All posts by Steve Stern

Super Moon(s)

Americana, Around home

This year, as luck would have it, the last Super Moon of a cluster of three fell on Michele’s birthday. And to make it even more special, according to Michele, this Super Moon was a Blue Moon – meaning that it was the second Super Moon of the month – with a total eclipse that resulted in it being a Blood Moon just before the dawn of her birthday. If you are into that sort of thing, which I am not, but Michele is, it is almost too exciting to bear. The day before ended with a sweet sunset. On the West Coast, the moon eclipse was about five in the morning and Michele’s plan was to get up every hour starting about three. I slept so I can’t attest to how many times Michele got up, but about five she woke me and it was pretty terrific.

It was dark and cold, silent except for the sounds of a couple of owls, with a light fog layer hanging over the tidal flats of the upper Tomales Bay and, above that, was a red moon, much bigger and rounder than I expected. Michele took several pictures and this is the one I like best (BTW, Michele’s reflection is on purpose).      , 

 

The Post and the Women’s March

Americana, Around home, Bay Area Walks

Michele and I saw The Post, the other night and I liked it, a lot. Maybe because it is political, maybe because it is a sort of homage to old-timey newspaper movies, but, mostly, I think because it is so comfortably familiar. I’m not normally a Steven Spielberg fan but he was the perfect director for this movie. The scenes of Merrill Streep walking into a room of all men, all in their dark power suits, seem so familiar  from my growing-up past and Streep’s tentative reaction is perfect. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t grow up in that environment, but I did grow up in an environment that was trying to ape that life. A life in which rich, cultivated, women were close to powerless but had the time and money to look great in their clothes. It was a time when a woman  being powerful was considered crass. Merrill Streep is great as one of these powerless women, Kay Graham – trusted only to manage the family while her husband was given a newspaper to run by her father – is forced to take control.  

This movie tells of a time, that seems longer ago than it was, when it wasn’t as obvious that men were killing the world (to paraphrase Mad Max Fury Road). It takes place in 1971 and Spielberg’s suburban, optimistic, sensibility is perfect for the time, giving us scenes like Graham leaving the supreme court and walking past a group of almost Rockwellian women, seemingly waiting for change. What a difference it was getting off Bart and going up an escalator into an immense crowd of, mostly women, who are no longer waiting; they want control now. Control of their bodies, control of their lives, and, I hope, control of the world.

Almost always, however, control is not freely given, it is seized. In this case, the only way to seize political power is through the ballot box and while slightly more women vote than men, only about 68% of women voted in 2016; I would guess that that number was considerably higher in this crowd. Everybody was in a celebratory mood and the most heartening thing to me was the high turnout of young women.

To answer the President’s question

Americana, Psychological Musings

“Why Are We Having All These People From Shithole Countries Come Here?” President Donald Trump

First of all, even though it was in-artfully said, it is a legitimate question. I’m going to define shithole country as any country tourists don’t want to go to. As an example, I don’t know anybody who went to Nigeria and stayed in a hotel in the capital, Abuja, on vacation. Abuja is a pretty fair-sized city of 2,440,000  and I bet it is interesting as hell. However, for the sake of this conversion,  I’m going to call Nigeria, a shithole country by the arbitrary definition that it is not a tourist destination. I mean, nobody is going to call France a shithole country (except when they didn’t want to put troops into Iraq, but they were a shithole country then because they were hard to boss around not because nobody wants to go there). So I’m going with  Nigeria. 

As I understand Trump’s question, If we don’t want to go to Nigeria, why do we want Nigerians to come here? Well, there are already about 275,000 Nigerians that have come here and a fair question is How are they doing? Nigerians, it turns out, are a hugely successful immigrant community, as are other African immigrants. According to Bloomberg, Nigerian immigrants “have a median household income well above the American average, and above the average of many white and Asian groups, such as those of Dutch or Korean descent.” Dutch or Korean success is a pretty high bar, but Nigerians are well-educated people – who value education – whose education level is way above our National average. A high proportion are Doctors and Engineers and this is a community that adds more to the country than their less educated European immigrant brethren. 

And, if you take longer to look at it than Trump obviously took, educated, ambitious, people are more likely to leave shithole countries because these countries are usually more violent and have more limited opportunities, than, say, Belgium. To answer Trump’s question, we should invite people in from shithole countries because they are the people who will Make America great again.

 

A thought on the way to cardiac rehab

Psychological Musings

I go to a cardiac rehab class at 8:30 in the morning, three times a week. I started when I had my aorta valve replaced by a new one, manufactured out of cow parts, and I have been going pretty much ever since. When I was working, I went to the 7:00 AM class but now I go to the 8:30 class. Anyway, I hit the only traffic light on my drive at about 8:15 and, except for the lull during the Christmas season, I always have to wait at the light. This morning, waiting for the light to change, maybe ten cars in front of me, a jogger was also waiting; standing by the side of the road in the shadow of a row of trees, under an already dark and brooding sky. I could barely see her but I was surprised she was wearing pants with huge legs, what we used to call palazzo pants in the 60s, and I could just barely make out her ponytail. Then the light changed and the cars started slowly moving forward and, as I got closer, the pants got thinner until they became regular jeans. Then I saw that it was a him not a her, and he didn’t have a ponytail. 

As I drove by the guy, I realized he wasn’t even a jogger, just a guy waiting for the light to change. It got me thinking about pattern recognition and our ability to see patterns, sometimes patterns that aren’t even there. We are hardwired to see patterns, all animals are. One of the easiest patterns to read are faces – two eyes over a nose and mouth hole – which are so easy to read that even computers and dumb animals can do it. As an aside, sheep are hardwired to run away from canine faces (think wolf for canine). Shepard dogs round up and control sheep by giving them the eye, essentially showing the sheep their eyes above a nose, to move sheep away from them. However, shepherds don’t want sheep guard dogs – think Old English Sheepdog or Komondor – to spook the sheep, they don’t want the sheep running away from their guard dogs, so they bred the guard dogs to have their eyes covered with hair thus thwarting the sheeps’ pattern recognition system. End aside. 

With just a little information, a shadowy figure by the side of the road, I saw a woman jogger with palazzo pants and she even had a ponytail. But most of the heavy lifting was done by my mind, filling in the blanks. It got me thinking about how often I must do that in other, non-visual, areas. What first came to mind was reading a snippet about Trump and then filling in the missing parts with parts that match my preconceived ideas. This is what makes political “dog whistles” work; Reagan says “inner city Welfare Queen driving a Cadilac” and our pattern recognition takes over from there.