Category Archives: Education

Challam County, Washington

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From the New York Times:

The new county with the longest streak of picking presidential winners is Clallam County, Wash., population 77,000, which has gotten every election right since 1980 — 10 times in a row, according to Ballotpedia, which tracks U.S. political statistics.

Mr. Biden won Clallam County by about 2,400 votes — a margin of 5.5 percentage points, giving it a claim to the nation’s longest presidential streak and ensuring that Port Angeles, its largest city, becomes a destination for a certain type of political reporter in 2024.

Port Angeles is the jumping off point for our regular ferry trip get-aways to Victoria, British Columbia. I digress, but if the border doesn’t open soon, I may not be responsible for my actions.

Do Unto Others

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In trying to make sense of what just happened, lots of people are taking mental shortcuts. Gross generalizations about groups—all Trump voters, all Democrats, all white guys in diners (Krugman)—are proliferating. It’s dehumanizing not to account for individual differences within groups. And yet, because we’re not up to the complexity of the moment, we succumb over and over again to simplistic mental placeholders. I do not want to be your mental placeholder for white, well educated, liberal Democrats. I want to be respected as an individual who sometimes parts ways with others who share my political affiliation. And because I want that, I assume you do too. I will try to remember that and refrain from assuming you are just like all the others in your respective groups.

February 2020

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From ‘This f—ing virus’: Inside Donald Trump’s 2020 undoing.

“Parscale, speaking from his Arlington, Va. apartment, had just told the president how good his internal poll numbers looked. But now he had an urgent message: The coronavirus was a big problem – and it could cost him reelection.

Trump was perplexed. The economy was strong. The president had built an enormous political infrastructure and was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. That month, Trump’s campaign conducted a $1.1 million polling project showing him leading prospective Democratic challengers even in blue states such as Colorado, New Mexico, and New Hampshire.

‘Sir, regardless, this is coming. It’s the only thing that could take down your presidency,’ Parscale told the president.

Trump snapped.

‘This fucking virus,’ Trump asked dismissively, according to a person with direct knowledge of the exchange, ‘what does it have to do with me getting reelected?'”

Weekend Required Reading

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Fauci says things won’t return to normal until 2022 so a heavy load. I have confidence in you though, I know you can do it.

1. McConnell Played Trump. Is Gruber giving The Turtle too much credit?

2. Investor Bill Gross accused of blaring ‘Gilligan’s Island’ song on loop to torment neighbor. Watching the ultra wealthy fight never gets boring. I want more content like this.

3. Are Dead People Voting By Mail? Findings from Washington State.

4. Quiz: Can You Tell a ‘Trump’ Fridge from a ‘Biden’ Fridge?

5. White House science office says Trump ended COVID-19 pandemic as US hits record cases. What the hell is this, North Korea?

6. Meet the 24-year-old who’s tracking every broken McDonald’s ice-cream machine in the US. It’s important to have a purpose in life.

7. Grateful for a Wedding in Prison. Can people completely change course? 

8. UK’s top universities urged to act on classism and accent prejudice. 

I Might Be Cracking Under Pressure

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Was it wrong to request an absentee ballot in the name of my deceased mother from the state of Florida? And father?

Given my recent references to ballot box explosives and voting forgery, how long until Trump’s Federal Marshalls surround my Prius with guns a blazing?

If the humble blog goes dark, you’ll know why.

Personal Life

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I hear someone super smart on a podcast. I read about an unsuspecting athlete inspiring lots of other people to vote. I watch Savannah Guthrie give Fox News hosts a tutorial on how to interview the President. I read an absolutely beautiful essay about the arrival of fall in Twisp, WA.

And I want to know more about these people. So I google them and in a few seconds I’m skimming their wikipedia pages (or in the case of the essay writer, their personal website).

And when I skim someone’s wikipedia page, I always start with “Personal Life”. Is that because I’m a nosy bastard or because it’s human nature? What, dig this, they live in Ojai, CA; they’ve been married a few times; they have three children; and they raise llamas.

I wonder whether this phenomenon, which I think is human nature, partially explains higher education’s irrelevance in most people’s day-to-day lives. Higher education is always looking itself in the mirror and saying “This is the year I’ll become a public intellectual. This is the year I’ll make my work accessible. This is the year I’ll engage with the Deplorables.”

But why don’t the changes ever take? I propose it’s because academics, intellectuals, scholars, pick your preferred term, never ever talk about their Personal Lives. The unspoken agreement is that it detracts from the seriousness of your scholarship. The thinking being that one’s ideas, if they’re persuasive and original enough, should be sufficient to garner attention.

And how’s that working out?

Maybe higher education needs to look in the mirror and say “This is the year I become human. This year I’ll reveal something, hell anything, about my life off campus. This is the year I’ll crack the curtains on my Personal Life.”

Journalism Heavyweight

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Congress has been asleep at the anti-trust wheel for a long time. Meaning you and I are largely responsible for the fact that every sector of our economy is dominated by fewer, ever larger entities. Small promising companies are inevitably gobbled up by larger ones. Economic theory suggests a lack of competitiveness is bad for consumers.

Similarly, if an ever shrinking number of newsrooms translates into less competition for readership, ever larger newspapers should be bad for citizens and our democracy. Right now, The New York Times is serving as a powerful counterfactual to this phenomenon. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the largest newspaper is doing a lot of the best work.

Two examples.

‘Straight to Gunshots’: How a U.S. Task Force Killed an Antifa Activist. From the article,

“President Trump praised the killing of Michael Reinoehl, suspected of fatally shooting a far-right protester, as ‘retribution.’ Our investigation found that officers may have shot without warning or seeing a gun.”

More and more it’s looking like Reinoehl was murdered by the U.S. government inside the U.S. Four officers fired their weapons around 30 times. Eight bullets hit civilian properties. Some bullets flew right by an eight year old on his bike. Others blew out windows of neighboring cars. Our incredible passivity about this murder will embolden our President. 

As the virus spread, private briefings from the Trump administration fueled a stock sell-off. While we’re making jokes about a fly, the owners of production fuck the proletariat. By calling it “draining the swamp”, their thoughts about us are obvious, they think we’re stupid. Remember what the President said in the run-up to the last election, “I love the uneducated.”

“The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.

Interviews with eight people who either received copies of the memo or were briefed on aspects of it as it spread among investors in New York and elsewhere provide a glimpse of how elite traders had access to information from the administration that helped them gain financial advantage during a chaotic three days when global markets were teetering.”

Imagine if the President’s base got half as upset about white collar criminality as they do about the occasional criminality that accompanies urban protests.