We think we recall the way we were taught!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2022

Overwhelmingly boring, but safe: How should kids in Virginia, or anywhere else, be taught American history? 

In truth, it's very hard to devise a grade school curriculum, especially at such polarized times as these. We think we recall the way we were taught when we were in grade school.

This takes us back to the no-longer existent Mystic School in Winchester, Massachusetts, back when Joe Bellino was lugging the ball for the Winchester High School Sachems, on his way to the Naval Academy and a Heisman trophy.

(Yes, that was our school's actual name—see Mystic River. It was part of the Winchester Public Schools. We kids played marbles in the schoolyard, then glumly trooped inside.)

If memory serves, the way we were taught was astoundingly boring, but it was also safe:

Thirty kids would sit in the classroom holding thirty copies of some history textbook open to some designated page. The teacher would call out names, one at a time, and the youngster whose name had been called would read the next paragraph of the day's assigned chapter aloud.

Was that really the way it worked? We actually think it was! If so, it was astoundingly unimaginative, but it was also safe. 

Here's what we mean by that:

As long as some such procedure is followed, at no point will teachers be inclined to start spouting off with their own unique ideas about some topic or other. We kids would just drone along from the textbook. No teacher input required!

Under some such system, it's easy to define the curriculum—you just have to look at the textbook! The textbook may contain outright errors or limited frameworks, but at least the errors and weird ideas aren't coming from hundreds of different sources. This shields everyone from the vagaries of fate. 

In that way, some such system is "safe." For us kids, it was also amazingly dull, and it was an extremely limited way to proceed in the face of thirty inquiring minds, or possibly one or two fewer. 

Most states take a different approach today. In states like Virginia, large groups of education professionals are gathered together for the task of defining the state's curriculum. 

Rather, they define the "standards of learning" for each grade—the various things the kids should learn in each year of their public school journey. The state's three million public school teachers are directed to take things from there. And yes, they actually refer to those "Standards of Learning" as the state's "SOLs!"

Under this system, there won't be some single textbook to which teachers are forced to restrict themselves. On the other hand, the resulting grade-by-grade curriculum guidelines will often drift toward incoherence, as you can possibly see by clicking here.

(As in this Washington Post report, we're linking to "a draft version of the SOLs that had been in the works for months: a more than 400-page document produced in consultation with museums, historians, professors, political scientists, economists, geographers, teachers, parents and students.") 

Apparently, suggestions were thrown in a Waring blender and that lengthy word salad emerged. The Post report tilts toward the idea that these were admirable guidelines—signposts of obvious pre-Youngkin worth.

Reading a single mandated textbook can be unbelievably easy. By way of contrast, deciphering 400 pages of highly pomposified technospeak can be extremely hard.

Teachers may scream and tear at their hair. At some point, chaos may reign.

When we were in fifth grade, our regular teacher had to be replaced for some unstated reason. A long-term substitute—Mrs. E—suddenly appeared in her place.

Mrs. E had surprising ideas of her own. More on that tomorrow!

GLIMMERS AND INTIMATIONS: What we did on our pre-holiday weekend!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2022

The demographication rules: We're told that Thanksgiving occurs this week, presumably on a Thursday.

Inevitably, that meant it was time for the Washington Post to publish a certain, currently mandated glimmer and intimation.

We refer to the lengthy news report from which we'll quote below. It appeared in the online Post on Saturday morning. As far as we can tell, the lengthy report hasn't yet appeared in the paper's print editions.

The report was written by a young journalist—a young journalist who graduated from college this very year. We don't offer that as a criticism of this journalist. It does strike us as a possible comment on the possible cynicism of her editors at the Post.

As almost everyone knows, the lengthy report this young journalist wrote has become standard fare in the past few years. The mandated headline says this:

These Native Americans focus on family amid Thanksgiving’s dark history

By now, everyone knows what the various versions of this report are going to say. They're going to say that while we Anglos (and Afros?) love the holiday in question, it's a very painful occasion for (many?) Native Americans.

It's going to say that the traditional history is all wrong, which everyone already knows, and that vicious historical brutality followed from there. 

Everyone already knows those things! But, to borrow from the famous old joke, while all these things have already been said, not every member of our tribe has had the chance to say them.

In this case, the report began as shown below. In the passage we've highlighted, we experienced our first point of puzzlement:

CHERY (11/19/22): For centuries, Thanksgiving has been billed as an opportunity for friends and family to gather, with peace and gratitude in their hearts. But for Native Americans, celebrating the autumnal holiday isn’t as simple.

The short-and-sweet story told in schools depicting the first Thanksgiving as a harmonious harvest celebration between Native people and Pilgrims “was a very romanticized, Whitewashed education about Indigenous peoples,” said Jordan Daniel, who’s a member of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe.

In reality, 1621 was not the first celebration of Thanksgiving between the English and the Wampanoag people, said David Silverman, a George Washington University professor who specializes in Native American history. The Wampanoags tried to ally with the English for trade and to maintain political independence from another Native group after an epidemic dwindled their numbers.

“Tensions built for years as the English population grew and began dispossessing, subjugating and evangelizing Native people,” Silverman said. Finally, war broke out around 1675, and after the English won, they enslaved about 2,000 American Indian prisoners of war, he added.

In 1970, the United American Indians of New England began commemorating Thanksgiving Day as a National Day of Mourning to honor their ancestors who experienced cultural genocide at the hands of European colonialists.

Native Americans as a whole say they’re still fighting for what’s rightfully theirs...

Already, we were puzzled. According to the Post report, Professor Silverman had said that "1621 was not the first celebration of Thanksgiving between the English and the Wampanoag people" (our emphasis). 

We were curious blue. Since the English (the "Pilgrims") had only settled in Wampanoag territory in 1620, we didn't know what previous celebration was being alluded to. 

The remarks by Silverman which were actually quoted didn't speak to that question. Nor did we know why that claim would be relevant to the larger, spectacularly familiar story which was (once again) being told. 

Skillfully, we clicked the link which appeared beneath the words, "In reality." We were taken to a version of this mandated new report which appeared in last year's Post.

(Last year's version: "In 1621, some pilgrims and some Wampanoags shared a feast. It wasn't the first meeting between the two groups and it wouldn't be the last, but for many reasons—including the American Civil War—the anniversary of that meal took on both an outsized importance and a whitewashed simplicity.")

Had Professor Silverman really said that the officially whitewashed "First Thanksgiving" actually wasn't "the first celebration of Thanksgiving between the English and the Wampanoag people?" 

We have no idea. In fairness, that isn't a major point in the glimmer and intimation the Post was offering here.

What did we do on our pre-holiday weekend? In large part, we traumatized ourselves by spending hours looking at the proposed guidelines for the state of Virginia's public school social studies curriculum.

We're speaking here about the (barely readable) 402 pages of guidelines which had been formulated before Glenn Youngkin took over as Virginia's governor. For background on this very poorly-reported issue, see Saturday's report.

What did we find when we looked at those 402 pages of guidelines? We saw the nightmare of incoherence and pomposification which seems to emerge from our blue tribe's public school leadership cadres whenever they're given the chance.

We suffered flashbacks from our interactions with similar posthuman pseudo-verbiage dating back to the 1970s. The traumatization remains, but we'll probably try to force ourselves to return to this topic, if only briefly, in the days to come.

We spent some time fighting our way through that punishing verbiage. We also wandered about, as we now do every year, in the current mandated version of the Thanksgiving story.

That version has replaced the "whitewashed" version which may (or may not?) still prevail in the nation's schools. That new version of the Thanksgiving story now appears in our major newspapers every year.

What did we find when we tilled those fields? We found glimmers and intimations of the way our own blue tribe struggles to keep The Other Tribe from voting in the ways we'd prefer. 

We'd also say that we saw glimmers of our tribe's demographication rules, which we expect to describe in the days and weeks ahead.

Alas! We were reminded of the last two points on Kevin Drum's recent seven-point list—two of the things centrist voters (and, presumably, conservatives) allegedly don't like about us:

Drum: "Things centrist voters don't like about us" 

[...] 

Point 6: They think wokeness is ridiculous. They want us to stop talking like academics from another galaxy. 

Point 7: They do not like being called racist.

In some ways, we thought about the first of those points when we reread this interview with Professor Silverman—an interview conducted by the Smithsonian back in 2019.

Just to be completely honest, we also thought about this:

We thought about the Native American kids who will be born tomorrow. We thought about the various ways their interests may or may not best be served.

We thought about the various ways various peoples around the world sometimes have and haven't dealt with the unmistakable facts of the world's unmistakably brutal history. We'll admit that we thought about the way some of those peoples may seem, at times, to cling to those brutal histories in way which may, or perhaps may not, best serve the planet's future.

What should children be taught about our nation's history in Virginia's schools? What might serve the interests of the children who will be born tomorrow all across this giant land?

There's a lot to ponder in the report that freshman journalist penned for the Post! On the whole, she was simply reworking a current standard story—a current story which is replacing an earlier standard story. 

In the process, was she producing a helpful new mandated story for readers to memorize? Does this process serve the interests of the nation as a whole—of the children born tomorrow?

Tomorrow: Continuing in the Post's current report:

"Native Americans as a whole say they’re still fighting for what’s rightfully theirs. The Mashpee Wampanoag tribe still doesn’t have control over their entire ancestral land." 

The soft bigotry of low (cable news) explorations!

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2022

Nicolle Wallace fakes it on schools: It was Thursday afternoon. midway through the 4 o'clock hour. Nicolle Wallace kick-started two segments of "cable news" fakery as shown:

WALLACE (11/17/22): Outrage today, from Virginia educators and Democrats, over what they are calling politically motivated changes to elementary school curriculum proposed this week by Governor Glenn Youngkin's new school board. 

Just one of their proposals, according to reporting in the Washington Post, included removing Martin Luther King Jr. from holidays that students in kindergarten should learn about. 

After lots of criticism, it appears they have added that back in, but here's one they're yet to reverse. From the Washington Post, "the new guidelines delete a suggestion from the previous version that kindergartners be taught 'respect for diversity' by learning how to work collaboratively with 'people of diverse backgrounds, viewpoints and experiences.' "

Thanks to the Internet Archive, you can watch the whole thing here.

For the record, we never taught kindergarten ourselves. (Fifth grade was as young as we got.) In part for that reason, we aren't real sure about this:

Should kindergarten kids be taught about the holiday which honors Dr. King? If so, what should they be taught? 

Also, should kindergarten kids "be taught respect for diversity by learning how to work collaboratively with people of diverse backgrounds, viewpoints and experiences?" Should kindergarten kids be taught that, whatever on the face of the earth that word salad is supposed to mean?

In the encyclopedic Post report from which Wallace was quoting, reporter Hannah Natanson notes that the original K-12 guidelines for the state of Virginia totaled 402 pages in all. The new, Youngkin-affiliated guidelines are, at least at present, just 52 pages in length.

You have to drop a lot of material to get from 400 pages to 50. Natanson included this account:

NATANSON (11/16/22): The new version is shorter partly because it no longer offers “curriculum frameworks,” suggestions for instructional resources, student activities and lines of classroom inquiry that were included in the old version of the guidelines. An Education Department spokesman said the agency will release a separate “curriculum frameworks” document in late summer 2023, and it will undergo a separate board approval process. The framework document may include some of the content present in the old guidelines but deleted from the new version.

[...]

In a fact sheet circulated among legislators by the education department over the weekend, staffers wrote that the old guidelines were clunky, “inaccessible” and “difficult for educators to understand and implement”—while the new version will “restore excellence, curiosity and excitement around teaching and learning history.”

Is it possible that the original, 402-page documents really was difficult to understand and implement?

Answer: Of course that's possible! Anyone who has ever dealt with such materials will understand that  fact.

That, of course, doesn't mean the new, Youngkin-affiliated proposed guidelines are better. It means that blue tribe members should be careful about accepting the kind of propaganda which comes at them from soft-core propagandists like Wallace, who used to offer her propaganda in favor of the war in Iraq and in favor of referendums which sought to ban same-sex marriage.

The impulse to peddle propaganda hasn't appreciably changed. The propaganda is pure blue now, but it's propaganda all the same.

In the course of the two segments which followed, Wallace didn't display the slightest sign of having the first idea what she was talking about. Lucky for us, she was able to throw to Heidi Przybyla, one of our favorite reporters and friends, who was introduced as shown:

WALLACE (continuing directly):  Joining our conversation is Heidi Przybyla, an investigative correspondent with Politico these days. We miss her from when she was here.

She's reported extensively on how state legislatures have been trying to change what can be taught about race and history in schools. Donna and Alicia are still here as well. [Edwards and Menendez] 

Heidi, take me inside what's happening, not just in Virginia, but where conservatives are trying to reach into curriculum.

For starters, let's state the obvious—conservatives have every right "to try to reach into curriculum," just as liberals do. 

In some cases, conservatives' ideas may be quite bad. On other occasions, such people may have a valid point. It could even turn out that they seem to be right about something!

If you think there are no dumb ideas floating around in our own blue tribe concerning what should happen in schools, you've been living on the dark side of Neptune lately. But let's not worry our little heads about such possibilities! Wallace will keep us blue tribe rubes from confronting such unpleasant notions. 

Wallace will keep us on message! During her second segment with Przybyla, she even pleasured us with this, pretty much out of nowhere:

WALLACE: It's hard to fathom that the depths of depravity on the right would extend into all the areas they do, right?

Given Wallace's know-nothing status in this area, that struck us as a truly repulsive remark.

At the time, Wallace's panel was discussing some recent actions by the newly-elected, conservative school board of Berkeley County, South Carolina. 

The panel had made zero attempt to present the possible pros and cons concerning the school board's actions. Instead, their pseudo-discussion was pure propaganda—sloganeering all the way down.

For ourselves, we struggled with a voluminous social studies curriculum back in the 1970s. When we read about the Viginia guidelines, we find ourselves wondering thusly:

Are there textbooks and other materials which will let Virginia's fourth and fifth graders have extensive reading experiences concerning the voluminous material they will allegedly be taught? 

To what extent will students be able to read and reason and debate and write about these various topics on their own? Or will they simply be lectured to by their teachers, droning in front of their classrooms?

Thoughts like those will never intrude on a cable news pseudo-discussion. Meanwhile how much did Przybyla actually know about the great debate in Virginia? The analysts came right out of their chairs when this exchange occurred:

WALLACE: Heidi, just finish this sentence for me. The goal of not teaching students all the continents is what?

PRZYBYLA: Look, I'm just reading this myself—

WALLACE (chuckling): I know!

PRZYBYLA: —and I don't, I don't want to make a sweeping statement that they couldn't learn about the other continents. But they would just have a Eurocentric—that was what I took away from reading the article, OK? I'm not the original reporter on it.

She only knew what she'd read in the Post! Wallace knew even less!

It's very, very, very hard to create a K-12 social studies curriculum. Also, people who have strong beliefs will often get out over their skis when they create 400 pages of such material, a great deal of which may be hard to interpret and implement.

Especially in such sensitive areas, people may tend to get carried away on both "the right" and "the left!" If you still don't understand that fact, it's possible that you've ingested too much propaganda during these cable news years.

Wallace is extremely good at what she does, but what she does isn't journalism. Blue tribe members are propagandized when they watch her TV show, just as the red tribe frequently was when it followed her work in the past.

Way back in the age of Roots: We go all the way back to the late Dr. Sam Banks, one of the nicest people we've ever met—and the creator of a stupendously unteachable social studies curriculum back in the 1970s.

Dr. Banks was widely loved in black Baltimore. In our (frequent, brief) interactions with him, we quickly saw why. That said, the curriculum he had lovingly built was completely unteachable, in several major ways. 

Dr. Banks was a spectacularly courteous person. He believed, very deeply, in what was then called multiculturalism. That said, his curriculum, as devised, couldn't be taught in real schools. 

It called for the use of a million different books at each grade level. Few of those books were in the schools; even the richest public school system couldn't afford to buy them. Also, almost all of the assigned books were too hard for public school kids, often by as many as four or five grade levels. 

Dr. Banks wanted kids to learn about the history of all us Americans, but he had gotten way out over his skis. He had devised a gigantic, sprawling, heartfelt curriculum—a curriculum which couldn't be taught.

Wallace and her panel showed few signs of knowing what they were talking about in Thursday's public school segments. They did know what our tribe's bumper stickers say, and they recited each one.

Virginia's kids deserve better than this. But in a time of tribal war, does anyone care about them?

Allen H. Weisselberg's possible fail!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2022

An offshoot of Trump Trump Jail: We've never exactly understood the criminal trial now underway in Manhattan.

In this criminal trial, the Trump Organization is charged with crimes. But Donald J. Trump isn't charged those crimes, and neither is anyone else!

We've never exactly understood the concept of a criminal trail aimed at an organization but not at any of its principals. Nor have we seen any cable pundits breaking their backs as they try to explain how a criminal trial of that type actually works. 

You can't send an organization to jail; presumably, the most you can do is fine it. That said, our blue tribe has been deeply involved in the various legal pursuits of Donald J. Trump, and very few questions have been asked about this underexplained criminal trial.

All in all, given the way our tribe loves to talk about Trump Trump Jail, this trial has been judged close enough!

That said, ugh! In a news report in today's New York Times, it sounds to us like the criminal case against the Trump Org may not be super-strong. The report begins like this:

BROMWICH ET AL (11/18/22): The criminal trial of Donald J. Trump’s family business took an emotional turn Thursday as one of the former president’s most loyal executives laid bare the machinery of a sprawling tax fraud, scoring points for both prosecution and defense during hours of illuminating testimony.

The executive, Allen H. Weisselberg, several times bolstered Manhattan prosecutors’ contention that the scheme benefited not just himself, but the Trump Organization. He testified that the off-the-books luxuries he and other executives received saved the company money in taxes.

Yet Mr. Weisselberg, 75, who started working for the Trumps decades ago, rose to become chief financial officer and is now the prosecution’s star witness, also distanced Mr. Trump and his family from the wrongdoing. He testified that they did not team up with him, nor authorize him to commit crimes. He agreed more than a dozen times that he had acted only for himself. 

Oof! If we might borrow from Tears of Rage:

But oh, what kind of "prosecution's star witness" is this, who goes from bad to worse?

Weisselberg has already pleaded guilty to 17 felonies for his role in the conduct under review. But all through today's report, Bromwich et al. have Weisselberg saying that Donald J. Trump wasn't part of the scheme for which the Trump Org is now on trial. 

According to Bromwich et al., Weisselberg could face as much as 15 years in prison, instead of as little as 100 days, "if the judge overseeing the case concludes that [he] lied on the stand." That said:

Throughout today's report, it sounds like Weisselberg is saying that he engaged in the conduct at question to benefit himself—and that Trump himself wasn't involved.

We've never quite understood the basic structure of this case. Plainly, Weisselberg was cheating on taxes, but he seems to be saying that others were not involved. 

No one—not even Ivanka! That's how bad this whole thing sounds!

KEVIN'S LIST: Does our tribe tend to make a certain mistake?

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2022

The demographication of everything: Just for the record, there's absolutely nothing wrong with David Von Drehle's smarts.

Von Drehle is one of (roughly) three million columnists for the Washington Post. That said, there is exactly nothing wrong with the scribe's sagacity.

For that reason, we were especially struck by a column Von Drehle wrote last week. It dealt with what the voters were trying to tell us in our recent elections.

Long ago and far away, a famous TV star named Lassie was constantly said to be "trying to tell us something." Today, the voters, or perhaps the American people, are frequently cast in a similar role.

What were the voters trying to tell us last week? Focusing on the voters of Kansas, Von Drehle began by offering this:

VON DREHLE (11/11/22): Instead of focusing on Florida, gauging Georgia or pondering Pennsylvania, I was hung up on results from Kansas, of all places. One weird pair of results in particular. I recalled the words of political consultant Dick Tuck, a legendary Pundits Club member. “The people have spoke—the bastards,” he said in 1966. His words echoed as I wondered what Kansans were trying to say.

The voters reelected Gov. Laura Kelly, a moderate Democrat with a soothing demeanor. Kelly is the sort of governor you want if you prefer not to give much thought to your governor: knowledgeable, practical, low-key. You get the feeling she probably has a safety pin and a spare handkerchief in her handbag, and maybe caramels for the grandkids.

Down the ballot, the same voters elected Kris Kobach to be their next attorney general. Kobach is an original gangsta of MAGA Republicanism; he manned the ramparts against immigrant throngs when Stephen Miller was but a lad watching “The Simpsons” and crushing on Mr. Burns. A perpetual candidate, Kobach distilled his platform this time to just three words: “Sue Joe Biden.”

Kelly and Kobach go together like a Christmas cardigan and a bag of broken glass. I can see why people might prefer one or the other, but I’m surprised to see both in the same shopping cart. Surprised and baffled. 

In this column, Von Drehle, who is plenty sharp, was "wonder[ing] what Kansans were trying to say" in last week's elections. The bafflement he experienced stemmed from these basic facts:

Kelly, a moderate Democrat, got re-elected as governor of the state. But in the same statewide election, Kobach, a MAGA Republican, got elected as attorney general!

What were Kansans trying to say, Von Drehle unwisely wondered. By the end of his column, he was offering a familiar conclusion, one pundits often reach:

Kansans were trying to say that they want divided government! More explicitly:

"Americans express a persistent impulse toward divided government...The ballot that elected both Kelly and Kobach...was cast by the electorate’s invisible hand, which seeks balance, always balance." Or at least, so Von Drehle said!

The Kansas electorate was seeking balance (between the two major parties)! David Von Drehle is very smart, but this extremely familiar judgment doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

For starters, there's no such congregation as "Kansans"—at least, not in the way Von Drehle's analysis might seem to suggest or imagine. 

A whole lot of individual Kansans went to the polls and voted last week—but they didn't do so as a group. It isn't clear that they were somehow voicing some sort of group judgment.

Why then did Kansas voters elect both Kelly and Kobach? A simple look at the Kansas tallies tells us this:

Kelly did win re-election—but she won by just over two points. Meanwhile, Kobach won his race for attorney general by substantially less than two points.

It would take very little ticket-splitting to produce those twin results. Almost surely, the vast majority of Kansas voters voted a straight party line, at least in these two races.

To her credit, Lassie was constantly trying to tell Timmy something. By way of contrast, there's no sign that the bulk of Kansas voters were trying to say that they favor divided government or some type of "balance."

That said, a simple fact emerges here—our elections are routinely decided by slender victory margins! Peeling away a small number of voters can turn defeats into wins.

That brings us to an instructive letter in today's New York Times. The letter writer makes several excellent points, while failing to notice another:

To the Editor:

Lest we Democrats take excessive comfort from the 2022 midterm results, note that many pivotal races were won with razor-thin margins. This means that tens of millions of Republicans backed candidates who were egregiously incompetent and/or blatantly dedicated to sabotaging future elections.

We cannot count on such helpful incompetency in the future, nor such timely outrages by the Supreme Court, to fuel our future success. Now is the time for Democrats to dramatically upgrade our messaging to earn a more substantial, reliable victory in 2024.

E— D— / Princeton, N.J.

Correct! The writer notes that many Democratic victories "were won with razor-thin margins." Beyond that, he notes that Democrats got some assists from outside forces this year. 

Dems got help from the Dobbs decision, and from some of Donald J. Trump's strikingly weak nominees. They may not get that kind of help next time, or in the elections which follow.

On that basis, the letter writer sensibly suggests that Democrats, and the blue tribe in general, need to upgrade their game. Along the way, he fails to note another key point:

Republicans actually won the majority of House seats this year! On balance, "the American people" don't seem to have been delivering the upbeat message which is currently being bandied about all over our blue tribe's cable news programs.

Republican candidates actually won the House—won more seats than Democrats! It's hard to square this obvious fact with the triumphalist cries emerging from within our blue tribe.

As that letter writer suggests, our blue tribe badly needs to step up its game. In our view, it has needed to do so for years.

Next week, we'll start to discuss one of the ways our tribe may be letting the GOP peel voters away. More specifically, we'll start discussing the seventh point on Kevin Drum's recent list.

As we do, we'll euphemistically start to discuss "the demographication of everything." In our view, it's one of the least helpful parts of our tribe's prevailing culture.

David Von Drehle is very smart. In our view, he wrote a column which pretty much wasn't.

Anthropologically speaking, it's very easy for us humans to make mistakes. We leave you with an award-winning question:

What kinds of mistakes—on the politics and on the merits—is our vastly self-impressed blue tribe perhaps inclined to make?

Coming: The demographication of everything

We're sorry to have to tell you this!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2022

Nova does it again: Which is larger? The number of plain old "counting numbers" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and the like) or the number of even counting numbers (2, 4, 6 and the like)?

We're sorry to tell you that the PBS program, Nova, was noodling around with that one last night, straight outta Arsenio Hall's "Things that make you go hhhmmmm." 

Here's the way it started:

TALITHIA WILLIAMS: Consider this: which is infinity is bigger? The set of counting numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4 et cetera, or the set of just the even numbers, 2, 4, 6 and so on?

EUGENIA CHENG: And intuitively we might go, “Well, that’s half of them.”

TALITHIA WILLIAMS: That’s half. Right.

The noodling continued from there, making viewers go hhhmmmm. To read the transcript or watch the tape, you can just click here. 

KEVIN'S LIST: Seven possible ways to lose votes!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2022

One way in particular: Michael Wolff wrote three best-selling books about the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

In this morning's New York Times, Wolff writes a guest essay about the newly-emerged Candidate Trump-All-Over-Again. Wolff's essay carries this headline:

The Chaos Inside Donald Trump’s Mind

Wolff pictures chaos—and "disorder." At one point, he offers this snapshot:

WOLFF (11/17/22): Having written three books in less than four years about Mr. Trump, with near constant input from his closest aides and friends, as well as hours of rambling from him, I have come to two primary conclusions: that there is almost never any true plan, strategy or forethought in Trump world and that everyone around him lives in the prison of his monologues, which allow for no interruptions or reality checks and overrule any plans others have tried to make. His fixations, misunderstandings and contempt for better minds that might correct him reign.

[One] aide recently described the constant churning within Trump world, as grievances and resentments are rehashed and blame assigned, as the workings of Mr. Trump’s “blender brain.”

Chaos suits him, allowing him again and again to turn what ought to be humiliating and defeating disorder into potent conflict...

Again, we'd like to see (carefully selected) medical specialists offer their thoughts about this apparent mental disorder—especially since the person Wolff describes could, within the realm of possibility, become the Republican nominee for president once again.

It's possible that Candidate Trump could win nomination again! Along the way, Wolff alludes in passing to a second point of concern:

WOLFF: Joe Biden will turn 80 this month, clearly frail and with obvious mental lapses. This is, admittedly, a weak hand...

"[T]he Democrats yet have a critical advantage." Wolff opines—"the professionalism needed to administer a modern presidential campaign." That said, we continue to face an uncertain near future on both sides of the presidential aisle—and there was Senate candidate Herschel Walker, orating at astounding length yesterday about the important differences between werewolves and vampires.

Walker could still end up in the Senate. This is the state into which we've fallen over the past several decades. 

Here within our floundering nation, this is the breakdown we've chosen! Within our history of the era, we'd start the chronology in 1992, with the mainstream press corps' long-running, undiscussed wars against both Clintons and Gore.

We'd start the chronology there, rather than with the most extreme version of this rolling disorder. That (even) more extreme disorder arrived on the scene in 2015 with the first emergence of Candidate Trump, who had already established himself as our reigning "king of the birthers."

As time passed, the king of the birthers became the King Arthur of QAnon. In the face of this sprawling mental disorder, voting in this month's House elections currently stood as shown as of 9 o'clock this morning:

Votes cast in House elections (to date):
For Republican candidates: 53.3 million (51.2%)
For Democratic candidates: 49.2 million (47.3 %)

Many votes remain to be counted, especially in California. But in the face of the lunacy of these most recent years, our blue tribe's party will have received, at best, something like half the national vote!

In the next presidential election, the GOP may nominate someone who isn't visibly disordered in the manner of Candidate Trump. The Democrats may nominate someone who, at age 81, may in fact seem to totter around on occasion.

To the extent that we currently live in a "nation" at all, our nation's public discourse, and our national politics, have long been a visible mess. It was in that context that Kevin Drum published his recent list.

Drum listed seven things we liberals are perceived to do—perceived behaviors which may tend to annoy some voters. We were especially struck by two items on this list:

Drum: "Things centrist voters don't like about us"
1) They think we're too lax on crime.
2) They think we're constantly making up stupid new rules.
3) They think we want to let in too many illegal immigrants.
4) They think we want to spend money endlessly and drive up the debt.
5) They were appalled by the looting and rioting during the BLM protests of 2020 and think Democrats should have denounced it more vigorously.
6) They think wokeness is ridiculous. They want us to stop talking like academics from another galaxy.
7) They do not like being called racist.

Is it possible that we blue tribers sometimes behave in ways which keep our team from winning more votes? Is it possible that we sometimes behave in ways which drive voters into the other tribe's camp?

Even more importantly, is it possible that we sometimes do such things—and that we do them somewhat dumbly? Is it possible that our judgment is sometimes quite poor—on the merits as well as on the possible politics?

As we looked at Kevin's list, we were struck by two of its points. We were struck by points 6 and 7, which are somewhat intertwined.

 When we wonder why it is that Republican candidates in this year's elections got 53.2 million votes (and counting), it seems to us that we should consider those last two points. We'd especially look at point 7.

Having said that, let us also say this:

Within our tribe, we have a long-standing, instant explanation for those 53 million votes. The people who cast those votes are racists, and misogynists, and quite a few more "ists" besides!

Rather plainly, that's the way our tribe is inclined to speak. It seems to us that we need to consider this part of our tribal culture.

Thee woods are lovely, dark and deep, but how sharp are we blue tribals? We're known to be deeply self-impressed. That said, are we actually all that sharp?

"Bing Bong! The warlock is dead," our tribe has been saying this week. We've also been exulting about what the democracy-loving American people have supposedly said.

In our view, we're way out over our skis when we make these claims. Also, we do perhaps have a tribal tendency to be less than sharp, along with quite unwise.

Tomorrow: "The American people have said..."

Why does it take California so long?

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2022

California lollygaggin': Why does it take California so long to count its freaking votes?

In just the past few hours, CNN has published a report on that topic. So has the New York Times. 

For our money, the Times does a better job with the question. That starts with this key bit of logic from Soumya Karlamangla, lead writer for the Times' California Today newsletter:

KARLAMANGIA (11/16/22): Perhaps you’re wondering why the Golden State seems to take so long to count ballots. I was, too, so I asked some election experts for their insight.

I had often heard that the delay was because California is an enormous state, with nearly 22 million registered voters. But while it’s true that we have more votes to count, we also have more election workers to help guide the process along, so volume probably isn’t the primary factor.

It's a big state, with lots of votes to count! For our money, CNN's report leaned on that explanation a bit too much. Rather sensibly, Karlamangia quickly noted the fact that California, being so large, should also have a larger than average number of election workers!

So why does Cali take so long? There seem to be several reasons. In part, the delay seems to stem from the massive rise in mail-in voting around the state. 

Allow us to voice a thought about one part of this passage:

KARLAMANGIA: In 2004, a third of California voters cast ballots by mail. In the June primary this year, that fraction had exploded to 91 percent, according to an analysis by the nonprofit California Voter Foundation.

Mail-in ballots take longer to process than those cast in person. Before a ballot can be opened and fed into a counting machine, an election worker must verify that the signature on the envelope matches the signature on file, to both confirm the identity of the voter and check that the person didn’t also fill out a ballot at a polling place.

It’s a tedious task that delays how long it takes to receive results...

In a cable broadcast last week, we heard someone in some other state—we think it may have been Georgia—say that such signature matches are performed by "handwriting experts." 

How many such "experts" really exist? You can color us skeptical.

At any rate, California continues to count—and count, and count, and count. By state law, mail-in ballots were still being accepted as of yesterday (Tuesday).

As of today, no more ballots are being accepted. To repeat the famous old bromide, it's all over now but the statewide molasses!

Back to the Cook Report: According to the Cook Report, just over 103 million votes have been officially tabulated to date in the nation's 435 House elections. 

Many votes remain uncounted. At present, though, the nationwide totals look like this: 

Votes cast in House elections:
For Republican candidates: 53.0 million (51.4%)
For Democratic candidates: 48.6 million (47.1 %)

As the counting proceeds, those numbers will change. We don't know where it will end.

That said, a lot of the canines weren't eating our blue tribe's dog food last week. Looking ahead to future elections, could there possibly be some ways to peel red votes away?

KEVIN'S LIST: We won by rather narrow margins!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2022

The need to peel away votes: As of last night, the suspense is finally over. Donald Trump has finally said that he's running again!

In their report in the New York Times, Bennett and Haberman refer to the former president's "unusually early announcement." Our thoughts drifted back to the dawn of the modern presidential era—to the famous and storied 1960 campaign.

Procedures were substantially different in that primitive era. Senator John F. Kennedy announced he was running for president on January 2, 1960—in January of the election year! 

There were only ten months to go! Pepperidge Farm remembers:

On January 2, 1960, Kennedy formally announced that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination in Washington, D.C. and stated that he would participate in multiple primaries, including New Hampshire...

On January 5, 1960, Governor Michael DiSalle, who was initially running as a favorite son candidate to lead Ohio's delegation at the national convention, endorsed Kennedy and stated that he would lead the Ohio delegation in support of him. On January 8, Kennedy filed to run in the New Hampshire primary, being the only major candidate to do so.

Our presidential elections weren't yet being run as a slush find for New Hampshire motel owners! At any rate, the election was only ten months away. That seemed like sufficient time back in that primitive era.

That storied campaign produced a lot of campaign lore. To cite one example, it produced the famous (though bogus) claim that people who listened on the radio thought Nixon won the debates. 

They couldn't see how much more handsome Kennedy was! So goes this bogus lore.

To this day, upper-end journalists haven't tired of repeating that bogus claim about the 1960 race. On the brighter side, the campaign also produced one of our greatest political jokes, recalled here by Elaine Kamarck:

The next opportunity for [Kennedy] to prove himself to the [Democratic Party] bosses was the May 10 West Virginia primary...In fact, Kennedy spent so much money to win West Virginia that he later famously quipped, “I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy; Dear Jack, Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” 

It's one of our greatest political jokes! In fact, Kennedy had been telling versions of this self-deprecating joke, right out in public, since at least 1958.

It's worth recalling that the nation's population was substantially smaller back then—just under 180 million. (Also, it was much less diverse.) In November 1960, the popular vote turned out to be (something like) this:

Popular vote, 1960 election
Kennedy / Johnson: 34,220,984
Nixon / Lodge: 34,108,157

By way of contrast, Trump received 74.2 million votes in 2020. He more than doubled Kennedy's vote! It's no wonder he wants to try again!

The population was much smaller then—and it was concentrated in different places. The state of New York had the most electoral votes. Believe it or not, these were the five largest allocations:

Electoral votes, 1960 election
New York: 45
Pennsylvania: 32
California: 32
Illinois: 27
Ohio: 25

Kennedy lost California, but won Texas, thus winning its 24 votes.

(Full disclosure! Our family moved to California in August of that year, as we entered eighth grade. Over the course of the next five years, we discovered that the suburban San Francisco of that era was a substantially better place than the old-world, culturally crabbed Northeast.)

At any rate, Kennedy announced in January of that very year! Somehow, we managed to conduct a presidential campaign in the space of just ten months. That's how backward we were!

No one in that year's campaign was as disordered as Donald J. Trump. Kennedy's money to the side, it's also true that no one had access to round-the-clock propaganda / misinformation messaging in the way modern candidates do.

(There was no Internet, and thus no social media. Talk radio was just getting started. There was no "cable news.")

Our politics has been badly distorted by the full emergence of Donald J. Trump in 2015. In the wake of last week's election results, the Republican Party may drift back to the practice of nominating more conventional candidates for all our national offices.

As we noted yesterday, our blue tribe managed to beat Tarleton State in many of last week's elections. (Tarleton State is an excellent school with a nascent football program.) 

We managed to beat Tarleton State! That said, we frequently did so by extremely narrow margins. In what ways could we possibly improve our game, possibly peeling votes away in our nation's future elections?

In response to the question you've asked, our thoughts have drifted back to Kevin Drum's recent list. He listed seven slightly annoying things our arguably imperfect blue tribe may on some occasions possibly tend to do.

Tomorrow, we'll return to Kevin's list. Our blue tribe is deeply sunk in its ways, which may sometimes be unwise and unhelpful.

Tomorrow: We're struck by two of those items

Who, or what, is Kari Lake?

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2022

An anthropology question: In this morning's New York Times, Jazmine Ulloa provides some (fairly standard) background on Kari Lake:

ULLOA (11/15/22): Former friends and colleagues of Ms. Lake described her as a liberal and a Buddhist who had a close circle of gay friends before she entered politics. But as she ran for office, she refashioned herself as a Christian conservative, among other things by assailing drag performers as bad influences on children.

Those flips have been widely reported. As we'll see below, it's a bit of an oddity on the part of the Times that the matter of the drag queens is the one item Ulloa cites.

That said, Ulloa also reports Lake's reaction to the fact that she has (narrowly) lost her bid to be governor of Arizona:

ULLOA: After the race was called on Monday night, Ms. Lake did not concede defeat, instead suggesting, without citing evidence, that the vote was marred. “Arizonans know BS when they see it,” she tweeted.

People like Lake don't bother with no stinkin' evidence. Meanwhile, do Arizonans know BS when they see it? Here is Vaughn Hillyard's instant description of Lake's campaign, as delivered on Morning Joe:  

HILLYARD (11/15/22): Look, I covered Kari Lake for a better part of the last year and a half here, and I think it was fitting to be here at Mar-a-Lago. I finally flew yesterday from Arizona, and essentially felt like I was covering Donald Trump's campaign of 2024, but in Arizona over the last year.

She predicated her campaign on trying to sell the "big lie" and trying to sell the conspiracy theories. When she wonders how she lost this race, look at it...

In the final week of her campaign, who did she campaign alongside? She campaigned alongside Steve Bannon. She campaigned alongside one of the chief promoters of Pizzagate. She campaigned alongside an individual who promoted the notion of the war on white people. She campaigned alongside state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who just earlier this year was here in Florida speaking at a white nationalist conference, somebody who frequently spews antisemitism.

This is an individual who just last week called her Democratic opponent "a pervert." This is an individual who suggested there should be perp walks for elections officials, criminal charges against individuals who oversaw Covid response in 2020 in Arizona.

This is an individual who's celebrating putting a dagger into the, quote, "McCain machine." She asserted that Cindy McCain wants to end America. She called Mike Lindell one of the great patriots of our time. She said Dinesh D'Souza is one of the great patriots in America. She suggested Paul Gosar was the kind of lawmaker our founding fathers envisioned. She called the media "the right hand of the devil, the scourge of the earth." 

Also, this is an individual who suggested, without citing evidence, that this election was phony too, just like the last election. Repeat:

Without citing evidence.

Thus campaigned the apparent former liberal, who tied her wagon to Trump. To see videotape of Hillyard's statement, you can just click here.

Who or what is Kari Lake? Do people really traffic in deliberate deception to this astounding extent? We will guess that many people, ourselves included, have never thought such questions all the way through.

We'd like to see medical specialists questioned about such topics. In our view, "these are the days of miracle and wonder" in the anthropological sense. 

We need to see ourselves more clearly!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2022

Dullest knives in the drawer: The important news report was published by the modern incarnation of Slate. 

People who clicked to read the report had, in effect, been Schwedeled:

Why yes, Tiffany Trump's Wedding Was the Most Tiffany Trump Event of All Time

The report was posted at 8 o'clock last night. In our view, the posting of this dimwitted pseudo-report helps us see who we are.

That utterly brainless report was posted last night. A few hours earlier, Slate had published these reports:

My Husband’s Gardening Hobby Has Spiraled Out of Control

Help! I Got Accused of “Stealing” Clothes I Don’t Need at the Thrift Store.

Slate produces this bullshit all day long. Starting at 5:55 this morning, it rapidly added these deathless reports:

My Mom Friends Think I’m Nuts to Trust My Daughters

Help! My Mom Has Devised a Plan for Spying on Us at Our Family Cabin.

How To Make A Life-Changing Decision In Under 60 Minutes

My Nieces Keep Telling My Kids Our Lifestyle is Gross and Weird

Earlier this morning, Slate had also posted a half hour-long Decoder Ring podcast:

The Truth About #TheDress

In the podcast, a group of Slatesters conduct an utterly pointless discussion of the famous 2017 event in which people couldn't decide whether a certain dress was actually blue and blue or was possibly white and gold. Our gang still debates this today!

In its present incarnation, Slate marbles in some traditional news reports, sometimes under inaccurate headlines, but continues to cram its larder with dimwitted "human interest" / gossip material. Increasingly, this seems to be the only way our blue tribe publications can attract enough of our eyeballs to pay their current bills.

The online version of the Washington Post has entered the same downward spiral. Based on what the Post was offering this morning on its online front page, it's clear that the Bezos operators think we readers are very dumb and extremely self-involved.

What did we find at today's online Post? The usual array of self-help piddle preceded the paper's WORLD news section. 

When we finally reached that section, we found five WORLD news reports. One of the five was this:

King Charles, who talks to trees, poses by ancient oak for birthday photo

There's nothing so trivial or so dumb that these publications won't rush to distract us with it. We would suggest to our blue tribe members that this tells us something about us.

Our blue tribe is famous for believing that we're the smart, brilliant, highly intelligent, "well educated,"  deeply moral segment of the population. 

It should be clear by now that this tribal self-assessment may not be perfectly accurate. If we hope to produce a more potent politics, we need to understand this basic fact about our imperfect selves.

The Sarah Cuauros slog in the mud we display who we actually are and what we actually care about. So-called Great Awakenings have come and have gone in our national history.

Leaving the religious component aside, could it be time for another?

KEVIN'S LIST: TCU beat Tarleton State!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2022

Also, Maggie Hassan beat Bolduc: In some ways, this is a day for blue tribe celebration.

A political bullet has been dodged. In this morning's New York Times, Bret Stephens and Gail Collins breathe a sigh of relief:

Bret Stephens: Gail, remember the old Rolaids ad that asked, “How do you spell ‘relief’?” I think the answer is “m-i-d-t-e-r-m-s.”

Your thoughts about last week’s results?

Gail Collins: Feeling pretty chipper, Bret. The House breakdown looks like nobody’s going to be able to get anything much done, but that’s definitely not the worst possibility...

Bret: If Herschel Walker loses the runoff in Georgia, I’ll be ecstatic. Simply the fact that every election denier who ran to become the top election official in a battleground state lost is a cause to uncork the champagne.

No one's going to get anything done! To a certain established class, that may seem like a decent outcome. Meanwhile, Stephens is hoping we can beat Herschel Walker! 

More on Bret and Gail's assessment below. For now, we'll direct you to the following fact:

Early in this year's college football season, TCU beat Tarleton State, 59-17.

A few words of explanation:

TCU (Texas Christian) runs a big-time football program. In the current Associated Press poll, they're rated as the fourth best team in the nation.

On the other hand, there's a fairly good chance that you've never heard of (the estimable) Tarleton State. Almost surely, you've never heard of the Tarleton State football program.

A bit of information:

The state involved in the name "Tarleton State" is the well-known state of Texas. The leading authority on the school offers this thumbnail sketch:

Tarleton State University is a public university with its main campus in Stephenville, Texas. It is a founding member of the Texas A&M University System and enrolled over 14,000 students in the fall of 2020.

John Tarleton Agricultural College was founded in 1899 with an endowment from settler John Tarleton. The college became a member of the Texas A&M University system in 1917. In 1949 it was renamed Tarleton State College then became a four-year degree-granting institution in 1959. Tarleton gained status as a university in 1973, adopting its current name. 

We're willing to say there's a reasonable chance that you've never heard of Stephenville, Texas. Again, the authority speaks:

Stephenville is a city in and the county seat of Erath County, Texas...As of the 2020 census, the city's population was 20,847, and it is the principal city in the Stephenville Micropolitan Statistical Area. Stephenville is among several communities that call themselves the "Cowboy Capital of the World."

For the record, Stephenville is a bit less than two hours southwest of Dallas. 

Warning! Within our tribe, we tend to roll our eyes at communities with nicknames like Stephenville's. If you stick with us a moment, that will lead us to Kevin Drum's List.

Tarleton State has been around a long time. If you've never heard of the (estimable) school, that may be because, to its former credit, it never had a big-time football program. 

Recently, Tarleton State decided to change. The relevant history follows:

Tarleton State University athletics currently competes at the NCAA Division I level in the Western Athletic Conference. They were admitted into the WAC on July 1, 2020, therefore ending their 26-year stint at the Division II level with the Lone Star Conference...

Tarleton left the LSC and Division II in July 2020 to join the Division I Western Athletic Conference. Because the WAC does not sponsor football, Tarleton football will play as a Division I FCS independent. 

Tarleton State has had a Division I football program for just the past two years. Who else has Tarleton State played this year?

They've also played Eastern New Mexico, Southwest Baptist, Southern Utah and Utah Tech. TCU played them this year because it would be easy to produce a very large victory margin.

That's part of the way college football works. That brings us to some of the victories Democrats won this year.

Especially on the Senate level, some of those victories were achieved at the expense of highly beatable opposition. In some widely reported instances, the Democratic Party actually spent money supporting those Trumpist candidates during the Republican primaries, assuming that they'd be easy to beat.

Now that those candidates have been defeated, our blue tribe can indeed breathe a sigh of relief. That said, riddle us this:

In a possibly post-Trump future, will our candidates be able to defeat more electable Republican nominees? We would be strongly inclined to call that a known unknown. Consider:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep—but the crackpot candidate Don Bolduc received 45% of the vote as he lost the New Hampshire Senate race to the estimable Maggie Hassan. 

On the gubernatorial level, the baldly disordered Kari Lake has been defeated in Arizona—but she has been defeated by less than one percent of the vote.

Gail Collins is "feeling pretty chipper" about living in a world where "nobody’s going to be able to get anything much done," but that is very much a first-world, upper-end attitude.  We've been living in that world for decades now, and our politics—and our national discourse—have been relentless clown shows.

Our blue tribe is feeling triumphant about the fact that we beat Don Bolduc! In effect, that was a win over Tarleton State. It doesn't tell us if we can compete on a higher level in the years to come.

Whether we know it or not, our blue tribe politics is a repulsive mess. On the intellectual and moral levels, our massively self-impressed tribe has long been a miserable joke, especially in the face of a world full of Sarah Cuauros.

On occasion, people in Stephenville notice such facts. In large numbers, they vote for Republicans. Are there things our tribe could do to start peeling such voters away, perhaps making Texas winnable?

In this year's elections, Donald J. Trump's massive disorder gave us a bunch of opponents we could defeat. But if the GOP moves beyond the disorder Trump, how will our game be then?

At least for now, the massive disorder of Donald J. Trump has rearranged the basic blocking and tackling of American election-year politics. How ridiculous has it become? Here's Bret Stephens' assessment of the candidates we managed to beat this year:

Bret: [T]he main takeaway from the election comes down to a line in E.E. Cummings’s poem “i sing of Olaf glad and big,” about a conscientious objector during World War I.

Gail: OK, an E.E. Cummings reference wins you the round, even before I hear it.

Bret: In the poem, Olaf says, “there is some stuff I will not eat,” although the actual word he uses is a bit more pungent than “stuff.” And what Americans said last week is that—however else they feel about inflation or crime or the overall direction of the country—they aren’t about to eat stuff when it comes to reproductive rights, election denialism and Republican candidates who have the intelligence of turnips and the personalities of tapeworms.

Tarleton State is an estimable school with a nascent football program. By way of contrast, our blue tribe has now shown that we can beat "Republican candidates who have the intelligence of turnips and the personalities of tapeworms."

If the GOP moves beyond the disorder of Trump, will we be able to beat stronger candidates?  The answer strikes us as highly unclear. 

That returns us to the intriguing, seven-point list Kevin Drum assembled last week. Are there things our tribe could do to improve its overall game?

Tomorrow: Pathways to defeat

STARTING TOMORROW: For today, we'll recommend yesterday's post!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2022

Attention should be paid: Our nation is absorbed with its first-world problems, as in this HELP DESK report on the front page of the online Washington Post:

Baby boomers can’t stop staring at their phones

For today, we're going to stay where we were yesterday. This morning, we find that we're still considering the terrible plight of the world's most deserving child.

At some point, attention ought to be paid! We may return to the incompetent, mundane, inane and local when we return on the morrow.

It's a "problem in philosophy," more specifically in ethics. We understood this at age 17. Slowly, we drifted away.

In the face of the world's most beautiful child...

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2022

...we recalled what a teenager knew: We had a plan for yesterday's DAILY HOWLER—but then, we encountered the front page of yesterday's New York Times.

On that front pager, we encountered "Sarah Cuauro, just 6 years old." Our day largely ended here, headline included:

A Girl Loses Her Mother in the Jungle, and a Migrant Dream Dies

DARIÉN GAP, Panama—In the darkness, the little girl called out for her mother, her tiny form lit by the moon.

The two had left their home in Venezuela a week before, bound for the United States. To get there, though, they would have to cross a brutal jungle called the Darién.

And in the chaos of the trek, the child had lost her only parent.

To contain her fear, Sarah Cuauro, just 6 years old, began to sing.

As if that wasn't enough, Times reporter Julie Turkewitz reported the contents of this little girl's song:

“The glory of God, giant and sacred,” she croaked through tears. “He carries me in his arms.”

If we're prepared to believe this report, that was this little girl's song.

Our day largely ended right there. That said, Turkewitz's front-page report reminded us of a conversation we had long ago—a conversation we've been recalling, with appreciation and with regret, a great deal in recent months.

First, all praise for Turkewitz and for Federico Rios, the photographer for that front-page report! At one point, Turkewitz explained how the New York Times was able to report the plight of this 6-year-old child:

To understand the journey so many are taking, two New York Times journalists crossed the 70-mile Darién route in September and October, interviewing migrants, guides, law enforcement, community leaders and aid workers.

The painful fruits of that commitment are found in Turkewitz' report and in Rios' photographs. For the record, we hasten to tell you this:

After three days of separation, Sarah Cuauro, just 6 years old, was reunited with her mother. For those three days, the little girl—in effect, she'd been adopted by a Samaritan—had continued to struggle toward the north, not knowing if her mother was dead or alive.

As it turned out, her mother was still alive. Eventually, mother and child decided they would have to return to Venezuela.

After reading Turkewitz's report, our day largely came to an end. We're always astonished by people like Turkewitz, who go to such remarkable lengths to report on the experiences of the wretched of the earth. 

In the face of that report, we thought again about the conversation we had—the conversation we had when we were seventeen years old, in the spring of our senior year in high school, beneath the fragrant eucalyptus trees, before the late 60s hit.

That spring—it would have been April or May of 1965—we fell, unexpectedly, head over heels in love! Emotionally, we were unprepared for the experience, but we talked and talked, and talked and talked, with the (wiser) junior in high school we were suddenly coming to know.

The gods must have favored us to let us meet this person. But out of all those hours of conversation—after school for hours and hours, then for hours and hours some evenings—we can only remember one specific exchange.

That exchange involved a person's responsibility to the wretched of the earth. The undesirable question at issue was this:

If you know that people are sick and dying around the world, don't you have a responsibility to try to act? 

That was the question we presented. It was based upon things we had read about Dr. Tom Dooley, a medical missionary who had become sick, and had died, in southeast Asia.

Didn't you have a responsibility to act? Even if you'd prefer that the cup be taken from your lips? 

Our friend said the answer was basically no. "It just isn't like that," she said.

Without any question, our friend was right, but then again, we were right too. Amazingly, that's the only specific exchange we can recall from those hours and hours, and hours and hours, of conversation that summer and spring.

The gods must have favored us at that time to let us interact with so wise a young person. (We'll guess that she'd drawn more "emotional intelligence" from her home than we'd been exposed to in ours.)

Yesterday morning, we thought about that conversation, as we've been doing lately. As we'd read about Sarah Cuauro, our day had pretty much come to an end.

The denouement goes like this:

In September of that year, we started our freshman year at Harvard College. In the introductory philosophy course—Phil 3, "Problems in Philosophy"—we were exposed to the unintentional humor of  this "philosophical problem:"

How do you knw that 7 plus 5 equals 12?

We've told this story in greater detail at this site. On balance, though, we regard that as a spectacular instance of "found humor." 

Several freshmen, including us, abandoned their intention to major in philosophy after learning what the "problems" of academic philosophy apparently turned out to be. 

(As the semester proceeded, applause at the end of each lecture diminished, then stopped altogether. Within five years, the thoroughly decent young professor had risen to major prominence within the cosseted world of academic philosophy.)

We returned to the philosophy major after sophomore year. By the end of our senior year, we'd been exposed to the later Wittgenstein's (extremely jumbled) implied critique of the comical bungles which constitute the canon of traditional academic philosophy.

For Professor Horwich's account of that matter, you can just click here. Our question from high school remains:

If you know that the wretched of the earth are becoming sick and dying, do you have an obligation to act?

No professor ever raised that question in our years at that well-known college.

We've never told the comical if embarrassing story of what happened at the end of our freshman seminar, Theory of Emotions. The seminar was conducted by a very nice person who was a psychology professor. 

In that instance, we freshmen were given a glimpse of what academic psychology is. Back to the unintentionally humorous problems of alleged philosophy:

In a wonderful bit of found humor, we can still picture our teaching assistant, NAME WITHHELD, tearing his hair as he stared out a third-floor window of Emerson Hall. He was tortured by the question of how he could possibly know that 7 plus 5 equals 12.

Don't jump, Mr. N, we wanted to shout. Things aren't really all that bad, at least not in Emerson Hall!

In our view, Turkewitz and Rios take the prize today. We'll also mention this:

Yesterday morning, the Washington Post of Jeff Bezos was selling you questions, concerns and problems like the ones listed below. 

On the front page of the online Post, these reports all took substantial priority over the placement of a certain front-page report from yesterday's print editions:

Ask Amy: I don’t go by my birth name, but my sister-in-law won’t stop using it

Miss Manners: Aspiring-influencer friend is plagiarizing my posts

Host your first dinner party in style with these basic supplies

A dog shower might be the most practical home upgrade luxury

How to create a logical spot for your television

Your toilet could harbor salmonella, staph and E. coli. Here’s how to clean it better.

Johns and Jons are about to make up 10 percent of the U.S. Senate

I mask at the gym. It’s the smart thing to do. Why do I feel so dumb?

Date Lab: He guessed that she’s ‘totally an introvert’

Sarah Cuauro is six years old. That's the dreck Bezos keeps selling.

On the front page of yesterday's online Post, all that bullshit was given priority over this other report:

‘Everyone has to act,’ Biden tells COP27, as developing nations slam U.S.

That other report appeared on the front page of yesterday's print editions. It concerned Biden's statements regarding climate change,  which is going to work its will on the Sarah Cuauros of the earth.

We strongly recommend Julie Turkewitz's astounding front-page report. Also,  Federico Rios' photographs of the world's most beautiful child.

To the world's teenagers, we recommend this:

Persist in the painful things you know. The things you know will persist!

What's happening in House elections?

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2022

Wisconsin's wasted votes: Just how large was the turnout for this year's elections?

As you may have heard, the counting continues! At the Cook Report's House Vote Tracker, here's the current tabulation of votes for the two major parties in the 435 House races:

Current tabulation, 2022 House races
Democratic candidates: 45.8 million votes
Republican candidates: 51.4 million votes

To our surprise, Republican candidates have received about twelve percent more votes among votes which have already been tabulated. 

That said, there are many votes yet to be counted. We'll be watching those numbers grow.

At the Cook link, you can check the vote totals for all 435 House races. Noodling around, we've spotted at least eighteen districts, including six in Texas alone, where there were zero Democratic votes because there was no Democratic candidate on the ballot this year. 

We don't know if that's a typical phenomenon. Two of those districts are in Wisconsin, a state which teaches a bit of a master class on the topic of "wasted votes."

As a general matter, Wisconsin has come to be pretty much a 50/50 state. In this week's election, its voters re-elected their Democratic governor (Tony Evers) and their Republican senator ("dumbest known human" Ron Johnson) 

That said, the state's eight House districts have split 6-2 in favor of the GOP. That's largely because of all the "wasted votes" in those two Democratic districts.

We start with Wisconsin 4 (basically, Milwaukee), where Gwen Moore won re-election with 75.4% of the vote. From there, we journey to Wisconsin 2 (basically, Madison), where Mark Pocan won 71.0% of the vote.

That's a lot of wasted votes! But are they the product of gerrymandering, or are they the product of demographic concentrations in those two parts of the state? 

We'd have to say that those House districts look to be reasonably compact, at least as these things tend to go. They don't have the look of lunatic gerrymandering, though we'll guess that you could easily redraw the lines so that District 2 would remain safely blue and next-door neighbor District 3 might turn blue too.

Is District 4 possibly gerrymandered a bit, with the intention of wasting Democratic votes? It looks to us like that might be the case, but we don't know the lay of the land. To the south, it's bordered by District 1, where Republican Byran Steil hung on with 54.1 percent of the vote. Not a whole lot of wasted votes there!

As Freud first said, sometimes wasted votes are just wasted votes. Sometimes, wasted votes truly are the product of deliberate gerrymanders. But sometimes, wasted votes simply reflect concentrations of population—the places where birds of a feather live.

Blue voters live in Milwaukee and Madison. Could someone, most likely Governor Evers, possibly force them to move?

Full disclosure: We believe we met Charlie Cook long ago, we think at the D.C. Improv. In our experience, he's exactly the same way at the Improv that he seems to be everywhere else!

THE CRAZY: Here Comes the Sun, David Brooks suggests!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2022

Some parts of The Crazy don't leave: At some point, the fever fueling the Tulip Craze finally broke.

Today, it's sometimes called the Tulip Mania. The leading authority on the craze thumbnails it as shown:

Tulip mania was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels. The major acceleration started in 1634 and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637...

...At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan. Research is difficult because of the limited economic data from the 1630s, much of which come from biased and speculative sources. Some modern economists have proposed rational explanations, rather than a speculative mania, for the rise and fall in prices.

The 1637 event gained popular attention in 1841 with the publication of the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, who wrote that at one point 12 acres of land were offered for a Semper Augustus bulb...Although Mackay's book is a classic, his account is contested. Many modern scholars believe that the mania was not as destructive as he described, but was limited to cliques of urban artisans.

It was just those cliques of urban artisans! The craze was limited to them!

According to the leading authority, the following may explain the way the mania began to subside: 

The collapse began in Haarlem, when, for the first time, buyers apparently refused to show up at a routine bulb auction. This may have been because Haarlem was then suffering from an outbreak of bubonic plague. The existence of the plague may have helped to create a culture of fatalistic risk-taking that allowed the speculation to skyrocket in the first place; this outbreak might also have helped to burst the bubble.

There was no bossa nova back then. For that reason, the authority blames the rise and fall of the mania on the bubonic plague!

The tulip craze has long existed as a narrative metaphor—as a symbol of the way large populations can (at times) go wild. In recent years, our own country has suffered from an episode of The Crazy—an episode featuring widespread unsupported beliefs driven by such figures as Jerry Falwell and, of course, Donald J. Trump.

The mainstream press corps played a leading role in various parts of this era, especially those involving wild claims about both Clintons and Candidate Gore. This morning, though, David Brooks suggests the possibility that this decades-long fever may have started to break.

Here comes the sun, Brooks has said or suggested—and he could even be right! For the record, here's the way his new column starts, headline included:

The Fever Is Breaking

A convulsion has shaken America and many other Western democracies over the past few years. People became disgusted with established power, trust in many institutions neared rock bottom, populist fury rose from right and left.

On the right, in America, this manifested as Donald Trump. To his great credit, Trump reinvented the G.O.P. He destroyed the corporate husk of Reaganism and set the party on the path to being a multiracial working-class party. To his great discredit, he enshrouded this transition in bigotry, buffoonery and corruption. He ushered in an age of performance politics—an age in which leaders put more emphasis on attention-grabbing postures than on practical change.

Brooks is focused on the manifestations of this fever "over the past few years." In our view, he goes a million miles out of his way to be fair and balanced concerning Trump, but he's expressing a hopeful view, one which has been widely voiced since this Wednesday morning.

For our money, the fever which Trump took to a new level got started decades ago. We'd include the passing mania which had missing children on the nation's milk cartons, along with the mania which sent owners of preschools off to die in jail.

As a people, we've been displaying a vast ability to buy into the unfounded ans The Crazy. As Brooks considers the past few years, he says the fever has broken:

BROOKS: Performative populism has begun to ebb. Twitter doesn’t have the hold on the media class it had two years ago. Peak wokeness has passed. There seem to be fewer cancellations recently, and less intellectual intimidation. I was a skeptic of the Jan. 6 committee at first, but I now recognize it’s played an important cultural role. That committee forced America to look into the abyss, to see the nihilistic violence that lay at the heart of Trumpian populism.

The election of 2022 marked the moment when America began to put performative populism behind us. Though the results are partial, and Trump acolytes could still help Republicans control Congress, this election we saw the emergence of an anti-Trump majority.

Have the elections which (mostly) ended this week really "marked the moment when America began to put performative populism behind us?" Has the price of our tulips begun to come down? On balance, have we as a very large, flailing nation started to walk away from The Crazy this week?

At this site, we can't be sure. That said, some manifestations of The Crazy are very deeply entrenched. Over the course of centuries, these manifestations have produced vicious behaviors around the world. 

A few weeks back, NBA star Kyrie Irving linked himself to one of these endless episodes. At the start of this report for RollingStone, Jon Blistein describes some of the poisonous claims to which Irving linked: 

BLISTEIN (10/29/22): Hours before another Brooklyn Nets loss on Thursday, noted “free-thinker” and basketball player Kyrie Irving took to Twitter to boost a movie and book, Hebrews to Negroes, stuffed with antisemitic tropes.

The 2018 film was directed by Ronald Dalton, Jr., and based upon his 2015 book of the same name. A description for the film states that it “uncovers the true identity of the Children of Israel,” while a similar one for the book reads, “Since the European and Arab slave traders stepped foot into Africa, blacks have been told lies about their heritage.” Both suggest Hebrews to Negroes espouses ideas in line with more extreme factions of the Black Hebrew Israelites, which have a long history of misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and especially antisemitism.

The Black Hebrew Israelite movement is fairly broad, comprising organizations that (per the Anti-Defamation League) “operate semi-independently.” The movement generally coalesces around the notion that Black people are the real descendants of the ancient Israelites, with more extreme factions claiming that Black people have been “robbed of their identity as being ‘God’s chosen people'” (via the Southern Poverty Law Center).

It’s those extremist sects that have often parroted “classic” antisemitic tropes, like claiming European Jews (often referred to as the “synagogue of Satan”) wield outsized control over society, especially in industries like banking and the media. They’ve also pushed antisemitic claims that Jews are responsible for slavery and the “effeminizing of Black men.”

At one point in the purported documentary Irving shared, Dalton (who also narrates the film) brings up the “real truth about the slave trades.” He claims that, when teaching slavery, schools don’t mention the involvement of the Catholic Church, Arab, East African, or Islamic slave traders, or “the Jewish slave ships that brought our West African negro or Bantu ancestors to slave ports owned by [Jews].”

Immediately after, Dalton pivots to the mass media, calling it “the biggest tool of indoctrination, brainwashing, and propaganda that the world has seen” and adding that it’s been “helping Satan deceive the world” for centuries. To back up his claim, Dalton utilizes a fabricated quote that’s been a staple of antisemitic literature for decades. The quote—which details the supposed control Jews have over every facet of society—is attributed to Harold Rosenthal, an aide to former New York Senator Jacob Javits who was killed in a terrorist attack in Istanbul in 1976. The “quote” first appeared two years later, published in a pamphlet called The Hidden Tyranny by a man named Walter White, Jr., who appeared to make up an entire interview with Rosenthal to push this antisemitic theory.

In introducing the phony quote, Dalton pointedly describes Rosenthal as an “Ashkenazi Jew.”

According to Dalton's film, the mass media has been “helping Satan deceive the world” for centuries. To support this claim, Dalton utilizes a fabricated quote, which first appeared in an entirely fabricated interview.

Blistein doesn't repeat the fabricated quote. Eventually, he describes parts of the Dalton book upon which the film is based:

BLISTEIN: Hebrews to Negroes, the book, contains even more instances of antisemitism...

[One] section wonders if there is “any connection” between Lucifer, Satan, Freemasonry, and Judaism and includes the claim, “Interesting enough, in earlier years, many Jews and European Scottish/York Freemasons have claimed that they worship Satan or Lucifer. Many famous high-ranking Jews and Freemasons have written books admitting to this.” 

The book also quotes the infamous antisemitic hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion...

Interestingly, many famous high-ranking Jews have written books admitting to their worship of Satan! Assuming that Blistein can be believed, so Dalton says in his book.

This is the species of disordered belief to which Irving decided to link. His decision is derived from the brutal history of our deeply flawed species—a brutal history involving murderous behavior toward people who identify as Jews and towards people of African descent.

Breaking! Borrowing from sacred Wittgenstein in a totally different context, the ability to believe ugly, unfounded claims is "as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing." 

The tendency to invent such murderous claims is also part of our natural history. Our species' powers of discernment are sometimes extremely limited when it comes to the adoption of such unfounded beliefs.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we humans are strongly inclined to place our faith in false and unfounded belief. (As we'll note next week, we routinely do this in our blue tribe too.)  When Irving linked to the film in question, he seemed to be inclined to assert the worst about one historically brutalized group because of the depth of his feelings concerning the horrific way another historically brutalized group has been treated.

This morning, a news report in the New York Times appears beneath this headline:

Kyrie Irving Is Not Antisemitic, N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver Says

As far as we know, that assessment is some version of accurate. Sopan Deb's report begins as shown:

DEB (11/11/22): N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver said Thursday that he didn’t believe Nets guard Kyrie Irving was antisemitic after meeting with him in person this week at the league’s headquarters in Manhattan. Irving has been facing backlash for promoting an antisemitic film on Twitter last month.

“We had a direct and candid conversation,” Silver, who is Jewish, said in an interview with The New York Times, adding, “He’s someone I’ve known for a decade, and I’ve never heard an antisemitic word from him or, frankly, hate directed at any group.”

In a follow-up phone conversation, Silver added, “Whether or not he is antisemitic is not relevant to the damage caused by the posting of hateful content.”

Silver declined to elaborate on his meeting with Irving, citing an agreement with him to keep the details of their conversation private. 

In Silver's assessment, Irving isn't antisemitic, but his link to the crackpot film and its hateful content did create plenty of damage.

Irving is or isn't antisemitic, but he's plainly human. Also, he seems to have an extremely jumbled mind, a fact which became clear a few years ago when he attempted to discuss his claim that the earth may in fact be flat.

Tomorrow, we'll show you excerpts from that astoundingly muddled interview with Deb. For the record, Wittgenstein said this remarkably muddled behavior extends all the way up the line to the highest levels of the academy, a point we'll visit, once again, in tomorrow's report.

Tomorrow: The rational animal's words

No day not improved: Any day can be improved by listening to George Harrison's spectacularly elegant Here Comes the Sun. To see him sing it with Paul Simon, you can just click here.

Also, Simon's Under African Skies. Linda Ronstadt adds her life story to say we're (secretly) the same beings the whole world over. 

To see the same song performed with Miriam Makeba's life story replacing Ronstadt's, you can just click here. "This is the way we begin to remember," or so Simon's lyrics have claimed.

Hours later, Boebert rising!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2022

Tired of all the success: Very frankly, we've begun to get tired of all the winning.

This morning, we noted the fact that Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) was trailing, if by a narrow margin, in her bid for re-election.

A few hours later, she's gone ahead, by 433 votes, with 98 percent counted. At Vanity Fair, it's being treated as perhaps a bit of a win that there may have to be a recount.

However Boebert's race turns out, the GOP will have control of the House and possibly of the Senate. If this is our tribe's idea of a win, we don't want to be there when we lose!

Fuller disclosure: It's still possible that Boebert's opponent, Adam Frisch, will come away with the win. For fuller disclosure, click here.