Mark J. Heinicke – Page 7 – Forecast: partly sunny with a chance of cataclysms

Hands across the Divide: a Softer Approach to Politics

Liberals, listen up! Not all that’s Right is Wrong

In the last two days my left wing partisanship has been mollified by news that undercut my picture of the political right wing as a monolithic tribe.

Of course I’ve been aware that my bias (and possibly yours?) has been simplistic and irrational, but when I hear leaders on the hard Right speak, all my objectivity flies out the window.

Time for a correction through hearing from regular people.

“Hands across the Hills” attempt to bridge a painful divide

On November 29, on NPR’s Here and Now,* came a report on “Hands across the Hills,” a gathering of Trump-voting West Virginians and Massachusetts liberals face-to-face.

A link to the Here and Now story follows. I recommend, if you have the time, to listen to the podcast, which has the greater emotional force. The transcript is quicker, but loses some of the human touch.

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Beethoven again: thunder and more

An antidote to the frenzies of our time –

Now that the thunder of the 2018 election has subsided into rumbles, let’s give the timeless thunder of great piano music a listen, in particular Ludwig van Beethoven’s third movement of the “Appassionata” sonata.

Those familiar with this sonata may argue that the first movement is the more distinctive, and is also more structurally coherent—despite its swings between ominous shadows and brilliant arcs, still a stable edifice. The third is—well, the “structure” is a vehicle racing along a precipice in an earthquake, jolted and swayed and flown and flung and repeatedly braked and accelerated under a sky of swirling rainbows sucked from an alien planet.

The sonata itself to come in a minute, but first an aside on Beethoven’s most devoted fan, the “Peanuts” character Schroeder, and Schroeder’s creator, Charles Schulz. Unbeknownst to me until I read the piece on Schulz and Schroeder by April Dembrosky in the New York Times, Schulz also had “a weakness for country western.”* I was also unaware that Beethoven’s food of choice was macaroni and cheese.** ( Read about it here.

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Low Crimes and Misdemeanors: Crushing Democracy One Shovelful at a Time

Scales of justice teetering all one way

Thunk, thunk, thunk, is the sound of Donald Trump throwing shovelfuls of partisan excrement on one side of the sagging scales of justice within a crumbling system of governance. In one week he has named a blatantly partisan operative of the political right wing to the position of Acting Attorney General—without even bothering to give lip service to the obligation to get Senate confirmation—and gone on to deny the legitimacy of elections in places where the sole source of grievance is that the President’s allies may lose to Democrats.

Talk of impeachment is now much in the air, with pundits parsing the meaning of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” to be invoked in the case of impeaching a U.S. President. Here’s the wording of the impeachment clause in the U.S. Constitution: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

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Hollowing out of the Middle Class: a Second Look

Middle class hollowed out? Kind of. Unhappy? It depends . . .

Progressives like Bernie Sanders and Michael Moore are fond of excoriating the rich and powerful for the “hollowing-out of the middle class.” What they fail to mention—either for lack of information or for political expediency—is that, money-wise, more families are leaving the middle class on the upside rather than the downside. There’s plenty of evidence for this. Check out the following, which is similar to other reports, but I especially like it because it is based on Pew research findings:

https://qz.com/1005068/the-upper-middle-class-is-the-new-middle-class/

A larger segment of the middle class, it seems, is rising into the highest and upper-middle class than is falling into the lowest class (the lower middle has remained unchanged), and the net effect, dollar-wise, of “hollowing out” appears to be a positive. Is this a Good Thing? After all, can’t money buy happiness?

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Settled Law, Settled Liar: Mistrust Rising

When an evasion is really, dangerously, a lie

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s dance around the question of whether he would overrule Roe v. Wade makes one wonder, on what other matter has one of his evasions, stripped of legalistic nuances, amounted to a lie.

Certainly Kavanaugh’s dodge around the Roe issue, that Roe is “settled law,” thus implying it was immune to being found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, is a lie. This was the the lie told to Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a staunch supporter of Roe v. Wade, in what she characterized as a lengthy one-on-one discussion. She reported that Kavanaugh said he regarded Roe as “settled law.”

As one commentator on MSNBC or CNN (sorry I forget which, and who) quipped: “Well, settled law is settled until it isn’t.”

Now, thanks to the recent release of an email heretofore kept under Republican Senate Judiciary Committee wraps as “committee confidential,” we find Kavanaugh, back in 2003, saying “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since [the Supreme] Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

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Hijacking the Reading Circuit: Are Screens Robbing Children of Comprehension?

Too much, too fast, too fragmented. Is there more to it?

Ever since the internet began to deluge our brains with an unceasing flow of information—meaning both raw data, and raw data given structure in the act of “informing”—intellectuals have been sounding alarms over the impacts on our thinking processes. There is a consensus, even among boosters of new data-heavy technology, that we need to take a hard look at those impacts and what they portend for the future of our society.

Nicholas Carr devoted a book to the subject in 2010, entitled The Shallows. His book begins with Carr’s self-observations on how his internet information-gathering practices have infused his thinking with a shorter attention span, lack of follow-through on reading material, and a propensity to jump to shaky inferences based on short, superficial snippets of information. He makes the case that these phenomena have spread throughout internet userdom (now, most of our society), to the detriment of deep comprehension and wisdom. (I’m not sure Carr used the word “wisdom”—it might sound a little sententious, and I read the book years ago—but if he didn’t use it I doubt he’d object to my imputing the idea to him.)

Carr—and many others preaching similar messages —puts an emphasis on distraction as the main threat to deeper thinking. How can you concentrate on any one train of thought when there are so many intercommunicating trains crowding the station, tempting you to hop on board via hyperlink? And take you to yet another crowded station with yet more bright and shiny hyperlinks?

How right is he? Is Carr’s examination of The Shallows too shallow?

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Animals Get Help from Above

Eyes in the sky usher in new era for monitoring animal diversity, numbers, and movement

Drones and satellites radically change the game in forestalling the worst in animal declines and species extinctions. Key to wildlife conservation is just getting the facts—and there are a lot of facts to get when it comes to the complexity of the natural world. Without accurate and comprehensive information on what is actually happening on the ground, prioritizing and designing conservation efforts are mostly guesswork. Such is the growing enormity of human impacts on the biosphere, research methods must scale up, or fall behind the accelerating pace of change.

How best to scale up is with devices that can remotely gather vast amounts of data on both groups and individuals—seeing both the forest and the trees. The best positioning for these devices is up in the sky, and their primary data-gathering methods are electronic.*

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Tribalism, Patriotism, White Supremacy, and the South

Mixed Identity Politics?

Cycling in southern Virginia recently, I noticed a large flag mounted on a 20-foot pole in someone’s front yard—with a conflicted message. The flag, as it turned out, had an identity issue: one side was the conventional Stars and Stripes U.S national flag; the other side was the “Southern Cross” of the Confederate flag (I assume it must have been two flags sewn together; I wasn’t about to stop and ask.) Homes with the two flags displayed separately are not unusual. But this two-faced flag combination captured the mixed identity of those who declare they are patriots, but who owe allegiance to something that is not quite the United States as conceived by the rest of us.

The more common two separate flags in the yard speak loudly for a tribe that has stood for white supremacy* and deep suspicion of the federal government, while also declaring their patriotism. That’s the perversely named “nativist” tribe, by which is meant, not affinity with actual native Americans, but quite the reverse: it’s rather an affinity with white people who invaded from Europe, slaughtered most of the indigenous folks and drove them off their lands. Let’s call the newly arisen nativists “neo nativists.” (Not to be confused with the same psychological term applied to cognitive development.)

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