Growing Up To Be President

Surely, one of the most pernicious, disgusting and damaging ideas in American life is the concept of "role model."  God save us from the role model.

Kids were supposed to idolize Babe Ruth, John F. Kennedy, and the whole idea of The President, as if these are ideal human beings to be emulated.

How much better we would be as parents to teach our children that no man is worthy of idolizing, that every man has weaknesses, and likely more weaknesses than strengths, but that each human being has the potential to do something so positive we can look past his many weaknesses and admire the good thing or things he has done and we can revere, not the man, but the accomplishment.

So when so many people said it would be wonderful if Hillary Clinton won because then little girls could know that one day they, too, could grow up to be president, I would retch. Whether she won and became President or not, every little girl can grow up to be President, especially if her parents are rich and driven. The fact is, as John Adams once said, "No man who ever held the office the Presidency would congratulate a friend on having attained it."

Women--some women--have railed against their perception of Donald John Trump as a man who views women as sexual objects.  Compared to his predecessors, Trump is prepubescent, and now at 70, it's hard to say exactly how he views women.
Warren Harding, a man of limited intellectual capabilities who looked like Hollywood's image of a President, loved having sex with a teenager, Nan Britton, in White House closets. Lyndon Johnson had a buzzer installed in the White House so the Secret Service could warn him when Lady Bird was approaching, so he could get rid of whatever woman he was currently indulging, and John Kennedy, well you needed a program to keep track of the players in his sexual follies. Not that testosterone driven behavior is a bad thing, but it's no virtue either.  Franklin Roosevelt had his Missy and Eisenhower his Kay Summersby. If power attracts women, and men have testosterone, whether he is David Petraeus or the paralytic FDR, the man will not pass up an opportunity. So what? 

There are worse things a man can be than interested in women.

Woodrow Wilson was an unreconstructed racist who did not believe women had the intellectual capacity to be trusted with the vote, who sent federal troops to Colorado to kill striking miners.  And Richard Nixon--gads!  Talk about a bundle of pathology. Donald Trump's narcissism pales in comparison to the paranoid mess that was Nixon. George W. Bush was simply not bright enough to see the trap laid for him by Osama Bin Laden.  Lyndon Johnson was not smart enough to see that Vietnam was a quagmire. Herbert Hoover was not smart enough to see the bankruptcy of the idea that Americans could lift themselves up out of the Depression by hard work without government action. 

Smart enough to decline the Presidency

What we should extol in the man in the Oval Office, is not his moral rectitude, as we see moral rectitude, but his capacity to see through to what will work for the country, to navigate the ship of state past the land mines beyond what  will sink it.

"The West Wing"  encapsulated the idea of a good man in the Presidency, a fundamentally decent, loving, funny, intelligent person, Josiah Bartlet, an ideal which in real life has been approached only once in the last 100 years--by Barack Obama. Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, he only got the chance for a 2 year Presidency. He made the most of it, but the Tea Party cut the legs out from under his Presidency and he spent 6 years simply dancing around the obstacles the Constitution laid in his path. He could not even get Gitmo closed, hard as he tried. That blight on the history of the United States of America, that monument to our fear, our willingness to abandon principles, to say to the world, "We don't really believe in what our Constitution says."  If Gitmo proved anything about the American Presidency, it was that the Oval Office is a very weak office. The founding fathers were careful to construct it that way, and after 227 years, the American President may be called the leader of the free world, the most powerful man in the world, but that only refers to our nuclear arsenal, not to the actual power of the office. 

Shut Up and Listen

Steve Bannon remarked the great chattering class of news media, pundits on CNN, MSNBC, PBS and elsewhere  have been or should be humiliated by how wrong they were about the Trump election, and in that he could have included Nate Silver and the pollster class, the political science department at Harvard, you name it. They all had their numbers and they were dead wrong.

So Mr. Bannon has a point.

You'd be well advised to figure out why you lost before you go attacking Mr. Trump.






“While it may upset The New York Times, Hollywood, the cast of ‘Hamilton’ and the groups marching in the streets, it is not upsetting to the constituents that elected these members and senators,” Sam Geduldig, a Republican lobbyist, said of Mr. Trump’s behavior. “There is a feeling that if those groups are against you, you’re doing the right thing.”





And there is some wisdom here. 

I, for one, would not dismiss everything Mr. Trump has said just because he's a stupid frat boy.


1. Isolationsim/ War with Islam/ Anti Muslim Sentiments/Xenophobia:  

I share the concern about an immigrant population which, far from pushing to "assimilate," refuses to embrace the one cardinal principle of a free society: Freedom of speech and with that, the notion, "I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
No, that's not what we hear from at least a few Imans at some Mosques in England, France and Germany. In those places, the mosque is a place of foment, discontent, rage and rebuke to all those infidels outside its walls who practice free love, who believe women should be sexually free and economically independent, who might draw cartoons about the prophet Mohammad and then deserve to be murdered. 
A group which enters, or you might say "infiltrates" a country with that sort of behavior in mind, really is a "Trojan Horse" in the purest sense. This is a group which is determined to destroy the city from within. The question is, how do you identify the bad actors?  The idea of a Trojan Horse is the invaders bent on destruction are concealed.
This is the concept of "invasive species."  In New Hampshire Norwegian Red Maple trees are considered invasive species. They don't belong here according to the department of Horticulture at UNH.  Fact is, every species of tree is an invasive species or was once. Fact is, somebody on the faculty of UNH doesn't like red trees. Color of the leaves offends them.  But look around Hampton, NH and you'll see a lot of people like the mix of red and green leaves. Mixing of the races. New Hampshire just doesn't look the same. The same as when?
Same is true of London, Berlin, Paris. Walk down some streets in London and you'd think you were in Baghdad. Is that a bad thing? For some this change is disturbing and unpleasant.


The problem is Trump's solutions, a ban on entry into the country of all Muslims, a registry of "suspects" i.e. Muslims is akin to the solution of the Third Reich. Just round 'em all up and kill them.


In Europe now, Germany, France, England, the idea of what a country ought to be like is it ought to be white, Christian and not swarthy or Muslim.  Diversity is not embraced as a good thing.  As far as I'm concerned, that is a value to be resisted or even deplored, and, practically speaking, America is stronger than any individual European nation precisely because we have, finally, after 300 years actually internalized that mixing of races and ethnicities is a good, joyful thing.  At least 49% of us have done this.


2. Protectionism, Anti Globalization, Anti Capitalism, Workers and their American Jobs:

The idea of protecting American jobs against the global economy, of protectionism as a value which Trumps free trade, low prices, maximal capitalist efficiency, is not ipso facto a loser.
The American entrepreneur who has developed a factory to manufacture shirts, who discovers he can have those shirts made in Vietnam, shipping the cloth there, having the workers paid $1 a day rather than $15 an hour, asks himself: What am I in business for? Am I going to work every day to make shirts, sell shirts and make as much money for myself as I can, or am I doing this to provide jobs to 300 workers here in America, and with that, to pay for their workmen's compensation, their retirement and their health insurance?


The capitalists, the upper 1% crowd, has clearly decided, we are going for the money. We do not sell shares to our stockholders so we can support an American workforce. Our primary loyalty is to our stockholders, which means what we are about is maximizing profit. In that sense, we are anti labor and we regard our employees as competitors, as a force which limits profit, which stands between us and our ultimate goal.

If the reason for keeping a Carrier airconditioner plant open is to generate profit for the shareholders, then we move the factory to Mexico. If it's to provide jobs for American workers, then we keep it in Indiana.  Of course, then you have the problem of robots: If we can make shirts in either place with 20 employees and 200 robots rather than 400 employees, do you have to choose the 400 employees? 


From our earliest days as a republic, New England shoemakers wanted protective tariffs while Southern cotton planters (who had nearly free slave labor) wanted no such barriers to trade with England.  Protective tariffs might have inhibited trade, but it protected shop owners and workers in Massachusetts.


Any effort to protect workers may, but not necessarily always does, result in building inefficiency into the chain of production.


This raises the question of why do we produce stuff? Is it to meet consumer demand or to provide jobs for workers? 


In some ways maybe we should shift to an economy which no longer produces stuff but only provides services.  Services nearly always requires employees.


The stuff can come from elsewhere.




3. The Unites States as the World's Policeman:

Why do we have American troops in Korea, Japan, Germany and who knows where else? Why do we have to spend money for that?
Why do we have American troops in Europe to defend Germany and France against Russia?
The "American First" types from the 1930's didn't care about Hitler or fascism or Germany rounding up and killing Jews and Gypsies. They just didn't want American boys dying to prevent that sort of nastiness on the other side of the ocean. 
The lesson of isolationism carried us forward for 75 years, but now, do we really want to launch our nuclear missiles or even send in our armoured division to defend Lativa, Estonia and Lithuania or Poland?
Why does the American taxpayer have to work 6 months a year to pay to maintain solidiers the French and German and Italian taxpayer do not have to pay for? 
Americans are lucky to get 2 weeks paid vacation. In Europe 12 or even 16 weeks of paid vacation is not uncommon.
Are we being played for suckers?
When Trump looks at NATO and all the other places we spend money, I have to smile in silent (until now) agreement.
The question is, have we really heard all the arguments?: At least we have to be thankful to the Donald for opening the discussion.

Fun Donald Altfactoids

Here's some alt facts to list and keep track of.
If we just keep adding to and updating this list we can save valuable time in each news cycle:

1. "Sanctuary cities" will be cut off from federal dollars. The nasty cities are located in  "donor" states, like California, which sends more dollars to the federal government than come back. 
The dollars which don't come back go to states like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Kentucky, West Virginia. But that's all right because all those states voted for Mr. Trump and these states hate the federal government for keeping them in a dependent state of mind like so many welfare queens. 
Sanctuary cities like Los Angeles and Boston refuse to send out storm troopers to demand papers from suspected illegal immigrants and those cities should be punished.


2. Speaking of punishing cities:  The feds will be sent to Chicago to get tough with the shooters there who are shooting "thousands" of people.
There are almost 300 shooting deaths a year in Chicago, and who knows how many non lethal shootings. Well, not quite right--the Donald knows there are "thousands."


 Anyway, there is carnage in Chicago and "the feds" will put an end to this.
 The democratic mayor of Chicago refuses to do anything because he is a friend of Obama's who was born in Kenya, where shootings are even more frequent. In the millions.
 So we'll send in the feds, but exactly which feds is not clear.
I'm thinking FEMA with those helicopters to rescue drowning victims. They are good at rescue.
Or maybe, EPA officers to test the water for lead, which must be a problem because all those Chicago ER's are inundated with patients with "lead poisoning."  Get it? "lead poisoning" as in lead bullets.
Or maybe we'll send in the FBI under the direction of James Comey. He's a good guy, Comey. You remember him, right?

3. "Clean Coal:"  We are putting all those coal miners back to work to get clean coal to the power plants again. This new coal is so cool it actually scrubs the skies clean and pulls CO2 out of the air and then it floats north and finds drowning polar bears and rescues them. President Trump is directing his new head of the EPA to create an award for the mine which produces the most clean coal and Rick Perry at Energy has been directed to convert all those wind farms to coal fired windmills and the solar panels will run on coal on cloudy days. It's so wonderful. Everyone's a winner.


4. Crowd Size/Penis size:  President trump is speaking to record crowds everywhere he goes. You cannot always see the crowds, but they are there on line.
Interviews have suggested the crowds all love him.
Did you see that crowd at the CIA cheering?  That was an authentic, loving, enthusiastic crowd. CIA employees, who the lying media said hated the Donald just loved him.
-Becausce, as CIA agents, they know Mr. Trump's penis is bigger than anyone's the biggest penis EVER.

5. The American embassy in Israel is now in Jerusalem, which is also includes Tel Aviv. Same town now.  In fact the American embassy in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Libya are all now in Jerusalem.  We are considering moving the State Department from E Street in Washington, D.C. to Jerusalem. Mexico will pay for that, too.

Look, ma! I look just like a soldier!

6. Islam Hates Us: Which is why they are lopping off heads. They hate us because Donald's penis is bigger than anyone in ISIS. You know what they really want to lop off. But we are winning because ISIS is afflicted with small penis size.


7. Water boarding is back: We have to be tough because they hate us. Anyone accused of a crime will be water boarded. They will be water boarded daily once convicted. This is good for the Ohio workers in the plant which makes water boarding paraphernalia. The owners of the plant, Blackwater, promises all components are made in America and the water is American. This will put hundreds of thousands of Ohio workers back to work.


8. Oil pipelines are good for the environment: We save all that fuel which we had to use to transport oil by rail and by truck. The pipelines will employ hundreds of thousands of workers from Wisconsin, and Mexico will pay for them.

9. Voter fraud is rampant: We are going to stop this cancer on democracy by restricting voting to voters who vote for Trump and Republican representatives. No Blacks, Hispanics or Women need apply, which is a sacrifice on the part of Mr. Trump since 53% of women voted for him and 30% of Hispanics did too. Blacks we didn't count, but we hear the turnout to vote for Mr. Trump in the Black inner cities of Philadelphia and Detroit was YUGE!  But, just to show how the Donald is willing to sacrifice for the good of the country no Blacks, Women or Hispanics, his own base, will be allowed to vote in the future. Costs of revising the voter rolls will be borne by Mexico, eventually.

Indifference as a Good Thing

The opposite of love is not hate; it's indifference.
--Elie Wiesel 

Is it just me, or does it seem every news story begins with the words "President Trump?"  It's like picking at a wound, which just gets worse as you pick more and more. 

And the thing is, 90% of the stories are inconsequential, stupid or both. Trump says 3 million fraudulent ballots were cast for Hillary Clinton. (Then two experts testify it's not true.) Trump says global warming is a Chinese plot.  Trump says Obama was born in Kenya or on Mars. (Hawaii denies it.) Trump says Women love him. (Some woman denies it.) Trump says the news media are dishonest. (News media deny it.) Trump says the folks at the CIA love him. (They cheer.) Trump says the soldiers voted for him overwhelmingly. (Nobody is asked.) Trump said he had the biggest audience for his wonderful Inauguration speech ever. 

Victim of a Chinese Plot!

By the time you get Trump said and somebody denies it, there is nothing left in the news. 

Why can't the PBS News Hours simply end every broadcast with a list of the things Trump said today and a tally of which of these things are without corroborating evidence and which are manifestly untrue?  Limit that to 90 seconds. 

Then, for the rest of the hour, simply ignore him. 

Could distinguish fiction from reality

The thing is, Trump is like my dog, if you pay attention to him, you only encourage him.  

Just ignore him.  Eventually, maybe he'll go away.

Oh, and there's one other thing: Alternative facts.
Actually, one of my best classes in college happened when the professor challenged us on the idea of what constitutes a "fact." His point was you can always present another point of view.  So, "we are sitting here together, in this classroom is a fact." And he responds. "Well, physically, but Susan over there hasn't heard a word we've said. She's here, but she's somewhere else, in her head."
This all came up when Trump said he had the biggest audience ever for his Inauguration and the Washington Post published photos showing Obama's crowd was bigger. 
Well, but when did they take those photos of Trump's crowd? After most people had left?  Were they photo-shopped? You can see photo-shopped nude photos of Ivanka Trump? You going to believe those? What is credible evidence? And, anyway, even if the crowd physically present was smaller, well in the world of the internet, people don't attend physically--they watched on line. Alternative facts. Not such a crazy thing. 
Mr. Trump and his followers distrust "evidence." Evidence is presented in court but always has to be examined, analyzed. Are the gloves that did not fit O.J. Simpson simply wool gloves which shrank, as wool things do? What of that evidence?

Mr. Trump does not accept that argument should be built in the way we were taught to do in school, citing evidence. You simply say something and it develops a life of its own: Obama was born in Kenya. Hillary is a crook. Obama is a closet Muslim. Obama was the founder of ISIS. Hillary was co-founder.  The news media lie. Global warming is a hoax. Vaccines cause mental retardation.  The crime rate in America is way up.  The cities are falling apart. Obamacare is a disaster.  Forty percent of America will believe it. If you repeat it often enough, 51% will believe it and vote you into office. In speech there is logic. 

Welcome to the alternative universe.

Or as Barney Frank would say: Excuse me, but on what planet do you spend the majority of your time?

Worm's Eye View: Of Government, Markets and Me

My brother has long urged me to read "Liar's Poker" and recently, I've come back to it. Typically, I jump among a dozen or so books on my Kindle and lately I've spent more time among Hamilton, Burr and the founding fathers, but in between watching coverage of the Million Women's March on TV, I got deep into "Liar's Poker."

Michael Lewis 

Of course, I could not help but think where I was in the story lines Michael Lewis outlines. Reading along, I could see I was simply one twig borne along by a swift and tumultuous flood.  Big things happened which affected my life in ways I was unaware of.  My own ideas, philosophy were shaped in ways I was barely aware of. My own behavior helped shaped larger events, although, again I was not aware of how. All this is put into perspective by Lewis.

In 1979 Paul Volker of the Federal Reserve decided to raise interest rates, and in doing so, he crushed the markets for mortgages.  Mortgages were given by local banks "thrift" institutions aka "Savings and Loans.  These local lenders scrutinized the likelihood the people seeking mortgage loans would repay them by examining the details of their income, their other debts and their credit history.  It was a meticulous process and one which required considerable grunt work.

People like me, unsophisticated in finance or economics, did not need college courses to realize we were throwing away our money on rent.  
If I took out a loan, I could deduct the interest payments from my income tax--even I could see this was a government giveaway--and I could eventually, once my mortgage was paid off, sell the house I now owned. (It did not occur to me I could sell the house before the 30 years term of the mortgage was up, but that was true.) 
And it was the ability to "pre pay" a mortgage early which posed problems for the lender, who wanted to plan for a steady stream of income from that loan over the years. Lewis never really explains why this is such a problem, but he keeps repeating it, so I guess that's true.

When I decided to buy a house, mortgage rates were 13% , and I objected. My father told me his mortgage rate was 2.9%, on the house he bought in 1956. But this was 1982 and the realtor assured me we'd never see rates below 13% again, in her best professional voice. She knew this.

The rates did fall and by 1983 I applied for a mortgage at some rate I can't recall, maybe 9%. I had to provide reams of paper about my finances. I had $50,000 from a book advance and I had my fledgling private practice of medicine and my wife was working but I was informed by phone the bank was denying my loan. Why? 

"Well, your practice is barely generating any profit," the loan officer told me. "Most of your money comes from the book you wrote and you may never be able to get another book published."

I had to agree with her. I would not have given me a loan. I told the realtor (a different realtor from the 13%-is-forever realtor) and she said, "Nonsense. Tell them you want the book."
"The book?"
"They compile a file on you. It's called the book. Tell them you have another bank willing to give you the loan but you want the book with all the stuff you've provided them so you can go to the other bank."
"But I don't have another bank willing to lend me the money."
"Doesn't matter," the realtor said. "Tell them."
I told the bank officer I wanted my book and within four hours she called me back and told me I had the mortgage.
This was my first introduction to business, liar's poker and the wonderful world of banking and finance.
Should have told me something.
As it turned out, my practice picked up, and I was able to find publishers for four more books over the next eight years and I was able to pay my mortgage payment every month. I was a better risk than I had thought.


But I noticed, after a few years, the bill for the mortgage no longer had the letter head of the Chevy Chase Bank, but it had some company I'd never heard of. When I called to ask about it I was told. "Your payment is the same. What do you care?" My mortgage had been sold to someone else. It had become part of mortgage backed bonds or something. 

There was one other revealing experience along the way. The day of the closing my wife and I, full of anticipation, arrived at the office of the real estate office in Bethesda. We had the mortgage and we had the guy who had built the house and was selling it and we sat down around the table and the lawyer I had hired. (Realizing I was about to take the biggest financial action of my life--I needed a lawyer. Money was tight but I figured a lawyer was insurance.) The lawyer comes in and says he just noticed the way the loan was written by the bank it was not entirely clear I could "pre pay" my mortgage without penalty, or possibly at all. This would be a big problem if I ever wanted to sell the house before 30 years, or if I wanted to pay more each month to pay it off early.
"How long have you known this?" I asked him.
"I just saw it this morning."
"You've had this document in front of you for three weeks and you just read it this morning?"
"Well, let me call the bank and clarify this now."
He came back a few minutes later and said they bank said they were okay with my pre paying the loan.
"So they'll put that in writing?"
"Well, no."
"Who did you talk to?"
"A loan officer"
For once in my life, I became testy with people I did not know. "Well," I told the lawyer, "I'm not really worried because, as God is my witness, if I go to sell this house and we hear even a murmur from the bank about this, I will simply sue the living shit out of you for malpractice, and I'll be sure and lean heavily on the pain and suffering aspect of it. My only worry is I might have trouble finding you, but I'll check on your whereabouts until I sell this house or pay off the loan." 


The lawyer actually gulped.
I tell this story to reflect just how sloppy and inept the real estate industry was, through and through.


Lewis calls the savings and loan bankers the 3-6-3 club: They get their money at 3%, loan it out at 6% and are on the golf course by 3 PM.  They made about $90,000 a year, which in 1980 wasn't bad. But the key thing is, they didn't have to know much or to work very hard and they could still drive nice cars and belong to country clubs.

It turns out while the guys in the mortgage bond department at Salomon Brothers were pushing their lobbyists to get the government to rescind the federal law guaranteeing the right to penalty free prepayment of mortgages, I was already protected by federal law, something the lawyer did not appreciate.

Salomon Brothers stock

It also turned out the guys at Salomon Brothers figured out a way to save the thrift institution banks from Paul Volker's high interest rates--they bundled mortgages as if they were any other commodity into mortgage backed bonds.
People were highly motivated to pay their mortgages and these people were carefully examined by the local lenders, and you had their houses as collateral, so mortgages were the safest bet out there.  At least that was the gospel.


Moody's and Standard and Poor's said these bonds were AAA. They bought the gospel. Of course, at that point nobody at Moody's had seen "The Big Short" because the movie hadn't been made, and nobody at Moody's had bother to investigate to discover mortgages were now being held by pole dancers in Florida who owned five mortgages, none of which they could afford to pay, but they owned these because the mortgage brokers told them they could always sell them, flip the mortgages, make a killing and get out.


(To my mind, if anyone deserved to be sent to jail it was the guys at the rating agencies.)
And the guys on Wall Street were making millions upon millions in this scheme and by the mid 1980's the mortgage bond department at Salomon Brothers was making more money than all the other institutions and departments on Wall Street combined.

So my mortgage, the different letterheads on the mortgage payment slips, which changed yearly, was just part of a monster so huge and so invisible, I could never have known. Had I read the Wall Street Journal daily, I would not have known.  Had I read everything publicly available about how these financial creations had been made, I still would not have known. Had I listened faithfully to "Squawk Box" or "Bloomberg News" I would not have known.

I would have had to wait for the movie, "The Big Short."

The whole system was an intricate symphony of government agencies manipulating the cost of money (the Fed), of government agencies (Ginnie Mae, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack)   which were trying to respond to the Congressional urging to increase home ownership, even if that meant giving mortgages to pole dancers  who might fail to pay them off  and of Congress itself, which did some good protecting constituents against the banking and financial raptors, who wanted to take away the right to prepayment and then there were the  backstage machinations of brokers on Wall Street, who were making millions by playing games. 

Work a day people like me hardly cared.
Let those unappetizing frat boys from Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and Penn make their millions sitting in their offices at Salomon Brothers by looking at graphs and making phone calls.  I could hardly imagine a worse circle of Hell than having to spend 12 hours a day staring at graphs and tables on a computer, typing on a keyboard and pressing a telephone between my shoulder and ear. They could have it. 
As depicted by Lewis, these traders were pretty grotesque. They reveled in their "goofs"--grade school antics which involved cutting ties off each other and pulling everything out of a suitcase and replacing it with wet toilet paper so their colleague arrived in a city, opened his suitcase to change for the big meeting to find only toilet paper. They were just a million laughs. They had the sense of entitlement because they had gone to the right schools and they had been selected from thousands of applicants. 
They were narcissistic, entitled, self absorbed, sloppy, uncaring, produced nothing of value to anyone but themselves and their co conspirators, sucked the innards of the nation dry, leaving only the husk behind, and then they flew the coop looking for another body to infest. 

They were doing me no harm.  I had my mortgage.

Until, of course, it all came crashing down in 2008. 

That got the attention of guys like me, and the work-a-day slobs out in Ohio and Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.  And they blamed anyone who was in power. 

And that begat Donald Trump.

The Dilettante Citizen

Raymond Chandler remarked, "There is nobody less curious than a doctor."  When I read that I thought, "No, just the opposite." But over the years, I think I'm beginning to appreciate what he means.

Belief can be a warm fuzzy feeling 

When a physician, has forty patients scheduled to be seen in eight hours, and he is confronted by a person he thinks is in the exam room because she has a cough, but it turns out she is actually short of breath and has just got back from a 20 hour airplane ride, and she has not just a cough but "dyspnea" the sense of air hunger, then the physician begins to regret asking more questions than the minimum. Now he is faced not with a 10 minute patient with a viral respiratory infection, but a possible pulmonary embolus (lung clot) which gets to be a 40 minute patient. He has, in the immortal words of The Wire's Bunk complicated and burdened his own life because, "There you go again, giving a fuck when you don't have to." 

If he then asks the patient to take off her shirt so he can listen to her lungs and he sees a pigmented lesion on her shoulder, a melanoma perhaps, then he has now got himself  a new problem, which will take yet more time,  and he still has that waiting room full of patients,  which is getting to look  like a runway at Logan in a snowstorm.

Better not to ask too many questions

Of course, in medical school, you are taught to be curious, to ask the next question, to uncover the most serious illness. Or, actually, I have to correct myself. Once upon a time, in the days of the dinosaurs, medical students were taught that. 
Now, in the days of commercial medicine, young doctors are taught to do a "focused" history and a "focused physical exam" which means, do not expand the inquiry, do not open that can of worms. "Keep your shirt on" for today's young doctors means listen to the chest with the patient's shirt on so you will not see the melanoma. If you do see that melanoma, tell the patient to come back for another visit: It's another fee for that problem, and you save time. Of course, if the patient doesn't get the message and never follows up once her cough is better, well she dies.

When I listen to a song like "Anything Goes" I am delighted and play it over and over again, but my son, a musician, hears it entirely differently. When he has me look at the sheet music and break it down, it becomes a lot of work. There is syncopation, and notes coming in with exquisite timing between other notes, the left hand playing against the right with precision. That song is work for the musician, pleasure for the dilettante listener.

I'm just enjoying the music 

My brother, a very sophisticated doctor, loves watching shows on business and finance in large part because, fundamentally, he's never been trained in that, so he loves hearing about it and he's fascinated. Had he gone to Wharton, it would just be work. But now he's a sort of instant expert because he's heard the show about some financial topic.

Listening to people who David Brooks would call, "Low information voters" talk about the virtues of Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton, you see the pleasure they get talking about what they know next to nothing about. A woman will say, "Well, Hillary's a crook. She belongs in jail," and she beams as if she's just said something brilliant and should be appointed mayor. 
How often have I heard some HVAC repairman tell me Social Security is going bankrupt and won't be there for him, or Medicare doesn't work,  when his parents are kept off his budget by Medicare?
And, here in New Hampshire, how often did I hear Obamacare called a disaster, when for all intents and purposes, Obamacare never got instituted here, not like in New York, where my sons could get the best health insurance they ever had for a quarter of the cost of their previous policies which covered almost nothing?

Knowing more, sometimes, is disturbing

Somehow, being incurious, cleaving to "what I heard" from some other ignoramus releases a warm and delicious feeling deep inside. 

Another scene from "The Wire"--at a meeting with the drug kingpin, Stringer Bell, some hopper or tout from the streets, who sells the drugs says something which reveals how little he knows about the business. This happens during a meeting which Bell has insisted be run according to Roberts Rules of Order. Bell explodes, and cuts off the hopper but the "parliamentarian" tries to intervene, "Uh, String, he did have the floor."
Bell erupts, "This nigger too ignorant to have the floor."
Ah, but for a moment the hopper felt fine, having expressed his uninformed opinion and having been taken seriously, until the consequences ensued. 
Ignorance, for a time, is bliss.

Prostitutes Are Not the Problem

Didn't see the press conference but from what I read on line Donald Trump was asked about Russia having videos of him having sex with prostitutes and rather than denying it he simply said he was a germophobe so not inclined to have sex with prostitutes for fear of getting a sexually transmitted disease.

If this is a true account of his response, you got to love it.


If, what he is saying is the reason I would not use a prostitute is not because it demeans women, or because it's immoral or for any other reason than I'd be afraid to get a venereal disease, all I can say is: This is a breath of fresh air.


This could be so liberating for prostitutes, and if we look as prostitution as a public health concern rather than some immoral group, then Mr. Trump has made his first positive step in his Presidency.


Can you imagine a President Cruz or a President anyone else taking this tack?

Media Melt Down: Note to Reporters--Nobody Cares about Russian Hacking

With their best soto profoundo voices, reporters are asking everyone they can get on camera from Trump team members, to members of Congress to simply other reporters, who they interview when they run out of officials to interview: Oh, so what do we think about the Russians hacking our election?

We knew something they didn't

The fact is, I do not care if Russia was behind the news that Hillary did this or that or that Panetta said whatever.


Those "leaks" simply reinforced previously held opinons--like the attack ads funded by the Koch brothers, none of it changed vacillating minds. Minds were made up and unchangeable long before any of that.


Proving the effect of free speech, even fake news, on the outcome of the election is one ongoing, unresolvable argument.

Counties (blue) won by Trump, Beige won by Clinton

Once upon a time in the United States, when there were only newspapers, or three channels on TV to form public opinions, a news story may have mattered. Not now, with Facebook, Fox News, Twitter, CNN, Rachel Madow.


There are simply too many sources. The proliferation of sources is the best antidote to any one source of disinformation.

Phantom's audience, world wide

Show me the Russians got into the pipes that funneled the vote counts to the main computers so Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan turned from blue to red, then I'll agree we have a direct effect on the outcome of the election.

They love me. They really love me.

Until then, the Republicans won because they underestimated the intelligence of the American public and they reaped the benefits of that low opinion, plain and simple.

The TV Time Machine: Seeing The Future In Designated Survivor

Two months before the unexpected 2016 election of Donald Trump a television show called "Designated Survivor" premiered with a story about a man who did not expect to become President of the United States who is suddenly thrust into that role.

The new President (Kiefer Sutherland) is temperamentally unsuited to be President, for exactly the opposite reasons Donald Trump was said to be temperamentally unsuited: rather than being impulsive and egomanical, he is overly cautious and simply too nice.

The show is dreadfully written:  the dialogue is written by people who never got past "Captain America" comic books--"You are now the President of the United States!" and "The White House has just been hacked!"  and "We are now at war! The terrorists have attacked!"
Presumably, some of the writers went to Cornell--the hero wears a Cornell sweatshirt--which only goes to show that an Ivy League pedigree is no guarantee of actual talent.

Long, lingering, simpering, scenes of the new President with his two comic book children are thrust upon the viewer. The President tries cooking breakfast for his two kids and he is a terrible cook. It's just too cute, cute, cute. There is an eight year old girl with a perpetually knitted brow, representing all the eight year old American girls who are worried about bad things in the world, who need Daddy to protect them, and who are constantly being told, "Bad people did some bad things, but we are going to stop them and make everyone safe again." These scenes involve lots of hugging and parents telling children they love them and children repeating back again they love their parents, too. 

It's all just so heart warming you could puke.

Then there is the comic book Nuk'em and kill-anything-that-moves general in his uniform, resplendent in all sorts of medals and badges and things, a humorless man who is simply "a bad man." 

who designs these uniforms?

Watching, as I am, concurrently, Season One of "The Wire" where Deputy Ops Rawls is introduced as a thoroughly malevolent Nuke 'em type of guy, I was again dazzled by how well a character like this can be done.  In his most threatening, malicious presentation, Rawls is clearly very funny and he thinks of himself not as the offender but as the offended party.  What is so masterful about "The Wire," about a really good TV series, is how many sides of people you are allowed to see, in glimpses, or in significant scenes.  The same Rawls sits Jimmy McNulty down later in the season, after McNulty's partner has been shot, and he tells McNulty, "Much as I would take pleasure in seeing an asshole like you suffer, 'cause Christ knows, you deserve it, you were not responsible for this particular fuck up. This was not on you."  And then there is a quick glimpse of Rawls, which happens so fast I missed it the first two times I saw that scene, just a glimpse in one episode of the third season, of Rawls in a gay bar. And if you noticed it, you got another insight into what made Rawls so angry.

Nothing like that goes on in the cartoon "Designated Survivor." It starts with an idea I'm sure many of us have had, looking at the State of the Union address, when the House of Representatives, the Senate, the cabinet and the Supreme Court all convene in one room and how many times have I thought, "Wow, one bomb and we'd have no federal government left."  And of course, there have been some times, I've thought, looking out over the Strom Thurmonds and the Mitch McConnells and the assorted creatures from the dark lagoons of Louisiana and Mississippi who are arrayed in that chamber and I've thought about that and thought: "Maybe not such a bad idea."
And then you realize: In fact, this is just what all those Rust Belt people thought and that's what they did this past November. And, much as you might revile Washington, what Washington really is about is the the triumph of Hope over experience. It's easy to just blow it up. What takes guts is trying to make it work.

The fact is, as a pageant, our democracy needs gatherings like this: the State of the Union address. We do not have a state religion. There are no royal weddings. But we do have the Capitol Building and every year there is that assembly. And after the attack on Pearl Harbor and after 9/11, there was that in your face assembly, where our leaders said, "No, we are not going into hiding. We are standing right here and speaking to the world." 

I'd love to see  a show which might explore the dangers inherent in a President who is unsuited to the job..  The descent into attacks on Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, the suffering of people thrown off their health insurance plans, the treachery of promising factory workers back their old jobs only to see robots replace them, all that could be effective, thought provoking television. 
Instead with have a President with goofy spectacles and his wife whose zygomatic arches are impossibly glamorous, who gets a phone call from her law firm's client who is about to be deported and within two scenes, that problem is resolved and there is another scene of a mother hugging her children, smiling through her tears. Oh, plueeeze.

The question is whether there would be an audience big enough for something better. 
"The Wire" never won an Emmy, and its following was a cult.  
"Celebrity Apprentice" and "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo"  found more Americans tuning in.

Thus goes the American Century.