Settling into my new home State's political scene....

I now literally live on the border of Albuquerque in Rio Rancho, NM so I cannot vote in next Tuesday October 3 elections there. Tim Keller is running for Mayor of Albuquerque.  He was the State Auditor before deciding to run for mayor of a city that represents nearly half the population of the State.  Keller is a Berniecrat in some ways, and has the intelligence, passion and drive to be a successful mayor of a town that remains poised for true growth, but has missed many opportunities.  Here is his platform for any ABQ'ers who have not yet voted and who may know people in ABQ.

The local newspaper, the Albuquerque Journal, is deathly afraid of Mr. Keller, who holds a lead at around 25-30% of voter support in an eight person race.  The next person in the polling is about 8-10 points behind.  The Journal did a horrible thing last Sunday and did a double endorsement, the Republican Dan Lewis and a truly corporate Democrat with an ethnic face.  The intent was to unite the Republicans and divide the Democrats with a hope that the Republican Dan Lewis will finish second.  It was truly disgusting in its calculated cynicism.

The Journal has also been leading the banshee, hysterical cries against the proposed sick pay ordinance, as if it portends the end of growing businesses as we know it in the area.  I have long heard such cries in the past in the Greatest State in the Union, and funny, but California went from a status of the 8th largest economy in 2011 to tied for 5th or solely in 6th place among world economies since then.  Growth and success depend far more on government involvement in developing and maintaining infrastructure and education than these relatively marginal rules--which nonetheless very importantly provide decent protections to the most economically vulnerable.

Overall, despite the fact that the Albuquerque Journal's politics are sorta rancid and cynical, it is, interestingly enough, a fine newspaper with regard to the level of local, state and national reporting, its arts section and its business section.  It is far superior to, say, the San Diego Union Tribune, and the usually-justly-criticized-for-a-rancid-editorial-page Orange County Register.  The Journal is not close to the Los Angeles Times in terms of degree of national coverage, but it is close enough for a favorable mention and comparison.  I am therefore most impressed with the newspaper from those very important standpoints.  I just have to learn to translate when reading its editorials.  They did, however, publish an edited version of my letter to the editor last Tuesday on the subject of the sick pay ordinance, so I guess I have to give the editorial staff that, at least....:)

Right now, I can say that I support Tim Keller for Mayor of Albuquerque and Jeff Apodaca for Governor of New Mexico.  Jeff's understanding of the need to use the State's ridiculously high "rainy day" fund to fund local businesses and solar/wind energy development, and to provide year round pre-school to every child in the State is remarkably visionary for a mainstream candidate.  His bio (scroll down) shows his political pedigree (his Dad was governor of the State in the 1970s), briefly mentions his teen-years cancer and his business experience, which make an interesting personal story. His Dad is Latino and his Mom Anglo for those who care about such things.  What I find compelling is Apodoca's detailed knowledge of the types of businesses in the State and where they stand in the global economy, and his earnest vision for the development of the State through investments in people as part of a support for business development.  He speaks with a compassion born of personal pain, sorta like RFK was when he ran in 1968.  The main Democratic Party candidate opposed to him, and who, by the way, is sweeping up national endorsements and state endorsements, is another corporate Democrat with a female ethnic face.  It is not she is horrible.  She has been a decent to good Congressperson.  It is just that I watch this and I think of a recent national Democratic Party candidate who failed to excite the base.  Listen to her rhetoric and the lack of specifics for the State, the accent on "I" and appeal to the "personal."  Apodaca is about policy and commitment to the State as a governor.  Watch this video of a stump speech Apodaca recently made and if you wish, go into about 5 or 6 minutes in as he begins to unveil the vision.  His powerpoint showing the various businesses and where they are at, where they need to be, and how to use government to get to a higher level of success, is, again, remarkable.  I can't find a similar stump speech from his main opponent because she is working back rooms more than anything else, which is her prerogative under the circumstances.

I think Keller will win but need a runoff against the Republican opponent and likely defeat that Republican opponent too.  I think Jeff Apodaca has a steep hill to climb, but unlike Bernie, he has money and better name recognition as the race will heat up after the ABQ election is decided.  Keller and Apodaca will make fine complements to the two great New Mexico U.S. Senators, Heinrich and Udall, and to the many Democratic Congresspeople starting with my own representative, Ben Ray Lujan.  New Mexico is, again, a state poised for greatness and one hopes it will elect more people with vision to take the State to economic development and cultural development that reflects the best hopes of its diverse population, from Native Americans to Latinos to African-Americans and us Anglos.

I am old enough to remember guys like this speaking exactly like this...

Yes.  He said it.  Indeed.

Trump's rhetoric freed this now ex-fire chief in Pennsylvania to think he could say out loud what he had never stopped thinking.  And now he is free!  Well, free to look for some employment in the private sector....

In fairness, I suppose, he looks old enough to start his pension, so perhaps he just can sit home and watch FoxNews all day.

For the young'uns out there, what this fellow said is what I used to hear back in New Jersey in the 1960s and 1970s, which is that if the black guy on the football team you rooted for was someone you liked, you called him by his name and honored him as a hero.  But the black guy or guys on the other team, or some black guy on the team you revered who spoke out in a way you did not like (Think, oh the late Johnny Sample*), well, the N word was what you called them.  

At page 19 of Dan Jenkins' legendary sequel book, "Life Its Own Self" (the sequel to "Semi-Tough"), Jenkins' right wing, white, Southern football player character, T.J. Lambert, says:

"In football, they's niggers and they's blacks.  Niggers is what plays for them, blacks is what plays for us."

This passed for enlightened attitudes among racists in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s.  And that is where this now ex-fire chief was coming from.  Yes, Trump fans.  You get to wear this.  I know too many people I grew up with who had the same exact attitude as T.J. Lambert who now proudly tell us they are not racist, but they love Trump when he speaks as he did last week in that rally in Alabama.

*Sample's book, "Confessions of a Dirty Ballplayer," is outstanding, and well worth finding and reading.  He articulates very clearly what it was like to be a smart, young black man in America playing football during the 1950s and 1960s. Sample's career began with the legendary Baltimore Colts in the late 1950s, and his stories of his run ins with the legendary coaches on that squad, one of whom was Weeb Eubank, who in the late 1960s, gave Sample a chance on the one great New York Jets team that won the Super Bowl over what people thought may have been the greatest Colts team going into that game, show very clearly how personal and institutional racism works.  

An insider at the edge of the inside calls the Clinton campaign of 2016 one of malpractice for a substantive reason

Stanley Greenberg is always worth reading and here is required reading.  He gets what I have been saying, which is that we are in a populist moment and maybe era, and the Democratic Party, if it wants to win elections in States it should win but are not, and win back Governor seats and State legislatures, must embrace the moment.

My one disagreement with Greenberg is that I see no reason to compromise in most instances and in most places on the cultural issues.  The way Bernie Sanders spoke about some of those issues at Liberty University in 2015 was correct and ultimately powerful.  It showed his strength of good character and courage, reenforcing his decency and authenticity, the latter most important, and he properly phrased the pro-choice position as a morally based one.  When Sanders was in Baltimore meeting with African-American leaders, he spoke movingly of the high cost of being poor and the psychic and economic challenges African-Americans in cities and elsewhere face.

The argument from certain elements of the DNC and the corporate Democrats is that abortion rights must be a litmus test.  I think it should be, too, but that does not mean in a particular right-wing district, we can't have some flexibility on a candidate who may win a primary and may be in favor of some pro-choice and contraception positions, but not others--at least at the moment.  I would say oppose that person in the primary but make sure the candidate we are supporting in that primary can speak of abortion in the manner Bernie Sanders does--and not the language of an elitist technocrat (And let me be clear: An elite technocrat is not incapable by biology of speaking morally, meaning with empathy and passion).  Let us see how we push that person who is less pro-choice than we would like in the general election and on issues that come up in legislative sessions when in office.  The key is to flip the advantage from Republican to Democrat--but let's also this time makes sure it means something positive for most of Americans, starting with those living Americans who are most vulnerable.

I find that the sudden abortion litmus test when too many corporate Democrats themselves have run from it for years, starting with the Bill Clinton campaign in 1991-1992, is cynically based.  To often they deride people who talk of economic populism as "purists" in that now classic sneering way.  But what is their opinion on abortion again?  Hmmmm...Greenberg is saying that where people like Hillary Clinton went wrong is the talk of "ponies" when talking about social democratic policies in place to our neighbor to the north and most civilized places around the world.  And it does not help when Tammy Duckworth, an otherwise admirable Democratic Party U.S. Senator, speaks of marching backwards and tut-tutting against Bernie Sanders' "Medicare for All" proposal.  What this does is tell us such people are more about not confronting economic privilege at a time when that privilege needs to be challenged to win elections and enact policies that will truly begin to heal divisions and economic and psychic pain in the United States.

Hats off to Greenberg for making the case against the latest self-pity party of the DNC and the Clintons in a manner that demands we move forward.

It's time for NFL Pro Football...or is it?

From a September 18 post at Facebook that I thought readers of MFBTS who are not on my FB page may find interesting or hopefully amusing at least...No links other than the original article that set me off to thinking is necessary, I don't think:

Football is a losing economic proposition for cities in my view because it is only eight games and maybe a playoff game. That's it. For cities to bestow billions in taxpayer money, credits or guarantees to billionaire owners of these teams strikes me as the worst form of socialism. The people of San Diego were so correct in letting the Spano family take their team elsewhere.

The decline in ratings in the NFL is only partly explained, in my gut sense, by the scandals of concussions and off field activities or even on field kneelings by certain players. It is more that I do not see young people choosing the NFL when they have so many other entertainment choices. I personally found myself watching the Green Bay-Atlanta game at a restaurant last night and I realized I still have an emotional tie to watching NFL football. As I said to The Wife, football is a far more complicated game than people think, and the players have to be much more intelligent than people give credit for in individual football players. Each team's playbook is a large, complicated document. The number of plays, the assignments and the strategies for and against the two sides that line up on each play are spelled out and players have to memorize the number signals for every single play and know their assignments. There are a multitude of plays that can be called and different numbers are codes. What one sees onscreen is often poetry in motion culminating in harsh collisions all across the field on every single play.

The Wife, however, remained unimpressed. :)

My children will watch a basketball game on television. They will not watch a baseball game except in person or the playoffs. They have no interest in football. They see it as a sport where the violent quotient outweighs the entertainment quotient. I don't know if that is indicative of the younger folks, quite honestly. But the decline in ratings may portend something longer term for football as a sport, and Goodell the NFL Commissioner seems ill-equipped to lead the other owners in that recognition and response. Perhaps the NFL needs a new economic oriented playbook...For the past decade, I have predicted that by 2030 we may only watch football on computer screens without people or live with robots. I know it's silly, but at least it speaks to the concussion issue that has arisen....

Oh well. It's just the start of the 2017 season...

City Mouse, Country Mouse. But maybe it is more like institutional failure...

The first time I saw the City/Country Mouse divide was Digby, the great blogger. One can overstate this closing monologue by Bill Maher, but it is a narrative that has enough validity to be useful. The Coates' argument about white people, particularly those over 40 also has sufficient validity to be a useful narrative.* Whatever it is, though, it remains a minority of actual voters and a bigger minority of potential but legal voters who support Trump and the Republicans in Congress. It is a structural failure that so many of us have a hard time thinking about in a sustained way because it seems so "wonky." 

If you live in a state where the State Legislature and Governor will not support voter reforms that actually help more people to vote, that refuse to support the idea already passed as law in 11 states that if enough states support popular voting for President, that the State will assign electors that reflect the popular vote totals, but that will support the cynically designed and racist ID laws and caging of voters to remove legal voters from the voting rolls, and...if Democratic Party leadership would bother to nominate people who speak more like Bernie as opposed to those who just tell us we can't have any ponies so maybe we should be actually excited about a candidate, well, we won't have to deal with the cultural explanations so often.

The structural explanation is, again, sorta boring, and I am glad to see many of us now understand it. But we can enjoy the Maher monologue and still realize the structural is where the priority should be. For the cultural explanations leave us in despair and division as we continue to reflect upon it, and it overstates the support for the type of politicians who are in power due to quirks in our system that undermine popular sovereignty.

* Though see George Packer's response to Coates' attacks on him in the essay.

Brain Doctor needs course in Epidemiology

Oh. My. God.

This brain doctor who writes in Yahoo! Sports about football and traumatic brain injuries and chronic traumatic encephalopathy fails the basics of epidemiology.  He reminds me of people (like Vice President Mike Pence) who say that since only a small percentage (around 25%) of people who smoke get lung cancer, there is no link between cigarette smoking and cancer.  But what researchers have found since the 1930s is that of people who get lung cancer, most (80% or more) smoked cigarettes.

He says the fact that others get CTE when not playing football is part of his reasoning.  But that is irrelevant.  People get cancer from causes other than cigarettes too.

Wow.  Maybe this guy should have been an engineer.

Democratic Party constituents must learn to chew gum and walk down the street at the same time...

Taking the dog to the vet this morning (poor old puppy!) and then off to work.  I hope you don't mind the lack of links in this one.  I think it is fairly common knowledge among those with any historical understanding, however...

A little history for the feint of heart Democratic Party constituents who think we should not primary recalcitrant corporate Democrats.

In 1933 and into 1934, FDR saw who was against the New Deal programs in the Democratic Party, and he actively recruited people to run in primaries against them. One of the people beaten was Thomas P. Gore, Gore Vidal's granddad, in Oklahoma. The replacement supported New Deal policies which became much more pro-worker and pro-farmer. The period of 1935-1938 proved to be the most productive in American history for working folks overall.

In 1978, Republicans began primarying those who would not get with the program on abortion and tax cuts. Some liberal Republicans like Clifford Case in NJ got beat, and the right winger Jeffrey Bell ended up losing in the general to Bill Bradley. But elsewhere, Republicans shored up what their base wanted on abortion and tax cuts. And in 1980, behind the right wingers' candidate, Ronald Wilson Reagan, or as I like to call him, Mr. 666 (count the letters in his names), they won.

What we do not want a repeat of is what happened in the first year of the Obama administration when, with Democratic Party majorities, our best policies were stymied because we let corporate Democrats like Claire McCaskill and Joe Manchin get away with their shilling for their corporate donors. They actively worked with Republicans to kill the public option, for example. And the Democratic Party missed a major opportunity to reinvigorate labor unions with card check legislation. What a party must do in power is strengthen their constituencies who vote for them, not ignore them.

It is not only possible but necessary to chew gum and walk down the street at the same time. We oppose Ryan and McConnell and Co. in Congress, and Trump's administration, particularly DeVos and Pruitt for starters. And we strengthen the Democratic Party for the next year mid-terms with candidates who excite our natural constituencies and, like Bernie, grab some cross over voters in what I keep calling the populist moment.

Again, we do not want a repeat of just thinking that electing any Democrat is a good thing. It is not...if we elect the type of Democrats who sabotage our best and most popular policies. Threats of primary'ing got Cory Booker's attention. He still has some work to do with folks like me. Kamala Harris is just starting out, but she will have to also show a commitment to progressive economic values that have often eluded her. The planet and we cannot afford to wait much longer or repeat the errors of the Democratic Party in the first years of the Obama administration and Democratic Party Congress of 2009-2010.

How to write realistically about tax policy when working for a financier's journal

So, say you're a writer at Bloomberg, the corporate financier business journal. And you want to tell people that tax cuts for investors are overrated and poisonous to public policy in this time and place. But you know your editors love tax cuts for investors. How to do it, how to do it?

You would write a seemingly, "Oh it's complex. On the one hand, on the other hand" article, but you make sure you quote Emannuel Saez at UC Berkeley, who is a foremost authority on money that goes to rich people in the modern system put in during the Reagan years and perfected in the Clinton years.

And presto, you get this past the editors. 

For me, I hate the entire idea of taxing capital gains differently from wages. Investors I see and deal with like the idea of being in power or at the start of something that gets big. That is their kick. The money is less important to them, except when they complain to a media person in the room, as they already have gobs of money--to invest. The person doing back breaking work, the doctor in the ER as the article writer, Ben Steverman, notes, are taxed ultimately at higher percentages on much less money to live on. 

Once we begin to understand the process, we ask, where does our money go when the revenue comes in? Well, it first and foremost goes to the maintenance of the Empire, where we feel a need as a nation to bomb other places around the world and wonder why we get blowback. The other place is to look at what Robert Reich looked at when he served in the Clinton administration and what was then sixty billion for corporate welfare.  It is now over one hundred billion in gifts to wealthy corporations every single year.

So yes, this article is well worth the read. Bravo to the brave writer who got this past his editor.

Brin on cell phone technology and climate disasters--and Brin talking to conservatives, not me

Here is David Brin in fine form talking about climate change, cell phone technology and how the two meet.

He also gets on his hobbyhorse about Goldwater and Buckley being "intellects" of conservatism, when the latter remains hugely overrated (apart from "God and Man at Yale," just begin by asking yourself which essay or writings of Buckley's stand the test of time to be read even now?*) and the former was not considered much of an intellect in most of his time in public life.**  Still, Brin is correct that conservatives used to stand much more for scientific endeavor and science-based evidence up through the 1970s at least.  And Brin's project here is not to talking to folks like me.  He is trying to talk your old, racist uncle off the shelf of anti-Americanism clothed in patriotism.  That is a very worthy endeavor.

Brin ends plaintively to modern conservatives that they won't turn into flaky leftists or even moderate liberals if they embrace science again.  Then he adds, "we'll negotiate, I promise."  

If "we" do negotiate, can we have David Graeber and Naomi Klein at the liberal-left side of the negotiating table so that information and analysis can truly be engaged?  Pretty please?  And it is not because those two are perfect, but they require a response that helps us recognize societal constructs in what people think are natural and immutable. 

* But see here and here for, respectively, Buckley's inadvertent feminism on his television show, which will be far more remembered for the liberals he invited on, and a political retrospective, where it shows Buckley was far more influential in terms of leading a conservative movement of the wealthy and coalition with racists (though the author is far too kind to say the latter, and far too ignorant to realize how much of a favorable structural role that seed money played in a monied culture and a corporate media opposed to socialist ideas except for the rich) that has come to fruition with the anti-intellectual snarl that characterizes "conservatism" today.  I wish Brin would simply say that and stop idealizing Buckley and Goldwater, but oh well...

**This is another article creating hagiography about Goldwater.  It makes Goldwater sound like a saint for not wanting to inject "race" into the 1964 presidential election.  But a careful read reveals something else:  Goldwater needed to hide his Jewish roots from his own supporters and offered LBJ a deal:  No race and no Jew baiting.  LBJ agreed as he knew by that point he was beating Goldwater anyway.  It is remarkable to me that I could find nothing on the Internet showing what was common knowledge about Goldwater's lack of intellectual acumen at the time he was in office and running for president in 1964.  One cannot, for example, find the interview Gore Vidal did in Look magazine in 1962 where he easily exposed Goldwater's ignorance, but fundamental decency.  Or where Eisenhower told Nixon that he thought Goldwater, while decent as a human being, was "just plain dumb."  Mary C. Brennan, "Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP" (U. of North Carolina Press, 1995), page 97.  This represents to me another example of the continuing rule that not everything is on the Internet.  It most certainly is not.  Still, the amazing thing is how much there still is...

Corporate Democrats have no intention of compromising for unity. That is the real story.

Remember articles like this one by corporate media pundit Greg Sargent in the Washington Post, where the elite media types were saying that Hillary Clinton has been through the wringer for 30 years of attacks and that Bernie had never been tested like Clinton?

Well, now we have Hillary Clinton saying the relatively light attacks Bernie made during the primary season of 2015-2016 are what somehow hurt her so fragile candidacy.

As I have said to people, here is the way we know it is not the progressive wing that is responsible for the civil war among Democrats.  First, ask, are we in a populist moment?  If the answer we receive is "no," then the person with whom we are speaking is delusional and there is no reason to continue the conversation, other than give that person the name of a psychiatrist to spend some time with.

If the person much more reasonably answers "yes," then we need to say the following: "Then, unity means uniting behind a populist message to get to electoral victories."

This is the very argument the Democratic Leadership Council, led by Clinton and Gore, made to unions and progressive groups in the wake of 1988's loss to George Herbert Walker Bush--except they asked, "Are we no longer in a New Deal moment so that we have to be more pro-business to compete?"   So union and progressive support went to "centrist" (meaning pro-corporate) Democrats and the Dems won electoral victories.  That meant union money. That meant progressive money.  That meant union workers and progressive activists on the ground, doing voter registration, doing phone banks, doing trips back and forth to the polling places to ensure people had rides to the polls.  I know. I was one of those who was no fan of Bill Clinton from the start and I saw union people wary of his "mend the NAFTA" line out there too.

But note now what we are seeing from corporate Democrats and their acolytes in the professional political class and corporate owned media, even after they acknowledge (really, they HAVE to acknowledge) they are in a populist moment.  They snarl, they wrap themselves tighter around their bubble where it is always 1992 or 1996, and they suddenly decide that abortion must be a litmus test when of course Pelosi, Biden, Obama and the Clintons themselves did not believe that in deep Red places either.  No, abortion is not their litmus test.  That is a cover.  What is the true litmus test for corporate Democrats is economic privilege.  They despise and have nothing but contempt for unions and populist anger.

They then say, "Well, you guys win a few elections, and we'll talk."  Well, sorry.  We live in a corporate media and money-based electoral culture that requires money to succeed and what we are saying is, If you want unity, recognize the moment and put your money where unity is, just like the progressive and union groups did in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s and up through corporate Obama's election of 2008.

There is no civil war without the corporate Democrats' snarling.  The fact that Hillary Clinton cannot leave this wound alone shows why we cannot move forward in unity.  People like Clinton and the corporate Dems do not want unity except on their own terms, even when this is no longer their moment or time.  If they really cared about the Supreme Court membership, if they really cared about "Dreamers," about abortion, they would be uniting behind the most popular politician in the United States today, Bernie Sanders.  Who the heck cares whether he calls himself a Democratic Party member?  He is more in touch with the populist moment and he is more in the heart of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt than most other politicians in office today.

This is not about the past, by the way.  This is not about fighting last election's battles between Sanders and Clinton.  This is about the way forward.  Democrats want victories?  Then, corporate Dems need to do what progressive and union groups did and get in the back seat, support with money populist candidates and let the progressive populists drive.  Bernie's views on public college tuition, health insurance, infrastructure, taxing the rich, the minimum wage and the environment have the support of a full on majority of Americans.  He is the true centrist if we define the term with any rationality of the meaning of "center," as opposed to the corporate media meaning, which too often just means "pro-corporate."

Again, there is no civil war without the corporate Democrats refusing to unify in a populist moment.  And really, Hillary Clinton, finally, and truly, it's not your turn anymore and never was.  I know it's hard to take but really, it's not about you.

"If it's not on, it's off." Why engineers may make such "good" Holocaust deniers and human-made climate change deniers

There was a fascinating article in Foreign Policy magazine in 2013 that showed how engineers are overrepresented as a profession among Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in nations where Muslims were the majority.  The article first noted:

In a 2009 paper, Diego Gambetta, an Oxford sociologist, and Steffan Hertog, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, found that "among violent Islamists with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries." Of a group of 404 members of violent Islamist groups in the Muslim world, Gambetta and Hertog tracked down the course of study for 178 individuals. Of those 178 violent Islamists, 78 (44 percent) were engineers....(Links removed)

The Oxford study is linked to here.

The article noted, however, that this overrepresentation of engineers was unique nearly around the world for violent, terrorist groups.  It stated, in the Western nations, this was not true for either Islamic terrorist groups, Latin American terrorist groups, or European ones such as the old Red Army and Red Brigades in Germany and Italy, respectively.  But then, there was this nugget:

To account for this disparity in occupation among Islamic terrorists in the Muslim world, Gambetta and Hertog sketch out a particular engineering "mindset" in which the profession is "more attractive to individuals seeking cognitive ‘closure’ and clear-cut answers as opposed to more open-ended sciences — a disposition which has been empirically linked to conservative political attitudes." Engineers, the authors find, are far more conservative on the whole than members of other professions. Islamic extremism "rejects Western pluralism and argues for a unified ordered society" — a political worldview that lines up nicely with a profession averse to chaos. 

In this earlier article from 2010 in the New York Times, the Gambetta/Hertog study was discussed, but with a bit more detail.  The article identified admittedly anecdotal evidence of white terrorist and hate group engineers dotting our landscape, including Richard Butler, founder of the America of the Aryan Nations white supremacy group having been an engineer. And these little things:

Each month, Gambetta and Hertog’s database grows....In February, Joseph Andrew Stack, a software engineer, crashed his plane into I.R.S. offices in Austin, Tex. In March, John Patrick Bedell, an engineering grad student, opened fire at an entrance to the Pentagon...

...The engineer mind-set, Gambetta and Hertog suggest, might be a mix of emotional conservatism and intellectual habits that prefers clear answers to ambiguous questions — “the combination of a sharp mind with a loyal acceptance of authority.” Do people become engineers because they are this way? Or does engineering work shape them? It’s probably a feedback loop of both, Gambetta says.

At the end of the article, an engineer who was former head of the National Academy of Engineering, scoffs at the study for being too small a sample and said "a person who is rigid is a bad engineer." Quite so on both counts, but not enough, Mr. Engineer.  For when doctors, lawyers and accountants are bad, we can be really, really bad, right?  Same with police officers who are bad.  The point is bad doctors, bad lawyers, bad accountants and bad police officers exist--and there is a certain mindset arising from the training each undergoes that can lead to very bad things.  I personally must add here that, for too long, we lawyers have had all sorts of lawyer jokes thrown at us (which I sometimes get a kick out of and have my own jokes about lawyers, too...) but truly, not so many jokes or, more important, blanket observations about engineers.

I mention all this because, from my own experience, I find it intriguing when I see engineers cropping up when one reads the "literature" of climate change deniers and Holocaust deniers in the United States. Now what I find interesting is there does not seem to have been any systemic study of engineers in the United States who subscribe to Holocaust denial and climate change denial.  Still, isn't it fascinating that one of the leading American citizen Holocaust deniers for decades was Arthur Butz, a professor of, guess what, electrical engineering at a prestigious university? Another Holocaust skeptic or denier, Fred Leuchter, claims to be an engineer in his training (the article linked to mentions a "part-time" engineer professor who is also a Holocaust denier who lost his position at a college because he promoted Butz's Holocaust denial literature).  I know, bad engineers--but really even that does not hold water as we don't really know if Butz is bad at building or designing things.  And certainly German engineers, before, during and after the Holocaust, were and remain supposedly very, very competent as engineers. But, let's not jump to the conclusion about overrepresentation, as other leading lights in Holocaust denial come from other backgrounds, such as history majors and even lawyers.  What I am talking about is what would we find below leadership and on the ground, apart from just dumb, mean people? I am talking about attitudes that compares engineers, lawyers, doctors etc. and help us get to the people we have met over the decades at social gatherings, who are, well, they just have a lot questions about whether the Holocaust really was "all what people say" or say, "Well, you know, scientists used to believe that the world was cooling back in the 1970s, right?"  (Well, actually, wrong.).  

So many of us have met these folks, and the best minds we have met, well, they are more often engineers than even us lawyers or even doctors.  I say this without a link because I want to make it clear that I am speaking as an individual talking about a few personal life encounters, but also from others I have met over the years who, when they start to think about it, may have noticed this phenomenon as well.

And that brings us to stuff like this when it comes to anthropomorphic climate change denial.  Note how the author tells us, in the third paragraph, "We Electrical Engineers would call this..." Yes, and just try reading this article if you are not learned in engineering or math.  I found it tough sledding. Very tough.  And we know engineers just like this guy, right?  

And there is this guy, Anthony Watts, who runs the website where the article appeared: "Watt's Up with That?" Watts' website is actually helpful because it forces people like me to challenge myself, and he is sometimes quite brilliant.  Watts studied, you guessed it again, electrical engineering at Purdue University, but did not graduate--and then, as noted at the WUWT website, became a meteorologist working in corporate owned media. 

It is not that engineers are dumb.  Far from it. We have heard over the years that engineering is a very difficult and demanding major in college, certainly up there with straight up math, chemistry, and physics, and I think most engineers are very bright, insightful people in most matters.*

Again, I would like to see someone perform a study similar to the Gambetta-Hertog study, but this time make it about Holocaust deniers and climate change deniers in the United States or at least the U.S. and Canada, and see what we find.  Are engineers overrepresented compared to other professionals, in either or both?  It sure feels like that to me, but I have a day job and it's tough enough to find the time to grind out things like this post. They could start by studying this 2012 peer reviewed study people like to cite as showing scientific community climate change skepticism. But note the study decided to query "professional engineers" and what it called "geoscientists," which Wiki says are "geologists."  

So, if you encounter a climate change skeptic who is an engineer, just nod and walk away.  They will try to overwhelm you with things that are just plain wrong--such as the aforementioned "global cooling consensus"--or they will start to sound like the fellow linked to above at "Watt's Up with That?", which, frankly, is just so much noise that tends to prove Albert Einstein's supposed dictum, "You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."

Me?  I tend to play with these guys, owing to my lawyerly nature.  I love asking them about what oceanographers talk about, i.e. ocean acidification, or about how the WUWT folks were all atwitter at the dawn of the 20th Century about the coming shift in solar winds, and how not only is there no Dr. Michael Mann "hockey stick," there would be a relative cooling of the Earth.  And how did that turn out.  Yes, they were right that it was not the hockey stick, but, and this is a BIG BUT, we stayed at around the highest recorded rate year, 1998, for years thereafter, which some called a "pause," and then have seen global temperatures begin to move upwards since.  And then I ask, well, it's not just the scientists, you know?  What about insurance company reinsurer and underwriter types, you know, guys and gals who are so economically cautious, conservative and sensible, who worry about the costs insurers incur with every Hurricane Harvey?  Surely, if they thought anthropomorphic climate change was a hoax, or had strong reason to doubt, they would not release reports like this, right?  And the CIA and Joint Chief of Staff, are they in on the conspiracy of long-haired, socialist scientists, too?  You could call that "mission creep," but that would be a glib, lawyerly answer, wouldn't it?**

And then of course, these engineer skeptics then tell me they worry about the economics, the costs of combating human contribution to climate change--as if the insurance underwriters and the Joint Chiefs and the CIA don't have down the costs of not doing something globally together to lower the increase in global temperatures.  And so often, these engineer types have never even heard of William Nordhaus, let alone read his work.

I know what we're saying here.  Maybe it's not that engineers are overrepresented in climate change and Holocaust denial.  But when they show up in those areas, well, well, well, are they adamant.  And that's where the title of my post comes in.  Engineers are taught that systems can and should be closed for efficiency and operation.  When we combine that with "cognitive dissonance," it gets us to the engineer's line, "If it's not on, it's off."  And politics, public policy, at their best, are open-ended, and are a continued conversation, for as Holly Hunter's Senator Finch character tells Charlie Rose in "Batman v. Superman," "democracy is a conversation."

And I get the point that maybe those guys (and sadly it's mostly us guys, right?) are being bad engineers.  But it's really bad politics from highly skilled and intelligent people.  It's sorta like the poor fellow at Google (who, in my lawyerly view, may have been wrongfully fired) who wrote an interesting 10 page engineer's "analysis" about sex discrimination at Google and other high tech places.  The poor fellow went off the rails because he thought it was elementary that there are biological differences between men and women that extended into conduct and thought.  It was eugenics thinking, of course, and the poor fellow needed to read a bit of Stephen Jay Gould.*** When I read the "10 pager" as I liked to call it among friends, I was struck by its engineer mindset and true beauty about regressions and means.  I was struck too that, if I was defending the guy, or taking his case against Google for wrongful termination in violation of California Labor Code 1102.5, which has been interpreted to protect one's political statements at work unless they truly become individually harassing, I would note the various places in the document that shows he is amenable to women engineers, amenable to changes to promote women in the tech industry and believes that it is wrong to judge individuals by so-called group characteristics.  I don't know why Google jumped here and did not have a conversation with the fellow.  He's only 28 years old from what I understand, and bless his heart, he was really trying here, people! :) But, frankly, again, he deserved better from Google from a legal and also moral standpoint to have his arguments checked and discussed as Google does have a problem with its male-centric culture and that it is far from alone.  I get that, and even this fellow gets it deep down.

As I say, the problem with at least some engineers is their life perspective and politics, and that it stems from "If it's not on, it's off." Sorry, engineers.  Sometimes, something as large as the planet or a mass government policy can be on and off at the same time. Critical thinking is most especially important to both engineers and to lawyers.  But critical thinking alone can be a dead end if one over-interprets the exceptions, and that is true for all of us.

*On the other hand, I had to read and digest an awful lot as a History major and then learn to think like a lawyer in law school, and that of course created my own arrogance at people for not seeing holes in their own arguments, and makes me prone to be argumentative and contrarian--and sometimes skeptical about language and-egad!--"truth" as a whole.  See, I get the point about us lawyers....As Lenny Bruce said in the Berkeley Concert of 1965 "...everybody's up for grabs!"meaning, we're all vulnerable in our thinking and abilities.

**And if I sense they are right wingers, I ask, "Did you initially support the Second Iraq War under Bush/Cheney?  Did you support Cheney's 1% doctrine, that if there was a 1% chance Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, we had to act?  If so, why should we not apply that doctrine or at least the 80% doctrine, we can call it, to protect the planet?  How much is the planet worth to you compared to Saddam having weapons of mass destruction?"  I know.  Damn lawyer!

***And reading Gould, one learns that it is good to question scientists who overstate their interpretations of results and to question scientists when they are reflecting prejudices they do not otherwise wish to acknowledge.  

Human ornaments

For those who can stand it, this review by Rosemary Hill in the London Review of Books is a very elegant article about the Royal Family of the past half century. By the end of my reading the article, Ms. Hill had merely provided more proof for me that Jeremy Corbyn and others who support the idea of republicanism in the U.K. are correct: The Brits should abolish the monarchy after the current Queen sheds her mortal coil.* 
Spending untold millions each year to present a few human beings as ornaments and fodder for reality television is an institution that is not only wasteful, but poisonous in a nation that prides itself as much on its openness, sense of individual merit and economic equality of opportunity.**
And count me in as someone who has long felt very badly for the bonny Prince Charles. I have long admired his environmental stances and watched with incredulity, but increasing recognition of the role of corporate owned media to discipline people who step out of their given places, the manner in which the Murdoch owned newspapers, and eventually most of British media, hounded and ridiculed him. The show that was Princess Diana has always struck me as hollow at its core and preening and voyeuristic at its worst. Again, human ornaments, all of them.  
Long stripped of much of their historical political power, and now constantly forced to navigate against the overwhelming power of mass and social media, the function of the Royal Family has largely been reduced to that of the Kardashians television program here in the United States of America, where we get to preen over, show awe at and often brutally criticize people who live in a continual fishbowl in the form of a camera. Those who watch the Kardashians reportedly feel a combination of envy at their wealth and celebrity, but also feel so superior to them. The Royal Family is in a constant fishbowl, as well, but one where appearances count, so that they are constantly worried their staff may be recording their bodily functions or otherwise their "bad hair" moments, or will outright lie for a media paid "exclusive" about something that has only that grain of truth, and where the Royal Family cannot, in any real sense, refute without more ridicule and insatiable demands upon what remains of their inner lives.  
My conclusion, therefore, is not based upon anger or malice against the Royal Family. It is more from a perspective that is perhaps partly pity, but ultimately wanting to be kind to those who I see as victims of modern celebrity. The other part, besides kindness and pity, is that I think abolishing the monarchy may have a salutary effect on the commonweal of not only Great Britain, but the U.S., where we may force ourselves to have a conversation about growing up, facing responsibilities we have to each other as citizens and realizing there is no magical Royal Family, be they Kennedys or Trumps or Houses of Hanover, to save us.

* The late Christopher Hitchens was uncharacteristically coy about his ultimate view as to whether to abolish the monarchy after Queen Elizabeth's demise. Here is one of his articles on the subject, from Vanity Fair. On the other hand, the British pop singer Morrissey has remained pretty certain about his feelings for the Royal Family.

** A wonderful, rip-roaring defense of British political philosophy, as against French political philosophy, was once penned by the British Marxist, E.P. Thompson, called "The Poverty of Theory" (1978). It is worth buying the book, in which the essay was eventually published, to savor all 200 odd pages of the essay.