We have a serious media problem

This past Sunday (Nov. 5, 2023) the New York Times started hyping an utterly screwball poll saying that Trump was leading Biden by an average of four points in six swing states. Right-wing subscribers to the Times swooped into the comments section to gloat. Times pundits doubled down on their usual snide and superior lecturing of Democrats while repeating and amplifying the usual Republican fictions.

Three days later, reality struck in the form of an actual real-world election. In the real world of elections, as opposed to the imaginary world that the media herd have bought into, Democrats won, bigtime, in multiple states, while MAGA Republicans got their you-know-whats handed to them.

I have no idea why political polling has gone haywire. Is it the “weighting” that pollsters apply? I have a hunch, though it’s untestable. When a pollster calls, more than 85 percent of the people who get the calls refuse to answer because of what they see on caller ID. My guess is that while most people roll their eyes and ignore the call, MAGA types are much more motivated to answer, because a poll gives them a way to register their rage and demoralization as their world falls apart. The hope of revenge is pretty much all they have left.

What’s frustrating is that there is no way for rational people to discipline the media for their malpractice. The New York Times thinks it knows better than everyone else, and nothing short of a major scandal (such as a reporter nailed for making stuff up) penetrates the Times’ unlimited faith in its own infallibility.

What we can do as rational people is to always keep in mind how Republican propagandists, starting in 1996 with the birth of Fox News, figured out how to use the principles of journalism to destroy journalism. For years, newspapers as a matter of principle refused to print the word “lie,” because that word wasn’t “objective,” even when reporting on Republican lies that journalists knew perfectly well were lies. That coincided with the rise of the internet and the ability to count clicks. Lies are designed to be provocative and thus get lots of clicks. Good government is boring to most people, which is why the media mostly ignore President Biden’s accomplishments. Whereas lies about Biden are never boring and thus get repeated and amplified by the mainstream media.

The New York Times poll that they hyped on Nov. 5 got lots of clicks. But the poll got the current political mindset of American voters exactly backwards, as the election on Nov. 7 showed. What’s worse is that the New York Times will learn nothing from this very public display of their own ongoing pattern not only of being wrong, but also of the now blind and baked-in pattern of being manipulated by right-wing propagandists. And worse still is that the mainstream media will never admit to having been a megaphone and amplifier to all the lies that led, starting in 1996 with the rise of Fox News, to an attempted right-wing coup against the government of the United States.

And they’re still not telling us that Trump is doomed, becaused they need the clicks.

Update:

The Biden campaign has sent letters to major media outlets scolding them for their distorted coverage of polls:

Biden campaign sends memo to media outlets asserting disparity in polling coverage

All the Light We Cannot See

This Netflix series is just barely over the threshold of watchability. The characters are sweet, but cloying, often to the point of being irritating. The dialogue was some of the worst I’ve encountered in a long time. Most of the scenes are about 30 percent too long. It’s one of those stories that tries to manipulate us into liking it, usually by being sentimental.

The novel All the Light We Cannot See was published in 2014. It won a Pulitzer Prize.

How, I kept asking myself, does mediocre material like this win a Pulitzer Prize? I found my answer in the Wikipedia article. The novel is written in the present tense. This is a proven technique that the very worst of writers figure out: If you develop some sort of quirky and irritating style of writing, then many people including critics will think it’s good writing. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall was published in 2009. I strongly suspect that Anthony Doerr was copying Mantel’s gimmick of writing in the present tense, though Doerr is less opaque than Mantel. (I read a sample of Doerr’s novel on Amazon. As for Hilary Mantel, I tried to read Wolf Hall and flung it after about four pages because the writing was so obnoxious.) Writing like Mantel’s accords with bad writers’ notions of what good writing sounds like. After all, that stuff wins prizes, doesn’t it?

Doerr’s dialogue is what I call lazy dialogue. That’s when the characters say the obvious thing for carrying the story forward, as the writer cranks it out. Good writers will see to it that their characters rarely say the obvious thing. Good writers put far more effort into dialogue that not only carries the story forward, but that also amplifies characterization and that adds color to whatever situation the characters are in.

And then there is rhythm. The rhythm of Doerr’s English sounds like a woodpecker.

I know I’m testy on the matter of bad writing that passes itself off as good writing. If it were merely bad, it would be easy enough to ignore it. But that bad writing wins prizes is an insult to the many better writers who remain more obscure, and an injustice to good editors who see bad writing for what it is but for whatever reason have to let authors get away with it. I have a fantasy of having someone like Hilary Mantel or Anthony Doerr trapped beside me on a crowded train so that I can berate them with what they never hear — that they are terrible writers badly in need of a fearless editor, from whom they might learn a great deal.

All that said, All the Light We Cannot See does contain a warm and edifying story, though a story that could have been much better told. And Doerr was very wise in choosing the medieval town of Saint-Malo, in Brittany, as his setting. Saint-Malo is an extremely picturesque walled town that was occupied by the Nazis in World War II and liberated by American forces in 1944 in battles that nearly destroyed the city. Saint-Malo was carefully rebuilt after the war. It’s now a tourist destination. According to Wikipedia, the population is under 50,000, but in tourist season there may be up to 300,000 people in the city. There are ferries to Saint-Malo from Portsmouth and the Channel Islands. Saint-Malo is now on my travel wish list, though I’d want to go in the off season to avoid the crowds.

Update:

It’s my practice not to read other people’s reviews before I write here about a book, a movie, or a television series. After I wrote the above this morning, I Googled for some reviews of All the Light We Cannot See. The New Republic savaged the novel as “a sentimental mess” and described Doerr’s writing as “pompous, pretentious, and imprecise.” Yes, yes, and yes.

But there’s worse. During the last fifteen minutes of the Netflix series, I cringed lest Doerr, being a bad writer, ruin the ending. The Netflix ending was just as it should be in the art of storytelling. But I learned from a review of the novel that Netflix changed Doerr’s ending, because Doerr had indeed ruined it. Knowing now that Doerr botched the novel with the kind of ending that amateur writers write, I reduce the grade from a C-minus to a D-minus, with thanks to Netflix for correcting such a crass authorial error.

Parade’s End


Benedict Cumberbatch and Adelaide Clemens

By accident, in the trashy wilderness of HBO Max, I discovered “Parade’s End,” a lavish five-part series from BBC Two that was broadcast in 2012. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Christopher Tietjens, a character in four novels by Ford Madox Ford published between 1924 and 1928. I’ve watched only the first episode so far, but it’s one of the best things I’ve come across in a while. The screenplay was adapted by Tom Stoppard, and, according to Wikipedia, it was often described as “the highbrow Downton Abbey.”

Who was Ford Madox Ford, and why had I never heard of him? Ford was very prolific and published something like 70 books. He knew all the literary luminaries of his time. But he never made any money, and his first editions seem to have ended up in rare book collections. That is, he fell out of print. His style was said to be experimental, modernist, and even impressionist — not at all a style to which I am attracted. But I sampled some of his prose at Google Books, and it seems entirely readable.

By some accounts, Ford was a disagreeable person, and Ernest Hemingway famously hated him, though Ford, as editor of the Transatlantic Review, had published some of Hemingway’s work. In a 2016 article “Why did Ernest Hemingway despise Ford Madox Ford?“, there is a quote from an interview with Ford:

“During a late interview with journalist George Seldes, Ford, on the verge of tears, says of Hemingway: ‘he disowns me now that he has become better known than I am.’ Tears now came to Ford’s eyes… ‘I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I’m now an old man and I’ll die without making a name like Hemingway.’ In his published description of the encounter, Seldes notes, ‘At this climax Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry.'”

On eBay, I found a 1961 edition of the four novels in a single volume. The titles are Some Do Not …, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up–, and The Last Post.

As I think I’ve said here before, novels that don’t become classics tend to become obscure. Some are rediscovered. Ford lived during a very fertile time for literature — Proust, Hemingway, James Joyce. Fertile or not, it’s not a period that interests me very much. But I’ll have a go at Ford, in the hope that, if a nimrod like Hemingway disliked him, that’s a recommendation.

Send in the ghosts


The Helix Nebula, a highly ordered part of the galaxy 650 light years from earth. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Spitzer Space Telescope.

People, I think, sort roughly into two categories: Those who want to live in a universe in which some magic and an occasional ghost are possible; and those who insist that magic and ghosts can’t possibly exist.

One might think that scientists are always in the second category, but that’s not necessarily so. It might be going too far to say that Erwin Schrödinger believed in pantheism, but he was certainly interested in it. Werner Heisenberg was probably a Platonist. Roger Penrose writes explicitly about a Platonic realm. As for Albert Einstein, it’s difficult to figure out when he was being metaphorical, but he famously found some parts of modern physics “spooky.”

A few days ago, I came across an article at Axios Science, “Scientists propose a ‘missing law’ for evolution in the universe.” The article is about a new paper by a group of scientists and philosophers, “On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems.”

In a universe with no spooks, everything is tending toward disorder (entropy). But in spite of this ever-increasing chaos described by the undisputed second law of thermodynamics, random occurrences over billions of years eventually produced stars, galaxies, and kittens, without any assistance from anything spooky.

The paper proposes that there is a missing law that is a kind of opposite of the law of increasing entropy. This missing law asserts that, when material things combine in such a way that they are new, stable, and do something interesting, then, over time, complexity increases and evolves, even in nonliving systems.

Just for fun, I searched the paper for the word “Platonic” and actually found one occurrence. That’s in the citations, a paper named “The protein folds as Platonic forms: New support for the pre-Darwinian conception of evolution by natural law.”

If there is such a thing as evolution by natural law, then it is so slow that it may not seem very spooky. But think of it this way. If there was a ghostly, Platonic kitten eons before a living material kitten finally evolved, then a missing law like this might provide a way for that ghostly Platonic kitten to conjure itself into material existence.

I’m a very skeptical sort of person. But as science sorts this out, I’m rooting for the ghosts.


Imaginary AI image created by DALL-E-3

AI image generators


AI image created by DALL-E-3. Click here for larger version.

When I started this blog sixteen years ago, one of my rules was that every post would include a photo. That hasn’t always been easy, especially when writing about current events. Free online image generators driven by AI create a whole new range of options. I’ll try not to overuse it!

You can try out Bing’s free image generator here: Bing AI image creator.


Click here for larger version.

Carrot-top pesto

Pesto

The young farmers from whom I bought vegetables this summer are now getting their fall crops. On Friday I picked up carrots, sweet potatoes, and curly kale. The carrots had been pulled that same morning. I’d never before heard of carrots being grown in this area, and I’d never had fresh carrots with the tops intact. It seemed like a crime not to use all those green leaves, so I made pesto.

My basil is almost gone, but there was enough to give the pesto a hint of basil. I also used extra garlic in case the carrot tops had any flavor that needed overpowering. But there were no off-putting flavors in the carrot tops. The carrot tops made a dense, hearty, very green-tasting pesto.

Mozart!

Saturday’s live stream from the Berlin Philharmonic was all Mozart. It was thrilling — the overture to Così fan tutte; Symphony No. 35 in D major (the Haffner symphony); the Concertone for two violins and orchestra; and everybody’s favorite Mozart symphony — the Symphony No. 40 in G minor. The conductor was Riccardo Minasi.

Is something going around in Berlin? I’ve never heard so much coughing from the audience. But it wasn’t because they were bored. In fact they were on their feet at the end of the 40th. I know most of that symphony by heart. The first classical recording I ever owned, age about 11, was Mozart’s 40th. I listened to it over and over, and I’ve continued to listen to it over and over all these years. Though the 40th is in a minor key and is often described as dark, I understand why so many people in the audience were smiling as they listened. It was because the performance was so superb, and maybe because it was the first time they’d ever heard it performed live.

It was a very warm day with sun streaming in the windows, so I listened with headphones so that Lily could snooze in the sun.


Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Highlands

Waverley

I finished reading Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley last week. There is much that I could say about it, but I’m at risk of becoming a Walter Scott boor. But for anyone who is curious about the odd sort of readers who still read Sir Walter Scott, I recommend the lecture below. It’s the literary historian Jenni Calder speaking to the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club. Look at all those gray heads in the audience! I had a look at their web site. They hold black tie dinners. Princess Anne attended one of their meetings. I can only say that it makes me happy to know that somewhere in the world (though probably only in that one place) there is a Sir Walter Scott club.

Pumpkin-barley bread

Once you’ve got some cooked pumpkin goody in the refrigerator (it’s October, so you do, don’t you?), then pumpkin bread is easy. Probably any recipe for banana bread would work, using mashed pumpkin instead of mashed bananas. And there are many recipes for pumpkin bread on the web.

This pumpkin bread was made with barley flour from organic hulled barley. Plain barley bread would be a heavy bread. But the pumpkin makes the bread very soft and moist. I used date sugar instead of sugar-sugar. Not much sugar is needed. There’s also an egg, some olive oil, cinnamon, and nutmeg. The proportion of pumpkin to flour is such that the pumpkin, egg, and olive oil are the only moistening ingredients needed for a thick batter. That’s lots of pumpkin. And of course don’t forget the baking powder or soda. Bake it at 350F. The bread is done when the internal temperature reaches 200 degrees F.

Pumpkin is sometimes listed as a super-food. The combination of pumpkin, barley, and date sugar is a feast for the microbiome. I need to go get more pumpkins while they’re still easy to find. I’d like to have enough to last most of the winter.

As I’m sure I’ve said before, every kitchen should have a means of grinding flour. I use a vintage Champion juicer with a mill attachment. One of the easiest ways to go would be a KitchenAid mixer with a mill attachment. Amazon sells organic hulled barley and date sugar.

A 1944 Willys MB Jeep


Click here for high resolution version.

One of my neighbors has a friend who has restored a 1944 Willys Army Jeep, model MB. My neighbor, knowing that I’m a Jeep fanatic, arranged for me to have a ride in the Jeep, off road on some of the trails through the surrounding woods.

This Jeep, I understand, would have been a commander’s Jeep. It has a machine gun and a radio. I believe my neighbor’s friend uses the Jeep in World War II enactments.

I’ve been a Jeep owner for 22 years. I bought my Jeep, a 2001 Wrangler TJ, back in 2001 when I lived in San Francisco. It has only 80,000 miles on the odometer. I wouldn’t sell it for the world.

Pumpkin-oatmeal pudding


Pumpkin-oatmeal pudding sweetened with date sugar

I could break down and make a pumpkin pie, but then I’d have to eat it all myself — a huge calorie load. I settled on pumpkin-oatmeal pudding, because I could make it in a modest quantity, and pudding avoids all the calories and carbs in the crust.

For a year or so, I have been experimenting with date sugar. Date sugar is nothing but dried dates, ground fine. It’s expensive, but obviously it’s much healthier than sugar-sugar. You can buy it on Amazon.

To make it: You don’t need a recipe for pumpkin-oatmeal pudding. I used old-fashioned oats that I had already cooked. Mix the oatmeal and pumpkin, add a beaten egg, some sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a touch of cream. Put a couple of pats of butter on top before putting the pudding in the oven. I’m sure that raw old-fashioned oats would work fine, if you allowed for the absorption of liquid. Or, better yet, toast the oats before adding them to the pudding. How long you need to bake the pudding will of course depend on how much pudding you made. Thirty minutes at 375F worked great for my pudding.

A good-size pumpkin will make enough pumpkin goody for a pie and a couple of soups. To cook the pumpkin, don’t even think of boiling it. Cut around the top of the pumpkin, like a lid. Scoop out the seeds. Throw the seeds into the yard for the birds. Put the lid back on and bake the pumpkin at 350 degrees. How long to bake the pumpkin will depend on the size. But it’s done when it starts to sink, the skin is softened, and a small quantity of pumpkin juice is oozing into the pan. After the pumpkin cools, pour the liquid inside the pumpkin into a jar and save it for soup stock. Scoop out the goody. Throw the skin into the yard for the possums.

To use canned pumpkin ought to be a felony punished with prison time. Don’t Americans bother to cook and eat fresh pumpkin anymore? I don’t know anyone but me who uses fresh pumpkin. And who doesn’t like pumpkin pie? I will certainly make pies at Thanksgiving and Christmas when I’ll have some expert help eating them.

Everyone can see it now


A Facebook meme

Prison, here they come

For several years, even a couple of my friends smirked at me for what they perceived was a fringy and starry-eyed position of mine — that Trump is going to prison. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough about the time line. It seemed obvious enough to me that it would take time for justice to catch up with Trump. Many people gave up on justice for Trump back in 2019, after Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, squelched Robert Mueller’s investigation and lied about what Mueller’s report concluded. The media fell for Barr’s distortions, partly because Mueller made such a fool of himself in front of Congress. But, if you actually read Mueller’s report rather than being schnookered by Barr’s spin, it was obvious that Trump was guilty as sin. And, in 2019, Trump had not even yet committed the worst of his many crimes — attempting to nullify an election, take over the U.S. government, and turn us into Russia.

Now here we are. The courts now have total control over Trump, including Trump’s mouth. Trump is powerless. Even his threats and menacing words have no power anymore, except insofar as they lead to gag orders. The evidence is damning, the penalties are severe, and Trump has no defense. Our abominable media and degenerate punditry, in spite of the evidence, continue to push the hits-friendly notion that prosecutors are overreaching, that the charges are weak, and that there are ways in which Trump can beat the charges. Such notions died this week — or should have died — when both Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, both of them evil lawyers, pleaded guilty to the charges in Georgia. This shows that Powell and Chesebro understood that the evidence against them is damning and that they would be convicted if they went to trial. And, even worse for Trump, Powell and Chesebro will now have to testify against all the others who have been charged in Georgia, including Trump, meaning that an already airtight case will now include damning eye-witness testimony from Trump’s co-conspirators.

We hardly need to mention the federal indictments brought by Jack Smith. The federal case against Trump and his co-conspirators will be just as airtight and just as damning as the Georgia cases. The whole sorry lot of them are headed for prison, except for those who are clever enough to plead guilty while there is still time. And I haven’t even mentioned the civil case in New York that will expose Trump’s true net worth (which may well be negative if all the loans were called in) and ruin Trump financially.

The House of Representatives

The present chaos in the U.S. House of Representatives is extremely revealing. Some are calling it a Republican civil war. Maybe. But I think there is a good chance that, between now and, say, April, the Trumpists will capitulate, when they finally see that Trump is truly and completely doomed. If the Trumpists can find new leadership (Jim Jordan seems to be a favorite, though he is as dumb as a rock), then there may well be a Republican civil war in 2024 in which the MAGA forces of chaos and fascism struggle with the corporate wing of the Republican party, the wing of the party that provides most of the money and which has no interests other than still lower taxes on the rich, more deregulation, a government in the hands of hacks owned by the party, law enforcement used only against the poor, and right-wing courts that won’t stand in the way of money and corruption. We shall see. But one thing we can see clearly in the House is that many Republicans who are cowardly and silent in public are struggling behind the scenes to regain control of the Republican Party for the corporate wing. There is nothing good to be said about the Republicans who are resisting MAGA. They are still vile human beings and enemies of democrary, every last one of them.

What is conservatism?

For a long time, I’ve been making a claim here that I don’t have the credentials to make. Nevertheless, it’s a claim that I believe to be true, and a claim for which much evidence and strong arguments exist (including the evidence right before our eyes at present in the Republican Party, MAGA world, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the white churches, particularly the execrable Southern Baptist Convention). The evidence is equally visible in history, if we bother to look for it. That claim is that all conservatives — and certainly all authoritarians — are cognitively and morally defective.

I recently came across an excellent paper written in 2004 by Philip E. Agre, a humanities professor and AI researcher who then was on the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles. The article is “What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?“. Agre gets straight to the point in the opening lines:

Q: What is conservatism?

A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?

A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

And:

Conservatism in every place and time is founded on deception. The deceptions of conservatism today are especially sophisticated, simply because culture today is sufficiently democratic that the myths of earlier times will no longer suffice.

My moral case against conservatives can be stated very simply: If a person wishes to use deception, inequality, and injustice as a tool for dominating others, depriving others of human goods that they claim for themselves, then that person is morally defective — not just morally wrong, but morally defective.

What might we say about aristocratic societies that actually were stable, for example, 19th Century Britain? Agre would say that the aristocracy was stable (at least, more stable than in France) because the lower classes in Britain had internalized their inferiority and their subordination. That is, they actually believed that the aristocracy were somehow superior and were thus entitled to rule. Agre again:

This is a central conservative argument: freedom is impossible unless the common people internalize aristocratic domination. Indeed, many conservative theorists to the present day have argued that freedom is not possible at all. Without the internalized domination of conservatism, it is argued, social order would require the external domination of state terror. In a sense this argument is correct: historically conservatives have routinely resorted to terror when internalized domination has not worked. What is unthinkable by design here is the possibility that people might organize their lives in a democratic fashion.

This is why MAGA types collect armaments and long for civil war — domination by terror, because some people refuse to internalize their inferiority and must be taught their place. Trump encourages this, formerly in dog whistles, but eventually in plain language. (See, in the New Yorker, “A President Asking for Civil War,” July 12, 2022.)

Neoliberalism as conservative derp

The theme of the Fall 2023 issue of Dissent Magazine asks the question, “Is neoliberalism dead?” (I certainly hope the answer is yes.) There is an excellent interview with Brad DeLong, an economics professor at UC-Berkeley who saw neoliberalism up close in the Clinton administration. DeLong describes the American form of neoliberalism, as it arose during the Reagan era, thus:

It was the belief that social democracy had greatly overreached and had created a society in 1979 that was too bureaucratic, too rigid, and also too equal: the rich needed to be richer so they would be incentivized to create jobs, and the poor needed to be poorer so they would be incentivized to work.

In other words, aristocracy. This begs a question: What do Republican deplorables in red states who don’t have a pot to piss in get out of aristocracy? I think the answer to that is clear. They get domination over all the people they don’t like, and, as lackeys, they get more of the crumbs that fall from the aristocratic table.

Incremental progress?

Could the U.S. yet fall backward into neofascism, in spite of Trump’s ruin and the disgusting but welcome spectacle of the Republican circus-train train wreck? On that I make no predictions, because we are still in a state of chaos and all sorts of things could go wrong. But I do think that a strong possibility for the future is some real progress, probably modest and incremental, but progress. I was wrong about Biden. In 2020, I thought that a Biden administration would be like a third term of the Obama administration — timid, staffed by neoliberals, eager for bad bargains with Republicans, and rudely dismissive of progressives like me. But Biden gets it. Dissent Magazine again:

After the Biden inauguration, many on the left settled down to await a familiar sequence of post-election equivocation and retreat. But a number of observers with no special affection for Biden have concluded that 2021 ended up marking some kind of a departure — if not quite the end of neoliberalism, at least the end of the bipartisan austerity consensus that has stifled American politics since the last days of disco. Corey Robin wrote that “No president since Ronald Reagan has achieved a more ambitious domestic legislative agenda in his first year than Joe Biden.” Cédric Durand, writing for the New Left Review, detected “a structural break in the regulation of capitalism.”

I’m not making any predications about progress, I’m only expressing hope. But one thing is clear. That’s that almost all of those who tried to pull off the Trump coup are headed for prison. Republicans have no leadership, no team of evil people capable of planning anything like Trump’s capture of the White House and his attempt to stay there after losing an election. Even the propagandists who provided weaker minds with ideas have been weakened and almost neutralized — Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson. Fox News can still wind people up, but with no one but feckless idiots such as Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene to do the wet work, and with contributions to Republicans running way behind Democrats, how can the Republican Party, in the next year, build another machine capable of winning (or even stealing) a national election?

For now, though, let’s just enjoy the circus. They are terrible people, and they deserve everything they get, and worse.


Guilty