Trump actually appeals to “losers”

Trump’s bombastic invitations to get mad, get even and hate someone are actually reaching willing ears, especially when he spews his lies about what “we’ve lost” and what’s been “taken from us” and what “we could lose” in the future.

I’m not talking about “loser” in the schoolboy insult meaning that Trump uses to denigrate his political opponents.

It turns out that lots of folks think of themselves as “losers” in some very specific ways. James Surowiecki spelled it out recently at NewYorker.com, read it here

Some excerpts:

"When Donald Trump appeared at the N.R.A.’s recent national convention, he had a simple message: Hillary Clinton “wants to take away your guns.” This was familiar rhetorical ground: warning of dire losses has been the core of Trump’s campaign. Free trade means that “we’re losing our jobs, we’re losing our money.” China’s trade practices amount to “the greatest theft in the history of the world.” We need a wall to stop illegal immigration because “we’re losing so much.” In Trump’s world, things are much worse than they seem, and it’s because American prosperity has been stolen: “We’re losing everything.”

…Trump is playing to one of the most powerful emotions in our economic life—what behavioral economists call loss aversion. The basic idea, which was pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is that people feel the pain of losses much more than they feel the pleasure of gains. Empirical studies suggest that, in general, losing is twice as painful as winning is enjoyable. So people will go to great lengths to avoid losses, and to recover what they’ve lost…

…A study by the Pew Research Center last fall found that seventy-nine per cent of those who lean Republican believe that their side is losing politically. A Rand survey in January found that voters who believed that “people like me don’t have any say about what the government does” were 86.5 per cent more likely to prefer Trump. Trump supporters feel that they, and the country, are losing economically, too…

…As one study puts it, “People are willing to run huge risks to avert or recover losses.” In the real world, this is why people hold falling stocks, hoping for a rebound rather than cutting their losses, and it’s why they double down after losing a bet. For Trump’s voters, the Obama years have felt like a disaster. Taking a flyer on Trump actually starts to feel sensible…

…Hillary Clinton has recently been emphasizing what a risk Trump represents. That’s fine when rallying the Democratic base and appealing to genuine independents. But it will only make Trump more popular with those who already believe in him. When he says, “We’re losing our country,” it doesn’t sound overwrought to his supporters. It sounds like the truth. For them, Trump is the long shot who may come in and give them back all that they have lost.”

Either Trump or Clinton is going to be the next president of the United States.

No sensible person can think there’s no difference between them.

Vote in November—if you don’t, everybody else is going to pick the next president.

Trump's paying himself to campaign

The unnecessary wall: "for" and "against"

Maybe Trump isn't hustling "new voters"

Bernie, do the right thing

Any connection here?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Kids will be kids—update

There has been a fascinating and, I think, poorly understood evolution of parenting and childhood since the earliest colonial days of the American experience.

Paula S. Fass writes about it in The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton University Press, 2006). A New York Times reviewer points out that the narrative gets a bit lost in the most recent history of “helicopter parents” who are overwhelmingly focused on controlling and protecting their children so they grow up to great lives with success and affluence and notable careers and….cue the all-important play date….make sure Joshua can get into Yale….

It’s intriguing to me to understand that colonial parents rather consciously moved away from the Old World view of children as economic resources, and adopted a more relaxed willingness to give their kids some degree of independence and flexibility in their paths to adult life. Of course, kids were put to work at a young age, but parents gave them opportunity and approval to feel engaged in the work and be open to wider horizons and innovation. Europeans thought that American children were “rude, unmannerly and bold.”

There were many circumstantial differences at work. In the colonies and early United States, there was an abundance of cheap land and a shortage of labor, and thus, pervasive opportunities for personal success. The European tradition of primogeniture was largely absent: on our side of the Atlantic, a father’s land and estate did not pass automatically to the firstborn son, so the more egalitarian inheritance practices boosted the life prospects of most children.

Of course, there’s another side to the childhood narrative: slave children in America were often treated as economic units by their owners. That’s a disgusting reality in our history.

Speed!

Remember "speed dating"?

Washington Monument hanky-panky

That tolerance thing

The cod in "Cape Cod"

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

The women who helped create electronic music

Electronic music doesn’t talk to me in a real loud voice, but this piece from OpenCulture.com rings a few bells.

It’s intriguing because it mentions the not too surprising fact that women were involved in the earliest incarnations of electronic music, back in the 1950s and even earlier.

Didja ever hear of Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue or Pauline Oliveros?

I think it’s a good bet I can say “Of course you didn’t.”

OpenCulture explains that these women “represent a small sampling of too-often-overlooked electronic composers, musicians, engineers, and theorists whose work deserves wider appreciation, not because it’s made by women, but because it’s innovative, technically brilliant, and beautiful music made by people who happen to be women.”

Laurie Spiegel

Read a little bit about them and hear their ethereal music here.

Amen, sister.

I’m sticking with Odetta and Joan Baez (her early work), but this was a tantalizing interlude.

Book review: Orphan Train

Another thing I don't understand....

The wisdom of William H. Gass

$1.2 billion for coffee!?!

The good old Dewey Decimal System

That tolerance thing

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Another thing I don’t understand….

In the United Kingdom on Thursday, a slight 52-48 majority of voters decided to take the UK out of the European Union. The process will take about two years.

The thing is, more than 1 out of 3 grownups in the UK didn’t bother to vote.

I don’t know what they were thinking. It’s a bit hard to imagine a more momentous nonviolent event that will affect the entire population of Britain, and much of the population of Europe.

For example, almost 50% of Britain’s exports go to the countries of the European Union.

After the vote result was announced, the British currency (English pound) immediately traded lower on world financial markets to its least favorable value in the last 30 years.

It is widely believed that the British economy will suffer in the wake of being cut off from EU financial and commercial activities.

Older voters in Britain strongly favored getting out of the European Union, while younger voters gave a large majority of their votes to staying in.

Sadly, it seems that this vote was more about immigration fears than economics.

p.s. A lot of folks in the UK apparently didn’t know too much about what was going on with this vote. After the “NO” decision was announced, the most popular EU-related Google search in the United Kingdom was:

“What does it mean to leave the EU?”

The next four most popular were:

“What is the EU?”

“Which countries are in the EU?”

“What will happen now we’ve left the EU?”
“How many countries are in the EU?”

Trump's paying himself to campaign

The unnecessary wall: "for" and "against"

Maybe Trump isn't hustling "new voters"

Bernie, do the right thing

Down Under is big!

Any connection here?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

$1.2 billion for coffee!?!

I don’t think there’s any criminal intent here, it just seems to be a really awkward fact that Americans have loaded $1.2 billion onto their Starbucks cards and the Starbucks app, waiting to pay $3.65 for that cinnamon dolce latte or whatever….

These coffee lovers apparently didn’t think twice about giving Starbucks the use (and the earned interest) of that $1.2 billion float—in financial terms, preloading your Starbucks card is the same as putting your coffee money in a sock.

So, we live in a world in which mostly perfectly normal people aren’t concerned about putting $1.2 billion into a noninterest-bearing account that really doesn’t make it easier to grab a Starbucks coffee.

I’m moving on, thinking about global climate change now….

Fish wrapper....

LinkedIn employees: Kiss your job goodbye?

Extra! Extra!

Who did it?

Soda consumption is still dropping

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Trump’s paying himself to campaign

The Trump campaign organization has paid about $6 million to several of his companies and to his family members.

That’s right. A big chunk of his meager fundraising haul is going right into Trump’s pockets.

For example: the campaign has spent $423,317 for space rental and catering at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.

Nearly $350,000 has been paid for use of Trump’s own aircraft.

Oh yeah, in case you’re wondering, $958,836 has been spent so far on “swag”: hats, pens, T-shirts, mugs, stickers and printing services and stuff.

The unnecessary wall: "for" and "against"

Maybe Trump isn't hustling "new voters"

Bernie, do the right thing

Any connection here?

"The horror, the horror."

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

The unnecessary wall: “for” and “against”

Paul Krugman offers more plain talk about the horrors of this political season in his recent New York Times column, “A Tale of Two Parties.”

Here’s a taste:

“The Republican establishment was easily overthrown because it was already hollow at the core…

“But as Mr. Trump is finding out, the Democratic establishment is different.

“As some political scientists are now acknowledging, America’s two major parties are not at all symmetric. The G.O.P. is, or was until Mr. Trump arrived, a top-down hierarchical structure enforcing a strict, ideologically pure party line. The Democrats, by contrast, are a “coalition of social groups,” from teachers’ unions to Planned Parenthood, seeking specific benefits from government action.”

There are more insights, read his column here.

Perhaps another way to say it is:

Too many Republicans are "against" stuff and people, while plenty of Democrats are "for" stuff and people. The difference is not subtle, but the essence of it often escapes public notice and thoughtful debate.

Which brings me to the media. I've stopped calling it "news media" because the content---on paper, on TV, online---isn't really about news anymore, it's about entertainment for the narrowly defined audience of each of those media channels. The media enabled Trump's success. I don't say the media "caused" Trump to win, but without the gazillions of dollars' worth of free coverage, I think he would have had a much more difficult time.

Needless to say, I don't watch TV anymore.

Have you noticed that it’s hard to find a “news” show that doesn’t have at least two people talking at the same time?

Maybe Trump isn't hustling "new voters"

Bernie, do the right thing

Any connection here?

"The horror, the horror."

Is there anything Trump won't say?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Gee willikers, six miles an hour!

Roller coasters have been a hit since the early 1800s in France.

The first roller coaster in America opened in 1884 on Coney Island in Brooklyn.

Hold that thought.

First roller coaster - Coney Island

LaMarcus Thompson built that wooden wonder and called it the “Switchback Railway.” Basically, the cars started at one end of a slightly elevated track, rolled 600 feet to the other end, and then rolled back to the starting point. The ticket price was a nickel. That baby traveled at 6 mph. Ladies, beware!

Nevertheless, it was a big hit and by 1900 there were hundreds of bigger and faster coasters in operation around the country.

Today, the highest roller coaster in the U. S. is Kingda Ka at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey. It’s 456 feet high and top speed is 128 mph. Gee willikers.

Fish wrapper....

Ways to watch the circus

Forgive them....

LinkedIn employees: Kiss your job goodbye?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Fish wrapper….

Public confidence in newspapers has been declining for more than a generation.

Now Gallup says only 20% of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the institution that has proclaimed itself the “public watchdog” for more than a couple centuries.

I think it’s been a long-running head fake.

It’s somewhat surprising to me that younger folks (18-34) have relatively positive attitudes toward newspapers—America’s dailies and weeklies have notoriously lost their fight to keep younger readers. Less than 20% of folks under 35 claim to have read a newspaper yesterday. Even among this minority of readers, those with unfavorable perceptions outnumber those with favorable views of newspapers.

Let’s push the point here: Gallup doesn’t elaborate on the meaning of “have a great deal of confidence in newspapers.” Confidence about what?

Journalists and newspaper owners have always trumpeted their self-appointed role as a watchdog institution that champions the interests of “the public.”

I’ve never seen any statistics on the scope or success of this watchdog role. Of course, newspapers big and small have done investigative stuff from time to time, and occasionally a blockbuster story about scandal, corruption and greed makes big headlines for a while.

Think about all the bad stuff and the bad guys who never get a headline.

Newspapers have left an awful lot of watchdog stuff get past them.

Now, the core of newspaper readers are older folks who have lifelong reading habits. When they die, there’s no one to replace them.

The future of newspapers?

The wisdom of Ben Hecht

Ways to watch the circus

Forgive them....

That tolerance thing

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Ways to watch the circus

Ways to watch the circus:

No. 1

Buy a ticket and sit in a seat inside the Big Top. This way you can buy and eat popcorn.

No. 2

Get together with your pals to crawl under the side of the tent far enough so you can see what’s going on, and hear the music, and smell the popcorn and stuff.

Try to do this after the bobby has passed by, otherwise you’re going to be answering some difficult questions….

p.s. The coppers in Britain are called “bobbies” and sometimes “peelers,” in reference to Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel, who introduced an act in Parliament in 1829 to create an official police force in London. They do not routinely carry a gun.

Papillon redux

Amos 'n' Andy: good stuff

Is it properly chilled?

"Get out of town before sundown!"

Let's all sing "Purple Haze"

Say again!?!?

The Three Wise Women....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Forgive them….

Cut these guys a break.

I’m pretty darn sure the word “joyride” hadn’t been invented when these guys were on the loose, so technically, I think they didn’t know what they were doing.

Or whatever.

Not your daddy's looking glass....

A Rosie by any other name....

Better than good

Redefining "comfortable"....

I did the Boston Marathon again!

No secret about good writing....

Lay down, Sally....redux

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

LinkedIn employees: Kiss your job goodbye?

Microsoft wants to buy LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in cash.

The question in my mind is: who will celebrate this announcement?

Look at Microsoft’s recent track record on buying companies:

In April 2014 Microsoft bought Nokia’s smart phone and smart tablet business for more than $9 billion. Since then, Microsoft has laid off about 20,000 former Nokia employees and posted an accounting loss of more or less the entire purchase price. That flushing sound you hear is the background music for this deal, it’s just about a complete bust.

So, if I were one of LinkedIn’s roughly 6,000 employees, I might be thinking about polishing my resume.

And by the way, what is Microsoft’s board thinking? The purchase price for LinkedIn is about $196 per share—LinkedIn stock closed last Friday at $131.08, so Microsoft is paying a 50% premium over the stock market’s consensus value of LinkedIn. That’s a lot of icing on the cake. Obviously one can ask: is Microsoft paying too much?

One explanatory factor is that Microsoft is holding about $115 billion in cash and cash equivalents. That’s about $1 million in cash reserves for each of Microsoft’s current employees. What’s the point of holding that much cash? I’m sure the employees and the stockholders would like to get their hands on some of it.

Is it really possible that the directors and executives of Microsoft haven’t been able to figure out any profitable ways to invest that huge cash hoard?

What are they thinking?

Beats me.

Extra! Extra!

Who did it?

Anything sound familiar here?

A long wait for the perp walk....

Outsourcing: what's it all about?

Another take from Peter Drucker

Massive stock buybacks: it's a shame

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Orlando massacre: frank talk about the issues

The terrorist murders in Orlando were a horrific crime. The victims and all of us suffer.

The shooter is dead, so there isn’t going to be any retribution against him.

The shooter was born in the United States 29 years ago—he was as much an American citizen as you and me, so this particular case has nothing to do with immigration.

The shooter legally bought a semi-automatic pistol and a high-capacity assault rifle a few days before he used them to kill and wound more than 100 people.

The shooter was on an FBI terrorist watch list twice—the Terrorist Screening Database, in 2013 and in 2014—but he was removed from the watch list after FBI agents questioned him and determined that he hadn’t broken any laws with his public statements and contact with an American who died in a suicide bombing in Syria.

Even if he had remained on the watch list, that by itself wouldn’t have prevented him from legally buying guns.

Why is anyone legally selling guns to anyone who is on or has been on an FBI terrorist watch list?

We have too many guns in America.

Too many dead people.

Four people shot dead or wounded—every day

Cops kill someone almost every day

With guns, it's not civil disobedience

Gotta say it

Deadly

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Speed!

It was big news 140 years ago.

The Transcontinental Express made the trip from New York City to San Francisco in 83 hours—only three days and 11 hours!—and stunned the nation. A human being could ride the rails and cross the country in less than four days. Yowza!

The coast-to-coast railroad connection had been completed only seven years earlier, after the federal government had supported the epic project with millions in government bonds and vast land grants. (Quite a few people got rich, illegally, in the process, and some members of Congress were in that clique).

The amazing fact of speedy passage from sea to shining seas was celebrated as a boon to commercial and industrial development, and to the national prestige of the United States, which had more miles of railroad track than any other country.

Some of the folks who read the news on June 4, 1876, could remember that it took Vice President Jefferson 10 days to travel the 225 miles, using horsepower, from Monticello to his office in Philadelphia (the national capital until 1801). History.com notes that at the time, the 100-mile trip from Philadelphia to New York City required “two days hard travel in a light stagecoach.” The word “comfortable” wasn’t used in any ads by stagecoach operators.

For a lot of folks, travel on the early transcontinental trains wasn’t much of a treat. First-class passengers wallowed in sumptuous splendor, but third-class travelers got a narrow wooden bench to sit on, no privacy and darn little respect—the third-class coaches often were shunted onto sidings to allow faster express trains to take precedence on the single track that served most of the route. The hoi polloi spent a whole lot more than 83 hours in their noisy coaches as they made the cross-country passage.

Remember "speed dating"?

Washington Monument hanky-panky

That tolerance thing

The cod in "Cape Cod"

It wasn't the good old days....

Did the British really try to win?

The "Bill of Rights" wasn't

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

“…somewhere hot…”

Book review: A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Jimmy Buffett (b. 1946)

Ballantine Books, New York, 1998

Full disclosure: I’m not a Parrothead, but I’m related by blood and marriage to gen-you-wine Buffett fans, so I take the liberty of using familiar language, even though “the king of somewhere hot” has never seen me and isn’t likely to in this earthly paradise….

A Pirate Looks at Fifty is a memoir-ish book by Himself, written almost 20 years ago, I spotted it in the local library’s discarded book sale bin and I did the right thing.

Seems to me, for starters, no one should ever discard a book full of Jimmy Buffett stuff, he’s just so much in love with life and he is a magnet for vicarious attention, I dare you to read Pirate without getting at least a fleeting urge to head for the islands and see the world through Jimmy’s eyes.

You don’t even have to read the whole book (I confess, I didn’t), just read as much as gets the juices flowing and then get on with your regular life, and you can dip into it again any time you want. Buffett’s music and Buffett’s style are a buffet—grab what you want, anytime, sing along as the spirit moves, and go back for more whenever….

You don’t even have to like margaritas to get the full, slobbering, belly laugh, hijinksed, hot damn but mucho mellow effect when you sing along with Jimmy about the Mexican cutie and the lost shaker of salt.

I dare you not to sing a couple verses and the refrain right now, you have to, really….

Book review: American Crisis

Another thought about biographies

"...two foolish children..."

Book review: The First Congress

Book review: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Whoa

This is a free country, mostly, sort of….so you can more or less write whatever book you think must be written, and usually you can read whatever you want….

I cherish these expectations, and so, when I see stuff like this:

It makes me love my actual TO READ list more and more.

Heck, I’ll eat a lobster, but….

The good old Dewey Decimal System

The history of spoiler alerts

Check it out!

Yeah, a blanket fort

Pillow talk

Worse than Fahrenheit 451

Moby-Dick and stuff....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Delight

Indian pudding,

        never forget your first taste....

                first taste is the best.

Stoned

"...there would be no music..."

Poetical thinking....

Teaching moments....

"...ever a child..."

Rite

Another poet heard from....(part 15)

Worlds, whirling, waiting....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Maybe Trump isn’t hustling “new voters”

Without a doubt, voter turnout in Republican primaries this season has been notably high.

Trump’s been claiming that he’s animating “new voters” and “expanding the Republican Party.”

Analysis by Politico and Optimus (a data analytics firm) indicates it ain’t necessarily so.

After studying the voting patterns in Virginia, Ohio and Michigan, the researchers found that most of the increased voting turnout reflected participation by folks who support Republicans in general elections but don’t normally vote in primaries. Thus, the busy primary voting represents “new primary voters” but not “new Republican voters.” Many of these voters are folks who most likely would turn out for the general election in any event.

The authors of the Optimus analysis concluded: “The increase in presidential primary turnout should give little comfort to the GOP as it looks ahead to November’s general election.”

Now, let’s get real about the November 8 election.

Clinton or Trump will be the next president of the United States.

If you vote for someone else, or if you don’t bother to vote, everybody else is going to choose the next president.

Do you trust everybody else to do that?

Bernie, do the right thing

Any connection here?

"The horror, the horror."

Is there anything Trump won't say?

The new bankruptcy

Sanders should feel this burn....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.