Dwarf Russia

President Obama remarked, in his offhanded, no drama way, that Russia is not really a major threat to the place of the United States in the world. 
They are a much smaller country than us, he said, which shocked me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxalXlBx9x0

Professor Google confirmed President Obama's numbers: Russia has less than half the population of the United States. Of course, it's land mass looks much larger, or at least longer--it covers 11 time zones. 
I was always accustomed to thinking of the Russians as vast.  They lost 20 million in the second World War. But  now Russia has roughly 144 million people to our 320 million.

Still a big guy?

President Obama went on to say: 
1. Russia doesn't innovate.
2. They don't make much of anything.
3. The only thing they have to sell  is oil and gas. 

Hell, Saudi Arabia does that. Is that all Russia's got?

Putin remarked, as he annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine, that Ukraine really isn't even a country, by which he meant, Ukraine is really just part of Russia. But, even if he could grab Ukraine, that  still would not reconstitute the Soviet Union. And, while I cannot know from this distance and with my limited knowledge of Ukraine, there is some reason to believe at least the Western half of Ukraine is populated by people who do not think of themselves as Russians. They don't even speak Russian as their first language. Ukrainian, apparently, is not Russian. I'm not even sure there's much affection for Russia in Ukraine or in any of those "Stan" countries. Not at all clear they'd send troops to Russia's aide.

Hope fulfilled 

The Russians do have lots of ICBM's with nuclear warheads. But North Korea has nuclear war heads on missiles and that remains nothing but a backwater and a bizarre anomaly. 

But the idea of Russia overwhelming Poland, Germany, France and England with a huge Red Army is just no longer in the cards. 

Nuclear weapons struck me as a good thing, when you considered a massive Soviet army overwhelming Western Europe and nuclear weapons were what stood as a wall against that,  but now that Leviathan is gone.

How little I know of Russia today. Just stories about their head of state ordering the murders of a defector in London with some radioactive cocktail, ordering the murder of journalists, of a woman dissident. They jail girl bands in Russia. As if "Pussy Riot" were a serious threat to national security. They cheat systematically by running Olympic athletes through doping programs. As if winning Olympic medals mattered enough to cheat like that. 
And their winter Olympics, where they could not even get all four Olympic rings to light up--why was that spectacle so important to them? For Hitler, in 1936, he was trying to showcase his ideas about the Master Race, but what was Russia trying to prove at Sochi?
 It's a sort of bad boy state.  
I will do what I want to do because I am big and strong and can get away with it.
Sort of a drunken frat boy, who wakes up naked and wonders why people don't respect him.

It's the classic small man syndrome: I will show you. I will make you respect me.

Never occurred to me Russia may be struggling with an inferiority complex.  Russia always seemed so big. It's amazing how you can listen to news programs so often, for so long, and never hear such a basic idea. 

I'm guessing President Obama said these things because he no longer feels constrained to follow a rule which says you don't belittle another country or another country's leader because you're just asking for trouble and why court trouble? But now. what does he have to lose? He can say whatever he wants.  

And what he's saying is Mr. Putin does not rule a superpower. He rules a second rate country. 

Japan makes great cars and lots of computers.  Germany makes cars and lots of highly engineered manufactured goods. France makes lots of high end stuff--food, clothes, the Citroen which has the world's best car seats. Britain has the City of London stock market and makes good movies, not to mention Downton Abbey.  Italy makes fashion, art, and entertainingly dysfunctional governments.  Even Finland made Nokia cell phones. Portugal makes Port and generates 100% of it's power grid by wind and solar some days. Iceland makes great sweaters. 

What does Russia make? Okay, Vodka, but really: a country with 11 time zones and the best it can do is vodka? Hell, the state of Kentucky makes moonshine, but that doesn't mean it's worth more than a bucket of warm spit.

So, great, you can murder people. Is that so admirable?

All Russia  makes, when you get right down to it,  is mischief. 

Trump: Fresh Communicator

Just caught a glimpse of Trump's press conference.

In some ways I had the same sensation I had listening to Ronald Reagan, years ago: This guy is different.


What I heard was the government is buying some new fighter and it will be a bargain, a great price and it will be a better airplane than what the Obama administration had planned for.


Reagan was fun to listen to because he had some great lines, which were clearly written for him but he delivered them with gusto.  "The problem cannot be solved by the government; the problem is the government."  Or, "The nine scariest words in the English language: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Had to laugh.

Try not to think too much about what he was saying but you understood.

Much as I loved President Obama, listening to him, with the pauses while he searched for just the right word, was not fun, not like with Reagan.

His Inaugural Address was so unemotional, so business like, it was simply not uplifting. The only time he was truly an inspiration speaker was at his 2004 convention speech. Oh, and his astonishing speech in Grant Park the night he won the Presidency for the first time, "If anyone ever doubted that in America, anything is possible..."The rest of the time he was admirable, rational, reassuring and ultra competent, but he took great pains not to appeal to your emotions. He was saying, that's not what I'm about.

Certainly, Hillary tried to appeal to emotions, but they were warm and fuzzy emotions, mostly, not stand up on your chair and shout emotions. Bernie did that.


Most of the politicians, when you watch them, you can see the wheels turning in their head, you can see them trying to avoid saying certain phrases which they've been warned will get some constituency angry, or which may be heard by a labor union or a Black advocacy group, or a policeman's union and they are trying to parse a sentence which will offend none of these people. So a Black man gets shot in the back by a white police officer and you get a sentence like, "We all deplore the loss of life, but we have to reserve judgment about this particular incident until we have all the facts and can determine if the officer discharged his service weapon in a manner which was justified by the circumstances."


Say what?

The last time, other than Bernie, I can remember a really liberal thinker appealing to emotions effectively was Martin Luther King. And that was 50 years ago.

Here's a challenge for you: Write a liberal manifesto, a speech, which appeals to the gut, to the soul.

Any topic, you choose.

 

Until we have something to say, someone to say it, we'll have Mr. Trump and his crowd.


The people want circus. Where's our circus?

Right To Work Law In New Hampshire

Aren't the Republicans masters of phrasing?  The "estate tax" becomes the "death tax" and an effort to destroy unions becomes "the Right To Work."  I mean, isn't everyone for the right to work?

Who is against telling a man or woman they have a right to work?


But, of course, what the law before the legislature in Concord, New Hampshire aims to do is to destroy unions, because, well, Republicans are the owner class, the bosses, and they hate unions.


The problem for Democrats is they have not been able to come up with a reasonable sounding answer to the anti union argument, which has been framed not as an anti union argument but an argument for freedom, for personal freedom to choose not to join a union.

If I am a man who wants to work in a super market but I grew up being repulsed by Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters' Union or if I currently hate the police union because they protect murderous, racist cops, why should I be forced to pay union dues?


All I want to do is to go to work and draw my pay. I don't want to join a movement. What's wrong with that?


The answer, of course, is you do not live your life in splendid isolation. You cannot ignore others around you. You are part of groups whether you want to be or not.

If the government fights a war, that requires a group effort. You can get drafted.
If you want to go to public school or send your kids to school, you have to be vaccinated against measles, because, much as you might want to just be left alone, you carry viruses which can threaten the health of those around you.


You benefit from the union contract, even if you do not join the union, because the union has done a lot of work negotiating with the owners to get the best wage and the best health insurance package, and since the union has done all this labor for you, you should not get a free ride. If you decide to undercut the union, to work for a lower wage, you have not taken that action in isolation, you have affected the market value of that job.


The bosses would be very quick to come down on any competitor to their product who undercuts their price--just look at all the hew and cry over China "dumping" steel in the U.S.--but when you undercut the wage package, well then you are a hero as far as the bosses and their Republican tools in the legislature are concerned.


But I never asked the union to do anything for me. How do you know I couldn't have negotiated with the boss for a better wage than what the union got?


The bosses, of course, would love you to think that. In fact, I worked for a corporation which in its employment contract forbid me to discuss my salary or benefits with any other worker. That was a firing offence. Why? Because the bosses knew they could keep wages down if they could prevent one worker from finding out another worker, doing the same job, was getting paid more.

There are some businesses which simply cannot run without human beings doing labor--everything from hospitals, to bus companies to super markets. True, technology is replacing workers in many businesses, but as long as the business needs human beings to do business and to make a profit, the workers are part of the cost of doing business and the owners and stock holders live in opposition to those workers every day, to the extent the wages paid are part of the overhead which gets subtracted from income to yield net profit.


But back to the "Right to Work" laws, which say the union can exist but it cannot ask workers who do not join the union to pay for the work of negotiations which those workers never asked the union to do for them.  Doesn't that sound fair?


The argument is, well, before you arrived, we had a union which got agreement for a pay scale, open to all, and every year since you've been here, you've benefited from that pay scale. You may not have asked for us to do the work, but you've benefited, so you have to pay your fair share.

You never asked the government to build the road you use to get to work, but you use that road and it needs upkeep, so you have to pay the tolls, the gasoline taxes used to support maintenance of that road. You can say, "Well, but I never asked for you to build that road," but as long as you benefit from it's presence, you pay.


You can say, well, that's different, because I can choose to use that road or not, but I can't choose to pay or not to pay those union fees.  But, actually, if you choose to work for a business which is kept going by the labor of its employees, you have chosen to benefit from the efforts of the union, which keeps the business going by insuring a reliable work force.


What you are really arguing in refusing to pay your dues is you want to live off the grid, you want to be unconnected to others while still benefiting from the work others do.  Some would say you want your cake and to eat it too.


All the benefits without any of the costs.

In fact, you learned to read and write at public schools and you paid property taxes for that. That made you more valuable to the business which employed you. You showered and used your home toilet before getting to work, more infrastructure you paid for. But when you got to work, suddenly you claim to be unconnected to the other workers keeping that business going. You are the lone cowboy, riding the range, the independent, self reliant man who needs nobody else in the world.


In the practical world, of course, if you allow some workers to opt out of paying union dues, then, especially when things get tight, more and more workers may opt out of paying dues and eventually the union collapses for lack of funds.


And when you get to work, you function in splendid isolation, with no desire to bond with your coworkers.


Congratulations: You need nobody in this life. You are strong enough to stand alone. Gary Cooper in "High Noon."

The Republicans want to frame this as an argument for personal freedom for that lone cowboy, that self reliant man who doesn't need the help of his co workers to fend for himself. Guy probably carries a gun, too, cause he don't need no police to protect him.  Truth is, that cowboy needs other people or he wouldn't be working for a pay check.

But if you want that job, where others work to support you, you have to pay.
You want to open your own business, work without others supporting you. Go right ahead. You want a pay check which has been enriched by the work of others, pay your damn dues.

Mutual Meddling: US and Russia, Nothing New

History is one long argument. Having little formal training in it, the best I can do to understand the past is to read and watch TV.  In that, I suppose I'm not much different from  my fellow citizens in those Blue Wall states.

1870 cartoon in New York Daily Graphic 

Lately I've been reading "Reilly: Ace of Spies" by Robin Bruce Lockhart and the more widely marketed, but far less compelling book on Reilly by Andrew Cook. 
And I've been watching "The Americans" on Amazon, and David Lean's version of "Dr. Zhivago," (a film made by a Brit, starring an Egyptian in the title role and an American actor as the chief villain.)

Sidney Reilly the real article 

From all of these sources the underlying concept I've formed is America (and Britain and France and most certainly Germany) have been reaching into Russia and trying to manipulate Russia for at least 150 years. We've had our hands up Russia's skirt so often, it is small wonder the Motherland is quick to slap us, and to want to return the favor.

TV version of Reilly

As early as 1870, at least some in America recognized Russia as a colossus we would have to deal with on a global scale. Britain orchestrated Russia's defeat and the loss of its Navy in the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of the 20th century and its agents (including Reilly) tried to overthrow Lenin when Russia pulled out of World War One. 

Brits tried to remove this guy

The first World War was a revelation for many in Russia, as the true meaning of the word "decadence" surfaced in the terrible suffering of the many owing to the indifference of the rich few.  

As Lockhart observed, Russia's "gallant but inadequately equipped army was being mauled by the Germans while in the cities and towns the people starved in the bread queues. In Petrograd, the aristocracy and rich bourgeoisie continued to live an orgiastic existence in which champagne, caviar and bedding their coachmen's daughters and their neighbours' wives were the main ingredients. The Russian nobility was an intellectual superfluity lost in artificial life, in sensual pleasure and in unbroken egoism. They had reduced love for women to a kind of voracious gourmandise."

If the Russians did try to "influence" our 2016 election, one has to say, "So, what else is new? We've done the same and worse many times over to Russia."

And the fact is, Democrats have tried to blame their losses on the Koch brothers, and now the Russians, when, in fact, the truth lies closer to home. As the Koch brothers have noted, if money and the TV ads it can buy were sufficient to win an election, they would have been more successful in electing their candidates to office.  In fact, Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump five to one in most states she lost and and nine to one in some. The money, the Citizens United case, none of it made a difference. 













If the Russians somehow managed to actually hack the voting tallies, actually managed to turn a Clinton electoral victory into a computer hacked defeat, well, then we'd have a case of Russia succeeding in doing something the Americans have apparently never succeeded in doing, but which the British most certainly tried, i.e. actually placing in power their man as opposed to the man the local population voted for.

Like the best spy stories, the truth will never to known about the particulars. But the truth about the greater story is obvious:  The United States tries to control Russia and the Russians would like to do the same to us.

Maybe this image isn't photo-shopped 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had mostly forgotten about the Russians. They were mostly a bogey man I didn't really believe in growing up during the cold war, but then they faded and were replaced by the undeniably vicious and rabid Islamic fundamentalists. 

Enough Endless War

The new problem for me is our own FBI.  Looks like we've got the Republican FBI and the Democratic CIA/NSA.  We used to laugh at the Russians and the Germans who had politicized their national police, and saw the various organizations fight among themselves.

Now look at us.

Donald The Joffrey: Let Your Eyes Feast on the Truth

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what are these two pictures worth?

"How godlike, how immortal is he?...But the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself that is which determines or rather indicates, his fate."
--Henry David Thoreau

Of course, Mr. Thoreau never knew Mr. Trump.

Trump Hisownself 

The Arithmetic of Deceit: The Perversion of the Republic (Gerrymander)

When people say Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million, it leaves me unimpressed. That number does not speak to the underlying psychology of voting in this country, and the implication of the statement is that a majority of voters in this country wanted Hillary Clinton to be President, not Donald Trump.
That number cannot tell you what was or is in the minds of the American population or even the American electorate (which are two different things.)

As anyone knows who lives in Maryland or Massachusetts knows, if you are a Democrat,  you don't need to go vote for your state to go the way you want it to--so you may go to work or go bowling instead of waiting in line at the polls.  Same is true for Mississippi and Idaho, on the Republic side. It is entirely possible, if the voters knew the election would be determined by the popular vote, millions more in the South and Mountain states would have voted for Mr. Trump.

We, by now, all realize we do not have a democracy but a republic. A democracy is ruled by a majority of the people; a republic is ruled by the representatives of the people, very different. Our hallowed founding fathers hedged their bets, not trusting the mostly uneducated rabble which constituted the population of America in the 18th century, before public education and mass communications. 

So we have the electoral college.  
We also have a largely unexamined concept that a country is not simply the people living within the geographic borders of our nation, but it is, somehow, the actual geographic territory, the mountains and farmlands and lakes and rivers which should have a say in how our nation is governed.  
So we have people living in Wyoming and Montana and the Dakotas complaining bitterly about the people in Washington, D.C. trying to take away their "country" from them. In fact, those people have somewhere between three and six times the voting power of the Black man living in Philadelphia, or certainly the Black man living in Washington, D.C.

a safe Republican district in Texas 

The fact is there is something which has taken away our country from the majority of its citizens for at least a century,and that is the perverse practice of drawing Congressional districts to take power and representation away from the majority of people living in a state: Gerrymandering.

One could ask why we have states represented in Congress at all, why we couldn't simply create a grid for the nation and elect people from that, or why we need to spread out the representatives by geographical territories at all. Historically, the interests of the industrial the  Northern states, of New England, were at odds with the agricultural South.  New England shoe factory owners and workers might have wanted tariffs ,where South plantation cotton owners wanted no tariffs because they sold their cotton to England and Europe and they wanted no part of a trade war. 

But now, the country is more integrated commercially and financially and these state borders we live with now may be anachronisms.

Doing away with states, or re drawing their boundaries will likely never happen, but it is remotely possible, however unlikely, we might do away with the bizarre boundaries which define Congressional districts which are designed to deny representation to the majority of people living in a state.

To mention just one of fifty possible examples, Pennsylvania:  Pennsylvania has 18 seats in Congress, 18 votes of which Republicans claimed 13.  In 2012 it took roughly, only 180,000 votes to send a Republican to Congress n Pennsylvania,  where it took 270,000 to elect a Democrat. (Wyoming sent it's Republican Congresswoman to Washington with only 166,000 votes.) Put another way, Republicans voting for a Republican put him in his seat with an 87% success rate and Democrats voted for a winner only 49% percent of the time, despite the fact about 51% of the votes were for Democrats and 49% were Republicans.

If these numbers make your head spin, think of it this way. If you took all the Democratic towns from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and drew a line around them and connected them into one Congressional district then the 51% of the vote would send only 1 Democrat to Congress and the Republicans would sent 17. 


The fact is, it doesn't have to be this way. If Congressmen ran for the House the way Senators run for the U.S. Senate, i.e., "at large" then the Pennsylvania delegation would have 10 Democrats and 8 Republicans, rather than 5 Democrats and 13 Republicans.


Of course, we still have to ask ourselves about the U.S. Senate whose members are elected at large. But then you get back to the idea that the Senators from Wyoming, Idaho and Montana all get two votes even though they represent fewer Americans than live in Washington, D.C., whose voters get no U.S.Senators at all.

Reaping the benefits of a perverted system

If Congress actually reflected the will, the philosophy, the needs and the opinions of the people, it would not much matter whether Donald Trump won.  In fact, the past 8 years of paralysis, during which a popular President was stymied by a Republican House and Senate, would have never happened.

Think of what that would have meant in just one area: Health care. The votes for a "public option" or "Medicare for all who want it," would have been there. Instead, all the Democrats could get through was an organism (Obamacare) so wounded and tied in knots by Republican opposition it had to sink beneath the waves, bleeding and dying before it was barely born; then the Republicans had the chutzpah to shout: "There we told you it would never work!"

And don't even get me started on the Supreme Court, which next to the House, is the most reactionary, Right Wing Tea Party, originalist bastion in government.

Wealth follows power

When Benjamin Franklin was asked by that lady outside the hall in Philadephia, "What sort of government have you got us?" Franklin famously replied, "A Republic, madam, if you can keep it."

We have our answer now. 

Of Experts and IQ

Reading Andrew Hacker's books about the follies of American educational theory and practice reminded me of an episode at one the annual Endocrine Society meetings some years ago.

The annual Endocrine Society meeting brings together four thousand endocrinologists from all over the world and it's where you have a chance to ask the "experts," the authors of the articles you've read in the "New England Journal of Medicine" or the "Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism" all those questions you've been storing up all year.

Every week I see newly pregnant women in my practice who have just learned they are hypothyroid, and these women have gone on line and read their babies will suffer a big hit to their IQ scores unless the mothers are treated yesterday. They arrive at my office, understandably, in a panic. Their incubating babies have been deprived of thyroid hormone from week 8 to 12 of their gestation and now they will never be smart enough to get into Harvard.

The source of this bad news about baby's IQ was a study done in Milan, Italy some years ago where mothers with low blood levels of thyroid hormone were divided into two groups, and one was treated with thyroid hormone to bring their levels to normal and the other was not.  The babies were tested at three years of age and those whose mothers were not treated with supplemental thyroid hormone scored three to four  IQ points lower than those whose mother got the extra thyroid hormone.

We discussed this study in our weekly endocrine conference and I was alone in voicing substantial doubts about the study, but, of course, like my colleagues, I figured, what the hell? Why not treat women with thyroid hormone?  The only real question was how often they needed their blood tests monitored and what to tell them about the harm done before they were treated.
Many of these women had experienced some delay before they were tested or treated and some were ready to sue their obstetricians for the blow dealt to their babies's brains and academic futures.

This simply made no sense to me for a variety of reasons:
1.  The developing fetal brain, it is well known, does not need thyroid hormone at various stages in development, which is the reason you can check babies at birth for the babies' blood level of thyroid hormone and you have a several weeks to treat them with thyroid hormone. This is the reason every American baby gets tested at birth for hypothyroidism (a test called TSH) and public health nurses track down those who are low and treat them. Since this practice was instituted the incidence of cretinism (the mental retardation caused by infantile hypothyroidism) in the United States has fallen to nearly zero, being seen only in babies born in places where mothers deliver off the grid. 
2. It's been long taught that thyroid hormone does not cross the placental barrier from mother to child, so why would treating the mother help?  Since this study, people have been back pedaling on this teaching and it has made me wonder how we knew this "fact" in the first place, and I have not yet discovered the answer. Another "truth" that "experts" taught, which may not be true.
3. The kids' IQ's were tested at age three. How do you test a 3 year old for IQ? And if you could reliably test for something called intelligence, at age three, what would you find at age 18 in these same kids?  This was the question I asked the panel at the meeting. I pointed out the neurosurgeons have been telling us for decades about how plastic the brains of kids are compared to adults, which permits all sorts of brain surgery, from which kids seem to recover and become perfectly functional. So why should we believe these kids whose mother did not get thyroid would not, at age 17,  get into Harvard because thyroid hormone therapy was delayed a few weeks when they were in utero?

4. During the discussion at the Society meeting someone mentioned that women in Italy do not get tested for thyroid until the 2nd trimester, sometime around week 14-16, so even the treated group got treated a lot later in pregnancy than American women, who are typically tested around week 8.  The organs are all "formed" by week 12, but this is one of those things which make you think that there might be more to an organ than its structure as seen by an ultrasound--there might be more going on in a brain or a liver in terms of "formation" and maturation. Lungs, of course, have long been known to look like lungs far before they can function outside the womb as lungs. 

The members of the panel on stage started squirming. One or two suppressed smiles, others could not, but some were clearly angry. No clear answer was forthcoming other than the usual, "We need more studies."

In the hallway, afterward a woman who introduced herself as a professor of pediatrics caught my arm and informed me that actually three year olds can be test for IQ and these IQ tests are very "durable" and predictive of adult IQ's, and a 3 to 4 point difference is "very significant."

I thanked her for her input and told her I did not believe a word she said. 

I'm a long way from being a pediatrician, but I've had two kids and I had the opportunity of observing them daily and closely and watching my wife, a nurse, put each one through their little Piaget tests at every age and I can tell you, I had no clue whether these kids would be academically talented, intelligent enough to tie their own shoes or even find their way from their rooms to the kitchen.  

For the longest time, our dog seemed several steps ahead of our kids. (He was a very bright dog, admittedly.)

an early fondness for blades

And one of these kids, was charming but I would not have bet on his getting out of middle school on time.  Doing his math homework with him, helping him write his essays, I thought, well, maybe he can work with his hands when he grows up, but he may not want to go to college.

Of course, I missed a few key clues about him. For one thing, when he was in 6th grade, he wrote an "epic" poem, based on a mix of fantasy books he loved, and the "Iliad" and his teacher put it in the literary magazine.  For another, while he seemed incapable of staying in his chair for more than thirty seconds, when he got home from wrestling team practice, beaten to a pulp and exhausted, he would read a 1,500 page fantasy novel with two dozen plot lines and as many characters and he would not budge until he finished. 

I was right about one thing: He did wind up making his living with his hands, as a surgeon. 

Working with his hands

His middle school teachers, his counselors, all the experts told us not to expect much from him, and looked at us as typical pushy parents who wanted their kid to go to Harvard when he really belonged in the construction trades.

His patients are human, but he makes an exception for gorillas

Expert opinion, right there.