All posts by Steve Stern

Donald Trump and Michele’s theory of why we should burn coal

Politics, Psychological Musings, Uncategorized

Zhangjiajie

China has eye-burning smog everywhere. When we were in China, in 2009, I think we only saw blue sky on one day. We thought we would see blue sky when we went to Zhangjiajie National Forest Park because it was pretty much out in the boonies – Zhangjiajie is a combination of Brice Canyon and Zion National Parks except that it has wild pink azaleas, roaming monkies, and Chinese food in little kiosks along the trail – and is one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited, but we never saw it with blue sky even after a two-day rain storm. Every day, my eyes burned and my nose ran. It was worse than when I lived in Los Angeles in the late 50s.

Because the smog is so bad in China, the pressure to reduce it is very high just like it was in Los Angeles in the 50s. Because the pollution is so visible, there is a massive lobby to get rid of sources of pollution and China has become a world leader in solar and wind power. In the US, because our sky looks so blue, the Clean-air Lobby is much weaker.

More and more we are burning Natural Gas. However, Natural Gas is still doing great damage to our environment. It is not as bad as coal – according to the Union of Concerned Scientists,  Natural gas emits 50 to 60 percent less carbon dioxide (CO2) when combusted in a new, efficient natural gas power plant – but burning Natural Gas is still doing great damage to our planet. Michele thinks that we should burn coal, because, then, we would see the damage we are doing and increase our efforts to clean up.

Hillary and the Democratic Establishment are like Natural Gas, they have been undermining our Democracy and pay only minimal attention to the Environment. Trump is like coal, we really see the damage he is doing and that is mobilizing the opposition (or Resistance as San Francisco Magazine calls it). In that way, Trump may be the best thing that has happened to us.

 

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.