2017 Mar 10^th

This morning’s paper carries a column by the right wing’s resident intellectual, George Will.  Will is rightfully upset that some Williams College students—Will calls them a “mob” – protested the appearance of Charles Murray, an author of “The Bell Curve.” Will claims the protestors were protesting their erroneous belief that the book supported the now discredited doctrine of eugenics; it didn’t. It does point out that poor people have more children than do rich people and suggests that this might have long term consequence.

He says, “Eugenics, the controlled breeding to improve heritable traits of human beings was a progressive cause.” Later Will modifies that a trifle by writing, “Between 1875 and 1925 when eugenics had many advocates, not all advocates were progressive, but advocates were disproportionally progressive because eugenics coincided with progressivism’s premises and agendas.” How could Will know that eugenics’ advocates were disproportionately progressive…and if they were, so what? Everybody then was piling on the eugenics bandwagon.

Will tells us that, “Progressives rejected the Founder’s natural rights doctrine and conception of freedom. Progressives said freedom is not the natural capacity of individuals whose rights pre-exist government. Rather, freedom is something achieved at different rates and indifferent degrees by different races.” Will should recognize that the natural rights theory sounds good in theory but the second and third sentences are right in fact. His apparent reverence for the “Founders” is remarkable because the founders allowed no one to vote unless they were white, male property owners; only these had “natural rights.” It was not until 1920 and the passage of the 19^th amendment that women got “the natural right” to vote.

Will writes, “At the urging of Robert Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association during World War 1 the army did intelligence testing of conscripts so that the nation could inventory its human stock as it does livestock.” Will’s attempt at snarkiness is wrong twice over. The government’s “inventory of its human stock” first occurred with the first government census on August 2, 1790; it was repeated every ten years. It would be interesting to see the evidence, if he has any, that Yerkes urged the army, or that the army urged Yerkes to do intelligence testing. Will, as usual, presents no evidence either way.

 It was important for the army to have some idea about the intelligence of their recruits. There were millions of new soldiers. Some of these would have to design new army camps with running water, sewage disposal fields and paved streets. If you can’t learn simple geometry you can’t be trained to do those things. There were any number of similar jobs which would require very extended training or a very low success rate for less intelligent soldiers.

 The result was a paper and pencil group intelligence test that could be given to hundreds of men at a time; this was, imaginatively, called the Army Alpha. It was quite successful at predicting which recruits should be encouraged to become officers and which were more suited to become teamsters. It was far from perfect but it was better than nothing.

There were also many illiterate recruits and so a non-verbal intelligence test was developed that with reasonable success helped sort out the mentally challenged soldier from the simply uneducated. The Army Alpha later morphed into the Army General Classification Test (AGCT) of WW 2. I know something about both of these tests because I used them as example of primitive intelligence testing in my Introductory Psych Lab when I was teaching college students 50 years ago.

2017 Mar 9^th

Scott Pruitt is a lawyer; he is also the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) whose charge it is to protect the environment. He was previously the attorney general of Oklahoma whose job it was to protect and promote the oil and gas interests in Oklahoma. He took that job very seriously and sued the EPA many times because of their insistence on enforcing onerous regulations on his state’s favorite industry. Pruitt made it clear at his confirmation hearing that he did not agree with Oklahoma’s Senator Inhofe that global warming was a hoax, or with President Trump that it was a fraud cooked up by the Chinese.  (We point out that Senator Inhofe has received a cool 2 million dollars from the industries who profit from his ignorance about the environment.)

Pruitt, at least, does not claim that global warming is a hoax; he has decided however that carbon dioxide, the result of burning fossil fuels is not the reason for this warming. His background in chemistry is non-existent; his college major was political science. His opinion is contrary to the opinion of almost all climate scientists. Carbon Dioxide is well known as a trapper of heat, as is water vapor. It is the nature of these compounds to trap heat unlike the other gasses, Nitrogen and Oxygen that surround us. We can trace the increase in Carbon Dioxide and the increase in the planet’s temperature as they rise in parallel. The only way to get rid of Pruitt is to get rid of Trump…and likely Pence as well.

How likely is it that our national embarrassment will have found other work before the end of this year? Betting on such things is illegal in this country but the odds on Trump surviving until the year is out are available on British betting sites. The odds that Trump will still be president by the end of the year are given by Ladbroke, a British betting parlor, as  even money. Whoa! This is a largely unbiased outfit with no political ax to grind and they see Trump’s continuing to the end of the year as a 50/50 proposition.

The people who work in the administration are not hopelessly naïve, at least they aren’t when their own welfare is involved. This means that Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer, Stephen Miller Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon and the King of the Hill himself, are given just a 50/50 chance of being employed by New Year’s Day. I’m sure Trump isn’t worried at all; if he isn’t president, assuming he isn’t in jail, he can play golf every day, tweet his paranoid musings as much as he likes and continue looking for President Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate.

2017 Mar 7^th & 8^th

For those of you who follow this blog, you need to know that the absence of yesterday’s entry was the result of a power outage followed by a computer glitch. That was yesterday; today we’re back.

The column by Patrick J. Buchanan today is titled, “Beltway conspiracy to break Trump.” Buchanan writes, “At its heart is the deep state—agents of the intelligence community, and their media collaborators, and their Amen corner in a Democratic party whose control of our permanent government is all but total.”

Does the man hide under a rock? This Democratic Party controls a government where the senate has a Republican majority, albeit slim; the house has a substantial Republican majority; the President was elected as a Republican; SCOTUS, with its new appointee, will be conservative. Trump’s Republican cabinet appointees are well on their way to demolishing the organizations they are supposed to oversee.  Still, Buchanan writes that “Democratic control of permanent government is all but total.”

Buchanan claims that, “What appears to be a big lie…that Russian intelligence officials…hacked the DNC…to systematically sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Therefore Trump stole the election and is an illegitimate president.” Most people who have some credibility on this issue agree that Russian hacking did not affect the outcome of the election. Speaking of attempting to delegitimize an election, Trump’s attempts to push the birther issue and claim that Obama was not a legitimate president maintains its position as tops in the absurdist contest. (Unless we count Trump’s Trump Tower phone hacking claim.)

Buchanan claims that reporters don’t have to testify under oath or “…be prosecuted to undermine the elected commander-in-chief.” This sounds like Buchanan believes that criticizing the president “undermining the elected commander-in-chief” should be a criminal offense. What does he think Trump tried to do with all that birther nonsense?

Buchanan tells us, “…Intelligence officials got a warrant to surveil Trump campaign officials or the Trump Tower, and. though failing to succeed in the FISA court in October, they did they did succeed in June.”  Predictably, Buchanan insists that this should be followed up by an investigation into whether any Trump campaign officials criminally colluded with the Russians. That’s obvious, but he goes on to insist that Comey identify, “…any FBI or intel agent who has leaked the fruits of their investigation, or fake-news, to the media.” This reflects Trump’s obsession with leaks.

Buchanan says nothing about the number of connections between the Trump campaign members  paid for various performances in Russia, or the very curious insistence by Trump that the Republican Party Platform completely scrub the plank recommending arms for Ukraine. That brazen pro-Russian action would have had any reputable intelligence professional alerted. All of these pro-Russian activities are supposed to be a way to reset our relationships with Russia. Sure they are!

The MI-6 agent, Christopher Steele, who produced the scandalous dossier on Trump is out of hiding. Stele claims he surfaced because Comey refused to follow up on the dossier about Trump and continued his assault on Hillary Clinton. There is certainly ample evidence that Comey did everything he could to push the election win away from Hillary Clinton. He released the fact that he was reexamining her emails before the election and then just before the vote claimed he had found nothing new; very obvious, but not very clever. No wonder Christopher Steele believes Comey’s credibility is gone and that he will have to push what he found out about Trump without help from the FBI.

As it happens, more and more of Steele’s work checks out; poor Donald, it looks like he’s out of his league. Isn’t that a surprise?

                                                                                                                                

2017 Mar 6^th

Donald Trump is stirring the political pot with his recent tweet that President Obama had Trump’s office in Trump Tower bugged. The pot hardly needed any additional agitation as it had not recovered from Attorney General Sessions’ forced recusal of himself from any involvement in events prior to the election. Trump is reported to have been in an enormously high dudgeon at that news. Even after Trump got to Mar-a-Lago, it required Steve Bannon to fly down and make nice with him. While he wouldn’t let Bannon fly down with him on AF-1, he did let Bannon fly back with him as long as he got on through the back entrance, Sad!

Trump’s assertion that his office was bugged had a source. He must have seen some of Mark Levin’s typical paranoid comments about President Obama when they were aired on Fox News. Levin runs a far right three-hour daily talk show out of a Texas radio station. He is not known for being careful with the truth, which gives him an immediate affiliation with our new president.

The president, any president, does not have the power to order the bugging of anyone. The best he can do is to obtain a FISA court’s order based on evidence that a foreign power is involved and only then can bugging occur. Our intelligence agencies in a position to know about such court orders insist no such request was made to any FISA court. Naturally, the right wing pundits claim these folks are all liars.  But suppose that there were permissions given to wiretap. Why would that be a surprise? There is a mountain of evidence that many in the Trump camp, from Paul Manafort to Mike Flynn to Carter Page even to Donald Trump Jr., have been paid by Russians to give speeches. Isn’t that enough evidence to get a wiretap on Trump’s communication systems? If they refused, they would be derelict in their duty to protect the country from foreign interference. (Unless you assume that Russia has only our best interests at heart.)

Trump’s principle advisor, Steve Bannon, claims his goal is “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” He is well on his way to achieving that goal. If deconstruction means taking apart, then the chaos of the Trump administration must be a delight to Steve Bannon. He really lucked out when tied himself to Trump. Trump’s initial edict to halt immigration was quickly struck down by the courts. The entire effort was embarrassingly naïve; no wonder; it was produced by a 32 year old, Steve Miller, with no experience and who was given no oversight in its preparation. No wonder it was a mess.

Trump’s first executive order was issued Jan. 29 and when the courts struck it down he declared that the nation was at desperate risk of terrorists flooding in here unless something could be done at once. Not so fast, there were golf dates, weekends at Mar-a-Lago and other important presidential bits of business, so it took until today, March 6^th to save the country from these terrorists. In the meantime how many terrorist acts have been perpetrated on our poor defenseless country? Not one!

2017 Mar 5^th

“This is a fine mess” is not only a memorable line from the Laurel and Hardy movies; it is also appropriate for the new administration; speaking of this administration, to paraphrase a famous man, “Never have so few caused such embarrassment to so many.”

Trump now claims, without any evidence, that Obama had bugged his residence in Trump Tower. Trump is also said to be furious with poor Jeffery Beauregard because the Attorney General has recused himself from investigations of matters in which he had a prominent role. Some of this will soon shake out, but today I’m going to post a piece I posted here some time ago because it might be more helpful to readers  than any political stuff that will surely heighten blood pressures.

TIA

It is to be devoutly hoped that you don’t know what TIA stands for; it stands for transitory ischemic attack, a mini-stroke. If you aren’t familiar with these initials then you probably haven’t suffered from a TIA. I, myself, have had a TIA. I’m not bragging here. Almost anyone can have one; age helps, so does having lived a dissolute life. Of course if your life has been very dissolute, then you’ll probably have a full-blown stroke. Even if your life has been moderate and serene, if you are beloved by one and all, you can still have a stroke. This does not prove that there is no justice in the world; it does prove that there is only a small amount and that you shouldn’t count on getting your share.

I now provide a brief disquisition on TIAs: The transitory part is self-evident; it doesn’t last long, from a few minutes to an hour. Ischemic means it results from a blocked blood vessel in the brain. There is another kind of stroke which isn’t ischemic; it is hemorrhagic. This means that a blood vessel has ruptured and is bleeding into the brain, or the space the brain occupies. 

Stroke symptoms are enormously varied. They depend on the part of the brain where the blockage occurs. One might have visual effects, an inability to move an arm or leg, numbness, dizziness, an inability to speak or understand words. If you ever have any of these symptoms go to an ER immediately! The odds of a TIA developing into a full-blown stroke are disturbingly high. You won’t know if yours is a transitory event until the symptoms subside. A hospital can tell if your episode is ischemic or hemorrhagic and treat it accordingly. If your problem is ischemic, you will be given clot-busting drugs; if your problem is hemorrhagic, clot forming drugs may be given to stop the bleeding. As you can see, the wrong initial treatment will probably be terminal!

I had been taking a baby aspirin every morning to help prevent a clot. This is a preventative action recommended for many men my age. Baby aspirin are 81 milligrams and are recommended because they are less likely to irritate the stomach than the 325 milligram regular aspirin. I should say that I am in good physical condition, no heart problems and no shortness of breath, normal weight and near normal blood pressure. My only risk factors were that I was eighty at the time, and I was male.

It was about four-thirty in the afternoon. I was watching a television news program containing nothing of any consequence. My wife was in the kitchen getting dinner ready and the pre-dinner cocktail ritual was fast approaching. As I was watching this program I suddenly realized that I had no idea what the announcer was talking about. The names were vaguely familiar but none of the commentary made any sense.

 All right, I know that most news programs don’t make any sense. Even allowing for that, this experience was unique. I decided to tell my wife about it and went into the dinning-room/kitchen area and sat on a counter stool. I started to describe this curious thing to her and an even more curious thing happened: I couldn’t speak a sentence. I would start to say something and nothing intelligible came out. I knew I couldn’t produce a sentence; it just seemed very odd at the time—not frightening, just odd. It quickly occurred to me that I might be having a stroke. They run in my family. I took a couple of aspirin and waited. I should have called 911 and gone to the hospital for professional treatment. Hospitals have much better clot busting drugs than aspirin. Also, this could have been a hemorrhagic stroke, in which case the aspirin would have been a very bad idea. I don’t always do what I should and this time I got lucky. Within twenty minutes everything was normal.

I went on the internet to find out more about TIAs. I discovered that people who have had a TIA are more likely to have a full blown stroke over the next six months or so. After about a year, if the TIA hasn’t recurred, the risk of stroke drops back to its pre TIA level.

About a year later, when time came for my usual physical, I told my physician about my bout of aphasia and the TIA I assumed had produced it. He said that the baby aspirin regimen hadn’t worked very well so I should move up to a regular aspirin every morning. He also suggested that next time I had these symptoms I should call 911. Fine, I’ll do that. I am also taking naps every afternoon and I am ignoring politics and the stock market. I am, therefore, much less likely to have a stroke but I am also having much less fun. Everything has its price, even a long life.

2017 Mar 4^th

Our new administration’s EPA has cut the Great Lakes Restorative Initiative (GLRI) funding by 97 percent. When you cut a program’s budget by 97 percent, you eliminate that program; the three percent that’s left in the budget gives you the money to buy “For Sale” signs for the equipment. Now we will see how Michigan’s Trump voters handle the unimpeded migration of Asian Carp into the Great Lakes and tributary rivers.  It was the EPA that once funded efforts to stop their migration. These fish are big and easy to catch; it should be a cinch to get the sports fishing people to start advertising the size of their Asian Carp catches after a fun day of Lake Michigan fishing.

It was also the EPA, now effectively strangled by Trump, that made sure ocean-going freighters didn’t dump their ballast into the lakes. Who knows what critters were in that ballast…and now who cares? It is certain that the EPA no longer does. Hey the name of the game is “get rid of regulations” and that is what President Trump promised and that is just what President Trump is doing. Enjoy!

Now to spice things up, and to draw attention away from Trump and friends’ Russian connection, we have “The Donald” claiming that President Obama had his Trump Tower digs wire tapped. As anyone familiar with how Trump’s mind works, it is no surprise that President Trump has not a shred of evidence to support this claim. We all know President Trump’s deep devotion to the truth, there are some who feel his word alone is evidence enough and no other evidence is needed.  The number of people feeling this way is diminishing rapidly.

The truth or falsity of Trump’s claim matters not a whit; what matters is now that Trump has tweeted his accusation, his accusation is all the news services want to talk about. This is exactly why Trump made the accusation in the first place. Why would he worry about one more lie? Look at the ones he’s already stacked up: His most recent is the whopper about the 6 trillion dollar cost of the recent wars when the cost was less than 2 trillion (That’s bad enough!); how about his huuuge electoral college win…which was in fact less than either of Obama’s and either of Bill Clinton’s wins.

Trump’s followers will believe whatever he tells them; his detractors will doubt the truth of anything he says; the media are delighted to report his apparent absurdities, increasing their eyeball count and the prices they can charge for their advertisements.

2017 Mar 3^rd

Today the excrement continues to drip into in the Trump administration’s fan blades. Much of this drip is due to Trump himself. Attorney General Sessions, in an attempt to look independent, has recused himself from any concern with investigations prior to the election; later investigations will be decided later. This attempt to appear independent was squelched by Trump himself who agreed with a Russian news agency in calling it a witch hunt. Gee, our president agreeing with the label given by a Russian news agency calling  an investigation by a senate committee a witch hunt.

Trump just has an affinity for churning up the stuff that eventually hits the fan. Now he tweets that there should be an investigation of Senator Schumer because Schumer had, fourteen years ago, met with Putin. Trump tweets that Schumer is a “hypocrite” but Schumer’s meeting was in public and in front of the press. Where were the Trump folks’ meetings? There is an old expression, “Hoist by his own petard” and that’s just happened to our Donald. (A petard was a powder keg on ancient warships.)

 When last seen Trump was in Marine One en route to Air Force One and what I am sure he feels is a well deserved three day weekend in Florida. First he will be at a school choice listening session, then to Palm Beach to dine with wealthy Republican donors and then on to Mar-a-Lago away from the hoi-polloi.

Trump has complained over and over about the slow pace of senate confirmations but what action has he taken to speed it up? There are an enormous number of unfilled sub-cabinet positions but Trump seems addicted to a four-day workweek. Much easier to fly off to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend and complain about the lazy senate not confirming his choices. In many instances, the required paperwork for the senate committees to vette his choices are not completed. It is apparent that Trump is not a believer in hard work

 Senator Rand Paul has been interviewed on several shows lately. The senator was asked about Sessions failing memory, or as others have claimed, his lies while testifying under oath. Senator Paul claimed that he didn’t know of any laws that had been broken. He is big proponent of deleting “Obamacare” because a number of alternatives are in the works and ready to go once this awful, awful Obamacare is out of the way. So far he isn’t very forthcoming on just how his plan, or the other plans would work. He is sure, however that this business of Russia’s meddling in our election and the issue of which Trump supporter spoke to which Russian about what is a witch hunt. I am inclined to think of Senator Rand Paul’s position as much preferring a white wash. He is uninterested in pursuing anything that doesn’t immediately advance his own agenda.