Author Archive: W. S. Topp

We don’t need no education…

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Although I try to resist any urge to participate, I do sometimes follow social media discussions about current events.

Based on my limited experience, most online “discussions” are not really discussions at all, as most posters are not looking to exchange information, but are only interested in promoting their own opinion. That’s fine, but that makes it a complete waste of time to try to engage these persons with actual facts.

Being ill-informed about a topic is nothing to be ashamed of.  No one can know everything about everything. Still, a little research goes a long way, and if you feel compelled to comment on a topic perhaps you could take a moment to learn a bit about it. Worse than a lack of knowledge, though, is a lack of information paired with certainty.  “I may not know much about this topic, and I am in no way interested in learning, but, by God, I am sure I am right!”

Sadly, this is not a new phenomenon. Anti-intellectualism has always been a part of the American Dream, but we seem to be entering an age now where actual knowledge of a subject – acquired through years of study and experience – is actually denigrated. As our problems are becoming more complex, we are actually disparaging the people who are best able to help us understand them.

For an enlightening discussion of this phenomena, see The Death of Expertise (Oxford University Press, 2017) by Tom Nichols.

“This book, then, is about expertise. Or, more accurately, it is about the relationship between experts and citizens in a democracy, why that relationship is collapsing, and what all of us, citizens and experts, might do about it.”

– Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise.

December 26, 2018

Hey, you kids…

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I try to avoid sounding like a cranky old white guy – “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!” – but I attended a professional basketball game today and yikes, what the heck was that?

For people who haven’t been to an NBA game in the past few years, I will simply say that such games are three hours of non-stop “entertainment,” and none of that includes the actual game.

If there even is a game, because, really, it’s hard to tell between the spotlights, the multiple dance teams, the acrobats, the t-shirt cannons, the singers, the lottery tickets parachuting down to the crowd, the quiz show exchanges, the ear-splitting music, the jets of fire shooting out of the scoreboard, the jumbo video screens, the dance contests, and the rest of the “show.” After three hours of hyper-stimulation, I will probably need 48 hours in a sensory deprivation tank to return to equilibrium.

Now the local team is having an historically bad season – and around here, that bar is set pretty high – so perhaps management wants to partially atone for the inferior product they are selling at premium prices. But the reality is that this kind of visual and auditory assault occurred when the team was actually good, and it, or something resembling it, occurs every night in just about every other NBA arena.

It’s as if NBA owners don’t trust their own product to hold people’s attention through the one-or-two-minute time-outs that occur regularly during the games. Which is a little sad, because professional basketball players are possibly the most athletic of all professional athletes.  Or, more likely, they don’t trust their customers to endure occasional breaks in the action without suffering some kind of adverse reaction.

 

Is it warm in here, or is it just me?

December 23, 2018

Just another brick in the wall

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The US southern (land) border is about 2000 miles long, about one third of it is “protected” by some sort of physical barrier (fence, wall, etc.).

Why is there not a barrier along the entire border?  Because the people in charge of border security for the past 100 years have not believed that a physical barrier was worth the expense of land acquisition, construction, maintenance, and constant patrolling that would be necessary to make it effective.

Enhanced border security is better achieved by a layered defense that includes electronic surveillance, drones, increased patrols, monitoring of choke points, and enhanced cooperation with Mexican authorities.

A more significant impact would be achieved by reforming and strengthening our immigration system, which, I can tell you from personal experience (my wife is a German citizen and a permanent resident in the United States), is badly broken.  (Fun fact:  the two most recent Congressional attempts at reforming and strengthening our immigration system were defeated by House Republicans in 2006 and 2013).

The wall is political theater.  It is an issue that resonates with a core group that is highly supportive of President Trump. He picks at this scab to encourage and fire up his “base.”  (“Promises made, promises kept,” and all that…) No wall will remove any of the 11 million or so people who are here illegally, and no wall will prevent additional people from coming here legally and overstaying their visas, which is how the majority of illegal immigrants got here in the first place.  And no wall will change the underlying reasons why people risk their lives to come here.  Keep in mind that people die trying to get here all the time.  (Another fun fact: In 1995 I was Assistant Operations Officer at JTF-160 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where we operated refugee camps for about 40,000 Cuban and Haitian migrants, who risked their lives on homemade rafts, massively overloaded skiffs, oils drums lashed together, and, in a few cases, walking through a minefield for a chance to get to the United States…) No wall is going to stop these people.

The administration doesn’t talk about reforming our immigration system, which could make an actual difference, because that kind of bipartisan policy development is difficult, time -consuming, requires an understanding of the complex issues involved, and doesn’t readily lend itself to chants of “Build that wall” at political rallies.

The opposite of the wall is not “open borders.” That is a false construct that is extraordinarily counterproductive, except as a political tool to further divide an already-fractured electorate.

It’s Christmas. We should give it a rest.  There is no policy solution to a “problem” that provides such an obvious political benefit to a segment of a political party, and any attempt to discuss this wildly political idea as if it is some kind of serious policy proposal is utterly senseless.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

December 22, 2018

 

 

OK, thanks

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Back in the days when I used e-mail a lot, I found that I didn’t always have time right away to craft a careful and fully-researched reply to an incoming message, but I still wanted to let the sender know that I had received the note.

So, I got in the habit of sending a quick, noncommittal, hard-to-misinterpret, “OK, thanks.”

‘OK, thanks.’ doesn’t imply agreement, doesn’t promise anything, and, most importantly doesn’t express any human emotion, commitment, belief, or opinion.  It is very close to a perfect e-mail response.

It is also a pretty good response to half-baked, mean-spirited, harassing, intellectually lazy, and flat-out wrong social media comments.

Of course, we would all be better off to avoid the fevered swamp of social media.  But like especially gruesome car accidents, sometimes, you just can’t turn away.

When you find yourself reading an exceptionally inaccurate, obnoxious, or hostile comment, back away slowly with a calming “OK, thanks,’ and then immediately sterilize your keyboard (or device) and take a long, hot shower.

I’ve seen several responses that artfully combine the neutrality of ‘OK, thanks’ with a slight dash of humor. Here are a few that you might find useful. Unfortunately, I cannot credit the originators of these posts, as I don’t know who they are. Several, of course, are quotes from feature films.

  • That ought to do it. Thanks, Ray.
  • So, there’s that.
  • I do not believe that that word means what you think it means.
  • Americans do not rejoice in the suffering of other Americans.
  • This post says a lot more about you than it does about (the subject of the post.)
  • I am sorry for your pain.
  • That’s not how any of this works.
  • Lighten up, Francis.
  • Be best.

And before you tell me how ridiculous and unhelpful this post is, just let me say one thing.

OK, thanks.

“Life is short. Make sure you spend as much time as possible on the internet arguing with strangers about politics.”           –  Internet meme, 2018

December 20, 2018

There is no ‘Away’

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I recently completed a training program about recycling conducted by the county Solid Waste District.  The purpose of the training is to prepare citizen volunteers to provide accurate information about recycling at community events or other functions.

Of course, when thinking about recycling, everybody has the same question: “Is this bottle recyclable?”

And, sadly, the correct answer is, “it depends.”

What does it depend on?  Primarily, where you live, and what arrangements your local community has with recycling facilities to dispose of the recyclables that they collect.  Even more sadly, the answer will change from time to time as the market for recyclables changes.  What was recyclable last year (or last week) might not be recyclable today. What’s recyclable in your town might not be recyclable in the next town down the road.

So, there’s that.

But I did learn a lot.  Here are ten things about recycling that you might not know.

  1. Recycling is not the answer. Compared to reuse and reduction – the other R’s from the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra – recycling is wildly inefficient. It is costly, complicated, and too often not done. We would be far better off if manufacturers and retailers designed their products and packaging with ultimate disposal in mind and if consumers considered the cost of disposal when purchasing a product. And while recycling is not the answer, until we get better at reducing and reusing, it will be much better than not recycling.
  2. Recycling is labor intensive and expensive. Tossing an empty bottle into a recycling bin isn’t the end of the recycling process, it is the beginning. That bin is going to be emptied and sorted – partly by machine, partly by hand – at a Material Recovery Facility (MRF) that is noisy, dirty, and dangerous.  Employees operate forklifts, balers, sorters, and other powerful industrial machinery to pull out recyclable materials.  And somewhere in the process is a line of workers hand sorting the contents of the emptied bins as they roll by on a conveyor belt.  The work is physically demanding, perilous, and doesn’t pay very well.
  3. Single Stream recycling is poor policy. To make the process easier for consumers and to reduce the cost of picking up materials, many communities have adopted single-stream recycling, in which all recyclables are collected in a single container. This shifts the burden of sorting from the consumer to the recycling facility, increasing their costs and greatly increasing the chances that material will be unusable because it is contaminated. The general manager of a recycling company called single stream collecting, “The worst thing that ever happened to this industry, ever.”
  4. Recycling is constantly changing. Because recycling is a market-based solution, it is constantly changing in response to market forces. Supply and demand rules recycling, as it rules every other industry.  As supply and demand fluctuate, the type of materials that can be recycled change. Right now, the loss of the Chinese market for recyclables is wreaking havoc on the recycling industry.
  5. Contamination is a significant problem. Contaminated materials are impossible to reuse. The level of contamination in U.S. recycling exports was largely responsible for China’s decision to stop accepting U.S. material. In many cases contaminants have to be removed by hand, slowing the process and increasing recycling costs. Once contaminated, few items or loads can be decontaminated. Contamination damages recycling machinery and endangers recycling facility workers.
  6. Failure at the start of the recycling process cannot be redeemed later. Material that is contaminated or mislabeled at the start of the process will never be recycled. It will probably go straight to a landfill.
  7. Almost everything we make is recyclable. But we only recycle items that can be recycled profitably. Electronic items are routinely disassembled and their parts re-used. There is even a term for this process: De-manufacturing. Virtually every manufactured item could be de-manufactured. But most manufactured items are not because their component parts are not valuable enough to make the process profitable.
  8. Economics drives recycling. No surprise here, but it is still worth noting that every step of the recycling process is evaluated on its economic merits. Factors that determine whether or not a particular item is recycled include the overall strength of the U.S. economy, the existence of a market for the material, the cost of collecting, the cost of sorting, the cost of equipment to prepare the material, the cost of decontaminating the material, and the cost of transporting. For many materials, only local markets work, as the cost of transportation renders more distant markets unprofitable. In the words of a recycling facility manager, “Like everything else, recycling is driven by money.”
  9. Education is vital. Most people will do the right thing, if they know what it is, and most people think recycling is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, recycling rules change frequently and are not the same from place to place, so public education must be followed by re-education and more re-education.
  10. Recycling is a process. When you toss a plastic bottle into a recycling bin, you are part of the process. The rest of the process includes hundreds or thousands of people making decisions about product design, marketing, packaging, disposing, collecting, sorting, baling, selling, and re-using.

The bottom line is that when we throw something away, there is no ‘away.’

 “We don’t throw it away, we throw it around.” – Diane Bickett, Executive Director of the Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District

December 15, 2018

Do as I say…

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Our college-student daughter recently planted some trees with the university’s biodiversity group.  I was quite impressed until I heard that the biodiversity group is composed entirely of humans.  How biodiverse is that?

Apparently, it is one more example of ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’

December 5, 2018

The Guilty Guy’s Playbook

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The slow drip, drip, drip of activity from the Mueller investigation has become a steady trickle, and it may soon become a flood.  If you are having trouble keeping up, take a few moments to review the latest edition of the Guilty Guy’s Playbook. You can’t get it on Amazon, but your cellmate or your Congressperson probably has a copy you can borrow.

Make sure you don’t confuse the Guilty Guy’s Playbook with the Wrongfully Accused Guy’s Playbook.  They are actually easy to tell apart, because the Guilty Guy’s Playbook is almost always dog-eared and tattered from near-constant use, while the Wrongfully Accused Guy’s Playbook is probably still bound in its original shrink-wrap.

One of the first things you will notice about the Guilty Guy’s Playbook is that it doesn’t matter what you are guilty of.  Murder, jaywalking, robbery, sexual assault, lying to the FBI, obstructing justice, colluding with a foreign power to interfere in a federal election: your response should be the same.  It also doesn’t matter who is accusing you.  Whether you are jousting with a small-town detective, the FBI, a Congressional sub-committee, a high school classmate, or an investigative reporter; it’s all the same to the guilty guy or gal.

All of the advice in the Guilty Guy’s Playbook stems from three basic facts:

  1. They have to prove it.
  2. They have to follow the rules.
  3. You don’t.

Keep these points in mind and the guidelines in the Playbook pretty much write themselves.

Here is a summary of the timeless advice contained in the Guilty Guy’s Playbook:

  1. Deny everything.
  2. Deny everything vehemently.
  3. Discredit witnesses.
  4. Attack the investigators.
  5. When they can prove an element, admit to it, and deny everything else. Repeat as necessary.
  6. Babble endlessly about unrelated and irrelevant topics.
  7. Never tell the truth. Never.

As the Guilty Guy’s Playbook explains, if you are actually guilty, the truth is not your friend.  So, you need to do everything in your power to prevent the truth from coming out.  Under no circumstances should you ever discuss the actual charges or allegations. Obfuscate, lie, dissemble, and attack.  These are your essential tactics. The guiltier you are, the harder you need to work to keep the truth hidden. This is the primary difference between the Guilty Guy’s Playbook and the Wrongly Accused Guy’s Playbook, which has a lot of old-fashioned advice about discovering the truth.

Following the guidelines of the Guilty Guy’s Playbook, a hypothetical guilty guy might respond to a hypothetical investigation like this:

  1. What meeting? There was no meeting.
  2. I told you before, there was no meeting.
  3. This investigation is rigged! THERE WAS NO MEETING!!!
  4. Oh, that meeting. OK, there was a meeting, but I wasn’t there.
  5. I told you before, I WASN’T THERE!!
  6. OK, I was there, but there were no Russians.
  7. Did you hear me? NO RUSSIANS!
  8. OK, there were Russians, but I didn’t know they were Russian.
  9. OK, I knew they were Russian, but I didn’t know what they wanted to talk about.
  10. Why are you harassing me? Why aren’t you out catching real criminals? She’s the puppet!
  11. OK, I knew what they wanted to talk about. It was adoptions.
  12. OK, I knew it wasn’t adoptions; they offered to provide dirt about a political opponent, but I didn’t know it.
  13. What about that guy? He’s been to lots of meetings. Why aren’t you investigating him? She’s the puppet!
  14. This whole investigation is a disgrace! Sad!
  15. OK, I knew they wanted to offer dirt about a political opponent, but I wasn’t interested.
  16. OK, I knew they were offering dirt and I was very interested, but I didn’t know where it came from.
  17. This whole investigation is corrupt!
  18. OK, I knew that they were offering information obtained by a foreign intelligence service that I could use against a political opponent in a federal election, and I was very happy to receive it, but the information wasn’t bad enough to help us, so we never used it.
  19. Everybody does it.
  20. Witch Hunt!!!!!

December 1, 2018

Lock Her Up

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Despite holding no office or official position of any kind, Hillary Clinton continues to exert an otherworldly power over a certain segment of the population.  This should really be investigated.

Of course, since she’s already been under investigation of one sort another pretty much continuously since 1992, at a cost to taxpayers of $100 million dollars, without ever being charged with an actual crime, perhaps another investigation isn’t what we need.

In many ways she is a remarkably accomplished person and future historians will no doubt puzzle over the hysteria her mere existence seems to provoke in some presumably sane individuals. At the same time, she is not a perfect person and she was certainly not a perfect presidential candidate.  She was, in fact, the only woman in America who could have put Donald Trump in the White House.  You’d think Mr. Trump would appreciate her efforts, just a bit.

While she’s had a very successful career, like the rest of us, when Mrs. Clinton looks back, she probably wishes she’d done a few things differently.  Attacking the women who accused her husband of sexual harassment and/or assault would be wrong today, and it was wrong in 1993. Losing money on Whitewater was ill-advised. Her inexplicable affection for pantsuits hurt. Murdering Vince Foster might have been a step too far.  So was organizing a pizzeria-based pedophile ring. And she shouldn’t have traded arms for hostages and used the profits to arm Central American rebels. But these things have all been investigated thoroughly, or will be investigated just as soon as the Mueller witch-hunt is completed, which, if the Whitewater and Benghazi investigations are any guide, ought to occur just in time for the presidential election in 2056.

 

 For an accounting of the cost of investigations of Bill and Hillary Clinton, see:

https://www.newstalkflorida.com/featured/gops-fear-loathing-hillary-clinton-cost-100-million/

 

November 30, 2018

“When you teach a man to hate…”

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Robert F. Kennedy was born on this date (November 20) in 1925.

His career in public service lasted less than 20 years, and included no significant legislative or policy accomplishments, but he was a compelling and complicated figure whose commitment to social justice remains relevant today.

Kennedy’s greatest strength as a political luminary was his willingness to evolve, to incorporate new information and new experiences into his positions, and to seek the best, most useful ideas from across the political spectrum. He would be derided as a flip-flopper today, and even in his day, his willingness to learn from experience set him apart.

He is remembered primarily for his opposition to the war in Vietnam. But the Bobby Kennedy that campaigned for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination as a champion of civil rights and as an opponent of the war was far different from the Bobby Kennedy that served as an investigator for Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953.

As John F. Kennedy’s campaign manager in 1952 and again in 1960, Robert Kennedy gained a reputation as overly ambitious and cold-hearted.  “More rude than ruthless,” according to biographer Larry Tye. But ‘ruthless’ was the label that stuck.

But any description of Robert Kennedy can only be viewed as a snapshot in time.  While he never lost his family-inspired win-at-all-costs competitiveness, his experience in government propelled him from ideology to idealism.

As a Senate subcommittee investigator, U.S. Attorney General, and U.S. Senator, Kennedy was exposed to the dark underside of the American Dream.  He saw first-hand the corrupting influence of organized crime, the unconstrained evil of bigotry and racial discrimination, and the heart-breaking impact of poverty. He was confronted by the terrifying specter of nuclear war and endured a nearly unfathomable loss with the assassination of his brother.

These experiences transformed him, not just politically, but as a person.  He became less rigid in his beliefs, more open to doubts. His allowed his innate empathy and compassion, which had been hidden by a hard shell, to emerge.  He dampened his natural competitiveness with a calming strain of fatalism.

His evolution was fitful, and at times, uncertain, and his journey was interrupted by an assassin’s bullet, but his commitment to justice never wavered. His policy ideas defied easy description and taken together they met no liberal-conservative definition.  He was pragmatic and idealistic at the same time.  He eschewed conventional suggestions in his relentless search for solutions that would work. He never thought he had all the answers, he was always willing to consider new information, to learn and to grow.

His words continue to resonate.

“When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies.”

“We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortune of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled nor enriched by hatred or revenge.”

(Remarks by Robert F. Kennedy, delivered at the Cleveland City Club, April 5,1968, on the day following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Quote from: https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy/robert-f-kennedy-speeches/remarks-to-the-cleveland-city-club-april-5-1968

For a detailed account of the career of Robert F. Kennnedy, see Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, by Larry Tye, Random House, New York, 2016.

November 20, 2018

Shake, Rattle, and Roll

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Had an opportunity today to spend an hour or so inside a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine.

If you haven’t had one, an MRI might sound futuristically high-tech, like the handheld medical scanners on science fiction shows.  And while an MRI will provide high resolution images of the internal structures of your body, in reality, an MRI is more like your mom’s washing machine than Dr. McCoy’s tricorder.

MRI scanners use a combination of magnetic fields and radio waves to produce detailed images. That’s pretty cool, and the images are remarkably helpful, but magnetic fields and radio waves aren’t exactly cutting-edge technology.

To be scanned, you lie inside the MRI machine, which is shaped like a large tube. Before you are inserted in the machine, you get earphones to listen to your choice of music. The first time I did it, I figured the music was to relax people who might be a little nervous about being confined in a space so tight that you cannot roll over.

Once they turned on the MRI, though, I realized that the music is really a failed attempt to drown out the alarmingly loud clanging and rattling of the machine. I am not sure how they generate the magnetic fields, but it sounds like it might involve two or three primates banging on metal trash cans. When they started the classical music I selected, I thought it was too loud.  Once the MRI began rocking and rolling, though, I couldn’t even hear the music. Next time, it’s heavy metal.

Still, the images were quite helpful, and as far as I know no parts actually flew off the MRI scanner while I was in there.

November 19, 2018