Shaky Danny

I am a big fan of the unsaid obvious.  Perhaps the best example was the fact that AIDS is passed by anal intercourse.  Sorry Magic. This deference of reality to propriety demonstrates the dangers of hypocrisy.  I remember the idiot virgin clubs where they proudly refrained from sex, because of all the dangers, then got that goofy sly look and mumbled about other things you could do.  Lazy eye is a good current example. If you look up strabismus, they will tell you that the cause is unknown. This is a lie. If you look up fetal alcohol syndrome, one of the symptoms is strabismus. It may be that there are other causes. But fetal alcohol causes strabismus. If you have a cast to your eye, perhaps your arms and your temper are a little short; chances are Mom was hitting it. Some people might consider this a lapse in good taste, but I think it is preferable to recognize a developmental disorder rather than a hereditary one. If they were truthful rather than pusill...

One of the first things you notice is how autobiographical most of the material is. I guess people write about the things that matter to them. One time this guy brought a fairly long manuscript, we are only supposed to read a few pages; he started at the beginning and read all the way to the end. It was about child molestation. At first I was surprised by his imagination, and then it occurred to me that he might actually know his subject. My stomach turned. No one interrupted him or asked him to cut it short. Perhaps the material was gripping or perhaps like me they had all shut down. I don’t remember what he said. At the end he shoved his manuscript back into its manila envelope and awaited our comments. A woman across from me took out a small pistol and shot the man through his forehead. The man next to me said: -Mine is really short.

For thousands of years Jews have had a prohibition against mixing meat with milk. This is a lot of work. It involves separate sets of dishes, and by separate I mean compulsively separate. In the last hundred years some of our rules have found scientific justification. One might suppose that correlations were noticed between behaviors and consequences, but given the short life spans it is puzzling. A lot of this stuff didn’t make sense until we saw germs under the microscope. I can imagine some saying: -I defecated near the well and nothing happened. Torah sometimes cloaks common sense rules in mysticism. If they told men that sex after childbirth is bad for the mother it might not have made an impression. I knew an obstetrician whose children were born nine months apart. Telling him: -She’s unclean, dammit, might have been more effective. Sorry to go mystical but there is the possibility that the prohibition on mixing meat and milk may one day find hygienic justification. Perhap...

I doubt that most of you still read newspapers. This Sunday we read the Tribune in bed while drinking coffee. Christine did have her laptop, which she used to plan our bike trip. Then she spoiled the day by dragging me bicycling in the forest preserves. It is not surprising that the Tribune has endorsed Rauner a Republican for the position of governor over Quinn a Democrat. It would be remarkable if they had chosen the opposite. The Tribune has always been a Republican paper. I suspect that their decision has far more to do with association than ideology or tradition. Their justification for the decision is that they regard Rauner as the more subversive candidate; that he will: -Shake things up. Illinois recently suffered another governor embarrassment when it was determined that we had elected a flat out crook. The embarrassment was that while Blagojevich was eager to sell, he didn’t have anything worth buying. That is how irrelevant the governor’s office is. The Tribune is...

Trip Advisor recently picked The Art Institute of Chicago as its best museum . I like museums that have a flavor of subversion to them. The worst museum in the world might be Epcot Center. It doesn’t claim museum status but it is supposed to represent Future World, sort of a perpetual exposition. There is nothing subversive about Epcot. Drained of content it is nothing more than a people containment facility, which may well represent their view of the future. My current favorite is the Door County Historical Museum in Sturgeon Bay Wisconsin. It is jammed with the usual historical knickknacks. They have a discussion of fish boils. There is also a fascinating wildlife diorama constructed by a true obsessive. In the middle of the museum is a leftover jail cell with the key. While I was there a girl locked her little brother in it. What little girl hasn’t wished to do that? That is what a museum is for. My favorite exhibit is the Mathematica Exhibit . It has moved around a bit. Ori...

At the end of 1971 the draft had ended and my school no longer had any ethical reason to keep me and I flunked out. At the beginning of 1972 I obtained employment as a medical records clerk at University of Chicago Hospitals. The mother of a girlfriend quit her job as an admitting clerk in the hospital and recommended me as a replacement. So part way through 1972 I became the night admitting clerk working from midnight to 8 in the morning at Chicago Lying In, the obstetrics and gynecology hospital at University of Chicago Hospitals. Termination of pregnancy was illegal and every few weeks I would admit from one to three emergency patients for botched abortions. I suppose the illegal operation would do all its patients on those particular evenings. After a few months it dawned on me that those I admitted were the ones who had made it to the emergency room and if there were these many botched procedures there must be others who had not made it to the emergency room. At that point I...

My job is to find some way to keep the mosquito from spreading malaria. Mosquitoes evolved from biting flies. Over time, they developed efficient ways to extract blood, and became dependent on it for the nutrients for breeding. Their life cycle hints at a difficult and complex evolution. They are the essential vector for malaria. Malaria also has a complex life cycle hinting at a complex evolution in the company of the mosquito. There has been a lot of futile research attempting to attack malaria directly. The research is futile because of malarias’ different life cycle changes. The plasmodium parasite has too many life stages. Singling out any particular one leaves the others and your medicine fails. If you wish to attack malaria then you must attack the mosquito. Malaria is one of the major detriments to human progress in the world. The genetic human disorder of sickle cell disease evolved as a natural defense to the scourge of malaria. In a time when so many species hav...

Christine dragged me through Kentucky this spring, and I strongly recommend it unless you dislike Bourbon, heat and bicycling through beautiful, hilly country. I don’t mind Bourbon. The greatest liabilities are the fried food and the pollen count. I found the reverence for the Civil War particularly irksome. I would have thought knowledge of that history would be accompanied by deep shame and bitter regret. They are planning to commemorate the Confederate assault on Frankfort , the state’s capital. This would kind of be like Chicago commemorating the Memorial Day massacre. In Kentucky they make a point of saying how Lincoln revered Henry Clay as the great compromiser. That Clay delayed the onset of the Civil War until the North had sufficient resources to win. Most historians regard the Southern Rebellion as yet another doomed cause. The industrialized North clearly superior to the doomed agrarian South, besotted with their romantic notions of cavalry. The Southern fantasy is w...

Nothing against Cate Blanchett, besides her difficult name but Bullock and Clooney were robbed. Gravity received precisely the wrong awards. Bullock and Clooney sold a ridiculous film. It’s dangerous to credulity to have science fiction slightly in the future. Tyson has already pointed out the hair issue, so I was ready for that. But the idea of somebody being able to grab anything not specifically designed for it with a pressurized glove was a total fail. Maybe they could loop their arm through something. The second time Bullock flipped on a hatch, I had to laugh, not exactly a quick learner. Not since Raging Bull have I enjoyed an actor getting slapped around so much. An astronaut estimating docking with a space station was outrageous. Try grabbing a speeding freight train and you get the idea. F=MA. People, who don’t understand that equation, and the resultant integration, think that they can somehow brace themselves rather than wear seat belts. We are talking about tonnage...

Password restriction rules are Vogon . The initial problem is that people choose simple passwords that are easy to remember. It’s like locking the screen door to let in the breeze. But when you restrict the universe of passwords that people can choose from you make it easier to hack. The fallacy is to apply the tougher passwords to the original universe of all passwords. People are still going to use passwords that they can remember within the more difficult rules. If you dumped the password files in the more restrictive environments you will find the same amount of redundancy. Before you start counting up the permutations, consider your own passwords, hopefully you have more than one. I’m sure that several of them are clever phrases that you believe are unique and fall within the restrictions. mIright?

In second grade our teacher Ms. Bowers introduced us to Cantor’s diagonal proofs. You are already familiar with this, of course. The rational numbers, the fractions, are listed with 1/1, ½, 1/3… on the top row, 1/1, 2/1, 3/1… in the first column and the diagonals always equal to 1: 1/1, 2/2, 3/3… and all the fractions in between. Then Cantor counts them by going up and down diagonally, zig-zagging between them. All the second graders accepted that. Then she showed us that the real numbers, say all the real numbers between .0000… and .9999…., were uncountable because no matter which way we listed them, she could generate a new one by going down the diagonal going on to infinity and generating a new one. Cantor liked diagonals. I may have lost some of you. I think the reason we got this as second graders is because we knew that if Ms. Bowers was explaining this to us, it couldn’t be that complicated. But adults believe that this stuff should be difficult. So if you don’t get thi...

Your tattoo is ugly and stupid. Your butt is so big because it gets the most use. Plastic surgery looks goofy. Loud is dumb. Check your medications, check them again. You are fat because you eat too much. Cubs fans are losers. Maybe if you move far away, people will think you are interesting, maybe not. I hope you trip on those pants. I hope you fall off those shoes. No one wants to hear it, any of it. Your poor kids are just as dumb and ugly as you. If you are that sick you might as well die. Everyone is lying to you. God hates you and she is right. The louder you play it, the deafer you get. You are annoying. You would make a lot more with an engineering degree. You are a lousy driver. It’s just sex. It’s just money. Your house is boring. Lesbians in a relationship disappear because they can’t get out the door. Please don’t friend me. Strauss sucks. It’s you. You are irritating, yes you are. You really don’t want to be noticed. If women ever discover short...

It is obvious by now that both Obama and Romney campaigns were trying to keep the race as close as possible in order to maximize fund raising. Our political campaigns are in the potlatch tradition. They provide the means for us to make payouts within the tax code without the appearance of impropriety. Very little of the activity has much to do with influencing votes. Dick Morris, the manic-depressive Delphi, argues that the United States electorate should be romanced like an adolescent with a constant barrage of upbeat optimism. When we step back from all the clutter there appear to be some fundamentals driving the voting choice. I believe that we can build a model for these beliefs based on our history. It is generally held that we Americans have no historical sense or memory but I contend that we do have a mythology based on our collective memory of historical events. One of our collective modern issues is that most of us, at least below a certain age, have never been in a true ...

Fritz, as Grandmother Hilda called him, his name was Fred, served as a lieutenant in the German army in World War I. He served on the western front, so he may have been fighting Americans. He won the Iron cross: -Everyone went over the top, except me and this other fellow. So, we looked at each other and decided it was better to be killed by the enemy than our own side. The job of the second line of the German army was to kill anyone in the first line who didn’t attack. We couldn’t find our guys, so we kept going; the other side must have withdrawn. Eventually our side caught up with us, so they gave us the medal. Years later, I realized that this is the story you tell when you don’t want to say what you did. When Fritz got taken into concentration camp, he wore that cross. They took it away from him. Hilda bribed a consulate for visas and got him and her family out of Germany. He was very calm describing the conditions in the camp except when he talked about them taking the c...

When you’re talking about police and soldiers, you’re essentially talking about a lot of guys who like to play Call Of Duty and Halo. It is difficult to appreciate the level of hypocrisy they confront and the depth of compartmentalization that this requires. Most of us at some fundamental level believe that there is some equitability or justice that plays its way out. This deep human desire is one of the foundations of religion. Whether it is reincarnation, heaven, rapture, eventual human development, fatalism or just the naïve joy at seeing the downfall of the wicked and horror at the victimization of the innocent, we all want the world to confirm our human perception of right and wrong. Justice, as any other ideal, is found as common or as rare and beautiful as your perception of it. The police dilemma is more extreme than the accommodations that we all make. Because of their situation, they stare into this moral disjoint every day and it can drive them mad. A good day for a poli...

I am not going to get into the issues of truth and justice because I am not a good advocate for that. I think there are some teachable moments in the Martin/Zimmerman case. It is so rare that children might pay attention to us older folk and this instance may give an opportunity. Given that all phone calls are recorded it seems to me that Mr. Martin’s last call should be subpoenaed from the phone company. There was some doubt about testimony that could be answered and it would give a more reliable timeline of events as well as state of mind. The precise GPS coordinates may be helpful as well. http://open.salon.com/blog/paul_j_orourke/2013/07/17/where_was_trayvon_the_missing_minutes There has been an observation that the administrations characterization of vigilante justice could also be applied to our foreign policy: http://www.salon.com/2013/07/18/holders_amazing_anti_drone_war_speech/ I think we should hunt down all vigilantes. There has been condemnation of Florida as unusua...

After Marx, academics had a serious issue: they had to build on his work without referencing it. This isn’t all that different from the difficulty academic psychologists had with Freud. Freud talked goofy and it sounded silly when you were writing grant proposals. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the latest attempt at building a rational sounding justification for talking therapy. Sounds like a prissy version of Freud to me. With Marx the difficulty was much more immediate. One citation and your funding disappeared. Poor Keynes had to throw in Calculus and talk all the way around his fulcrum to say that if you wanted to keep the game going you had to grab money away from the winners and keep the losers in the game. Sociology hung onto its journalist roots; that shred of honesty kept it halfway decent. But then they threw in statistics. The real ugliness was when they coopted Marx’s use of the word alienation. Alienation meant losing you inheritance, your position in your family...

Just recently some Americans from Bulgaria were warning me about the dangers of Muslim immigrants. I said: -If we can survive the Irish, we can survive anything. They responded. -You don’t understand. They are violent fundamentalists who want to impose their religion on everyone. Sam Kinison was the comic who made the observation that since people were making poor geographical choices, the solution was not to feed them but bring them somewhere else. In the case of the Irish, the British subjected them to a horrific policy of mono-culture, deprivation and abandonment . The United States did not conduct a military campaign of evacuation, but it came fairly close. It was a terrific social and economic burden for the United States. But it was far preferable to conducting a military campaign against the British on behalf of the Irish, although the Irish may have preferred that solution. In Syria we have two million Alawites who most likely want to leave. The sooner they get out ...

Someday Bicyclists will have to pass a driver’s test, get a license and have a plate on their bicycle just like motorists. Until then some observations on bicycle safety: To begin with, ride straight. The bicycle version of the two footed goof who drives with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake is the cyclist who ducks in and out of traffic to keep away from the cars. It is more difficult to keep track of you when you are playing games. If you are hiding from me it is no longer my fault. Just like the two footed moron who thinks they should stop more quickly, the phantom cyclist is un-teachable, certain that they are courteously providing more room. Next, understand one fundamental fact: you are a nuisance, and the longer I have to be in your company, the more of a nuisance you are. You are not a traffic warden. Police officers and crossing guards take a class in how to direct traffic. You haven’t taken that class. The moment you start waving your hands you have messed...

My girlfriend’s fixation on the Great Gatsby took us to Sands Point and the Howard Gould estate on Long Island. It became obvious how F. Scott Fitzgerald came to the device of a pedestrian accident. It is just hilly and winding enough to encourage adventurous driving. It also confirmed my initial premise on reading the book that Gatsby is Jewish. Fitzgerald’s new money/old money is an obvious McGuffin. If money has any sense at all it respects money. Old money is happy to accommodate new money and that is one of the many ways it survives. The bootlegging device is also specious. Many of the wealthy made some investments in this profitable enterprise. Visiting Hempstead house and hearing of the Gould’s who inspired Fitzgerald’s story it becomes clear that the one great social sin was being Jewish and not knowing your place. The Gould’s and Gatsby are yet more examples of the tragic mulatto. They didn’t see themselves as Jewish and they could not have acceptance as WASPs. Fitzgeral...

This should be read at poetry slams, open mic events, or wherever writers might congregate. All movies, romance, comedy or drama are really horror movies. The one thing that cinema does well is draw you into their premise and then surprise and shock you. That sense of outrage as you find yourself sympathizing with the loser, cheering for some victorious social deviant and then realizing its absurdity is what makes movies so entertaining. The last good action movie I saw was Heathers, the humor, violence and sex seemed believable to me. I liked the premise that adults would accept a rash of teenage suicides that were really homicides. Body Heat was good; the combination of mystery and sympathy for the villains enchanted me. The Three Stooges shorts were a respectable depiction of violence. Most action movies suck. The hero gets captured, the villain gets killed. This is because they have to have the dialogue between the hero and villain. In what way is that realistic? All problems a...

It was difficult for me working against fourth ward Alderman Timmy Evans. I liked his people. They were better than some, try as they might to distinguish themselves. I was carpet bagging, coming into their precinct/ward from my own ward, the fifth. There are fifty wards in Chicago. You would think that with fifty aldermen it wouldn’t be such a big deal, yet the aldermanic elections are the most hard fought. Mom had called me out at the last minute to poll watch for a new candidate, Toni Preckwinkle. I had to go to my job, so I was more like the old regular democratic workers who showed up in the morning and the night, to check in and get the count. Timmy’s people just wanted their three extra votes. The way it works is that they report their expected vote count. Then Timmy, or whoever, says: -That’s great, can you get me three more. This is somewhat insulting. Either you were holding back on your reported count, or you have some magic way of convincing people to change their ...

Some years ago, after many academic adventures I found myself taking an introductory programming course as a general requirement for graduation. The best part of the course was the computer problems book. It encapsulated all the uses for a computer up to the undergraduate senior level. I wanted to get my computer programs out of the way at the beginning of the semester so I could clear the decks for the important courses I was taking in mathematics. Several computer program problems were required, but some were electives; they were ranked in order of difficulty. In the back of the book, there was a list of how many lines of code each problem took. Cross referencing each list to get the most credit for the least lines of code lead to the problem called partitions. Partitions was defined as the number of different ways to sum integers to reach another integer. For instance 2 is 1 + 1, 3 is 1 + 1 + 1, 2 + 1, 1 + 2 and so on. The problem was to list the number of partitions for ea...

The short and simple answer is yes. The various authorities and means available to him are as diverse and varied as our government agencies. Most obviously as Commander in Chief the president commands the military. The military will carry out his orders. The military should also record his orders and report the consequences. Such reports should be available for review by authorized persons making it likely that they will become public. The military has overcome this oversight in the past by various well-known mechanisms. One legendary example was the order to troops in the Pacific to feed captives from their own rations. Another is to maintain favored units or individuals who well understand that their privileges depend on obedience and discretion. More normally certain areas or endeavors are categorized as off limits and subject to summary execution. J. Edgar Hoover was a remarkable instance. His homosexuality made him so vulnerable that he would carry out any executive order. The...

The major task in marketing is categorization. For instance once you have categorized groceries you can compare the UPC codes sent against the categorized items you have and kick out the ones that are new. Assuming that you have correctly categorized the current ones and no one complains then only the new items are subject to human review. Automating the process utilizing their item description seems like a tempting application until you consider the coffee problem. What is coffee? It is a product, a flavor, a color, and an appliance, at the very least. Cross referencing to the UPC manufacturer code gives an indication but you get the idea. The general solution to the coffee problem as mentioned above is one that humans routinely use. We cheat. That is, we make use of other information, such as the UPC manufacturer code. Open Salon has its own version of the coffee problem, the spam issue. How do we distinguish between someone venting their opinion and someone generating gibberis...

Mark Ames has written a rant against Michigan passing the right to work law: http://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/right-to-work Howard Zinn would have been proud. While all his facts seem correct, he has missed the point about the Wagner act. The reason for all the atrocities he lists and for the Wagner act itself was that the unions were winning. If the unions had been losing the act would not have passed. It is true that violence decreased after the act but that can also be explained as a consequence of the constraint on organizing. As the act itself makes clear the unions were winning because they had finally developed the rolling wildcat strike and the boycott. It would have been difficult to ban these two super weapons without giving something in return so the strike as an election process was developed. The established unions were willing to trade because they thought they had won and saw little hope of organizing the rest of the labor force. As we now can see this was a mistak...

The greatest and most difficult issue facing humanity is social segregation. This issue allows all other issues to fester unaddressed. The fictional town of Pottersville has one significant advantage over our real civic arrangements: Potter lives in Pottersville. The cost per student at The Cairo IL high school is $8,817. In Highland Park IL it is $17,636. That is because education, security, maintenance and recreation are funded by real estate taxes. The corporate ghetto, Oak Brook IL, is organized to minimize services in order to benefit the companies that reside there. Other suburbs minimize their education expenses because only the servants use those schools or the residents are old. The real estate tax itself could be very progressive. But using it to locally fund our services maximizes the benefits of social segregation. The cherry on top, isn’t it great to live in America, is that social segregation is then subsidized by our income tax code. Because the real estate tax is de...

Chanukah is packaged as some sort of gooey sweet adjunct of Christmas. Maccabees were sick twisted.  They hated the Greeks. That’s understandable: -Oh, you have a god; well of course we can include him.   -He’s the greatest? Hmm, work with me here, we conquered you, right?   -So, you study the law while we study the world, how interesting.   Here you are, proud of reading, writing and developing a sophisticated integrated society and the newbies are in charge, treating you like hicks. What we are celebrating is a fundamentalist homophobic resistance movement engaged in terrorist activities against a modern world civilization.