I have not read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis—there are far too many books more worthy of my reading time—but I do have Appalachian reckoning : a region responds to Hillbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll on order and I’m looking forward to that read.

As I wrote back in 2006, I’m the product of a mixed marriage. My mother was a Buckeye and my father a Mountaineer. My Ohio roots extend only to the 1870s, but my West Virginia roots go back nearly 300 years, to 1723 when Samuel and Balthazar Hess emigrated from Germany to Palatine, Virginia—now Fairmont, West Virginia—so I have a dog in this hunt. (Coincidentally, my 50th high school reunion and the Hess family’s 300th anniversary as Americans are both only four years away.)

This morning I came across Once Upon a Time in Trumpalachia by Dwight B. Billings, an Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Appalachian Studies at the University of Kentucky. Billings begins:

Once upon a time, there was “a strange land and peculiar people.” It was a mythical place known as “Trumpalachia.” J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, has been widely acclaimed as its foremost explorer, mapmaker, interpreter, and critic. Countless readers have turned to his book to understand the appeal of Donald Trump to white working-class voters. But Hillbilly Elegy is not a “Trump for Dummies,” nor is it an elegy for Appalachia. It’s an advertisement for corporate capitalism and personal choice.

J.D. Vance, a political conservative and self-described “Scots-Irish hillbilly,” was a thirty-one-year-old graduate of Yale Law School and a principal in a Silicon Valley investment firm when he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Vance was haphazardly raised by an unstable and abusive, drug- and alcohol-addicted single mother in Middletown, Ohio, a once-thriving but now Rust Belt town he describes as “hemorrhaging jobs and hope.” His childhood was full of emotional trauma and economic insecurity. Vance says he wrote Hillbilly Elegy to explain how he overcame the obstacles of his childhood and the surrounding despair of his community. He attributes his success to his severe but loving hillbilly grandparents who preached the value of hard work and the American Dream of upward mobility as well as to an empowering stint in the Marine Corps. His other purpose for writing in these troubling economic times is to deliver a jeremiad to the white working class, especially those of Scots-Irish descent with ties to Appalachia. It is one thing to write a personal memoir extolling the wisdom of one’s personal choices but quite something else—something extraordinarily audacious—to presume to write the “memoir” of a culture.

But exactly what you would expect a Trumpist to write. Billings continues:

A nostalgic image of an Appalachian barn on the side of a gravel road is on the book’s front cover. But Vance knows very little about contemporary Appalachia—certainly not the region’s vibrant grassroots struggles to build a post-coal economy, nor its past and ongoing struggles for economic, labor, environmental, and social justice. He has only visited family members in eastern Kentucky or attended funerals there. His inventory of pathological Appalachian traits—drug addiction, teen pregnancy and illegitimacy, violence, fatalism, the lack of a work ethic, “learned helplessness,” poverty as a “family tradition,” the inability to face the truth about one’s self, and so on—reads like a catalog of stereotypes Appalachian scholars have worked so long to dispel. Vance’s Appalachia is refracted through the distorted lens of his own dysfunctional family experience. It makes as much sense as generalizing about Italian Americans from the fictional Tony Soprano.

A very wise woman once reminded me that if you know one person with X, then you know one person with X. All characterizations, all stereotypes are deeply flawed if not worthless. Truly, There’s nowt so queer as folk.

Bonus No. 1: Worlds largest steam locomotive is back! Big Boy 4014 hits the main line.

Bonus No. 2: Country Roads-John Denver WVU 6 September 1980 Full Song.

Bonus No. 3: I had this to say about John Denver back in 2006.

So, last evening I read, and posted, Ralph Nader’s latest—Trump vs. Congress and Our Constitution—about the impeachableness of President Donald John Trump. At the bottom of his essay, Nader links to his 12 January radio interview with constitutional scholar Alan Hirsch. I listened to the podcast this morning and these are my takeaways.

First, this exchange where, I think Hirsch strikes his main theme and attempts to rein in Nader:

Ralph Nader: On the election point, the argument is there’s not enough time to wait for an election. This is an emergency; he’s unfit for office, the allegation is.

Alan Hirsch: Okay, but you said the right words there, “emergency,” “unfit.” This is not just a case of boy oh boy, this president is lousy, even if he gets us into war, he destroys the economy, that is what we have elections for. The Constitution is pretty clear on this Ralph; you can only impeach a president for treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors. Now I understand the latter phrase is a bit opaque, but they explicitly rejected the idea that it was a maladministration, basically, the president doing a bad job. Now you’re pushing me into this corner of being so anti- impeachment. I want to emphasize, I am. But part of the reason is I think you get someone like Trump, who we may have to impeach and remove, and we don’t want to dilute the standards so it seems like it’s just a political act and the next president, the other party does the same thing. It really should be reserved for the president and Trump may very well be the poster child for impeachment. But it should be reserved for the president who violates the Constitution. You’re right, it doesn’t have to be that they violate the criminal code. They don’t have to specifically commit a criminal offense. But they have to commit a constitutional offense and if we start declaring that high crimes or misdemeanor means any dumb speech the president gives, and I agree Trump has done a dozen things that turn our heads, that make us sick, but it takes more.

Nader won’t let go:

Ralph Nader: This is where the critical mass comes in. For example, let me give you an extreme case: let’s say we have a president and every day he gets up there and a hundred times, on a microphone, beamed to the American people, he lies on all kinds of things, dealing with serious matters. He lies on what he isn’t doing oversees, is doing oversees that’s violating the Constitution and international treaties. He lies about what number of people are receiving health care and being denied health care. Let’s say he just does that day after day. Are we left with the 25th Amendment?

Alan Hirsch: Well, you just read my mind. I was going to say it sounds to me like you’re describing someone with a pathological disease. That is the appropriate path to take then, is the 25th Amendment.

Ralph Nader: Explain that to our listeners.

Alan Hirsch: The 25th Amendment is a means—the other means for removing an unfit president it’s not requiring a specific criminal act. It rather requires that he be unfit. Specifically, it requires the vice president, which is why it is improbable that it will be utilized–the vice president and a majority of the cabinet have to transmit to the Senate and the House, the written declaration that the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Now that’s vague. That doesn’t require a crime. That requires just the inability to discharge the duties–typically presumed that it’s because of a physical disability, but it doesn’t have to be. The president gets to contest it. We don’t want to get in the weeds here, but the Congress would then get to rule. I take your point that the president may be cumulatively a nightmare. And I would say, again that the rotten store metaphor is where that comes into play; that it can be taken into account in the context of the allegation of some specific wrongdoing. I think to say chronic dishonesty is an impeachable offense, is maybe a little bit broad, and almost a guarantee that every president is going to have people calling for impeachment on that basis.

With the exception of Vice President Michael Richard Pence, who must mind his legacy, the rest of the kleptocrats on Trump’s cabinet are loyalists who care only for how they’ll profit once they’re out of the political world. They have no political aspirations that they need to protect. For that reason I think the 25th Amendment is a dead issue.

Nader next makes a plea—one I’ve made more than once, but I’m not Ralph Nader—to pitchforks and torches.

Ralph Nader: One of your lessons was, impeachment had to be supported by the American people. Could you spell that out? How would that be demonstrated?

Alan Hirsch: The usual way is public opinion polls. I’m not suggesting this as an absolute requirement. What I am suggesting is, this was one of the lessons from the Clinton impeachment. There was no chance that he was ever going to be convicted. What I argue in the book is impeachment shouldn’t be symbolic–a way of making points or scoring political points. It should only be undertaken if there’s a legitimate chance of success. Realistically, there’s not a realistic chance except if the people, broadly speaking, support impeachment. But having said that, I don’t think you need to poll the Senate or poll the American people and get a certain result before you proceed. That’s too static a way of thinking about it. Things change when you pursue proper action. Nixon, when the impeachment process started, there were very few Republicans who were going along with it. But by the time all the information had been unearthed relevant his wrong- doing, it had bipartisan support. I would say, here’s my way of looking at it, and again, this is art more than science; you don’t need the votes to start the impeachment process. That would be Alice in Wonderland. Verdict first, trial later. What you do need is a realistic chance of success.

Ralph keeps digging a hole, pitching the end of the Democracy and Hirsch keeps trying to fill the hole back in.

Ralph Nader: That’s all true. But in the meantime, people are getting sick, dying; they’re losing their homes; they’re losing their savings. It’s always the time factor. The point I want to make with you is that I don’t think they faithfully execute the laws, has any boundaries, if the only time you want to make it into impeachable offense is going after an affirmative president action like Nixon and the IRS; instead of simply doing nothing, shutting down the operation.

Alan Hirsch: Yeah, so Ralph, again, I think you might have to put a little more trust in Congress, in the courts. There are vehicles for resisting all of the abuses you’re talking about. And, the only question, which is separating us, is when does the extreme remedy of impeachment come into play? If I can’t convince you of the constitutional matter, I would try convince you as a tactical matter. Can you imagine right now, if Congress, without waiting for the Mueller report, they listen to Ralph Nader and they said, my God this president has to go; there’s too much suffering in the meantime. And they set in motion impeachment proceedings. What would happen? Trump would be acquitted in the Senate, because the case would not have been made, because the American people aren’t ready for it. The Democrats would take a bath next election, and Trump would be rewarded for it.

Ralph insists on swinging for the bleachers, taking the all-or-nothing attitude of Babe Ruth while Hirsch calls for singles and doubles (gawd, I can’t believe that I used a sports metaphor. I’m so ashamed.) but remembering that this interview was conducted more than three months ago, before the Mueller report dropped, I found the closing moments prophetic.

Steve Skrovan: That’s right because Bruce Fein was telling us, and correct me if I’m wrong, Ralph, that the Mueller investigation really has nothing to do with impeachment. It has to be/it has to come out of the House Judiciary Committee, in their own investigation, right?

Ralph Nader: Yeah, I was gonna ask you that, Alan, is he gonna be just left with, given who is attorney general and president, is he gonna be just left with a report to Congress?

Alan Hirsch: Probably, yeah. I mean the alternative is he could indict Trump and most likely it will be determined by the courts that he can’t, even though I think there’s a case to be made that he can. But I think what we’re most likely going to get out of him is a report, which the attorney general will probably try to keep a secret, but the House will subpoena. Then they can certainly initiate impeachment proceedings based on his report. They don’t have to pretend it doesn’t exist, and then start from scratch with an independent inquiry.

Ralph Nader: On the other hand, they could ask him to testify the contents of his report.

Alan Hirsch: Absolutely. Even if they can’t get their hands on it, there’s no way they can stop him from talking to them.

And that is where we are today, Friday, the 3rd of May, 2019.

Bonus No. 1: Donald Trump even has lies hiding in the underpants of the secret service.

Bonus No. 2: An Open Letter to the Environmental Community.

I seldom use a direct quote in a headline, and repeating the lede in a headline is not a good idea, but Ralph Nader’s column this week is the exception that proves the rule. Nader is right, President Donald John Trump is the most impeachable president in American history, but that doesn’t mean that impeachment hearings should begin immediately.

I don’t think Democrats in the House of Representatives should begin impeachment hearings.

Not yet.

They should, no must, investigate the fuck out of the corrupt gang of grifters occupying The White House and our executive branch, but until they can find their Howard Henry Baker, they will, at best, have a show trial that would make Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin shake his head. Nader understands that. In Trump vs. Congress and Our Constitution, he writes:

Donald Trump is the most impeachable president in American history. Many Democrats, however, are running away from the word “impeachment” for tactical political reasons. Some Democrats say they have a sworn duty under the Constitution to present articles of impeachment for a vote in the House of Representatives, regardless of the refusal by the Republican controlled Senate to hold a trial.

Interestingly, when Republicans in the House impeached President Bill Clinton in 1998, he was more popular in polls than Donald Trump is now. The Republican controlled Senate, however, failed to get the two-thirds vote needed to remove President Clinton from office. Clinton’s offenses–lying under oath and obstruction of justice pale in comparison to the many mega offenses of Trump.

The six major House Committees are investigating issues ranging from his tax returns and business dealings to the documented serial obstructions of justice documented in the Mueller Report. As these investigations move well beyond what is already on the public record and more Americans learn their contents, there will be more than enough to substantiate numerous articles of impeachment. Plus a new one of Trump’s own creation—the wholesale, broadside obstruction of all these Congressional investigations, defying subpoenas for sworn testimony and documents, amounting to a Continue Reading »

So, I’m still on a bit of a B.F. (or Fred as I like to now call him) Skinner jag and this morning I’m going with Fred’s take on a bit that we all experience: growing older. (I once attended a lecture by Gray Panther founder Maggie Kuhn who opened her talk by asking the audience: who here is getting older, and when everyone raised there hand she said: Good, we all agree.)

When he was 78, Fred wrote Intellectual Self-Management in Old Age for American Psychologist—he later expanded that paper into Enjoy Old Age: A Practice Guide which I’m now reading and will review in the future—and I was hooked at the abstract:

Old age is only partly a biological condition. Environments age as well as bodies, and fortunately that process can be retarded. This article records personal techniques that have proved helpful in offsetting some of the physiological limitations of old age and particularly in making it possible to continue to engage in intellectual work. Problems dealt with include sensory and motor deficiencies, memory loss, motivational changes, mental fatigue, and the disruptive effects of the social environment of the aged. The emphasis is on constructing a world in which the behavior of old people will continue to be abundantly reinforced.

Now, come on. Who doesn’t want to live in a world constructed to abundantly reinforce their behavior?

Seriously, though. I’m now at the same age that my father took early retirement—I continue to judge my own age by how I remember my father at that point in his life—and I’m retiring from the teaching gig I’ve had for the past 21 years to again devote my full time to writing. (More on that later.) I’m taking Skinner’s advice to heart because he was the original life hacker and on the horizon I see a lot of my own future—and present—experiences matching his own.

Fred begins by tackling the aging metaphor taken from horticulture that sees our lives as one of growth, maturation and decay. That last bit disturbs him. He writes:

Much of what seems to be the unfolding of an inner potential is the product of an unfolding environment; a person’s world develops. The aging of a person, as distinct from the aging of an organism, depends upon changes in the physical and social environments. We recognize the difference when we say that some young people are old for their years or when, as Shakespeare put it, old people return to childishness. Fortunately, the course of a developing environment can be changed. That kind of aging can be retarded.

If the stages in our lives were due merely to the passage of time, we should have to find a fountain of youth to reverse the direction of change, but if many of the problems of old people are due to shortcomings in their environments, the environments can be improved.

Fred, reflecting on his own experiences at 78 (and ones I’m already aware of at 63), writes about the accommodations he made, particularly in the area of memory recall.

The problem is raised by the way in which we make use of past experience, the effects of which seem to fade too quickly. A special set of techniques is needed for its solution. Practical examples may be helpful before turning to comparable intellectual behavior.

Ten minutes before you leave your house for the day you hear a weather report: It will probably rain before you return. It occurs to you to take an umbrella (the sentence means quite literally what it says: The behavior of taking an umbrella occurs to you), but you are not yet able to execute it. Ten minutes later you leave without the umbrella. You can solve that kind of problem by executing as much of the behavior as possible when it occurs to you. Hang the umbrella on the doorknob, or put it through the handle of your briefcase, or in some other way start the process of taking it with you. Here is a similar intellectual problem: In the middle of the night it occurs to you that you can clarify a passage in the paper you are writing by making a certain change. At your desk the next day you forget to make the change. Again, the solution is to make the change when it occurs to you, using, say, a notepad or tape recorder kept beside your bed. The problem in old age is not so much how to have ideas as how to have them when you can use them. A written or dictated record, consulted from time to time, has the same effect as the umbrella hung on the doorknob. [I’ve always carried a writer’s notebook, but I find myself increasingly relying on the notebook, sticky notes inside the notebook and voice recordings on my phone. JH] A pocket notebook or recorder helps to maximize one’s intellectual output by recording one’s behavior when it occurs. The practice is helpful at any age but particularly so for the aging scholar. In place of memories, memoranda.

Cognitive distribution–the fancy smancy psychologist term for note taking/list making—has long been vital to what I do, but as my memory becomes wonkier I realize that I’m moving into undiscovered country.

One horrible habit that I have is digressing when I speak. A decade ago the habit was annoying to others, but I managed to keep the flow of thought roughly in the same channel. Not so much anymore. Increasingly I find myself at the end of a long ramble with no idea of where I turned off my intended path. Fred clearly experienced the same and he wrote:

The same problem arises when you are speaking and digress. You finish the digression and cannot remember why you embarked on it or where you were when you did so. The solution is simply not to digress— that is, not to interrupt yourself. A long sentence always raises that kind of problem: The last part is not likely to agree with the first because the first has passed out of reach. …You will do much better if you speak only simple sentences, and the same remedy is available to the aging scholar who is giving an impromptu address in his or her own language. Short sentences are also advisable when you are talking to yourself—in other words, thinking.

Fred realized, however, that all the hacks could not accommodate the changes that aging bring and that his mind needed increased opportunities to recover. He needed to chill.

Old age is like fatigue, except that its effects cannot be corrected by relaxing or taking a vacation. Particularly troublesome is old age plus fatigue, and half of that can be avoided. It may be necessary to be content with fewer good working hours per day, and it is particularly necessary to spend the rest of the time in what the Greeks called eutrapelia—the productive use of leisure. Leisure should be relaxing. Possibly you like complicated puzzles, or chess, or other intellectual games. Give them up. If you want to continue to be intellectually productive you must risk the contempt of your younger acquaintances and freely admit that you read detective stories or watch Archie Bunker on TV.

When I last lived the life of the full-time writer I figured that four hours was as much as I could do in one day. Then I could write 1,000 worlds an hour and at that clip I could write a 100,000-word novel in a month. (I actually took about three months to write a book once I was at full speed and knew where I was going because I still went down rabbit holes with the plot and had to backtrack, often deleting a week’s work of work to do so.) I’m not sure how many hours I’ll be able to sustain now. I’ll find out at the end of the month when I close out my teaching years.

The last passage that caught my attention focused on human connections. Fred wrote:

An audience is a neglected, independent variable. What one says is determined in a very important way by whom one is talking to. But the retired teacher no longer talks with students, the retired scientist no longer discusses work with colleagues. Old people find themselves spending time with others who are not interested in their fields. They may receive fewer invitations to speak or find it harder to accept them. Those who will read the papers or books they are writing are much too far removed in time to serve as an audience. An appropriate measure of intellectual self-management is to organize discussions, if only in groups of two. Find someone with similar interests. Two heads together are better than both apart. In talking with another person we have ideas that do not occur when we are alone at our desks. Some of what we say may be borrowed from what the other says, but the mere effect of having someone to say it to is usually conspicuous.

I only recently reconnected with an old friend who suggested that we form a weekly salon of two. Perhaps that door opened at precisely the right time. There is much more in Fred’s article that I highlighted for myself and I’m sure I’ll enjoy the book as well. If you’re growing older, give Fred a read.

Bonus No. 1: Mueller Complained About Barr’s Letter to Congress: A Closer Look.

Bonus No. 2: William Barr’s Master Class on Hair Splitting.

Bonus No. 3: DENNIS MUILENBURG’S DAYS MAY BE NUMBERED…

It didn’t happen often but it wasn’t rare either.

Reporters at the Plain Dealer and the Press (which was killed in 1982) would find themselves censored.

They didn’t like it.

So, the censored material was somehow passed to me to be published in Point Of Viəw.

Acts of rebellion.

One of my favorites was a portion of an article sliced from the story written by the late Ned Whelan. I don’t know who sent it to me but I was happy to print it.

As you will see it involved a top corporate leader making two racial jokes before an audience of Cleveland police officers. The joke was made about then Mayor Carl Stokes. The entire reference of TRW’s top boss Fred Crawford was sliced from the published version of the story. Protected.

The kind of protection editors often confer on special people.

Sometime later at an informal meeting of board members and students at Case Western Reserve University, Crawford was questioned about the story. Oh, he said, that’s just a guy with a mimeograph machine in his basement that writes that stuff. He didn’t know but the student did—that I was in that gaggle talking to him.

I first leaned of DeRay McKesson a few weeks ago when I came across Lola Fadulu’s June 1918 story about McKesson for The Atlantic. I included a link to her story as Bonus No. 1 in my 13 April post. This morning McKesson’s name popped up in another piece for The Atlantic: Speech Rights for Trump, but Not DeRay McKesson by Garrett Epps.

I’m a person who believes that our Constitution matters. Despite our founding document’s flaws—Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 and Article I, Section 1, Clause 3 for starters—it remains the most powerful of political statements in human history and the First Amendment guarantees of freedom are the gold standard for any Democracy.

There is a quote—I don’t have it right and cannot immediately find the source—that runs something like this: The denial of the rights of one is the denial of rights for all. If a right is awarded one and denied to another then we are all at risk as Epps illustrates:

On March 1, 2016, Donald Trump pointed to a group of protesters at a campaign rally in Louisville, Kentucky, and said “Get ‘em out of here,” piously adding, “Don’t hurt ‘em.” Supporters assaulted the protesters as they were led out.

The protesters later sued Trump for “incitement to riot”; a panel of the Sixth Circuit dismissed the claim: “The mere tendency of speech to encourage unlawful acts” is not “sufficient reason for banning it.” Even if Trump had intended to encourage violence, the First Amendment still protected him, unless “the words used specifically advocated the use of violence, whether explicitly or implicitly.”

The decision was correct; the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that public protest, and even advocacy of violence, is protected by the First Amendment unless clearly intended to cause immediate violence. But a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit, in a case decided last week, seemed to see things otherwise; it made a mockery of Court precedent even as it reached back to revive an old segregation-era tactic: civil lawsuits to intimidate protesters.

On July 9, 2016, a group of Black Lives Matter activists blocked the highway in front of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police-department headquarters to protest the July 5 killing of Alton Sterling. Someone threw a hard object at police, injuring a Baton Rouge Police Department officer, who later reported “loss of teeth, a jaw injury, a brain injury, a head injury, lost wages, ‘and other compensable losses.’”

DeRay Mckesson, a high-profile, Baltimore-based Black Lives Matter organizer, was arrested along with more than 100 others. The anonymous officer, referred to as John Doe, sued Mckesson and the entire Black Lives Matter movement, alleging that “Mckesson did nothing to prevent the violence or to calm the crowd” and that he “incited the violence.”

Wait. What? The officer is referred to as John Doe? Sorry. My Bad. This is Louisiana. Continue Mr. Epps.

Doe’s 17-page complaint portrays the Black Lives Matter movement as a violent nationwide conspiracy. But nowhere does it allege a specific word or action taken by Mckesson that led to or caused the violence in Baton Rogue. The closest it gets is: “Black Lives Matter leadership ratified all action taken during the protest. DeRay Mckesson ratified all action taken during the Baton Rogue protest.”

A federal district judge dismissed the lawsuit in September 2017. Plaintiffs can’t sue an entire social movement, the judge noted (“#BlackLivesMatter”—a hashtag—lacks the capacity to be sued,” he wrote); as for Mckesson, “The only public speech to which Plaintiff cites in his Complaint is a one-sentence statement that Mckesson allegedly made to The New York Times: ‘The police want protestors to be too afraid to protest.’” Those words, the judge wrote, “do not advocate—or make any reference to—violence of any kind.”

At that point, Doe v. Mckesson seemed like one of hundreds of nuisance lawsuits filed every year. Press coverage was desultory; the civil-liberties groups I reached out to last week had barely registered it.

A panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held the case from late 2017 until last week, when, without allowing oral argument, the panel reinstated the lawsuit.

Holy fucking Ku Klux Klan Batman!

We should not, we cannot tolerate one set of rights for a billionaire candidate for public office and another for a civil rights advocate. To allow that is to set fire to our Constitution. Epps contiues:

In a statement, Alanah Odoms Hebert, the executive director of the Louisiana chapter of the ACLU, put it this way: “The principles outlined in this decision put civil disobedience at risk. If this doctrine had existed during the civil rights movement there would not have been a civil rights movement.” John Paul Schnapper-Casteras, a former appellate counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, sounded much the same note in an email to me: “The Fifth Circuit seems to embrace a broad theory of negligence to suggest that it’s plausible to impose liability upon a non-violent protestor/organizer for the violent actions of a third party. If that were the law of the land, it could be at odds with America’s long history of protesting and marching in the streets.”

These concerns aside, the Fifth Circuit twisted the meaning of that single reference to the First Amendment. “The First Amendment does not protect violence” comes from NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, which arose in 1966 when the NAACP in Claiborne County, Mississippi, called on black people in the area to boycott white-owned stores. In a rally supporting the boycott, the civil-rights leader Charles Evers told the crowd that “if we catch any of you going in any of them racist stores, we’re gonna break your damn neck.” When, later on, someone fired through the window of a home and smashed a car windshield, local merchants filed a tort suit (like Doe’s) alleging that the NAACP was engaged in an illegal boycott and that Evers and other leaders had threatened violence to enforce it. Mississippi state courts decided that the association and its leaders were liable for the merchants’ lost profits. Appeals dragged on until 1982, when the Supreme Court ordered the case dismissed on First Amendment grounds.

We the people have a long history of celebrating and exercising our rights under the First Amendment and our courts have in recent decades clarified and expanded the scope of those rights. Now, however, this case is wending its way toward a Supreme Court of The United States with a distinctively conservative bent and the court of Chief Justice John Glover Roberts may flip the calendar backwards; way backwards. Epps concludes:

Claiborne Hardware was one of several cases that established the robust speech protections most protesters take for granted today. When Alabama sued the NAACP to demand a list of its members, the Supreme Court sided with the NAACP in 1957. When Virginia sued the NAACP because it actively solicited plaintiffs for test cases, the Court sided with the NAACP in 1963. Then southern authorities, including police officials, filed libel suits against northern news organizations—and local civil-rights workers—who criticized southern governments in out-of-state news media. In 1965, the landmark case of New York Times v. Sullivan guaranteed the right to criticize officials without fear of massive libel judgments.

Now a panel of the Fifth Circuit has reopened the argument more or less out of a clear blue sky. One can only speculate on why these three judges—appointed by Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump—have decided that the First Amendment needs a working-over and that now is the time to do it. Certainly, the ordinary restraints of case law are slipping their moorings in the Trump era. The Fifth Circuit last year openly defied Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey; the Supreme Court majority cringed in front of the administration in the “travel ban” case; Justice Clarence Thomas has recently called for the Court to overrule New York Times v. Sullivan.

The past two years have been a kind of national Walpurgisnacht, calculated to summon the worst impulses of conservative jurists. We own the courts now, an inner voice may be whispering; no need for precedent or even explanation. Doe v. McKesson may be an anomaly, but it also may be a straw in a very chill wind.

This is why Neil McGill Gorsuch and Brett Michael Kavanaugh matter. Trump may be gone in four or five years, but the conservative tilt of the court is solidly cemented and the packing of all lower federal courts by Senate Majority Leader Addison Mitch McConnell only serves to further enshrine the legacy of President Ronald Wilson Reagan. Republican control one-and-half branches of our government. Subverting the Judicial to the Executive will be a constitutional and national disaster.

Bonus No. 1: The urgent necessity of public-interest journalism

Bonus No. 2: Nobody watched the leaders’ debate, we need the Filthy Centrists party and a ceremonial dacking.

Bonus No. 3: Civil-Rights Protests Have Never Been Popular.

On Monday, 4 May 1970, I was 14 and finishing my freshman year at Warren High School in rural Washington County, Ohio. Two days before I had ridden along with some friends to visit Ohio University in the next county over. We had gone there because of all the talk that something was happening. We had no fucking idea of the shit storm coming.

Derf—John Backderf—was 10-years-old on that day and much closer to the moment that would alter much of what we knew and believed. Nearly 50 years later he is working on a graphic narrative that imagines the story through the eyes of the four students killed that day: Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder.

Dave DeOreo and David C. Barnett, in Derf’s Childhood Memories Spark Graphic Novel About Kent State Shootings, interviewed Derf about what may be his most challenging project yet. You can scroll to the bottom of the WCPN piece to listen to the entire interview.

Later that summer, my family would take a road trip to visit the newly opened Sea World near Aurora, Ohio. To get there we drove through Kent and my Dad made a point of pointing out where the shootings had happened. I never told him that I had taken my own road trips to Athens before, and after, 4 May. The images of the Ohio Army National Guard lining Court Street (where 10 years later I would get drunk many times) have stayed with me.

Bonus No. 1: Kent State Truth Tribunal, 4 May 2010.

Bonus No. 2: Clive Palmer has 40,000 zillion banillion Cliverinos in the bank and he doesn’t care what you think!

Bonus No. 3: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Ohio.

Cleveland’s elites and both newspapers wanted a new mayor—the General. How pathetic.

Ramrod tall, stern, imposing and somewhat black Gen. Benjamin Davis was just what the Cleveland establishment needed to replace the contentious Mayor Carl Stokes.

The Glenville bloodshed had taken its toll. On Stokes. On the city.

Those in control wanted more control. What better than a general. Their general. He had earned the nickname “Benny Brownshirt.” He had ego. Ordered 1,000 colored photos of himself as Safety Director.

The general, however, wasn’t a politician.

Stokes showed him the ropes.

Before he did, however, Stokes stumbled. Davis charged him with giving “support and comfort to the enemies of law enforcement” at a City Hall press conference. A shocker. Davis, however, refused to name the enemies, leaving Stokes hanging in the wind.

It left the news media to speculate. Just what did the General have.

A Plain Dealer top editor, himself labeled racist, vouched for Davis. He had golfed with the man. Stand-up guy.

Stokes, a day later, exploded the General and his charges. Davis wouldn’t name the “enemies.” Stokes did. They turned out to be well-known black activists, including a popular religious leader and even the Call & Post.

The General never recovered.

On Wednesday I wrote about the first two sections of Robert Epstein’s Skinner As Self-Manager—emphasizing B.F. Skinner’s thoughts on self-improvement and writing. This morning I’m writing about the final three sections of Epstein’s paper: Resolving the Tension Between Self-Control, Determinism and Self-Control After Skinner and Dying With His Boots On.

The tension that Epstein addresses is, of course, the Damoclean blade hanging above all ideas of self-control. He begins:

Skinner framed his seminal chapter on self-control with a defense of determinism, and he framed the term itself in quotation marks. In what sense is determinism compatible with his conception of self-control? If Skinner truly believed in determinism, did he truly believe in self-control? Is self-control a trivial epiphenomenon for Skinner, or does it overlap with the idea of self-determination? [Emphasis mine, JH]

Our justice system—and most of religion—depends upon Free Will, on Choice. If we have neither, then punishing offenders for actions over which the have no control is cruel and for deities to determine our actions and then reward or condemn us for those actions is evil. Epstein continues, attempting to find a Solomonic balance in Skinner.

Extreme philosophical determinism encompasses all events, by definition, so it certainly encompasses the controlling self. In that sense, Skinner is technically correct: The behaviors we label self-managing are fully determined. But remember that philosophical positions are, in effect, just fantasies. [Emphasis mine, JH] They are interpretations of data. Like pure logic or pure mathematics, they are not always good predictors of events in the world, and they have no trouble coexisting with very different interpretations of the same data. The real question is whether the behavioral phenomena Skinner described in his characterization of self-control are trivial. If so, self-control disappears as a topic worthy of further consideration. If not, we must ask what self-control practices accomplish for the individual.

The best way to settle the issue, I believe, is to examine two extreme cases. First, consider the individual who has no self-control skills. In Skinner’s view, such a person falls prey to all immediate stimuli, even those that are linked to delayed punishment. Seeing a chocolate cake, she eats it. Handed a cigarette, she smokes. Given an opportunity to steal, she steals. She may make plans, but she has no ability to carry them out, because she is entirely at the mercy of proximal events. She is a sailboat blowing uncontrollably in a gale, like the characters in Frank Norris’s classic, McTeague.

At the other extreme we have a skillful self-manager, like Fred Skinner. He, too, sets goals, but he has ample ability to meet them. He has the skills to cast dangerous reinforcers aside. He identifies conditions that affect his behavior and alters them to suit him. He takes temporally remote possibilities into account in setting his priorities. External factors still affect him, but he is looking through a very large window. The wind is blowing, but he sets the boat’s destination and directs it there.

These two individuals are profoundly different. The first is being controlled in almost a linear fashion by her immediate environment. The second is, in a nontrivial sense, controlling his own life. They are different in their ability to function, to negotiate through life. In our culture, the first might conceivably smoke, drink, commit crimes, take drugs, squander money, and so on. The second, well practiced in foregoing immediate pleasure when long-term gain is at stake, and well equipped with the relevant self-management skills, would presumably have a ‘‘meaningful’’ life, the meaning being the realization of long-term goals.

Now Epstein gets the heart of the argument:

In a very real sense, Skinner’s concept of self-control is the equivalent of self-determination, because the practice of self-control has a profound impact on one’s life. Note that self-control, in spite of the quotation marks, was not one of the many by-products or collateral products that Skinner talked about and dismissed. Mind was an epiphenomenon to Fred, a useless and even dangerous concept. [Emphasis mine, JH] Feelings were real for him, as the passage I quoted above states clearly, but they played no causal role in behavior, so they were at best collateral products of environmental events and therefore unimportant in an analysis of behavior. Self-management—the practice of self-control—fits none of the trivia categories. It encompasses a set of powerful skills and procedures that produce substantive change.

Our two cases differ in yet another respect, and here the ironies begin to percolate. The woman who lacks self-control skills feels controlled. She may believe in free will (in fact, in our culture, it’s a safe bet that she does) but her own life is out of control. A belief in free will only exacerbates her frustration. She should be able to will herself out of any jam, but ‘‘willpower’’ proves to be highly unreliable.11 In contrast, the self-manager feels that he is in control. Ironically, like Skinner, he may believe in determinism, but he not only feels that he is in control, he is in fact exercising considerably more control over his life than our impulsive subject. [Emphasis mine, JH]

We are controlled when we believe we are controlled and in control when we believe we are in control. Wrap you head around that for a bit! (I’m not sure that I have yet.)

In Self-Control After Skinner, Epstein ponders where are (or at least were in 1997).

Skinner’s original notion that self-control involves the practice of skills for avoiding reinforcers correlated with delayed punishment has certainly been incorporated into several contemporary views, and many of the techniques of self-control he outlined have been taught for millennia by organized religions and were even described in the writings of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers.

Such techniques have been essential to human civilization because they allow individuals to avoid or escape dangerous, immediate reinforcers with minimal or no help from other people. Without self-control skills, we would need constant monitoring, as indeed young children do. Our parents and our clergy have been the main purveyors of such skills, but so many people lack these skills that it is clear that society is failing to teach them adequately. As a result, a great many people are blowing aimlessly in the wind, and society seems to be foundering. [Emphasis mine, JH]

Epstein follow that with a global leap, one that made me go whoa!

Teaching self-control practices serves two important functions for society: It creates citizens who fulfill their potential and thus are in a position to make greater contributions to the group, and it gives society a mechanism for assuring that individuals will respect the long-term interests of the group. Some reinforcers are correlated with punishers so long delayed that only the individual’s progeny will experience them. Abusing our natural resources is a prime example. When society teaches us to use self-control skills to save water, to recycle our trash, to turn down our thermostats, it creates a better world for our descendants.

Remember, Skinner put those thoughts to paper in 1973, the year I graduated from high school, at a time when the Global Warming was an idea only in the thoughts of a tiny minority. Epstein concludes his penultimate section with a plug—shameless, but still worth the notice.

By conveying what we know about self-control and self-management, behavioral scientists and practitioners can play a special role in helping society do its job. In a Siddhartha-style book I completed recently [Self Help Without The Hype] intended for a popular audience, I have provided a simple framework for teaching basic self-management skills. A young man whose life is in disarray (he smokes, drinks, overeats, loses things, procrastinates, and so on) seeks advice from his parents, teachers, and friends, but no one can help. Then he remembers his old Uncle Fred (modeled, shamelessly, after Fred Skinner), whose life always seemed to be in perfect harmony. In a series of visits, Uncle Fred reveals to him the three ‘‘secrets’’ of self-management, all Ms: Modify your environment, monitor your behavior, and make commitments. Fred also reveals and explains the self-management principle: Behavior changes behavior. After each visit, the young man (who has no name) tries out a new technique, and his life is changed radically for the better. In one scene, he sees a classroom of remarkably creative and insightful children who have been trained in self-management techniques in a public school. It is fiction, of course, but the technology is well established and the possibilities are well within reach.

I’ve tried, with no luck, to find a library copy of Epstein’s book, although there are plenty of used copies available for purchase online. I’m interested, not for myself, but for my students. Maybe I’ll buy a copy.

The final section—Dying With His Boots On—is mostly a recitation of Epstein’s personal memories and an eulogy of sorts for his mentor. You may find the closing interesting. I did not.

So, where do you come down on self-management?

Previously: FREE WILL IS NOT—NEVER HAS BEEN—FREE: PART I…

Bonus No. 1: The Special Counsel of Oz.

Bonus No. 2: Bernie Sanders on the Today Show 1981

People are pissed at Boeing. How do I know? My post BOEING MAY BE NOW WELL AND TRULY FUCKED… (a reposting of Ralph Nader’s Boeing’s Homicides Will Give Way to Safety Reforms if Flyers Organize) went viral and crashed my server last weekend. As reader would expect, Nader isn’t finished.

In Boeing Mismanagers Forfeit Your Pay and Resign: An Open Letter to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, Nader writes:

On April 4, 2019 you somewhat belatedly released a statement that “We at Boeing are sorry for the lives lost in the recent 737 MAX accidents.” You added that a preliminary investigation made it “apparent that in both flights” the [Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System] “activated in response to erroneous angle of attack information.”

Your acknowledgement of the problems with the 737 MAX somehow escaped inclusion in your messages to shareholders, the capital markets, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is now stunningly clear that your overly optimistic outlook on January 20, 2019—after the Indonesian Lion Air crash—was misleading. Whatever the public learns, day after day about the troubles of your company, it is still far less than what Boeing knows will come out day by day, and not just about the deadly design of the 737 MAX.

Your narrow-body passenger aircraft—namely, the long series of 737’s that began in the nineteen sixties was past its prime. How long could Boeing avoid making the investment needed to produce a “clean-sheet” aircraft and, instead, in the words of Bloomberg Businessweek “push an aging design beyond its limits?” Answer: As Continue Reading »

Journalists can only make so much stuff up, we can only cry wolf so many times, before our audience turns its back. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein didn’t become famous because they told a sensational story, they became famous for carefully getting the story right. Right now, this morning, I trust Matt Taibbi because he’s getting the story right.

Taibbi, writing in The Press Will Learn Nothing From the Russiagate Fiasco for Rolling Stone, lays out his case, but in the final six paragraphs his conclusion don’t bode well for the breathless and astonished. He writes:

The Mueller report makes clear reporters were sold wolf whistles over and over, led by reams of unnamed official sources who urged them to see meaning in meaningless things and assume connections that weren’t there.

Reporters should be furious about being fed these red herrings. They should be outraged at all those people who urged them to publish the Steele report, which might have led to career-imperiling mistakes in print. They should be mad as hell at CIA chief Gina Haspel and the other unnamed officials who told them disclosing the name of already long-ago exposed government informant Stefan Halper would “risk lives.”

More than anything, reporters should be furious at the many sources close to the various investigations who (it now seems clear) must have known pretty early there were serious holes in many areas of this story, and that a lot of these “dots” were dead ends, but didn’t warn their press counterparts. For instance, the papers should be mad those who supposedly had misgivings about the Steele report didn’t warn them earlier.

But they’re not mad, which makes it look like a case of intentional blindness, in which eyes and ears were shut among other things because the Trump-Russia conspiracy tale made a ton of money. Media companies earned boffo ratings while the Mueller probe still carried the drama of a potential spectacular ending, with blue-state audiences eating up all those “walls are closing in” hot takes. [Emphasis mine, JH]

This fiasco will surely end up being a net plus for Trump. The obstruction parts of the report make him look like a brainless goon and thug, but the absence of what Mueller repeatedly calls “underlying crime” make his ravings about an elitist mob out to get him look justified. This is not an easy thing to achieve, but we’re there, and the press is a big part of that picture.

News audiences were betrayed, and sooner or later, even the most virulently Trump-despising demographics will realize it and tune us out. The only way to reverse the damage is to own how big of a screw-up this was, but after the last three years, who would hold their breath waiting for that?

So, who do you, post Mueller, trust?

Bonus No. 1: Mueller Report Shows How Witnesses, Messaging Apps Stymied Investigation.

Bonus No. 2: Some troop disrespecting naysayers say it’s not very dignified to spend $500m fetishising deaths.

How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one but the light bulb has to really want to change. Wanting to change is the bedrock of humanistic modernism: we’ve created a mythos that we’re in charge and spend billions (trillions?) of dollars watching, reading and listening to self-help grifters in search of the one system that make us perfect.

Good morning, I’m Jeff and I’m a self-help addict. Here in the 21st century the hip prefer the term life hacker, but nothing has really changed since at least Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations. I’m such a fan of Oliver Burkeman’s weekly column (the general title is more than a little tongue-in-cheek, but well meant) that I have an alarm set for 0955 every Friday (remember this alarm) so that I can read the latest installment when Burkeman hits upload at—usually–1000.

So, that alarm. Where the feck did that come from? From a paper written by Burrhus Frederic (commonly known as B.F.) Skinner that I found via a Burkeman column written some five years ago. Burkeman began:

According to rumour, the psychologist BF Skinner was a sinister fellow, hellbent on manipulating others. The worst story was that he raised his own daughter in a dark box, like the ones he trained rats in, rendering her psychotic; years later, she shot herself in the head in a bowling alley in Billings, Montana. This tale was popularised in a 2004 book, but it lost credibility when Deborah Skinner Buzan–neither psychotic nor dead, but understandably cross–surfaced to explain that the “box” was just a homemade crib, warm and open-topped. She’d never even been to Billings, Montana, much less shot herself there. (It’s the sort of thing you’d remember.) The truth about Skinner, whose 110th anniversary is this year, is that he was a skilled manipulator of himself. And in a world where we’re ever more subject to manipulation by commercial forces, we could stand to learn some of his tricks, since if anyone’s going to manipulate us, it might as well be us.

In a paper entitled Skinner As Self-Manager, his colleague Robert Epstein explains Skinner’s singular ability to see his own life as one big mass of variables, some of which could be altered by tweaking others.

My alarm (and many others like it) is a tweak I learned by reading Epstein’s 1997 paper— Skinner As Self-Manager—and a 1983 paper written by Skinner himself: Intellectual Self-Management in Old Age.

Last week, flipping through my grass-catcher cards (they come via Charles Hobbs) I came across three cards with references to Skinner and added following up on those notes to my work for this week. Doing so involved re-reading the two papers above and a third paper, written by Skinner in 1987: A Thinking Aid.

The first bit in Epstein’s article that I highlighted the beginnings of Skinner’s published comment on self-management. Epstein wrote:

Fred’s first published statements on selfcontrol and self-management appear in his 1948 novel, Walden Two [I have the 1976 reissued copy, JH], portions of which were inspired by monthly discussions he had been having with philosophers and literary critics at the University of Minnesota (Skinner, 1979). Chapter 14 of the novel is entirely about self-control. Professor Castle, a hostile visitor to Walden Two, questions Frazier, the radical founder of this behaviorally engineered utopian community, about childrearing practices in the community.

Walden Two was my introduction to Skinner and I read the book in 1983 as part of my Psychology 101 class at Ohio University. Much of the book is a dialogue between Frazier (Skinner’s surrogate) and Castle arguing over Frazier’s methods.

Castle becomes increasingly upset with Frazier’s account and demands to know what the children gain through such abuse. Frazier rhapsodizes,

What they get is escape from the petty emotions which eat the heart out of the unprepared. They get the satisfaction of pleasant and profitable social relations on a scale almost undreamed of in the world at large. They get immeasurably increased efficiency, because they can stick to a job without suffering the aches and pains which soon beset most of us. They get new horizons, for they are spared the emotions characteristic of frustration and failure. [Emphasis mine, JH] They get—” His eyes searched the branches of the trees. “Is that enough?”

The real world, Frazier argues, provides only haphazard training in self-control, but Walden Two strives to make “every man a brave man.” “What is the virtue of accident?”

What is the virtue of accident? We don’t expect our children to learn to read and write by accident, why not discipline and order as well? (How many times have you, or people you know, lamented I wish that my parents hadn’t let me quit…?

Self-control/self-management became a theme for Skinner. Epstein continues:

In some sense all of Walden Two is a treatise on self-control, both for the individual and for society; each becomes proficient in controlling itself for its ultimate good. As Segal (1987) puts it in an insightful essay about the novel, “Skinner envisioned a world where psychology is the preeminent science, and its chief task is to teach selfknowledge and self-control.” Indeed, one finds statements about self-control in Skinner’s later writings that are as extreme as Frazier’s. For example, in notes he made for a debate with Carl Rogers in 1962, he called self-control “man’s only hope” and in casting about for themes for a second novel (which he never completed), he considered self-control:

Why not self-control—a new Pilgrim’s Progress—the hero gradually discovering how to control himself by controlling the world in which he lives, adapting techniques for controlling others to control oneself? That was close to the theme I had found most moving in literature. [Emphasis mine, JH]

And boy, did that theme cause problems at Harvard (and elsewhere?).

Skinner’s developing views on self-control and related topics were incorporated into Natural Sciences 114, the course he designed around his own scientific and theoretical work upon becoming a professor at Harvard in 1948. His views were expressed in detail in 1953 in Science and Human Behavior, the textbook that was based on the content of this course. The entire third section of the book, more than 60 pages long, is concerned with the functioning of the individual, and virtually all of this material is relevant to an understanding of self-control. The first of the four chapters in this section is entitled “Self-Control,” with that term, once again, in quotation marks.

The unsavory theme of Science and Human Behavior is that all human behavior is controlled, an assertion that sent so many of Skinner’s students to the Harvard health services with complaints of depression that the counselors there named a syndrome after his course. Lest the reader think he is straying from the theme, he begins the “self-control” chapter with a reminder: “Implicit in a functional analysis is the notion of control. When we discover an independent variable which can be controlled, we discover a means of controlling the behavior which is a function of it.” The fact that the individual might be able to do this on his or her own is, he argues, no threat to his assertion that all human behavior is determined by external variables.

In the second section of Epstein’s paper—A Self-Managed Lifestyle—I found the most practical advice and deep insight into Skinner’s experiments upon himself. Epstein begins:

Skinner’s later reflections on self-control and self-management (which is simply the practice of techniques of self-control) are wholly consistent with the theoretical formulation he presented in 1953. But in his later writings we see more frequent accounts of his own self-management practices, and, ultimately, extensive advice on how to become a self-manager.

…To my knowledge, and all of the rumors notwithstanding, Fred did not rely on behavior modification techniques to control people. Quite the contrary. He was relaxed, natural, and gentle in most of his dealings with other people. His interpersonal style was made milder, if anything, by the scientific principles he helped to develop, because his research convinced him that punishment was a poor tool for changing behavior, so he avoided using it in his everyday life. [This is very much in line with what I’ve learned as an educator via the writings of Alfie Kohn. JH]

Fred avoided manipulating others, but he most certainly manipulated his own behavior, and he did so with great success.

I found a tremendous amount of crossover between Skinner’s ideas and much of what I’ve read over the years about the psychology of writers and how they tackle unpleasant tasks like sitting down to write. Epstein writes:

Fred knew that unpleasant tasks become more pleasant if we arrange our environment appropriately. At one point he used to get himself to ride his exercise bike in the morning by positioning reading materials over the handlebar, and when we worked together he had a small television set there. He’d pedal while watching the morning news.

He knew that the best ideas are often fleeting, so he developed special ways to capture them. He kept a notebook or a tape recorder by his bed and by his pool, for example. He knew that writing was a delicate and easily disrupted activity, so he took pains to shelter it from disruptions. He built special shelves so that his dictionaries and other reference books were always at arm’s reach. He used his writing desk for serious writing only; he answered letters and paid bills elsewhere. He made memoranda with whatever was at hand: If he planned to bring a book home from the office, he would toss it where he would be sure to see it on his way out. [Emphasis mine, JH]

Is it any wonder that writers’ rooms are so often vital? Epstein continues:

In four publications during his last decade, Fred translated his own self-management practices into specific recommendations for others. Three are concerned with intellectual self-management per se, and the fourth covers somewhat more general issues of self-management in old age. In How to Discover What You Have to Say, Skinner offers advice to students: (a) Keep yourself in good condition. You will think and write more clearly if your body is in good shape. (b) Write in the same place each day and do nothing else there. (c) Write at the same time each day. (d) Surround yourself with the best writing materials you can get. (e) Write every day. (f ) Start small, and build up. (g) Schedule leisure time and use it productively. (h) capture new ideas as they occur. Carry a notebook, and put one by your bed. (i) Surround yourself with appropriate stimulation: the right audience, reading materials that stimulate your thinking, new situations. (j) Make outlines to organize your thoughts before you cast them into prose. Very large sheets of blank paper (without lines) are helpful for this purpose, so you can show relationships among ideas graphically. (k) Write first, without concern for style. Edit later.

Epstein wraps up the second section with these observations:

Fred’s use of self-management techniques was easy and natural for him. In no way did it smack of the ‘‘tyranny’’ of the self-control training of Walden Two. It was like a game that he played, a puzzle to be solved, and he enjoyed the process as much as the results. He also took pride in self-management, because it seemed to show a powerful, practical side to his science that was lacking in other branches of psychology or psychiatry. Consider the following entries from his notebooks, each written in the 1960s:

Freud was unable to stop smoking cigars, up to 25 a day, though smoking must have been obviously related to the heavy catarrh he suffered from most of his life, as well as to the protracted cancer of the jaw in his last years… an astonishing lack of self-understanding or self-control. Was he not bothered by it, or did much of his theory spring from the need to acknowledge that the habit was “bigger than he was”?

I have, I think, made good use of my analysis of behavior in managing my own life, particularly my own verbal behavior. Can the psychoanalysts and the cognitive and humanistic psychologists say as much? Did Freud ever report the use of his theory to influence his own thinking? Are cognitive psychologists particularly knowledgeable about knowledge? Are humanistic psychologists more effective in helping other people because of their theories?

Fred’s most important self-management practice is implied in his writings but is nowhere clearly stated. He always spent a few minutes each day, often scattered throughout the day, searching for and analyzing variables of which his behavior seemed to be a function. It is not enough to live your life, he told me; you also need to analyze it and make changes in it frequently and regularly. [Emphasis mine, JH]

I’ll tackle sections three: Resolving the Tension Between Self-Control; four: Determinism and Self-Control After Skinner; and five: Dying With His Boots On, on Friday.

Is there any there there? I have no feckin’ idea. Will we, and by we I mean the general public, every know? Probably not. What we don know is the America media—they don’t deserve the tag journalists—got played by someone for advertising dollars and, to steal a line from Pamela Brown, America kept eagerly hitting the refresh button.

Matt Taibbi warned us—here and here—and in Russiagate was journalist QAnon (Part 1), he makes his case in an introduction for what he expects will be a book-length project. Taibbi begins:

The final revelation, tabbed MUELLER DAY, was a national emergency for most news organizations.

Most every reporter and editor with profile was recalled to man barricades on the morning of April the 18th,* and await the bombshell of bombshells.

Every broadcast and cable station, major newspaper, and online outlet went into crash mode, an old-school newsroom drama in which every employee coffees up to deliver nonstop marathon content about the Most Important Story In History.

Will the Anchorman panda finally give birth? Will Baby Jessica come up alive after 56 hours down a well? Could there be sounds of life inside the sunken Kursk?

More recently: did America’s entire “respectable” news media really spend 22-plus months humping a transparent conspiracy theory, praying out loud for a former FBI chief to save them from Donald Trump, like cultists awaiting passage to Heaven’s Gate on the Hale-Bopp Comet?

Taibbi’s short answer, of course, is yes.

Go read the rest.

Bonus No. 1: Here’s what happens to Bill Shorten if he loses the unlosable election.

Bonus No. 1: Bernie Sanders: Lordstown Tough…

Bonus No. 2: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING WILLING TO BE EMPTY…

President Lyndon Baines Johnson nearly got me killed. Using the ginned-up excuse of the Gulf of Tonkin incident he reversed the course of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and ramped up the Vietnam War. He ultimately saw nearly 60,000 Americans dead and a more than 300,000 wounded out of the 2.7 million who served in there. I easily could have been one of them.

I still have my draft card, but I was never called up. (Ironically perhaps, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy in October 1974 and technically am a Vietnam Era veteran. Go figure.) All of that is to say that you would think I would have some interest in the man who could have gotten me killed, but I never did. So, when I heard about Robert Caro’s five-volume biography of LBJ my initial reaction was: five fecking volumes? Please.

I’ll never read the biography, but another of Caro’s works in the interview piqued my interest. Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing is the kind of book that I love to read. Getting inside the head of a great writer is like bacon to me. I’ve ordered the book from the library, but this morning I came across an interview with Caro in The Guardian by Rachel Cooke.

Cooke, writing in Robert Caro: ‘The more facts you collect, the closer you come to the truth’ for The Guardian, digs in and focuses on advice from Caro that any writer should pay close attention. For instance:

Working contains plenty of advice for biographers, including the value of silence–“SU” he writes in his notebook before interviews, which stands for “shut up” – though a writer should, he believes, also be willing to go back to his witness again and again, squeezing him like an orange until the pips shoot out; Caro talked to LBJ’s aide Horace Busby, who died in 2000, no fewer than 22 times. (“I ask people over and over what they saw, and what they heard. They get really fed up. But often people don’t know what they know.”) No, it may not be possible to look at every document relating to your subject – the LBJ library contains 45m pieces of paper–but Caro has never forgotten the words of his editor at Newsday, delivered when he was just a rookie: “Turn every goddamned page.” There is no substitute for going through the files, and not only because they will almost certainly yield secrets; to hold a contemporaneous document in your hand is to be brought magically closer to what he calls “genuineness”, a form of time travel so compelling that even now, when he’s sitting next to a library cart piled high with his requests, he sometimes finds it difficult to keep track of the hour.

Shut up! Check. Turn every page. Check. Cooke continues:

The best bits of Working, however, are its set pieces, each one more indelible than the last. The time he slept out in the Texas Hill Country, the better to understand the extreme loneliness of LBJ’s mother. The time he took LBJ’s brother Sam Houston back to the family ranch in Johnson City and finally heard of the terrible rows the future president used to have with his father. The time he interviewed LBJ’s wife, Lady Bird, unable to meet her eye as she talked to him of her husband’s love affair with a beautiful young woman called Alice Glass. Most gripping of all, there is an account of his visit in 2000 to the home of a mortally ill Georgia senator, Herman Talmadge, one of the good old racist boys who raised LBJ to the Senate, believing him to be on the side of the south, only to watch, horrified, as his civil rights legislation passed into law. “It was a brilliant moment,” Caro says, unable to resist taking up the story. “This immense power. You drive along Herman Talmadge Highway, and you exit on Herman Talmadge Boulevard, and you arrive at this house with the tall white columns, and a black man in a waistcoat comes to open the door…” He asked the elderly senator what he had believed Johnson thought about the relationship between whites and blacks in segregated America. “Master and servant,” came the reply. Then he asked him how he felt about the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Disappointed. Angry. Sick,” said the senator, after his own long silence.

“LBJ made these guys believe for 20 years that he believed something he didn’t believe at all,” says Caro, delight creeping over his face. “When people say that power corrupts… I don’t happen to believe that. Power reveals. When you’re on your way up, you have to conceal what you intend to do. Once you get power, then you see it, what he really wanted to do.”

That is a powerful observation that sheds an important light on the freshman class of 2018 who, lead by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has little or no interest in following the old rules of playing along. (The same can be said of Senator Bernie Sanders who has championed and voted his principles for nearly 40 years as an elected official.) Caro calls President Johnson wondrous and appalling. Cooke prompts Caro to explain the dichotomy.

For Caro, the key to understanding Johnson lies in his childhood. “That terrible childhood. The loneliness and the poverty. His father transformed into the laughing stock of the town [having hubristically bought it back, Johnson’s father subsequently lost the family ranch, a property that anyone with eyes could see was on infertile land]. Every month they were afraid the bank would take their house. He came out of that with his character formed; the fire was too hot.”

Well, maybe, if I find myself in retirement and nothing better to do, I’ll make a stab at the five volumes, but I should think I’ll tackle Sir Martin Gilbert’s work first.

Bonus No. 1: Bill McKibben: Climate Change Is ‘Greatest Challenge Humans Have Ever Faced.’

Bonus No. 2: Tell Me I’m Fat.

Bonus No. 3: Portland county pays $100,000 in lawsuit tied to Blue Lives Matter flag.

So, there are 14 Republicans in the U.S. Senate—including the Senate Majority Leader—who have clearly voiced the opinion that obstruction of justice by the President of the United States certainly rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors when issuing a verdict of guilty in the constitutionally sanctioned removal of a president from office.

The junior senator from my own state, Robert Jones Portman, had this to say:

There is no joy in this task. This is a sad day for our country and for the Office of the President. I have listened carefully to the comments of my colleagues today just as I carefully reviewed the facts, the underlying articles of impeachment and the report of the Committee on the Judiciary that came before us this week. I do not question the motives of my colleagues who oppose impeachment, who do not find impeachable offenses, even as many of them have questioned the motives of those of us who will support one or more of the articles.

For myself, I believe the evidence of serious wrongdoing is simply too compelling to be swept aside. I am particularly troubled by the clear evidence of lying under oath in that it must be the bedrock of our judicial system. I believe the long term consequence to this country of not acting on these serious charges before us far outweigh the consequences of following what the Constitution provides for and bringing this matter to trial in the United States Senate.

There is a catch, of course. Portman’s words are taken from the Congressional Record of 18 December 1998 when he was a Representative and not a Senator, and the president whose fate is under consideration then was President William Jefferson Clinton and not President Donald John Trump.

Jon Swaine and Lauren Gambino, writing in Trump tampered with witnesses. These Senate Republicans voted to oust Bill Clinton for doing just that. for The Guardian, have combed the record for the words of Portman and 13 other Republicans that are 180 degrees out from the words they are voicing now. They lede:

Robert Mueller’s report effectively accused Donald Trump of obstructing justice by witness tampering, one of the offences that led Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton 20 years ago.

Mueller’s team found Trump repeatedly made efforts to “encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation” into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the special counsel’s final report said.

The list of Senate Republicans does start at the top with Senator Addison Mitchell McConnell, who, in 1998 said:

Following his deposition, the president had to decide what to do with his loyal secretary, Ms Betty Currie. And, again, the undisputed evidence shows that the president took the path of lies and deceit.

Contrary to federal obstruction of justice laws and contrary to judge Wright’s protective order … President Clinton left the deposition, went back to the White House and called Ms Currie at home to ask her to come to the White House the next day, which, I might add, was a Sunday.

… I am completely and utterly perplexed by those who argue that perjury and obstruction of justice are not high crimes and misdemeanors. [Emphasis mine, JH]

Joining McConnell and Portman are: Charles Ernest Grassley, Iowa; Lindsey Olin Graham, South Carolina; Charles Patrick Roberts, Kansas; Michael Dean Crapo, Idaho; Michael Bradley Enz, Wyoming; James Mountain Inhofe, Oklahoma; Richard Craig Shelby, Alabama; Roy Dean Blun, Missouri; Richard Mauze Burr, North Carolina; Gerald Wesley Moran, Kansas; Roger Frederick Wicker, Mississippi and John Randolph Thune, South Dakota.

So, were the good senators speaking the truth in 1998 or are they speaking the truth in 2019?

Or, as I believe to be the case, is truth something that none of them give a fart from a rat’s ass about.

In his television series, The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin tackled many political issues, but one that has stuck with me came in episode 127, A Good Day, when children from Future Leaders for Democracy advocate for lowering the voting age. I, and if YouTube is any indication, many others think the kids make a good case. We should give them their shot.

Ralph Nader, writing in Children’s Moral Power Can Challenge Corporate Power on Climate Crisis, lays out his case:

The famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead, once said to me that children have a distinct moral authority to change some of their parents’ habits or opinions. She gave use of seat belts and smoking cigarettes as examples.

Indeed, most of us know instances when sons and daughters have looked into the eyes of their fathers and mothers and urged them to wear their seat belts or stop smoking. They say in their own plaintive way that they want mommy and daddy around for them. Many mothers and fathers have had such experiences.

Many parents and corporate executives are doing slow motion dances round global climate disruptions, despite the brutally visual and scientific evidence of our climate crisis. The rising tide of worldwide protests in recent months by young students cutting classes to shake up their elders should be a wakeup call and a sign of more activism on Continue Reading »

One of my favorite books on the topic of mindfulness is Dr. Jan Chozen Bays’ (yes, she’s an MD) Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food. In particular, I like her exploration of emptiness and our innocence of what it means to be empty. Towards the end of the book she asks two questions:

Are you willing to empty? Are you willing to do nothing?

First, she asks, are you willing to be empty? Bays writes:

The first noble truth of Buddhism is the universality of suffering. If you are a human being, you will encounter suffering in your life. Many people in industrialized countries hear this and think, “This truth of suffering doesn’t apply to me. I’m not in a war zone, I’m not being tortured or starving.” The suffering that the Buddha talked about, however, is an experience that is often much more subtle than outright pain. It is a feeling of dissatisfaction, a persistent feeling that things are not as they should be. It is an unpleasant or irritating feeling, one that impels us to move, to do something, to distract ourselves, to eat something, to binge, to vomit, to make the feeling of dis-ease go away. [Emphasis mine, JH]

Moving away and creating distractions are not long-term solutions to this feeling that something is not right. It is a feeling based in truth. It must be attended to. Eating, drinking, using drugs or alcohol, courting danger, courting a new lover—these are all over-the-counter remedies for the temporary relief of this fundamental dis-ease, the intuition that things are not as they could or even should be. The true source of this dissatisfaction is spiritual, and thus the only true cure is also spiritual.

To be willing to be empty is to align with a fundamental truth of our being.

The first time I read those paragraphs, I sat back in my chair. Earlier in the book, Bays talked about the concept of Heart Hunger, the idea of comfort food. We joke about the idea, but, as Bays points out, our cultural obsession with comfort food (to the point that there are marketing campaigns designed around these kinds of foods) is, in fact, part of our national dis-ease—I really like how she breaks the word to allow us to focus on the underlying meaning. She continues:

Let’s look at emptiness another way. We could frame the question thus: “Are you willing to do nothing?”

There is a natural rhythm that is characteristic of all life: the eternal cresting and ebbing of the ocean, the waxing and waning of the moon, the universal in-breath and out breath of all living creatures, the steady beating our hearts. Life depends upon the incessant alternation. If it were always night, or if our heart could not relax after it contracts, life would end. The out-breath is as important as the in-breath. Emptying is as important as filling. We know this in relationship to our breath, but we’ve forgotten it in relationship to our stomach. We’ve also forgotten it in relationship to our minds.

When we think all the time, our minds never get a rest. Here, too, emptying is as important as filling. Life-changing insights arise out of a quiet, open mind. [See also WALKING WILL DO MORE THAN CLEAR YOUR HEAD…, JH] So do seminal scientific discoveries. Archimedes realized the principle of displacement as he entered that bath, Newton the force of gravity as he rested under an apple tree. The equation for relativity flashed into Einstein’s mind as he idly watched a passing train. That is also how important spiritual insights arise in the receptive space of a mind that is calm and aware. This emptying is the essence of centering prayer or meditation. God [I prefer Our Genius, JH] can’t call in on a busy line.

There are some three-dozen exercises in book, many with guided imagery recorded on an accompanying. For me, the most power is Bays’ penultimate exercise: Experiencing Emptiness in the Body and Mind. Here is the fourth step:

Now bring your awareness to the mind. Imagine the mind as a large empty room. Thoughts naturally accumulate in this room like dry leaves blowing into an empty storehouse. You are interested in keeping this room clean and empty for a while.

Imagine the out-breath as a wind or quiet leaf blower. The out-breath scatters thoughts as they accumulate and blows them out of the room. The room returns to its original state, empty and quiet

Are the sensations of a mind that is empty like a great room pleasant, neutral or unpleasant? Do any impulses arise to change the awareness of an empty mind?

Blowing the leaves out of the room works for me every time.

Bonus No. 1: Notre Dame: we can’t even burn a building down without everyone carrying on like idiots any more.

Bonus No. 2: Dr. Bays has a number of mindful eating videos on YouTube.

There is no more byzantine compilation of laws in the United States than that found in the federal tax codes. Like medicine today, the general practitioner simply does not exist who can confidently state that they understand the entirety of our tax laws. So, there can be no surprise that Section 6103 could be missed. Even by Steve Mnuchin and Charles Rettig.

That someone brought Section 6103 to their attention is clear in the way that
Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, at least, has begun carefully parsing his words when speaking about the tax returns of President Donald John Trump.

David Cay Johnston, writing in Here’s the Law That Requires Mnuchin to Turn Over Trump’s Taxes, or Lose His Office and Go to Prison for The Daily Beast, lays out the Nixonian peril:

Donald Trump and his top White House aide declare that the administration will not give the president’s tax returns to Congress, as required under a 1924 anti-corruption law. But both the Treasury secretary and the tax commissioner have been much more nuanced, saying that they will obey the law even as they delay actually doing so.

I know why Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Charles Rettig, the IRS commissioner, are so cautious. They don’t want to be removed from office and sent to prison for five years just for doing Trump’s bidding.

The reason will no doubt surprise those who think Trump can thumb his nose at the law governing congressional access to anyone’s tax returns, including his. It will for sure shock Trump, who claims that “the law is 100 percent on my side.”

The exact opposite is true.

Under Section 6103 of our tax code, Treasury officials “shall” turn over the tax returns “upon written request” of the chair of either congressional tax committee or the federal employee who runs Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. No request has ever been refused, a host of former congressional tax aides tell me.

There is, however, a law requiring every federal “employee” who touches the tax system to do their duty or be removed from office.

The crystal-clear language of this law applies to Trump, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Mnuchin and Rettig, federal employees all.

Oops.

Bonus No. 1: Blocking Trump Tax Return Release Puts Treasury Sec. In Legal Jeopardy.

Bonus No. 1: Watch Bryan Cranston, Michael Keaton, Richard Kind and Michael K. Williams portray the elusive Richard Sackler.

Bonus No. 2: Scott Morrison is going to win the 2019 federal election. ARE YOU READY?