Chicken Fried Steak and The Donald

While cooking chicken fried steak with bacon-horseradish smashed potatoes and collard greens (yeah, even elitist libruls luv this kinda food — recipes are below) I got to thinking about The Donald.

The amusing aspect of Mr. Trump’s rise among the rank and file of the GOP is that it is accompanied by an angry burst of disbelief and dismay from the party bigwigs — you know, the ones who think of themselves as moderates. The Republican king makers are freaking out over Mr. Trump who is spouting some pretty ugly stuff about immigrants, Latinos, women, gays and the sainted John McCain. They understand that a politician who aims for the highest office is making life difficult for himself when attacking these groups — they vote.

Reince Priebus, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, George Will — you know, the usual suspects — are aghast that the Republican faithful could ever embrace someone like this.

Well, my friends at the zenith of the GOP, as you have sown so shall you reap. You have all just replayed Mary Shelley’s little farrago. You built the laboratory and found the willing subjects. Eventually someone would come along, seize this moment and catalyze the ignorant, fearful, mistrusting band you crafted.

Two decades of lies, deception and misrepresentation set the stage for The Donald. You created this monster.

Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Hannity, O’Reilly, Doocy and scores of others have flooded the airwaves, the Internet and cable TV with hatred, suspicion, distrust, bias and anti-government rhetoric for decades. They have belched tens of thousands of hours of vicious, homophobic, xenophobic right-wing banter and bullshit. And, it worked.

Congratulations to all you hard-working, dedicated Republicans. Good job. Enjoy the monster you made.

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Chicken fried steak:

tenderized steak cuts — about 1/3 lb per person

1 egg and 1 t of milk mixed on a platter

4 T of flour with salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder mixed on a platter

dredge steaks in flour mixture (shake excess), dip in egg mixture, back in flour (shake excess)

pan fry in a couple Ts of canola oil — when done put in warm oven while making gravy

in the same pan add 1 or 2 T of flour to remaining canola — use the leftover flour mixture and add oil or flour to get a one-to-one balance.

stir over moderate heat to make a roux

add 1 c chicken broth/stock and 1/2 c milk to make the gravy

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Bacon, horseradish smashed potatoes:

cook 4 oz bacon, crumble and set aside

cut up and boil 2 lb potatoes (Yukon Gold or Red Bliss are both good) — keep skins on

smash with wooden spoon

add 2 T butter and enough cream to get a nice texture

add 2 T (or more) horseradish

return bacon

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Collard greens:

cook 4 oz bacon, crumble and set aside

1 onion sliced into half rounds

3 garlic cloves smashed and chopped

1/3 lb mushrooms sliced

1/2 t red chili flakes (or other hot spice — cayenne, Shiracha, Thai chili, whatever)

1+ lb collard greens (rough chop) — cut stems off if hard or thick and chop

sauté onion, garlic, mushrooms, chili flakes and stems in olive oil till onions and mushroom begin to caramelize

add collard greens, stir as they cook down, cover and cook for half-hour (or maybe more depending on toughness), stirring occasionally

return bacon at the end

optional: a splash of red wine vinegar or lemon juice

Success and Luck Redux

“Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 examination of highly successful persons, was a justifiably influential book. I touched on this issue before and find it continuously fascinating. Using historical and contemporary data Gladwell explored the various factors that contributed to the success of “outliers,” those who became wildly successful in one or another endeavor. Gladwell was eclectic, he looked at business, science, sports, culture and art. The question was, are there common factors that emerge across domains? Are there core reasons why some people become highly successful while their compatriots end up either middle-of-the road contributors or simply disappear into the great sea of the unacknowledged. ‘Tis a question worth asking.

What Gladwell found was most provocative. Two factors emerged: practice and luck. The practice wasn’t a surprise. No one doubts the importance of focused, dedicated practice. There are stupid jokes (Guy carrying a violin case: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Drunk: “Practice, man, practice”) and serious research (K. Anders Ericsson’s extensive studies on expertise).

The consensus is that something like 10,000 hours of devoted, intense practice is a requisite for achieving high performance levels. The 10,000 hour finding kept popping up wherever psychologists looked: tennis players, violinists, gymnasts, entrepreneurs, lawyers, even psychologists. Whenever someone was trying to achieve expert status in some field it seemed like roughly five years of full time focus was needed.

While it’s turned out that this is something of an oversimplification, that’s okay. The point is made. You’re not going to become expert in anything interestingly complex without a lot of hard work and devotion.

But there was still the lingering question: what about those “outliers,” the ones who were wildly successful. Did Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie work harder than his compatriots in business? Did Einstein put in more hours thinking than other physicists? How about Babe Ruth? Or Abraham Lincoln? Picasso? Warren Buffet? Beethoven? Jobs? Did these insanely successful people have something else? Was it some component in their make-up? Was it genetic? Were they born destined for greatness? Were they embodiments of what some call the “American Dream” and got there because they worked harder than others or were smarter or more dedicated?

The more psychologists looked at these factors the more they faded into statistical insignificance. None of them seemed, to use the technical expression, to account for a significant amount of the variance. There just doesn’t seem to be anything special about these individuals.

What did emerge and what Gladwell focused on in “Outliers” was luck.

Everyone worked hard. Those who pursued a professional career all put in their 10,000 hours — often a lot more. There was no special impact of motivation, drive or commitment in the outliers. The people who rose to the top didn’t look very different from the outset from those who merely achieved journeyman status. But somewhere along the line they got breaks, ran into the right mentor, were born at the right time, found themselves in an advantageous environment, made friends with the right people, etc., etc. 

Last night I got a chance to collect some real world data. We went to a Vancouver Giants hockey game. The Giants are a Western Hockey League (WHL) team, meaning the players are all kids between the ages of 15 and 20. The WHL is a pathway to the big time, the NHL, but only the best make it — become outliers. I took a look at the rosters of the Giants and their opponents to see if one of Gladwell’s “luck” factors was evident. Boy, was it ever!

What month a boy was born in has an outsized impact on his chances of becoming a top quality player. No, it’s got nothing to do with astrology. It’s physical size and development and its role in giving a young player the opportunity to get the kinds of early training, coaching and experience that can hone his skills.

The ones who develop their early talents in the “Initiation” leagues (limited to kids under 7) or the “Novice” leagues (under 9) aren’t picked by accident. The coaches grab the biggest and fastest ones!

The cut point for determining the age of eligibility is January 1st and the boy’s age is determined by the year in which they turn the requisite age. A boy who turned 7 in January is going to be a lot bigger and more physically developed than one who won’t turn 7 till December of that same year. Yet both are considered to be in the same age cohort.

There were 61 players listed on the rosters of the two teams. Thirty-six (59%) were, in fact, born in the first four months of the year. Fourteen (23%) in the next four months and a mere 11 (18%) in the last four. Out of the 61 only two were December babies and only another three were born in November. Interestingly, of this tiny, late-year cohort, two were goalies where size and speed are less important. The overall correlation with month of birth was .70 which, given the very small sample, is remarkable.

UPDATE [September 15]. Went to another Giants’ game, this time against the Victoria Royals. A quick look at the Royals’ roster revealed that of the 28 players 18 were born in January, February, March and April and exactly 0 were born in the last four months of the year.

Are the players who were conceived in April and May better in some fundamental way than those in February and March? Not when they were 5 years-old but they are now, when they’re in their late teens and hoping to make it to the NHL. Are the kids fortunate enough to be born in the early months harder workers? More motivated? More deserving of praise and fortune? Unlikely. But they are the ones whose talents are more likely to be groomed.

If we scan our lives dispassionately we’ll all see moments where circumstance produced a chancey moment, one that other equally-motivated and equally-endowed folks didn’t have.

This is a hard concept to grasp; a difficult truth to accept. Those who have “made it” feel good about themselves, congratulate themselves for having survived adversity, been devoted to the task at hand and are proud of their accomplishments. But they shouldn’t feel as though they are more worthy in some abstract way than others of their cohort. Luckier, yes; better, no.

Those who observe these outliers can properly admire their achievements and praise their accomplishments. But it would be inappropriate to treat them as somehow special, more worthy than others in similar circumstances. Luckier, yes; better, no.

Embracing Ignorance

In Yuval Harari’s new book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he makes an interesting argument that the acknowledgement of ignorance was the driving component of the emergence of modern society.

He presents his thesis in the context of a larger question, one that’s been asked many times and evoked numerous answers, all unsatisfactory: Why Europe? Why did the European culture, from roughly 1600 on come to dominate the world?

Proffered answers have run from unsavory, racist ones touting Europeans as, somehow, having better genes or being smarter or more politically savvy to others that focus on climate, access to the seas or, of course, just dumb luck.

Harari tosses these all aside. Europeans, he argues, beginning with people like Galileo who, in 1610, discovered that Jupiter had several moons orbiting around it, and Leeuwenhoek who, in the 1670s, looked through his new invention, the microscope, and discovered to his, and everyone else’s, astonishment that ordinary water was alive with hundreds, nay thousands, of tiny, heretofore invisible creatures welcomed the obvious — there was a lot they didn’t know. From the very large to the very small new worlds were opening and the tug to investigate, to explore was irresistible. In 1662 the Royal Society was formally organized in Britain and in 1666 the French established the Academy of Sciences. The Scientific Revolution had begun and its home base was Europe.

The epistemic foundation for these organizations was the presumption that the world was a lot more complicated than we’d thought and needs to be examined systematically. Unlike earlier conceptualizations, based as they were on the certitude and unflinching convictions of theologians, scientists embraced not knowing. Ignorance, it was suddenly recognized, could become the motivator for progress. It was irresistible.

Well, to some. To others this sudden revelation of ignorance was not welcome for humankind had fallen all too comfortably into a very different mode: everything was known or, if not, could come to be known by the examination of sacred texts or consultation with whatever theologian or shaman had managed to convince the locals that he knew or could find the answer.

In 1592 Francis Bacon, one of the codifiers of the new Empiricist approach, wrote[1] this humorous tale tweaking theologians who, in his opinion, were inappropriately sure of themselves.

“In the year of our Lord 1432, there arose a grievous quarrel among the brethren over the number of teeth in the mouth of a horse. For thirteen days the disputation raged without ceasing. All the ancient books and chronicles were fetched out, and wonderful and ponderous erudition such as was never before heard of in this region was made manifest. At the beginning of the fourteenth day, a youthful friar of goodly bearing asked his learned superiors for permission to add a word, and straightway, to the wonderment of the disputants, whose deep wisdom he sore vexed, he beseeched them to unbend in a manner coarse and unheard-of and to look in the open mouth of a horse and find answer to their questionings. At this, their dignity being grievously hurt, they waxed exceeding wroth; and, joining in a mighty uproar, they flew upon him and smote him, hip and thigh, and cast him out forthwith. For, said they, surely Satan hath tempted this bold neophyte to declare unholy and unheard-of ways of finding truth, contrary to all the teachings of the fathers. After many days more of grievous strife, the dove of peace sat on the assembly, and they as one man declaring the problem to be an everlasting mystery because of a grievous dearth of historical and theological evidence thereof, so ordered the same writ down.”

And, indeed, the Empiricists won the day. Those willing to peer into a horse’s mouth triumphed and we’ve never looked back.

But it is disconcerting that today we find ourselves fighting Bacon’s battle anew. Biblical literalists deny evolution, refuse to look into the mouths of horses, mules, elephants and sharks to discern the commonalities and transitions that evolutionary pressures produced. Young earthers claim that humans walked with dinosaurs. Climate change deniers toss the data away saying it’s all a hoax cooked up by elitists in liberal universities. Social critics, celebrities and politicians believe that vaccinations cause autism.

Yes, ignorance is back but not as something to be embraced because it stimulates exploration and the growth of knowledge. It is back in a pre-17th century form, an unthinking acceptance of nonsense. Not-knowing has become something to fear, to quail from, to retreat back into rigidity where facts can be ignored and science suppressed.

Alas, the nonsense is coming from folks with real clout. From Paul Broun (R- GA) who, unbelievably, sits on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, we got this: “… evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.”

Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) made this contribution, “I do not believe that CO2 is a cause of global warming, nor have I ever advocated the reduction of CO2.”

Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), gave us a staggering display of ignorance with “What the science says is that temperatures peaked out globally in 1998. So we’ve gone for 10-plus years where the temperatures have gone down.” In fact the decade after 1998 was the hottest on record and each year since then has been hotter than the previous one.

Todd Akin (R-MI) revealed that he held some very weird ideas about women’s reproductive functions with the now (in)famous statement, “If it’s legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Nobody seems to know what “legitimate” rape is.

Marco Rubio (R-FL) when asked how old he thought the earth was, responded, “I’m not a scientist … but whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.” That part about not being a scientist was right. FWIW, Rick Perry (R-TX) and Mike Huckabee (R-AR) when asked the same question gave the same answer.

James Inhofe (R-OK) who chairs the Senate Environmental Committee is a climate change denier who thinks that bringing a snowball into the chamber somehow negates the data from several thousand scientific studies.

These are just the most glaring examples because these folks are in positions of considerable power. The current Congress is astonishingly anti-science. In fact, well over half our elected officials have publically taken anti-science stands.

I’m hoping this is just temporary but what’s worrisome is the number of influential politicians willing to turn back the clock. Equally worrisome is that they all seem to be Republicans. I looked for Democrats who are publically outspoken, anti-science. Couldn’t find them. Perhaps they’re there, lying low.

I spent over a half-century doing science. I learned early on to embrace ignorance, to follow the guide of the men and women of the Enlightenment, to dispel the fear of the unknown, to revel in the joy of understanding, to nurture curiosity. Every interesting finding that came from my research opened new realms of the unknown, new avenues to explore, new problems to be solved. You only get to play this wonderful game when you admit you don’t know much.

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[1] Or is reported to have written, there are questions about authorship — though not about the message.

Ashley Madison -- Thoughts

Everybody seems to have an opinion on the hacking of the Ashley Madison “adultery” site. I do too, of course. I think things are actually pretty straightforward. I have no problem with people looking to have extramarital affairs. In all cases that’s their business, not mine. In some cases (as Glen Greenwald found out) there are fully understandable reasons (e.g., living with a disabled spouse).

FWIW, when much younger (back in the loose and wholly unscripted late ’60s, early ’70s) we and several of our friends tried the “open marriage” experiment. It did not go well.

But that’s besides the point. My only concern is when the names of individuals who have taken public stances, politicians who promote the “sanctity of marriage,” preachers who rail against “adulterers” and moralizing celebrity figures turn up on AM.

It bothers me the same way as when anti-homosexual ministers turn out to have gay lovers, when Catholic priests molest children (of either gender), when outspoken anti-drug politicians are discovered to have serious problems with substance abuse.

I think that the hacking of this site is unconscionable — but that is independent of the hypocrisy that it uncovered.

Lefties Driving The Left Batshit Crazy -- Part II

Somehow, in my naiveté I thought we had lived through the era of Politically Correct speech. The PC movement began in reasonable ways with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement and Feminism when it dawned (finally) on folks that certain words and expressions caused pain. There were two ways in which language could do this. The most obvious was when words and phrases specifically designed to hurt (e.g., “nigger” or “slut”) were used. Less obvious but, so the argument went, perhaps more insidious was the softer version like “redskin” or “girl.”

It was relatively easy to persuade people to eschew the use of those designed to cause suffering — except, of course, for instances where that was precisely what the speaker wished to do. It wasn’t so easy with the latter because the folks doing the speaking didn’t intend to hurt another and couldn’t grasp why anyone could feel offended or object.

To educate these unsuspecting biased souls the movement for politically correct speech was enjoined. It was an important movement because it revealed, not how insidious language can be (we already knew that from the first usage patterns), but how delicately and unsuspectingly we allowed our culture’s biases and prejudices to leak over into our daily speech and writing.

 In many ways it worked. For the most part we’ve become sensitive to how we use words that denigrate someone’s ethnicity or race. We’re aware of sexual orientation and, in many cases, uncomfortable just thinking about how we used to talk. My generation grew up referring to gay men as “faggots” and never once thought that this wasn’t appropriate.

We’ve also pretty much stopped using the masculine form as the default pronoun. While “he/she” is awkward, it turns out to be fairly easy to avoid sexist language.[1] Of course, it didn’t work in other ways. We still haven’t completely given up using “girl” to refer to adult women but, except for the very testy it doesn’t seem to be causing any problems. So, over time the PC movement seemed to fade away which most us of took as evidence of its success.

Alas, it is back and this time, folks, in a batshit crazy version. The Atlantic had an insightful piece on it. This new effort to control and direct language and writing isn’t to change the manner in which the larger culture speaks, writes and, by extension, thinks about others, it’s designed to protect and coddle and, alas, the movers are my friends on the left.

Psychologists have, since the PC movement began, studied the impact of “microaggressions” and “implicit” prejudice. Both of these “soft” forms of bias occur without the speaker being aware they have used a term or made a statement that another might find upsetting and which, some argue, reveal an underlying ethnic, racial or gender bias. Such language, the argument goes, can “trigger” off an unpleasant or unwanted emotional reaction. Because these unintentional verbal slips can disturb others, this new PC movement has swept across the very landscape where it should have been resisted, college campuses.

How nutty can this get? A group of Harvard Law students requested that the section on “rape law” be dropped from the curriculum because it violated the feelings of women students. A professor at Northwestern was subjected to an internal investigation over an article written for the prestigious Chronicle of Higher Education because she attacked students’ “sexual paranoia.” An adjunct professor at the University of Central Florida was suspended because he joked that he was “killing” his students with all the homework assignments. English professors now warn students that they may find some words offensive in the writing of Twain or F. Scott Fitzgerald. At Brandeis even a poster designed to raise consciousness by listing the “trigger” words and phrases that Asian-American students might find offensive was subjected to attack because it, in virtue of its existence in a public forum, was a violation of Asian-American sensitivities. The university ordered it removed and apologized publically.

This, sports fans, is nothing short of censorship, an infringement on 1st Amendment rights, a sullying of what it means to teach and a violation of academic freedom. It is also not the way to run a university where one of the central tenets has always been to confront ideas, discuss the controversial, debate and critique the uncomfortable thoughts and theories of others.

What’s doubling disturbing about this weirdly protective movement is that it relies on one line of research about the harm of implicit prejudice while ignoring a much more important field of study into the long-term impact of inappropriately protecting students from reality.

Yes, it can be useful to see college as a time of quiet reflection, a period in one’s life where they are free to learn, explore and engage. But it is just weird to expect them to learn, explore and engage when they’re being shielded from any minor offense, any word or picture or reference that might trigger off even the most fleeting unsettled emotion.

Unfortunately, this movement is still gathering steam. In legal realms where speech is both protected and controlled the line separating the two is moving. Because, as noted at the very outset of this essay, words can cause genuine pain, there are legal boundaries in place. The Departments of Education and Justice guidelines used to state that speech that a “reasonable person” finds to be “objectively offensive” may be deemed harassment and restricted.

Recently, in response to this virulent PC movement, this guideline was changed so that speech that an individual finds “unwelcome” can be regarded as harassment. The “reasonable person” test is gone and a simple, subjective, individual emotion has replaced it. The result is, of course, that everyone in education is on high alert for even the most benign utterance or reading assignment can trigger off something in someone.

And, of course, the right wingers are just loving this. In their world view this is just another reason to dismiss progressives as a bunch of molly-coddling dogooders who can’t or won’t face reality. They’re attacking “big government” (again) because the DOE and the DOJ have inserted themselves into our lives by shifting their classifications of unacceptable speech. They’re calling for the reformation of universities and colleges to include more teachers with conservative credentials.

Update (9/3): And, alas, The Donald has seized on the idiocy of this new PC movement. Assaults on polictical correctness appear in virtually every speech, attacks on crackpot liberals who want to censor ordinary folks are sprinkled throughout his press conferences and the progressive wing is made to look like a bunch of mewling babies who can’t handle even the simplest verbal assault. It sure as hell isn’t helping our cause.

It’s really getting ugly out there.

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[1] Both The New Gamblers Bible and Poker, Life and Other Confusing Things were written in gender-neutral language, a fact which even my editor didn’t notice.