or leave it.

Mind Your PQ

It's only fair that I make a full and candid declaration of my "media bias" to my readers, so they can have some perspective on my opinions -- and so I took an incredibly boring 40 question quiz created by "media bias expert" Dr. Tim Groseclose, who believes that mainstream media is slanted to the left and that this slant is having a major impact on the American mind (though I believe that the mainstream media, like any other corporation, is giving the people the stories they want -- and so therefore a reflection of the American mind . . . because if you want conservative news, you know where to get it) and my PQ Survey results (83.2) indicate that I'm fairly liberal -- somewhere between Joe Biden (80.5) and Hillary Clinton (87.6) -- but the quiz seems very one dimensional; if I were to guess, I think I would be a libertarian in respect to people's rights, somewhat conservative in market economics, radical in terms of environmentalism -- though hypocritical about it -- and socially liberal . . . but now I have no idea what I am (aside from an 83.2) but one thing the quiz does point out is how divided our government is . . . though the questions aren't terribly nuanced or exciting, the voting statistics are interesting in themselves (and I also took this quiz, and it labelled me a Working Class Warrior . . . which is absurd, since I'm an elitist pedantic bastard).