Eric The Blue

Sound smart in meetings

 

I'm not a devotee of The Simpsons, so it's probably not the finest moment in the show's history, but a 12-second clip of my favorite of the ones I know is above. It's a work meeting. The big bosses have been outlining their stupid proposal. A guy interrupts to say, mildly and without rancor, "Excuse me, but aren't 'paradigm' and 'proactive' just buzz words that dumb people use to sound important?" No one says anything for a second. Then he says, "I'm fired, aren't I?"

I had around 30,000 chances to be such a hero and turned them all down. A wasted career. I remember now that one of my many bosses was fond of forming adjectives by adding -ful to the most ordinary nouns. For example, instead of achieving proactivity with plans, she urged us to be planful. An idea too banal even to mention—we should have a plan!—was thus transfigured into something like a Zen state of being. 

Back when they went to school, my kids had lessons in "mindfulness" administered by, I believe, the staff mindfulness specialist. Maybe this is so that they don't feel the need to smoke pot? I asked the older one about it, because I figured the younger one would not have been sufficiently in the moment to remember anything about her mindfulness training, but she (the older one) just shrugged her shoulders. Not that that is an unusual response to my questions about school. I think educators understand what's "extra" because distance learning appears to be mainly math, science, reading, and social studies. Though a new term is about to start and one of my kids is registered for "choir." I'm a little curious about how that works over the internet, but most likely the teacher has been planful about the paradigm shift.

Maybe she—I know it's a she—should work in the Trump administration as it seems there was never a "testing plan" and, now that a vaccine is available, it seems there isn't a plan to get it injected into arms, either. I'm not the kind of smart ass who is against having a plan. 

 

Authors: Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson resembles Shakespeare in the respect that a lack of biographical data frustrates curiosity about the person who could have produced such a body of work, thereby encouraging the invention of theories more grounded in fancy than fact. She is not as remote in time, of course, but at least with Shakespeare his progress in the world may be traced through the real estate transactions to which he was  party: as an adult, Dickinson never lived in any house but her father's, and she hardly ever ventured out of it. She never married, and likely died a virgin. At her death, bundles of paper packets of poetry were discovered in a chest, a total of almost 1800 untitled and eccentrically punctuated poems, including:

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile—the Winds—
To a heart in port—
Done with the Compass—
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In thee!

She was born on December 10, 1830, at Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father, Edward, was a lawyer, the treasurer of Amherst College, and, for one term, a member of the United States House of Representatives. Her mother seems to have left almost no mark in the world and was an invalid for the last 25 years of her life. From some of her surviving letters, written to friends and relatives, one concludes that Emily found her mother to be a distant, unengaged parent and that she regarded her father with reverence and awe. When he died in 1874, the funeral service was at the house, and Emily, now in her mid-40s, could not bear to attend, choosing instead to listen through an open bedroom door. There were two other children, a girl, Lavinia, who like Emily never married and lived at home, and a boy, Austin, whose marital troubles, eventually involving the wife of an Amherst astronomer, were a small scandal around town.

Edward Dickinson took care that his kids were all educated—considering that two were girls, this was a bit out of the ordinary for the times. We know that Emily's instructors at Amherst Academy had a high opinion of her abilities, and that the curriculum included math, science (her particular interest: botany), classical languages and literature, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Upon graduating at age 17, she enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where, though it was only about nine miles away, she suffered acute homesickness and returned to Amherst after less than a year. This is where the biographical light almost flickers out for a few years.  She went on a month-long trip to Washington—her father was in the Congress—and Philadelphia in 1855. The next year she won second place for a bread she entered in a local competition. The year after that, 1857, she was a judge in the same competition. She had been a kind of Valentine's poetess, but sometime around in here she began writing more steadily and seriously. Scholarship has determined that the years of her greatest productivity coincided almost exactly with the Civil War—by one estimate, she wrote 86 poems in 1861, 366 in 1862, 141 in 1863, and 174 in 1864. There seems to be no connection, however, between the national tumult and her apparently feverish literary activity. There is no mention of the war (that I'm aware of) in any of her poems, certainly not in the ones that get printed in anthologies. That they are so short accounts (to a degree) for how she could write about three or four a week for four years, and also makes it easy to set a few down in their entirety. Here's one:

I never lost as much but twice,
And that was in the sod.
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!

Angels—twice descending
Reimbursed my store—
Burglar! Banker—Father!
I am poor once more!

And another:

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

I picked these partly for their biographical interest. There's been a lot of effort expended at identifying the two events, but the biographical record supplies only candidates, with the result that the quest goes on. As linguistic performances, these poems are unusual and, in the judgment of time, dazzling. Words of a single syllable abound, but the extreme simplicity is joined to a kind of obliquity of expression. Burglar, banker, father—what's going on here? The standard line of English verse had had ten syllables, which she usually reduces, often in alternate lines, to eight and six: compression. The longer line accommodates some peculiarities of English. In Latin and Greek, nouns are inflected to indicate their grammatical place in a sentence. That is, while we add -s for plural and -'s for possessive, Latin and Greek nouns take different endings depending upon whether they are the subject, the direct object, the indirect object, etc.,—relationships that in English are conveyed by words, usually prepositional phrases that use up syllables and have the effect of dissipating meaning—I mean that the meaning is spread out over too many words, which are however necessary. Thus perhaps the familiar poetic contractions like o'er and e'er: no one talks like that, but they save a syllable. Dickinson eschews "poetic" language. The problem I've alluded to she seems to have solved to her satisfaction by denying that the necessary words are really necessary. The eccentric punctuation, especially the dashes, stand in sometimes for elisions, kind of like they might in the personal letter of a person with a racing mind. This simplicity and compression is her leading technical innovation and gives her best poems a quality of wildness, ferocity. There's something austere, controlled but aggressive, about them—the way, for instance, that in the second poem the simplicity of the seventh line gives way to something even more pared down in the eighth and last line, six emphatic monosyllables landing like blows.

Death is her leading theme but her attitude toward it is inconstant: on different occasions, in different poems, dread, fear, sorrow, something like relief, or even exhilaration, predominate. Her status is such that some of her lines, usually the openings to poems, will sound familiar to people who have never read them.

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—

And:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—

Her mental health was perhaps not the best. By the late 1860s she almost never left the house. And what an odd household it must have been. The father, a distinguished member of the community; a mother whose health kept her mostly bedridden from the mid-1850s until her death in 1882; and two old maid daughters, one of whom never left the house but would after her death be recognized as one of the country's greatest poets. In 1862, she sent a letter and four of her poems to the literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and asked, in the letter’s first sentence: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" She seems to have had an eye toward publication, but Higginson, though impressed, did not strongly encourage her. He did visit her in Amherst and committed his impressions to his diary:

a step like a pattering child's in entry . . . . a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair and a face . . . with no good feature. . . . She came to me with two day-lilies, which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand and said "These are my introduction," in a soft, frightened, breathless childlike voice—and added under her breath, "Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers and hardly know what to say"—but she talked soon and thenceforth continuously—and deferentially—sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her—but readily recommencing.

In the end, ten of her poems were published during her lifetime. The editorial process tamed them, made them more conventional. Her family may have thought there were no more. She died, age 55, on May 15, 1886. A doctor gave Bright's disease as the cause of death and its duration as 2.5 years. She had instructed Lavinia to burn her letters but said nothing about the poems bound together in the chest. Does this suggest she knew their worth and hoped for what has in fact come to pass? A volume, edited more or less in the manner of the ten poems published in her lifetime, appeared in 1891. Not until 1955 was there published a complete edition of all her poems, following her texts as carefully copied out in the papers and notebooks contained in the chest. A fairly wide selection of her poems can be read online, here. 

A Christmas story to uplift the heart

Jack Goldsmith, of Harvard Law School and, according to The New York Times, "one of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament," has been performing taxonomic labors on the pardons issued (so far) by President Trump:

Total pardons/commutations by Trump: 94.

Breakdown:

1) Advance political agenda? 68/94
2) Personal Connection? 40/94
3) TV/TV Commentator? 13/94
4) Celebrity? 20/94

Personal or Political Connections (i.e. 1,2,3 or 4): 86/94 (91%)https://t.co/gGHEUOuEGR

— Jack Goldsmith (@jacklgoldsmith) December 24, 2020

The pardon of Charles Kushner, father of Trump's son-in-law Jared, husband to Ivanka, clearly belongs in category #2, "personal connection." But I think the men are bound by more than just the marriage of their children. They are of the same class and general line of work ("real estate development"), and there is a certain affinity of means, methods, and legal troubles. Under the terms of a deal he struck with Chris Christie, at the time the US Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Kushner in 2005 pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. The details of the witness tampering are the most captivating. When he discovered that he was being investigated, and that his sister was cooperating with the g-men, Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, who was also cooperating with John Law. The hooker succeeded at her assigned task and their sex act was, according to plan, recorded by a hidden camera in a New Jersey motel room. The recording was subsequently delivered to Kushner's sister, which, by Christie's theory of the case, was for the dual purpose of punishing her for her cooperation with the investigation and to encourage her and her spouse to desist. That was the witness tampering count to which Charles Kushner pleaded guilty, a crime for which he has now been pardoned.

I'm sure there must be many Americans whose grandfathers are both criminals. The children of Jared and Ivanka, however, belong to a special little subset of that demographic: one of their criminal grandpas was pardoned by the other criminal grandpa, who was also the President of the United States. It's a charming Christmas tale that makes me proud to be an American. Happy Holidays!

Notice

Wish I could remember what I had googled that caused me to stumble upon this. Not for nothing that some blogs get more traffic than mine.

Merry Christmas!

It snows, the news blows

Watching the news while watching it snow, I see that Trump, having maintained for weeks radio silence about congressional negotiations on a COVID relief package, revealed last night, after Congress had finally passed a bill, that he's with Rashida Tlaib and AOC on this one: the stimulus checks should be for two grand per person, not a mere $600, the amount Senate Republicans insisted upon but which Trump now terms "a disgrace." More 3-d chess by the author of Art of the Deal? 

More likely it's just payback for Mitch McConnell having acknowledged that Biden won the election. Months ago the House passed a bill, the "Heroes Act," that would have cut us all a second $1200 check. The Republican Senate killed it—"dead on arrival," they chortled. Trump's announcement is therefore a gift to Democrats. Nancy Pelosi immediately  tweeted  that the House stood ready to consider the president's proposal. McConnell's turn for radio silence now. He's too busy trying to pull the knife out of his back to talk. 

McConnell might be wishing he'd thought to distract Trump from COVID relief by sending him a list of vile criminals to consider for pardons. Probably wouldn't have worked, though, as our president is already all over that one. Chris Collins, the first congressional Republican to have endorsed Trump for president and a convicted inside trader of stocks—pardoned. Duncan Hunter, the second congressional Republican to have endorsed Trump for president, who indulged his epicurean impulses with funds suckers donated to his political campaigns—pardoned. Four murderers and war criminals in the employ of the brother of Trump's Secretary of Education—pardoned. More on the way, no doubt: he's president for four more weeks.

Sexy topic: tax base and the metro checkerboard

I came to the U.S. in 1992, and after all these years I still can’t get used to the obscene idea that local public schools are funded by local taxes, and not by an equitable national budget. Every kid should get the same opportunity. It should *not* depend on local wealth.

— Ami Dar (@AmiDar) December 18, 2020

So . . . I'm generally sympathetic with the tweeter's view, but the facts of the case are frequently more complicated. For example, at least in Minnesota, where I live, "local taxes," in the form of the tax on real property, provide no more than a third of the funding for public schools. It would be awful if the schools ran only on property tax dollars, because then what the tweeter calls "local wealth," meaning I assume property tax base, would indeed limit educational opportunities for students in poor districts. The rich and poor would have the same lone method of raising money, but the more affluent districts could raise more by imposing a lower tax rate on their local properties, which on average are worth considerably more than the properties in poor districts.  Moreover, wealthy districts tend to have fewer needs, since the high home prices have the effect of screening out, for example, students requiring ESL or other special instruction. Greater needs and less tax base mean higher tax rates, which makes poor districts even less desirable places to live, which drives down home prices further, which means either tax rates have to be yet higher or needs left unmet—a downward spiral of doom. 

Minnesota, recognizing this weakness, has state government kick in for public education generally about twice as much as comes from the local property tax. The state money is not distributed evenly to all districts but rather according to complicated considerations and formulae relating to things like disparities in tax base and the needs of individual districts: in other words, what some people call "socialism," since you get more if you need more. The idea, to revert to the tweeter's language, is to make it so that educational opportunities, and the overall quality of public schools, don't "depend on local wealth." But it's an imperfect remedy. One good thing about the property tax is that land and buildings don't deliquesce and so are there to be taxed, in good times and bad. When, however, budgets are tight, state aid for public education is invariably on the chopping block: most taxpayers don't have kids in public school, and, even if they do, they're only hurt by a cut if they live in poorer districts that rely less on the property tax and more on  state funds. The dynamic relating to the downward spiral is back in operation. The tweeter's fundamental complaint is sometimes confirmed accidentally—for example, if you are perusing real estate listings in the Lake Minnetonka area, you will see again and again things like EXCELLENT PUBLIC SCHOOLS! or SOUGHT AFTER WAYZATA SCHOOL DISTRICT! The home price is usually half a million or more. But suppose that, instead of looking in the Lake Minnetonka area, you filter only for price and search for homes anywhere in the metro listed for less than $175,000. Now you don't hear so much about the schools. 

Since property taxes bankroll nearly everything local government does, the inequities connected to school funding apply comprehensively. To continue picking on Wayzata, its needs for police and fire and streets and utilities and parks & rec and public library, etc., do not exceed Brooklyn Center's need for the same services. And, again, the two cities have the same means of raising revenue for these services, which are purchased in the same market place. But Wayzata is way richer. It can raise all the money it needs by taxing its valuable properties at a relatively low rate. That is why someone who owns a $300,000 home in Wayzata (if there are any that affordable) pays less property tax than someone who owns a $300,000 home in Brooklyn Center (if there are any that expensive). It seems to me there is a "good government reform" that would address the inequities in a more thoroughgoing fashion without enlisting the feds in the way the tweeter suggests. Why do we have this confusing checkerboard of literally hundreds of different taxing authorities across a single metropolitan area? The boundaries between them are artificial and relate in no meaningful way to how people live. Your home, which is determinative for local tax purposes, is in a particular municipality, sure, but you might work in a different suburb from the one in which you live while shopping for groceries in a third, going to church in a fourth, hauling your kids to music lessons in a fifth, and attending sports or cultural events "downtown." While prosecuting the daily routine, you aren't even aware of all the tax boundaries you're crossing, but, for some reason, the location of your bed is all that matters for determining your tax bill.

A single, interdependent metropolitan area should have a single uniform tax structure that applies throughout the region. If the checkerboard were eliminated, the inequities identified by the tweeter would be ameliorated, and the region as a whole would be healthier.

Indianapolis, on the initiative of Republican mayor Richard Lugar, instituted such a reform in the 1970s, and it was successful and popular enough so that Lugar was soon elected to the US Senate (where he forsook his previous interest in metropolitan governance and became a foreign policy maven—his political brand is as extinct as tyrannosaurus rex). I'm not sure why the idea hasn't spread. In Minnesota, we have "fiscal disparities" laws that recognize it wouldn't make sense if, say, Bloomington got to keep all the city share of the property tax generated by the Mall of America. That would be great for homeowners in Bloomington, whose tax bill would be reduced considerably, but instead the tax revenue generated by the Mall is distributed across the metropolitan area, on the theory that it and other valuable commercial properties are regional assets. But if it wouldn't be right for Bloomington to reap the tax benefits generated by the Mall of America property, why is it fine that toney suburbs get all the benefit of their expensive residential housing? They have the greatest resources (lots of valuable properties to tax) and probably the fewest needs (because the expensive housing tends to screen out people who need government services). So they ease along from year to year, relatively low tax rates and relatively high levels of local government service—certainly all the cops they need, nice parks, summer rec programs for kids, not a lot of hand wringing over the municipal budget. Meanwhile communities not 15 miles away, unambiguously part of the same metropolitan area, struggle to avoid the downward spiral of doom. The property wealth within their little square on the checkerboard isn't enough to meet basic needs. 

 

Jeopardy, etc.

I think the last few Jeopardy shows Alex Trebek taped are now airing? Don't know for sure as the local NBC channel has been dropped from my cable provider's lineup. How can that be? Two hundred seventy nine channels and I can't watch Jeopardy for a half hour at 4:30, aperitif in hand. A long time ago, I suddenly lost access to a bunch of channels, but I said nothing because I simultaneously gained access to HBO. That is how I began watching The Sopranos. The upside to the current snafu is invisible, however.

Anyway, here is my homage. Anagrams for two thousand, Alex.

They are members of a mainline Protestant denomination: BRITNEY SPEARS.

Who are the Presbyterians?!

Not the content you're here for? My favorite bit of news over the past couple of days concerns all the pearl-clutching Republicans, led by Florida's little Marco, complaining about the president-elect's incoming deputy chief of staff referring to them, in an interview, as "a bunch of fuckers." Isn't Trump their guy? Moreover, I believe that in libel law the truth is a defense. 

I am also perplexed by the controversy regarding Jill Biden's doctorate in education. I guess she should not go by "Dr Biden" unless she can write you a prescription for your ED meds? That seems absurd, so the next line of attack relates to her allegedly deficient dissertation. The wingnuts regularly accuse Dems of being "elitist" and then, when massaging one another in their journalistic organs, such as in this case National Review, write:

As for Biden, she has spent a lot of time teaching remedial English to slow learners in community colleges. Which is like being a rock musician who's in a bar band. That plays covers. At mixers. Held in assisted-living facilities.

One receives the distinct impression that the author thinks he's quite the clever fellow. Au contraire! You, sir, are just another fucker. 

 

More--last?--election facts, figures, and opinions

Instead of having footnotes, I'm just going to say at the start that Dave Wasserman's Twitter feed is a treasure trove of interesting 2020 election factoids and he's my source for much of what follows. Wasserman is House Editor of The Cook Political Report. 

1. The congressional district in which I live, Minnesota's Fifth, which is Minneapolis and many of its inner ring suburbs, may have led the nation in widest gap between presidential and US House vote. In the presidential race, Biden defeated Trump in the Fifth District by 80 to 18 percent. In the congressional race, however, Democratic incumbent Ilhan Omar defeated Republican Lacy Johnson by "only" 64 to 26 percent. (Note to Mr Wasserman: Cook Political Report's "partisan voter index" for the district—D+26—may be in need of review.) 

Explanations that I've seen for Omar's under performance have focused on her liabilities. I think her opponent ran a fairly effective campaign. He was awash in cash, thanks to Omar haters around the country determined to invest in a lost cause, and he appears to have used a lot of it on TV ads that never mentioned he's a Republican. Instead, he came out against "divisiveness" while necessarily displaying the fact that he's Black. That can't be the whole story, however. Note that the two-party vote for president sums to 98 percent, whereas 10 percent of voters in the House race voted for neither Omar nor Johnson. Plainly these voters chose Biden for president but not their Democratic representative in Congress.

The main thing I like about Omar is that she criticizes, however awkwardly, the Israeli government. But just as only Nixon could go to China, it seems only Jews can say that Israel's settlement policies in the occupied territories are morally repugnant and violate international law.

2. The state Trump won by the most, in terms of raw vote margin, was Tennessee. In the recent past, this award usually went to Texas. Since Tennessee isn't a huge state, the conclusion would seem to be that big states are all either Democratic or competitive. Running down the list of biggest states tends to confirm this judgment: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey . . . .

3. A staple of the conspiracy tales advanced by the MAGA crowd concerns how Biden improved on Clinton's 2016 performance only in the swings states he needed to win the election. Highly suspicious!

This, however, is poppycock. In the swing states that delivered to him the Electoral College, Biden outperformed Clinton in Wisconsin by 1 percent, in Pennsylvania by 2 percent, in Michigan by 3 percent, in Arizona by 4 percent, and in Georgia by 5 percent. But he also improved on Clinton's performance in: Indiana (3 percent), Connecticut (6 percent), Rhode Island (5 percent), Alaska (5 percent), Iowa (1 percent, same as neighboring Wisconsin),  Montana (4 percent), West Virginia (3 percent), Tennessee (3 percent), Kansas (6 percent), Oregon (5 percent), Nebraska (6 percent), Minnesota (5 percent), Colorado (8 percent), Texas (3 percent), Washington (4 percent), South Dakota (4 percent), North Dakota (3 percent) . . . .

The point is that the swing states, where Biden's performance is said to have been "suspicious" and marked by "irregularities," behaved pretty much like most of the others. 

4. The New York result is interesting. In New York City, Trump did 7.5 percent better than in 2016, but in the rest of the state he did 5.1 percent worse. Within the city, Trump's biggest gains were in the boroughs with the highest percentages of nonwhite voters (Queens and the Bronx). In the whitest borough (Staten Island), he gained nothing at all—actually went backwards by a fraction of 1 percent.

I say this result is "interesting" but it's not in any way anomalous. Compared to four years ago, Trump, in New York as in the rest of the country, did better with nonwhite voters and worse with white voters. Yet for some reason his meritless claims of fraud have called attention to supposedly "irregular" results in places such as Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit, a heavily African American city. In 2016 Trump lost Wayne County by 37 percent and this year he lost it by 38 percent. Meanwhile, in suburban Oakland County, just to the north of Detroit, Trump's deficit went from 8 points in 2016 to 14 points in 2020. The biggest town in western Michigan is Grand Rapids, in Kent County. Trump won the county by 3 points in 2016. This year, he lost it by 6 points. Two big counties in which he went backwards by 6 points and 9 points, but he cries foul about the African American county where, in fact, he held his own. 

None of Trump's complaints stand up to the slightest scrutiny, which helps explain why Rudy Giuliani et al kept getting laughed out of court, often by Trump appointed judges. 

5. Biden won 17 percent of the country's counties, up just a single tick from Clinton's 16 percent. This may seem odd, considering that he more than doubled Clinton's 3 million popular vote margin, but the country is divided, and, generally speaking, the blue counties got bluer and the red ones stayed just as red. But the blue counties are much bigger and growing. Clinton won 87 of the 100 biggest counties, to which Biden added 4, including the two largest Trump had carried in 2016: Maricopa (Phoenix) and Tarrant (Fort Worth). Of the 50 biggest counties, Trump carried only two, one of them, Suffolk, on the eastern end of Long Island, by only 232 votes out of more than 760,000 cast. In 2016 Trump won Suffolk County by more than 45,000 votes. Trump's other biggest-50 county victory was in Collin, which is suburbs north of Dallas, where he won by 4 points. Four years ago he carried Collin County by 17 points. No mislick on the keyboard. Seventeen, down to 4. 

6. According to an analysis by the Brookings Institute, the 17 percent of counties carried by Biden generate 70 percent of our Gross Domestic Product. That, and the fact that the divide is not between states but within them, metropolitan versus "outstate," should probably squelch Rush Limbaugh's daydreams of secession and a new MAGA nation. 

7. Immediately after the election, there was brave talk by some Democrats about how Trump's gains with Hispanics were limited to Cubans in south Florida. Better reconsider. The ten counties that from 2016 to 2020 swung hardest toward Trump are all in Texas, all heavily Hispanic, and mainly in the Rio Grande valley. For example, in Hidalgo County, where nearly a quarter million votes were cast, Biden's margin was 58-41: sounds pretty good but Clinton carried the county by 68-28. The returns from New York City suggest that Democrats slipped with Hispanics in Queens and the Bronx as well. It appears to have been a nationwide phenomenon and probably prevented something that might have qualified as a "landslide." Texas, for instance, would have been very close if Biden had maintained Clinton's level of support from Hispanics. Similarly with Florida, where Biden suffered a meltdown in Miami-Dade. The Republicans have had a challenge holding together a coalition that includes country club types, chamber of commerce types, and evangelicals. Democrats have made significant inroads with the first two groups, but not with evangelicals, and one can see how Hispanics, who are Catholic as the pope, might have some of the same political inclinations as evangelical Protestants. 

With both parties, the things you say to rev up The Base may alienate your less committed voters, and I wonder whether there is a kind of parallelism between the erosion of Democratic support from Hispanics and the exodus of educated, white, suburban women from the GOP. Hispanic Catholics are put off by "woke" young people. Suburban women roll their eyes when the superannuated white men of the GOP mount a soapbox to discuss what's good for "housewives." It's shocking, but true, that politics requires political skills.

8. Speaking of superannuated: the gap between the Electoral College, a relic of the 18th century, and the popular vote continues to grow. A uniform shift toward Trump of just two-thirds of one percent would have resulted in his "reelection" even though Biden would still have won an absolute majority of all votes cast, about 51-47 percent. Wasserman estimates that it was the last million of Biden's 7.1 million vote victory that secured for him the Electoral College. Had he merely doubled Clinton's 3 million vote advantage, Trump would have been "reelected" despite a 6 million vote deficit in the land. The Electoral College, two senators for every state, and a gerrymandered congressional map: instruments of minority rule, affirmative action for Republicans. 

Jennifer Senior on Philip Brickman and Happiness Studies

Jennifer Senior (pictured) is a New York Times Op-Ed columnist and the author of a book called All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. I haven't read it, but the title, which I guess is just the flip reply of a new father she knew to her inevitable question, indicates that the book doesn't altogether accept the notion that new babies are a source of joy in the lives of their parents. Indeed a conclusion of social science, consistent through the years, is that adults self-report being, if anything, a little less happy after becoming parents. It isn't that hard to understand. You had gotten used to living for yourself and suddenly 8 pounds of puling neediness that does not for years let up, and the rewards for your sustained efforts uncertain. But I'm not sure the "paradox" is "modern." Here is the internal monologue of a character in a 19th-century Russian novel (Anna Karenina) as she travels to a relative's house:

Dolly shuddered at the mere thought of the pain she had endured from sore nipples, from which she had suffered with almost every baby. 'Then the children's illnesses, that continued anxiety; then their education, nasty tendencies. . . . It is all so incomprehensible and difficult. . . . And what is it all for? What will come of it all? I myself, without having a moment's peace, now pregnant, now nursing, always cross and grumbling, tormenting myself and others, repulsive to my husband—I shall live my life, and produce unfortunate, badly brought-up and beggared children. . . . Well, supposing the best: that none of the other children die, and that I somehow succeed in bringing them up; at the very best they will only escape being ne'er do wells. That is all I can hope for. And for this, so much suffering and trouble. . . . My whole life ruined!'

It seems the author understood what Mrs Tolstoy was experiencing in the other rooms while he was holed up in the study with his manuscripts, self-actualizing. Toward the end of his life, Tolstoy became a religious fanatic, intent upon giving away his wealth and renouncing his copyrights. You can imagine what Mrs Tolstoy thought of that. Finally, time for some ease and comfort only to find that now she's married to John the Baptist. Fine for him to apostrophize on happiness and the meaning of it all!

Though she's a political columnist with her guns often pointed at the Narcissist-in-Chief, Senior seems to have carved out for herself a secondary beat that might be described as happiness-and-the-meaning-of-it-all, with a particular interest in the insights of social science. Here, for example, is her long and I think engrossing article about Philip Brickman, a psychologist and co-author of a paper that introduced the terms "hedonic treadmill" and "hedonic paradox." The social science data point that gave rise to these terms concerns how transformative life events, both good and bad, appear to have surprisingly little effect upon satisfaction, happiness, and contentedness. Lottery winners and people paralyzed in car crashes in time return to the vicinity of a "set point" for happiness, as if there were some kind of internal thermostat with a preset temperature: the needle wobbles with the weather but always settles near the degree mark God or DNA determined. It seems that our adaptive capacities deserve either the credit or blame. Regarding the striving high achievers whom we may eye enviously: they become almost immediately acclimated to the more rarefied air and, instead of enjoying the view, keep their sights fixed upward upon elevations not yet attained. Their successes therefore only fleetingly boost their life satisfaction. This is the "treadmill" and "paradox" described by Brickman.  

But, again, while Brickman and his colleague may have introduced new vocabulary, the idea itself doesn't seem new. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who died in 1860, compared the desire for riches to guzzling seawater: "the more we drink, the thirstier we become," he wrote, before adding that the same could be said of fame. It isn't hard to see that a treadmill and an unslaked thirst are representations of the same idea. Schopenhauer had a keen interest in the texts of eastern religions, where he would have found the same diagnosis in, for example, Buddhism's "four noble truths." The Buddha lived around 2500 years ago. That the social sciences are investigating and describing problems about as old as written records of human thought suggests that the diagnosis is more obvious than the cure—a conclusion that might tend to be confirmed by the fact that Brickman, a pioneer of human happiness studies, committed suicide at age 38. Senior's exploration of his successful professional life, centered on of all things happiness research, and his own distressed private life is more absorbing than most things one finds in a daily newspaper. 

II. Laugh or cry

I've been entertaining myself by reviewing the TikToks of Sarah Cooper lip syncing speech acts of our president. Funny as they all are, I'm not sure she ever surpassed her debut in the genre, "How to Medical":

 

You laugh and laugh but finally I think it's also sort of chilling. Trump has said, when asked about his remarks that day in the White House briefing room, that of course he was joking. Fake news! But listen to him. He's not joking. He's that dumb, and he's the President of the United States. Forty-two more days. 

"You're going to have to use medical doctors." Good grief. 

Laugh or cry

Shot:

Chaser:

Online shopping

This is what happens when you search Target Shipt for "brownie pan." Maybe there's an extra letter in "Shipt." Or maybe it really is "better on the app." 

My daughter, 10, heard me laugh, so I had to explain that I'd seen something funny on my phone.

"You want to see?" I say.

"No," she says, "it's probably just some dumb 63-year-old-man vibe."

These little a-holes need to get back in school. Now they're playing "football." The lighter one has a worthless 4-point stance and I'm worried about the Christmas tree. Btw, I'm 62. Geesh!

 

 

Georgia's Republican incumbents

Is it just the imagination of an inveterate Democratic voter, or are the Republican incumbents in Georgia's US Senate runoff elections both horrible candidates? I don't mean "horrible" in connection with their position on this issue or that one—by that metric, they're in the Republican grain and no more objectionable, on average, than 50 of their colleagues in the US Senate. I mean "horrible" in the sense of ineffective, bad at what they do, unattractive, unlikeable, uncharismatic, wooden, probably corrupt, and, unless these deficiencies are obscuring their wit, dumb as rocks. Last night, one of them, Kelly Loeffler, whose husband owns the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, debated her Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock, senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. I say "debated," which suggests there was an exchange of ideas and viewpoints. But it wasn't that kind of debate, since, no matter the question, Loeffler's answer, spoken in the voice of Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the effect heightened by her vacant stare, was that Warnock is a radical Marxist. What should be done about the plague? "My opponent is a radical Marxist." Would she acknowledge that Biden won the election? "My opponent is a radical Marxist." Why do the players on the basketball team you own dislike you so?  "My opponent is a radical Marxist." Please tell us why it's okay that, after being briefed on coronavirus last winter, you dumped a bunch of hospitality stocks and bought shares in companies specializing in work-from-home software applications. "My opponent is a radical Marxist." 

The craziest thing I heard today was a theory about how during the debate Loeffler was wearing an ear piece through which she received prompts from an overlord on what to say. No, no, I think she is herself responsible for the full range of coruscating brilliance on display. I was thinking that her incumbency was a poor advertisement for Georgia voters, but then Warnock reminded everyone that Loeffler didn't win an election. She's in the Senate because the Republican governor appointed her to the seat after the real incumbent retired early on account of poor health. "Loeffler was appointed and Georgia was disappointed," quipped the Reverend. He probably realized that Loeffler's one note performance was a license to drop every line he had practiced. That is the way with radical Marxists—they can hold many lines in their head at once and summon them forth at a plausibly appropriate moment. Sinister!

At least Loeffler gets a participation trophy. Her colleague, Senator David Perdue, didn't show up to debate Jon Ossoff, the Democratic challenger for his seat. They debated in October, before the general election, and there was a consensus that it had not gone well for Perdue. He nevertheless outpolled Ossoff in the election, though so narrowly as to attain only a plurality, not an outright majority as Georgia law requires. Thus the runoff election, and Perdue has evidently decided not to repeat the mistake of subjecting himself to questions. As far as I know, the last time he opened his mouth was to mispronounce Kamala Harris's name, repeatedly and deliberately, with more than a tinge of a racial taunt, while warming up the crowd for a Trump rally in Georgia. Ho, ho, ho, funny stuff!

Believe it or not, Perdue also has ethics problems related to stock trades: during his time in the Senate, he's made nearly a third of all the transactions made by all the senators. One of a hundred senators, one out of three stock trades.  But why are any senators trading stock? They are buying and selling the stocks of corporations that are spending millions to lobby them. Seems like something he could be asked about in a debate. In fact Loeffler was asked that very question last night. She said that her opponent is a radical Marxist. 

Fouls and penalties

I've been watching sports on TV and apparently there is no solution to the problem of fouling intentionally at the end of basketball games. I'm referring to the situation where the team with the ball is ahead by a few points, a minute or so to play, and the trailing team, in order to "extend the game," fouls on purpose. This way they can get the ball back without any time running off. If the leading team misses a free throw, the trailing team can cut into the lead by scoring a basket before fouling again. The possibility of making a 3-point basket means you can cut into the lead even if the other team makes two free throws. One team tries to make foul shots, the other team tries to make 3-point baskets. Foul shots are easier but only count 1 point.

Games thus descend into the realm of farce. For 39 minutes, the teams compete at "basketball," and then for the last minute the one that's earned a lead has to prove its worthiness by playing some different, chintzier game. It's as if after 71 holes at St. Andrews a golfer trailing the leader by a stroke or two could, by fiat, compel the guy with the lead to play the 72nd hole at a nearby mini course where, to demonstrate he's a worthy British Open champion, he must putt the ball through a tunnel guarded by the blades of a turning windmill.

The very worst situation occasionally arises from the fact that, for example in college games, the first six team fouls in a half don't result in free throws: unless the fouled player was attempting a shot, her (or his) team just keeps the ball. This means that, at the end of the game, a trailing team might very well be punished for not having fouled enough. In order to get the ball back, they have to commit, intentionally and as quickly as possible, their fourth, fifth, sixth, and finally seventh team fouls as the game's remaining seconds dwindle. They'd have had a chance if only they'd fouled more back when they didn't know they were going to be behind by 4 points in the last minute. What kind of arrangement is that?

I'm not sure I have a solution but it annoys me that the rules committees evidently don't, either. Maybe the farcical situation should allow for arguably half farcical solutions. When the trailing team commits a common foul in the last minute of the game, there could be, in addition to free throws, a ten second run off the clock. The NFL does this when the team on offense is penalized for intentional grounding during the last two minutes of either half. Same idea. If you're going to "kill the clock" by "breaking rules," the clock by rule is going to run down. 

Not that football has necessarily figured everything out. In last year's Gopher game at Iowa, we had the ball, around 10 seconds left in the first half, on about Iowa's 10-yard line. We passed into the end zone, incomplete—because of flagrant pass interference on their d-back. Penalty for that is automatic first down on the 2-yard line. But, since there's now only 4 seconds left in the half, that's hardly any penalty at all. By interfering, Iowa kept us from scoring a touchdown on the next-to-last play of the half. Now there was time for one more play, and we either had to try a field goal or risk getting no points at all. We kicked a field goal. Pass interference on Iowa, 4 fewer points for Minnesota. Iowa ended up winning the game, 23-19. 

If an offensive penalty toward the end of a half can result in a 10-second runoff, how about a defensive penalty in their own end zone resulting in 10 seconds added to the clock? Perhaps at the discretion of the offense. If they want 10 more seconds, they can have them, but they can also decline that part of the penalty. 

Next I'm going to devise an apt penalty for Trump and his enablers in the Republican party. Something worse, but more subtle, than the Lake of Fire. 

The beat goes on

I think only a few stray ballots remain uncounted in the presidential election. No state is slower than New York, but earlier this week it finally reported the absentee ballot results for the five boroughs of Gotham. Here's what that looked like for the borough of Manhattan:

Biden     225,435 (90%)
Trump      20,184 (8%)

For a long time, Biden had been leading Trump by exactly 4 percent of the national vote, 51.1 to 47.1, but these late additions from populous jurisdictions that voted overwhelmingly for Biden have budged the number: it looks like the final margin is going to be more like Biden by 4.4 percent, 51.3 to 46.9. 

Imagine if New York were a "swing state," that the election outcome hinged on who would win its 29 electoral votes, and that the absentee ballots from New York City put Biden over the top. Then these ballots would be "a vote dump" and evidence—no, proof—of FRAUD! FRAUD! FRAUD! But, since Biden was already way ahead in New York, and there was no question of him having won the state's electoral votes, these ballots are just accepted for what they are—the tabulated votes of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers expressing by ballot their preference for president. The "ballot dumps" that Trump is complaining about, such as were added to the count in Wisconsin in the wee hours of the morning on November 4, aren't any more mysterious. Milwaukee County reporting. It happens all over the country. Democrats live in cities. It takes a while to open all those envelopes. When they're counted and added to the tally, the Democratic candidate gets a big bump.

Actually, in New York as in a lot of other big cities, it's true that Trump got trounced but also true that he did somewhat better than four years ago. For example, sticking with Manhattan, Biden carried the borough by 86.4 to 12.2 percent. Four years ago, Clinton carried it by 86.6 to 9.7 percent. In the Bronx, where the Democratic voters have quite a different demographic profile, the trend was more pronounced: Biden carried the borough by 83.3 to 15.9, but Clinton had won it by even more, 88.5 to 9.5. The only borough where Trump failed to gain ground was the won he carried, Staten Island: he won it by 15 points in 2016 and by 15 points again this year. 

Staten Island is home to the city's white working class. Trump made no gains there. In the country as a whole, his share of the nonwhite vote ticked upward, and this likely explains his improved performance in the other four boroughs. One feels more sure of this after inspecting results from upstate New York. In Oneida County (county seat is Utica), Trump's margin went from 19.4 percent in 2016 to 15.5 percent this year. He carried Essex County, on the Vermont border almost to Canada, by one point in 2016; Biden won it by 51-46 this time. Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens are almost the only places in the state where he did appreciably better than four years ago.

Trump is never right about anything. He attributes his defeat to fraudulent "vote dumps" in inner cities, with the implication that the election was stolen from him in black and brown precincts. The truth is that there was no fraud, that he gained among nonwhite voters, and that he lost because white voters turned against him. Meanwhile, the daily COVID death count is running a couple hundred below that of 9/11, a couple hundred above Pearl Harbor’s. Tomorrow will likely be another day of 2500 or more dead. Trump has nothing to say about that. He lies about the election being stolen, then turns his attention to pardons for his children. He must know they've done crimes. 

Catchers: post postscript

Well, I've been pursuing my researches, in case you want to descend into the rabbit hole with me. Campanella's 1953 season has more rivals than just Yogi Berra in 1950. I think I suffer a bit from the tendency to idealize a golden past when giants bestrode the earth.

How about Johnny Bench, whose rookie card I still own?  As a 22-year-old in 1970, he batted .293 with 45 homers, 35 doubles, 148 RBI, 97 runs scored, and an OPS of .932. His career stats are a testament, perhaps, to the toll associated with catching every day, for his production tailed off in the years when players tend to be in their primes—the season he was 29 (1977), for example, Bench drove in 107 runs, but after that his biggest RBI year was 80. 

At least I knew enough to suspect that Bench might have had years to rival the best of Campanella and Berra. To google Mike Piazza, I first had to google "hall of fame catchers" and then methodically check them out one-by-one. Maybe it's because, being a Twins fan, I know more about American Leaguers of the past 50 years; or maybe my self-diagnosis about romanticizing the more distant past explains it; but Piazza!—consider, say, his 1997 season for the Dodgers: batting average of .362 [sic], 40 home runs, 32 doubles, 124 RBI, 104 runs scored, and an OPS of 1.070. And that was not his only monster year. For offensive production over a 10-year period, Piazza is Berra's equal. Exhibit A in the brief for Piazza might be that four times his OPS exceeded 1.000, and the last time he did it was 8 seasons after the first time he did it. Or try this: from 1993 through 2002—that's 10 big league seasons—Piazza's average OPS was .969. He was selected by the Dodgers in the 62nd [sic] round of the 1988 draft. 

Retreating into the dim past, it's easy to account for the tendency to overlook Bill Dickey (pictured). He played his entire career—from 1928 through 1946, not including 1944 and 1945, when he was in the service—with the Yankees, a circumstance resulting in a predictably low profile as he was never without either Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, or Joe DiMaggio as a teammate. (For his first seven seasons, both Ruth and Gehrig were his teammates.) But Dickey, in the 1936 season, hit for a .362 average, with 22 homers, 107 RBI, 99 runs scored, and an OPS of 1.045. He followed that up in 1937 by hitting a mere .332, but with 29 homers, 133 RBI, 87 runs scored, and an OPS of .987.

Interesting sidebar. Dickey played himself in the movie Pride of the Yankees, about Lou Gehrig, and later had a part in The Stratton Story, a 1949 movie. The script for Stratton Story called for him to take strike three, which he could not abide, and the result was a tedious sequence of retakes. When the ordeal was ended, Dickey said he had  struck out more times that morning than in his entire career—a quip that caused me to notice that, over his 17 seasons in the majors, he struck out a total of 289 times: an average of exactly 17 per season. Since he had some part-time years at the start and end of his career, it might be a fairer representation to divide career plate appearances (7065) by career strikeouts (289), which yields the result that he struck out about 1 time out of every 25 that he came to bat. Things have changed. Five times Babe Ruth led the American League in striking out but he never whiffed 100 times in a season. The Twins' Miguel Sano struck out 90 times in the Covid-shortened 2020 season. In 2019, he struck out 159 times. Joe Mauer had a reputation for being "tough to fan," but over the course of his career he struck out 1 time out of every 7.7 plate appearances. That's more than three times as often as Dickey did.

The games would be more entertaining, and blessedly shorter, if two or three times per inning someone put the ball in play.

Postscript: Roy Campanella

Regarding Roy Campanella, I asked yesterday whether any big league catcher ever had a better year with the bat than he did in the 1953 season, when he hit for a .312 average, with 41 homers, 142 RBI, 103 runs scored, and an OPS of 1.006. Since he played in about a thousand World Series games against crosstown rival Yogi Berra, it occurred to me to look up Yogi's best year and compare: exact contemporaries, both Hall of Famers at the same position, so seems a worthwhile exercise. Turns out that Yogi wasn't far behind. I think his best year was probably 1950, the season he turned 25. (Campanella was 25 when Jackie Robinson broke the color line and so, at the same age, had not yet played in a major league game.) In the 1950 season, Yogi batted .322, with 28 homers, 124 RBI, 116 runs scored, and an OPS of .915. Pretty similar! Here's something that leaps out at you: Yogi struck out 12 times during the 1950 season. I typed that carefully, it's not a mistake. He came to bat 656 times and 12 of them resulted in a strikeout. Played every day and struck out twice a month. 

Like Campanella, Yogi was a three-time league MVP. Probably should have been at least four—his teammate, Phil Rizzuto, won the award in that 1950 season. Rizzuto had a good year—batted .324 and scored 125 runs for the pennant winning Yankees—but who did the writers think was always driving in the little banjo hitter? "Well, Rizzuto played shortstop," people will say—like that's harder than catcher! Yogi finished third in the 1950 balloting. The next year he won his first MVP award. The year after that he finished fourth. The year after that he was second. Then he won the award two years in a row. Then he finished second again. It helped that the Yankees were always winning the pennant but holy crap! Over the course of seven consecutive seasons, he never finished below fourth in the MVP voting while winning the award three times. It's kind of a shame that a lot of people think of him as a baseball clown because he was actually one of the very greatest players, ever. 

Someone asked me about Campanella's ethnic heritage as the picture I attached to my post about him makes it look as if he could have passed for white. His mother was African American and his father as Italian as Joe DiMaggio—thus, "Campanella." I don't know what the rules were—if there were rules—about how black you had to be before you had to play in the Negro leagues, not the major leagues. I do know that in college, in a class on American history, I had a young African American instructor. She was young back then, she'd be pushing 80 now if she's survived. Anyway, she was lecturing one day about how in the Jim Crow South the officious bigots had established an elaborate system of rules determining how much black blood you needed before you had to drink from this fountain, not that one, etc. One Black parent was obviously enough. What if one parent was three-eighths and the other white? It got complicated. The African American community, she said, had a saying to help strip away the complexity and keep things simple. The saying was, "A little dab'll do ya."