Eric The Blue

The beat goes on

 

I wonder whether our president is losing something from his meagre store of mental clarity.  Or maybe it's just that each day's dumbness crowds out the memory of the last episode, so you always think things are deteriorating, when actually it's just the same ongoing shit-show.  The other day I was driving to Target, NPR on in the car, and it happened that his presser with the Spanish prime minister began just when I got there, so I sat in the parking lot and listened as he referred to the prime minister as the "president" of Spain, a wonderful country, a very wonderful country--great architecture there--before explaining, in the manner of someone who had been briefed earlier in the day, that Puerto Rico is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, which is "a very big ocean," and that you can't just drive trucks there from another state, but that everything is great, and everyone in Puerto Rico is thanking him for what a great job he's doing, or will do, or something.

And then there's this business, in connection with the Republicans' latest health-care debacle, about the need to get rid of the senate filibuster, and moreover what terrible bad luck it was that, just when they're running out of time to pass the health-care bill, a senator from Mississippi has to go into the hospital. And he would have voted for it!  Sometimes, like when mocking John McCain's physical disability, he seems to understand that the R's problem is not that they can't get sixty votes but that they can't get fifty, or McCain's, which renders irrelevant the support of the Mississippian.  But then it slips his mind, and he starts talking as if the filibuster is the culprit, as well as the hospitalization of the senator from Mississippi, who actually is not in the hospital, and could vote, but of course there will be no vote since there aren't fifty votes for the bill among the ailing and the well.

Also earlier this week, he was asked about some changes to his travel ban--who's on, who's off the list.  Here's the transcript of the exchange:

 You couldn't really say that the travel ban resides on an obscure byway of the official policy of the Trump administration.  His slate, however, is blank.

(To Jimmy Kimmel) You go boy!

 

Sarah Lerner, who is followed by someone I follow on Twitter, observes that there are ups and downs to being a woman.  On the plus side, you get to make friends with other drunk girls standing in line to pee.  In the other column goes the fact that men write health-care bills without asking your advice.

Strictly speaking, her formulation is open to the objection that no one really knows who wrote the Graham-Cassidy bill that Jimmy Kimmel has been inveighing against.  According to health-care analysts who have weighed in, neither Graham nor Cassidy understands its content as well as Kimmel does.  This might suggest neither Graham nor Cassidy wrote it.  Their staffs?  If so, some women might actually be implicated in the composition of this open-faced shit sandwich.  I admit I'm way out on a limb here trying to mitigate the guilt of my own demographic group, goyish white guys on the downward slope of middle age.

Apparently somewhere in the range of 46 to 51 of the 52 Republican senators is ready to vote for Graham-Cassidy.  The one sure No is Rand Paul, who thinks the bill unreasonably tempers the state of nature described by Thomas Hobbes, which tells you what you need to know about the modern Republican party.  Despite the bill's evident "popularity" within the Republican caucus, media outlets can't find Republican senators willing to discuss, for the record and before cameras, the reasons for their support.  Here's just a wild guess at the reason for that:  they haven't an answer to the criticisms advanced by virtually every interest group that opposes the bill, an abbreviated list of which includes the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, the Arthritis Foundation, the National Health Council, the March of Dimes,  AARP, the American Medical Association, the National Council for Behavioral Health, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, America's Health Insurance Plans (the insurance industry's leading lobby), ALS Association, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Lutheran Services in America, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, WomenHeart, the American Hospital Association . . . .

Hell, Chris Christie and at least four other Republican governors oppose the bill.  Since one of the bill's distinguishing features is the outsourcing of health-care policy to fifty states (but without enough money to do the job), it's notable that Republican governors are much more apt to be opposed than are Republican senators.  As the following transcript of an interview with Sen. Pat Roberts, Republican from Kansas, shows, the loneliness of Republican senators derives from the fact that everyone else's analysis of the bill is connected to policy considerations, whereas their analysis takes account of only political considerations:

Interviewer: Senator, I wanted to ask you for a policy-based explanation for why you’re moving forward with the Graham-Cassidy proposal. What problems will this solve in the health care system?

Roberts: That — that is the last stage out of Dodge City.

Interviewer: I’m just trying to explain to our readers what the policy —

Roberts: What readers? Who do you represent?

Interviewer: It’s a website called Vox.

Roberts: ... [Graham-Cassidy] is the last stage out of Dodge City. I’m from Dodge City. So it’s the last stage out to do anything. Restoring decision-making back to the states is always a good idea, but this is not the best possible bill — this is the best bill possible under the circumstances. If we do nothing, I think it has a tremendous impact on the 2018 elections. And whether or not Republicans still maintain control and we have the gavel.

Interviewer: But why does this bill make things better for Americans? How does it help?

Roberts: Pardon me?

Interviewer: Why does this make things better?  What is this doing?

Roberts: Look, we’re in the back seat of a convertible being driven by Thelma and Louise, and we’re headed toward the canyon. That’s a movie that you’ve probably never seen —

Interviewer: I do know Thelma & Louise, sir.

Roberts: So we have to get out of the car, and you have to have a car to get into, and this is the only car there is.

You can tell that the Vox guy seems to have ambushed Roberts in an elevator.  He wouldn't say this on Meet the Press, which is why you can believe him.  The air of jokey nihilism perfectly encapsulates what passes for "the national conversation" when politicians, instead of comedians like Kimmel, are doing the talking.  I love the "pardon me"--like, he can't comprehend that the reporter seems to assume his support for the bill might have anything to do with health and the public good.

 

 

Stanislav Petrov, 1939-2017

The New York Times obituary for Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet military officer to whom Americans over the age of 35 may owe their lives.  On September 26, 1983, he was on duty at a command center outside Moscow monitoring satellites designed to detect missile launches from American soil.  Early in the morning the system suddenly began indicating that five intercontinental ballistic missiles had been fired from an American base and would land in Russia within about 25 minutes. The obituary describes protocol:

Colonel Petrov was at a pivotal point in the decision-making chain. His superiors at the warning-system headquarters reported to the general staff of the Soviet military, which would consult with Mr. Andropov on launching a retaliatory attack.

It's not known what Andropov and his top military advisers would have done. They did not receive news of the alert until after the missiles would have reached their targets.  For around five minutes, Petrov deliberated himself before concluding that the blinking-red military system was likely an error.  He decided to report only "a system malfunction."  Within twenty minutes, when nothing happened, what he later described as his "gut feeling" was confirmed.  His training had taught him to expect something different--an all-out attack designed to knock out as much of the Soviet's response capability as possible, so that the US could survive an expected but diminished retaliatory strike.  Just five missiles therefore aroused his suspicion.  Moreover, the early-warning system was relatively new, and he didn't entirely trust it.  An investigation later determined that the false alarm had been triggered by the sun's reflection off the tops of clouds.  With either deliberate or unconscious understatement, the obituary notes that "[t]he computer program that was supposed to filter out such information had to be rewritten."

Petrov received a reprimand for inadequate entries in his log book that morning.  He retired from military service the next year and worked as an engineer until taking a small pension in the 1990s to care for his wife, who had cancer. She died in 1997.  His part in avoiding catastrophe in 1983 was not revealed until 1998, when a retired Soviet military commander published a memoir.  Petrov then achieved a certain renown, and was the subject of a 2014 film, The Man Who Saved the World, but he spurned publicity and lived out his days in what photographs suggest was a somewhat shabby apartment in a Moscow suburb (the above photo was taken in 2015 and accompanies an NPR obituary).  His death last May was not reported in Russia and became widely known only recently, when western contacts, having failed in efforts to communicate with him, finally reached his son.

The title of the film is arguably windy, since Andropov, who knew as much or more than Petrov, may well have exhibited similar restraint.  On the other hand, tensions were high, President Reagan was regularly referring to the Soviet Union as "the evil empire," and only three weeks earlier the Soviets had shot down a Korean commercial airliner that had strayed into their airspace, killing all 269 people on board.  Of the many chilling what-ifs that arise, one concerns the degree to which we can trust our current president to act sensibly in any crisis.  If the fate of the earth depended on either Trump or a Russian chosen at random from a Moscow directory exercising restraint, I wouldn't hesitate to call for the directory. 

Twins: 13 games to go

 

People ask me what's changed now that I'm retired.  Well, I'm more apt to have a drink with lunch, and I think my personal grooming may have taken a hit. Also, since I'm shaving less without having made any progress on the novels of Charles Dickens, it should almost go without saying that I'm following the Twins more closely than ever.  When I last took note of their progress, it was late June, and I was trying to be cheerful even though they had just fallen out of first place after being swept by Cleveland in a 4-game series at Target Field.  Turns out that losing those games was not really cause for alarm.  Since the Indians left town on June 19, the Twins have lost more than a dozen games to them in the standings despite going 44-38 themselves.  The Indians have been rolling everyone.

The good news is that the Twins' long steady pull of "pretty good baseball" has placed them on the inside track for the American League's second wild-card berth in the playoffs.  With 13 games to play, the race for that last slot looks like it's coming down to just the Twins and the Angels, who currently are 2 games behind us.  While brushing my teeth (I still do that much), I think that if we go 6-7 they have to be 8-5 to catch us.  While cleaning up the breakfast dishes, I think that if we go 7-6 they have to be 9-4 to catch us.  Bad news: ten of our games are on the road.  Good news: we're done with the Indians, and the Angels aren't.  I've plainly got it pretty bad.  The crazy part is that the most likely scenario is probably that the Twins claim the last wild-card slot and then have their season end a day later when they lose the wild-card game to the Yankees in the Bronx.  Weeks of obsessive fretting, then elation, then nothing: like getting hit by a bus right after the doctor says he was worried but you're fine. 

Really, though, the long season is the attraction, and no one can take that away.  Something to look forward to every day.  The players become familiar, their peculiar ways, but they change slowly, too, like your kids, and you can't remember when things became different.  With the count 2-2, Byron Buxton batting, you'd avert your eyes in May, because you knew he was about to wave at a breaking ball that the catcher would backhand at dirt level behind the left-handed batter's box.  Now he usually takes it, ball three, full count, then hits a foul or two, then walks, or hits a fair ball, and damn it's fun to watch him run.  I have no idea what Eddie Rosario is like, but he appears to wear a perpetual small curl on his lip.  After striking out, he heads back to the dugout, glancing over his shoulder at the pitcher, the curled lip, like you're lucky I missed that one, fucker, which seemed dumb because you felt he was most likely going to strike out next time, too.   But now I feel that if the pitcher tries that again there really is a decent chance that the ball ends up lying by the fence in right-center field, or even on the other side of it.  Since the all-star break, Rosario is batting .305 with 16 homers, 46 RBI, and a slugging percentage of .600. 

Of American leaguers with at least 150 at-bats since the break, only four have a higher slugging percentage than Rosario.  Buxton (.622) is one of them.  

I could go on about Dozier, and Mauer, and Escobar, who is a particular favorite of mine, mainly because it is so easy to tell what a good time he's having playing the best game in the world. 

UPDATE 9/24:  I was wrong to say above that the Twins are done with the Indians.  We have three games with them in Cleveland starting Tuesday.  The real good news for the Twins was that seven of our last thirteen games are against the Tigers.  Now that we've won four in Detroit, we've got three more, at home, to close out the regular season next weekend.   

 

 

 

 

Philosopy and marriage

A short version of Aristotle's treatises on ethics might be, "Easy does it!  Not too little, not too much, but the golden mean."

Amplification: Don't be rash or reckless, but don't be a coward, either.  How many good friends should you have?  Not too many, but not too few, either.  Wondering how much to give to charity?  Enough, but not too much.  Et cetera.

I wonder whether anyone at the Lyceum ever thought to ask him how many mistresses a married fellow should have.  Four could be expensive.  Just one and you run the risk of being lonesome when the wife is out of town.  So probably two or three.  Moderation in all things.

Seriously, speaking of marriage, and philosophers, it's surprising how little the latter have to say about the former.  Maybe it's because so few of them knew anything about it, first-hand.  Here is a list of philosophers who never married:

Immanuel Kant
Friedrich Nietzsche
Rene Descartes
John Locke
David Hume
Baruch Spinoza
Thomas Aquinas
Arthur Schopenhauer
Soren Kierkegaard
Jean Paul Sartre
Gottfried Leibniz
Thomas Hobbes
Adam Smith
Jeremy Bentham
Henry David Thoreau
Ludwig Wittgenstein

No doubt the list is incomplete, due to my limited knowledge and disinclination to do research while the Twins are on.  Jonathan Wolff, here, mentions that Plato never married "as far as we know" and that, as to big-thinking women, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch were all childless.  If you don't sweat the details, you could almost say it's the philosophy department's entire syllabus, sans Aristotle, Marx, and Hegel. Maybe there could be a separate category for philosophers who married only late in life and had no children: this evidently would capture John Stuart Mill and George Berkeley.  The mating habits of A.J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell make them the exceptions that prove the rule.  

My only theory about this connects with something I recall reading about Einstein--that his friends disapproved of one of his marriages on the ground that his bride wasn't his intellectual equal, a standard that would narrow the field somewhat.  It's probably true that geniuses are bad candidates for marriage, and the great philosophers, being reflective, may have figured that out about themselves beforehand, so were spared from learning the hard way.  According to one of the above bachelors (Nietzsche), marriage is "a long conversation," and he probably would not have been satisfied with what works for Amanda and me (or, at least, me):

Shall we have Subway or Chinese?

I can't believe you forgot to remind me about 4th grade curriculum night.

What's so interesting about your phone?  Do you even realize the Twins had bases loaded, no outs, and didn't score?

The Case of Kaepernick

Colin Kaepernick, the free-agent quarterback, was born in November of 1987 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  His birth mother, single, 19, and poor, put him up for adoption, and he took the name of his adoptive parents, Rick and Teresa Kaepernick, who had lost two infant sons to heart defects--two other Kaepernick children survive.  When Colin was 4, the family moved from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin to California's central valley, where their youngest eventually excelled in both school and athletics at John H. Pitman High in the town of Turlock.  Colin played football, basketball, and baseball, had a 4.0 grade point average, was nominated for all-state consideration in all three sports, and was a first-team all-district, all-conference, and all-academic selection.  In his senior year, Pitman's basketball team was eliminated from their district tournament by rival Oak Ridge despite 34 points from Kaepernick; Ryan Anderson, currently of the Houston Rockets in the NBA, scored 50 points in the game for Oak Ridge.  Kaepernick received the most attention for his baseball pitching, but he was determined to play college football despite attracting little interest from D-1 FBS programs--a likely factor was his physical specs, 6-4 and only 170 pounds as a high school senior.  He accepted a football scholarship from the University of Nevada after an assistant coach saw him play in a high school basketball game and was blown away by his athleticism.  This turned out well for Nevada: Kaepernick is the only D-1 quarterback to have passed for more than 10,000 yards and rushed for more than 4,000 yards during his collegiate career.  The San Francisco 49ers chose him in the second round of the 2011 NFL draft, and from then till now the headlines of his biography are comparatively well known.  Before becoming a lightning rod for criticism on account of impiety during the national anthem, his biggest brush with trouble was probably when, in 2014, he incurred a $10,000 fine from the NFL for wearing Beats headphones to a post-game press conference--Bose being at the time the official headphone of the NFL.  He's contributed money by the barrelful to charity.

I'm not Kaepernick's official biographer but, if Wikipedia can be trusted, the above is all true. 

That he has become a persona non grata is somewhat perplexing to me.  I had thought that a bedrock American principle is summarized in the saying, I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend onto death your right to say it. Obviously I was wrong.  That people are, or purport to be, apoplectic over such a mild protest seems to me to qualify them for what I guess they call snowflakery.  Much of what is said about Kaepernick is wildly over-the-top.  The bit about disrespecting dead servicemen is a gambit that, if valid, would in effect rescind the First Amendment: people have died in battle, therefore you must be silent.  Former NFL star Jim Brown says Kaepernick desecrates the flag.  I don't know what he means by "desecrate," but the Supreme Court, in an opinion joined by Justice Scalia, has held that burning the flag, which seems well beyond anything Kaepernick has done, is constitutionally protected speech.  There can't be any question about him being within his rights as an American citizen.

Nevertheless, it's apparent that he's been blackballed by the NFL.  The argument that football considerations account for no team picking him up is laughable.  He'll turn 30 in November and, in the most recently completed season, had a quarterback rating of 91 as an occasional starter for a terrible team.  In a game against the Dolphins last November, he passed for 296 yards and three touchdowns while rushing for 113 yards: the 49ers lost anyway.  Yet no one wants him even as a back-up.  The snowflakes say there are so many of them that he's bad for business, but Kaepernick could help a team win.  And isn't winning good for business?  Isn't that why there's a place on rosters for, say, serial abusers of wives/fiancees/girlfriends/escorts?  

Can you really throw someone out of the league for expressing an opinion?  Moreover, for what it's worth, Kaepernick's protests arise from opinions on police shootings and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement that are surely shared by a significant percentage of the league's fans.  Though he isn't on a team, Kaepernick's jersey is still a top-20 seller.  But, without recourse to any economic aspect of his case, blackballing him is simply un-American.

I say something similar about college protestors who shout down wing-nuts who come to campus--they should instead just stay home and study, or take a date to the movies.  It's a cliché, because it's true, that the remedy for stupidity is more speech, more expression, not less.  Jon Stewart has shown pretty convincingly that if you just let them talk, and then play the tape, the sane part of the population immediately comprehends that they are hilariously full of shit.  Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have recently proven the general principle with their incisive commentary on the hurricane in Florida.

I don't particularly carry the torch for Kaepernick.  His body is festooned with tattoos of bible verses, which, when asked about, he unfailingly says things you'd think should be too stupid for a 4.0 student to believe.  It's pretty much the same shtick that causes baseball players to blow a kiss heavenward while crossing the plate after hitting a homer.  I guess the poor pitcher is just a tool used by God to give glory to the hitter.  You'd think He might check out of the ball game long enough to direct hurricanes away from population centers, but no, He's a real fan.

 

Books of the Bible: Second Thessalonians

A little taxonomy.  There are twenty-seven units ("books") in the New Testament.   Of these, four are gospels, one of which (Luke) has an appendage, the history of the early church known as Acts.  And there is the concluding Book of Revelation.  So that makes six.  The other twenty-one are epistles (letters), and of these, thirteen have been attributed to Paul.  Of these thirteen, seven were undoubtedly written by Paul, and a few of them are probably responsible for Christianity becoming a world religion instead of just a footnote in the history of Judaism.  These seven are (in likeliest order of composition) First Thessalonians, Galations, First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon.  The other six belong to a "Pauline school" but, with varying degrees of certainty, were not written by Paul himself.  These are Second Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, and the three so-called pastoral letters--First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus.  We come now to the works of the Pauline school, beginning with Second Thessalonians.

There are two reasons for doubting that Second Thessalonians was written by Paul.  The first is that the author sometimes appears determined to pass himself off as Paul, which presumably Paul would not need to do.  The letter concludes:

I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand.  This is the mark in every letter of mine; it is the way I write.  The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.

You catch a whiff of fishiness without perhaps feeling sure of what to make of this.  One learns from rooting around in commentaries that it was common for letters and legal documents to be dictated to a scribe and then signed by the actual author.  On what might be called the "innocent" interpretation, then, the letter is in the handwriting of someone else and these last sentences were added by Paul, in his own hand, as a kind of seal of authenticity.  It wouldn't be the only instance of this in Paul's letters. For example, in Galatians, which is undoubtedly by Paul, he writes (6:11), as he proceeds to his conclusion:

See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand.

And he goes on for another couple hundred words or so before signing off.  The brief for the opposing side holds that what in Galatians seems plausibly organic is, in Second Thessalonians, too much like special pleading--akin to insisting upon your innocence even though no accusation has been leveled.  According to this view, the convention of offering proof of authenticity is, in Second Thessalonians, copied and rather oddly insisted upon for no evident reason, unless the reason is that Paul is not the author.  Along this line, the striking similarities in phrasing between First Thessalonians and Second Thessalonians have seemed to some peculiar.  The salutation to First Thessalonians:

Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy
To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
Grace to you and peace.

The salutation to Second Thessalonians:

Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy,
To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Authors, of course, have their ways, and fall into certain habits.  On the "innocent" interpretation, that's what's going on here and elsewhere in the two letters: Paul, on a later occasion, sounding like himself on a former occasion--it is, you might say, "the way he writes." 

Or, alternatively, the opposing view: No, this is not a case of one author "sounding like himself" but of one author imitating another. 

Now, no matter one's view of this essentially linguistic argument, it's easy to see what view will be adopted by fighting fundamentalists.  If you are committed to the proposition that every word of Scripture is the inspired word of God, you will reject out of hand the notion that a sentence such as

I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand

was written by someone pretending to be Paul.  Since the argument is that the sentence was written by someone misrepresenting himself as Paul, it would be as if at least this one sentence of the Holy Bible was a deliberate lie.  Not permitted.  

As bad as that would be, the second reason for doubting that Paul wrote Second Thessalonians is probably worse, for it relates again to this recurring and vexing question about the timing of Christ's Second Coming.  Recall that, in his first letter to the Thessalonian church, Paul had addressed their apparent befuddlement over the fact that believers were dying without receiving the expected award at the end time.  What would happen to them?  And, more pointedly, why was it taking so long?  The text of First Thessalonians makes it very evident that these early Christians believed they were living at the very end of human history--indeed, that they would "not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come."

Paul's quite heady answer had made use of the simile about the Second Coming arriving "like a thief in the night."  That is, Paul, without denying that the end was (more or less) imminent, indicates that the precise timing cannot be known and that the best course for the Christian is therefore to pursue soberly his duties.  In Second Thessalonians, this whole question is revisited, and the treatment is altogether different:

Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.

So much for the thief in the night!  There will be visible signs, events that must occur before the last event can occur, and of course a cottage industry of theological quackery has arisen around the identification of, for example, "the man of lawlessness" with Nero, or Hitler, or whomever (Obama!), from which the "prophet" then deduces the date on which the elect will be gathered up.  This does not sound like sober Paul, more like the Book of Revelation, and there is a real question about why Paul, in two letters addressed to the same church within a relatively brief period, would treat this same issue so differently.

He almost certainly didn't.  Second Thessalonians was written by someone else, much later, at least a generation after the death of Paul in about A.D. 64.  To the unknown author, it may have seemed a shame that Paul could not update his thinking in light of the fact that the Second Coming still hadn't happened.