The Curmudgeon Speaks

So much regarding the future of this country seems to come down to who it is we are willing to trust. The execution of many government functions depends on employees who work across different administrations and are there to do a job and not work for a party. This is being challenged by Trump who seems to have brought a belief from his business experience that all employers of an organization work for him. Perhaps he can be forgiven for this misguided assumption as the business experience he touts was not leading a publicly traded organization. Being responsible to an organization is very different from assuming the organization is responsible to you. The danger is rather than adapt Trump seems trying to change the organization which in this case is the country. For all the concerns with what is democratic socialism, we should be more concerned with an emerging dictatorship.

When you spend two months away from what you describe as your home base, it is a little different than taking what most would describe as a trip. You have decided to live somewhere else for a while. You do many of the same things you would do when at home because seeking new adventures on a daily basis is not the way most of us live our lives. Cindy might disagree as she sees daily life as an adventure, but I am not the same live each day to the fullest type person.

I spend about the same amount of time here reading and writing I would spend at home. The coffee shop changes and the route to walk there is different and warmer, but the core activities are very similar.

I have been listening to Blue Highways a book by William Least-Heat Moon I first read several decades ago. There are so many books I want to read that I have already purchased that rereading a book from “the early years” is very rare. Blue highways refers to secondary roads which at the time the book was written were blue on paper maps. My appreciation of the book is based on the quality of the author’s ability to write very interesting prose telling the stories of his adventures linking to my own interest in travel by car for extended trips. Finding the book again as an audiobook available from one of the libraries I frequent was great.

One of the interesting things about my second exploration of this book is the addition of all of the life experiences I have accumulated since I first read this book. Least-Heat Moon’s route roughly followed the perimeter of the country and he describing passing through some of the territory I have experienced. During this listen I appreciated his description of his journey through northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. I have walked across the origins of the Mississippi at the location he described and the town of Danbury is northern Wisconsin is the closest town to our Wisconsin lake home. He describes Danbury as dismal, but he may have passed through at night this time of year when he should have been in Hawaii.

I highly recommend this author’s writing. His capacity to tell stories about the places he travels through is a gift I greatly admire. He has a way of describing people tied to their places in the country that offers many lessons. 

Once in a while, I decide to repost something I wrote previously. Some content does not seem to become dated and this is a way of brining this material to what may be a new audience. This one is from 2013.

I may be too easily annoyed, but “insider speak” annoys me. Educators should know better than use unique terminology as part of their mission is to communicate with a broad audience. When they constantly refer to PD, SAMR, NAEP, and CCSS, I am guessing the commentary that follows has little impact on the general public.

However, maybe my attitude is functioning as a personal liability. You must set yourself apart to gain recognition. Perhaps I should try to create my own “in group” and see if I can generate an acronym that I can claim as a special insight.

[pause for 5 minutes of thinking time]

I have it. I call my new education model LOYO. I considered for a moment calling my model PPD, as in personal professional development, but decided that I am a fan of the vowel. LOYO encourages individualization, personalization, and differentiation. These must be really good things because I keep reading that these are important processes. LOYO is Learning On Your Own. Because I am a tech guy, I will first emphasize a unique version of LOYO that will hence be referred to as OLOYO (online learning on your own).

For those of you interested in becoming OLOYOs, you need to develop tools that feed you information for REFLECTION (another one of those insider terms). I kept thinking reflection was some kind of STEM term related to mirrors and physics, but it turns out after some OLOYO that it means thinking. See how well my model works for LOYO.

When engaged in LOYO via OLOYO, it is important to recognize that you are likely to have personal biases and these may limit the content you access for REFLECTION. To overcome this known bias, I recommend you both follow some folks who say things you find helpful (see Feedly) and also seek broader input in case your selection of experts runs to those I would refer to as a DOOFUS (not an acronym, but you can access a definition through Webster. To protect yourself from the DOOFUS effect, I recommend Google Alerts.

Follow this blog for further LOYO developments. Become a LOYO promoter. Become LOYO certified so you can add another honorary to your email signature block. You do not have to seek my approval or attend one of my workshops to secure this certification. In keeping with the spirit of LOYO, you are encouraged to certify yourself. I am working on some rubrics to guide your SE (self evaluation), but until I have another five minutes to develop the SE model and associated rubrics, you are on your own.

So much of what I read lately concerns trying to understand the spread of disinformation and possibly what educators can do about it. I thought a recent Wired article on the topic could be helpful to members of the general public trying to understand the issue.

The Wired writer compared the issue of misinformation to the trafficking of illegal drugs and used this comparison to illustrate why the decision some make (go after Facebook or Twitter) may not achieve a long term solution.

My take on the logic of the Wired piece was not that the online companies or their top executives are not responsible for some portion of the problem, but the comparison identifying the multiple parties to the issue was helpful. Like drug lords and drug cartels the tech execs seem an easy target. Like the war on drugs, elimination of the drug execs and their organizations do not eliminate what has become a demand. Another company is likely to rise up to provide for the need. Such companies are not intentionally evil, but open to how people seem to want to use social media.

A total solution will require an effort to address those who consume and encourage disinformation through their likes and shares. The mechanisms here are difficult to address. Confirmation bias in the general case is involved and in the case off some categories of disinformation a particularly damaging form of confirmation bias based in personal identify. In the most difficult cases we function somewhat like fans of a particular sports team or perhaps practitioners of a specific religion. Our commitments are biased by what is an important component of how we have come to understand ourselves. Changing a structure of understanding at this core level is very challenging.

I heard that the Trump approval ratings had been improving. I thought this might just be a Fox News thing, but I trust Gallup and these survey folks say this is the case. The findings that led to the impeachment, the obviousness of all of the other character flaws, the anti-Obama rationale for deprecating the advances in health insurance, the increase in the National Debt to fund a trillion or more increase in tax forgiveness for large corporations, the horrendous treatment of desperate people trying to come to this country, etc. do not allow me a way to rationalize this trend.

In the area of research that attempts to understand this type of personal decision making, this type of thing is described as a function of personal identify. We all bend facts to our own models of the world. The gap Gallup documents between Democratic and Republican support for Trump is now at an all-time high. This is what the role of identity can do. When issues become associated with a political party – climate change makes a good example – the facts play a much diminished role. If you identify as a Republican and climate change has become associated as a democratic thing, you find yourself questioning the scientists or ignoring efforts to address climate change. Educated people should know better, but they find themselves falling in line nonetheless.

I see no other way to account for the way people can find value in Trump. There is so much that must be ignored or explained away. This is how identity politics works.

If we are going to worry about politically emotional labels, we should be more worried about the movement of our government toward a dictatorship than socialism.

This story from USA Today got me thinking about the labels applied to politicians and policies.

Sometimes a headline alone is worth a post. Hard to know whether the befuddled lawmaker or the paper bothering with such blather deserves the attention of our amusement. I think the lack of understanding people have for the meaning of words that seem to generate an emotional reaction is a problem. There is a vast difference between a socialist form of government and a government that takes action in circumstances that offer a public good. Our highway system does not make our government socialist. Our protections that are supposed to assure clean water and healthy foods do not make our government socialist. Our government that organizes a military for our collective protection and taxes us accordingly does not make our government socialist. We would do better to be concerned with a leader who seems to think he is all powerful (a dictator) than to throw the word socialist around as a slight against those who hope that the government will require certain actions for the general good. Try substituting the word empathetic when a collective action you value is described as socialistic.

It is the third party cookies that irritate me. When I use a free online service I feel some responsibility to trade information I generate when using that site for access. What I don’t think I owe that company is the information I generate when visiting other sites. Third party cookies are the reason things show up as ads in Facebook that address something you have been doing online but not something you have been doing within Facebook (good explanation of first party and third party cookies).

Facebook claims it allows you to opt out of the way it uses off-site information to target you for ads. I hope the following quick tutorial will be enough to explain how you can set up Facebook to do this. You start by opening your settings.

There are a couple of ways to turn off this activity, but I am showing a way to first check on the information about you that Facebook has accumulated off-site. You will want to select the setting showing your Facebook information and then the option showing off-Facebook activity.

You should be able to learn about Off-Facebook activity.

This is how bad it gets. My off-site activity involved information from 137 apps and web sites. Now, to manage this use select the manage option appearing under more options.

Here will find the slider to turn off or on the collection of off-Facebook information.

Bots have a bad reputation and sometimes they do bad things. The bot activity that has been in the news allowed a few individuals from a foreign government to relay content through multiple bots so that it might appear that a message was coming from many people.

I think Resist Bot is OK. Here is a Wikipedia description of the Resist Bot project. The intent of Resist bot is to make it easier for citizens to send messages to politicians and to post this same information to other outlets if desired. Let’s stick to politicians. Recent political events may have made you upset with or happy with your Representative or Senator. Resist bot allows you to send a comment.

Resist bot works with text messaging. You text “resist” to 50409 and then follow the instructions. The bot will interact with you to set up an account and to send a “letter” or “call” to the individuals you are trying to contact. Just to be clear, the service allows you to communicate with the politicians that represent you and not others you might want to reach with a message. I assume the program uses your ZIP code to make this connection. I would like to communicate with other politicians who represent the state I lived in just a few years ago, but I can understand why the developers did not want to allow blanketing of politicians with messages. The content would then lose effectiveness.

I had some concern with providing my phone number and my email address, but I pretty much ignore phone calls I don’t recognize and my email address offers a way for the politicians representing me to respond. I sent a message to my Senators after yesterday’s Senate hearing and one did respond. I am guessing most responses are fairly generic and not actually from my Senator, but I still think commenting is important.

I provide some screens below to offer you a way to anticipate what the experience looks like.

You may or may not have caught this recent news story within the haze of recent political stories. The National Archive decided to digitally degrade parts of photos containing imagery that was critical of the President and other political commentary from signs carried during the Woman’s March of 2017. As most historians would likely argue, this modification of actual history is antithetical to the goals of recording history as it is for later consideration. The National Archives later apologized for their action, but in some ways the damage was done.

My reaction immediately caused my memory to focus on images I remember when working on a history project showing drinking fountains for blacks and whites and an image of the outside of a movie theater directly blacks to use the stairs to their place in the balcony. Losing the honesty of such facts undervalues any study of the political record.

Our youngest daughter happened to be in Chicago during the Women’s March for 2020. She sent me these images when I mentioned what I had read about the National Archives.