Bret Stephen's and His Lack Of A Comprehensive Comment About National Character. Hanson Comments and 3 M's - Merkel, Meltdown and American Math.

Translation Not Needed

And:

A couple was invited to a swanky costume party  The Mrs. got a terrible headache and told her husband to go to the party alone. He being a devoted husband protested, but she argued and said she was going to take some aspirin and go to bed and there was no need for his good time being spoiled by not going. So he took his costume and away he went.

The wife, after sleeping soundly for about an hour, awakened without pain and, as it was still early, decided to go the party. Since her husband did not know what her costume was, she thought she would have some fun by watching her husband to see how he acted when she was not with him.

She joined the party and soon spotted her husband cavorting around on the dance floor, dancing with every nice looking woman he could, and copping a little feel here and a little kiss there.

His wife sidled up to him and being a rather seductive babe herself, he left his     current partner high and dry and devoted his time to the new babe that had just arrived. She let him go as far as he wished,naturally, since he was her husband.

Finally, he whispered a little proposition in her ear and she agreed.

So off they went to one of the cars and had a quickie. Just before unmasking at midnight , she slipped away, went home, put the costume away and got into bed, wondering what kind of explanation he would make for his behavior.

She was sitting up reading when he came in, and she asked what kind of a time he had.

He said: 'Oh, the same old thing. You know I never have a good time when you're not there.'

'Did you dance much ?'

 I'll tell you, I never even danced one dance. When I got there, I met Pete, Bill Brown, and some other guys and we went into the den and played poker all evening.    But you're not going to believe what happened to the guy I loaned my costume to!!'

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From time to time I engage in a variety of discordant activities and thought processes that result in a series of free associations.

I am having my first reaction to the chemo pills I take and it  feels like it would had I eaten a slice of exceedingly hot pizza and burned the roof of my mouth. At the same time, I am reading a book by Robert Hughes entitled: "American Visions: The Epic History of Art In America." It is a very comprehensive book, not an easy read but fascinating.

Hughes' is my anti-dote (the definition  of antidote: A remedy or other agent to counteract the effects of a poison - which chemo certainly is.) Because it is chock full of anecdotal commentary my mind drifts.

At the same time, I am also writing memos and thinking about today's election and what Bret Stephens recently wrote regarding Trump's character.  If that is not enough of a confluence of disparate thoughts,I had a free association in which I asked myself why Bret did not mention Bill Maher's recent comment  regarding what Maher wished for in the same article as evidence of one's character?

If you recall, Maher, who I find repugnant and "snarky" (there is no such word but it sounds like it fits him) recently stated he wished we would go into a recession which would take down Trump. In essence, in order to harm Trump, Maher was willing to harm the nation while heaping misery upon fellow citizens.

I find such a thought contemptible enough but to feel he could express it without condemnation  and/or public rebuke from fair minded op ed writers was beyond comprehension.

Stop and think about someone who wishes people lose employment, with all its personal indignities, traumas and insecurities, in order to bring down a president whom you hated.  That kind of reasoning defines my own contempt for those who would go to any length, including assassination, to satisfy their own warped feelings. If this is the kind of national character the mass media folks are unwilling to challenge and large numbers of radicalized citizens hold,  then we really have reached a state of depravity from which we cannot recover.

My mouth may be inflamed but my ears remain sensitive to such heresy and Bret may be selective in his discussion of Trump's character but I cannot let it pass without comment..

The next 24 hours will be a defining period for out nation. (See 1 and 1a below.)

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Basic math education. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) .

CNN’s Existential War With Trump By Victor Davis Hanson It may be unwise or monotonous for President Trump to harp on CNN as a purveyor of “fake news.” And the constant refrain “enemy of the people” should not be used of a media outlet, even one as prejudicial as CNN. Yet Trump’s obsessions with CNN are largely reactive, not preemptive. After just 100 days in office, before his own agendas could even be enacted, the liberal Shorenstein Center at Harvard reported that 93 percent of CNN’s coverage of the Trump Administration was already negative. Just one in every 13 CNN stories proved positive. That radically asymmetrical pattern (shared by NBC/MSNBC) had never been seen before in the history of comparable media analytics. No one at CNN sought to explain the imbalance, leaving the impression that the news organization had more or less joined the progressive opposition. In his serial pushbacks against CNN, if Trump has perhaps surpassed the invective of Barack Obama’s own periodic dismissals of Fox News, he has clearly not ordered his Justice Department to monitor the communications of any CNN reporter, in the manner of Eric Holder’s surveillance of Fox News journalist James Rosen. Associated Press journalists are not being monitored by the administration as they were during the Obama years. That difference is oddly never cited by CNN reporters who are want to decry their own treatment by the administration, but who were not particularly vocal when their professional colleagues were once placed under electronic surveillance. Naming Names But most importantly, both Chris Cillizza and White House correspondent Jim Acosta are quite mistaken in their most recent denials of CNN reporters as purveyors of fake news, and, even more so, in dismissing such accusations as “just empty rhetoric.” Cillizza complains without irony that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “can’t name specific outlets or specific people who are enemies of the people or purveyors of fake news because the whole thing is just empty rhetoric solely designed to motivate base voters.” Acosta went further, challenging Sanders to “have the guts” to “state which outlets, which journalists are the enemy of the people.” Didn’t CNN reporter Manu Raju in December 2017 falsely assert that Donald Trump, Jr. had advanced access to the hacked WikiLeaks documents? Such a false charge smeared Trump, Jr. and it may have spawned all sort of subsidiary rumors that he was on the verge of a Mueller indictment. What were Raju’s sources for such an inaccurate charge? Why did CNN anchor Chris Cuomo falsely assert that only the media (i.e., outlets like CNN) could download the hacked email trove of John Podesta—as if it was illegal for anyone else to do the same (e.g., “Remember, it is illegal to possess these stolen documents. It is different from the media. So everything you learn about this, you are learning from us.”)? What CNN legal counsel gave him such absurd advice? Why did CNN’s own “unnamed source”—namely Lanny Davis—later deny he had ever given CNN any information that Donald Trump had advance warning of a meeting between Russian interests and Donald Trump, Jr.? Why did not the authors of the false story, Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen, retract in full the allegation, or at least explain exactly why their not-so-anonymous source Lanny Davis was claiming that he never told the three that his client Michael Cohen had professed foreknowledge of the meeting on the part of Trump. Why were Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris, the supposed dream team of CNN investigative reporters, all forced to resign from CNN? Was it their collective but false report that Anthony Scaramucci was connected to a $10-billion Russian investment fund? What were the sources for that fake account? Did that news account hurt the Trump transition? Would they have been so fast and loose with the truth in the case of president-elect Hillary Clinton? Might they instead have reported at about the same time on the Clinton’s campaign funding of the Fusion/GPS/Christopher Steele project? CNN’s Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus, remember, also had erroneously reported that former FBI Director James Comey would in congressional testimony soon contradict President Trump’s prior assertion that he was told by Comey that he was not under investigation. That report proved false—and yet it too had helped to whip up anti-Trump hysteria on the eve of the Comey appearance. Why is it that one can easily predict the particular political slant of these fake news stories? This Is CNN’s Shoddiness Even in trivial matters, CNN has fudged the truth and always in a predictably biased direction—as, for example, in its selective viewing of a video that suggested Trump buffoonishly had preempted the Japanese Prime Minister and overfed fish during a joint photo-op (“Trump feeds fish, winds up pouring entire box of food into koi pond.”). In truth, Trump simply followed the feeding model of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Earlier, CNN had reported that singer Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the music of her father Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”—a story of her purported anger that Sinatra denied. During the lead-up to the Neil Gorsuch nomination announcement, CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny inaccurately announced that the Trump White House was purportedly “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest” by creating two “identical Twitter pages” for both possible nominees Justices Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman. Later Zeleny sheepishly retracted that falsehood. The shoddiness in reporting about Trump and the occasional flat-out inaccurate new stories reflect a toxic network culture in which partisanship is now standard and apparently to be expected. A certain furor over Trump often erupts in repeated, obscene anti-Trump and unprofessional outbursts of CNN journalists, contributors, and anchors—whether Anderson Cooper trashing a pro-Trump panelist by profanely retorting, “If he took a dump on his desk, you would defend it!” or CNN religious scholar Reza Aslan referring to Trump as “this piece of sh-t,” or perhaps the late CNN host Anthony Bourdain joking in an interview about poisoning Trump or CNN New Year’s Eve host Kathy Griffin’s infamous photo-pose holding a facsimile of Trump’s severed head. After a while, the pattern becomes undeniable. We saw such biased activism during the Ferguson drama when the entire newsroom of CNN panelists (on the supposedly straight news “CNN Newsroom”) in December 2014 adopted an on-air “hands up, don’t shoot” photo-op pose—an emulation of the false narrative surrounding the shooting death of Michael Brown that was proven fantastical by grand jury testimonies and an investigation by Eric Holder’s Justice Department. Apparently, CNN has created a landscape in which not only are journalists likely to relax professional standards when it comes to reporting on Trump, but there is a sloppy environment of crude disparagement of the candidate and later president, and a general indifference to journalistic ethics. The permeating ethos is perhaps best illustrated by the CNN staffers working with CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux during the campaign who were caught on a hot mic joking about the crash of Trump’s jet. CNN commentator Donna Brazile leaked a primary debate question to candidate Hillary Clinton, and then shamelessly lied that she had not done so. CNN panelist Julia Joffe (previously fired from Politico for tweeting that the president and his daughter Ivanka might have had an incestuous relationship) claimed that Trump had radicalized more people than had ISIS. CNN contributor and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has suggested that President Trump is being duped as if he was a de facto Russian asset, while another CNN contributor, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, on more than one occasion has compared Trump and his policies in various ways to Hitler, U.S. immigration enforcement to the Holocaust, and America under Trump to Nazi Germany. CNN anchor Don Lemon recently asserted that “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men”—another false assertion, given that radical Islamist terrorists have killed far more Americans in terrorist acts than have white men, whether left-wing or right-wing, and despite the fact that while “white men” constitute about a third of the U.S. population, Islamists constitute a mere fraction. At least Christiane Amanpour (“I believe in being truthful not neutral”) was intellectually honest when she asserted—in some sense echoing the confessions of New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg—that journalists could not and should not be neutral reporters any longer, given their low opinion of Trump and their own belief that he is untrustworthy and a threat to the republic. Welcome to the Echo Chamber Given the fabrications and outright falsehoods that were critical to the selling of Obamacare, from those of Barack Obama to Jonathan Gruber’s, I doubt any credible journalist would have dared state that they could no longer stay neutral in reporting Obama Administration policies. What followed the fabrications of Obamacare were Ben Rhodes’ later admissions of creating an echo chamber by which he orchestrated all sorts of narratives among incompetent and compliant young reporters, or Susan Rice’s serial lies about the Benghazi deaths, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, the complete removal of WMD from Syria, and denials that she had requested unmaskings of Trump associates swept up in the Obama Administration’s FISA warrant surveillance. In fact, the duty of a journalist is to stay neutral and to report the truth, at least as it can be determined by testimonies, evidence, motive, and common sense—without worry whether such reporting injures or aids a particular politician or agenda. In answer to both Cillizza and Acosta, unfortunately CNN has serially issued false reports, has had to fire hosts, contributors, and reporters, and has had its anchors and panelists engage in wild ahistorical attacks on Trump and traffic in racialist stereotypes and obscenity. The names of those who have abused the journalistic ethos and the regrettable failure of CNN to uphold media standards are a matter of record. The best way to stop the chronic Trump attacks on the veracity of CNN is not to unleash a rude and boisterous Acosta to argue endlessly with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but simply to ensure that CNN news reports are fact-checked and not in need of retractions or firings, that CNN hosts, contributors, and anchors do not stoop to profanity, scatology, racism, and ahistorical comparisons to Stalin and Hitler, and that CNN’s staff and hosts do not joke about the president being killed through plane crashes and decapitation.

1a)The Great Meltdown

By Victor Davis Hanson

Every 20 to 50 years in Germany, things start unraveling. Germans feel aggrieved. Ideas and movements gyrate wildly between far left and far right extremes. And the Germans finally find consensus in a sense of victimhood paradoxically expressed as national chauvinism. Germany's neighbors in 1870, 1914, 1939 — and increasingly in the present — usually bear the brunt of this national meltdown.

Germany is supposed to be the economic powerhouse of Europe, its financial leader, and its trusted and responsible political center. Often it plays those roles superbly. But recently, it's been cracking up — in a way that is hauntingly familiar to its European neighbors. On mass immigration, it is beginning to terrify the nearby nations of Eastern Europe. On Brexit, it bullies the British. On finance, it alienates the southern Europeans. On Russia, it irks the Baltic States and makes the Scandinavians uneasy by doing business with the Russian energy interests. And on all matters American, it increasingly seems incensed.

Certainly, Germany has done some unbelievably strange things in the last ten years. In a fit of fear, after the Japanese Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown in 2011, and in a huff about climate change, Berlin more or less abruptly junked traditionally generated electrical power and opted for inefficient and unreliable "green" renewable wind and solar — despite the less than Mediterranean nature of its climate and warnings of the financial downside. The result is that electricity costs have climbed 50 percent in recent years and are among the most expensive in the developed world — and electricity itself is sometimes scarce. In response to shortfalls in power generation, the German energy industry for now is looking at solutions like coal-fired plants, buying nuclear-generated electricity from its neighbors, and cutting deals with Vladimir Putin for natural gas. In other words, Germany spiraled from the one extreme of green idealists to the other of dirty coal, while counting on others to export their electricity into Germany.

Immigration is similar. A bipolar Germany cannot just take in a limited and manageable number of genuine refugees, hope to assimilate them — and then keep quiet about its resulting sense of noblesse oblige. Instead, in a little over a year, Berlin enthusiastically opened its borders and accepted over a million migrants who were mostly unvetted and from the Middle East and North Africa, defending this radical policy with virtue sloganeering about German magnanimity ("we can do this"). Until recently, a mostly homogenous Germany had little experience with diversity, much less with assimilating and integrating mostly impoverished, male, Muslim immigrants. The result of these massive influxes from the Middle East has often been chaos. In an Orwellian sort of good-deed imperialism, Germany hectors its worried, smaller, and far more vulnerable European neighbors to embrace the nearly suicidal German model of open European borders.

Germany has always had a "Jewish Problem." In the late nineteenth-century, German academics became obsessed with pseudo-research about eugenics and racial purity — which often led to talk of both Aryan purity and crass anti-Semitism that played out in the real world with disastrous results during the Holocaust. After World War II, Germany tried to make amends through introspection, some reparations, and the subsidized sales of military supplies to Israel. Yet Germany seems to once again be embracing anti-Semitism quite aside from its fierce opposition to Israel. Dieter Graumann, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has warned of the present climate: "These are the worst times since the Nazi era. On the streets, you hear things like "the Jews should be gassed, the Jews should be burned. We haven't had that in Germany for decades.

Anyone saying those slogans isn't criticizing Israeli politics, it's just pure hatred against Jews: nothing else."

In response to the growing hatred, Felix Klein, Germany's recently appointed special envoy entrusted by the Merkel government with addressing the nation's growing anti-Semitism — much of it the result of the influx of Muslims — recently shrugged it off, simply pointing out that more and more Jews are leaving Germany: "It is quite understandable that those who are scared for the safety of their children would consider leaving."

During the recent decade of tension between North and South European Union nations, we saw a similar trend play itself out — a sort of self-righteous veneer plastered over cold, hard power-mongering. Germany knew its continental mercantile system hinged on easy credit to weak EU members on the Mediterranean to buy German imports on credit. When they predictably defaulted on German loans, "shocked" German bankers and pension holders understandably went ballistic. They offered self-righteous lectures on Teutonic thrift and parsimony — but only years after leveraged BMWs and Mercedes had poured into far poorer Athens and Rome.

Militarily, the radical about-faces are the same. Germany has gone from spiked helmets to Weimar pacifism, from the Waffen SS to Potemkin divisions and gossamer air wings. Berlin never quite seems to realize that had it just followed the classical golden mean — strong armed forces under the auspices of Democratic government — it would have neither scared its neighbors nor required 70 years of subsidized postwar defense dependence.

Despite America's role in the Cold War protecting West Germany and later unifying East and West, Germans now conveniently poll as among the most anti-American people in the EU. And, Germany polls the most anti-Trump, which is not surprising given Trump's harangues about fairer NATO defense spending and trade deficits, both implicit denunciations of Germany's mercantile trade policies, and virtual disarmament and reliance on the U.S. military.

Some historical context is also necessary. Germans often inexplicably fail to grasp that Americans did not plan on landing in France in either 1917 or 1944 — or staying on in Germany until 2018 (there are currently 35,000 U.S. troops still stationed in the country). Much of American foreign policy over the 75 years between 1917 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was predicated on either defending Germany's neighbors from German aggression, or defending Germany itself from Russian invasion. Trump's election showed that most Americans probably want those U.S. troops out of Germany (and a lot of other places too) as much as Germans now claim to wish them gone. Good distance may make good NATO friends.

For all of its growing animus toward America, Germany has still not met its promised 2 percent expenditures of GDP on defense according to NATO's requirements. Yet it still runs up huge trade deficits with the United States ($65 billion a year). Germany also enjoys the world's largest account surplus at $287 billion — warping international trade as the country discourages imports and calibrates its economy mostly for export. The Euro is, by Berlin's design, still undervalued, and allows the Germans a commercial competitiveness likely impossible were they still to use the Deutsche Mark.

Amid the crises in the Middle East, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China, most Westerners assumed that Germany, given its size and dynamic economy, would continue to be a model Western leader and a calming force in a historically unstable Europe. Instead, it seems to be entering a dangerous phase when at the zenith of its wealth and power, it nevertheless pouts and blames. Berlin feels snookered by Southern Europeans, ignored by a departing United Kingdom, not given sufficient deference by Eastern Europeans, and resentful of America.

In a perfect world, Germany would address its frustrations through introspection. After all, no one forced Berlin to take in over a million problematic refugees from the Middle East. No one forced it to export goods on easy credit to leveraged buyers who visibly lived far above their means. No one forced it to renege on its NATO defense promises and responsibilities. No one forced it to have a long and catastrophic history with the Jewish people. And no one forces it to expect perpetual U.S. military protection while continually setting record trade surpluses.

Despite the long postwar history of U.S.-German friendship, and despite Germany's financial and economic power, the country is becoming psychologically isolated, if not unhinged. While Germans broadcast their anti-Americanism, they seem oblivious that Americans may likewise be tiring of German petulance.

If we are entering yet another historical period of dangerous German resentment, the ensuing result will bode ill for everyone involved.

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2)INTRO . . .

Last week, I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58. The counter girl took my $2. As I was digging for my change, I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her.  She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register.  I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help.  Why do I tell you this?

Because of the evolution in teaching math since the 1950's:

1. Teaching Math In 1950's

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100.  His cost of production is 4/5 of the price.  What is his profit?

2. Teaching Math In 1960's

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100.  His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80.  What is his profit?

3. Teaching Math In 1970's

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100.  His cost of production is $80.  Did he make a profit?

4. Teaching Math In 1980's

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100.  His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20.  Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

  

5. Teaching Math In 1990's

A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands.  He does this so he can make a profit of $20.  What do you think of this way of making a living?

Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes? (There are no wrong answers, and if you feel like crying, it's ok.)

6. Teaching Math In 2000's

A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands.  He does this so he can make a profit of $20.  What do you think of this way of making a living?

If you have special needs or just feel you need assistance because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, childhood memories, criminal background, then don't answer and the correct answer will be provided for you.  There are no wrong answers.

7. Teaching Math In 2010's

Un hachero vende una carrtada de maderapara 100 pesos.  El costo de la producciones es 80 pesos.  Cuanto dinero ha hecho?

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