Saturday, December 17, 2016

Entry 361: Winter Break -- Woo!

Likely no entries for a few weeks.  We are headed out for the rest of 2016, going south for a much needed vacation.  I got a book loaded on my Kindle -- The Man Who Knew Infinity -- and I'm looking forward to finishing it.  It's about the mathematician S. Ramanujan.  There is a movie by the same name coming out in April, and I would feel like a fraud if I saw the movie without reading the book first.  Although the book is not as good as I was hoping thus far.  It's not bad, by any means; I'm enjoying it, but it's slow, and there isn't nearly enough math in it.  The "problem" with it is that it is written for a general audience, and I want something more technical and math nerdy.  Less culture, more conjectures!  Oh well.

It's a shame the movie isn't out already, as S and I might actually get a chance to go to the theater by ourselves.  We usually do about once a year.  Last year we saw Force Awakens, so this year maybe we will see Rogue One.  Although, honestly, I'm not that into the new Star Wars movies.  I could take them or leave them.  They would be great to watch with my kids, but they are still too young (and I've heard Rogue One is 133 minutes of war and violence).  But, hey, there are worse ways to spend an afternoon than watching a new Star Wars film -- like, say, being forced to watch Office Christmas Party.

Okay, gotta go -- a long drive awaits.  Until next time...


Sunday, December 11, 2016

Entry 360: A Little Taste of Single Parenthood

It's still just me and Lil' S1 for another week.  Well, not quite a week; S gets back Friday evening, so this is the last weekend day we are alone together.  That's key.  The weekdays are relative easy/boring.  It's an hour or so in the morning mostly getting him ready for the day, and a few hours in the evening mostly getting him ready for bed.  I'm in a time pinch when I have to go into the office because of my commute, but other than that it's not bad.

But the weekends are a whole 'nother ball or wax.  Yesterday was long.  I took him to get a haircut in the morning.  Then we went to the Starbucks next door just to kill some time.  Then we got back home, the clock showed 11:00 a.m., and I thought to myself, "Great, so what do we do for the next nine hours?"  Usually we would go to the park, but it's too cold here right now.  There are indoor play areas around and things of that nature, but I'm never sure whether he's going to take to them.  If he's with a group of kids -- no problem.  But if it's just him, sometimes he just doesn't want to play, and then you're in the weird position of trying to coerce your kid into an activity that's supposed to be fun for them, because you drove all the way there and paid the $15 to get in.  You're like, "Enjoy yourself, goddammit!  Jump into that big foam pit or I'll throw you in myself!"  Actually, Lil' S1 would love it if I threw him in.  That's the other thing that happens sometimes: If there are no other kids around his age, he wants me to play with him.  This is problematic because I often physically cannot do the things he does (last time I tried to jump on a trampoline I damn near threw my back out), and because a big reason for us going is because I wanted a break.  We can play together in our basement anytime.

These interstices of single parenthood really make me appreciate full-time single parents.  It must be rough.  I mean, if I was a single parent, I would structure my life differently to help relieve some of the burden.  For example, I would move closer to my family, and I would become more involved with parent groups and play groups and things of that nature.  A big part of the reason it's hard on us when S's goes away is because we are so accustomed to having her here.  But still, I imagine there are many things that are just more difficult as a single parent, no matter how inured you get to them.

Today is nice because Lil' S1 went to some friends' house.  When our friend A found out it was just he and I for a few weeks, she offered to take for him for a day, and I said "yes" without thinking twice.  She has three young kids, and they play together nicely, so it all works out.  I'm not exactly sure what "the day" means -- she said she will just text me when she wants me to come get him -- but I'm hoping it's closer to dinner time than lunch time.  We shall see.



Anyway, I should probably go now -- I want to take advantage of this opportunity and get some stuff done around the house -- but before I do, I wanted to link to a post by Paul Krugman about an article by Matt Yglesias.  They're about Trump's brand of populism, and how a big part of it is contrasting oneself with those snooty, lefty elitists.  It doesn't matter that Trump is, at his core, a spoiled rich kid, who was born into the aristocracy, who has never had to do any "real" work in his life, and who opposes things like unions and minimum wage increases and government regulations that would actually benefit the proletariat.  All that matters is that he says he likes fast food and guns and fossil fuels and speaking English ("this is America!") and factory jobs and even Christianity (the Bible is his favorite book, after all) -- unlike those effete coastal liberals who think they are too good for all this stuff.

It really is brilliant marketing, and while I think much of the "liberals should have seen this coming!" analysis about the election is 20-20 hindsight to the nth degree (Remember: millions more people voted for Hillary!  We weren't that wrong.), I will say that people like myself probably underestimated the appeal of Trump to some extent, because we thought: Not that many people are stupid enough to fall for this, right?

And therein lies the rub.  In many ways, the white working class is right about people like me: We do think we're better -- not that our lives are any more valuable or that our experiences are any more meaningful.  We don't think we are more deserving of existence.  But we do think that we're smarter, or at least that we have more knowledge, and we can leverage this knowledge into a better country for everybody, if we could somehow get through to people.  We have good reasons for being the way we are.  We don't like fast food, because it cause health problems; we like gun control, because the data show unfettered access to guns makes it easier to commit mass murders (especially in big, dense cities, where most of us live); we don't like fossil fuel, because we believe in the science of anthropogenic global warming; we like multiculturalism because we live in places where it works (for the most part) and because we believe the economists who tell us immigration is not the job killer it's made out to be; we like factory jobs, but we recognize that technology is moving the economy in a new direction, and we need to adapt; we're fine with Christianity, until it is used to justify discrimination or teaching pseudoscience like creationism in public schools.  We feel this way not because we're on "Team Liberal," or because we have an innate disdain for working class whites, but because we, not you, have put in the time and the energy to study these issues from an objective, scientifically-minded vantage, and these are our conclusions.

Could we be wrong about things?  Of course.  Are there things we still don't understand?  Yes, many.  But that doesn't negate everything we have to say, just like a doctor's advice about how to cure a disease isn't useless, just because we haven't completely eradicated sickness.   We are constantly walking a tightrope between being confident enough to put our ideas forward, and being humble enough to question our assumptions and conclusions.  (And this humbleness often works to our disadvantage.)



Whenever I hear about elitism, I'm reminded of my favorite Isaac Asimov quote:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
If being an elitist means thinking highly of the acquisition of knowledge so that you can make the best decisions possible, then I am a proud elitist.  And I only want elitists running the country.  My question is, why doesn't everybody?  It always comes back to this: Why can't everybody think like me?

Until next time...

Sunday, December 4, 2016

Entry 359: On Chess

Distractions...

It is a pretty good time for fans of Seattle sportsball.  The Seahawks are comfortably in first place; the Sounders improbably made it to the MLS finals; and the University of Washington even more improbably qualified for the college football playoffs.  But don't worry, I'm not going to talk about these things in depth.  Of the five people whom I know read this blog regularly not a one of them is interested in Seattle sports.  I am however going to talk about a different sport -- kinda: chess.

Magnus Carlsen, a 26-year-old Norwegian chess wunderkind, retained his title of "Greatest Chess Player Alive" (probably "ever," honestly), by defeating Russian challenger Sergey Karjakin in the World Chess Championship on Wednesday.  The match was incredibly close, which was not expected, but Carlsen, the heavy favorite, ultimately pulled it out in "overtime."  This event likely would have come and gone without my notice had I not heard it discussed on a podcast.  I don't follow chess regularly, but it's a great subject to do a deep dive on, so every now and then I will go down the chess rabbit hole, and this match gave me a great opportunity to do so.


[The baby-faced kid who runs the dining hall in your dorm?  No!  The greatest chess player ever.]

I've tried on several occasions to take up playing chess, but it has never really stuck.  I never felt like I was making much progress as a player.  I would read annotated games and have little idea why one move was better than another, even after it was explained.  When I would play (usually against a computer) my entire strategy was to set up a very focused, multi-move siege on one of my opponent's major pieces.  And then as I was carrying it out, my opponent would either (a) move the piece to safety; (b) take one of my major pieces that I had left unprotected because I was too focused on my attack.  Then I would lose.

Also, chess is a game with an extremely steep "entry fee," meaning in order to be good you have to do a lot of tedious memorization.  With the aid of computers, people have mapped out thousands upon thousands of different opening sequences, and if you don't learn them, you simply can't compete with somebody who has.  It's like Scabble in that if you don't have the dictionary more or less completely memorized, you will never be a top player no matter how good you are at actually playing Scrabble.

But chess is very different from Scrabble in that there is no randomness to it.  It never comes down to the luck of the draw.  This is both good and bad.  It's good in that it's pretty much as "fair" a game as you can possibly have -- our wits against your opponent's.  It's bad in that this can make games boring to follow.  When both players of a chess match are really good, ties are overwhelmingly likely (in the 12 regulation games, Carlsen and Karjakin drew 10 of them), and games often turn on a single misstep.  You rarely see amazing comebacks and swings in win-expectancy like you do in Scrabble or poker or a game in which luck is an integral part.  Now, there are variations of chess that are more exciting, and you can induce action by making players move more quickly (this is how they break ties in official matches -- they continually decrease the amount of time on the players' clocks until somebody wins outright), but I think a lot of "true" chess aficionados view this as a bastardization of the game -- like how many soccer fans don't like penalty kicks as a tie-breaker.

Another reason I'm interested in chess is the a.i. aspect.  It's the perfect human-vs.-machine game -- or at least it was.  It's not much of a competition anymore.  The decision is in: Machines won.  There is a good documentary Game Over about the (in)famous 1997 match in which IBM's Deep Blue beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov in disputed (by Kasparov, at least) fashion.  (Apparently you can watch the entire movie on YouTube.)  But the whole thing seems quite quaint now, given that I could probably download a free chess app on my phone that could defeat Magnus Carlsen with ease.


But don't despair, fellow human, Skynet isn't taking over just yet.  Although the best chess algorithm can defeat the best human, a decent chess player with the aid of a computer can defeat the best computer by itself.  There is a whole new variant of chess called centaur chess (or advanced chess) in which humans compete against each other, but the use of computers is completely legal.  The best players are those who can effectively manipulate computers to look for good moves, but not rely completely on the output from a single program.

In general, this is the way humans "stay ahead" of computers.  We use them to make ourselves smarter (and if you believe futurist Ray Kurzweil, we are not that far away from cyborg brains).  Computers can do amazing things like, say, solve difficult math problems or fill in crossword puzzle grids (y'know, for people who are into math and crossword puzzles), but the best work is still done by a human using a computer as a tool.  People aren't obsolete yet.  Also, when it comes to Terminator 2 style takeovers, there is another thing we have to consider: We can still turn computers off.  They aren't sentient beings.  That's a pretty big thing.  Imbuing a previously inanimate object with a sense of self is not exactly a trivial accomplishment.

When it comes to chess a.i. specifically, I have some personal connections.  When I was about ten I set out to "solve" chess.  That is, I was going to write down every possible combination of moves, so that when I played, I could just follow along in my master book of moves and never lose!  This, of course, is beyond naive.  The total number of possible combinations of chess moves is something literally unimaginable -- like if a billion people were able to write a billion moves per second for a billion days, you still wouldn't be anywhere near it.  (Note: I don't know if this is technically true or not; I'm just saying it to make a point.)  But, hey, at least I recognized that chess could, in theory, be solved by brute force enumeration.  That's not bad for a preteen.  I was just too ambitious.  If I had gone with tic-tac-toe, I probably could have pulled it off.

I remember I told my dad about my plan to solve chess, and he was like, "yeah... you're not going to do that."  And I insisted that I was, and he was like, "no you aren't."  And I again insisted that I was, and he again told me that I wasn't.  And the conversation finally ended with him telling me to go ahead and try.  (It's funny how the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.  I can't tell you how many conversations I have with Lil' S1 in which he insists something is true when it is clearly false.  The other day he drew a '3', and said it was an 'A'.  When I told him he was wrong, he ran into his room crying and got under his covers.  Oh well, he needed a nap anyway.)  I didn't even get past white's first move.  After I did a few pawns, I realized that perhaps my dad knew what he was talking about, and started playing Nintendo or something.

[Fisher vs. Spassky in 1972.  One of the most interesting chess matches in modern history.]

So I never did solve chess, but as a junior in high school I did program my own chess engine in computer science class: Ski-Bot the chess playing machine.  I consider it my greatest academic achievement.  I'm not being facetious.  I actually think it was a bigger accomplishment than my Ph.D. dissertation.  As a seventeen-year-old with about three months worth of programming classes, I wrote a computer algorithm that could actually play chess against the user.  Ski-Bot was by no means a great chess player, but it could whoop up on beginners, and it would always catch a mistake, so it impressed a lot of people.  I still have it on floppy disk somewhere, but I don't have an old Mac to run it on, and there is a decent chance that the magnetic tape of the disk has eroded anyway.  It's more than 20 years old after all.  So Ski-Bot might be gone forever.  But that's okay.  I'll just tell people I retired it after it beat Nat Nguyen, the best chess player in my class, much like IBM retired Deep Blue after it beat Kasparov.

Alright, I think you are probably tired chess by now (if you've even stuck it out this far), so I will call it a post.

Until next time...

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Entry 358: The Turkey's a Little Dry... THE TURKEY'S A LITTLE DRY!!!

I made my first ever Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday.  It came out pretty well, given it was all planned in the eleventh hour.  On Tuesday during work, S and I were texting about what we should do for the holiday.  We didn't have any firm plans.  Our friends informally invited us over, but they live on the other side of the city, and with nap schedules and all that, it sounded like too much of a hassle.  (Yes, that's where we are at right now: We didn't go to our friends' house because they live in a different section of the city.  They are still in D.C., but they live in the southeast quadrant, and we just can't be bothered to leave the northwest.)  So we decided to just stay home, and then I had a brilliantly bold idea: I could cook Thanksgiving dinner.  I didn't really know how to do this, but it couldn't be that hard -- right?

Turns out, that is in fact right.  If you were expecting a Mr. Mom-style comedy of errors, in which I try to stuff the turkey with a loaf of bread and then cook it in the toaster, you are out of luck (and you should update your movie collection).  I made a perfectly acceptable, decent-tasting turkey dinner.  I overcooked the Turkey a tad bit because I was so scared of undercooking it and killing my family with salmonella.  But I eat my turkey mixed with potatoes and stuffing and dosed in gravy anyway, so I hardly notice if it's a tad bit dry.  And in my defense, I didn't have a meat thermometer.  They were all out of proper meat thermometers at the supermarket, so I bought a soup thermometer and tried to sorta jabbed it in to a hole I cut with a knife.  I think it actually worked, but I didn't completely trust the reading, so even though it said it was done, I left it in for an extra 15 minutes, which I think dried it out a little bit.  But, like I said, no biggie.  S liked it; Lil' S1 "liked" it (i.e., he choked down a piece we made him eat before he could watch iPad); Lil' S2 didn't really like it, but turkey is one of the few foods he doesn't like in general -- he ate everything else I made.  I bought the smallest turkey I could find, and I'm still going to get five meals out of it and then likely throw some of it away.



The rest of the courses were fine as well.  The mashed potatoes were lumpy because I mashed them with a wooden spoon (in addition to a meat thermometer, we apparently could use a potato masher).  But I actually prefer my potatoes lumpy, so that's fine with me.  Then I also made some green beans (gotta have something green), some stuffing, some bread rolls, and of course a pot of gravy.  Good eatin'!

If I do this again next year, I'm going to try to snazz it up a bit.  I went very conservative, because it was my first time, and because I bought everything in one supermarket trip two days before Thanksgiving.  Some people like it simple, and I do too, but all things equal, I prefer it not simple.  I'm the food asshole who ruins it for everybody.  I'm the reason if you order a hamburger in D.C. it might come topped with saffron orange aioli, or if you get coleslaw it might have dried cranberries in it, or a club sandwich might come on focaccia bread.  I'm the guy who loves all that fancy shit.  So next year, I might try to do it up.  We shall see.

As for the ritual of Thanksgiving, Lil' S1 went around the table and asked us all what we are thankfully for -- it was cute; he must have learned it at school -- but I'm not feeling too thankful this year.  Yeah, sure, I have my family and my health and all that, but I would still have that if we didn't elect a crazy man to be our next president.  A bunch of my friends on Facebook put up posts giving thanks to God, and, in light of our recent election, I was so tempted to reply with something snarky (they're all Trump haters), but I bit my tongue (held my fingers?).  I hate arguing on Facebook, and I hate arguing about religion, so I probably made the right choice in not arguing on Facebook about religion.

Bill Maher said something I found funny (because it's true) on his last show about religion [paraphrase]: "It's hard to have a rational discussion about religion, because it's such bullshit."  I'm nicer and less vocal about religion than Maher -- mostly because I'm not a comedian who makes a very nice living, in part, off of ridiculing religion -- but I agree with his broad assessment of it.  It's all such nonsense.  It's fairy tales.  I've noticed I've become a much more staunch atheist as I've gotten older.  This doesn't mean I've become more closed-minded or less accepting of people who think differently -- it's the exact opposite, in fact (live and let live is my motto).  What it means is that, on a personal level, I don't hedge my bets with religion anymore.  I admittedly have zero faith.



I was never a formally religious person, but when I was younger, I still believed in God.  I still had a fear of God.  I thought that if I disrespected him, even in my own head -- thought he didn't exist or thought his rules were bullshit -- that somehow he would punish me for it later.  I also used to pray to God frequently, and believed that it worked in some sort of long-term cosmic way.  Even though I didn't go to church or worship, I thought that I had a personal "understanding" with God, like you do with that old friend you haven't seen in a decade: You do your thing, and I'll do mine, but you know I love you, and if the chips are down, I always got your back.  God and I were tight.  He was just alright with me.

But something changed.  At some point I realized that I hadn't checked in with God in a very long time, and that my life was absolutely no different.  I realized nothing bad happens to you if you don't believe in God, and good things don't happen to you if do.  I realized that my reasons for believing in God all required a presumption of God to begin with.  It was circular logic.  And once I stepped outside the circle, I realized how silly it all really was.

After all, there have been thousands of "circles" that people have been caught in throughout history; there have been thousands of gods and religions we all dismiss as absurd now -- sun gods, harvest gods, rain gods (oh wait), war gods, etc. -- but now we are supposed to believe that we've finally figured it out?  It just so happens that we are living at a moment in human in history in which we've discovered the one real god and the one true religion?  Yeah, I'm not buying it.  Look, maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Hinduism or Taoism or Pastafariansim really is the one true religion.  Maybe.  We shall see -- or we won't.  My money is one the latter.


OK, I think I'll wrap it up here.  S took the kids out for a little while, but they are due back soon, and I'm getting hungry.  I'm not sure what I'll have for lunch -- probably turkey.

Until next time...

Friday, November 18, 2016

Entry 357: Things Are Just Going to Suck for a While... They'll Get Better... Then They'll Probably Suck Again

I don’t know the official stages of grief, but I’m pretty sure “acceptance” is one of them.  That’s where I’m at right now.  I’ve accepted that things are going to suck for a while, and there is not much I can do about it.  I accepted that there is going to be a black cloud hanging over me (and most the nation) for – who knows how long?  A month?  A year?  Two years?  Four years?  I don't know.  But I do know that every time I think a good thought, it’s quickly purged from my head by the same terrible thought.

“Yes! The Seahawks beat the Patriots! ... (But Trump is going to be president.)”

“Mmm, these nachos are pretty good… (But Trump is going to be president.)”

“Ha!  Lil’ S2 is so cute dancing to music… (But Trump is going to be president.)”

It’s like there is a little orange devil sitting on my shoulder, who pokes me in the brain with his trident as soon as I start to feel the slightest bit happy.  And he’s not going away anytime soon.  I can’t get rid of him.  I just have to wait for him to die on his own.  He will die.  I will feel better.  I was sad when George Bush won in 2004 (though not nearly at the same level), but it’s not like my life sucked the next four years.  Those were pretty fun times for me, truth be told.  So things will get better* – at least until Trump’s policies actually start to take hold…
I’ve been trying to walk the fine line between staying informed and staying sane.  One underrated, shitty aspect about Trump’s election is that it ruins news.  I've become a bit of a political news junkie.  I read a lot about politics online; I binge read The New Yorker every few weeks; and I listen to five or six political podcasts every week.  But I’ve had to cut back drastically.  I just can’t handle listening to another breakdown of why Hillary lost, of why we all should have seen it coming, of what Trump’s victory means or what terrible cabinet choice he is going to make.  It’s just... tortuous.  So I’m forcing myself to do the bare minimum to not succumb to the siren song of quietism.  But after I do that bare minimum, I’m putting on the Bill Barnwell Show and trying to distract myself with the weekly NFL matchups.

But I’ll be ready for the fight.  There is a good chance people who normally just sit on the sidelines and root (like myself) are going to have to take a more active role in the resistance.  What this means exactly, I don’t know.  Unfortunately, I’m bad at activism.  But when an opportunity presents itself, I’ll be ready.  One thing I know I can do is donate to worthy causes.  I’ll definitely step up my donation game.

Alright, that's enough about that -- fine line, remember? -- let's move on to a more pleasant topic: My kids.



Things are going pretty well with them.  They still aren’t letting me sleep enough, but that’s to be expected.  Every morning Lil’ S2 wakes up around 6:00 a.m., and I bring him into bed with me (S is usually gone by then) where he tosses and turns for a half hour, and then we both fall back asleep, just in time for his older brother to bust through the door and destroy our five minutes of peace.  It’s an "awesome" morning ritual.

We had parent-teacher conferences for each kid this week.  I went to the one for Lil’ S1.  It was fine.  He’s doing fine.  I don’t really know what to take away from these types of events to be honest.  All the kids in his class were “graded” on their pattern recognition and their regulation of their emotions.  Lil’ S1 was a 4 out of 7 in the former and a 5 out of 6 in the latter.  So this means he can “copy simple repeating patterns,”and he can “comfort himself by seeking out a special object,” but he can’t “extend and create simple patterns” or  “look at a situation differently.”  Okay… good to know, I guess.  Although I think they got those grades reversed.  He can make simple patterns (the other day he made a “light saver” with connecting blocks that alternated exactly three dark blue and two light blue), but he really struggles to comfort himself and calm down once he gets revved up.  I mean, more so than most kids his age.  The other thing to keep in mind is that he turned four three months, while other kids in his class are already five.  Those nine months matter immensely at that age.

Lil’ S2 is doing well too.  He’s getting really good at understanding what we tell him, and he’s quite mobile for his age, but he still can’t talk at all.  This is a bit strange.  Most kids can say a few words around a year or so.  He’s already 15 months and there’s not even so much as a “no” or a “mine” or a “mama” or “dada” out of him.  S and I aren’t particularly worried because he doesn’t appear to be behind in other areas – like I said, he clearly understands things (for example, every time we put socks on him, he will go and grab his shoes, and he does the same thing for his brother, and he knows whose shoes are whose) – but it would be nice to hear him say a few words soon.

He’s actually going to go to his grandparents’ in South Carolina for about a month soon.  S has to take another trip to Africa for a few weeks in early December, so to make things easier on me, she’s going to take him to her parents’ place (I can handle one by myself, no problem), and then everybody will be going down there for the holidays.  So maybe he will start talking while he’s there.  Maybe my mother-in-law with teach him some Kannada.

Well, I’m writing this on my lunch break, and it is now over, so I will have to call it a post.

Until next time…

*Note: I'm only speaking for myself -- my privileged, white, heterosexual, cisgendered, upper-middle class self.

Friday, November 11, 2016

Entry 356: Shit

The past three days, I've fluctuated wildly between having too much to say about Tuesday's election and having nothing to say about it at all.  When something unexpected like this happens, everybody goes searching for reasons why -- was it whitelash?  was it sexism?  was it the uprising of an economically oppressed class?  was it a repudiation of the Clintons?  of politics as usual?  I think it is natural to ask these questions and possibly even helpful.  If you can properly diagnose what went wrong, you will be better able to prevent it in the future.  But only to a point.  Because there is one aspect of Tuesday's election that few people are talking about: bad luck.

I keep hearing about how everybody got the election wrong.  But did we actually get it wrong, or did something unlikely just happen?  (Let's not forget, Hillary won popular vote!  We weren't wrong that more Americans preferred her to Trump.) Sometimes the underdog wins; that doesn't mean they shouldn't have been the underdog.  There is an element of randomness to elections -- particularly presidential elections with the winner-take-all by state format.  Try as we might, we simply cannot predict with complete accuracy who will turn out for whom where on a given day in November.  As far as the public is concerned it is a random event.  It is left in large part to chance.  Is it meaningful that Hillary narrowly lost Florida, but overperformed in Texas and Arizona?  That she won Colorado and Nevada, but lost the Midwest?  Does this tell us anything going forward, or did things just break that way this election?  Before you think it must be the former, that there must be a deep lesson we all can learn, remember this: In 2008 and 2012 the big takeaway was that the only way Republicans could compete nationally is if they appeal to Latinos.  How morbidly laughable does that seem now?

A lot has been written about what liberals should do now.  How can we win again?  The big thing I keep hearing is that we need leaders who will appeal to the neglected working class of rural America, to those who have been legitimately hurt by automation and free trade.  And I think we do need to do this, but I think we need to do this because helping the working class is the right thing to do, because it is in line with our values, not because we think it's the missing piece to winning the next election.  Because nobody really knows what or who will win the next election.  Nobody knows what the state of the electorate will be four years from now or even two years from now.

The real message -- or at least a real message -- we should take away from this election is that the future is more uncertain and random than our initial instincts lead us to believe.*  What I say to liberal leaders looking for answers is this: Do what you think is right.  Start a movement you believe in.  Don't try to play the game, because you don't understand the rules of the game -- nobody does; they are constantly changing.  By the time we get the rules figure out for 2016, it's 2018 and we are on to something new.   So don't think an old, Jewish socialist is unelectable; don't think endorsing Black Lives Matter will alienate too many white people; don't think you have to bend over backwards to appear pro business or tough on crime or hawkish.  Stand up for what you believe in.  Do what's in your heart.  Be authentic.  Try to start something cool.  The votes will follow.  Or they won't.  We just don't know.  We never know.

Until next time...

*Another message we learned, or rather one we had reconfirmed is that America is still a very racist nation.  We simply haven't yet overcome our legacy of slavery.  When people like Paul Ryan acknowledge the president-elect is racist, but support him anyway because he personally isn't the member of a targeted group, and he needs somebody to sign his stupid budget -- that's white privilege.  When black and brown people in the inner-city are beset by economic hardship, our response is "it's your own fault; you need to have better families; you need to take personal responsibility for your own lives, and clean up your own communities; you need to do life better."  When rural white people are beset by economic hardship, our response is "brown people are taking our jobs!  the system is rigged!  burn the whole thing down!" -- that's white supremacy.

Friday, November 4, 2016

Entry 355: Just Vote, Gonna Be Okay, Da Da Doo-Doo-Mmm

Just vote, gonna be okay, da da doo-doo-mmm
Just vote, mark that ballot babe, da da doo-doo-mmm
Just vote, gonna be okay, v-v-v-vote
Vote, vote, just, j-j-just vote



The 2016 presidential vote is happening on Tuesday, and I'm trying really hard to channel my inner Lady Gaga, only instead of being inebriated in a club whose name I can't remember, I'm anxious in a land of election news I can't make sense of -- a place where sanity has little standing, facts matter not a whit, and we are a missed 38-yard field goal away from having President Pussygrabber become a reality.  

And that, unfortunately, might be underestimating Trump's chances.  My boy Nate Silver is even more bullish on the Great Orange Groper, giving him a 35% chance of winning, roughly double that of the New York Times' Upshot, linked above.  (Note: both forecasts are frequently updated, so their respective odds might have changed a little, but I doubt either will move drastically this close to the election.)  The difference, as I understand it, is that the FiveThirtyEight model responds more aggressively to poll fluctuations than does the Upshot's model.  The most recent polls are relatively favorable to Trump -- due perhaps to natural tightening as the election draws nigh, perhaps to the (utterly bullshit) resurgence of Hillary's emails into the news (I tend to think it's mostly the former, actually) -- and so this is reflected more strongly in the FiveThirtyEight model than the Upshot model.  Also, FiveThirtyEight -- because they weigh poll fluctuations more heavily and because of the large presence of undecided and third party voters -- see the race as inherently more volatile than Upshot.  This leads them to be more bullish on Trump, but also more bullish on a Clinton landslide.  That is, they are more open to the possibility the polls are significantly off in either direction.


Which model do I personally think is more accurate?  I lean toward FiveThirtyEight, because Nate Silver has a good track record with me.  He's gone 100 for 100 in calling states the past two presidential elections, and I've relied heavily on his college basketball forecasting in my annual office March Madness pool, and I've done quite well in it.  Not trusting him now would feel like cherry-picking, i.e., believing him only when he tells me what I want to hear.  Either way, this will be a very interesting experiment as FiveThirtyEight and the Upshot are quite far apart on several swing states (see below), so there should be a conclusive forecast "winner" this election.

Florida: 538, Trump 52%; Upshot, Clinton 69%
Ohio: 538, Trump 68%; Upshot, Trump 53%
North Carolina: 538, Trump 52%; Upshot, Clinton 71%
Nevada: 538, Trump 49%; Upshot, Clinton 66%
New Hampshire: 538, Clinton 62%; Upshot, Clinton 75%

One more thing I will say about FiveThirtyEight is that I've found their election coverage this past week kind of annoying.  Reading the headlines and the tenor of the articles, you might get the impression that Trump is the two-to-one favorite, not Clinton.  I understand that they want to emphasize that, in their view, many people aren't giving Trump enough of a chance, and that they have to write something new each day.  (If everyday they ran the same article with the headline "Clinton is still the clear favorite, but Trump could possibly win," it would be an accurate reflection of reality, but it probably wouldn't attract many readers.)  But it's starting to come off as overly-contrarian, sensationalistic, and click bait-y (for a data-journalism website, anyway), which isn't super surprising being that they are now owned by ESPN.  You can find some examples of what I mean here, here, and here.

But I think it is very important to not confuse FiveThirtyEight's election coverage with their election forecasting model.  Despite what many people commenting on their articles have charged, I don't believe that they have monkeyed with their model to make the election seem closer than it really is.  I think it's basically the same model that predicted with great accuracy that Obama would win handily in 2008 and 2012.

As you can gather, I've been spending way too much time analyzing this election.  One reason is that I appreciate the math that goes into the polling and modeling; another reason is that the stakes are so damn high this election.  I personally have much more emotional capital invested in this election than I have in any other election.  If Trump wins, I will be devastated in a way that I wasn't when Bush won in 2004 (in 2000 I was out of the country, so I mostly missed that whole kerfuffle), and that I wouldn't have been if either McCain or Romney had won in 2008 or 2012, respectively.  It goes beyond policy (although a Trump presidency would be a policy disaster); it goes beyond existential fear of my country (we survived a literal civil war; we will survive a Trump presidency); it's something more personal: If Trump wins, I will, for the first time in my life, be ashamed to be an American.  That's not something I ever want to feel.

Well, that's about all I have to say for now.  I'll catch you all on the flip side of November 8.  But before I go, I ask -- nay, demand -- that you vote (and not for Trump).  Also, I leave you with this bit of encouragement.  Sam Wang isn't some lefty crackpot.  He's a smart dude, and he could very well be right.  Let's hope he is.  We shall all find out soon.

Until next time...

Friday, October 28, 2016

Entry 354: Politics... Wait, No, Family and Marriage, Actually

Is there anything else to write about now other than the election?  Yes, there is, but I have a different forum for crossword puzzles, and nobody wants to hear my in-depth thoughts on the Seahawks running back situation.  (But if you want my quick take: I miss Beastmode!)  Oh, I suppose I could also write about family, but things are pretty boring right now on that front – which is fine.  We have our routines; they work for us… for now.

If you froze my current situation in time and repeated it until the day I died, sixty years from now (99 seems like a decent age to hypothetically die), I wouldn’t think it was much of a life – the highlights of my day are usually the walk I take during my lunch break, and the five minutes I’m home and both of my kids are awake and not whining about something – but the good thing is that my current situation is not frozen in time.  I imagine the kids will be less clingy and less fussy by the time they reach their 60s (when I hypothetically die) than they are now.  I imagine someday S and I will be able to do more things with them and take them more places.  I imagine someday they will become more independent, and we will be able to spend more than ten minutes alone together, when we aren’t sleeping or wishing we were sleeping.


It’s weird, two of S’s friends who don’t know each other, and who each have small children confided in her in back-to-back days that their respective relationships with their husbands have been very rocky since the kids came, and they are both worried.  One of them said she was frequently annoyed with her husband’s presence for no good reason, and the other said that she and her husband had become “coworkers” instead of spouses.  And my first thought was, “Uh… yeah, isn’t that how all relationships are for parents of small kids?”

I suppose it’s a matter of degree, but that’s kinda how things go for a while, right?  If you have young children, you’re likely to be majorly overworked and sleep-deprived; and if you’re majorly overworked and sleep-deprived, you’re likely to be grumpy; and if you’re likely to be grumpy, you’re likely to be annoyed by the mere presence of other people; and if you’re likely to be annoyed by the mere presence of other people, you’re likely to take it out on your spouse, because they’re the person who is always around and whom you can take it out on.  If you tried to pull that shit with your boss, you'd probably be fired.

As for being coworkers, yeah, marriage does get pretty logistical with young kids – that's just how it goes.  But if you work well together as a team you can take some pride in it.  The other night both our kids woke up at the same time around 2:00 a.m., and S and I arose from our slumbers, quickly set up our game plan, double-teamed the kitchen for some milk, went into man-to-man coverage to put each kid back down (she got big; I got little), and were back in bed spooning within five minutes.  (Of course the spoon only lasted about five minutes because it’s not very comfortable to actually fall asleep in that position, but it was a nice five minutes.)  Things don’t always go that smoothly, but when they do, it’s a beautiful thing.

My general feeling on it is don’t put so much stress on your relationship.  Enjoy the little things and know that the big things will come back in time.  I think S feels the same way, but maybe not quite to the same degree.  She definitely gets antsy and starts saying we need to have a date night, and we usually do, but here’s the thing about date nights: They are not always fun.  Sometimes they are, and you have a great time, but other times you just feel like you’re going through the motions because you should, and you’re not really enjoying yourself.

[I find both these actors very funny, and yet you would have to pay me a lot of money for me to actually watch this movie.]

The first problem with date night is that you have to get somebody to watch your kids.  DC is an expensive city, especially when it comes to child care, so sitters are pricey.  Add this cost to the cost of the activity, and S and I are dropping at least a Benjamin every time we go out, often much more.  That's not such a big deal, if we have a fantastic time, but a lot of times we don't because (a) we incessantly worry about the kids (more me than S), (b) we start to fade immediately after leaving the house (more S than me) -- and not only that but we are cognizant of the fact that our kids are going to be waking us up at the crack at of dawn, possibly early, and it's really hard to cut loose and relax when the prospect of a 5:30 a.m. wake up call is hanging over your head.  All of this is not to say S and I are incapable of going out and having a good time.  We do have enjoyable nights out sometimes.  It’s just to say that date nights often aren’t what they're cracked up to be.

Actually, recently S really wanted to do a date night, so I suggested that instead of going out and spending a bunch of money just to be tired in nicer clothes than sweats, we should rent a movie from iTunes, pick a specific day and time to watch it after the kids are in bed, and make it into a little event that we are going to do together – no folding laundry, no checking Facebook, no reading work email, no following a game online.  We are going to set up date conditions and have a date night at home.  She said that was a good idea, so we did it, and then she fell asleep a half hour into the movie.  I didn’t mind.  I finished it (Whiplash -- pretty good), then I turned on the end of a football game and watched that, and then I woke her up and we went to bed at the same time, which is a rarity.  Oh, and both kids slept until the morning – so it was actually a nice little night.

Alright, apparently I can write about something other than the election.  The actual vote is coming up in 10 days (the end is nigh!), so I’ll probably have something to say on it next week.  But for now I hope you enjoyed this all-family entry.

Until next time…

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Entry 353: Late But... Probably Not Worth the Wait, Honestly

I meant to put something up this weekend, but I got sidetracked by my other blog, which required a post because I got another New York Times crossword puzzle published on Monday.  I'm kinda making a name for myself in Crossworld, which is cool.  (And I've got a bunch more on the way too!)

So I'm home from work today because Lil' S1 threw up like six times yesterday, so he couldn't go to school today.  He's taking a nap now, the length or which will be directly correlated to the length of this post.  It's weird, he's not showing any signs of being sick other than throwing up -- which is a bit like the old joke "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?" -- but usually when somebody is vomiting there are auxiliary symptoms.  With Lil' S1 there seem to be none, and today he has been acting completely normally.  Maybe he ate something that gave him mild food poisoning, or maybe he caught a very centralized stomach bug -- I don't know.  I just hope it is gone by tomorrow.  One day off with him is actually kinda nice, but two days is starting to push it.  I would definitely struggle as a stay-at-home dad.  It's funny, I asked him what he wanted to do today "museum?  movie?  park?" and what's his response?  "Daddy, can we go to Target?!"  Target happens to be in the same building as our gym, and they have daycare service, so I was actually in favor of this proposal.  Might as well get in a workout if I'm not going to work.



In other news, as you probably know, the final presidential debate is tonight.  I'll very likely watch it -- if only for the finality of it.  It's like when you watch a TV series that you've invested a lot of time in, but it starts to totally go off the rails at the end, but you still feel compelled to watch the finale.  That's how I am with this debate.  Honestly, I doubt it will matter much at all.  I suspect the vast, vast majority of people have decided already and aren't open to having their minds changed this late in the game.  For people who like Hillary and/or hate Trump, this is good news, as she has a commanding lead in the polls and will win handily if all her potential voters turn out.  That's my biggest fear: That would-be Hillary voters overwhelmingly don't turn out, because they never really supported her in the first place, and, when it actually comes down to it, aren't going to be motivated enough by the prospect of her in the White House to endure the slight inconvenience of going to the voting booth.  Another, smaller fear is that there are many people who support Trump but are embarrassed to admit it, so they are lying to pollsters about it, and thus the race is actually much closer than it appears.  My coworker subscribes to this theory, but I think he's a closet Trump supporter, so he could just be projecting his feelings onto everybody else.  My intuition from day one is that Hillary is a heavy favorite, and that's what the models that nailed the last two presidential elections are saying, so that's probably the way it is.

[I'm not with him!  And if you're not either, vote, dammit!]

In other other news, Lil' S2 is getting really cute.  He's nearing maximum cuteness, which happens at some point between one and a half and two and a half.  The problem is that he's only cute about 10% of the time, and the other 90% he's either sleeping or he's fussing.  That kid is cranky.  He just whines about everything -- I mean more than other kids his age, more than his brother at that age.  He's also a bit of a daddy's boy, so I get the brunt of it.  If I'm home and not holding him at that precise moment, he will toddle over to me and tug on my pant legs and whine.  To makes matter worse, the moment I pick him up, his brother will come running over and demand to be picked up as well ("Daddy, I'm tired of walking").  It's nice to be wanted, and people always say you miss it when it's gone, but I don't think I'm going to miss this.

In other ways, however, Lil' S2 is much easier than his brother was at his age.  He's easier to put to bed, and he's much easier to feed.  Lil' S1 has been a finicky eater since we gave him solids.  He just doesn't seem to like eating for some reason.  His brother is the exact opposite.  That kid will mow down whatever you put in front of him.  For breakfast, Lil' S1 will take three bites of an English muffin with cream cheese and then say he's full, while Lil' S2 will eat a piece of bread, a yogurt, half a banana, and some of my oatmeal, and then want a bottle of milk on top of all that.  This could very well be how most kids his age eat, and it just seems like a huge amount to me because I'm used to his brother...

Speaking of which, I hear some rustling upstairs.  I'd better throw some pics on this bad boy and call it an entry.

Until next time...

Saturday, October 8, 2016

Entry 352: Can You Actually Grab a Woman *By* the [Kitty]?

It's late Saturday night.  I'm on "Trump hot mic" overload.  Schadenfreude levels are high.  I doubt I'll have a chance to post to this blog tomorrow, so it's a quick comedy ("comedy"?) post tonight.  Here are five Trump jokes that I almost posted on FaceBook before deciding against it because... well, just because.

1.  The thing I realized is that Donald Trump and I just have different taste in women.  He likes blondes ones; I like consenting ones.

2.  I found Trump's new campaign poster:


Okay, I stole that from a FaceBook friend.  But then I commented:
"Trump also once tried to get busy in a Burger King bathroom. He moved on her hard, but she was married."  
C'mon, that's funny.  The Humpty Dance, here's your chance to do the hump...

3.  Can you actually grab a woman *by* the [kitty]?  There's not really much to grab *by* down there.  And if there's one thing worse than somebody who brags about committing sexual assault, it's somebody who brags about committing sexual assault and misuses prepositions.

4.  Trump dismissed what he said as "locker room talk".  And this is true... just ask any of Darren Sharper's ex-teammates.*

5. Make America great again... one stolen vag grab at a time.

Until next time...

*Link provided for non-football fans.

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Entry 351: Kinda Late Debate Analysis

Like millions of fellow Americans, I watched Monday night's presidential debate, and I came away feeling... surprisingly satisfied.  I typically don't watch the debates because I personally don't find them particularly useful, and because they always make me feel anxious.  It's like watching an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm -- you are just waiting in uncomfortable anticipation for somebody to say something embarrassing -- but without any jokes to provide a payoff for your anxiety.  But these are special times, and I was quite curious about what was going to be said, so I tuned in.

And I'm glad I did.  Because I got to watch in real-time Donald Trump get his ass handed to him by a far smarter, far more articulate, far more prepared, and dare I say it -- far more likable -- opponent.  He was totally and utterly objectively outclassed.  It was like watching the neighborhood bully fight a kid who has been doing nothing but practicing mixed martial arts for the past four years.  The bully came out and tried to use his weight and bravado to cow his opponent, but she easily weathered his initial advance, methodically maneuvered him into an advantageous position, and then ruthlessly delivered strikes of her own until the bully was trying to play the victim card and garner sympathy for himself ("She's being mean to me!").

Like I said, it was SO satisfying to watch.  Even if it doesn't swing the election, even if there isn't a pro-Clinton bounce (although there probably will be), it still happened.  We still all watched it.  There is NO way a fair-minded observer can say that Trump did anything other than get destroyed.  And that's very gratifying at the moment.  In November, if Trump somehow manages to win -- which could always happen; that's just the country we live in right now -- Clinton's performance in this debate will be little consolation.  But November is next month, for now, there is no harm in reveling in the epic smackdown we all witnessed on Monday night.


Also, there are two more debates, and it now seems highly unlikely that Trump is going to "win" either of them.  I suppose it's theoretically possibly he could do a much better job, but the other debates will not have the viewing audience the first one did, so they are less likely to move the needle, and Clinton is a tough opponent, anyway.  She has a strategy that if she sticks to it -- and given her preparation and performance in the first debate, I imagine she will -- is virtually indefensible: Troll Trump repeatedly.  No matter what the question she has to frame her answer in a way that subtly (or not so subtly) belittles her opponent.  She did this masterfully in the first debate -- bringing up Trump's "small" $14 million loan from his father, suggesting he isn't as rich as he claims, insinuating he's a racist, insinuating he's a sexist, and, one of my personal favorites, insinuating he's creepy (he likes "hanging around" beauty pageants).

The reason this is such a good strategy is because Trump inevitably takes the bait and gets off message (if he was ever "on" it to begin with) and starts saying stupid, offensive, or just downright incomprehensible things.  He just absolutely cannot help himself.  And even if he could, what's he going to do about it?  Just stand there and let Hillary tear him apart with a barrage of insults without defending himself?  How would that look any better for him?  He would come off as weak and pathetic.  He simply doesn't have the oratory skills or the critical thinking skills to outduel an adroit arguer.  It's why Ted Cruz was dying to get him in a one-on-one debate during the primary.  Cruz knew Trump wouldn't be able to go 90 minutes on his own, absent a stadium full of acolytes who cheer at literally anything he says no matter how offensive or bizarre.

It is widely acknowledged that Trump did much better at the beginning of the debate, and he did, but even if the entire next two debates go like the first part of the last debate, I still don't think Trump "wins."  I think people get bored (how long can you rehash the effectiveness of past trade deals?), and it's a stalemate.  Plus, Clinton knows she's vulnerable on trade and will undoubtedly have a focus-group-tested, polls-tested line of defense ready for another Trump attack on the issue.  The winning target for Trump is so small, and he's such an unsteady shot, I'm not too worried he's actually going to hit the bull's eye.

One thing he might do, one thing he's been posturing to do is bring up Bill Clinton's affairs -- perhaps implying that Hillary was complicit in a cover up of a sexual assault or something like that.  I think this would be foolish.  For one thing, Hillary will absolutely be prepared for anything he has to say about this, and she will absolutely bring up Trump's own infidelities, and, again, given his terrible debate skills, I don't see how he wins this exchange.

Another thing he might do is hint at Bill's past transgressions, and then claim he's too kind to bring them up -- a repeat of what he did in the first debate.  If he does this, if I'm Hillary, I'm calling him out on it.  Here's what I would say:
You know, Donald, this is the second time you've implied you have something terrible to say about me and my family, but you aren't going to say it, because you're too "nice."  Well, you're the same guy who has retweeted vicious memes about me from known white supremacists (*WRONG!*), so spare me the gentleman act.  I'm no damsel in distress.  I've been defending myself against lies from people much tougher than you my entire career, so if you have something you want to say about me or my family, go ahead and say it now to my face and to the American people.
Then if he backs down, I would stare at him like an alpha gorilla, and say, "That's what I thought.  That's what I thought."

If instead he actually tries to say something, he's on the spot; now he actually has to come up with something good -- the moment has been built up and the pressure is on.  If all he has is some fusty, old conspiracy theory that everybody but hardcore Hillary haters tired of two decades ago, which is probably the case, then it will be very easy to parry away.

Also, at the end, I would launch into a heartfelt monologue about how difficult it is to have your personal problems litigated in public, being sure to emphasize that my opponent surely knows first-hand how painful and damaging infidelities can be to a marriage.  I'd say something like this.

Alright, I think this is as good a place as any to end this one.  I have to prepare myself mentally for the vice presidential debate.  Just kidding.  I doubt I will watch it.  What's the point?  Tim Kaine versus Mike Pence: Battle of the old boring white guys!  Monday's presidential debate got ratings that rivaled the Super Bowl; expect the VP debate to be more in line with the Pro Bowl.  That's a funny joke for football fans, by the way.

Until next time...

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Entry 350: Guest Post

Something a little different today.  For the first time in six years, I'm posting something not written by me.  It's a funny anecdote by my sister.  I'm quite excited about it, so without further ado, let me introduce you to the one and only My Sister!  Take it away, K...

***********************

Thank you to Crocodile DG for allowing me this platform to vent my frustrations anonymously because none of my friends are aware this blog exists, although I often think the whole world should be reading it on a regular basis. Admittedly I might be biased because my brother and I, for all our differences of opinion, and there are quite a few (for example I do not think he’d win a fight with a wolverine) do see eye-to-eye on some issues one of which is my topic: Dumb-Ass Parents With No Common Sense.

My oldest son started middle school this fall. Before that he and my youngest child were both attending a primary school close enough to our house that we are not eligible for bus service. For the past 5 years, or approximately 900 drop-off/pick-ups, it’s been smooth sailing which I now realize is thanks to Mr. W. Until I began dropping my oldest off at the middle school a month ago I had no idea the enormity of the service Mr. W provides at the primary school. Every morning and every afternoon, rain or shine, he is out in front of the building wearing his cargo shorts and fluorescent vest and directing parents in his booming New Zealand accent. I marvel at how he summons the energy, day after day, to repeatedly urge parents to “pull forward, pull forward, keep going. Stop here, please stay in the car, Mom, that’s it. Ok, now move along, move along. Next car please, pull forward, pull forward, keep going. Stop here, stay in the car, Dad, that’s it…” I’ve even wondered if this direction is necessary since we parents are grown ups with (presumably) valid driver’s licenses. Surely we can handle this on our own. But I now understand Mr. W is out there every day because he knows he is the only thing standing between us and chaos. You see, the middle school doesn’t have a Mr. W. There is in fact no one directing drop-off/pick-up and at the middle school; mayhem reigns supreme.

Let me explain the logistics… the front of the middle school is parallel to a busy street. The parking lot runs the length of the school and there is only one entrance/exit. When you enter the lot you stay straight and follow along the curb. The first two-thirds of the curb is red, and “No Stopping” is painted on the pavement every 10 feet. The last third of the curb is yellow and opens up to a wider area directly in front of the main doors that is clearly a loading zone. It is long enough for 5 vehicles to pull into at a time. Seems self-explanatory, right? Pull into the lot, drive along until you get to the designated zone, stop the car, tell your kid to get out, maybe tell him you love him depending on how the morning went, and then pull away from the curb to continue circling through the parking lot until you get back to the entrance/exit. If the loading zone is full you politely wait a moment until someone leaves and then you pull forward as far as possible allowing room for others behind you. I’ve provided a diagram you will want to refer to for this next part:



So on the first day of drop-off I was unsure how it all worked, although I’d been to the school previously for orientation and had an idea of how it should flow. Well, apparently I was one of only a few parents who had this idea because most were utterly lost. Many parents were stopping in the “no stopping” red zone or pulling into the loading zone, but stopping with room for two or more cars in front of them. Because of this the parents stuck behind them were abruptly and with no signaling swerving around the stopped vehicles (the place is swarming with kids, remember) and some were even pulling into parking spots and kicking their precious children out of their cars leaving them to navigate the craziness like pixelated frogs. I managed to drop my kid off in the loading zone and barely escaped with my life. I was shaken, but optimistic it would get better as the days went on and people figured it out. And it has gotten better, sort of. Most parents have figured out how to keep the flow going. But others… well that brings me to this morning.

I turn into the school lot with 3 cars ahead of me, pleased to see there is no one in the loading zone and anticipating a quick in and out. Next thing I know I’m slamming on my brakes possibly giving my child whiplash because the first car in the line (A on the diagram), the car with NO ONE IN FRONT OF HER, has parked. In the red zone. In front of where it says “No Stopping.” Then she GETS OUT OF HER CAR. She opens the back door for her daughter and helps her UNLOAD HER CELLO oblivious to the cars now backing up into the street and blocking traffic. She kisses her daughter good-bye and WATCHES HER CHILD WALK TOWARDS THE BUILDING. She then unhurriedly climbs back into her car and SITS THERE. Since this transaction takes a couple of minutes the car behind Dumb-ass decides to unload her kids and so, of course, the car directly in front of me does the same thing because, why not? So there I am watching kids being unloaded 50 feet away from the EMPTY drop-off zone. I so badly want to fling my door open, march up to Dumb-ass, and shout, “what the FUCK??” that I almost pass out. But I restrain myself and hear a soft honk behind me. I look in the mirror to see a dear friend directly behind me in her SUV smiling and waving. I half-heartedly wave back and then gesture to Dumb-ass with a “get a load of this dumb-ass” look on my face. My friend, of course, gets it because she’s my friend and I feel a little better that we have both witnessed this act of incredible stupidity and can bitch about it later. By now Dumb-ass and her followers have moved so I pull ALL THE WAY forward into the designated drop-off zone (B), tell my kid to get out and I love him (we had a good morning) and prepare to drive away. But first I look into my mirror so I can wave goodbye to my friend and see her … unloading her kid 7 car lengths behind me (C). In the red zone.  On top of  where it says “No Stopping.” Backing up traffic. Like a dumb-ass.

At least she didn’t get out of her car. 

Saturday, September 24, 2016

Entry 349: ... and Major

After two recent police shootings, there is much civil unrest in Charlotte right now, but ironically (for lack of a better word) that shooting probably was justified (update: or not, see below), while the one in Tulsa almost certainly was not.  But this probably has more to do with the demographics in those respective cities than it does with the merits of the cases.  (The percentage of African Americans in Charlotte is over twice that in Tulsa.)  Also, the officer in Tulsa has been charged with felony manslaughter, while in Charlotte a lot of the protest is about the police department releasing the videos they have of the shooting.  I find this obstinacy by Charlotte P.D. troubling and strange.  It completely flies in the face of the police transparency movement that is supposed to help build trust between law enforcement and residents.  (Although, North Carolina recently passed a bill that will go into effect in a week that makes it illegal to release police footage without a court order.  So North Carolina seems to not really be down with this police "glasnost" concept at all.)  The police chief in Charlotte claims that he’s not releasing the videos, because there is no compelling reason to do so, and that it might further inflame things.  But my thought is – Isn’t thousands of people protesting in the street a compelling reason?  And aren’t things already quite inflamed?

With that said, looking at the evidence dispassionately, I do think the man who was killed in Charlotte, Keith Scott, was in fact holding a gun and refused to let it go when he was shot.  Reading the transcript of the video released by his wife who was recording the incident on her cell phone (I can’t bring myself to actually watch these videos) the police officer -- who it is worth noting is African American -- says the following: “Gun. Gun. Drop the gun. Drop the fucking gun.”  Then later he says several times more to “drop the gun.”  So either (a) Scott actually had a gun; (b) the police office straight-up fabricated it on the spot; (c) the officer confused something else for a gun and the department is now covering it up (they said they recovered the gun on the scene).  In order of likelihood, these go (a), (c), (b) for me.  Although I certainly don’t begrudge people – especially black people – for thinking (c) deserves more weight than I’m giving it.  As we have learned from other tragic incidents, such as the Laquan McDonald shooting in Chicago, the Walter Scott shooting in South Carolina, and the Samuel DuBose shooting in Cincinnati, police officers will lie to cover their asses -- or at least they will "massage" the facts, consciously or subconsciously, to produce a version of events very favorable to themselves and very divergent from reality.
Update: Apparently since I started working on this post, they have released the dashcam footage.  Here is what a friend of mine on Facebook said about it.  I'm going to quote him verbatim and leave it at that since I agree with him.  
(1) No police officer is going to get charged if Mr. Scott had a loaded gun in his hand at the time he was shot by the police--regardless of whether it was pointed at the officers or not. (2) There was no reason for police to engage with Mr. Scott, who was sitting in his car minding his business (and maybe rolling a joint) in the first place--especially after the wife told them he had a TBI. Why would they order him out of the car and force a deadly confrontation? Why not secure a perimeter, take safe cover, and wait it out? Nobody had to get shot or die that day...
I mean, just look at the Tulsa case.  If the video on that didn’t definitively show that the victim, Terence Crutcher, was not a threat when he was shoot, I guarantee the officer would not have been charged.  She could have told her side of the story about being scared and thinking he was going for a weapon – and who would have refuted her?  The other cops on the scene?  (As we've also learned, first and foremost cops protect one other.)  It’s not that she would have been lying necessarily; it’s that her perception of the events would have been a wild distortion of what actually happened, and nobody would have been able to really challenge her on it.  That’s one of the truly insidious things about disputed killings.  Often the only person who can credibly contradict the killer’s narrative is dead.

I read a lot of articles on stuff like this, and then, on occasion, I do something that I know I shouldn’t do, but I do it anyway: I read the comments section.  It's an awful habit of self-flagellation.  If you are ever feeling too optimistic about the current state race relations in our country, read the comments of an article about the shooting of a black man by police.  You are guaranteed to cringe at least twenty times by the third comment.

Once you get past those cringes, though, you do notice the same recurring arguments for justifying the actions of the police officers, no matter what (even in the cases where the officers actually get charged with a crime).  I thought I would list out the most prevalent of these arguments and debunk them in turn.

The victim wasn’t following the officer’s orders.  Had he complied he wouldn’t have been shot.
There are many problems with this argument.  One that I rarely hear mentioned, but is true to my own experience, is that it isn't always easy to follow police instructions.  Once I disobeyed a "no turn on red" sign that I didn't notice, and I got pulled over by two police cars.  The officers had me get out of my car and do a sobriety test.  (I think it was a quasi-drunk driving sting, as it was near the main bar district in a college town at around midnight.)  Although I was sober, I completely failed their field test, because I was having a lot of difficulty following their instructions.  My adrenaline was pumping like crazy, so I was struggling to retain the things they were saying, and then I couldn't tell who was talking exactly because they were shining their lights in my face, and they weren't exactly epitomes of clear communication.  So the whole thing was a mess.  They were about to arrest me, but, of course, they gave me a Breathalyzer, and I only blew a  0.03 (the legal limit is 0.08).  "You are the winner tonight, my friend," said one of the officers before they let me go and drove off.  Yes, I didn't go to jail for a crime I didn't commit -- winning!

It's completely understandable that in an incredibly stressful situation, somebody wouldn't be able to fully process the commands a police officer is shouting at them.  And even if they can, non-compliance is not a capital offense!  In America, we have a process in which people are tried before a jury of their peers for crimes -- even truly heinous crimes.  They aren't executed on the spot.  That's for fascist dictatorships.  (So it's completely unsurprising that most of the "comply or die" crowd support Donald Trump, whose role models of strong leadership are fascist dictators.)

Parents need to teach their kids to respect police!  Yes, sir, no, sir!  Do as they say!  Then this type of thing wouldn't happen.  I know this will never happen to my kids because I taught them how to behave around police officers!  
This is just a different way of phrasing the same argument as above.  And I would be willing to bet that the person who wrote this is white.  Well, I know he is white, because I wrote it.  But I see comments like this all the time, and I bet those commenters are white.  Because from what I've heard from black parents, they do talk to their kids about how to behave around police, and they are still scared to death of them getting shot because they flinch and an officer has an itchy trigger finger.

Also, white parents, I bet your kids aren't as well behaved around police as you think.  I know this because I went to college with a whole lot of white kids, and I'd go to parties where there was pretty much only white people, and the police would show up to break it up, and it was not "yes, sir, no, sir," I assure you.  Kids would run away; kids would talk back; kids would lie; kids would mockingly hug officers; and kids would occasionally challenge officers to mano-y-mano fistfights (this actually happened, more than once).  And what happened?  Well, these kids would sometimes get citations for disorderly conduct or minor in possession or something of the like.  But you know what never happened?  Nobody ever got shot!  I never even saw an officer so much as motion toward his or her weapon.  For some reason, the police officers, despite the obstinacy never viewed us as threats.  Now why would that be?  If we were a bunch of young black kids, doing the exact same thing, it would have been totally the same -- right?

Yeah, but black people commit a far higher percentage of violent crimes than any other race.  So police should profile them.  It's not racism; it's just facts.
Okay, but it's also a fact that a very small percentage of people of any race are going to commit a violent crime at all -- particularly killing a police officer.  So shouldn't the risk assessment be "How much of threat is person going to be to me?" not "How much of threat is this person going to be to me relative to somebody of another race?"  If it's the former, which it should be, then the answer is that a person is almost never going to be a mortal threat to you, because most people, even those who get stopped by police officers aren't killers.

And why are we so quick to lump together "black people" when it comes to crime, anyway?  We don't do this for white people -- or for men.  I mean, men commit a far higher percentage of violent crime than any race does.  But can you imagine if police treated all men the way they treat black men, and women defended it by saying "hey, men are more violent than women!"?  How would that go over?  

The real problem is black on black violence.
No! That's not the real problem because there is no single real problem.  Police brutality toward people of color is a problem; gang violence (which is what I think most people mean when they use the awful term "black of black violence") is a separate problem.  Why are you bringing up the latter when we are discussing the former?  Imagine if we used this logic in other areas:

"We need to stop foreign terrorists from getting into our country!"
"Actually, more Americans kill Americans than foreigners kill Americans.  So that's the real problem!"

"We need to find a cure for cancer!"
"Actually, more people die of heart disease.  So that's the real problem!"

It's nonsensical.

All these people are criticizing the police, but if somebody broke into their house, who would they call?!
I would call the police.  It's their job to protect people.  I would also like it to be part of their job that they not kill so many unarmed black people.  Is that too high a standard for you?

That's all I got.

Until next time...

Friday, September 23, 2016

Entry 348: Some stuff, Both Minor...

I’m not feeling great at the moment.  I was a little sick last week, but nothing too bad, and then Wednesday evening something hit me like a sledge hammer.  I was in that awful state of somehow being too hot and too cold simultaneously.  I’d bundle up in a hoodie only to remove it sweat-soaked ten minutes later.  My fever peaked at 103, which is pretty damn hot.  To make matters worse, something was wrong with my urinary tract.  It constantly felt like I had to pee, but nothing would come out, and then my urethra would burn like hell when it finally did.  (Ten years ago, I might have been worried about an STD; today I can pretty much dismiss that possibility altogether.)  It was quite unpleasant.  To make matters even worse, I had to take care of Lil’ S2.  This was doubly bad in that I felt like shit, and there was little I could do to limit his exposure to my germs.  I'm the only one here to take care of him right now.

But, it’s quite possible that he gave me what he has, so I don’t have worry about getting him resick.  I don’t know.  Both of us seem to be feeling better today (Friday), so that’s good.  I usually go into the office on Thursday, but since I was feeling ill I decided to work from home, so that I wouldn’t infect all my coworkers and so that I could take a nap if need be.  At around 10:30 a.m. I decided to do just that – take a nap – so I laid my head down to doze off for a few minutes and woke up… four hours later!  Apparently I needed more than just a nap.  At that point I figured it best to call it a day and take sick leave.


Lack of sleep is almost certainly a big reason for my ailment.  I just don’t sleep enough.  It’s not something I can easily fix either, because I’m not tired during the times I can sleep – or to put it more accurately, I am tired, but I don't feeling like sleeping.  If I go to bed at 10:30 p.m., I’ll just lie in bed awake.  1:00 a.m. is pretty much the earliest I can go to sleep on a regular basis, and if the kids are waking me up at 5:45 a.m. – well, I’m not Nikola Tesla.  I do my best sleeping between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m.  That’s just always the way I’ve been.  Even when I had a job that required me to be at work super early (one summer in college, I stocked shoes at a sporting goods store before it opened), I still wouldn’t go to sleep early.  I’d only sleep a few hours at night, and then I would occasionally take a quick nap after work.  (Incidentally, during these naps I would sometimes experience sleep paralysis.  It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever done so – thankfully, as sleep paralysis is absolutely terrifying.)  Then on the weekends I’d sleep in until noon.  That’s a huge problem now: I can’t “catch up” on sleep on the weekend with these damn kids around.  If only I was a deadbeat dad… *sigh*.

Anyway, enough about the woes of being an “owl.”  There are more important things to discuss, like black people getting shot by the police (again and again).  However, I decided to move that to a different post, which will be up very soon (with S and Lil' S1 out of town I have a lot more free time to blog).  I wanted to devote a post specifically to these shootings, and also I wanted to up my entry count.  Once I sell this blog for big money, I'm going to charge by the entry.

Until then...