October bends w/o breaking.
2016 in the Hudson Valley
Wind and rain impaired
October’s color pageant.
Still the year’s best month.
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Author: Mellow Curmudgeon
My blog touches on many things, often with humor and/or haiku. I have been a scientist; an engineer; an Alzheimer’s caregiver.
Fairness
Like the other Enlightenment values (liberty; rationality; tolerance), fairness is always under attack. Fairness differs in that it is much harder to determine whether we have it.
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If lumping fairness with (liberty; rationality; tolerance) sounds odd, please note that fairness to me is subtler than crude egalitarianism. Credit where credit is due. Ability rather than ancestry as qualification for high office. Opportunity for upward mobility. Respect for differing priorities. Willingness to forego getting all I want so that everybody has a shot at getting all they need, w/o trying to impose the same wants/needs categories on everybody.
Downloaded from Clipart Kid, the image of David and Goliath trash talking illustrates a subtlety of fairness. It may look unfair that Goliath is the only one with armor and heavy weapons. Should David have them too? No, he would still be a scrawny youth, just encumbered by all that stuff. Let David have what suits David’s (not Goliath’s) skills and will not interfere with Plan B:
If my shots miss, run like Hell!
Deciding what is fair and then doing it can be a lot of work, as the endless stream of affirmative action lawsuits illustrates. Dunno how that story will end. I do know a true story about the difficulties of being fair in the real world that has a happy ending. I blogged about it in 2015, before I had a responsive theme. My post would have been unintelligible to anybody surfing on a phone or tablet (Harrumph!) rather than a real computer. Now that I have a responsive theme and a renewed urge to defend Enlightenment values (thanks to the current dismal state of US politics), I have revised that post in many small ways, partly to make it more explicit about fairness. The WordPress previewer assures me that it is indeed intelligible on all 3 platforms. Here is the link:
An open letter to the Aetna CEO
Typing just [Enter] key into the Search box makes it easy to browse WordPress blogs like this one. Here, the [Menu] button (atop the vertical black bar) reveals widgets like the Search box.The post reblogged here is a welcome reminder that there are still some thoughtful and pragmatic people in the US. Tho seriously flawed in many ways, the ACA is an improvement over what came before. The flaws can be fixed if the pols will stop posturing for a while.
Dear Mark T. Bertolini, Chairman and CEO, Aetna,
As a former actuary, benefits consultant, benefits manager, and a business and personal client of Aetna, I recognize fully the complexity of healthcare delivery and insurance in the US. I understand the meaning of claims loss ratios and the need for Aetna to earn a profit for its shareholders.
With this context, I ask that you please reconsider pulling Aetna out of the Healthcare exchanges in North Carolina and other states. I became an Aetna customer again when Aetna purchased the business of Coventry and integrated the two companies into the Aetna network. On the whole, our service has been good and we appreciate your negotiated discounts with Carolinas Medical Center and its doctor network. Many insureds do not realize the value of these discounts that must be paid by uninsureds.
The Affordable Care Act is still in its early childhood, but…
View original post 271 more words
How to Visualize Veracity
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As John Adams noted long ago, facts are stubborn things. So are misconceptions. Tossing dull little facts against a seductively simple misconception is like tossing pebbles against a window. To break the window, U must organize the pebbles into something like a chunk of concrete.
One way to organize facts is to create a clear and colorful visualization that sums up the take-away. One kind of visualization is a bar chart where all the big bars have the same length but are divided into little bars of various lengths. Perhaps a green little bar shows the percentage of my daily protein that comes from breakfast, while yellow and red little bars show the percentages that come from lunch and dinner. Another big bar shows those 3 percentages for somebody else. This kind of bar chart can be very helpful when there are more kinds of little bar than just breakfast/lunch/dinner, if the chart marker chooses colors well.
An excellent example of this kind of bar chart is in a Daily Kos post by Auriandra dated 2016-10-05. The whole post is a good read; the chart is shown below, in a cropped screenshot.
Contrary to what many cartoonists and progressive purists (not to mention right-wingers) proclaim, Hillary Clinton is relatively truthful, among the pols considered. (None of them deserve high marks by the standards of scientific research or testimony under oath.) By far the least truthful is Donald Trump.
If voters eventually notice and heed the veracity difference between Clinton/Kaine and Trump/Pence, the loss will leave Trump angry at the fact checkers. How can someone with his skillset (blustering; lying; swindling) get back at them? He could try for yet another Pants-on-Fire rating, with a lie about the fermentation capabilities of his microbiome.
Revenge for Fact Checking
Donald Trump could say
his farts and his shit smell like
warm cinnamon rolls.
Deciduous
My response to a CDHK challenge about leafless trees is a haiku attributing lungs to such trees. Why not?
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Deciduous
Lifeless? No, leafless.
Trees hold their breath all winter,
exhale leaves in spring.
Tough Lessons
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Learning from history is tough, even for those who remember it. Parallels are never exact. The importance of each difference between then and now is a judgement call. Consider a darkly hilarious cartoon by Jen Sorensen:
Yes, the resemblance of the armed guard to a Nazi storm trooper is as subtle as a sledge hammer. Fine by me. Maybe it will overcome the American propensity for historical amnesia and wishful thinking.
Much to my dismay, Hillary Clinton is the only Trump opponent who might conceivably be elected. The progressive purists who disdain supporting Clinton are confident that something like what happened in Germany in 1932 and 1933 could not happen here and now, with a Trump victory. Yes, our traditions of liberal democracy are stronger than those of the Weimar Republic. The pertinent question is not whether our traditions are stronger but whether they are still strong enough, after years of relentless assault from the pseudoconservative coalition of bigots and plutocrats that controls staggering amounts of dark money and has already taken over the GOP. Dammit, the answer is not obvious.
Loyalty
The failure of Congress to renew the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program endangers people who served as translators for US troops in Afghanistan. Enduring the same dangers and hardships as the troops, the translators sometimes fought alongside them. Links to details will follow shortly.
This is not about whether the war in Afghanistan (or any war) was justified. This is about doing right by good people who put their lives on the line but are being abandoned by lazy pols.
As a thoughtful video (under 3 minutes) produced by No One Left Behind points out, this is one of those extremely rare situations where it would be fairly easy to act both honorably and in our own self-interest, if only Congress would listen to a few combat veterans in its own ranks.
The rest of this post is excerpted from e-mail about the visa crisis that I received 2016-09-19 from No One Left Behind. There are plenty of links to details in the excerpt.
˙ ˙ ˙
Congress left Washington, DC at the end of last week having failed to hold a vote on the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program. As a result of their unconscionable inaction, the State Department will run out of visas on 1 October 2016 (the start of the new fiscal year). The current backlog of visas is roughly 10,000 applicants (when one includes family, we estimate the true number of applicants is 35,000+). Thanks to Congress, our country will now break its promise to our Afghan translators and other wartime allies – who will continue to wait in limbo, in hiding, afraid that any moment might be the one where the Taliban or ISIS’s death squads finally find them. How many will die before Congress does their job (votes to renew the program and authorize and issue more visas to the State Department) and honors our nation’s promise?
To help highlight the national security implications of this issue and the importance of protecting the honor of the American military, veterans, and credibility, we organized a Letter to Congress, which we delivered on 6 September 2016. Hundreds of thousands of veterans, representing every branch of service in every American conflict dating back to World War II joined Medal of Honor recipients from Vietnam to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, former Chairmen and members of the Joint Chiefs, numerous wartime commanders, and other general and flag officers in adding their signatures to the letter.
˙ ˙ ˙ This past weekend, the [Wall Street] Journal joined the New York Times and the Washington Post in urging the Congress to renew and properly fund the program – the nation’s three leading newspapers are rarely this unified on matters of policy.
This is the 11th hour. The State Department will run out of visas in 11 days. Unless we build a movement and demand Congress renew the program immediately, it will likely die an unceremonious death, lost as an obscure program that got drowned out by the intense rhetoric of the 2016 election.
Help us prevent this tragedy by doing two things:
- Forward this email to 10 friends and urge them to join the fight by signing up at www.nooneleft.org/savethesiv.
- Share the following on Twitter and Facebook: Keep our obligation to our #Veterans. Tell Congress to #SaveTheSIV. nooneleft.org/savethesiv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwmMviIBpwg
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Update [2016-09-20]
If U have not already done so, please contact your Senators and Representatives.
I dislike phones and try to be much less scathing when communicating to pols rather than about them, so I used the e-mail links on my legislators’ web pages to send the following message.
General topic: Immigration | National Security
Specific topic: Afghan Special Immigrant Visas
Message text:
The failure of Congress to renew the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program endangers people who served as translators for US troops in Afghanistan. Enduring the same dangers and hardships as the troops, the translators sometimes fought alongside them. This is one of those extremely rare situations where it would be fairly easy to act both honorably and in our own self-interest, if only Congress would listen to a few combat veterans in its own ranks and do right by good people who put their lives on the line but are being abandoned.
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Bhaskara for President!
Fooey. He has hardly any name recognition, was not born a US citizen, and has been dead for centuries. Being more reality-oriented than those who handed Donald Trump the job, I cannot seriously promote Bhaskara. What a pity. His elegant old proof helps me stay sane in the Age of Trumpery.
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Who’s Bhaskara? We will get to that question shortly. First, consider whatever gadget U are using to read this post. It depends on many things, discovered over many years by many people who (unlike many pols) preferred building up to tearing down. With many steps omitted (and “depends on” abbreviated to ←), a few of those dependencies go like this:
Your Gadget ← quantum physics ← coordinate systems ← Pythagoras’ Theorem
Back in high school, Pythagoras’ Theorem may have seemed like a little fact about right triangles that may have been mildly interesting but did not deserve the effort of slogging thru the book’s tedious proof. I could read the proof line by line, observe that it was valid, and be glad that I never needed to retrieve it for a test. Hardly anybody could remember it for more than a few minutes.
Pythagoras’ Theorem turned out to be essential to blogging (and much else), so it would be nice to have a proof that mere mortals could remember, appreciate, and be inspired by. Enter Bhaskara, 1114-1185.
Bhaskara replaced the usual picture (of 3 squares glued to the sides of 1 triangle) with a picture of 4 copies of the same triangle, arranged to form a big square with a little square inside it:
(a+b)²
=
4 · ( ½ · a · b) + c²
=
4 · ( ½ · a · b) + c²
The proof is sometimes displayed more tersely, with just the figure. I prefer to write out a little algebra (while not belaboring why the angles do add up the way the figure suggests). Tho he did not have modern notation, Bhaskara did have an elegant way to provide more detail for the mathematically fastidious. He displayed another figure that also puts the 4 copies of the triangle inside a big square with sides a+b. In the other figure, the area not covered by copies of the triangle amounts to a²+ b² because it consists of 2 small squares. But the not-covered area amounts to c² in the figure displayed above, so we can conclude that
a²+ b² = c²
w/o bothering with algebra and how to compute areas of right triangles. We just need to bother with drawing both figures. Wanna try your hand at drawing the other figure? U can find the answer by following the link provided by Sieglinglungenlied in the comment section.
Googling reveals some variation in what is attributed to Bhaskara. The 1-figure proof I displayed appears in several places (sometimes attributed to Bhaskara and sometimes w/o attribution). A similar 1-figure proof is commonly attributed to Bhaskara, with a big square of length c. The 2-figure version that avoids algebra is attributed to Bhaskara in Math in 100 Key Breakthroughs, a nicely illustrated book by Richard Elwes. Historical accuracy is not crucial at the moment, so I went with the best story w/o worrying about who got it right.
OK, I admit that having written a proof of mind-blowing elegance does not really qualify Bhaskara to be POTUS. Too bad that many people think mind-blowing arrogance can hack it.
Clicking on the “politics” category or tag in this post will display all my uses of acidic humor to cope with the current state of US politics. But acids are corrosive. Sometimes, I forgo acid and contemplate some of the enduring (so far) glories of modern Western civilization, one of which is that it is not exclusively Western. In particular, we got some elegant math from India and some elegant poetry forms from Japan.
One Way to Stay Sane in the Age of Trumpery
Cherish all that is
true and good and beautiful
(like Bhaskara’s proof).
Calliope and Geology
The juxtaposition in my title is weird, but Calliope is unfazed. After all, she is the ancient Greek muse of eloquence, epic poetry, and circus music.
© Wisconsinart | Dreamstime.com
As American politics in 2016 illustrates, Calliope’s portfolio is not as weird as I would wish. Neither is my title.
Stale Bread Can Wait
My muse is stingy (when implored)
or really bitchy (when ignored).
If I want to sing of croutons
(but her fancy turns to plutons),
I have just one way to go:
with the mighty magma flow.
As I discovered long ago when I tried to read an English translation of Goethe’s Faust, poetry in couplets tends to sound silly even when it is dead serious. Now that I have had my little respite from blank verse in haiku form, maybe I should go back to solemn austerity. Maybe.
What the World Needs
More silliness from
those who know they are silly;
less from the others.
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Beyond Towels
In response to [Carpe Diem #1028 sadness], my take on sadness is grimmer than that of Khalil Gibran. But not hopeless. Many things that work best when dry can still work when damp.
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Sadness
It is a liquid.
It wets the soul and somehow
never fully dries.
Amazing Photos Out There
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While I did not take the photos shown here, I did write the haiku.
Many amazing photos have been submitted to the Weather Channel’s It’s Amazing Out There / 2016 Photo Contest. The contest has both expert judging and voting for the “fan favorite” by anybody with a Facebook account. U can vote daily until 2016-08-26 and distribute those votes however U like. Having viewed only a few of the submissions, am I competent to recommend votes to other people? Not really, but Donald Trump has set the competence bar low enough to be cleared by a garden slug. Being a little more competent (and a lot more honest) than Trump, I will share my enthusiasms anyway, with cropped/resized versions of 2 submissions.
While I have been voting enthusiastically for Coming Storm by CJDraper (aka Dancing Echoes on WordPress), I also want to salute the fan favorite as of the last time I looked: Ozzie (a bald eagle) by Davedc. The latter already has plenty of well-deserved votes, so I wrote a haiku inspired by it.
Mythornithology
When we saw himself,
Narcissus forgot to drink.
Eagle had more sense.
Australian Rainbow
Randy Olson’s superb photo of a rainbow is both a visual complement to the yearning expressed in the famous Judy Garland song and a great illustration for one of my haiku. A rainbow is forever out of reach. And yet …
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To illustrate my response to Carpe Diem # 1020 rainbow, I did a quick search that found more fine images of rainbows than I could view in a lifetime. The image used here jumped out because it has a vertical format, does not need the rainbow to grab me, and hints at a futile yearning. The termite mound in the foreground looks like a hand trying to grasp the rainbow.
Termites are much too busy building mounds and digesting cellulose to indulge in such yearnings. Humans are busy too, and many of us have some awareness of the geometric reasons that a rainbow is forever out of reach. We sometimes yearn anyway.
No Pots of Gold
Seek ends of rainbows.
You will not find them? Okay.
The quest is enough.
The image used here is a photo by Randy Olson that was available at the time of posting as computer desktop wallpaper from National Geographic.
Fragment & Phrase in Haiku
This haiku in fragment/phrase style honors the memory of Jane Reichold in several ways.
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Many of the haiku I like have 2 contrasting parts (called fragment and phrase by Jane Reichold) in a juxtaposition that may seem incongruous at first. (Much of the fun comes from realizing that the juxtaposition does make sense, perhaps because one part clarifies the other.) After quoting from Jane’s essay Fragment & Phrase Theory, Kristjaan Panneman asks readers of Carpe Diem Theme Week (6) 5 “Ask Jane …” to honor her memory with a haiku in this style. My attempt is a haiku with
- the clearest fragment/phrase boundary of any haiku that I have written, plus
- a celebration of her essay’s emphasis on pluralism and pragmatism, with
- a line adapted from her essay in my phrase part;
- a few departures from common practice that work well here.
Ad honorem: Jane Reichold, 1937-2016
It is as she said:
rules should not be carved in stone.
Bamboo bends with wind.
The image used in this post has been resized from the original by Skip Allen; U can see the original in full glory by clicking on the link in item #1 below. The original post using the image is gratefully reblogged (in effect) by item #2.
Who Wrote That?
The following 3 quotes all come from the same person. Can U guess who?
- The citizens … must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they themselves have called into being.
- It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes … have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.
- Those who oppose all reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.
The choices listed in the following poll have varying plausibility; they do include the actual author. Please have a go before scrolling down to see the answer and why it matters.
Scroll down for the answer …
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The image of the US Constitution’s famous oversimplification “We the People” was downloaded and resized from http://mtviewmirror.com/wp-content/uploads/we-the-people-9.jpg.
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All of the quotes are from a speech on The New Nationalism delivered 1910-08-31 by Theodore Roosevelt. More than a century later, the work has still not been done. More than a century later, pseudoconservatives still dump truckloads of ratcrap on anybody who opposes running the USA for the benefit of the biggest corporations and richest billionaires.
What to do in 2016? Yes, I feel the pull toward a protest vote like writing in Bernie Sanders (or Theodore Roosevelt). In what is not so obviously a mere gesture of protest, I could vote Green or Libertarian. But I will not. Unless U live in a cobalt blue or screaming red state, voting Green or Libertarian in 2016 is voting for Trump. In the real world, all options suck. Some suck worse than others. Much worse.
Yes, one can hope that the combination of Trump in the White House with McConnell and Ryan dominating Congress will be so blatantly toxic that “the people” finally wake up, rise up, and wrest control from the plutocrats. Alas, the 99% of us who are getting shafted includes bigots and nitwits. It includes those who bought the Fox News claim to be fair and balanced. It includes heavily armed crazies like Omar Mateen and Dylan Roof.
Popular uprisings do succeed now and then, as when the government of East Germany collapsed in 1989. Hey, the good people on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall suffered only 44 years (*) of communist oppression before that. More often, uprisings are either crushed (as in Hungary 1956) or seem successful for a while but descend into chaotic violence that spawns yet another tyranny (French Revolution; Russian Revolution; Arab Spring; …).
So I will trudge to the polls, hold my nose, and vote for Hillary. I will also remember a more familiar quotation from TR, excerpted below with a few letters added in italics:
It is not the critic who counts; … The credit belongs to the woman who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; … ; who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; …
While Hillary is deeply flawed, she is not one of those “timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat” detested by TR. For that matter, neither is Trump. He has other issues. While TR was far from being a pacifist, he could see the downside of putting an impulsive jerk in a position to start a war. That jerk also thinks appeasing the NRA is more important than making it harder for crazies like Adam Lanza to murder school children and their teachers.
(*) The physical wall stood for less than 44 years, but the whole point of erecting it was to stop desperate dashes thru the political wall erected in 1945.
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Prophet for a Day
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Soon after the wild daylilies have finished blooming, another flower in my yard turns to prophecy. The pale blue blossoms are long gone, but a few of the leaves on a few of the plants have another calling now. For about a day, they prophesy the next season.
Prophet for a Day
Wild geranium
(just one leaf for just one day)
turns in high summer.
Lovers Watching a Sunset
A haiku that began as part of a comment on a post by Sieglinglungenlied gets a title and a life of its own. An outstanding sunset photo by Dan Hahn complements the haiku to form a haiga.
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This post’s haiku began as part of my comment on Sieglinglungenlied’s beautiful and creative post Partners, Flying through Clouds. I realized later that the haiku could live outside the comment with an appropriate title. (I like titles for haiku anyway.) Thank U, Sieglinglungenlied. Thanks are also owed to photographer Dan Hahn, with details at the end of this post.
Lovers Watching a Sunset
The clouds burn yellow,
smolder red, and fade to gray.
The love keeps burning.
Image Source
It would have been nice to illustrate the poetry with a series of 3 images that show the same clouds at successive stages of a sunset: yellow; red; gray. Even if I shoot such a series in the future, I would never be able to get a series that includes the lovers. So I did an image search, found many fine images of sunsets being watched by lovers, and found an outstanding one by Dan Hahn that showed all 3 color stages, in different clouds at the same moment. Bingo.
The image as used in this post has been cropped to emphasize the clouds; U can see the original in full glory by clicking on the link in item #1 below. Haiku lovers will also enjoy item #2, and there are other treasures on Dan Hahn’s website. Prints can be bought.
- Lovers at Sunset in the Cape Cod gallery
- Dawn Zen in the Seasons gallery
Mellow Curmudgeon 
