Monthly Archives: January 2017

Time to Volunteer

Americana, Politics

Bernie2

Donald J Trump is president of the United States of America. Even if you don’t like it, even if you are horrified, it is still true. What is also true, is that marches like The Woman’s March don’t change that and they won’t change Trump either. Bitching whether it is facebook, Twitter, a blog, or standing on a street corner,  doesn’t do anything but, temporarily, make the bitcher feel better.

I worked on the Obama campaign and went to a couple of Bernie Rallies plus I’ve complained a lot so I figured I had done all that was necessary but I was wrong. I am just beginning to understand what the Tea Party figured out years ago, that getting people in power, whose values match mine, is the only way to get the political result I want. Get involved. The easiest and fastest way to get people we want into power is in the swing districts of the House of Representatives. That is where this Trump insanity started and, if Progressives want to take back the house and end the insanity, we have to get involved. Here is a good place to start. 

Volunteer

Believing Is Seeing

Americana, Evolution

Eyeball

A couple of parts in my right eye have come loose. It is a little uncomfortable but my vision is still the same so my main problem is my concern that it will get worse. Still, even though I can see as well as before, it is turning out to be a remarkable experience (not really remarkable, I guess, but remarkable to me). When the damage first happened, I saw floaties in my field of vision, pretty big floaties, that I guessed were just debris from the loosening. But now I usually don’t see the floaties, they are still there but my brain has wired around them filling in the blank spaces with information from the other eye, I think, sort of like Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop.

Except that my brain only wired around most of them, not all. While I am standing in the kitchen doing dishes, for example, and a floaty drifts down to the corner of my eye, I will be distracted by seeing the cat just at the edge of my vision field. When I turn my head and look, she is not there. In other words, when the floaty is floating around where there shouldn’t be anything, my brain sort of fills in the blank spot but when the floaty is somewhere where there might be something, my brain uses the information from the eye and makes it something reasonable, like a cat crouching down next to the dishwasher.

We don’t see with our eyes, we see with our brain. The eyes just provide the necessary raw information required for the for the brain to turn it into an image. However, the required information doesn’t have to be very much information. We are incessantly trying to connect the dots, trying to make patterns out of the constant flow of information coming from our eyes. At a very basic level, our brain is overriding our lying eyes.

I suspect that when we know the answer, really know the answer, it is even easier for our brains to override those lying eyes.

Disruption

Uncategorized

Disrupt

I was reading a review of The Founder and was taken by the comment that, like The Social Network and Steve Jobs, this movie is about disruption.  facebook, the iPhone, and McDonald’s all changed the world. Whether they are all good changes may be up for question but there is no question that they changed their world. In an article on disruption in business in the Harvard Business Review – that was linked in one of the reviews, I am not normally a HBR reader – and how to combat it, they say The first key to survival is understanding that big-bang disruptions differ from more-traditional innovations not just in degree but in kind….Once big-bang disrupters enter the market, it’s up, up, and away. They deliver surprise after surprise, thanks to three defining characteristics: unencumbered development, unconstrained growth, and undisciplined strategy….these innovations are often built out of readily available components that cost little or are free.

It seems to me that this describes Trump.

 

 

La La Land

Americana, Film

LLL d 29 _5194.NEF

If you want to get away from Trump for an afternoon or an evening, go see La La Land. It is terrific. It is a subtle and realistic movie about a relationship – relationships, really – with the unspoken as music. It is a deep, moving movie disguised as a frolic.

Lies, liars, post truth reality, and the fight for the National Truth

Americana, Politics

Crowds

We want our politicians transparent, yet we want them powerful as well, and power, even in the best of circumstances, means the management of information, and telling the truth is not managing the information. Nathan Heller in The New Yorker some time ago.

“I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth.” Trump at CIA Headquarters.

“You’re saying it’s a falsehood and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,”  Kellyanne Conway, senior Campaign Manager and now counselor to President Donald Trump, to NBC’s Chuck Todd.

What most irks me right now is when my fellow Liberal dismiss Trump as stupid or deranged. The problem is that when one thinks of him as stupid and he does something like the crowd size press briefing, the natural reaction is to say Look how stupid he is, doing something so stupid and counter-productive?  But Trump is not delusional – he just believes what he wants to believe which, BTW, will be much easier now that he is in the Presidential Bubble – he is very smart and he is nasty and cunning; the question should be Why would he do something that seems so stupid and counter-productive, what does he have up his sleeve?