MR. TOAD RIDES AGAIN

This is,to put it mildly, a strange time. Enormous and possibly significant popular protests in China and Iran, the largest active volcano in the world errupting, Republicans unable to figure out what to do with the tiny majority they have won in the House of Representatives, and a former president and leading candidate for the presidency in 2024 dines with someone who loves Hitler and then, in reaction to an obscure report about Twitter, says that the U.S. Constitution should be abrogated so that he can be appointed to the presidency forthwith.

Completely unable to find anything intelligent to say about these various developments, I took refuge this morning as I so often do in my own words (hence the reference to Mr. Toad.)  I read once again my unpublished 14 page comment on a conference I attended many years ago on Kant and the law. It is, I think, one of the funniest things I have ever written and if you have nothing better to do on a lazy Sunday I recommend it to you. Its title is "Why, Indeed?" and it can be found in the collection of "My Stuff" by following the link at the top of this page.

JUST SITTING AND WATCHING

Napoleon famously said, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."  I am just going to sit here quietly and watch the Republican Party self-destruct. My guess is Nancy Pelosi has advised her caucus to do the same. What with the world going to hell in a hand basket, there is not much fun these days so you have to take the amusement where you find it.

HOMAGE TO MY BIG SISTER

As readers of this blog know, I have an older sister, Barbara, who lives in a Continuing Care Retirement Community in Southern California much like the one in which I live here in North Carolina. Barbara is 3 ½ years older than I am so I think of her as my big sister, even though she is now even shorter than I am. Barbara went to school before I did, of course, and when she came home she would want to play school, with her as the teacher. Since I was the only little kid around, I was the pupil and so it was that she taught me to read. Along with all of her other accomplishments, Barbara was a great dancer and when I got to be 12 or 13 she taught me the Foxtrot and the Lindy Hop.

 

Well, eighty years or so have passed, and she is still teaching me things I need to know. Yesterday, through the miracle of FaceTime, I spent 40 minutes talking to Barbara about this and that. Barbara has for some time been in a wheelchair and she has regular caregivers, who come to her apartment to help her.  As my Parkinson’s gets worse, I am forced to face the fact that at some point I will need the help of caregivers to manage my life, especially so that I can continue to look after my wife. I am, to be honest, somewhat humiliated by this fact and also resistant to it. I cannot figure out quite how it would help to have someone in the apartment a certain number of hours each week since the things with which I need help seem scattered throughout the day and more or less random in their occurrence. I asked Barbara how she handled having caregivers and patiently, slowly, she explained it to me.

 

This is a dance quite as challenging as the Lindy Hop and I am grateful once more to have a big sister to teach me how to do it.

ALMOST FAMOUS

I have just learned that In Defense of Anarchism will be translated into Arabic and published in Kuwait.  I guess it is too much to hope that it will be translated into Farsi and published in Iran.

ONE OF THE MANY THINGS THAT IRRITATE ME ABOUT CABLE NEWS SHOWS

One of the continuing challenges in teaching is to figure out what your students do not know. Especially when teaching graduate students, this is difficult because graduate students have learned to put on their game faces and pretend to understand everything, hoping desperately that what they do not understand will be explained along the way without their having to acknowledge that they are mystified. I watch a good deal of cable news and I am struck by how often the “experts” who appear on those shows completely fail to understand what the audience does and does not know. Let me give you some recent examples.

 

Yesterday, I was listening to a well-known newspaper reporter talk about something she learned through a “foyer” request. I knew that “foyer” or “foya” is the way that the acronym FOIA is pronounced. I also knew that the letters FOIA stand for Freedom of Information Act, a federal law that for almost half a century has made government records available to ordinary citizens. I knew that, and of course everybody on the show knows that, but I would be willing to bet that 80% or 90% of the viewers did not know that and therefore did not really understand what the newspaper reporter was talking about. What is more, it simply never occurred to the host of the show to take 10 seconds to explain it so that the viewers would know what was being talked about.

 

Here is another example, which I will flesh out with my own made up explanation. Whenever defense or intelligence experts appear on a show to talk about the classified documents that Trump took to Mar-a-Lago with him, they make reference to the possibility that these documents will compromise “sources and methods.” Since this phrase reappears so often in the discussions on television, I assume it is a standard expression used by people who spend their life dealing with government secrets of one sort or another. But the phrase is never explained and therefore it is never clear to ordinary listeners like me exactly how Trump’s having those documents could compromise “sources and methods.” I thought about it for a while and I came up with the following hypothetical example.

 

Suppose some branch of our government is trying to keep track of who is in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle of advisors. This is important, we may suppose, for getting some insight into his plans regarding the war in Ukraine. Imagine that one of our spies in Moscow, masquerading as a McDonald’s hamburgers executive, learns of some low-level nobody whose job it is to bring tea and coffee and snacks to Putin when he is meeting with people in his office. This nonentity sits in the pantry until a buzzer tells him to get up, pick up a tray, and bring the snacks into Putin’s office. He does so without saying a word and leaves, and he has been doing this every day for years. Our spy somehow gets to this nobody and persuades him to keep track of the people he sees there and report any changes. Some while later, after the information has been passed back to CIA headquarters in Langley, an analyst writes a memorandum calling attention to the fact that there has been a change in the circle of Putin’s closest advisers. He does not say where the information comes from, simply that it is well confirmed.

 

If one of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago guests manages to take a picture of this document surreptitiously when it sits in Trump’s desk drawer and passes the picture back to Moscow, folks there pretty quickly can figure out that the information must come from one of only three or four people who have regular access to Putin’s inner office.  Our “sources” have been compromised.

 

This would take only a few moments to explain to several million viewers, who would then have a much clearer idea of why experts are so exercised by the fact that Trump took these documents and kept them in an insecure fashion.

 

Here is a third example. Senate rules dictate that if the Democrats and Republicans each have 50 senators, then all committees have equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, which makes it very difficult for the Democrats to issue subpoenas and also very difficult to get Biden’s judicial and other nominees through committee to the floor of the Senate. If Warnock wins, that will not change control of the Senate, but it will dramatically change what the Democrats can do with their control. This is not rocket science and has actually been mentioned once or twice on cable news shows that I have watched but most of the time the commentators talk as though nothing major is at stake in the runoff as the Democrats already have 50 senators.

WAKING NIGHTMARES

Seven years ago, in 2015, I did a deep dive into the rules governing the allocation of Republican Party convention delegates in the different states, and demonstrated on this blog that if Donald Trump could get a steady 30 – 35% of the voters in the various primaries, he would win enough delegates to secure the nomination even without the so-called “superdelegates” allocated by Republican Party rules. I am not aware that any of the states have made significant changes to their rules, which essentially gives the winner of a primary all or most of the delegates. It is my impression, although only that, that Trump can reasonably expect to command at least 1/3 of the delegates in the upcoming primaries for the 2024 election. If, as seems likely, as many as a dozen candidates announce their candidacy, then unless Ron DeSantis can actually secure more than half of the delegates not committed to Trump in the early primaries, Trump will start to build up what will appear to be an unbeatable lead in delegate commitments. The anti-Trump forces in the Republican Party could forestall such an event by all combining behind a single non-Trump candidate, but we know that will not happen.

 

By the way, being in jail is not an obstacle to running for president. Just ask Eugene Victor Debs, five-time nominee of the Socialist party in the first part of the 20^th century, who ran for president the fifth time in 1920 while in jail and got 3 million votes.

 

THIS AND THAT

For those who did not recognize the passage quoted by Fritz Poebel in his comment, you will find it in the second paragraph of the Introduction to David Hume’s great work A Treatise of Human Nature. I have long believed that Hume is the greatest philosopher to write in the English language. I first studied the Treatise in the fall of 1951 and love to return to it from time to time.

 

Well, well, well. Samuel Alito has been outed as having leaked an important Supreme Court decision 10 years ago. John Roberts must be beside himself.

 

It occurred to me yesterday as I lay in bed thinking that this is now the 75^th anniversary of an event that loomed large in my family and in my own teenage years. In 1942, the Westinghouse Corporation established something called the Science Talent Search, a nationwide competition for high school seniors which involved both a written examination and a report of an individual science project. The chair of the biology department in Forest Hills High School, Paul Brandwein, decided to make a big push for the Westinghouse in 1947–48, and my big sister Barbara was one of a number of students at Forest Hills who entered the Westinghouse. She not only did well enough in the examination to be one of the 400 students nationwide to win Honourable Mention, her research project was good enough for her to be selected as well as one of the 40 students who went to Washington DC for a week-long visit, during which the students were interviewed about their projects. (Forest Hills had four winners that year, an astonishing accomplishment.)

At the end of the week, the review committee selected one boy and one girl (that is the way they were talked about in those days) as grand national winners and Barbara was the Westinghouse grand national girl winner. She won a $2,400 scholarship, which paid for four years of tuition at Swarthmore College, from which she eventually graduated summa cum laude.

 

Barbara’s research project was on phenocopies in Drosophila Melanogaster, which is to say fruit flies. She conducted her research in the basement of our little house in Kew Gardens Hills but some of the critters got loose and would migrate upstairs to the dining room where they hovered in a little cloud over the dinner table each evening.

 

After many years, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search became the Intel Science Talent Search, and is apparently now the Regeneron Science Talent Search.  Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez was a winner of the Intel competition her senior year in high school.

 

As Barbara’s little brother, I was of course expected to try out for the Westinghouse as well. My first thought for a project was to take metalworking shop, make a pair of slide calipers, and go to Chinatown to measure their heads of first and second generation Chinese-Americans to see whether there was any difference. When that did not pan out, I had a go at an analysis of the flora and fauna of a pond in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.  Eventually I did some silly analytic geometry project. I did get an Honorable Mention and can still remember telling my girlfriend, Susie (now my wife), how disappointed I was. She tried to convince me that it was still something to get an Honorable Mention, but I knew better.