All posts by Steve Stern

Sanity and other people

Americana, Psychological Musings

I don’t believe it’s possible to have a disembodied intelligence without a physical connection to reality. Everything we think, everything in our thought processes is built around being in touch with reality. Even the word “touch”…Rodney Brooks, former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Rethink Robotics. 

I first heard of Rodney Brooks in 1997 when I saw him in Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. In it, Brooks talks about making simple, cheap, insect-like, robots with closed circuitry that didn’t work on paper (it was ten years ago that I saw the movie and I am technically way over my head so I may have misremembered some of this). The robots kept falling down and bumping into walls but as they did they started self-correcting; soon they were walking and not bumping into walls. Their learning was shaped by an external reality.  

We humans, Homo sapiens, are social animals and we are shaped by our social environment as well as our physical environment. Not just growing up but as grown-ups. Hermits aren’t hermits because they are weird, they become weird because they have no social environment to bump into to keep them reasonable. People who live alone, like the uni-bomber, become strange; if they started strange, they become stranger living alone; isolated. Because dictators are usually behind a wall of courtesans, in a very real way, they are also alone which, I think, is why so many of them spiral into increasingly extreme behavior. They are alone because nobody is pushing back everybody is unctuously agreeing.

I think this isolation, surrounded by toadies and fixers, is the way Trump ran his business and, increasingly, the Trump Presidency. Extrapolating, this is the problem with the closed feedback loop of Facebook. Only hearing our side of the story makes us crazy.  

Michelle Wolf and the loss of irony (and humor)

Americana, Psychological Musings

Dang, I thought I posted this when it was current, but, anyhow…

Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting, scholarship winners, not to divide people. Unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of the mission. The complaint by The White House Correspondents’ Association’s president, Margaret Talev who, apparently, has no idea what a “vigorous and free press” means. A press that is afraid of dividing people by telling the truth seems to me to be too close to a press that self-censors the truth because it might offend somebody in power

Margaret Talev was reacting to Michelle Wolf’s comedy act at the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Dinner, where the press and the people they are supposed to be covering, get together. I thought her act was just OK, but, to be fair to her, I read that this is a very hard crowd to play; it’s in a big space, everybody is formally dressed to impress not laugh, and, with round tables, half the people in the room are facing the wrong way to start with. The big damper, however, is that the room is full of very important people who are sucking-up to each other and they don’t like being made fun of. Trump stayed away which just shows that he is not as stupid as some people think. 

A case against Bernie for president

Americana, Politics

We are the lens through which we understand the universe. Resa Aslan as quoted in a New Yorker Briefly Noted review of God read while standing at the kitchen counter drinking my cherry juice for gout.

Several times now, I’ve been berated for being ageist, mostly by old people who love Bernie, when I say he should not be our candidate in 2020 (if he were the only progressive running, I would vote for him, but I hope he will back somebody much younger).  Recently Vern Smith said I didn’t know that common sense and decency had a shelf life, and I thought but that’s not the problem, the problem is…and that’s where I ran into my problem. How to explain that Bernie is too old to be president? I want to quickly add that, of course, Hillary is too old too, so is Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, and, extra of course, so is Donald Trump. Not physically or, even mentally too old, but culturally too old. In a way, it is very simple, Bernie is out of it, just like I am, just like anybody is who complains about kids being on their cell phones too much, just like our grandparents were. I loved my grandparents and they were very influential in my life but they were from a different era, they came here before the last century and called a car “the machine”.  In all four cases above, I do not think the problem is that they are not vigorous, they just are products of a different time. They do not see the same solutions that are visible to people who were born into and grew up in a world closer to the world as it is today. It is not a coincidence or an anomaly that the titans of Silicon Valley are all young. I think the Indians are right – I don’t know if it is the real First Americans or just the Indians in the movies but, either way, the point holds – the Chief should be young and the Elders should be trusted advisors. 

A tree in memory and dying three times

Around home, Psychological Musings

We have a lovely dogwood in our backyard and while it seems young because it is so spindly, Michele got it eighteen years ago to memorize her father’s death. It blooms every year, reminding us, each spring, of Michele’s father, Kurt Heath. Kurt was born Kurt Hoenigsberg and he escaped Europe to the United States as Europe was falling into the Nazi abyss in 1939. Actually, the escaping started when his family escaped Romanian pogroms under Premier Ion Brătianu by moving to Germany, about the beginning of the last century. Then, as Hitler came into power, they escaped Germany to France. It was a time of fear and loss that I can’t even begin to imagine and it left Kurt a difficult man, especially for his three kids. Having a tree that blooms so brightly, even on cold overcast days, seems like a great way to remember him.  

I was listening to a radio program a week or so ago and the program was touting several short essays on death. The only one I remember was an essay – a paragraph, really – on how we really have three deaths, rather than only one. The first time we die is when our heart stops beating, we all know that one, it is the date and time on the Death Certificate. We die a second time when we are put in the ground. The third death, which takes place in the future, is the death that most moved me. The third death, the last death, takes place when our name is said for the last time. When nobody remembers us, when we have disappeared into the flow of history, then we have ceased to exist.  

The FBI has raided Trump’s attorney, or, officially, the office and home of Michael Cohen

Current Affairs, Politics

I want to start with The FBI is out to get Trump (and back pedal from there). Trump slandered the FBI throughout his campaign and – and there is no better way to say this – fucked over the FBI ever since he has been President. The fact that he has actually done this ignores one of life’s cardinal axioms,  You can’t fight City Hall and it makes me wonder Why would he do this? I can come up with a theory on the slandering during the election part; he may have thought that it gave him street cred as an outsider – especially compared to Hillary Clinton, who he kept saying, was left off easy by the FBI because she was an insider – it gave the message that his campaign was not just against the Democrats but against the unfair and unresponsive insider government itself, and it was a pre-excuse for why he lost, if he did lose, which, a lot of evidence seems to show, Trump expected. But, once Trump was elected President, Why did he go out of his way to alienate the FBI?. I don’t know but I’ve got a half-baked theory.

Going all the back to 1973, Trump has acted as if he were above the law and reacted to problems by suing and then, often, settling. In that first year, 1973, he was sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination and he sued back for 100 million dollars. They settled and he, essentially, agreed to follow the law. As an aside, he didn’t follow the law and he was sued again for breaking the settlement agreement. End aside. Since then, Trump has defended about 1,450 lawsuits and usually settled for less than he would have had to pay if he had honored the agreement (he has also sued about 1,900 times). I think that this has left him with the belief that laws are malleable and law enforcement pretty weak.

Trump has been referred to as a businessman and, while he has been in business, he is not an organizational chart kind of businessman with the kind of checks and balances that implies. He is more of a mafia-type businessman in which he is the absolute monarch at the center of an organization. It was easy for Trump to confused loyalty to him with virtue so that anybody who is not loyal to him is, de facto, not virtuous and shouldn’t be in the organization. He has never had a Board of Directors to moderate his impulses, and, one thing for sure, he is impulsive. That those impulses have largely worked out in the past has emboldened him. The FBI with its loyalty to its own rules and procedures is never going to be loyal enough to Trump for Trump; that aggravates him and he lashes out. Why not? He is now more powerful than ever. 

People join the FBI for all kinds of different reasons, to help make society safer, to bring criminals to justice, for some, it is a safe government job and for some, it is a way and place to feel powerful, to feel dominant. I once heard an interview with an L.A. gang member, in talking about the anti-gang unit, he said: “They are the biggest, most powerful, gang; they always win.” Well, the biggest, most powerful except for the FBI.

The FBI embodies the same desires as its agents, it wants to make America safer, jail criminals, and it wants to be dominant, it wants to be the most effective law enforcement agency in the world. This is not an organization that takes criticism well, especially fake criticism. Trump has picked a fight with the biggest gang in the country and it is already not going well for him. To show how serious this is, the FBI has even broken through the client/attorney privilege. That must not have been easy, they had to prove to a judge that they were looking for something, not just fishing for anything, but looking for a specific something that they had a good reason to think they would find in Michael Cohen’s office. In the process, they must now have all his hard drives, and our hard drives know even more about us than Facebook.