Nothing Is Unbelievable Now

The word “unbelievable” is obsolete now that Trump is president. Any horrible thing you can imagine someone in government doing or saying is believable now. Trump's appointments and actions seem calculated to hurt the most people possible, especially if they are brown, female, or immigrants. Some of this is ideological but most of it seems more like mean-spirited bullying, a Trump specialty. It doesn't seem that these actions actually HELP anyone, not even Trump's misguided yet hopeful supporters, but he's fulfilling his wild campaign promises, so his fans are like, “hell yeah!” Many of Trump's actions will end up hurting his supporters much more than they will educated know-it-all liberals like me.

But to see this requires accepting facts and sometimes complicated reasoning. Take for example building a wall with Mexico and (maybe) imposing 20% import tariffs on goods from Mexico to “force them to pay for it.” This will raise prices on many goods for Americans (including vegetables and fruits) and probably cost jobs in industries that rely on imported parts. We could have a trade war. Americans will pay for the wall through higher prices and job losses. It will also damage the Mexican economy which will likely increase illegal immigration regardless of any wall.

As was the case during the campaign, there's such a flurry of batshit-crazy "alternative facts" coming out of Trump and his cronies that it's hard to keep it all in focus. And it's only been one week! This is all bad, but it's just the tip of the iceberg because he is also saying and doing scary things in the international arena, like saying again that we "should have kept the oil" in Iraq, and maybe we will get another chance. Statements like this are lighting up social media in the Arab world and putting at even greater risk the thousands of military personnel we still have in place helping our Iraqi allies to fight ISIS. And as Trump has been so fond of saying about others, there is clearly "something going on" with Russia to explain why he has criticized everyone from the US intelligence community to John Lewis to Meryl Streep -- but never Vladimir Putin.

Here are a few other examples just from today's NY Times.

Gail Collins suggests that Trump actually has no strong views on abortion and women's rights (or perhaps on anything but himself) but that he's just following Pence's toxic anti-woman agenda on this. He's a puppet for both Putin and Pence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/opinion/mike-pence-pulls-president-trumps-strings.html

Nicholas Kristoff points out that the stupid lies about inauguration crowd sizes and nonexistent electoral fraud are acting as a smokescreen for real damage caused by early actions like the abortion “gag rule” that blocks US foreign aid to any care-providing organization that even discusses abortion. This goes farther than gag rules from earlier presidents in that it will apply to all health services, including for example efforts to combat the Zika virus. Direct US funding of abortions is already banned, but this expanded policy will kill poor women in places like Africa and lead to more abortions. But Pence and Trump won't see or care.

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/opinion/president-trumps-war-on-women-begins.html

Charles Blow focuses on Trump's use of lies and criticism of the press to try to control all narratives, supplying “alternate facts” when the truth is too inconvenient, as it usually is. In addition to this, the Trump team is blocking US government agencies that deal with science from using social media and removing references to climate change from government websites. Charles Blow writes in part:

[Trump] is in fact having a running war with the truth itself.

Donald Trump is a proven liar. He lies often and effortlessly. He lies about the profound and the trivial. He lies to avoid guilt and invite glory. He lies when his pride is injured and when his pomposity is challenged.

Indeed, one of the greatest threats Trump poses is that he corrupts and corrodes the absoluteness of truth, facts and science.

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/opinion/a-lie-by-any-other-name.html

Welcome to 1984.

The cartoon by Nomi Kane is from The Nib, a great political cartoon site:

https://thenib.com/an-embarrassment-of-leaks

Obama Farewell

I watched President Obama’s farewell speech last night with my wife. It was an incredibly hopeful and moving speech, and the part near the end when he spoke to and about his family and his VP and friend Joe Biden was hard to see without crying. The presidency is huge, an unimaginably high-pressure job in which you are pulled in a million different directions and challenged every day to keep thousands of balls in the air. Obama did it with grace and often made it look easy, which it was not. I truly believe he is one of the most decent human beings ever to hold this office and that when he had to comfort the families of children murdered in Newtown or order military operations or drone strikes that took lives, often including innocent lives, that this responsibility truly weighed on him. I don’t want to contrast him with what is following him in just over a week. There’s no comparison. But at least we had this great and decent man as our president for eight years.

This is not to say he was perfect in office – he would be the first to say he was far from perfect. He made mistakes, some of them very costly, but very few people are in the position to judge the trade offs a president is forced to make to keep our country mostly safe and mostly free most of the time. And I far prefer the coolness of Obama to the impetuousness of… certain others.

For those of us who believe in facts, who believe in the Constitution, who believe in science, who believe that all people deserve a chance, who believe that America is a great country but not the most important one in the world – wow, he was our president. For those who hate him for whatever reason, whether it’s because they didn’t prosper while much of the country was getting better after the near-disasters of the Bush years, or just because they choose to believe that this country is somehow intended to be Christian and White, I feel sorry for them. They missed out on something great.

His speech suggested that we need to keep working for what is right even in the face of the evil that has wormed its way into Washington and will be in charge for at least four years (assuming we make it that long). He says he’s optimistic, and I want to believe him, I want to try, but it’s very hard, even for a natural rational optimist like me. I’m giving money. Can I do more than that? Can I be an activist? Can I stomach the noise of politics more than a few months every four years? I don’t know. I'm glad I volunteered for the small amount of campaign work and donated the money I did in 2008 and 2012 (and 2016), but now I can barely stand to watch MSNBC for more than a few minutes. My wife watches it a lot and she’s anxious about the coming time. I get that, wanting to be informed but scared to death of what you see happening. I'm fortunate that I am able put it aside and focus on other things – sometimes anyway.

I don’t know what to do. Reach out to the other side? Try to cross that shaky bridge? I'm not sure I can, and that in itself is a bad sign. I need to think more about it once the dust has settled a bit. But I know I will miss having a president who is smart and who I can trust to lead our country for the benefit of its people. That is a huge and scary loss.

100 Days

One of the most encouraging things I looked at in the NY Times this morning was the interactive "Who Will Be President?" feature, part of their numbers-oriented Upshot section. It says that based on current polling, as of yesterday, Hillary Clinton has about a 69% chance of winning the presidency. With Donald Trump continuing to double down on his crazy statements and his traitorous flirting with Putin, I have to believe that Clinton's odds will improve over the next 100 days. There will be debates (that will certainly be bizarre) and probably more surprises from Russian hackers, but I'm hopeful that Hillary's team is ready for all of this and that the Dems' convention bounce will exceed the one Trump got from the RNC. I think the DNC did a masterful job of making the case for optimism about the country and for the qualifications of Mrs. Clinton.

Of course there are always ways to look on the dark side. I also read an essay in The Atlantic summarizing the typical Trump supporter's view of "what is really going on" and why they believe he will win. It seems to hinge on voter turnout and male support. Supporters believe there are many people, especially men, who normally wouldn't even vote but who secretly support Trump and who will turn out in droves to vote for him. They believe this latent "surge" of disgruntled people is invisible in polls. Why? I'm not sure. Maybe these closet Trump supporters are embarrassed and lie to pollsters but will choose him in the privacy of the voting booth? Some of these Trumpsters even believe that many black and Latino males will go for Trump because they would feel emasculated by a woman president -- the machismo vote?

This reminds me of similar ideas in 2008 and 2012 about President Obama. It was called the Bradley Effect. It posed the idea of what you might call "embarrassed racists," people who would tell pollsters they supported Obama but who would actually refuse to vote for a black man for president. Subsequent analysis found that this did not occur -- the polls were pretty reliable. But could it be different with secret Trump supporters? I hope not.

In any case, I am excited that Hillary Clinton is the nominee and I plan to do whatever I can to support her against the very real threat of Trumpism. I can see more donations and some New Hampshire front doors in my future -- at least in the next 100 days. 

Perspective

My heart goes out to the many people who have been injured or lost loved ones in terrorist actions around the world, most recently the horrific Bastille Day truck attack in Nice, France. These actions are unconscionable and the people who perpetrate or support such acts must be brought to justice.  Terrorism is obviously intended to terrorize, and these attacks are certainly scary, with the scariness amplified by instant and repetitive news coverage that makes Nice or Paris seem as close as Orlando or Boston (and for my friends in France, recent attacks have been all too close). It is a small world thanks to global communication and the internet, and we know that terrorism, like other types of crime, can happen anywhere, so we shouldn’t be complacent. But we shouldn’t panic either.

Terrorism is a real problem, but it is not the end of the world, which is currently home to some 7.2 billion humans and countless other species. For perspective, note that in the US, something like 100 people die in car accidents each day. Worldwide, over a million people die annually in car accidents, and there are over half a million “intentional homicides” each year. So many lives tragically cut short every day, yet we hear nothing about most of these millions of deaths. Commercial plane crashes are rare, and when one does occur, many people may die, so it’s big news. The same with terrorist attacks, which have become more common worldwide, though nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Nigeria continue to bear the brunt of those attacks, even though attacks in Western countries get much more news coverage.  

You can Google for statistics as well as I can and find that you are more likely to be killed by falling furniture than by terrorism. My wife has recently told me she’s getting more concerned about my business travel, especially to Europe. But I am far safer on a business trip to anywhere in Europe, Japan, or Korea than I am driving my car to work. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be concerned about terrorism. It’s an awful thing if this is the “new normal,” and we shouldn’t simply accept that. We can and should come together worldwide to make progress against this threat, though it is certainly not the greatest threat to civilization that we face (that would be climate change).

Steven Pinker and others have pointed to extensive data to show that even as terrorism and crime fill the headlines, the world is not falling apart, and on an overall basis, violence in the world has greatly decreased, and not only because there are fewer wars.  Other forms of violence and cruelty are also greatly in decline, though they have not reached zero and probably never will. I’m optimistic that we can still build a better world for my grandchildren -- and for everyone else. We should not be complacent about terrorism, but we shouldn’t freak out, change our way of life, or start another war over it. 

The image above has nothing to do with it except that this is the planet we all happen to share (a screen shot from the free Orbiter space flight simulator, and one of my most popular pictures on Flickr). 

Insane Convictions

For the first time this year, Donald Trump is starting to fall behind in polls of likely Republican primary voters, especially in Iowa but also in one major national poll (New York Times today). This would be good news were it not for the fact that it is Dr. Ben Carson who is catching up with The Donald. Trump's conviction is that he is simply the greatest. He's self-serving and egomaniacal and willing to say or do anything to get attention. He is also extremely rich and quite smart in his obnoxious way. Sometimes I think he is playing all of us, that this is all a big game of some sort, although he probably really does think he could be a good president.

Carson, on the other hand, may be certifiably insane. Here's a guy who had to have been brilliant at one time to achieve what he did as an innovative pediatric neurosurgeon. But he's also a Seventh-day Adventist who seems to be completely dominated by his religious beliefs. It's almost funny that he has talked about his fear of a Muslim president who might try to institute sharia law in the United States. This from a guy who clearly wants to impose his own Christian beliefs on our entire country, starting with no abortions for any reason, although in a recent interview, he seemed unable to connect this with the obvious GOP agenda step of reversing Roe vs. Wade. It seemed like he didn't really know what that was. He has strong, insane convictions, but very large gaps in his knowledge of how our country works. And of reality in general. He looks and sounds like he's on Thorazine or some other antipsychotic drug.

It's a testament to the power of religion to make you believe in strange things that he does not believe in evolution. Here's a man trained as a neurosurgeon who helped develop a surgical procedure to separate conjoined twins joined at the brain. I have to believe that some of the procedures that were developed for this and other surgical innovations were tested and practiced on animals such as dogs, monkeys, and maybe even chimps because of their anatomical similarities to humans. He must have noticed those resemblances and is perhaps even familiar with how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics (through evolution). And that all life on Earth uses the same DNA system that we do, and that the genomes of great apes are nearly identical to ours. I suppose Ben believes that God created all of the similarities just because he felt like it, even though humans were somehow independently created from all the other animals.

Ben also believes that homosexuality is a choice (and not unlike bestiality), that Obamacare is like Hitler, that abortion is like slavery, that people who are shot by mass killers simply failed to defend themselves, and on and on. This Salon article is a nice review of seven of his most insane statements:

1. Gayness must be a choice, because prisoners who are raped come out gay.
2. Obamacare is worse than slavery. We live in a Gestapo age.
3. The Big Bang is a "fairy tale" and the notion of evolution was encouraged by the devil.
4. There's no war on women; there may be a war on women's insides. [ WTF? -Ed. ]
5. Nope, I don't see any global warming.
6. Nope, I don't see any racism.
7. Planned Parenthood is a plot to kill black babies.

Considering that Carson claims to have been a Democrat in 1992, it's tempting to believe that his current conservative views have been cherry-picked to appeal to right wing Republican voters, although he might truly believe in some or all of them. In this Yahoo Politics article, he even describes how he only learned in 2013 the right way for a Republican to talk about guns. It seems he actually believes that assault weapons should be restricted in urban areas, but of course a Republican can't say anything like this, you always have to start with "the Second Amendment is sacred, no restrictions on guns!"

So what is this dude's appeal? He's personally non-threatening, soft-spoken, ultra religious, and occasionally articulate-sounding. I can see how this sells among evangelicals in a place like Iowa if you don't look too closely at his ideas and beliefs. But I would hope that once the details of his views become better known, that mainstream Republican voters will quickly recognize what an insane and dangerous thing we have here in Ben Carson. We should not be considering handing the keys to the US nuclear arsenal to such an inexperienced and loopy guy, let alone a man who believes that the "End of Times" may soon be upon us.

Gun Madness

I've been thinking about gun violence. It's always in the news because with over 33,000 gun deaths per year in the USA, we're never more than a few days away from a major national gun death story. Just the other day, a disgruntled, fired ex-reporter from a TV station in Virginia killed two of his former colleagues while they were on the air doing a live news interview. He later killed himself. I can't find the number, but there were probably at least two dozen other gun murders in America on August 26. Something like 25 to 30 murders occur daily along with many other gun deaths, suicides and accidents, an average of about 90 gun deaths per day nationwide.

Considering that we are supposed to be an "advanced country," this is obviously appalling, but there doesn't seem to be anything we can do about it because of our history and politics. The paranoid gun lobby opposes even the most minor commonsense restrictions on gun availability. I feel lucky to live in the state with the second lowest number of gun deaths and nearly the lowest rate of gun ownership in the country. Only Hawaii is better than Massachusetts. These statistics are obviously closely related, but that is not obvious to the many people who feel that even the slightest restriction on the right to buy, own, and use guns is a violation of their civil rights. But what about the civil rights of the thousands of people who are killed or injured by these guns?

There are some countries in South America and Africa where there are more per capita deaths due to gun violence then in the USA. But we are the only country in the world with an advanced economy and high levels of education that suffers such high rates of gun violence. The US has 88.8 guns per 100 people, the highest in the world. This must reflect many people owning multiple guns, because the range for household gun ownership goes from 60.6% in Alaska down to 9.7% in Hawaii. Of course gun death rates correlate closely with these statistics. Hawaii has 2.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people (Massachusetts has 3.1, 2013 figures). At the top end, Alaska has 19.8 deaths per 100,000 people (the rest of the top five is Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Wyoming).

The national average for gun deaths in the US is 10.4 per 100,000 people. Compare this to some other advanced and seemingly still free countries: Australia 0.86, Canada 2.22, France 3.01, Germany 1.24, New Zealand 1.45, UK 0.26. Countries with numbers more similar to the US include Argentina 10.05, Uruguay 14.01, South Africa 21.5, Brazil 19.03, Mexico 11.2, Colombia 28.14, and Jamaica 39.7. Venezuela blows everybody away with 50.9 gun deaths per 100,000 people ("mixed years" says Wikipedia -- statistics vary in year and quality). I'm sure the US role as a leading market for illegal drugs helps push up the numbers in drug-source countries like Mexico and Columbia. Another benefit from the War on Drugs!

As I said to my wife last night, this feels something like an uncontrollable natural disaster or plague for us, like a monsoon or an earthquake that hits every few days. Or maybe like living next to an active volcano. Other countries somehow manage to get better at this as they become more educated and more prosperous. But not God-Blessed-America! Here it is tied to the willful ignorance of a big chunk of largely "God-fearing" people, many of whom also deny evolution and climate change and refuse to vaccinate their children. Aided and abetted by certain Republican, corporate, and religious leaders.

I will end this cheerful survey with an observation from Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times who pointed out recently that more Americans have died from domestic gun violence between 1968 and the present than have died in all wars fought by the US, including the Civil War (estimated at 750,000 deaths, though disease probably accounts for more of those than guns). This was fact checked by politifact.com and seems to be true, with about 1.4 million killed in American wars, versus 1.5 million in American streets and homes. There's the case for American exceptionalism right there.

Summer of (Ugh) Trump

My interest in politics right now is pretty low, and the 2016 presidential election still seems a long way off. So I don't often think much about it, and I rarely blog about politics (heck, I rarely blog at all these days -- though I write a lot in my journal). But the 16 ring circus that is the fight for the Republican nomination is pretty hard to avoid, especially when my wife watches MSNBC and I occasionally sit in. Rachel Madow and other MSNBC commentators have been having a field day with the motley crew of Republican contenders. But since Donald Trump announced his run for the presidency in June, he has made their jobs even easier and has dominated every news cycle with his ever more ridiculous shoot-from-the-hip pronouncements.

He started with Mexicans and immigration, claiming that most illegal immigrants are rapists and drug dealers. He says that when he is president, he will build an impenetrable wall along the border with Mexico, and force Mexico to pay for it. Then the other day in an interview on stage, he ad-libbed some remarks about Senator John McCain and how he isn't really a war hero, followed by, "OK, maybe he is, but only because he was captured. And I like people who weren't captured." I'm definitely no fan of John McCain, but anybody who does not respect the service and sacrifice of a naval aviator who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison is insane and despicable. Though of course we already knew that Trump was insane and despicable. Yesterday he went on the rampage against some of the other Republicans who have insulted him in the press, especially Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Speaking to an audience in South Carolina, Trump insulted Graham as a loser and a wimp and actually gave out Graham's private cell phone number to the crowd.

Trump's form of campaigning is basically improvised insult comedy -- Don Rickles with more money and a creative hair stylist. It's only a matter of time before everyone, no matter how conservative, realizes what a toxic waste dump he is. It's hard to understand how he can achieve 16% in any poll of anybody, Republican or not (some suggestions here). Someone pointed out on a show last night that four years ago, Sarah Palin (not even running), Rick Perry, and Michelle Bachmann were leading in Republican polls at this point (summer 2011, ahead of the 2012 election season). Romney and Santorum were far behind. In spring 2011, Trump himself was actually leading in the polls. I don't recall when he bowed out of the 2012 race that Mitt Romney ultimately won for the GOP nomination. So his strength in the polls at this time really means nothing, except that under the crazy rules set by FOXNews, national poll position will determine which 10 of now 16 Republicans will get to participate in the first GOP debate on August 6. So Trump will be on stage that night, making the Republican debate even more bizarre than it would be with only "serious" candidates.

As comedian Andy Borowitz has written, Trump is the first openly asshole presidential candidate, and there apparently are a lot of assholes in the country who are rooting for him. He is not a serious presidential candidate, and he certainly knows this himself (I read somewhere that he's only spending 50% of his time on his presidential run because of his business commitments). But Trump is an entertainer who thrives on any sort of publicity, and that is what he is getting now by the ton. The good news is that it disrupts the GOP. The bad news is that he makes somebody like Jeb Bush almost look like a reasonable person. Almost. 

Obama Action Figure

When I was in Japan last month, I was searching for some info on a Japanese toy. Can't remember what or why, but along the way I found a description of a Japanese action figure toy... of Barack Obama! I thought it was hilarious.

There was some other cool stuff in Japan I've been meaning to write up. Maybe I'll write a post about my 2012 travels when I have some time off between Christmas and New Year.

Les Misbarack (revisited)

I was looking back at some old blog posts to see where I was in November 2008 when President Obama won his first term (that's the real purpose of this blog - outsourced, searchable memory!). I was in Salzburg, Austria, teaching a CODE V class during a gorgeous stretch of weather. Not bad duty, actually, except for being far away from home for an election in which I was very engaged. I remember my brother called me at 3 am local time (9 pm on election day in New York) to talk about the results that were just starting to come in (he didn't know I was in Europe). I wasn't sleeping very well anyway and had planned to get up at 4:30 am local to check the status (10:30 pm EST). I think I managed to watch Obama's victory speech live on CNN (I watched this year's on YouTube after the fact, in Tokyo).

I was surprised to find that this 2008 campaign video was still up. Obama campaign workers in Chicago mouthed the words to "One More Day" from Les Miserables. They had stand-ins for John McCain and Sarah Palin (shown above), singing about how the revolution will be crushed. Fortunately the election turned out better than the plot of Les Mis!

How I Spell Relief

O-B-A-M-A-W-O-N!

If this blog is about anything at all (and with so little posting recently, it's hard for me to tell), it's really not about politics. Except (very rarely) when it is. This may not be the last political post until the next presidential election, but it may be.

In any case, I'm enormously relieved and happy that President Obama won re-election yesterday. I really believe that after spending four years helping us dig out of an enormous hole, that we are going in the right direction, and that President Obama definitely deserved another term. Mitt Romney was the wrong guy with the wrong message (to name just a couple of wrong things about Mitt, not to mention his scary running mate). 

At the moment, Florida still has not been called, but with over 97% counted, Obama still has a pretty good lead. But whether it's 303 electoral votes or 332 doesn't matter much. It's enough of a margin that we won't have any 2000 like drama. 

Keeping Me Sane

Although I'm normally only moderately interested in politics, I've gotten a little obsessed with the election in these final few weeks, as I did in 2008. I look too much at polling sites. Between that and trying to finish my new album, my brain capacity is pretty much maxed out (I keep some in reserve for work). I thought the President did very well in the final debate tonight, and Romney didn't look crazy, which I guess was his goal,as he tried to portray Obama's foreign policy actions as weak, while saying that he agreed with most of them and would do the same things. But I'm still worried that something like half of the people in this country think that Mitt would be an OK president.

Two things keep me sane in this. One is Nate Silver's number-crunchingly satisfying FiveThirtyEight Blog which takes tons of different polls' data, runs them through an election simulation model, and predicts the odds (and many other things). This helps me avoid panic when some specific poll shows Romney with a 6 point lead. Nate did very well in 2008, calling 49 out of 50 states correctly. Tonight his forecast has the President with a 70% chance of winning the electoral college, with 290 electoral votes. I hope he's right!

The other thing that helps is The Borowitz Report. Andy's often zany fake news articles are most often about Mr. Romney these days, such as this one on his belief in a woman's right to choose... what to make for dinner. I hope Andy doesn't have Mitt to kick around much longer.

Election 2012

In 2008, I became somewhat politically active for the first time since 1972, when I was in college and briefly campaigned for Senator George McGovern for president. I'm still a liberal, but it took eight disastrous years of George W. Bush and the frightening prospect of a McCain-Palin win to jolt me into action. Massachusetts was a safe bet for Obama, but New Hampshire wasn't, so I signed up to do phone calls as well as a couple of canvassing trips to the nearby Granite State. Obama ultimately took NH and of course the election.

This year I'm again worried about the possibility of a GOP win, and I have again made a lot of small donations to the Obama campaign, other Democrat-supporting organizations, and Planned Parenthood, though I haven't signed up for any phone banks or canvassing trips. I really don't like anything about Romney and Ryan, but I'm especially concerned about their positions on women's issues, and the effect that their likely Supreme Court appointments could have on the future of this country. I don't want my daughters and my new granddaughter to live in the kind of America that many in the GOP would like to see. It might not be as bad as the frightening Christian Theocracy that Octavia Butler imagined in The Parable of the Sower. But Romney-Ryan would certainly pave the way.

So I've been looking at polls and worrying about Romney's "bump" since the President's disappointing performance in the first debate. It's closer than I would like, and of course anything can happen in the next four weeks. But in the critical swing states, Obama is in better shape than Romney, and the Dems have quite a full war chest to counter the tidal wave of GOP attack adds. After handing the first one to Mitt, I'm thinking Biden and Obama will do much better in the remaining debates. So I am optimistic that Obama will pull it off.

I've been looking at Poll Headlines which is a quick way to look at a lot of polls in summary. They have a pretty cool electoral map where you can fill in the toss-up states to make your own prediction of the electoral college results. Today it is showing Obama with 225 strong and 32 leaning (it was 257 strong a week ago, ouch). Romney has 191 strong and 15 leaning, and there are 75 votes shown as a tossup. So it can still go either way, but here is my guess for how it will end up, based on recent swing state results:

I hope I'm right!

UPDATE (10/18/12): Obama won the second debate - not as important as losing the first, true, but it has energized his supporters, and the Obama campaign's fund raising and ground game in swing states look very strong. I think Romney's views on women were clearer in the second debate - and not favorable to him. Same with Romney's views on immigration - I'm guessing he will lose ground with Hispanic voters in swing states. It's far from over, and the nationwide popular vote will probably be very close. But this is my revised guess for the electoral outcome. Pretty much the same except for Colorado, now blue:

Where It All Began

I meant to post this when it was actually 50 years to the day, but now it's after midnight. Oh well, it's still cool. Fifty years ago yesterday, September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University in Texas in which he stated the goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of decade. The famous part of the speech is this:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Guess what? Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, fulfilling JFK's pledge. There's a lot more to the story of course. But it's still a pretty good story. 1962 was right around when I started to get crazy about space and all the associated technology. It's pretty amazing that when he made this speech, only four Mercury astronauts had flown in space, two very quick suborbital flights (Shepard and Grissom) and two brief orbital flights (Glenn and Carpenter), three orbits each. Wally Schirra would fly six orbits a few weeks after this speech. It's a long way from three orbits to the moon.

There's a video here. The text of the speech and other links can be found here.

Matt Bors Wins Cartooning Award

My favorite editorial cartoonist by far is Matt Bors. So I was happy to learn that Matt has been awarded the 2012 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning (check out some of his work on that page, or look through his blogged archives). He is fearless and funny. Nobody gets a pass from Matt Bors - not Obama, not God, not even Steve Jobs! Though like me, he does seem to have special feelings for Rick Santorum. Matt really deserves this award. Congratulations!

American Taliban?

As if the aptly named politician Rick Santorum were not already sufficiently stomach-turning (and he was), his recent comments about not believing in the separation of church and state combined with his toxic views on the rights of women have really pushed him beyond outrageous for me. What sort of country would Santorum like to lead if by some horrible fluke he were actually elected president?

I have a pretty good idea from a couple of amazing "science fiction" books I read and reviewed here in 2006. Octavia Butler's dystopian novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents present a near future America where white ultra-right-wing religious politicians have created a Christian version of Taliban society. It comes complete with Bible-sanctioned suppression of women and even slavery.

Despite the dark circumstances, these books are really wonderful, uplifting, life-affirming, and even spiritual in nature. But the starting point in 2027 is scarily plausible. As I wrote in 2006:

My biggest impression of this pair of books is that the environment within which the story takes place rings all too true. It struck me as the future “facts on the ground” of an America that continued to ignore “inconvenient truths” of global warming, poverty, inequality, and abuse of power until it was too late, and then gave even more power to religious fundamentalists, who blamed the problems of society on the victims, and on superstitious ideas along the lines of “these problems are God’s punishment for the wicked ways of people who are not enough like us – good, God-fearing, white, conservative Christians.”

You Have To Laugh...

I'm trying to not pay much attention to politics this early in 2012, but the many antics of the Republican presidential candidates are just too much like a car crash - you don't want to look, but you can't help it. There are two guys who spin this stuff with all the decorum and hilarity it deserves: Andy Borowitz with The Borowitz Report, and Matt Bors with his amazing political comics and blog posts. Laughing is better than crying.

President Barack Obama

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

-President Barack Obama

I'm very proud of my country today. President Obama's inaugural address was incredible, and the events of the day were truly hope inspiring. There's a lot of hard work ahead, but in spite of all the problems we face, I'm feeling pretty optimistic tonight.

Soldier's Heart

I finally finished Goodwin's Team of Rivals, and it is every bit as good as reviewers have said, one of the best works of history and biography I have read. The subtitle refers to the "political genius" of Abraham Lincoln, and he clearly was a genius in many ways - in choosing people, in understanding complex situations, in disarming tensions, and most of all in timing. He would weather severe criticism and delay action in situations where even his closest friends and supporters questioned whether he understood the nature of the crisis. But with well-timed action, Lincoln would resolve the crisis with the fewest possible side effects. In chess terms, he was looking ahead through many possible moves and counter moves, but this was not only an intellectual judgment. He understood the complex interplay of tensions and feelings among his cabinet members and generals as well as with the soldiers and with the general public in the North and even in the South.

Lincoln's intellect was great, as was his ability to communicate complex issues simply but accurately. But it was his empathy that held it all together. He truly felt the pain of all the players - his cabinet members, his generals, and the soldiers he would often visit throughout the Civil War. But somehow he was able to absorb and dissipate all this pain and maintain his spirits and his ability to focus.

Team of Rivals shows you the Civil War from the point of view of Lincoln, his family, and his cabinet members. They had plenty of direct contact with the war and its effects - many of the biggest battles were within 100 miles of the White House, and some much closer. But the war itself is still somewhat abstract. So when I came across a Civil War book my daughter had read in school some years ago, I decided to do a quick supplemental read.

I actually read Soldier's Heart once before. Gary Paulsen is one of my favorite authors, even though he is known mainly as an author for young readers. The subtitle of Soldier's Heart is "Being the Story of the Enlistment and Due Service of the Boy Charley Goddard in the First Minnesota Volunteers," and it is the brief, slightly fictionalized story of a real 15 year old boy who lied about his age to enlist in the Union army 1861. He fought in several major battles, but there is little in the way of big picture perspective here - it is pure experience and feelings, as visceral as any war book I have ever read. I strongly recommend both Team of Rivals and Soldier's Heart.

REAL Science in the Capital

In 2007 I read Kim Stanley Robinson's "Science in the Capital" trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007). Set in the near future, they portray some dramatic effects of rapid climate change and the efforts of scientists at the National Science Foundation (and elsewhere) to solve these problems. These are political novels as much (or more than) science fiction, and I really enjoyed all three books. Robinson is best known for his Mars Trilogy, and while some of his characters are quirky, the science is well researched, and the portrayal of the scientists and their work seems very plausible. What seemed harder to believe in the dark depths of the Bush adminstration was the election of a president who takes science and scientists seriously.

Things are different now. President-elect Obama today announced the four top members of his science team, including Harvard physicist and environmental scientist Dr. John Holdren as presidential science advisor. Read or watch today's weekly address in which Mr. Obama describes the importance of science and technology and introduces his top science team. I was really encouraged by his remarks including these closing lines:

I am confident that if we recommit ourselves to discovery; if we support science education to create the next generation of scientists and engineers right here in America; if we have the vision to believe and invest in things unseen, then we can lead the world into a new future of peace and prosperity.

More Space Proposals

There are a few other space-related proposals that are open for discussion in the Change.gov "seat at the table" area:

1. Coalition for Space Exploration Policy Recommendations - The report is mainly a summary of special Gallup polls showing strong public support for space exploration. The Coalition is made up of mainstream aerospace industry companies (Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, ATK, etc.) and space advocacy groups.

2. X Prize - The X Prize organization offers some suggestions on how NASA can work better.

3. Association of Space Explorers International Panel on Asteroid Threat Mitigation - As they say in their description:

Because NEO impacts represent a global, long-term threat to the collective welfare of humanity, an international program and set of preparatory measures for action should be established.

The ASE report is a 54 page PDF that is available for download at the above link. There are very few comments so far. I added this one:

We humans evolved to deal very well with certain time spans (seconds to hours to a few years) and to judge well the probabilities and impacts of certain types of events and threats (predators, prey, day/night, weather). With very short or very long time spans and for very small probabilities, our instincts aren't very good, but fortunately, we have science, and the ability to learn from things that are distant and abstract. Asteroids are like that. Long periods can pass with no big asteroid events, but there's nothing special about this time compared to 65 million years ago or 1908. Now is as likely a time for an asteroid to hit as any other. This proposal is basically asking us to spend what is really a small amount of money and a bit more attention to a low probability risk with big consequences. It really is like insurance and fire extinguishers - something we should assign a little money and attention to while we devote a lot more money and attention to more immediate problems.

The proposal is also suggesting improvements in international planning and cooperation on this important issue, and explaining why such cooperation is essential.

The Obama transition team is inviting Americans to participate in the various discussions of issues that may be important to them. If you care about space exploration and the risk of NEO impacts, please add your voice to these discussions.