public policy | The Casual Blog

March 11, 2018

My new crown, and notes on health and violence

New construction on Hillsborough Street

This week I bit the bullet and went to the dentist to get a crown on my bottom left molar (tooth number 18). The filling in that tooth was worn out and starting to crack, and a replacement was needed. The procedure involved a lot of drilling. The anesthetic worked, and the drilling wasn’t painful, but the noise, the burning smell, and the uncertainty were not pleasant. But it’s good to have operational teeth, and I am grateful for modern dentistry.

I took my first yoga class in many moons last Tuesday morning. I’ve been working out at the gym most mornings, but yoga fell out of my routine after a teacher I’d liked left. Returning to Blue Lotus, just across the street from our building, I was reminded vinyasa is harder than it looks, but also more calming than it looks. It’s good to contract and stretch, to move in sync with others, and to be reminded to breath deeply.

I suppose we could spend too much time on our bodily health, but for most of us, that risk is theoretical; we usually err in the other direction. At times our bodies seem so solid, and at times so fragile.

There was a fascinating, though also gut wrenching, piece in the NY Times this week about the effects of an assault rifle shooting into a human body. Guns like the AR-15 propel bullets at two or three times the speed of a handgun, and so unleash exponentially greater energy. Five trauma surgeons described the gruesome effects of such bullets. They make a small entry wound, then tumble, exploding bones and causing widespread tissue and organ damage, and then tear a large exit wound. One surgeon noted that seeing a victim of such a shooting is traumatizing for bystanders.

Kudos to the high school students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High and elsewhere who have been making themselves heard on the subject of assault weapons and other guns. A lot of us who think the lack of reasonable gun laws is very bad policy have gotten discouraged and wondered if we’ll ever get anything positive done. These students are righteously angry, and they are hard to ignore. They may be changing the terms of the debate.

Now if we could just get some of that energy focused on addressing the risks of thermonuclear weapons. While assault weapons on public streets are very dangerous, the destructive potential of the world’s nuclear stockpiles, including the US’s, is incomparably worse. Apropos, recently there was a short interview with Daniel Ellsberg, who worked as a nuclear strategist in the 1960s. In Ellsberg’s view, only amazing luck accounts for our not already having had a nuclear apocalypse.

I started reading Ellsberg’s recent book, The Doomsday Machine, in which he recounts learning that in the early 60s, US war planners expected in case of any nuclear war to kill several hundred million people. We know now that they underestimated, and that the blasts, fires, pulses, fallout, and famine from nuclear winter could well mean the extinction of all humans, not to mention many other life forms.

There are serious voices trying to get this issue on the table, though they get little play in US mainstream media. A few weeks ago, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists put the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight signalling the closest we’ve been to disaster since 1953 and the height of the cold war. Last year 122 nations in the United Nations voted in favor a new treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons. This year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

This essay by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is well worth reading. It explains that we need to de-escalate international conflicts and enter into nuclear control diplomacy. As the Scientists note, humans created this problem, and they can solve it.

Rising like the phoenix from the ashes — new construction viewed from Casa Tiller

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January 14, 2018

What can you do when the President refuses to defend the U.S. against Russia? It’s simple.

Cold canoes at Umstead Park, January 13, 2018

“Have you heard the latest from Trump?” Sally asked as I got home on Thursday, and my heart jumped. It had been a few minutes since I’d last checked the news, so it was quite possible that I hadn’t. It’s hard to keep up with the latest startling pronouncement from the White House. Just trying can wear you out, which may be part of the idea.

Even so, I found the energy to download and read some of the new minority report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee entitled Putin’s Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security. The report gives useful context for understanding how Putin is threatened by democracy, and how his regime has worked diligently to undermine it using, among other malign tools, cyberwarfare, disinformation campaigns, and military force.

The report summarizes the Kremlin’s propaganda effort as involving “four simple tactics: dismiss the critic, distort the facts, distract from the main issue, and dismay the audience. . . . [D]isinformation operations seek to challenge the concept of objective truth . . . . [to subvert] the notion of verifiable facts and casting doubt on the veracity of all information, regardless of the source . . . .” (Report at 39) The effort relies on high volume — “a firehose of falsehood” — that propagates faster than fact checkers can check. (Id. at 40)

The Kremlin’s cyber arm includes carefully organized efforts by hundreds of young Russians employed as social media trolls. In the run up to the 2016 presidential election, they were “trained on ‘the nuances of American social polemics’ . . . to set Americans against their own government: to provoke unrest and discontent.” (Report at 45) They use bot networks to quickly spread disinformation. The Kremlin’s hackers also use “doxing” — breaking into networks, stealing private information, and leaking it publicly. An example was the doxing of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election. (Id. at 46)

The Senate minority report also describes how governments in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, the Baltic states, and the Nordic states have successfully responded to Putin’s program to undermine political order. This is in contrast to the U.S., which “still does not have a coherent, comprehensive, and coordinated approach to the Kremlin’s malign influence operations, either abroad or at home. Instead, “the U.S. President continues to deny that any such threat exists . . . .” (Report at 3-4) As Senator Benjamin Cardin states in the letter of transmittal, “Never before in American history has so clear a threat to national security been so clearly ignored by a U.S. president.”

This is obviously not OK, and I checked to see if it was unconstitutional. I think it is. Article II, section 1 of the Constitution requires that the President take an oath saying “I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” This is the oath Trump took at his inauguration (before an incredible crowd, in his telling). Protecting the United States is the prime directive of the President. You might try to argue that you could protect and defend the Constitution while denying and trying to divert attention from the efforts of a hostile foreign power to undermine the government. But that would not be a persuasive argument.

It would be interesting to know for sure whether the Trump campaign worked directly with the Russians during the campaign, or intended to obstruct the investigation of such efforts. But we don’t have to know those answers to chart our course. Never mind the corruption, for the time being. Leave to one side Trump’s cluelessness, shamelessness, and titanic incompetence. Once we understand that we’re targets of serious and sustained aggression by Russia intended to weaken and undermine our country, and we know that the President denies that and refuses to defend against that aggression, that President should be removed from office. That presidential failure all by itself is a violation of his constitutional oath.

In other words, it’s not only absurd that the President claims Russia’s interference in our elections is “fake news” and efforts to investigate its actions are a “witch hunt.” It’s grounds for impeachment.

So how can a member of Congress continue in good faith to support President Trump? Political expediency and self-interest are tolerable to a point, but I think we’re well past that point. Our democracy faces a serious threat from Russia, and the President’s refusal to address that threat is a violation of his constitutional oath.

If you agree, you might call your representatives and ask them (probably via their answering machine) to focus on this problem. Here are three questions you could ask. 1. Do you support President Trump’s refusal to defend the United States from Russia’s interference in our elections and other aggression ? 2. Do you think a President who refuses to honor his constitutional oath should be allowed to continue in office? 3. Do you acknowledge your oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and do you intend to fulfill it?

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October 8, 2017

A swimming milestone, Courage-ous soccer, deconstruction in our neighborhood, gun idealists, and nuke idealists

Looking south over Capital Boulevard at downtown Raleigh. Our building is the big one one on the upper right.

I had the last of my eight swim lessons last week, and my teacher Eric seemed pleased with my progress. My primary objective was learning the butterfly stroke, which I did, though Eric said it looked like I still had to think about it, which was true enough. He said the cure for that was practice. On freestyle, we talked about gliding and breathing, and for backstroke, we focused on keeping the head and chest up. He liked my breaststroke! These last weeks working on better swimming have been energizing, and I look forward to many more good laps.

On Sunday afternoon, we got out to see our N.C. Courage play the Chicago Red Stars in the semi-finals of the National Women’s Soccer League. These ladies can play! The Courage had more attacks, but Chicago played almost flawless defense, and the game was scoreless through 89 minutes. In the 90th minute, a hard, low shot from the Courage’s Denise O’Sullivan found the net. The crowd went wild! The Courage, in their first season here, will be playing in the championship game in Orlando against the Portland Thorns.

In our neighborhood there’s a tremendous amount of construction going on, and also deconstruction. Just a couple of blocks to the north and east, several buildings have been taken down in the last couple of weeks, including Finch’s Restaurant and my favorite photo gear and advice spot, Peace Camera (whose business is now located at Quail Corners Shopping Center). The destroyed buildings had no particular architectural distinction, and it’s sort of exciting to see things changing and look forward to new developments, though at the moment it’s a wasteland. I took these pictures on Saturday morning with the Tiller Quadcopter.

The horrifying mass shooting in Las Vegas happened in front of the Luxor, where I stayed last year. The national press mostly focused on the killer’s motivation, which remains unknown. I read a couple of interesting pieces on the more important question of why a lot of Americans are passionate about guns and oppose all gun regulation. Kurt Andersen’s piece in Slate is brilliant. Andersen acknowledges that shooting guns can be a perfectly fine recreation, but also shows the powerful fantasies and fears that drive gun activists to extreme positions. Somehow a significant number of people came to believe that they need a lot of powerful guns because they’re likely to be needed to fight the government that wants to take their guns.

I also thought David Brooks’s latest NY Times column on guns was thought-provoking. Brooks views love of guns not so much as a product of fear or fantasy as of identity politics. People who oppose gun regulation are demonstrating solidarity with a matrix of “conservative” issues, such as opposing abortion and immigration. He suggests we need to end the culture wars if we want to address the gun issue. That’s a tall order. In the meantime, if we hear something that sounds like bullets, let’s be prepared to hit the deck.

Speaking of perils, I’d like to congratulate this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Committee for recognizing them: the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Don’t feel bad if you missed the announcement of this prestigious prize, which the NY Times buried on page A10. The risk of nuclear accidents and nuclear conflicts is so enormous that it’s almost impossible to think about, and so we generally don’t. The situation is dire, but it isn’t hopeless. Indeed, ratification of the new UN treaty banning nuclear weapons is in process in at least 53 nations. Kudos to the ICAN for continuing to sound the alarm.

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August 13, 2017

Looking on the bright side — how to fix our nuclear problem

This week Trump has been threatening to start a nuclear war against North Korea, which got me rattled. So far, the sun has come up every morning, and with each additional day with no mushroom clouds it seems more likely that those threats are just bombast. His continuing along on his golfing vacation is also reassuring, if ridiculous. But how could anyone with the slightest clue as to what nuclear war would do even talk like that? And how could anyone think it a good idea to explore what happens when you provoke a nuclearized, paranoid dictator with threats of ultimate destruction?

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that Kim Jong-Un is only pretending to be crazy, Trump’s impulsivity is contained, and we survive. Even so, the threats will have done real damage. Markets have been roiled. In the community of nations, our government is viewed as even more irresponsible and unpredictable. At the personal level, my own mood has been darker than normal, tense and uncertain, and I’m surely not the only one. Our mental health is not good.

I usually try to find the bright side of dark situations, so I’ll take a swing at it here. If we’re lucky and avoid disaster, we might finally wake up, realize we’ve long been on the edge of the nuclear precipice, and carefully back away. Nuclear risks are not something anyone likes to think about, which in part accounts for why we are where we are. But we can’t not think about them now, with the threat so clear and close. We might take this as an opportunity to reconsider received ideas and correct some mistakes.

We thought initially that nuclear weapons could assure our safety by terrifying others into submission. When that didn’t work, we raced to build still more weapons, with ever more destructive force, until we could in a matter of hours destroy the world several times over. We put the weapons on hair-trigger alerts, and the risks of accidents and miscalculations increased.

In the past decades, there have been several nuclear accidents and close calls that could have killed thousands or sparked an all-out conflagration. In Command and Control, Eric Schlosser recounts a number of these, and there was a quick overview last week in the HuffPost . Our engineering is imperfect, and always will be. Maintaining large numbers of weapons on hair-trigger alert is incredibly dangerous.

In addition to the risk of system accidents, we live each day with the risk of human failure. People make mistakes in the use of violence for any number of reasons — lack of knowledge, lack of sleep, intoxication, mental illness, etc. And people’s reasoning powers are frequently overwhelmed by powerful emotions. It’s far from impossible that fear or anger could cause a nuclear attack that results in a counter attack and the end of the world as we know it.

The worst possible way to manage this risk is the one we’ve adopted: give one person with no training or qualifications complete power to launch the missiles. The dependence on the good judgment of a single individual with no constraints is inherently dangerous. Even the best of us from time to time make poor decisions when angered or confused. To put it mildly, Trump is not the best of us.

So is the situation hopeless? No. It’s not hard to imagine international agreements that greatly reduce nuclear forces and the risk of total annihilation. Indeed, the START treaties accomplished a lot. The new U.N. treaty banning nuclear weapons adopted by 120 countries shows that more is possible. It’s not hard to imagine doing away with the hair trigger and engineering in more time for analysis before launching. Likewise, we could put in place checks and balances on the executive, as we do in other areas.

But we need to start with adjusting our thinking, and recognizing that the nuclear risk is intolerable. We need to treat this problem as time-sensitive and high priority. If we do nothing . . . well, it’s unthinkable.

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July 23, 2017

Learning new things, including the butterfly stroke and about our worst tendencies

It was brutally hot here in Raleigh this weekend, which made me consider breaking my commitment to getting outside with my camera at least once a week and trying to see something fresh in the natural world. But I ultimately hung tough and did a short photo safari at Raulston Arboretum, which was not as miserable as I expected. I was happy I got these pictures.

Learning new things is sometimes fun, and sometimes hard, but always important, to keep our brains from turning to mush. And so I decided to take some swimming lessons, and had my first one this week. As I told my teacher, a young woman named Deanna, I would like to try to learn the butterfly stroke. It’s one of those things I’ve always wondered if I could do, and it would add another variation to my lap swimming. My first efforts were awkward, but by the end of the lesson, I had a version of the dolphin kick going. I found it hard and fun.

In these tumultuous times, we’re learning a lot about our weaknesses and strengths. Under a constant deluge of lies, vulgarities, and mad fantasies, it’s more difficult to be open and curious, to think rationally and critically. Panic and anger seem natural, and at times overwhelming. We’re seeing how some of our worst tendencies, like intolerance and bigotry, are unleashed and encouraged.

It’s not exactly cheering news, but at least we have a more realistic idea of the extent of our ignorance, intolerance, and susceptibility to manipulation. We’ve gotten these and other problems out in the open where we can potentially address them. Eventually we might figure out how to be better people.

In the policy area, we’re learning more about our health care system. Repealing Obamacare somehow became a mantra for the right — a symbolic acid test for signalling membership in the conservative tribe. It’s hard to feel great about the enormous waste of time, energy, and public funds from the repeal effort, and the failure so far to address pressing problems, but there is a slightly bright side.

It’s looking like some delusions are getting cleared up. We now know that the mantra of repeal had almost no relation to the real issues of our health care system. Some who liked the mantra have belatedly realized that cutting off insurance means real humans die prematurely. It appears that even the most committed ideologues, or at least the majority, get uncomfortable once we reach a certain level of cruelty.

This debate has cleared the landscape like a forest fire, and some fresh ideas are starting to germinate. For the first time in a couple of generations, we’re starting to widen the discussion about health care. It’s starting to be more widely understood that we pay way too much for it, and the quality of care is bad in comparison with our peers. There’s a new openness to the possibility of a sensible single payer system, such as an expanded version of Medicare.

It won’t be easy to get from here to there. Even leaving aside our dysfunctional political leadership, there are powerful institutional forces supporting the status quo. Here’s how the Economist recently put it: If the amount the U.S. spends on health care were reduced to the level of France, Germany, or Switzerland, we would save a trillion dollars, or $8,000 per family. “Much of that trillion dollars goes to enrich the owners and executives of drug companies, device manufacturers, and relentlessly consolidating hospitals. This rent-seeking is supported by an army of lobbyists: there are more than twice as many lobbyists for the pharmaceutical and health-products industry than there are Congressmen.”

Indeed, there are quite a few other blockers, like doctors, many of whom would be resistant to having their incomes reduced, and insurers, with similar issues. Real improvements don’t seem likely in the near term, but I’m not giving up hope that eventually we’ll make progress.

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March 6, 2017

Guilty pleasures, my new grand piano, and understanding mass delusions

Daffodils at Fletcher Park, March 4, 2017

It’s been pleasantly mild in Raleigh this week, bringing out the early spring flowers, though it got colder this weekend. I’ve been in good spirits, which is hard to explain. With so many big things to worry about, I’ve felt a little guilty about this happiness. But what can you do?

On Friday I had a successful spinning class with Matt at Flywheel. Despite a couple of weeks off, I finished with the first place score, with 320 points. Almost everyone (or everyone) in the class was considerably younger than me. It’s invigorating to try to keep up with younger people, and especially fun to go faster than them!

Gabe and I had lunch this week at the Remedy Diner, and talked about the possibility of his becoming a partner in a new print-jobbing and graphic design firm. He’s already doing web site design and related print design work, and the new business could be a good platform. I’m excited for him, and enjoyed kicking around some of the practical aspects, like finding clients, office space, legal services, accounting, and insurance.

My new Fazioli F228

This week I figured out how to work forScore, an app for reading piano music on my tablet device. There’s a massive amount of great music in the public domain and available for free on sites like IMSLP.org, but it’s cumbersome to work with unbound paper copies. Just as my tablet has become my primary tool for reading books, it might become that for music. Another plus is solving the problem of page turning. In prior generations, pianists needed two hands to play the instrument and a third hand to turn pages, but I’m getting a little wireless foot pedal that should do the job.

I’m in love with my new grand piano, a Fazioli F228. The sound is amazing! It is truly a joy to play. It’s a 2003 instrument that I acquired from a businessman in Greenwich, Connecticut, who’d got it for his young son to learn on. Since then, it’s been lovingly tended to by an experienced technician, but barely used. It will certainly be used by me. I’ve been delving into my favorite music of Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy, and discovering beautiful new prospects. I’m selling my Steinway A, a 2004 instrument with a really lovely tone, if you know anyone who might be interested.

Being of such good cheer, I’d planned to abstain from political discussions this week. But I can’t resist sharing links to a couple of articles with very intriguing ideas about a big question: are we losing our grip on reality? The White House’s attacks on the media, the justice system, scientific consensus, and other institutions initially seemed to me so bizarre and ridiculous that I assumed no one would take them seriously. But some people are.

Alexander George in the NY Times compared the situation to a famous forger of Vermeer’s work who succeeded by temporarily changing, through his own fake paintings, the understanding of what qualified as a Vermeer. George points up that we judge the validity of new information based on our current knowledge base, including the concepts we’ve developed as to what sources are reliable. If someone were to convince us that we could no longer trust scientists or journalists, our existing knowledge base would be undermined. Rationality would be seriously impaired, as would political organization and action. Query, is this the Bannon plan?

Also in the sad, failing, fake news Times, Philip Fernbach and Steven Sloman wrote a piece entitled Why We Believe Obvious Untruths, which centers on an idea that is both simple and profound. The answer, they say, is not lack of intelligence. Fernbach and Sloman point out that human knowledge is essentially collective — dependent on knowledge of other humans. The things we think we know are for the most part actually things we’re confident somebody else knows. While this system of collective intelligence allows for the large and long collaborations necessary for the greatest human achievements, it also accounts for our susceptibility to mass delusions.

For better and for worse, we largely rely on our communities for knowledge, and our tools for detecting when our communities go awry are not so good. As others have noted, we have a tendency to believe new information that fits with whatever we (and our community) already believe and ignore and suppress everything else, which has an error magnification effect. Social media serves for many as news fast food that compounds the echo chamber problem.

Thus it turns out to be easy for groups to come to strong agreement in support of ideas overwhelmingly at odds with the weight of the evidence. QED: climate change is a hoax, immigrants are threatening us with terrorism, our military is too weak, etc.

On a cheerier note, speaking of intelligence, there was a report this week of experiments showing that insects have a lot more mental capacity than previously thought. They aren’t just automatons operating on pure instinct, but can learn and solve problems. Scientists at the Queen Mary University in London taught bumblebees to roll a little ball across a platform in exchange for a reward. Amazing!

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February 12, 2017

Losing things, and joining a protest

Protest march in downtown Raleigh, February 11, 2017

It’s been almost 3 hours since I last lost something, which is a slightly sad thing to be pleased about. Lately my little things — car keys, access cards, reading glasses, my tablet device, my phone — have gone missing more than usual. I find them eventually, but the interval between losing and finding is tense and uncomfortable. It could be early onset Alzheimer’s, but I suspect the cause is Trump. With his non-stop boasting and lying, his cluelessness on every vital issue, his shameful targeting of minorities, and his general shamelessness, he’s got me spinning and oscillating with amazement, laughter, and fear. That could be what’s impairing my brain.

It may be no coincidence that I’m seeing more references to losing things. I’ve heard multiple citations recently to the famous Elizabeth Bishop poem One Art (“The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”), which is worth rereading. And there’s a beautiful, lively, and touching piece by Kathryn Schultz in the current New Yorker entitled Losing Streak. She writes of her personal losses of little things (wallets, bike locks), and big ones (her car, her father). Schultz comes up with some fun facts: the average person misplaces up to 9 objects per day, and in a lifetime will spend 6 months looking for lost things. She identifies some of the possible causes — your spouse, aliens, wormholes.

The only disappointment was that she didn’t zero in on Trump. But a new piece by David Frum in the Atlantic tends to confirm his potential for making us all losers, wondering what became of our democracy. Frum points up a critical difference between previous varieties of fascism and Trumpism: Trump doesn’t need to stop holding elections, shut down the press, and murder political opponents to achieve his primary objective: enriching himself. Modern kleptocracies grow by fostering cynicism and apathy. Corruption could become ordinary and expected here, as is already has in many countries. A possible future is the end of the rule of law.

Frum ends on a hopeful note by encouraging us to all get in touch with our Congressmen and Senators and support good laws. He seems to be of the view that resistance is not futile. That’s where I am, too. Even if it is futile, the alternative is worse.

Apropos, on Saturday morning I went to a protest in downtown Raleigh– the HKonJ and Moral March organized by the NAACP with some 200 other groups. Fayetteville Street was packed for several blocks with many thousands of people.

Being in big noisy crowds is not comfortable for me, but that said, it was a cheery noise, and a truly diverse crowd. There were signs for Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, gun control, reproductive rights, immigrant rights, living wages, health care rights, civil rights, and animal rights, among many others. There were signs against The Wall, the immigration ban, HB2, voter suppression, Tweeting, and intolerance, among many others. There are so many things that need resisting that it’s hard to stay determined and focused, but we’ve got to get started.

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February 5, 2017

Dance photos, octopus minds, and engineering Islamophobia

Dress rehearsal for Petit Ballet Romantique

I took a photography lesson this week from Ted Salamone at a dress rehearsal of the Carolina Ballet. The lighting conditions were challenging, and at first I felt well out of my depth. It took some pressurized experimenting with ISO and shutter speed to get anything to work. Ted gave me some great tips, and the dancers were beautiful and inspiring.

I just finished reading Other Minds: the Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Godfrey-Smith is a diver as well as a philosopher who has spent a lot of time watching cephalopods. As he notes, octopuses are aliens to us, about as far removed in evolutionary terms as possible.

Yet they have abilities and behaviors that merit the word intelligence. Their shape-shifting and camouflaging abilities are astonishing, of course, but they also solve problems and exhibit curiosity and affection. Godfrey-Smith connects them, and us, to the great journey of evolution, and to a better understanding of the nature of consciousness. There’s a good review here. l

Trying to understand non-human intelligence eventually leads to the question, how well do we understand ourselves? The question came into focus in a new way for me this week, when I read of polls indicating that a more Americans favored Trump’s new anti-Muslim measures than opposed them. I like to think of my neighbors and fellow citizens as mostly kind, compassionate, and tolerant, and mostly willing to help others in need. I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the possible alternative.

When Franklin Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” I think he meant that fear was a powerful force that could undermine us, but also that it could be overcome. The new President has a different message: the world is very scary and we need to be more fearful.

And that message seems to be having an effect. Of course, humans have always been wary of those who are different. But other forces usually counterbalance those feelings, like curiosity, generosity, and love. We seem to be losing our balance.

Dress rehearsal for The Little Mermaid

Is Trump’s demonization of Muslims a deliberate strategy? At first it just seems arbitrary and bizarre. But Amanda Taub wrote a worthwhile piece in the NY Times this week that suggested a possible method in the madness.

Taub points up that authoritarian politicians often exploit fears by targeting a politically powerless minority and creating an us-versus-them mentality. By creating artificial enemies and claiming to be protecting against them, they may increase their popularity and power. Unless such leaders are checked, they tend to expand the list of targets and dial up the level of violence.

Of course, we have a governmental system with certain institutional checks and balances. Are they strong enough? We’ll find out.

Dress rehearsal for The Little Mermaid

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December 11, 2016

On Broadway, fake news, and some new (to me) art

Last week I went to a conference in New York and stayed for the weekend to see loved ones and take in some culture. Midtown was decorated for the holidays, including wreaths, angels, and a very big evergreen with ornaments at Rockefeller Center. It was cheering. Crowded, though. We finally gave up on taxis, on the grounds of slowness, and embraced the subway.

On Broadway we saw The Encounter, a one-man show starring Simon McBurney as a nameless storyteller. His story is about a solo expedition in the Amazon to contact the Mayoruna people, and it’s engrossing. But the performance is as much about the power of our imagination as about the story. The audience members wear headphones, bringing us into an intimate relationship with the storyteller’s voice and the exotic sounds of the jungle. The storyteller repeatedly reminds us that we are in a story, but even with this warning, we can’t help becoming immersed. McBurney manages to get us to look at ourselves in the act of being manipulated.

Fake News
As fake news came into better focus over the last couple if weeks, I’ve felt dread and wonder at how easily people can be deceived by various hoaxes, and then become passionately committed to remaining in their deceived state. At its most bizarre and extreme (as in, the hoax that the Clintons are running a child sex slave business in a D.C. pizzeria), many enthusiasts cannot be dissuaded by reports debunking the tale in the mainstream media. They view these as part of the conspiracy — a cover up.

This is obviously nutty, and it would be nice to think you and I could never be taken in by such craziness. Or would it? Recently I’ve found myself wondering more about whether particular news reports are correct, and even whether my most basic assumptions are reliable. This is uncomfortable, but it’s actually a good thing. Always keeping in view the possibility that we may be wrong makes us more likely to consider new information and open to revising our beliefs — updating our credences, as Bayesians say. It also fosters a degree of humility, as we recognize that none of us has perfect knowledge, and all of us are prone to error.

That said, some descriptions of events are more wrong than others, and certain wrong ones are dangerous — like one inspiring an armed man showing up at a pizza parlor to avenge an made-up crime against children. In the long term, better education may be the way to address the mass hoax problem. There are various mental resources involved in assessing possible new facts, which include a good fund of background knowledge, evaluation of the reliability of sources, and weighing of evidence.

These resources and skills take time to acquire. In the short term, we need to use our best hostage negotiation skills with people seized by a dangerous conspiracy theory — try to keep the conversation going, and if they’re armed, be prepared to dive for cover.

New (to me) art

While in New York, I saw a lot of interesting art, including video work. At the New Museum, there was an exhibit of the work of Pipilotti Rist, a Swiss artist, who used video technology to explore nature. There were early works designed for a single viewer to insert her head up through a hole in a pyramid with the base on a wall to watch a screen and be surrounded by sound. Her more recent works are large-scale installations intended for groups of viewers.

In one work, she placed beds on the gallery floor and watery images on the ceiling, surrounded by meditative music, which led strangers to lie down together, look upwards, and relax. The images weren’t all that interesting, but the experience was. We were taken both inward and outward, into our feelings and out into relationships, as the artist made us into part of the art.

Video art is challenging, in that it resists skimming. You have to give it some time. And a given work may be boring, or anyway, not for you. But unlike painting, which lives most comfortably in a private dwelling, video’s natural home can be in a museum, where it can keep on playing and waiting for the right people to watch it. And those people can share it, and have a communal experience.

Also at the New Museum, I spent some time with the Cheng Ran’s work, Diary of a Madman, which is an outsider’s view of the gritty side of New York. Where Rist was loosely improvisatory and mostly cheerful, Ran was focused and melancholy, with exquisite technique and tight control. He visibly struggled to extend the expressive possibilities of new technology and embrace the world of humans and their detritus.

At the Whitney, I took in Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, which had a lot of video artists’ work displayed on large screens and other surfaces. A lot of the work was interesting mainly as art history, rather than as a provocative message for right now, but there were some provocations. My favorite piece was by Andrea Crespo, titled Neurolibidinal Induction Complex 2.2. It used words (isolated emotions, for example) and colors to give us a reboot. I also particularly liked the work of Lynn Hershmann Leeson, which included female cyborgs and bots, including one with an unsettling holographic gaze who could do an irritating conversation with you.

I also spent some time looking at Bruce Conner’s Crossroads, It’s a slow motion depiction of U.S. nuclear tests off Bikini Island in 1946. If you tend to think that nuclear weapons are an existential threat to the human species, you will continue to think that after seeing the film. Seeing the images is sobering, and may make us think more about stopping the madness, which we clearly need to do.

We went out to the Brooklyn Museum to see the work of Marilyn Minter, known for her explorations of female faces and forms and of the dark underside of fashion. I wasn’t crazy about her monumental paintings, but I liked her quirky videos. At MOMA, we saw the Francis Picabia exhibit, which we liked. He had a great visual imagination, great technical ingenuity, and a willingness to continually experiment. His was a questing spirit.

Finally, while Sally went to the Breuer and saw (at my recommendation) the fine Kelly James Marshall exhibition, I went to the Met to see Beyond Caravaggio — paintings of Valentin de Boulogne, a French artist who worked in Rome in the early 1600s. I really liked Valentin! The paintings had much of the intensity of Caravaggio, with his amazing understanding of light and the human figure, but had a broader emotional range, including people who were clearly individuals, with secrets and regrets.

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November 13, 2016

It could be worse

On Saturday, still in shock from the election, I took a longish drive over to Hanging Rock State Park. It was sunny and brisk, and the last leg of the drive was hilly and twisty. At the park, the trail went upwards quickly. The trees were getting ready for winter. There were sweet waterfalls and cliffs, and sweeping vistas.

On the drive back, I listened to some Liszt, and continued to mull. How much should we be worried that the President-elect will keep his campaign promises? Americans of color, immigrants, and Muslims are understandably uneasy, as are transgender people, gays, and women. Indeed, anyone with an interest in avoiding devastating climate change and nuclear catastrophe should be concerned.

But with all those risks, there’s a strong mitigator. The President-elect is a man who has based his career on deceiving people and who is indifferent to ordinary standards of truth and honesty. There’s a long list of his victims – investors in his projects, ordinary contractors, students hoping to learn the secrets of his supposed success.

As despicable as his dishonesty is, we can now see an upside to it: his campaign promises can be significantly discounted. For him, promises are simply words that are useful in manipulating people. He is unlikely to view any recent promises as binding.

As to his deplorable racist language, as best we can tell, he is no ideologue. His primary driver is to be admired. He probably has no other agenda. Thus he is probably not determined to stop and frisk minorities, deport immigrants, and bar Muslims. He will probably not actively promote torturing those suspected of terrorism or killing their families. He doesn’t actually hate minorities, or care much about them one way or the other.

Of course, there are some of his supporters who are driven by hate. They are angry people. They’ll probably get angrier still when they realize that those promises that inspired them –- bringing back the good manufacturing jobs, more steel, more coal, and so forth – were just empty words, and he won’t be bringing back the jobs. His supporters could turn on him.

Same with the promises of populist change. Most likely, he’ll find the actual business of understanding government and making policy intolerably boring, and leave the real work to the traditional power elite — that is, establishment “conservatives” primarily concerned with not paying taxes and otherwise feathering their own nests, while hoping the base will be distracted by symbolic “conservative” social policies. In other words, the usual Republican playbook.

This is, to be sure, all very bad. Our structural economic problems, including inequality of opportunity, will not be addressed. Our systemic health care problems will probably get worse. Our education system problems will not be fixed. Our environmental problems will probably get worse. The threat of war, including cyber war, will increase. The existential threats from global warming – hurricanes, draughts, floods – will get worse, as will the existential threat of the nuclear holocaust hair-trigger – if we’re lucky.

But it could be worse. At the moment, the plumbing and electricity still work. There’s food in the stores and medicine in the hospitals. We’re not in a state of war, or a condition of near anarchy.

I don’t rule out the possibility that our traditional protections for free expression and limits on state power could go by the wayside. Thug paramilitaries could be unleashed, with dissidents disappearing, and ever more intrusive state surveillance. We could become a kleptocratic thugocracy, like Russia, or some new species of fascism. And then you and I would find out how much courage we really have.

But we’re not there yet, and we may not get there. In his latest NY Times column, David Brooks predicted that the President-elect would “probably resign or be impeached within a year.”

Anyhow, we survived the Reagan years (though we wreaked considerable havoc). We survived the George W. Bush years (though wreaking more havoc). We will probably survive the years (or months) of the Orange One.

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Category: public policy