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.

Stacy Inadvertently Prevents Me From Making a Really Stupid Decision

My friend Stacy is kicking herself, because during a discussion on back-hair maintenance, I told her that it might be time to resurrect my idea for a giant tattoo (the great undersea battle between the squid and the whale) because then I would no longer have to maintain my back hair, as hair does not grow through tattoos, but she said, "Hair does too grow through tattoos!" and I checked and she was right, so getting ink all over my back isn't the solution-- but now Stacey is angry because if she didn't open her mouth, then I would have learned the hard way.

Left Tackle Appreciation Day

One of the marks of a good book is how stupid it makes you feel, and The Blind Side: Evolution of A Game (by Michael Lewis, who also write Moneyball) did just that; I usually don't deign to read books about sports, but Malcolm Gladwell listed this as one of his ten favorite books and now I know why: all these years I had considered myself a football fan, but how could I have been a fan when I didn't understand how coveted, rare, highly paid, and important the left tackle is to the modern passing offense-- do you choose a left tackle (or even an offensive line?) in Fantasy Football?-- and not only does the book trace the rise of the left tackle (it all started with L.T.) but it also tells the fantastic story of a poor black kid from the west side of Memphis, who through extraordinary circumstances, escapes the derelict projects of Hurt Village.

Awkward Dave Returns in the Form of a Duck (or a Llama)

Awkward Dave reared his ugly head last Tuesday, and if it wasn't for my colleague Chantal, things might have gotten really awkward, but she heroically stepped in and saved the day; to understand the situation you need a bit of backstory . . . fifteen minutes before this Awkward Moment of Dave, I was introduced to a very silly game on Kevin's phone, called "Duck or Llama": the game is simple but frustrating, you are shown a picture of a duck, or a picture of a llama, and you must press the appropriate button -- "Duck" or "Llama" -- VERY quickly, or you lose; I was terrible at first but once I got the hang of it, I got quite good and scored sixty correct answers in a row . . . more than double what anyone else got; the pictures get more and more ridiculous and abstract: there are line drawings and close-ups and llamas with sunglasses and duck-butts and rubber ducks and stuffed llamas, and everyone has the same stupid story at the end of their round . . . either, "I was doing really well, and then I mistook a duck for a llama!" or "I was doing really well, and then I mistook a llama for a duck!" and this is the sort of thing that I can get obsessed with, which is why I don't have a video game system in my house, and so when a woman from another department, who runs a committee that I am part of, totally went out of her way and came upstairs to the English office solely to help me sign-up for a workshop at Columbia University, I really, really tried to pay attention to her; she showed me some forms and explained how to fill them out . . . but then, without realizing it, I picked up the phone -- determined to get one hundred correct answers in a row -- and started playing "Duck or Llama," and I guess this nice woman, who totally went out of her way to help me out with this project, made quite a face, but luckily my friend Chantal saw the face, and was a good enough friend to yell at me and tell me to focus, and this was enough to break my obsession with the game and allow me to finish the now rather awkward social interaction with the woman who had gone out of her way to climb the stairs and find me in the English office and help me out.

Bloggers Unite!

John McCain may have thought he was being cute with a bunch of his constituents, but when he said, "Now we've got the cables, talk radio, the bloggers-- I HATE the bloggers," and this comment was followed by loud laughter from the crowd-- but that's the moment he lost my vote . . . yes, this was going to be the presidential election that I finally planned to participate in-- to get out and vote, to cast my ballot, to chime in politically, to pull the lever for democracy, but now I might just sit at home and blog about what a stupid comment that was, alienating the most intelligent, creative, energetic, egalitarian cutting-edge, diligent, gritty, inventive, sincere, down-to-earth and timely segment of the media-- the bloggers!-- who I now hope will go jihad on his ass and remind everyone that McCain once wanted to rid the country of the corn and ethanol subsidies but has now changed his tune, and I hope they will dig up all that great blogging scuttlebutt and hearsay and rumor and fact and spread it across the internet in a tsunami of searchable text that will wash away the slightly tech-savvy septuagenarians who recognized the word "blogger" as something liberal and elitist and having to do with computers and therefore deserving derision, along with the McCain campaign itself!

Crowded Bridge, Noisy Bridge, Deserted Bridge, Little Bridge

Yesterday's Man Hike (led by Dave Tulloch) started out reminiscent of the day my wife and I spend in New York a few months ago but the reason this is called the Man Hike is not sexist-- only men would be stupid enough to spoil a good day in NYC by walking way too far (although not as far as this one and better weather than this one) and so while we started out in known territory-- we took the train to the Oculus, carefully examined the treescape (pretty incredible irrigation system) and the survivor tree at the 9/11 Memorial (and then saw a clone of the tree that inspired Anne Frank and the church where George Costanza attempted to convert to Latvian Orthodoxy) and then we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with the throngs of people-- this was the crowded bridge-- then did NOT stop in DUMBO for pictures, beer and food-- instead we zipped right back across the noisy bridge-- the Manhattan Bridge-- shouting above the roar of the train-- beautiful views, anyone who was anyone was riding around on their yacht in the East River-- and then we walked a bit (and Pete and I lost the group when we stopped for Asian pastries) and crossed back into Brookly on the Williamsburg Bridge (which was empty) and walked through Greenpoint and other Brooklyn neighborhoods and saw ALL the hipsters and young people, out and about, we stopped for some amazing pizza, and then crossed the small(ish) Pulaski Bridge into Queens-- and I had never really wandered about in Queens so that was new and then we made out way to the a park on the water near Roosevelt Island and caught a ferry all the way back down to Wall Street, had a few beers and a burger, and hitched a ride home with Doug, who took a shortcut through Staten Island . . . so we visited four of the five boroughs, walked some 35,000 steps, and only neglected the Bronx.

The Future Hasn't Happened Yet

In one corner, you've got Robert Gordon claiming that American growth is over-- the greatest technological leaps happened between 1870 and 1970 and those kinds of radical changes will never happen again-- but his premise is challenged by Kevin Kelly's book The Inevitable: Understanding The 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future . . . Kelly envisions a world where we don't own much at all and instead subscribe to services-- the Netflix, Uber model-- but we do this for for everything, and we participate in "dot-Communism" and do a tremendous amount of work for free (e.g. this blog and Wikipedia) including making and placing our own advertisements and photos on the internet for micro-payments, and we live in flowing "real time" of course, where everything happens instantaneously, and most of our jobs are replaced by robots . . . and if you don't think this is possible, check out Kelly's Seven Stages of Robot Replacement (of course my job won't be replaced by a robot-- you say to yourself-- a robot couldn't possibly do what I do . . . it could do some of the things, but not everything . . . and it might break down . . . ok, it can do the routine stuff: grade papers, ask questions, check for reading comprehension . . . but I need to train it to do new stuff and teach new lessons . . . ok, it can do my stupid boring job, but that's because teaching is inhuman and should be done by robots . . . and now my new job-- designing curriculum for robots to teach is much better than my old job and pays more . . . and I'm glad that a robot could never do what I do now . . . and so on) and Kelly readily acknowledges that what will be lost in this real-time, collaborative, cybernetic, collectivist, brand-based, robotic, completely searchable future is what scholars call "literature space," the place your brain goes when you read a book . . . according to scientists, your brain goes to a different place when it is immersed in a large linear logical piece of writing-- what is traditionally known as a book-- as opposed to what Kelly calls "screening," which is using various devices to browse the loosely connected miscellany that is the web . . . but maybe in the future there will be no reason to think that long about any one subject, and it will be considered antiquated to read in that fashion, and we'll be happy wandering from idea to idea, narrative to narrative, video to audio to text to who knows, adding a bit here, taking a bit there, like digital hunter-gatherers, wandering the binary plains.

Social Media is Anti-Social

Here's a case of idiotic social media amplification run amok at the high school where I teach. . . a couple of yearbook pictures got inadvertently switched-- easy to do when students are running the show and the mistake was traced back to simple human error-- but the pictures were of two religious/cultural clubs- one mainly Jewish and one mainly Muslim-- and the Jewish club forgot to turn in the names of its members to the yearbook staff so the names aren't in the book-- the same is true for several other clubs that have pages in the book . . . but this case is particularly egregious and symbolic, according to the internet hordes-- and now accusations are flying, people are OUTRAGED! on social media, the worst is being assumed, internet trolls (including a rabbi internet troll) are posting unwarranted rumors about students and teachers and it's a general shitshow, which will blow over when the next stupid story comes along-- but right now, it's fodder for the endless, moronic 24-hour news cycle, which feeds on crap like this.

Remind Me To Do This

In his new book The Social Animal, David Brooks cites a psychology experiment I'd like to replicate: in a college psychology class, the students decided to do an experiment on the professor (I'm surprised my students haven't done something like this to me, Lord knows I deserve it as I'm always doing stupid experiments on them) and it was simple yet effective; every time the professor moved to the left side of the room, the students appeared distracted and looked away from him, but every time he moved to the right side of the room, they became attentive and engaged . . . by the end of the period he was nearly out the door (on the right side of the room, of course) and if I read this during the school year, I'd have students doing it to teachers immediately, but since it's summer, I'm going to have to rely on my memory, and-- as this post proves-- this blog is more powerful than my memory.

There Are Two Sides to Every Conflict About a Rubber Doorstopper

Earlier in the week, my friend and colleague Terry was sitting morosely in the English Office (as he is wont to do, we don't call him Eeyore for nothing) and he said to me:

"Liz just called me a dick, in front of our homeroom!"

I asked him why this happened and he said: 

"We've got this stupid rubber doorstopper and I couldn't get it to work because you have to fold it over or something and after she showed me how to do it, I said 'I still don't like it,' just joking around and she blew up at me!"

I said that was odd and maybe she was upset about something else-- she was teaching an extra class and had a lot of different preps and maybe she was just in a bad mood-- and then for the sake of Denise, who was also in the office and hates all men, I said: 

"You know, not everyone is as calm and rational as us in these kind of situations" 

and then I went on my merry way

the next day, Liz said to me, "I don't want you taking Terry's side before you hear the entire story" and so I gave her a recap of what Terry said happened and then-- because she has a dramatic bent-- Liz acted out what happened-- or what she thinks happened-- and it was a bit more compelling than Terry's story . . . apparently Terry is the extra teacher in the homeroom and he doesn't contribute much to running the show-- and Liz claims he was hunched over the doorstopper, fooling with it and muttering and complaining for like five minutes-- and she showed him how it worked but he continued to complain so she told him to "fuck off" . . . and she did admit she got pretty pissed-- which can certainly happen to Liz, who generally exudes school spirit and positivity, but when she's confronted with enough masculine fatalism she can lose it-- longtime fans of this sentence may remember when Liz kicked me out of the department because I did not want to "dress like a holiday" . . . and now, coincidentally, I share homeroom with Haim, the guy who prevented me from redeeming myself in that debacle . . . anyway, something happened between Terry and Liz in homeroom and the catalyst was a rubber doorstopper . . . the rest is shrouded in a profane mystery.

Faculty Follies

Once again, the Triennial (not triannual, thank God) Faculty Follies were a roaring success-- teachers, administrators, secretaries and hall-aides performed skits, dances, and other entertaining stuff to a packed house (plus there were videos, including an awesome parody of Serial that Stacey made . . . I was the prime suspect) and while I never physically got up on stage-- it's too weird up there-- I performed below the stage in the "house band" (we called ourselves the SATs . . . not nearly as good a name as The Hanging Chads) and it's too bad Weird Al cornered the market in stupid song parodies, because though we only rehearsed once, we rocked the house; here is our set list:

1) Instagram-- to The Beatles "Yesterday"--

2) It's Fun to Guess on the P.S.A.T. -- to "Y.M.C.A"--

3) Take Me to Lunch-- to Hozier's "Take Me to Church"--

4) You're Not the Only One-- to Sam Smith's "I'm Not the Only One."

The Great Irony of Life

When you are young and you have your good looks and a head full of hair, you're too stupid to talk to the ladies.

Sensitive Student Saves Teacher's Job

Last week, I was moved from my classroom for several days because of make-up HSPA testing -- and so when I informed my classes of the change of venue, I also told them that this was a "test of their memory," and if they showed up late to class because they originally went to our normal classroom, then they had failed the test and would have to do ten push-ups . . . and I told them that I was certainly in jeopardy of failing the memory test as well, and many students confessed that they thought they were definitely going to fail . . . because it's really hard to escape "the clutches of the bell schedule" and then I had a great idea, and I told my students that I was going to make a big sign to put on the door with the correct classroom information and the addendum: "YOU FAILED . . . YOU FAILURE" and everyone thought that would be really funny and a great idea, and everyone was speculating on who was going to screw up and have to suffer the sign . . . except one student, who said, "I don't think you should do that because the kids taking the make-up test are going to read the sign and think it's directed at them and it's going to make them feel really bad," and I took a moment to process how stupid a mistake I almost made, and then I thanked the kid profusely and we all agreed that he did me a great service.

Learning to Let a Sleeping Cat Lie . . .or Lay . . . Whatever She Prefers

Last week I corrected my wife for using the word "lay" instead of "lie," and when she questioned me about the proper usage I made the mistake of saying, "You call yourself a teacher?" and then I attempted to explain the difference between "lie" and "lay"-- that "lay" always takes a direct object, which is why you lie down in your bed, but a chicken lays an egg-- but she was hearing none of it; she was rightfully indignant over my contemptuous tone (I need to work on that) and I realized that this was a sleeping dog that I should let lie . . . so I didn't mention it again until yesterday, when I heard her repeatedly telling our dog to "lay down," and so-- being very careful of my tone-- I yelled from the kitchen, "Are you trying to annoy me, or what?" but apparently my attempt to use a warm and playful tone didn't work because she yelled back, "No . . . I guess I'm just really stupid!" and even I could recognize that she was being sarcastic . . . so though it offends the English teacher in me, I think I'm going to have to live with this one fault that my wonderful, beautiful, generally flawless wife possesses, and consider myself lucky that this is my only grievance in an otherwise blissful marriage.

Wink Wink Nudge Nudge Revisited

I read the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness way back in 2009 and-- like much of rational liberal America, I decided I was a "libertarian paternalist" and bought in-- this was a kinder gentler time in politics, the years of hope and economic recovery from the subprime economic crisis-- which seemed to be a technical crisis more than anything, based on technocratic choices and rules gone wrong-- and now it seemed if we got those technocratic rules right, then solutions and progress could be made by smart little tweaks to choice architecture-- technocratic solutions instead of partisan political chaos and conflict-- but after listening to Mike Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri revisit this book and all the "nudge-like" ideas on their fantastic podcast If Books Could Kill, I realize-- like Mike Hobbes-- I bought into something very silly-- and so I have changed my mind-- especially since the main anecdote supposed to hammer home their thesis is not true-- changing organ donation box default from opting in to opting out does NOT greatly affect the organ transplant system of a nation-- Spain has best organ donation program because of the structural system they put into place-- and when Mike and peter break down, debunk, run the numbers, and point out the illogic and in the rest of the nudge-like examples-- then none of them work or seem to even fit the description of a gentle choice architecture nudge-- aside from the one very simple example-- putting the desserts below eye level in a cafeteria line and promoting fruits and vegetables to a better placement promotes slightly healthier eating-- more telling examples are things like "we know how to fix gay marriage . . . just make ALL marriages a private legal affair-- so essentially burn down the institution of marriage instead of letting gay people take part in it" and "we know the problem with healthcare-- let people opt out of litigation if care goes wrong and then it will be cheaper because all these lawsuits are what's wrong with the US healthcare system" . . . so just downright stupid stuff that I was probably too sleepy to parse back then (because I had two very young children) and in part two of the episode, they really dive deep and point out that co-author Cass Sunstein ended up riding this "nudge" wave to a government position on the creepy Reagan-created Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an office designed to sit on regulations and block regulations and essentially murder people in a slow methodical deliberate bureaucratic manner-- a real detriment to Obama's legacy and technocratic slow walking of anything against big business-- check out what happened to silica regulations under Sunstein's reign; co-author Richard Thaler kind of rescinded his ideas about the ubiquitous wonder of nudging, realizing that many nudges were scams-- and we are surrounded by scams in America-- and when it comes down to it, the nudges just never seemed to be neutral-- anyway, listen to both parts of the podcast, wonderful and funny and logical and eye-opening-- but the only scary thing is this kind of breakdown makes me not want to read these fun non-fiction books anymore because they play so fast and loose with facts and numbers, and these books have to fill pages with stuff that won't hold up to academic scrutiny-- and I'm not doing academic research in the fifteen minutes before I drift into REM sleep at night so I can succumb to these ideas quite easily (as can entire administrations of the US government . . . and many other governments, who formed "nudge units").

The Tragedy of Dave Learning About The Tragedy of the Commons

Biologist Garrett Hardin famously used the idea of "the tragedy of the commons" as an environmental principle that explained how individuals will inevitably deplete a shared resource-- such as a common pasture-- because no one owns the particular resource, so no one is invested in protecting it; the simple solution is to allow people to own the land, because then they won't let their animals overgraze-- unless they are stupid-- and the tragedy of the commons explains why public bathrooms are filthy and why it's difficult to get kids to clean up their trash in the school cafeteria and why it's impossible to get nations to subscribe to the Kyoto Protocol, and it is also a wonderful rationalization if you feel like littering in your local park or don't feel like scooping up your dog's excrement or if you stain a library book with chocolate fingerprints or if you feel like tossing some trash out your car window . . . if someone looks at you askance, simply shrug your shoulders and say, "tragedy of the commons, what can you do?"

Required Reading (Especially for the NJDOE)

Cathy O'Neil's new book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy is a must read for anyone living in our digital age; she's uniquely qualified to write this book, as she's an academic mathematician who earned her Ph.D from Harvard, worked for a hedge fund on Wall Street, analyzed big data for marketing start-ups and then became a political activist because she realized that a number of dangerous discriminatory algorithms are opaque, affect enormous numbers of people, and do unseen damage . . . she nicknames these WMDs . . . Weapons of Math Destruction, and she explains how these black box formulas evaluate creditworthiness, college rankings, our employability, our Facebook and Twitter feeds, and-- most significant to me-- teacher evaluations . . . and she spends a good portion of the book on just how irrational, absurd, and insanely unsound the models are that assess teacher performance-- the formulas might work if teachers taught ten thousand kids at a time, but for a class of 30 students, measuring how a kid did on a standardized test from one year to the next is essentially random (all the teachers know this, of course, even those of us who do not possess a math Phd. from Harvard, but it's nice to hear an expert explain the logic of why this is so) but apparently the NJDOE hasn't figured this out, and at the start of this school year, they increased the weight of standardized test scores in the evaluation model from 10% to 30% . . . so now, if a teacher works in a tested grade-- such as my wife-- one third of a teacher's numerical assessment is random . . . even if she teaches math and and can point out the many problems with the algorithm (a sociologist would cite Campbell's Law, of course, and also present a valid argument for why this change is absolutely inane) and I can't explain (without long strings of profanity) how incensed this makes me-- how utterly stupid the people at the NJDOE must all be, to enact this increase-- but I'm hoping that this book indicates a sea change in how we view these algorithms and formulas, and that people will learn enough math to understand how screwed up this is . . . and if the NJDOE changes the algorithm and writes a personal apology to me, confessing that they were totally ignorant of all math and logic, then I'm willing to forgive them, because even Bill Gates got it wrong with his charter school funding, he ignored the Law of Large Numbers and came to the conclusion that small schools were better than large schools, when the fact of the matter is that small schools have more statistical variance than large schools, because they have less students in them . . . so more of them will be better and more of them will be worse . . . but, of course, people may learn the truth and still not do anything about it-- we know that a later start time will improve test scores in high school, but the bus schedule prohibits this, and so kids show up at 7 AM, in a building without AC, ready to learn AP Physics . . . everyone knows this is not the best way to teach kids, but no one does anything about it, instead we purchase new software platforms so we can upload all the spurious data and crunch the numbers-- and there may be enough people in the NJDOE and other administrative capacities who love this idea so much, the idea that we're generating loads of numbers from standardized tests and evaluation algorithms, and they don't care that all the numbers are bullshit, because it's fun to have loads of "evidence" to evaluate and all this data perpetuates the idea that we need to pay people to look at it . . . anyway, I could go on and on, but read the book, it's revelatory . . . and if you don't feel like reading it, you can listen to her discussing it on Slate Money.

Daylight Sucking Time

Everything always feels topsy-turvy the first Monday after Daylight Fucking Saving Time (otherwise known as I Had a Vivid Nightmare Saturday Night That the Government Stole Time From Me and Sunday Morning It Turned Out It Wasn't a Nightmare Day) and so while I was at school and then the gym, I watched the latest political polarized shitshow in reverse chronological order and I think it made more sense that way: first-- in the English Office-- I watched Scarlett Johanssen's SNL send-up of Senator Katie Britt's absurdly melodramatic SOTU response; next, while riding the bike at the gym I actually watched Katie Britt's entire seventeen-minute oddly unhinged, trad-wife, transitionless, tone-deaf kitchen-centric monologue; and then I watched President Biden's fairly energetic and topical SOTU address . . . and I've decided to cryogenically freeze myself until next December so I don't have to live through this stupid rematch.

My Sentiments EXACTLY!

Carrie Brownstein-- of the sketch comedy show Portlandia-- was being interviewed on "Fresh Air" a few weeks ago, and when Terry Gross asked her to describe her tattoos, Brownstein said something that I agree with wholeheartedly . . . as I possess some really stupid tattoos that I do not wish to talk about (why couldn't I have gotten a cool science tattoo, like these people?) and not only do I completely and unequivocally agree with what she said about tattoos, but I also think she used the perfect analogy to develop her opinion . . . she said: "Telling people about your tattoos is worse than telling people about your dreams."

Lantern Flies: The Hits Keep on Coming

Ian and I took a chainsaw to the low branches on the autumn blaze maple in our yard; I held the ladder and Ian used his long arms to reach and sever a half dozen or so limbs that were hanging over the bamboo and the Leyland cypress, in the the hopes that now the lantern flies will be more exposed on the main trunk-- the easier for trapping and killing . . . meanwhile, I taped the two maples in our front yard and while many lantern flies got stuck on the tape bands, there's still been an endless supply climbing the trunk, which I diligently massacre every time I go outside . . . so at the base of each tree there's a mass grave of splattered lantern flies-- which you'd think would serve as a warning to these stupid beasts, but they keep on coming-- but the questions is: where the fuck are they coming from? . . . or to be grammatically correct: from fuck all where do they be coming?