DAY ONE

Well, I watched several hours of the hearings, and one simple fact seemed obvious, at least to me: whatever else the Democrats and their lawyers may be they are simply awful teachers.  Let me explain.

The testimony dealt at length with Ukraine.  I would estimate that there are maybe two million people in America who could more or less locate Ukraine on a map, which is to say fewer than 1% of the adults in this country.  The point of the hearings is to educate the American people about what is already known, not to discover new facts.  So the first thing any halfway decent teacher would do is put up a map on screen and spend ten minutes describing the location, the history, and a few salient facts about the country [such as:  Ukraine is the largest country, by area, in Europe;  Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union in return for promises of protection, etc.]

Did Adam Schiff do this?  Not even remotely.  So the entire day was incomprehensible to anyone not already totally clued in.  By contrast, the only fact in Watergate not already known to the general public was that there is an apartment complex in DC called “The Watergate.”

I seriously doubt that this exercise will move the polls, and hence the Republicans.

Meanwhile, Mike Bloomberg and Deval Patrick have decided the Democratic race for the nomination needs a few more centrists.  The monied classes must, behind the scenes, be in a panic.

THE WHORE OF MENSA

If there is anyone out there who has never read this classic short short story by Woody Allen, just click on this and enjoy.

When he was young, he was to die for.

HOW SOON THEY FORGET

All of us, I take it, are familiar with printed warnings, especially on milk and other dairy items, that a quart of milk or tub of cottage cheese is to be removed from the shelves after some specified date.  This is usually referred to as the “sell-by date.”

Yesterday, I traveled once again to New York to teach at Columbia University.  The trip began uneventfully, at six a.m. when I pulled out of my parking slot and headed for Raleigh Durham Airport, but it quickly deteriorated into a classic air travel sad story.  We pulled back from the gate on time at 8:10 a.m. and headed for the active runway, in light rain, but as we waited our turn to take off, the pilot announced that LaGuardia had just announced a one hour ground halt, so we sat.  After an hour, the pilot announced another one hour delay, so we continued to sit, but just as he was revving up the  engines for our much delayed takeoff, he announced that there was a mechanical problem that had to be fixed, so he returned to Gate D5, from which we had departed, full of hope, two hours earlier, and were told we could deplane but should remain in the area of the Gate as we might be leaving at short notice.  Half an hour later, we pulled back once again.  The mechanical problem?  A lack of appropriate differential pressure in the toilets meant that they would not flush until we reached 18,000 feet.  [I am not making this up.]  Finally, seven hours and fifty-five minutes after leaving home, I sat down at the seminar table, five minutes before the class was scheduled to begin.

That was when I got the real shock of the day.  One of the graduate students in the seminar told me that he had gone to see Professor Akeel Bilgrami about some philosophical issues.  Bilgrami is a quite senior member of the Philosophy Department who currently holds the Sidney Morgenbesser Professorship of Philosophy.  When Bilgrami suggested that the student consult some of the writings of Robert Paul Wolff [very flattering], my student replied that he was currently taking a course with Wolff.  Bilgrami replied, “But that is not possible.  He died ten years ago.”

Now, I freely admit that it has been thirty years since I have attended a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, and almost that long since I last published anything at all in a Philosophy journal, but, I mean, really!

Pretty clearly, I have passed my sell-by date and should be removed from the shelf before I give some unsuspecting consumer the intellectual version of food poisoning.

IS THERE A DEEPER MEANING HERE?

Here is an idle thought I had this morning while walking in sub-freezing temperature.  In my adult lifetime there have been two full scale public education campaigns aimed at getting everyone to alter his or her settled habits, and both, surprisingly, have been quite successful.

The first was the campaign to get people to use their seatbelts, and the second was the effort to get people to stop smoking.  In both cases, it is instructive to compare old movies, especially black and white movies, with modern movies.  In the old movies, everyone smokes, seemingly all the time, even in intimate love scenes.  It really turns me off.  In modern movies, almost nobody smokes.  In old movies, gangsters drive away from a bank heist and cops jump in their cop cars and give chase, and no one buckles up.  In modern movies, even when the lead’s life is at stake, she carefully puts on her seatbelt before speeding away.

In both cases, there has been backsliding, with young people both vaping and texting while driving.  But I would never have thought that a conscious, deliberate public health campaign would have any effect at all.

AWRIGHT AWREADY

Next semester, probably starting in February, I shall deliver a series of videotaped lectures on David Hume's Theory of Knowledge which will be posted, as I deliver them, on YouTube.

Don't say I never did anything for you.

HE SAID IT BETTER

No sooner had I posted my last comment on the world than I clicked on HuffPost and read this much better expression of the same thought.  Oh well.

THE MONEY IS WORRIED

Well, well, Mike Bloomberg suddenly emerges from seclusion to put his name into the first-deadline primary in Alabama.  Then word emerges that Clinton loyalist Eric Holder is dipping a toe in the water.  So long as Good Old Joe was topping the polls by double digits, the money slept easy, but once Joe started to slide and Elizabeth and Bernie hung on or even surged, sensible no-nonsense types began to worry that the party was moving "to far to the left," which is code for "Help!!!  Someone wants to tax our piles of dough."

Meanwhile, desperate Republicans have hit on a strategy to save Trump:  throw Rudy, Mike, and Gordon under the bus.  All of which has created a new on-line betting game, Who Will Flip on Trump First?


Life is not all bad.