What is a "Fact?" Fact Free Zones and The Truth About Trump

One of the best classes I ever had in college occurred without warning during a literature class with Professor Rosenblum, a tweedy, humble man who was listening to a student's response and asked, rather innocently, "But what is a fact?"

Eyes rolled all around the room, but I was fascinated.
Eventually, the usual things got rolled out: "Well 2 +2 =4."
"Oh, that's a definition. Math is all about convention. Actually, 2+4 =4 in a base 10 system, but not in others."
"I am sitting in this class," another student offered.
"Well, yes, we can agree on that," Professor Rosenblum added, "But how we apprehend your presence may differ, and while you may be physically perceived to be here, you may be a million miles away in some ways, or, in your mind, you may be back in your dorm room with a girlfriend."


As the years went by, I thought of all sorts of unassailable facts, like, "The heart pumps blood to the brain." These are "facts" of mechanics, which we can see and there is so much every day empirical observation and experience, they are beyond much dispute.

Nevertheless, it all comes down to evidence, definition and perception.


When I watch Alisyn Camerota and Chris Cuomo, they struggle with their exasperation with President Trump for his fact free tweets and comments, or for his denying "facts" which they know to be true facts.


But much of what they assert are true facts is open to interpretation. Take Trump's claim crime is up in America, that inner cities are rife with and riven by crime. They play a clip of Newt Gingrich defending Trump's assertion about high crime rates and what he says is the experience of the inner city citizen makes him think crime is up, emotionally, even if crime statistics suggest otherwise. The murder rate is down. Rapes are down. Armed robberies and assault are down, according to police and FBI statistics and yet Trump says crime is up.

But what Gingrich is saying is, if you are the victim, it doesn't feel like crime is down to you.
And as anyone who has watched "The Wire" will know, crime statistics in particular are often "massaged" to make police departments look better.


Murder rates are more intransigent, because when you have a dead body, one would think, it's hard to deny there's been a murder. Unless...the dead body is ruled by the medical examiner to have died from natural causes, and again, as Wire viewers know, police may argue with the ME to classify a death as natural causes because they do not want to be saddled with a murder they cannot solve. Makes their statistics look bad.
Trump claimed his inauguration crowds broke all records, but the Washington Post published the "fact" that the crowd was smaller than for Obama. They published photos to substantiate this "fact." But crowd estimates are notoriously inaccurate and who knows when the Trump crowd photos were taken? Were they shot after he finished speaking or well before?


In medicine, we are dealing with "facts" in every New England Journal of Medicine article: People eating a high fiber diet are found to have, despite previous claims, no reduction in colon cancer. But for how long were they eating the diet? Was it long enough to affect the development of colon cancer, which may take years? What did they consider a "high fiber diet?"  How were the colon cancers detected? Is it possible some were missed?  The statement of facts often generate long debates over analysis. 


The thing about a statement like: "Hispanics love me," or "Women love me," is they are statements of emotion, not subject to measurement. Surely, some Hispanics love Trump, and you are not meant to think all Hispanics love me. That is understood. Same for women.
Trump, in a sense, deals in the unassailable because he strives to reach a data free zone.

She is so crooked. Well, how crooked is so crooked? And what exactly is crooked? If she takes a fee for a speech to Wall Street while she is Senator and she may govern some legislation which regulates Wall Street is that crooked?


Trump is also well attuned to indemnifying himself against fact checkers. He'll say, "Well eighty percent of those immigrants are rapists. Or something like that. I don't know but a lot of them. A lot. Really incredible. Just too many."


So, he'll back off, immediately, saying, essentially: "Don't hold me to a number. Whatever the true number is, it's too high."


Then there is the area which is simply untestable, which Trump seeks out: So 6 million votes, the number he lost the popular vote by, were all "fraudulent" votes, cast by phantom fraudulent voters.  And President Obama wired tapped Trump Tower. How do you prove President Obama did NOT wire tap Trump Tower? Just because nobody has located those wires...Just because nobody FOUND those weapons of mass destruction doesn't mean they weren't there. Just because Obama's birth certificate was presented to the press, well documents can be forged. Oh, you'd be surprised what Trump's men were finding about Mr. Obama's birth.


What is frustrating Camerota and Cuomo is that Trump won't play their game and argue about what the "evidence" says is actually happening.
Another problem they have is they have no real news many days, so they talk about the latest Gallup poll, as if the Gallup poll on the President's approval rating means anything.


The truth is, news media people like Camerota and Cuomo, who I like, are simply not all that well educated, in the liberal arts sense. So they get emotional about "facts" and they are not capable of analyzing what really frustrates them with Trump.


You'd think CNN would have people to help them with this.


Personally, I'd like to respond in kind:
1/ Mr. Trump's hair is fake hair. He is more than a comb over; he is bald.
2/ Mr. Trump has erectile dysfunction, which may explain his over compensation with respect to women.
and all like that.

President Trump: Max Headroom Comes to Life

The Donald is the ultimate entertainment-as-reality creature.

Then there is the advertisement in which the actor admits he is not really a surgeon but he plays one on T.V., so he should be taken seriously. That's The Donald.


Max Headroom was a British TV character who was created to look like a computer simulation of a real person, but not a real person. He was the creation of corporate greed and the public's hunger for an anti establishment figure who denigrated the idea of expertise and respectability. He was only ever a head and shoulders figure, created in a time just before computer technology had its big bang.


He was born around 1984 and disappeared soon thereafter, but he has returned  to life, like some latter day Frankenstein, as Donald John the Trump, President of the United States.

The Brits around this time also created "Spitting Image" puppets who looked like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and Reagan would be awakened at night, in a state of confusion and would inevitably push the bedside button unleashing nuclear holocaust.


We have got to stop taking Mr. Trump seriously. He is an entertainment figure, a reality show star of unreality.


If we are ever to bring him down, it will be with the instruments and devices of his own creation:  Comedy.


You could not kill a Toon, as well learned in Roger Rabbit, with ordinary weapons--bullets, axes, bombs would not touch them.


You needed a special dip to kill a Toon.

To undo and erase Mr. Trump, we need a media solution as well.

Russians: Oh, Plueeeeze!

Here's my personal experience with Russians:

1. A Russian cardiologist decided he wanted to do real estate development and he demolished the ranch house next door to my house and he built a McMansion which towered over my house, making mine look like a carriage house next door and in fact it was so out of character for the neighborhood people simply referred to it as "the monstrosity," and you never had to ask what they were talking about. Everyone knew.


2. Russian ex-pats, maybe they were embassy employees, used to play ice hockey on the C&O canal down the street from my house whenever the canal froze over, and you could hear them shout "Da! Da!" whenever anyone scored a goal. They were young men and they looked like they were having fun and you sort of had to like them.


3. I was at a dinner party once with Tim Sebastian (BBC) and Anne Garrels (NPR), news media people who were fluent in Russian and they both  were clearly enthralled by Russia, which Tim described in rapturous detail.  "The smell of sweat in the Moscow subway. The energy. The sheer magnetism of the place." 

4. A Russian émigré sold me my new Ford Taurus station wagon. He told me he was a Jew and in Russia that was stamped into his passport. I don't know if that was true. I do know the car turned out to be a lemon, suffering the fate a large number of that model suffered for about four model years--recurrent transmission failure.


5. My son made me watch an entire  Maria Sharapova tennis match. I have enough ADD, I cannot sit still to watch any sports event I'm not playing in, but he made me watch. It took 2 hours.  Her opponent looked to me to be the better player, quicker, more precise shots, better ball movement and placement, but Sharapova was relentless. She'd lose a game, a set, but she kept on coming back at this smaller, more agile player, until she finally wore her down and beat her. I don't know if you can generalize to all Russia from Ms. Sharapova, but that did seem to be the Russian strategy during WWII.


6. A Russian émigré friend worked for Voice of America, and he was a delightful fellow, with a wonderful, mordant view of the world--he simply expected the government to lie, all governments--Russian and American and British--it's simply their default posture, he said.
"But the Voice of America is a government agency," I said. "Do you lie for a living?"
"I say what I'm told to say. I cannot know if it is true or not. But since it comes from the government, I assume at least some of it is not true."
"So you lie for a living?"
"At least here," he smiled, "I lie for the good guys."

One thing about Vladimir Putin and the current Russian government, it's pretty obvious he kills people who displease him. Rather a more aggressive response than tweeting, but it does have the virtue of clarity, and, apparently, there is a long tradition of this sort of practice in Russia.

Having said all this, do I care if Mr. Putin worked hard to help Mr. Trump get elected?
Not in the least.
I worked hard to persuade others to vote against Mr. Trump.
In the end, it was the decision of the voters.
The voters were bombarded with information and misinformation and they knew enough to distrust all of it.
Doesn't matter whether the Russians released stuff about Hillary's emails. I cannot believe any of that was determinative.  All sorts of things undermined HIllary: Her speeches to Wall Street for $225,000 a pop which she could never satisfactorily explain, could never shake the idea she was bought and paid for by Wall Street, her stand on abortion, her gender, her pant suits. Who knows what combination of things cost her Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida?
But the Russians had no chance of changing minds in any of those places, no matter how persuasive they tried to be.

Dreams of the Worm Turning

Remarks at Prescott Park, Fall, 2017

Jumbotron shows images of adorable immigrant children coming in at Ellis Island mixed with more recent children at the detention centers for women and children in Texas, mixed with images of the wall along the Texas border and the Statue of Liberty.

Leftist Marching Band and Revolutionary Rhythm Section play under a flag:  Liberty League, Indivisible They are playing “With a Little Help from My Friends,” then “I Can See Clearly Now.”

Old man walks on stage and sings, acapella , to the tune “Oh, Death.”

Ooh Trump!

Whooooah Trump

Won’t you build me a wall right away?

Well, what is that I can’t see

With no Trumpcare taking care of me.

Well I am Trump none can excel

I’ll open the door to heaven or Hell

Whoa Trump someone would say

Could you build me a wall right away?

The children prayed the preacher preached

Time and mercy is out of your reach

I’ll fix your  eyes so you can’t blink

I’ll fix your brain so you can’t think

I’ll close your eyes so you can’t see

This very hour come and go with me

Trump has come to take your soul

Leave your body and leave it cold.

Old man leaves stage handing microphone to MC, who wears a hat “Qui Tacit Consentit”

MC:  Wow! Will you look at this crowd!  Biggest crowd since…well ever. 

And the lines of people still trying to get in!  Thousands out there. Stretched all the way back to the Maine border, which is, I admit, just the Piscataqua River, but really incredible. 

I heard this is even bigger than the crowd at the Inauguration! Which, I don’t know, may be true. Lady in the parking lot told me. Same lady who told me vaccines cause mental problems. So incredible. Really. All the way to the border.

And I heard Paul LePage is building a wall on his side of the border. You know Paul Le Page: He's the first coming. Now we've had the second coming of the Mesiah. But Paul was the first. And he’s building this wall and he's making New Hampshire pay for it, because, you know, Maine is open for business. And you know what that means.  Do you know what that means?  Tell me, what does that mean? I never could figure that one.

So you’re probably wondering why I invited you all here today.

I’m asking myself the same thing. Really, I think it’s group therapy.

Not like a group hug. I’ am so  through with hugs, man, really had enough of that. Time is over for talking about how scary life is, how mean, how uncaring--had enough of that.

So what do we do?  Well, we are here in a pretty small state, so what can we do? We are not the smallest state by population. There’s Rhode Island, and Wyoming. Is Wyoming actually a state?  They have two Senators,  must be a state.  Then again, Kentucky has two senators and looking at that as a indicator of statehood, well, the bar for statedom has got to be pretty low. What, really, is a state? One thing is it has got to have borders. Walls, not so much, but that may be coming. Personally, I think if they extended that wall down in Texas all the way around that state, we might all be better off. Keep those Texans behind that wall. Like crating Fido, you know? But that's not really why we're here.

I digress. I do that a lot. It’s better than smoking pot and it’s just as diversionary.

Even, small as we are, people pay attention to us. For about two weeks in January, every four years, they pay attention to us and then they move on.  It’s like “Will you still love me tomorrow?” And they never do. Talk about a one night stand.  And we fall for it every time.  

But for those two weeks, it’s really fun.  And then, about seven, eight months later, that’s the typical gestation period, we find out what we got.

So, I had this idea:  Maybe we could actually have a conversation. You know, not just wham bang, thank you New Hampshire, but maybe we could actually say something that mattered.

Did you know that when one of George Washington’s slaves escaped, Ona Judge, she somehow got all the way from Philadelphia to New Hampshire—man, she must have really not liked Washington—and Washington, well, he was a nice guy in a lot of ways I guess, but he apparently got pretty worked up about his property getting up and leaving, so he told the governor of New Hampshire he wanted his property returned to him—and this was before the fugitive slave act—and the governor of New Hampshire said, “Well, actually, what you are calling your property, is a human being, and this particular human being says she does not want to be owned by you, or anyone else.”

“But you can’t listen to that. That’s my property. She doesn’t have any rights.”

And this was way before Dred Scott, right?

And the governor said, “Well, maybe she doesn’t have any rights in Mount Vernon, but up here in Portsmouth, she is a human being and human beings have rights.”

Now, of course, I wasn’t around at the time. And in the 18^th century, there were no recordings or TV or youtube, but I like the story the way I told it. Sort of alternative facts, or alternative history. And, any way, the essentials must be pretty close, because Washington never did get his slave back. 

She was the winner, in that one. She was a refugee who got across the border and was free.  And, far as I know, people around here are happy she did.

So, we've said and done important things before. No reason we can't do that again.

We The People Vs. We The Maps

We the People is the way our Constitution begins.  That document describes the rules and outlines of a new nation, and it begins not with geography, or money, or descriptions of purple mountain majesties or rivers, but with the people. 

A government of the people, by the people for the people, Lincoln said, as he formulated the reasons for the second American Revolution which was the Civil War. 

But, of course, Hamilton, Jefferson and Washington and enough of the founding fathers, those 18th century men in whigs and silk stockings were afraid of "the people" so they constructed a country of states with borders and the government embodied land, borders, states as players just as important, more important than the people. 

Looking at the 2016 census, you can group the states in different ways, but there seem to be several distinct categories:

1.  States of roughly 20 million or more souls:California (39 m), Texas (27 m), Florida (20 m) New York (19m). These are the Huge States. (4 states)

2. States of 8-13 million:  Pennsylvania (13 m), Illinois(13m), Ohio (11m), Georgia (10m), North Carolina (10m), Michigan (10m), New Jersey (9m), Virginia (8m). These are the Big 8 States. (8 states)

3. States of 4-7 million: Washington (7m),Arizona (7 m),Massachusetts (7 m), Tennessee (6m), Indiana (6m), Missouri (6m), Maryland (6m), Wisconsin (6m), Colorado (6m), Minnesota (6m), South Carolina (5m), Alabama (5m), Louisiana (5m), Kentucky (4m), Oregon (4m), Oklahoma (4) Connecticut (3.5m)  These are Middleweight States.  (17 states)

4. States of roughly 3 million: Iowa(3m), Utah (3m), Mississippi (3m), Arkansas (3m), Nevada (3 m) Kansas (3m), New Mexico (2m), Nebraska (2m), West Virginia (2m) These are the Lightweight States. (9 states)

5. States of less than 2 million: Idaho, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming. These are the Mini States. (12 states)

2016 vote by population

All these states get about one Representative in the House per 700,000 population. But in the United States Senate, Barbara Boxer represents 18 million voters where Bernie Sanders represents 312 thousand voters. 

2016 vote by counties

Until the 2016 election, half of the biggest group (Middleweight) states were liberal, blue states, but that fell to 1/3 with the election of Trump. Of the Huge states, half are liberal, half conservative. Of the Big 8 States, only 2 are consistently liberal, the other 2/3 flip back and forth. Of the lightweight states only one (New Mexico) is liberal. Of the dozen Mini States, 1/3 are reliably liberal.

Of the 21 states in the Lightweight and Mini divisions only 4 are reliably liberal (New Mexico, Hawaii, Delaware and Vermont.) 

The End Result of Disproportionate Political Power

If the Senate were reconstructed to reflect population, then 17 states which now exert disproportionate power would enjoy only a power proportionate to their people.  These 17 states now stand in the way of a single payer/government option for health care, a Supreme Court which lives in the 21st as opposed to the 18th century, a robust environmental protection agency, the development of wind and solar power on a scale which could connect nearly every American home to the grid without increasing CO2, the resurgence of labor unions and any hope for a fair break for the middle class, free college tuition at reliable not for profit state universities, a tax code with is friendly to the middle class and which asks more from those to whom much has been given, and a huge new infrastructure program could be undertaken which would provide full employment for generations. 

If the Supreme Court were composed of 9 voting justices, the 9 most recently appointed, with 2 new justices appointed by the President with each Presidential term, then progress on a multitude of fronts would be possible.

But that is not the America we have. We are still living with the distrust of We The People which we inherited from some men who were slave owners and from some who simply distrusted the rifraff. 

Slaver

Fever Dreams

Unlike liberal Democrats, those of  the reactionary Republican persuasion have been thinking about what they want for years. 

In 2000, the platform of the Texas GOP included:
1/ A return to the gold standard
2/ Abolition of the Federal Reserve
3/ Elimination of the minimum wage
4/Abolition of Social Security
5/ Repeal of the 16th Amendment (federal income tax)
6/ Elimination of the IRS.

We are not talking about some wacko splinter group, living off the grid survivalists in Wyoming here. We are talking about a mainstream, state of Texas state Republican party.  The party of Louis Gohmert. 

Now, I ask you, while these fellow Americans have been dreaming these fever dreams, what have liberal Democrats been dreaming?

You know, the fact is, for something to happen, you must first imagine it.  Well, that's not entirely true. You can develop a disease you'd never imagine in a million years. But if you want to create something, if you want to go somewhere, build something, you have to dream first. And these people have been dreaming fervently. That is a problem for the rest of us, don't you think?

Here are members of today's "Freedom Caucus" in the United States Congress, the guys who blocked the All American Healthcare Act, because it still required insurance companies to cover hospitalization. 
I'm going to Google each one of these guys, day by day, just to see how really creepy they are. But remember, these guys are representatives of thousands of people, who think like they do.

Sweet dreams.

Andy Biggs

AZ-5

Bill Posey

FL-8

Dave Brat

VA-7

Jim Jordan

OH-4

Justin Amash

MI-3

Louie Gohmert

TX-1

Mark Meadows

NC-11

Mo Brooks

AL-5

Paul Gosar

AZ-4

Randy Weber

TX-14

Raúl R. Labrador

ID-1

Rod Blum

IA-1

Ted Budd

NC-13

Ted Yoho

FL-3

Tom Garrett

VA-5

REPEAL! Don't Let that Dog off the Leash

The Republicans in Congress are that classic brand of coward who will taunt the dog who is leashed to the front porch, dance around throwing stones at him, as long as they can see nothing will happen to them.

But once that dog is off the leash, they don't want anything to do with that beast; they won't even set foot in the front yard. They'll cross the street and run as fast as they can.

So every day for 7 years they hurled invectives at Obamacare, said what a disaster it would be/is/was and they threw stones and they voted daily to repeal it, because they knew their votes would never have any effect.

You might think they would have been thinking about what they would do to replace it, if they ever got a chance. You might think when President Trump won the election November 8, more than 4 months ago, they would have done a few retreats, listened to some invited experts about what a good health care plan would require, had some late night sessions about what they wanted to do now.

But no.

They are all talk, no action.

Action would require crunching numbers, talking about policy, thinking about what sort of world they would like to see.
But no.
They are what they've been since at least 2008, the party of No.
Mitch McConnell said his only job in 2008 was to make sure whatever President Obama wanted to do would not happen.


Apparently, he liked that job and will do the same for Mr. Trump.