I've used this blog to riff on the 2016 Presidential Election.  I though it was no contest, that Ms Clinton would win by 45 to 48 states.  It never entered my mind that there were people out there who, by force of circumstance, could not take it so lightly.

The critical circumstance is that inequality in income and wealth has expanded more in the last 8 years than in any other decade in our history:  the rich are getting richer, the poor are unable to find jobs with living wages.  I did not believe that this would be addressed.  I was more concerned about the dangers of racism, misogyny, and nationalism.

I was wrong.  The election was about the very rich taking it all, and the ordinary people not waiting any longer for crumbs to fall from their tables.  

I have no faith that Mr Trump can provide our deplorable classes with meaningful jobs and the dignity of work.  But if he fails, we will all fail.

Our economy is fragile.  Keeping it from the brink will largely be a matter of chance.

This will be my last posting on this Brave New World Notes Blog.  It is humbling to realize that all my previous posts were irrelevant to what really mattered.

  

M

Global optimization is a branch of applied mathematics and numerical analysis that deals with the global optimization of a function or a set of functions according to some criteria.  As you might imagine, I know nothing more than that.

Dancing in the End Zone

Shortly after the Big Bang, the universe went dark for a hundred million years.  Then physics kindled nuclear lights in the stars.  The world was in the dark after the fall of Rome for a thousand years before capitalism set humans free.  After World War II, the world lived in a dark cold war until the Soviet Union ended in 1991.

We are  now on the cusp of a new dark age.  We are about to elect as president a well known liar who should be in jail.

In childhood I was told that when a man is caught in a lie, he should feel shame.  That paradigm is now dead.   Confabulation is the norm among our better people.  Arrogance is perceived as authenticity.  Facts are dismissed as artifacts of a failed intellectual tradition.  We are in the twilight of the Age of Reason in America. 

How can our new president govern, given that she is known to be dishonest?  How can her administration function while tangled in a constantly expanding web of lies?   We like to think that you cannot fool all the people all the time, but there is no evidence that she believes it?

We toasted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the end of the Cold War in 1991.  One man at our New Years party joined the toast but feared we might be entering an age of dangerous international instability.  He wondered if we might someday look back on the 80's as "the good old days."   

I will toast Ms Clinton’s victory in November, but I fear that she has already given her enemies tools they can use to destroy her.  And I fear she will continue to arm them.  The shameful way this election has been conducted may look benign, even enlightened,  in retrospect.

We need a Truth and Reconciliation process;  when those who have done wrong embrace the truth and express remorse, forgiveness becomes possible. Forgiveness can forestall a storm of hate.  If a Truth and Reconciliation process worked in post-apartheid South Africa, surely it can be made to work here.**   Am I dreaming?    

In the absence of a Truth and Reconciliation process, President Obama must pardon Mrs Clinton as soon as she is elected, for all past real or hypothetical crimes.  If she is not protected from the law she will be hounded by the law and distracted from more important things from the moment of her inauguration. The law might provide justice but, at this time in our national experience and in world history, we need a functional government more than we need justice.  

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

* Abraham Lincoln is popularly associated with this "fool people" quote, but he may never have said it.

**  For more on Truth and Reconciliation, click here. Or click here.

Finally

All the Perfumes of Arabia will not Sweeten

Double, double toil and trouble; 

Fire burn and caldron bubble. 

In 1960 three friends and I did a scene from Shakespeare, part of a high school Parents' Night show.  It was a pastiche made up of bits of the Macbeth witches scenes.*  We were terrible, but that scene still bubbles deep in memory.

Macbeth is a about a politically ambitious Scottish couple, a weak man with a strong woman, that achieves political success through a series of ethically questionable actions which they eventually come to regret.

It has many famous lines:

Macbeth:

Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care.

Equally famous is:

Lady Macbeth:

Out, damned spot! Out, I say!

Less famous but more relevant to this quasi political blog is:

Lady Macbeth:

What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?

Macbeth is on my mind this week for two reasons:  1)   We attended the Los Angeles Opera's production of Verdi's Macbeth last Sunday.**   The story, and most of the lines, are straight out of original play.  2)  Tomorrow the Clintons, no strangers to ethical compromise, will be in Las Vegas, where she will "debate" Donald Trump, in the pursuit of the kind of power the Lady Macbeth could have never imagined.

The Clintons and Macbeths have little in common except arrogance.  Macbeth betrayed and killed his king, framed others for the crime, then murdered friends and associates.  They are held accountable in the play; it has a happy ending.  The Clintons lied, cheated, used governmental authority for petty private purposes, subverted the rule of law, but they never killed anyone.  Neither was, or will ever be held accountable.  "What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?" is the family motto.  Forget a happy ending.  

The LA Opera's production is fresh, energetic and powerful, engaging intellect and emotion.   In the second half I was disturbed to feel  a surge of empathy for Lady Macbeth during her "Out damned spot" tortured sleepwalking aria.

I am ashamed of all of us who let Trump get this far into the presidential electoral process. ***    All the perfumes of Arabia will not mask the smell of her corruption, but Mrs Clinton is infinitely to be preferred to Mr Trump.  She, her family and associates may be contemptible, but I feel a wave of empathy when I see her as Ms. Not Trump.

She will win at least 45 states.  That will be the easy part.  

*******

*

There are four "witch scenes"

Act 1 Scene 1 - Witches
Act 1 Scene 3 - Witches, Macbeth + Banquo
Act 3 Scene 5 - Witches Act 4 Scene 1 - Witched, Macbeth + Apparitions 

**
The photos are from the LA Opera Website.

***
I am ashamed not because I ever voted for the guy, but  because I am  part of a community that has created a no win political situation.  No matter how one looks at it, the American people will loose this election.  Hacked Podesta e-mails show that, during the primaries, the Clinton campaign secretly  promoted Trump; they thought he would be easy to beat.  They were - I hope - right about that but they have played a dangerous game.  He probably would have won the GOP primaries anyhow, but her campaign was willing to flirt with catastrophe.  For more see:
http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/WikiLeaks-Clinton-Promote-Carson/2016/10/11/id/752705/

When I was a Child

                                                                                                      Stock photo

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

                                                                                                1 Corinthians 13:11

When I was a child I rode a bus to and from school.  It was not a yellow bus; I think anyone with the fare or a punch ticket was welcome to ride. But I never saw anyone other than a kid from my school on it. *

Kids were typically combed, brushed, and well behaved on the way to school.  But the rides home were often rowdy.  One feature was that the “bad” boys migrated to the back of the bus, wrestled with and punched each other, and told shocking, horrific, and heroic stories.

One day the stories dealt with fathers’ wartime exploits.  A story was told of one father killing a whole bunch of Japanese soldiers in a jungle.  Another boy told of his father parachuting into the middle of the German army and mowing them all down with a machine gun.  Another boy shared a lesson his father taught him: always kill a man QUIETLY AND QUICKLY with a knife rather than nosily with a gun.**

That night I told my family some of those stories, during dinner at the kitchen table.  My dad cautioned me that, while he did not know actual facts, some of the stories sounded implausible.  He suggested that maybe I should question some of the things heard “in the back of the bus.”

Now that I am a man, when I hear a childish presidential candidate boasting - on a bus - of a superlibido, sexual aggression and conquests, I do not believe him for a moment.  If he were to say it in court, under penalty of perjury, then I might pay attention;  but – good grief – he was talking to a TV news bimbo! 

Prominent on the list of reasons not to vote for Mr Trump is that he is infantile.  But let’s not take his sexual fantasies seriously.

UPDATE:  According to a New York Times story just put on line, I may be dead wrong.  Two credible women have come forward with believable damning stories.  There is no joy here.

___________________________________________________

* Circa 1953

* * Killing with knife is often quieter than with a gun shot, but quick quiet killing requires skill and strength.  Google "Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Smith" if you have the stomach for that sort of thing.  As to how effective silencers are in suppressing gun shot noise, a quick google search suggests that they are not very effective.  

On Faith

Lakshmi

I accidentally met the Hindu goddess Lakshmi this week when a podcast devoted to her origins and evolution came up after the end of another.   Among other things, she is the patron of good government and fertility.  Her iconography includes elephants, lotus, gold coins, and cow dung (fertilizer).  What's not to like?

The "good government" connection made me wonder if there were a Christian patron of good government?  The answer is yes,  sort of.  Thomas Moore, Catholic saint since 1935 and Anglican saint since 1980, was assigned the duties of patron saint to "statesmen and politicians" by Pope John Paul II in 2000.  Moore's head got cut off in 1535 because he would not agree to say a few lines he did not believe .  In the light of our current politics, he sounds terribly quaint.

Thomas Moore

Saint Hilary

Hillary is the feminine for Hilary (the name derives from the same root as hilarious).  Saint Hilary protects against snakebites; no relation to Saint Patrick, who protects against snakes.  But those of us who think of Trump as a snake-in-the-grass-roots should burn incense at both shrines.

Saint Emydius (aka Emygdius) protects against earthquakes.   He and St Patrick are co-patrons of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.  Those concerned with a possible Trump victory in November could do worse than pray to St. Emydius.

Saint Donald

Little is known of Saint Donald.  He apparently is not the patron saint of anything.  Interestingly, most people named Donald are not named for the saint, but for the Scottish clan, Donald.  I'm just guessing, but I expect very few new born boys will be named Donald in the USA in the next few generations.

Saint Expeditous

Saint Expeditous, patron of urgent causes, probably never existed.  Nevertheless, many older european churches include shrines dedicated to him.  People looking for work, spouses, cures, and loans pray at them.   Those who wish we had candidates to believe in should light a candles at his alter.

We passed this car on our Monday morning bike ride.  I found myself wondering WWJD about a Supreme Court Nominee.  Would he promote the paradigm of a "living constitution?"  Or would he nominate an "originalist?"

My chance encounter with the red Mustang provoked my curiosity about the iconography of the "Jesus for President" campaign.  A google - image search returned lots of hits.  I like the image above because it takes "change" out of its usual political context.

I don't much like the following image, but it is reminiscent of the famous 2008 Obama "Hope" poster.

I like the "Vote Jesus" image for its graphic design.

The last image in this series of spiritually inspired reflections on the election was amusing when I photoshopped it, but now it seems very sad.  There is no joy here.

Herod's step daughter Salome, danced before Herod.   He was pleased and offered her anything she might ask for in return. When she asked her mother what she should request, she was told to demand the head of John the Baptist on a plate.  Herod, feeling he had a binding commitment, issued the necessary orders. (According to the Gospel of Saint Mark)