The Anti-Presidency - Tяump log #16

I thought my anger toward Trump supporters/voters would subsided by now. In actuality, it has only gotten stronger. Each time the scab starts to grow over the wound, I read another headline and I rip off the scab to keep it fresh. I hear some say, "they didn't know how bad he was going to be" and I simply "Really?" ... and what about his campaign didn't make them believe he was going to be this bad? For those who have buyer's remorse and regret voting for him, I add pity to my derision. I only hope their regret remains until mid-term elections.

I don't consider myself a one issue voter, but for a while now, I have made the environment my top priority as a voter. This fact has put me solid in the blue column. The most recent Bush administration had such a bad environmental record, I made an anti-Republican pledge to not vote for a Republican on any level of government. I suggest you do the same. If there were a Republican running for dog catcher, I'd vote against them. My wife tells me often that not all Republicans are disgusting and I usually respond, "if they weren't, they would have left this party by now."  Not to sound smug, but this Trump administration has proven me correct on this one. I am no lover of the Democrats. The D's have their problems, but I will choose one of them or any other party before I choose an R, until they change. If you are wonder why, you need not go any further than this week's Trump log.

2/28/17  - Trump instructs the EPA and Army Corp of Engineers to roll back an Obama regulation called the Waters of the United States Rule. Rolling back this rule would make it easy for agricultural and development concerns to drain wetlands. (Source: Washington Post)

2/27/17 - Trump's budget dramatically increases defense spending and decreases spending on domestic agencies, especially the EPA. It ignores infrastructure. It is the opposite of what we actually need. (Source: New York Times) 

2/26/17 - Trump's nominee for Secretary of Commerce's, Wilbur Ross, approach to trade is the exact opposite to the approached that Trump spoke of during his campaign. He has made millions off of free trade.  (Source: New York Times)

2/25/17 - Trump bans some media outlets who were critical to his administration (CNN, Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Politico) from press briefing. This is an assault on the freedom of the press. Assault on the press is usually one of the first step of any autocratic regime. (Source: Washington Post)

2/24/17 - International travel to the US is down significantly since Trump became president. This is very bad news to regions (like my own) that rely on tourism. (Source: Frommers)

2/23/17 - As expected, our Mexican border wall is probably not going to be a wall, but a fence. Not unlike what we already have but just a little bit longer.  (Source: The Guardian)

2/23/17 - Trump's loosening of regulation on coal mining's waste dumping will not create a lot of jobs, if any. It will only damage the mountain streams. (Source: New York Times)

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Prior Trump Logs:
Issue # 1 - posted November 15th, 2016
Issue # 2 - posted November 22nd, 2016
Issue # 3 - posted November 29th, 2016
Issue # 4 - posted December 6, 2016
Issue # 5 - posted December 12, 2016
Issue # 6 - posted December 19, 2016
Issue # 7 - posted December 26, 2016
Issue # 8 - posted January 3, 2017
Issue # 9 - posted January 10, 2017
Issue #10 - posted January 17, 2017
Issue #11 - posted January 24, 2017
Issue #12 - posted January 31, 2017
Issue #13 - posted February 7, 2017
Issue #14 - posted February 14, 2017
Issue #15 - posted February 21, 2017

The President Who Cried Wolf - Tяump log #15

Trump and his minions tell so many lies, you cannot respond to all of them. It is seems to act like a smoke screen. You are so busy fighting the lies that you have little time and energy to do anything else. They lie about everything big and small: the crowd size at the inauguration, crime stats, voter fraud, media coverage and terrorist attacks. Autocrats attack truth because they don't want to be accountable. If you cannot trust anyone, then you might as well trust the one in charge.

This is terrifying because at some point, we will have to trust him. Something big will happen, like a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak, and we will all have difficulty believing him.

2/21/17 - Trump's anti-science outlook is emboldening the anti-vaccine movement which is threat to public health. (Source: Washington Post)

2/20/17 - Trump's recent comments about Sweden only show that he gets his information from really bad sources ... like his followers. Is he a liar or is he is simply out of touch with reality? (Source: Washington Post)

2/19/17 - Much of Trump's deputy cabinet positions have gone unfilled because he refuses to hire anyone that has ever said anything negative about him. This severely limits the pool of qualified people. (Source: New York Times)

2/18/17 - Trump's budget could axe some very popular government programs that really don't cost a lot. They include Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts and ArmeriCorps among others. (Source: New York Times)

2/17/17 - During the 2.5 years prior to the election, Trump retweeted white supremacists 75 times. He now has a white supremacist as a top advisor. He also has ties to an organization called ACT for America, a group categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Source: Washington Post)

2/16/17 - Trump's nominee for Labor Secretary, Andrew Puzder, steps down due to the fact that his nomination was going to be rejected by the Senate. He had a ton of problems like a history of domestic violence, having an illegal alien as a maid and ... oh ya ... the fact that he hates labor. (Source: Washington Post)

2/15/17 - Trump campaign aides were in contact with Russia a year before the election. This amidst the fact the allegations that Russia hacked the DNC around the same time is very troubling.  Meanwhile Russia tests a land missile violating an international treaty and the White House is quiet about it.  His buddy, Putin, can do no wrong. (Source: New York Times)

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Prior Trump Logs:
Issue # 1 - posted November 15th, 2016
Issue # 2 - posted November 22nd, 2016
Issue # 3 - posted November 29th, 2016
Issue # 4 - posted December 6, 2016
Issue # 5 - posted December 12, 2016
Issue # 6 - posted December 19, 2016
Issue # 7 - posted December 26, 2016
Issue # 8 - posted January 3, 2017
Issue # 9 - posted January 10, 2017
Issue #10 - posted January 17, 2017
Issue #11 - posted January 24, 2017
Issue #12 - posted January 31, 2017
Issue #13 - posted February 7, 2017
Issue #14 - posted February 14, 2017

Our So-Called President #scrotus: Tяump log #14

One of the biggest complaints about Hillary Clinton during the election was her use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State for government classified business. Yet, the same crowd doesn't seem to care that Trump's famous Twitter account is tied to a Gmail account. He also uses an unmodified old Android phone linked to that insecure Twitter account. What kind of mischief could be caused by someone hacking these?  Well, lets see ... what stock to do you want to crash? What country to do you want to talk about nuking?  It only goes to show how fake the outrage was over Clinton's email server was. The problems with security in this administration are not limited to Trump's phone.

2/14/17 - Trump has a dinner meeting with Japanese delegation at a club with very little security.  As an international crisis unfolds, wait staff and other diners post pictures on Facebook. (Source: New York Times)

2/13/17 - The President's National Security Council is in a state of disarray. Flynn lied to Pence when he was vetted to be head of the NSC. He was fired from Obama administration for being unstable, yet Trump didn't think this was a red flag. (Source: New York Times) 

2/12/17 - Trump issues another executive order requesting local governments to report any crime committed by undocumented immigrants so that it can compile a list of such crimes. Yet, any such data collection in the past have failed due to state and local governments not being interested, having too few resources and there being no standards for such collection. Since his administration has no interest in real facts, what's the point?  (Source: Washington Post)

2/11/17 - You can say good-bye to Net Neutrality. (Source: New York Times)

2/10/17 - Trump is using his Twitter account to intimidate Nordstrom for cancelling their business deal with his daughter Ivanka. This is a major violation of ethics rules. (Source: New York Times)

2/9/17 - It is not your imagination.  There has been an uptick in hate crimes since Trump was elected. (Source: Slate)

2/8/17 - It is not only Americans that are nervous over Trump. This is a wide spread global phenomenon: Sweden, for example. (Source: Washington Post)

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Prior Trump Logs:
Issue # 1 - posted November 15th, 2016
Issue # 2 - posted November 22nd, 2016
Issue # 3 - posted November 29th, 2016
Issue # 4 - posted December 6, 2016
Issue # 5 - posted December 12, 2016
Issue # 6 - posted December 19, 2016
Issue # 7 - posted December 26, 2016
Issue # 8 - posted January 3, 2017
Issue # 9 - posted January 10, 2017
Issue #10 - posted January 17, 2017
Issue #11 - posted January 24, 2017
Issue #12 - posted January 31, 2017
Issue #13 - posted February 7, 2017

All the Light We Cannot See

I joined a book club recently. I've always avoided book clubs because I have always preferred choosing my own books to read. But this can get lonely, can it not? Since I am alone most of the time, I need more outlets for being social. So I chose to give up the freedom of choice in order to have someone to talk with about the book. Our first book was Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, one of my favorites, and our second and most recent was Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. Ironically it was my pick. I lobbied to read this Pulitzer Prize winner because I was half done with it already.

All the Light We Cannot See is a lovely book about World War II. It poetically tells the tale of two young protagonists one French and one German, bouncing back and forth between their third person present narratives. Marie-Laure is a blind girl living in Paris with her father who is a locksmith for the Natural History Museum while Werner is a German boy who is an orphan in a coal mining town who has a talent for electronics. As the war progresses we follow her exodus from Paris to a seaside town and his joining the Hitler youth eventually evolving into a soldier.

The use of language is lovely in this book. One of things he does is use the term "light" very creatively. After finishing the book I had time before my book club to do some research. Using my Kindle app, I searched for the word "light." The first reference to light is in one of the first short chapters called "Bombers" where the German bombers over Paris are described as "threads of red light." The book is full of imagery like this. In the chapter titled "Saint-Malo" he describes the town of the same name as "In stormy light, its granite glows blue." In the chapter titled, "Around the World in 80 Days" the narrator says that "The huge cypress trees she and her father pass on their morning walk are shimmering kaleidoscopes, each needle a polygon of light." The story is great in this book but it this beautiful poetic writing that captivated me.

Much of the lovely language about light comes in the chapters about Marie-Laure which is ironic because she is blind. In the Werner chapters, most of the references to light are his flash light (aka "field light") when he is in a coal mine or under the rubble of a bombed out building. In the chapter, "Cellar" his field light is described as a single light bulb that "casts everything in a wavering shadow." Of course, he is blinded in a different way, he is the citizen of a totalitarian regime where "light," the metaphorical kind, is frowned upon. The weak are sought out and destroyed.

In great works of literature you can sometimes find the philosophical heart of the book in a particular chapter. This is what a high school student might call the book's theme. In Moby Dick, it is in the chapter called "The Sermon" where Father Mapple builds his sermon about humility around the story of Jonah. In Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, the chapter "Snow" is the philosophical essence of the book. For All the Light We Cannot See, the chapter is "The Professor" and probably the two chapters following. When they were very young, before the war, Werner and his sister Jutta's greatest joy came during "lights out" when they listened to a science show on the radio.  Werner's favorite episode is when the professor talks about light:

"The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children ... It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light.  It brims with color and movement. So how, children does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?"

He goes on connecting the light from the sun to coal:

"Consider a single piece glowing in your  family's stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one millions years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun's energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years --- eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers. And eventually the peat dried and became like stone, and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it to your house, and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight --- sunlight one hundred million years old --- is heating your home tonight ----"

Then

"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever."

In the very next chapter, "Sea of Flames," which is about a diamond Marie-Laure's father is hiding from the Nazis, she says this about the diamond, it "is like a piece of light from the original world. Before it fell. A piece of light rained to earth from God."

So what is the light we cannot see? It must be important for it is the prominent symbol and an eponymous reference by our author. The light we cannot see is that which we do not have, all that we do not see or understand. The characters relationship to light is very important in this novel. The ephemeral voice on the radio says, in the next chapter "Open Your Eyes," that from a scientific stand point that "all light is invisible." This makes me think that even that which we can see, we don't understand fully. For Marie Laure, because she is blind, she doesn't have the delusion that she understands the world because she can see it for what it is, darkness. Like the shadows in Plato's cave or in Werner coal mines of Zollverein, by seeing the world we don't understand it. We have small slivers of knowledge and delude ourselves about our wisdom.

For Werner, the world is even smaller for him. Even though he has sight, what he sees is a world being taken over by the Third Reich. He is being manipulated, acknowledges it and has little no power to overcome it. His only show of resistance is his freewill which he uses in small clandestine ways throughout the book. For him, (*spoiler*) light is "metallic," "wintery," "faint," "watery," "alien," foreshadowing his destiny of doom. Light plays tricks and seems futile. It makes him think of "corpses" when looking at a group of mannequins. He is not in a good place. He asks, looking at the carnage of war: "Why bother to make music, when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?" This is harsh contrast to the "pearly" light that "seeps" into the apartment where Marie-Laure is hiding. When Werner finally sees her up close, the light "outlines her in silver." For Werner's sister, light only comes to her in dreams, "settling on a field like snow." Late in the book up until Werner's death, Jutta is more a dreamlike character that seems to only exist in his thoughts and memories, living in an old pre-war world, behind the lines, where he will never return. 

For Marie-Laure's great-uncle, Entienne, light is a thing of fear. He recalls the flares, "the very lights," that were used during his time in the military in World War I. They gave sight to snipers to shoot down the enemy. Marie-Laures says that light "is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark." For Entienne, light is a great weight that ails him. He is a recluse that stays within his house fearing the outside world. When he finally leaves his house after 24 years, *spoiler* "any light, even through closed eyelids, became excruciatingly bright." He does not last long once he leaves the house.

For his housekeeper, Madame Manec, the light is somewhat of a cathartic savior ... "her privation and fear are rinsed away by wind and color and light." For the tumor ridden Nazi, Von Rumpel, the only time he seems to come into contact with light is in Marie-Laure's apartment and that light is "strange." He is a very complicated character. His obsession is of a diamond which ultimately is a very old piece of coal which we  already established is only light after all.

I tend to enjoy books with beautiful writing over books with an intricate plot. I would much prefer a Henry Miller novel with his bold beautiful and sometimes offensive paragraphs and little plot over a Stephen King novel full of pithy dialogue and the steady beat of a story.  The language of All the Light We Cannot See is so beautiful that I sometimes forget about the plot and get a little lost in the language. The descent into a novel is a lot like the descent into a coal or diamond mine ... the plot is what keeps you going deeper. In All the Light We Cannot See, Doerr's language are the diamonds you find along the way.

Are We Great Again, Yet? - Trump Log #13

If you have ever worked for a manager who was erratic and authoritarian, you know how unhealthy it is. You go about your day fearing the loss of your job among people who are doing the same. It is not an environment conducive to creativity but one of playing it safe. People are more concerned about covering their ass than they are about doing their best. Being seen and noticed is not your motive, but to get through the days in the shadows is your goal and if something goes wrong, finger pointing commences.  This is what it must be like working in the Trump administration.

This is the type of environment that doesn't produce loyalty and is conducive to stress. One has to wonder how the retention rate will be for high ranking government employees particular in an economy in an upswing. Looks like the brain drain in this administration will continue.

2/7/17 - Over a quarter of a million jobs in America are in the solar industry, more than in coal. Yet Trump's energy plan doesn't even mention solar. (Source: Washington Post)

2/6/17 - If the Trump administration were a boat, it would be sinking. The number of leaks coming out of his administration is unprecedented. (Source: Washington Post)

2/5/17 - Trump is expected to issue another executive order to roll back Dodd-Frank which regulates banks. Since it was designed to help prevent banks from acting risky with our money, I suspect more banking shenanigans. This is a gift to his Wall Street pals. (Source: Washington Post)

2/4/17 - As a result of Trump not divesting, the tax payers are in an impossible situation of providing security for this children when they go on business trips. (Source: Washington Post)

2/3/17 - True to form, on the top of Trump's list as possible European Union's ambassadors is Ted Malloch, a businessman who has compared the EU to the Soviet Union and believes it needs "taming." In the first time in their history, officials at the EU say they would reject Malloch as an ambassador.  (Source: BBC)

2/2/17 - Trump has his worst phone call yet with another world leader with a phone call with Australian PM Turnbull became testy. This is the leader of one of our greatest allies. By the end of the Trump presidency, we'll be lucky if we have any allies left ... other than Russia.  (Source: New York Times)

2/1/17 - Trump is expected to lay off two thirds of the EPA. (Source: Washington Post)

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Prior Trump Logs:
Issue # 1 - posted November 15th, 2016
Issue # 2 - posted November 22nd, 2016
Issue # 3 - posted November 29th, 2016
Issue # 4 - posted December 6, 2016
Issue # 5 - posted December 12, 2016
Issue # 6 - posted December 19, 2016
Issue # 7 - posted December 26, 2016
Issue # 8 - posted January 3, 2017
Issue # 9 - posted January 10, 2017
Issue #10 - posted January 17, 2017
Issue #11 - posted January 24, 2017
Issue #12 - posted January 31, 2017