Dave Goes "All Out" for Halloween

While I generally do not partake in costume-wearing at work, I didn't want a repeat of this epic failure and so when Liz K. told me to dress as Hamlet for Halloween, I quickly and congenially agreed (aside from the cape she wanted time to wear-- like Edna says: No capes!) and I really went all-out, I purchased a "Get Thee to a Nunnery" t-shirt on Amazon (which is a big deal for me because I generally do not wear t-shirts with words or slogans on them . . . once my yellow "Mosquito Control" t-shirt disintegrated, I was done with that phase of my life) and so I was one of the "main characters" from the novels and plays we teach-- perhaps you can identify some of the others . . . my wife opted for something less educational, but right on the nose for her: "a rock star."

Many Americans Are Walking on a Tightrope

 Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope Hardcover is a tough read; Pulitzer Prize-winning husband-wife-super-journalist team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn trace the lives of a number of Kristof's childhood friends, all from the vicinity of Yamhill, Oregon and they end up reporting on income inequality in America . . . one of my favorite phrases I learned from the book is "talking left and walking right," which a number of successful liberal families employ . . . they are all for divorce and abortion and legalized drug-use, but rarely need these in their own lives-- it seems conservative values about family and school make the difference in who escapes poverty in places like Yamhill . . . anyway, here's a couple of excerpts that I pulled by taking a photo of the page with my phone and then opening that photo with Google docs . . . the Google AI "reads" the photo and does a decent job making it text:

When so many Americans make the same bad choice, that should be a clue simply individual moral failure. It is a systemic failure.

Here's one way of looking at what happened: Daniel was injured on the job, and then doctors in and out of the military prescribed highly addictive opioids that got him hooked. That was because the government, through lax oversight, empowered pharmaceutical companies to profit from reckless marketing. Once Daniel was addicted. didn't try adequately to help him, but rather spit him out, and the became a target not of public health efforts but of the criminal system. The government failed him, blamed him, and jailed him. 

A couple of generations ago, the United States rewarded veterans by affording them education and housing benefits. More recently, the United States helped get veterans hooked on drugs and then incarcerated them.

    *    *    *    *    *

We Americans are a patriotic tribe, and we tend to wax lyrical about our land of plenty and opportunity. "We have never been a nation of haves and have-nots," Senator Marco Rubio once declared. “We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who have made it and people who will make it." We proudly assert, “We're number 1!" and in terms of overall economic and military strength, we are. But in other respects our self-confidence is delusional.

Here's the blunt, harsh truth.

America ranks number 40 in child mortality, according to the Social Progress Index, which is based on research by three Nobel Prize-winning economists and covers 146 countries for which there is reliable data. We rank number 32 in internet access, number 39 in access to clean drinking water, number 50 in personal safety, and number 61 in high-school enrollment. Somehow, "We're number 61!" doesn’t seem so proud a boast. Overall, the Social Progress Index ranks the United States number 25 in the well-being of citizens.

Dreams Are Dumb?

I've always been a proponent of the Anti-Freudian "dreams are dumb and indicate nothing" school-of-thought (and may COVID-19 kill me dead if this blog becomes a dream journal) but I woke up at 2 AM this morning-- possibly because of an earthquake-- in the midst of a particularly vivid and possibly symbolic somnolent vision; here's what happened: 

I was trekking through the jungle at sunset and came to a spot where I could see through the dense foliage and I spotted a hippo in the tall grass, and the hippo's wet skin was reflecting beautiful streaks of red, purple, and orange from the waning daylight and then a jaguar walked out of the jungle and he hopped up on top of the hippo and just stood there, posing (and there was also a random llama in the background) and so I grabbed my phone and took a picture of a JAGUAR ON TOP OF A HIPPO (with a llama in the background) and all three animals were magnificent, iridescent from the setting sun in this wild tableau and then I raced back to camp to show Catherine the miracle I had witnessed and when I tried to find the pictures on my phone, they were gone-- total technical failure-- and it was my fault, I had pressed something and lost them all, the greatest nature photos ever snapped . . . and that's pretty much how school feels so far this year.

Serendipitous Mechanical Failure

Our ductless mini-split died the other day, but I'm considering lack of AC on our ground floor "practice" for our forthcoming trip to Costa Rica-- I've probably got such a good mindset because:

#1) we're lucky enough to be going on a trip to Costa Rica;

#2) our ductless mini-split is 21 years old;

#3) the weather has been unusually decent;

#4) I'm also enjoying the lack of AC in my classroom at school . . . I thought it would be the opposite, because all my colleagues in the English Department teach on the second floor and they finally received AC window units this year, so I thought I would be insanely jealous and angry, but their air-conditioners aren't working all that well: they are loud and the filters are already filthy and my buddy Kevin is claiming he got sick from yelling over top of his and breathing in the dirt-ridden air . . . so I'm happy -- for the time being-- opening the windows and adjusting to the warm weather (which isn't particularly warm yet).

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.

Dave's Book List: 2018

Another end of the year book list . . . yuck . . . so let me boil it down to something practical. First some boilerplate: I read a bunch of good books this year, and I'm proud of that (or fairly proud . . . Stacey delivered a healthy whack to my self-esteem) but I understand that you're probably not going to enjoy the same books as me. Certainly not forty-three of the same books.

It's really hard to recommend a good book. Reading-- real reading-- is deeply personal. In the end, it's what you think about the words that makes the book good for you or not. Not that I subscribe to relative aesthetic ethics . . . I think some sentences are written far better than others. But once a book reaches a certain level of competence, then it's really up to the reader to appreciate and make sense of it. And if it sounds like "hillbilly gibberish," as Darryl McDaniels categorized the lyrics to "Walk This Way"-- then even if you sing it like you mean it, it still might not mean much to you at all (even if everyone else loves it).

So skip the list if you want, but grant me one sincere, universal, sure-fire recommendation. A list of one. I would trade all the books on my list for #39. Boom. Literally.

I'm talking about Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson. Anderson is so passionate about his subject matter that it doesn't matter if you're a Thunder/Flaming Lips fan, or a tornado junkie, or a history buff who wants to know more about the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889-- which Anderson says should either be called "Chaos Explosion Apocalypse Town" or "Reckoning of the Doom Settlers: Clusterfuck on the Prairie-- none of that matters, as the book races along at EF5 speed towards the inevitable explosion.

Read it.

1. The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik


2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe


3. Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town by Brian Alexander


4. White Tears by Hari Kunzru


5. The Amateur: The Pleasure of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield


6. The Night Market by Jonathan Moore


7. Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth


8. The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann


9. The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson


10. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt


11. Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy by Noam Chomsky


12. Beartown by Fredrik Backman


13. Requiem for the American Dream by Noam Chomsky


14. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin


15. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson


16. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli


17. Drown by Junot Diaz


18. The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind by Michael S. Gazzaniga


19. When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt


20.  The Changeling by Joy Williams


21. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students by Allan Bloom


22. Florida by Laura Groff


23. Ask the Dust by John Fante


24. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie


25. Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy


26. The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke by Andrew Lawler


27.  Calypso by David Sedaris


28. World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer


29. The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World -- An Us by Richard O. Prum


30. Borne by Jeff Vandermeer


31. The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky


32. A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron


33. Authority by Jeff Vandermeer


34. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher


35. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt


36. The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher


37. Vox by Christina Dalcher


38. Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh


39. Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson


40. Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data Andrew Wheeler


41. American Prison by Shane Bauer


42. Middlemarch by George Eliot


43. Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven JohnsonFarsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven Johnson

To Coddle or Not To Coddle

My take on Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's new book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is that it's based on a fairly reasonable premise:

prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child

and I think the authors do a great job extending the ideas from the viral Atlantic essay they wrote a few years ago . . . since then, there have been even more issues of "safety-ism" and the abrogation of free speech on college campuses and the book details these, including the shrieking girl at Yale, the assault at Middlebury, and the riots at Evergreen College; the authors worry that this new generation of students, labeled iGen, have been taught three great untruths:

1. what doesn't kill you makes you weaker

2. always trust your feelings

3. life is a battle between good people and evil people

and this has led to all sorts of logical problems, such as catastrophizing, call out culture, overgeneralizing, emotional reasoning, etc and that the fact that college campuses have become more and more liberal, with less and less representation by conservative professors, has led to a very sheltered and polarized, almost religiously fanatical us-against-them atmosphere on certain progressive campuses (I just read that more people identify themselves as LGBTQ than conservative at Harvard and Yale) and while this may have some very just causes-- the President Trump/Alex Jones nut job fringe right wing contingent-- there is still a serious problem with the lack of perspectives and the inability of many young people to deal with a diversity of thought, and this ability to debate and discuss ideas that might be slightly repulsive is an important part of a democratic nation; the first amendment is an extraordinarily powerful right, to not only believe and speak, but to amplify with the press, assemble other like-minded people and then petition the government . . . and the authors see some of the behavior on college campuses as a strike to dismantle this right . . . especially because administration rarely support the "offending" professors, who often meant well-- but intentions don't matter, only feelings-- and because college is so expensive, it's less a place of intellectual discourse and more of a luxury item, where "the customer is always right," but the book does offer hope and sees a way forward, away from "micro-agressions" and victimhood and blame, and towards CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and debate and dialogue . . . and this all sounds excellent to me-- I teach logic and rationality in my Philosophy and Comp classes, and regularly try to expose my students to controversial texts and topics (right now I'm presenting my sophomores  with Bundyville, a different take on the American Dream than they are used to) and I teach them to have reasonable and intellectual discourse on ideas that may be foreign to them . . . but apparently not everyone agrees with me about this book-- there's been some blowback-- and some view the book as a betrayal and a turn rightward by "elite liberals" in America . . . this Guardian review says it all, the advice is fine and good if your middle class and the book (horror!) was written by a couple of white guys, so it's easy for them to be reasonable-- and it might even have good advice if you're a minority attending one of these elite institutions, to help you navigate the waters, but if you're really progressive, then it's not enough to prepare the child for the road . . . you need to imagine how the new generation can change the road . . . but that's a little scary to me, to narrow and pave the road means serious revision to our first amendment rights, and in a society that's moving towards total surveillance, that may be all we have left . . . people -- especially kids-- are not that fragile, and the dangers that plagued humanity for most of our existence-- disease, constant warfare, threats of violence and crime, inequality and slavery-- there have been great inroads made in all these areas and so instead of seeking more and more safe havens, isolated from those that are different, we need to find common ground with the people that we don't necessarily share values with and understand that our children are going to come in contact with texts, words, people and ideas that they disagree with (and perhaps even disgust them) and that sunlight is the best antiseptic . . . anyway, read the book, see what you think, and perhaps even put some of the ideas into action, while raising your own kids or thinking your own thoughts.

What We've Got Here is a Failure to Communicate

My buddy Rob has written a sincere and excellent post over at Gheorghe the Blog about grappling with the difficulties of our times--  the thrust of it is that our current government, who are behaving like "third world banana republicans" are something of a kleptocracy, redistributing wealth to the rich, at the expense of the uninsured, the immigrants, the rule of law (especially the powers of the FBI) and the "darker, the weirder, the more foreign among us," and people of good conscience are going to have to take a stand against that behavior; I have something to report on this issue and I'm not going to do it justice so I suggest you read the articles, but several Indonesian immigrants are taking sanctuary in a church around the corner from me in Highland Park-- one of the immigrants, Harry Pangemanan, has been here since 1993 (he entered on a temporary visa) and has been involved in a project rebuilding homes devastated by Hurricane Sandy since 2012 (he won the 2018 Martin Luther King award in HP for this) and while this has been a terrible time for these people, I'm proud of the role my friends and the the community have played in the situation . . . meanwhile, while the immigrants were seeking sanctuary, someone got wind of their absence and their homes were vandalized and ransacked, and passports and money was stolen-- it's still hazy how this happened, if ICE leaked information as to where they lived, or if people saw the homes on the news (but not all of them were on the news) and took action-- but there's something awful going on in this country and everyone needs to have a frank discussion about it . . . as usual, I have a couple of recommendations if you want to get deeper into this issue: The Weeds "The White Genocide Episode You've Been Waiting For" explains how some of the current immigration policy being considered offers concession for "undocumented immigrants" but there is a push to curtail legal immigration, especially to families . . . the subtext is the discussion that needs to be had: it seems the ethnic constituency of America changing too much and too rapidly for many people in the nation and there have been previous, restrictive and rather racist policies to preserve the racial constituency of America (most notably the Immigrations Acts of 1917 and 1924) so we've done this before . . . I live in central New jersey, one of the most racially and ethnically diverse places in the world, and I thought this debate was over in my area-- but the vandalism and ransacking of the homes of the immigrants seeking sanctuary obviously refute this . . . this is an issue on the purpose of America: is it a place for immigrants to come and thrive or are we building a wall and locking our doors; the interesting thing is that economists universally accept that immigration, legal or illegal, is a boon to the economy-- more workers, more jobs, more consumers, more people to pay taxes and buy property, etc. etc. a more diverse economy-- but it seems that certain white people are willing to take the hit to the economy to preserve the racial integrity of the country (or what's left of it) and if you really want to take a deep dive on this cultural divide, check out the second season of The United States of Anxiety, a podcast that does a fantastic hob tracing the roots of the current dichotomy; the climate change episode is especially informative, as it traces the evolution of conservative climate change skepticism, which did not exist twenty-five years ago when Bush Sr. announced that we would all have to band together and solve this global and existential problem, but then became a conservative bona fide once the Republicans realized it was not an environmental issue, it was a political issue . . . thinking about this stuff is going to make you angry and depressed and indignant, but we have to discuss it as a nation because there's actually a reasonable middle ground on issues like climate change policy and immigration (unlike, say, nuclear war) and if we can get beyond the rancor and the hatred and the utter disdain that people are feeling for those with different opinions, maybe we can elect some people that will hammer our some reasonable policy . . . I remain optimistic that people are not as stupid and narrow-minded as the folks representing them in our government right now.

Dave Spends $5 Dollars on Future Human Capital

I recently showed my college writing class The Big Short-- we just finished a paper on Karen Ho's illuminating (but rather long and repetitive) essay on Wall Street culture in the aughts: "Biographies of Hegemony: The Culture of Smartness and the Recruitment and Construction of Investment Bankers" and I wanted to show them what happened to this insulated system that Karen Ho critiques-- and my son Alex saw the cover of the DVD and decided he wanted to watch it . . . I told him it was a great movie, but long and complicated, and he said, "My favorite movie is Inception, Dad, I think I can handle it" so  I sweetened the deal and told him if he endured a short lecture from me before the film started-- on mortgages and subprimes loans and stocks and bonds-- and then, at the end of the film, if he could explain the systemic failure and how the financial crash of 2008 actually happened, I would give him five dollars, and-- withour irony and in the spirit of the movie, he agreed to this; Ian also watched and endured several of my financial asides, but when it was all over (and they watched the entire thing last night) Ian declined to try to explain it for five dollars (though he claimed to understand the plot) and also declined to make a sidebet on whether Alex would be able to successfully explain the origins and nature of the crash, but Alex rose to the challenge and gave me a fairly accurate portrayal of the crisis, including mortgage backed securities, CDOs, credit default swaps, fraudulent ratings, how to short the market, premiums eating into your account, the big pay-out and the bail-out . . . the only thing he had trouble with (which the movies glosses over) is the idea that the banks were unloading toxic securities they had created onto investors before they accurately marked the price, then shorting those same investments in order to attempt to balance their books -- creating a crazy conflict of interest feedback loop . . . you can learn about it in this special episode of This American Life, "Inside Job," which details the arbitrage, fraud, and corrupt strategies and tactics that Magnetar used during the crash-- and Alex was suitably annoyed with the result, a taxpayer bailout that funded the very institutions that created the crash and paid big bonuses to many of the engineers of the bubble, a bailout that so enormous that it might be incalculable and probably resulted in the election, oddly, of Donald Trump . . . because, as Jared Vennett clairvoyantly explains at the end:

In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating-agency executives went to jail . . . the SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivative industries . . . just kidding! . . . banks took the money the American people gave them, and used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform . . . and then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers . . .

the end of that little bait and switch speech surprised both my students and my children-- but it makes sense, as it too boring and complicated to completely understand the forces tearing apart our economy-- so it's much easier to blame the other, the barbarians at the gate and the freeloaders within; anyway, I'm proud of both my kids for making it all the way through-- Ian could have defaulted to The Walking Dead and Alex has decided he's going to read the book . . . maybe if enough youngsters understand what went wrong, they'll vote some people into office that will enact some policy to prevent this kind of thing . . . or maybe they'll blow all their savings on cryptocurrency and we'll all have another great movie to watch.

 

The Singularity vs. Nightfall

Ian Morris begins his massive history of Eastern and Western social development, Why the West Rules-- for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, at the very beginning --15,000 years ago, deep in prehistory-- and he runs through the typical Guns, Germs, and Steel stuff (with more details about Chinese history) but he comes at this massive scale of time from the perspective of an archaeologist, and on the "maps vs. chaps" debate, he's firmly on the side of the maps (unlike someone like Paul Johnson, who goes more for the chaps) which might be offensive to some because he takes the humanity out of history, and views the span of human achievement as something of a Civilization computer game, with an algorithm for social development based on energy capture, urbanization, information technology, and war-making capacity . . . so you're going to get a lot of numbers, as societies advance, which is sometimes disconcerting but it all eventually makes sense and if you can't figure out how to break through the hard ceiling-- perhaps this occurs at a social development index of 24-- then you don't get to stagnate at whatever glory you have achieved, instead things tend to spiral out of control and your civilization collapses . . . you can't turn away the four horsemen of the apocalypse: climate change, famine, state failure and migration (occasionally, there is a fifth horseman: disease) and you need particular resources to defeat these horsemen, and of your geographical and technological situation doesn't possess them, then you're screwed . . . no matter who is making the decisions . . . but with great collapse comes great resilience and great recovery-- so you might as well embrace the impending apocalypse, because while a few good decisions might head off or postpone a collapse, if it's going to happen, no individual human-- brilliant leader, scientist, thinker, moral crusader, or whatever-- is going to defeat the lazy, scared, concerned masses . . . you might be able to temporarily plug the dike, but you're not going to stop the flood . . . and Morris doesn't see any inherent superior value to Western culture-- there's no cultural bias here-- the East surges ahead of the West at times (541 AD to 1100 AD in particular) and then hits a hard ceiling and it takes the Industrial Revolution for the West to make the big move ahead and it really didn't matter who invented what or when (Stigler's Law of Eponymy) and then, finally, Morris gets to now and that's when the book really takes off-- he explains the economic marriage of America and China (we buy Chinese products and China buys our debt, making the America dollar more valuable and the Chinese renminbi less so and if we stopped buying Chinese products, they could dump all the US dollars they own on the market, thus totally devaluing our currency . . . so we're stuck with each other) and how we are headed towards an uncharted future as far as social development-- we might hit 5000!-- which could result in cities of 140 million people or more, but we're hitting a hard ceiling around 1000 points, and we can't go on this way-- all the citizens of earth can't live the way the richest countries live-- we're burning too much fossil fuel, contributing to what Morris calls "global weirding" and as the world becomes smaller and flatter, developed nations are becoming more concerned with immigration (a prescient prediction of Trump's victory and Brexit . . . the book was published in 2011) and because we are at such a technological high point, the stakes are infinite . . . we may see a transformation in the next fifty years that makes the Industrial Revolution look like the domestication of the goat, a singularity situation where AI and energy capture make the world so small that geography and nations are meaningless . . . or we may be staggering towards a collapse like no other, where-- as Einstein pithily predicted-- we fight World War IV with rocks . . . the scary thing is that, with the technology we now possess, it only takes one thing to go wrong and then we are shrouded in nuclear winter or enduring the desert of the real, while it will take incredible diplomacy and cooperation to make everything go right, so that we break through the next hard ceiling and propel ourselves into a phenomenal future . . . I'm rooting for humanity to do it, but I'm not sure we've got it in us, but if we don't succeed, there's always the hope that some other life form-- cockroaches? rats?-- will step up to the plate and eventually swing for the fences . . . anyway, this is a must read, but when you get bored of the ancient Chinese history, skip a bit brother, and get to the conclusion (which a good hundred pages in itself).

You Probably Had to Be There (But F#$@ It)

If this sentence is a failure, then I apologize in advance, but I'm going to try to capture one of those tiny, humorous moments that makes a day at work, if not quite entertaining, at least bearable; we were all suffering through the first day of school for teachers, an endless workshop on curriculum revision and how to use the new software platforms, and I was showing Stacey my class roster on my school-issued Chromebook-- which is NOT a touchscreen-- and Stacey put her finger on the screen, to point to a former student that she really liked, and my hand was resting on the touchpad of the computer, and my brain instantly decided that the best course of action would be to make the screen move a little when she physically touched it, so then she scrolled with her finger, and I surreptitiously scrolled on the touchpad (this is easier than it sounds) and then she scrolled the other direction, and I followed suit, and for four seconds or so, she thought that I had in my possession a very special school-issued Chromebook with a dynamic touch screen, and she looked at me with a mixture of awe and jealousy, a "how-do-you-rate?" kind of look . . . and then she realized I was fucking with her and she started laughing . . . and the weird thing is, my brain decided to play this "joke" before my consciousness did . . . I just started doing it, and then I realized how funny it was . . . my finger on the touchpad instantly mimicked Stacey's finger movement on the screen and then I realized I was screwing with her perception, and even after we both knew the deal, it was still fun for her to flick the screen and watch it do what she desired . . . and soon enough all this will work fluidly and we'll control screens with our minds (but not yet, in fact, Stacey and I spent twenty-five minutes on Friday attempting to log someone out of Microsoft Outlook email-- God knows why our school adopted that platform this year-- only to determine that it's utterly impossible).

The Test 58: Can You?

This week on The Test, Stacey puts Cunningham and me on the spot . . . and while we occasionally perform admirably, there's plenty of failure and humiliation as well; as a bonus, there is a rousing debate on the appropriate use of mnemonic devices . . . so give it a shot, keep score, and see if you can too.
 

Falling Down When No One is Looking

A few weeks ago we did an "evaluating technology" unit in Composition Class, and I stumbled upon a This American Life  excerpt about how time travel is the most coveted future technology-- Pew Research polled 1001 Americans and nine percent want to travel through time; and I was so excited to ask this same question to my classes-- what future technology do you desire the most?-- that I got ahead of myself and tried to spin, sit down, and type at the same time, which resulted in me kicking my rolling chair out from under me as I tried to sit in it, and so I hit the floor pretty hard . . . but no one saw this happen-- everyone from the previous class had exited the room and no one was in the hallway . . . but though there were no witnesses, I ended up creating some, because I reenacted the scene for my next two periods (and also told them the story of this magnificent failure to sit in a chair and consequently reenacted that humiliating pratfall for them, so by the end of the day I was pretty sore) and then I asked them the question that caused my excitement: "What exciting new technology would you like to see happen in the near future?" and in both classes, time travel was the winner . . . and, during This American Life, when they interviewed people as to why they wanted to travel through time, most people wanted to either kill Hitler or just fix embarrassing stuff that happened to them in the past, or see dinosaurs, and while I don't think humans could ever possibly handle a technology as powerful as time travel (we can't handle the combination of cell phones and cars) I can see the allure of seeing a dinosaur, or just fixing some of the awkward moments that make up much of the content of this blog (but I wouldn't have much to write about).

Men and Women are a Little Different

The head of my department recently progressed from looking a little pregnant to looking very pregnant, and she's getting the usual curious glances and awkward comments-- especially from older gentlemen, who won't mention the actual baby living inside her and instead ask vague questions about how she is feeling . . . but this is to be expected, as carrying a baby is so incredibly foreign to men, it's completely out of our ken . . . while men and women are certainly more similar than different in how they perceive and experience the world, there are certain things that will never translate, such as the complete failure of a woman's ability to comfort a man after he's just been hit in the testicles by a sharply hit softball.

Dave (Inadvertently) Appreciates Canada!

Back in 2012, I made a New Year's Resolution to appreciate Canada more, but apparently that's not the kind of thing you can force yourself to do . . . despite my abject failure at deliberately appreciating our neighbors to the north, I'm pleased to report that sometimes you can end up appreciating Canada by accident (which seems fitting for a country with a capital city that no one can identify) and I've been doing just that: two years ago I learned to play Gordon Lightfoot's ominous and excellent song "Sundown" on the guitar (and my friend Rob coincidentally learned it as well) and then a couple days ago I heard a snippet of a song on the radio and vaguely recognized it and wanted to learn it on the guitar and so I looked it up, and it turned out to be another Gordon Lightfoot song ("If You Could Read My Mind") and so I did some research and not only is Gordon Lightfoot Canadian, but he is one of the most appreciated Canadians; for example, but Robbie Robertson considers him a "national treasure" and Bob Dylan wishes his songs would all last forever . . . anyway, I like his lyrics more than I like his voice, but he's a hell of a lot better than Nickelback.

Serendipity, Baby

Though I didn't plan it, I ended up simultaneously reading Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, by Alex Bellos, and Play Their Hearts Out: A Coach, His Star Recruit, and the Youth Basketball Machine by George Dohrmann . . . and while there is no question that Brazil is crazy about soccer and America is crazy about basketball, the craziness exhibits itself in very different ways: Brazilians are superstitious, zealous, and obsessively festive about their national pastime (soccer fan clubs also participate in wildly gala and choreographed carnival events, where tattooed soccer hooligans organize thousands of costumed participants in synchronized marching and dancing) and creative to a fault with their gameplay, as illustrated by their incorporation of religion into the sport, their use of bizarre nicknames and their attempt at an "autoball" league in the 1970's . . . meanwhile, the story George Dohrmann tells of elite youth basketball players and their sleazy, despicable, but wildly successful coach Joe Keller paints a portrait of greed, consumption, high hopes, wild aspirations, hard work, hype, enormous success, great pressure, and epic failure . . . all in the milieu of middle school . . . the story is by turns compelling and infuriating, but the book is a must read, especially if you coach kids, and once you're finished, you can check Dohrmann's blog to see where the players from the book are now.

Layers and Layers of Irony and Failure

Nothing makes me more unhappy that enforced pep (you may remember my difficulties when I was compelled to "Dress Like a Holiday") but rather than suffer the ire of certain female members of my department, I now begrudgingly go along with whatever spirit theme is chosen, and so on Wednesday, I wore the required uniform -- black shirt and pants, glasses, and a beret (I only wore the beret momentarily, for "check in," but that's still pretty spirited for me) -- and our department followed suit . . . we were supposed to be Beatnik poets, but I thought some people looked like French painters and others looked like college graduates . . . but we did well enough with our department unity to tie the business department, and since the math department came up with this contest idea, they administered the tie-breaker . . . a math test . . . mano a mano . . . by someone chosen from the department, and so --ironically -- my department chose me to take the test, because though I am the least spirited member of the department, I am pretty good at math (and even taught it, long long ago) and so this set-up the wonderful possibility that the person who really didn't want to "dress like a holiday" would end up being the department spirit hero . . . and so I e-mailed the math teacher administering the tie-breaker and we set up a time and she told me to bring a calculator . . . and that's when I realized that this might actually be a math test and not some math riddle or math trivia quiz or something fun and spirited . . . as we were dealing with the math department, not the English department, and this made me a bit anxious, and it turned out I was right: I had to take a ten question quiz with algebraic equations and number lines and solution sets . . . and this test, in mathematical terms, was 0% fun, but I still felt confident taking it (which means nothing . . . I always feel confident when I take math tests and I've gotten some really abysmal math grades in my life) and I remembered all my acronyms: SMATO (subtraction means adding the opposites) and Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally and FOIL (first outside middle last) and was proudly reciting them to the proctor of the test as I did the problems, and -- for a moment-- I thought I just might be the least spirited department hero ever . . . Cinderella story, underdog victory and all that, but my lack of spirit must have caused some kind of karmic justice; I got a 90% on the quiz-- pretty good, but not good enough, as the guy from the business department got a perfect score (and I really should have got them all right too, but I missed a pair of absolute value bars in the first question, I think I saw them as parentheses, and -- always my problem in math -- I didn't check over my work well enough) but I'm going to try to parlay this ostensible failure into a success . . . I am so distraught and humiliated at my crucial role in our defeat that I can't bear to take part in any other spirit days, or it will remind me of the trauma of this one (that's my story and I'm sticking to it . . . and if there is a moral to my woeful tale, it is this: if the math department says that they are giving you a math test, it's going to be a math test).

The Rule Gets Bigger and Better

One of the wonderful things about teaching is that you get to expand and develop ideas that you barely fleshed out the year before . . . unlike real life, you get as many chances as you need to get it right; several years ago I extemporaneously introduced this important life rule to my class, but then I forgot about it until last Tuesday, when a number of students who were absent before the holiday weekend came into class and did the typical -- just before class, one at a time, they approached my desk, and asked me "What did I miss?" and once I explained to one student, then another materialized and asked the same question, and this reminded me of my rule, and so I delivered a monologue that I will approximate here:

"I'm going to introduce you to a rule that does not just apply to my class, or education in general; this is a rule that you need to learn if you want to participate in our American educational system, and it is also a rule that you need to learn if you want to participate in our American economy . . . if you wish to move to the woods and live like Thoreau then you don't need to listen this, but everyone else, please pay attention . . . if you are ever absent -- from school, from work, from a team meeting, from a committee -- from any event, and you need to find out what happened at this event from your superior, then when you ask, you must provide some piece of information about what you missed, you need to ascertain some piece of information about what you missed, and include this when you ask your superior what to do about your absence -- and this is to show you care  about what you missed, and so you will approach me and say, "I was absent on Friday but I know we had to read an essay and write a page about the theme, and I was wondering if there's anything else I need to make-up?" and if you don't approach me like this, with some piece of information about what happened in class when you were away, then your failure will be epic and monumental, because there has been no generation in the history of mankind that has been more connected technologically then your generation, no generation where information has been more accessible, whether through Facebook or texting or e-mail, and so your neglect in having any idea of what went on in class is both insulting and irresponsible . . . I realize that in past times, when you needed to beat a drum or send smoke signals, in order to communicate that the plague is coming, or some other horror, that it was much more difficult to share information -- but now you have the wherewithal to at least pretend that you care, it's easy to fake it, and I fake it all the time -- I'm a coach, so I get to miss all kinds of meetings, which is one of the things I love about coaching: I get paid to miss meetings and be outside and run soccer drills, but when I meet with my superiors, I pretend that I am interested in what I missed . . . I say, "I know I missed the diabetes presentation, and what can I do to make this up?" even though I don't care about diabetes, because that's what you do in order to pretend to show that you care," and I know my monologue hit home, because the next day, when a girl who was absent for the monologue asked me what she missed in class, the students erupted in a chorus of "Don't say that!" and then they quickly filled her in on the life-lesson from the day before.

Bonus!

If you don't care about the Giants, but you love all things "Dave," then head over to Gheorghe: The Blog for a book review and some self-indulgent psychological assessment . . . and, if you're not careful, you just might learn something that will save your offspring from abject failure.

A Cinematic Analogy Both Succeeds and Fails in the Same Moment

I liked The Brothers Bloom, but I didn't love it -- it is definitely a film with more style than substance, which also describes the brothers themselves, who are extremely adept con-artists; we tour Eastern Europe with them, and the scenes are shot beautifully, but they happen so quickly that they actually lack drama . . . and for me to say something moves too fast means it must really be moving fast, because I don't have much of an attention span for slow films (Stalker almost killed me) but there is one thing I did love about the movie: Stephen's running gag -- when he meets someone, he always asks them to think of a card, and then he whips out his deck, cuts it, and presents the person with what should ostensibly be the card -- but it never is, he's not telepathic and he's always wrong, and so his brother asks him why he constantly repeats this pathetic failure of a trick, and Stephen says, "If I do it enough, someday it's going to work on someone, and then it will be the best damn card trick in the world" . . . I love this statistical approach to magic; I use the same method when I see an old student: I always take a guess at their name -- whether I am confident about this fact or not -- and while I often miss the mark, when I do get it right, they are always impressed . . . the other day in the library, I recognized a "kid" that I taught long ago . . . I recognized him despite the fact that he was a good thirty pounds heavier than when I taught him, and was also sporting a beard, and so I took a shot at his name and said,"Sebastian?" I said, and he turned his head and smiled, impressed that I remembered his name; it turns out that he's now thirty years old, which is wild in its own way, but when I explained my philosophy on guessing names and my analogy to The Brothers Bloom, I think I totally confused him . . . and, of course, I was breaking a cardinal rule of magic: a good magician should never reveal his tricks.