Tag Archives: Trump

Is It Any Surprise?

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Top officials in the Trump administration are clueless about how best to cope with their boss. Haven’t you been there? Several times likely?

That’s what I find so fascinating about this, nearly every adult working person can relate to some degree. We haven’t wanted to kill our worst bosses like in the 2011 comedy Horrible Bosses, but we’ve desperately wanted them replaced.

And in those situations, we haven’t known what to do either.

We realized quitting wouldn’t accomplish much. So we complained a lot to whomever would listen, but that didn’t accomplish anything either. We’ve tried talking to them about necessary changes to no avail. We’ve conveyed our dismay to their boss with mixed results. That’s the key difference in this workplace. Mattis, Kelly, and the other cabinet members don’t have that option. I feel for Mad Dog, JK, and the others deeply mired in Trump’s swamp of amoral ego.

When it comes to coping with truly dysfunctional bosses, what is the collective wisdom? What should individuals and work groups do first, second, third? What is the academic literature on this? Absent any profound insights, we just end up with anonymous editorials, resignations, and books that offer little guidance on what to do differently the next time.

We can and must do better. Somehow.

Friday Assorted Links

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1. This Man Expects to Run a 2:50 in the Boston Marathon on Monday. His passion and commitment are inspiring, but it’s also kind of sad that he can’t imagine what else he might do in life post athletics.

2. Roubaix’s showers a dying part of cycling lore. I’m a privileged, aging, soft lap dog for gentrification; sometimes though, we need downmarket grittiness for contrast if nothing else.

“It’s not the nicest of place to take a shower, to be honest. It’s freezing cold and not much privacy. That’s the beauty of it. It was so grim in there that it was a way to finish off a grim race. Why would you have a nice, comfy seat in a cubicle to have a shower after 260km of hell? It was a race from hell, so they were the showers from hell.”

3. What I’m reading.

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4. What I just watched. Among other reasons to commit the 55 minutes, the incredible vividness of the Charlottesville footage.

Trump’s Takeover.

2118 Thinking

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Easter service at Good Shepherd Lutheran brought a surfeit of babies. One particularly endearing one craned her neck to look up at the ceiling lights one minute and head butted her grandpa the next. The red-headed one, sadly, didn’t get quite as much attention as the blonde head butter.

Those babies may live until 2118, which prompted me to think how differently a President might govern, a Congress might legislate, and a Judiciary might rule if they focused their attention on the later years of Good Shepherd’s littlest Easter service congregants.

What if our news cycles were ten years long and all of us adopted 2118 thinking?

We’d reign in our federal debt, we’d conserve natural resources, and we’d focus on reducing global poverty. In contrast, the Associated Press reports, “The Trump administration is expected to announce that it will roll back automobile gas mileage and pollution standards that were a pillar in the Obama administration’s plans to combat climate change.”

Is that what he means by “Make America Great Again”?

 

 

Monday Assorted Links

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1. Michigan’s sixth man is easy to root for.

2. Some headlines are better than others.

3. American adults just keep getting fatter.

My brother and his partner, as I learned last week, walk 1 mile around their block every night without fail, right after dinner, without even picking up the kitchen.

4. Props to Bill and Melinda for acknowledging that teacher evaluation efforts haven’t shown results.

5. The worst part of Trump’s presidency so far.

 

Trump Really Say That?

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Did he say, “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”? Or did he say. . .

  • “If I wasn’t watching Fox News in bed, I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”
  • “If I wasn’t tweeting, I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”
  • “If I wasn’t golfing, I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”
  • “If I wasn’t bloviating at CPAC, I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”
  • “If I wasn’t having sexual relations with a porn star, I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”
  • “If I wasn’t looking in the mirror, I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”
  • “If I wasn’t having sexual relations with a Playboy Playmate, I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”

There have been so many selfless acts of bravery, he probably deserves the benefit of the doubt.

 

The RepubliCON Tax Plan

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From Money magazine:

“According to a 2015 report from Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, 4,700 estate tax returns reporting tax liability were filed in 2013, out of 2.6 million total deaths in the United States. That means the estate tax hits roughly 0.2% of Americans, or 1 out of every 500 people who die.”

Paul Ryan, Kevin Brady, and company are betting that the American people are complete idiots. The midterm elections will tell us if they’re right or not.

The proposed plan is great for the five thousand Americans each year that pay up 40% in estate taxes. Nah, that understates it. The plan is fucking unbelievable for the five thousand Americans that pay up to 40% in estate taxes each year. If Frump is in fact a billionaire, when he dies his heirs will save $400m in taxes.

Social mobility in the U.S. already lags most every other developed country in the world. The elimination of the estate tax will create a large, entrenched aristocracy that will put the British to shame.

Somehow we’re supposed to believe that working families that are not invested in the stock market are going to benefit from a 15% reduction in the corporate tax rate. Trickle down my ass.

There are only two questions that matter, but they’re not ones the Republicons want asked, let alone answered:

• Can we flourish as one country given the current differences in wealth?

• Will this plan reduce the rich/poor divide?

Don’t buy the bullshit the Republicons are selling. The answers are no and hell no.

And thanks to Dan, Dan, the Transpo man for teaching me how to spell Republicon. I have mistakenly been using an “a” for many years.

Postscript: Is there a Congressional Medal for this?

 

 

Friday Assorted Links

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1. A Teacher’s Struggle With Student Anxiety.

“Anxiety has become the most significant obstacle to learning among my adolescent students. In a teaching career spanning more than 30 years, I have watched as it has usurped attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which itself displaced “dyslexia,” as the diagnosis I encounter most often among struggling students. In contrast to dyslexia or ADHD, for which I have developed effective teaching strategies, anxiety in students leaves me feeling powerless. As a new school year kicks off, I am left wondering how anxiety has become so prevalent so quickly. What can I do about it? Might my teaching actually contribute to it?”

It doesn’t appear as if Doyle is familiar with Twenge’s recent work on how smart phones contribute to adolescents’ anxiety.

2. There’s nothing more addictively soothing than watching someone flipping homes on HGTV.

“HGTV was the third-most-popular network on cable television in 2016, a 24/7 testament to the powers of Target chic, the open-plan kitchen, and social conservatism. It unspools with the same bland cheerfulness as Leave It to Beaver, and its heart is in the same place. Many viewers — in red states and blue cities, in rent-controlled studio apartments and 6,000-square-foot McMansions — confess it’s a bedtime ritual, prelude to a night spent dreaming of ceramic-tile backsplashes and double-sink vanities. Over the past two years, it has become such a ratings and advertising sensation that it is largely responsible for the recent sale, this summer, of its parent company, Scripps Networks Interactive, to Discovery Communications for $11.9 billion.”

I confess, I’m an HGTV-er.

3. A university president held a dinner for black students—and set the table with cotton stalks and collard greens. I propose a term for this. . . macro aggression.

4. Even jellyfish sleep.

5. Evan Osnos’s take-aways from a trip to North Korea. Long time Pressing Pausers will know I’ve been a long time observer of North Korea. Osnos’s report is interesting throughout. He reports that if Kim Jong Un’s picture appears in a newspaper, North Koreans must avoid creasing his face. And being in a wheelchair disqualifies you from living in Pyonyang, the capital. Monitors on the city’s perimeter limit movement in and out of the capital. Most importantly, Osnos’s reporting strongly suggests North Korea wants better relations with the U.S. Which makes Trump’s approach—increasingly provocative threats—the exact wrong one at the wrong time. Heaven help us, and especially, the South Koreans.

 

 

On Anti-Intellectualism

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Jordan Weissmann of Slate shares a mind numbing story that calls into question the President’s intelligence. Titled “A Small But Soul-Crushing Illustration of Donald Trump’s Economic Illiteracy,” he concludes:

“At some point, it appears Donald Trump heard somebody say that the United States cannot grow as fast as China or Malaysia because we have a ‘large’ economy. No doubt, what they meant is that the U.S. is a highly developed, rich nation and therefore can’t expand as quickly as developing countries that can still reap large gains from taking basic steps to improve their living standards. But Trump did not understand it that way. He apparently thought that when whoever he was listening to said “large,” they were talking about population. Therefore, in his mind, if China grows at nearly 7 percent per year with its 1.4 billion people, the U.S. should be able to do it too. This is the man who millions of voters are relying on to bring back jobs.”

Many anti-Trumpers will interpret this middle school-like error as disqualifying. A President has to have a modicum of economic literacy, doesn’t she? But there are lots of others whose school experience was so negative that they are suspicious of anyone or anything academic in nature. They trust people who work with their hands way more than they do people, like journalists, who work with words.

It’s easy to write off these people’s anti-intellectualism as simple-minded, but there’s more to it. Listen to their stories and inevitably they’ll talk about classmates’, teachers’, or employers’ negative preconceived notions of them. Their strongest memories of school are of a pervasive arrogance that often takes root early as a result of homogenous ability grouping or “tracking”. In the way they design curriculum and evaluate student work, educators routinely define “intelligence” far too narrowly, agreeing that those especially good at reading and writing have it, and those whose “smarts” take less academic forms, do not.

Formally educated professionals aren’t intentionally arrogant, but often, they convey a sense of superiority in subtle and nuanced ways. Not being in touch with one’s arrogance doesn’t negate its impact.

We talk about education’s importance all the time without acknowledging the underlying antipathy many have for formally educated know-it-alls who would never conflate the meaning of a “large economy”. One particular friend of mine, who is unconventionally smart and happened to vote for the reading-averse President, would conclude one thing from Weissmann’s story, he’s an arrogant prick.

Is that because my friend is just another irrational right wing nutter or are formally educated people like me to blame? At least in part.

The Age of Self Promotion

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When a person’s image and/or reputation is inflated, sometimes people lament, “Big hat, no cattle.” A lot of people today, like the President of the United States, excel at promoting themselves more than anything else. Thanks to the public’s allegiance to valueless media, we’re making a mockery of merit.

A case study. My July morning routine entails working out, eating breakfast, making a green tea latte, and then settling in to the day’s Tour de France stage which I spend about thirty minutes fast forwarding through.

This year there are three cyclists from the U.S. in le Tour, meaning about 1.5% of the total peloton. One of the U.S. riders is barely surviving the mountain climbs, just making the maximum time cuts. But because we’re living in the Age of Self Promotion, that same rider is starring on the U.S. television coverage, dropping daily broh-heavy “behind the scenes” video segments that add nothing to the event. He seems likable enough because of a goofy personality. And maybe the fact that both of his parents were professional cyclists and he’s bounced back from a horrific accident a few years ago contribute to some of his faux-fame as well.

But even accounting for those extenuating circumstances, the fact that he’s in damn near last place would only matter if we were in an Age of Meritocracy, but we’re not. Increasingly, we’re surrounded by people with really, really big hats. Which makes it tough to see the front of the race.

Thank You For Being Late—Buyer Beware

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Excellent take down of Thomas Friedman’s newest NY Times best seller by Justin Peters of Slate.

Fav pgraph:

“Thank You for Being Late was put to bed well before the presidential election, and throughout the text Friedman makes occasional dismissive references to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. (Ha ha, remember those clowns? Good thing technocratic rationality prevailed!) Near the end of the book, Friedman presents an earnest 18-point plan for governmental reform in the age of accelerations; a platform for the “Making the Future Work for Everybody” party, as he puts it. Thomas Friedman doesn’t know a damn thing about the future. Despite all of his self-serving rhetoric about necessities and inevitabilities, he still couldn’t recognize that Trumpism is in part a consequence of thought leadership, of rampant globalization with blithe disregard for its domestic casualties, of having your head jammed so far up the future’s ass that you’ve completely lost touch with the present.”

If you’re looking for something better to read, I recommend Hillbilly Elegy: Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by JD Vance. In this day and age, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it has become a political beach ball, batted around by Republicans and Democrats to argue for conservative and liberal social and economic policies. It’s Vance’s story of growing up in a dysfunctional family in Kentucky and Ohio, two states I grew up in. Here’s an idea, you can’t tell a person their story is “wrong”. Yes, if you must, you can tell them the conclusions they draw from it are misguided, but how about waiting awhile.

Alibaba, can I count Hillbilly Elegy as a 2017 book if I started it in the final days of 2016? What do your “book list” rules say about that? I also just finished the sup short collection of essays by Oliver Sacks that you gave me for Christmas. Does the fact that I enjoy reading and thinking about how people approach the end of life mean I’m old? How ’bout waiting awhile to answer that.

I just started a bruiser, Empire of Things by Frank Trentmann. Hoping to finish before UCLA cuts down the nets in Phoenix and/or JSpieth birdies #12 at Augusta National on Sunday. Also hoping everyone forgets I’m reading this so no one asks how it’s coming. #toomuchpressure

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