Here is a selection of items that caught my attention recently:

1. A headline from a local news outlet:

Police arrest suspect who harassed man with gun

In Seattle, gun owners have to expect to be harassed.  People here are prone to let their emotions get the better of them when they express themselves on matters of public policy.  Seattle is not only anti-gun.  It’s also anti-harassment.  It’s difficult to judge which of those attitudes will get the upper hand in any situation until it plays out.  In this case, the harassment must have been fierce.  Myself, I would have expected the police to arrest the person with the gun.  You never know.

2. The accountant for a company where I have an investment is late in producing some tax forms. She sent a message out to all of the company’s clients telling us that she was running late, something we already knew.  She closed with this sentence:

Please bare with me.

I don’t see how that’s going to help.  However, the forms haven’t arrived yet and I am thinking seriously of giving it a try.  I don’t see how it can make the situation worse.  On the other hand, it’s been chilly here for the last few days.  She is located in Texas, where the weather is warmer, so it’s less of a concern for her.

3. Another headline:

King County Council votes to put tax funding crisis centers on April ballot.

Here is a case of good intentions gone wrong.  King County, whose county seat is Seattle, has a median household income of about $106,000 per year.  That’s the highest in the state.  It’s not enough to put the county in the top 20 in the U.S., but it is still some 35% above the national median household income of $78,000.  At that level of income, a reasonable person has to expect a hefty tax bill.  Oliver Wendell Holmes said that he didn’t mind paying taxes because with them he bought civilization.  A visit to downtown Seattle might have caused the eminent jurist to reconsider.  Even so, if people are in crisis over their tax funding, that means they are doing well enough to pay for their own counseling.  The rest of us should not have to pay for someone else’s first-world problem.

Four points of view on the Chinese balloon that I have encountered in news reports or comments:

1. The balloon is on a spy mission.
2. The balloon’s mission is not to collect information. China launched it into US airspace to test the US government’s reaction.
3. It’s nothing more than a weather balloon that was blown off course.
4. The whole thing is a non-event. Besides, the US flies spy missions over China all the time.

The US military appears to believe the first statement.  In that case, why did they wait until Saturday, February 4 to deflate the balloon?  It entered US airspace over Alaska on Saturday, January 28.  It cut a corner over Canada and then re-entered the Unites States over Idaho on Monday, January 30.  By Wednesday, February 1 it was over Montana.  President Biden gave an order that day to destroy the balloon.  The order was carried out three days later on Saturday, February 4, after the balloon had transited the continental United States.

It seems obvious that the failure to shoot it down immediately is a demonstration of weakness.  Demonstrating weakness to an aggressor provokes more aggression.

Uniformed spokespersons have told us that by waiting until the balloon was over water, they avoided the possibility of injury to persons or damage to property on the ground.  Did the military check with their lawyers before destroying the balloon?  It sounds like a lawyer’s decision.

Alaska has 1.3 people per square mile.  Montana has 7.5.  I have driven on roads in eastern Montana where 30 minutes can pass without the appearance of a vehicle coming from the opposite direction.  This is empty country.

The risk that anyone would be injured or killed by falling debris in Alaska or Montana is minuscule.  It’s minuscule, but it’s not zero.  If someone were to be killed by debris, there would be headlines for days, not to mention congressional hearings.  Is that why the United States military decided to allow a spy mission to continue across the breadth of the continent even after receiving authorization from the commander-in-chief to shoot it down three days earlier?

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin seemed to take pride that the balloon had been shot down over US territorial waters when he announced the success of the mission.  The accomplishment of destroying the balloon without any injury, loss of life, or damage to property must be weighed against the possible alteration in China’s calculations of the risks it can take in the future.  The danger is that the “red line” (to borrow a phrase from President Obama) is not as far back as it appears to be.

The idea is similar to broken windows policing.  Some potential offenders may be deterred from significant violations of the law if the police demonstrate that they won’t tolerate minor infractions.  The same principle translated to international affairs means that a show of resolve now in the face of an act of aggression can help to discourage an act of war later.

From China’s standpoint, this incident may fit neatly with what they learned from phone calls that General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, made to his counterpart in October 2020 and January 2021.  US intelligence believed that China was concerned that the unsettled political situation in the United States might lead the US to attack China.  General Milley told China’s General Li that the United States had no plans to attack China.  Unfortunately, he went further and said that he, Milley, would personally inform Li if an attack were imminent.

When word of this statement made it to the public, General Milley’s damage control followed a familiar trajectory.  First, he denied that it happened.  Then he pointed out that high-level talks among military leaders take place frequently.  Then he stated that the conversations had been authorized by the Secretary of Defense and had been attended by eleven other individuals.  Only after receiving a direct question in a Congressional hearing did the General confirm that he had made this statement to his Chinese counterpart.

Think about the impression that these high-level conversations made on China’s military and political leadership.  Isn’t it likely that they would believe that China could push a little harder without risk against a nation whose highest military staff officer would make a promise like that?  I think we can assume that General Li did not call General Milley before China sent the balloon into US airspace.

Political leaders here in the United States have begun to circle the wagons.  Mr. Biden has received praise from Senate Majority Leader Schumer for the president’s stalwart and measured response.  An unnamed senior official in the Department of Defense is reported to have said that three such balloons entered United States airspace during the Trump administration.  That information does not appear to have reached Mr. Trump, either of his Directors of National Intelligence, or his CIA Director.  That’s good enough for Politico, Newsweek, AP, and others to run headlines of the variety “Republicans deny . . . . .”.  These folks know how to float a trial balloon even if they are slow to shoot down a real one.

Meanwhile, in chanceries around the world, leaders will examine the incident and make small adjustments to their contingency plans.  Nations that feel the gravitational pull of two competing powers may lean away from the competitor that has failed once again to show resolve.

—  Gerry Bresslour

Here are two vignettes from my local supermarket.

For nearly a year and a half, I have been taking a daily supplement that contains green tea, curcumin, and resveratrol.  My favorite way to consume resveratrol is by drinking red wine, but every little bit extra helps.  Anyway, for the last several months, whenever I buy some of that red wine at my local QFC, they have asked for proof of age. 

I am well past normal retirement age and make no effort to appear younger than the great weight of years that I carry.  The reason they ask for proof of age has to be the supplement.  I buy it from Amazon.  I am thinking of posting a review.

If a busybody from the Kroger Corporation is reading this and notes that they have a policy of asking for photo ID from all of their valued customers who purchase alcohol, my reply is that I am not here to discuss your policy.  Just run your stores as well as you can and I’ll run this blog.

The second item I’ll mention occurred today.  I have the Kroger app on my phone.  Before checking out, I scan my fingerprint and a QR code appears on my phone.  Once a cashier scans the QR code, the bill is automatically charged to the card stored on the app.  It’s truly a time saver, even after you factor in the additional sixty seconds it takes most cashiers to get the store’s scanner to work.

As I waved my phone this time, the cheerful high-school-aged cashier said, “Look at you, using technology!”  I know she meant to be friendly, but her comment stung.  I thought about saying that she had been condescending and hurtful, but focusing on my feelings would have reinforced the worst habits of her generation.  I considered saying that I had been using technology since before she was born.  The irony might not have come off.  I expect she would have continued her campaign of condescension by saying “Good to know” or something like that.

In the end, I said nothing.  I accepted the insult.  Her condescension toward an old person is balanced by her fellow cashiers who insist on registering disbelief that I really am past my 21^st birthday whenever I try to get out of the store with a bottle of wine.  Things have a way of balancing themselves out over time.

The first seven works that Brahms published were compositions for solo piano or for voice and piano.  In 1854, at the age of 21, Brahms ventured into chamber music with the publication of his first trio for piano, violin, and cello, Opus 8. It holds a unique place in the composer’s catalog.

Brahms had lifelong doubts about the quality of his work.  He wrote many more pieces than he published. By the time he was 50, he had destroyed all the unpublished manuscripts from his youth that he could get hold of.  Some of those works might be ranked today as masterpieces had they been allowed to survive, but they did not meet their author’s standard.

Delay rather than suppression was another strategy that Brahms employed to deal with his doubts.  He was over 40 before he published a symphony or a string quartet.  Had Mozart or Schubert waited until they were past their 30s to produce a symphony or a string quartet, they would have waited too long.

Brahms adopted yet a third strategy for Opus 8.  Thirty-five years after releasing the piece to the public, he revised it.  The word “revised” is both too weak and too strong.  He refined the piece’s strong points here and there while ruthlessly deleting weaker material in wholesale lots to replace it with new music of unsurpassed power, grace, and beauty.  He considered giving the revised work opus number 108 and leaving the original in the catalog, but decided to keep the original opus number for the new piece.  This is the only Brahms work to exist in two versions, dubbed the “original” 1854 version and the “revised” 1889 version.  A work with an early opus number was completed in the composer’s full maturity.

I heard this trio for the first time when I was 21.  The powerful impression it made on me then has never worn off.  I still remember the room I was in, the scent of early summer air entering through an open window.  The piece seems to have the same attraction for musicians.  Many of the world’s finest pianists, violinists, and cellists have presented this jewel.

While it is generally agreed that the revised version is significantly superior, the original version is nevertheless the subject of intense study by musicologists.  Comparing the two versions allows insights into Brahms’s methods that are not available for other works because the composer was thorough in his destruction of notes and drafts.

The first movement begins with a melody notable for its reserved beauty.  Although it sounds like the product of the mature Brahms, the tune dates from 1854.  In both versions, the piano hints at the theme in a four-measure introduction.  The cello adds more detail as it joins the piano in a further 16-measure anticipation before the melody is presented in its finished form.  The young Brahms brought the violin in too early, something that he corrected 35 years later.  The 1889 version keeps the violin silent for 20 measures, until the composer is prepared to present the melody fully formed for the first time.  The delayed entry of the violin, when it articulates the melody, improves the presentation of what was already nearly perfect.  The composer tightened up a few measures as the melody closes, but otherwise he left the first subject alone.

He tossed the rest of the first movement and started over.  A bland second subject was deleted and replaced with material that is worthy of the first subject.  A completely new development section, significantly leaner than the original, draws chiefly from the first subject to build tension that is released by the return of the original theme in a new form.  A new coda provides a tender reprise of the movement’s main melodies.

Brahms barely touched the second movement, a scherzo, in the 1889 revision.  His treatment of the slow third movement and the haunting fourth movement is similar to what he did with the first movement.  The slow movement is in A-B-A form.  Brahms retained the hymn-like outer sections, while completely replacing the middle section with a tune whose beauty rivals the opening movement’s first melody.  Similarly, in the fourth movement, the first part is retained and refined, while the second subject, the central section, and the coda are almost completely deleted and replaced with better music.  A few phrases from the original survive to be repurposed.

The work has been recorded so many times by gifted musicians that a listener could select one at random.  Even so, I prefer certain renditions, based chiefly on three considerations.

First movement repeat.  The exposition of the first movement requires some 118 measures.  At the end of that section, there is a “first ending” sign telling the musicians to go back to the beginning and repeat the entire exposition until they get to the “second ending”, at which point the development section begins.  Performers are divided on whether to repeat the exposition or to go straight to the second ending.

There are several reasons to take the repeat.

Presenting the abundant material of the exposition twice will aid the listener as themes bubble up in the taut development section.

The opening melody recurs in the development, the recapitulation, and the coda, but it never again appears in its original form.  Before encountering the alterations, the listener appreciates the chance to place the details of this memorable tune firmly in mind.

The melodies of the first movement are so beautiful that it is worth hearing them twice for that reason alone.

There are some impressive performances that skip the repeat.  I don’t include them among my favorites.  I don’t think the music has been presented at its best if the musicians omit the repeat.

Energy and Pace of Play.  Brahms marked the first movement of the original version “Allegro con moto”.  He gives a metronome mark of 72 half-notes per minute for this movement.  He doesn’t give a metronome mark for the revised version, but he marks it “Allegro con brio”.  He had roughly the same pace in mind.  Musicians differ on the proper speed at which the first movement of Opus 8 should be presented.

72 half notes per minute is impossibly fast.  I have found only one performance that approaches that speed.  It dates from 1941, the earliest recording I have heard, and features Artur Rubinstein (piano), Jascha Heifetz (violin), and Emanuel Feurmann (cello) – a trio for the ages.  (I’ll mention other groups in that order: piano-violin-cello.)  They skip the first ending and get through the opening movement in a blazing eight and a half minutes.  Even so, that is slower than Brahms’s metronome marking, which implies that the musicians are to finish the movement in eight minutes flat (if they skip the repeat).  At the speed chosen by these titans, I hear the notes but I don’t hear the music.

In 1951, Knushevitsky-D. Oistrakh-Oberon slowed things down a bit.  They take the repeat and complete the first movement in 13:24. They are noticeably slower than the Rubinstein group but still remarkably fast.

A dramatic shift toward a slow tempo came the next year.  In 1952, Myra Hess, Isaac Stern, and Pablo Casals give us a first movement (with repeat) that lasts nearly 16 minutes.  In my opinion, the music drags at that pace.  This is the slowest first movement that I have encountered.

Later performances balance the expressive potential that lies in the first movement played at a measured pace against the need to build and release tension by keeping things moving.

The most notable of these is the 1966 studio recording by Istomin-Stern-Rose (released 1967).  This was the one that my host played at my first hearing.  Their stately yet energetic presentation allows the music to breathe without letting go.  The Istomin-Stern-Rose pace seems to have become standard, although some recent recordings – some faster, at least one considerably slower – indicate that opinion is still divided.

Ultimately, it’s less a question of pace than it is of energy.  For example, Previn-Mullova-H. Schiff (1995) take 15:00 to present the first movement with repeat.  Among more recent recordings, Angelich-R. Capuçon-Moreau (2019) operate at about the same pace.  Those two are only slightly slower than the Istomin-Stern-Rose standard – they take 14:50 — yet to my ear both the Previn and Angelich performances convert the first movement to a lullaby.  In contrast, the Gaon Trio (2017) are slightly faster than the Istomin-Stern-Rose standard.  That slight difference provides the sense of forward motion that Brahms’s tempo marking – allegro con brio – seems to call for.

Balance.  The piano writing is dense and complicated.  Brahms intended for all of that impressive detail to be heard.  But is there a danger that the piano at full volume will overwhelm the strings?  The balance between the strings and the piano is delicate.  As with pace and energy, musicians’ choices over the balance between strings and keyboard cover a wide range.

Maria João Pires-Augustin Dumay-Jian Wang (1996) make the case for the extroverted piano.  Ms. Pires’s attitude seems to be that the customers have paid to hear the piano and she is going to make sure they get what they paid for.  Alessandro Taverna-Clara-Jumi Kang-Jian Wang (again) take a similar approach, combined with a very slow pace, producing a rather ponderous rendition.  Katchen-Suk-Starker (1969) produce a magnificent performance and are the best of the “piano forward” groups, in my opinion.

By contrast, Edwin Fischer can barely be heard on a 1954 “live” recording (Fischer-Schneiderhan-Mainardi).  This must be due to the engineering rather than the performance.

Once again, Istomin-Stern-Rose provide a model performance.  The piano is dominant when that is what the score calls for.  When the strings take center stage, Istomin acts as accompanist, providing a rhythmic and harmonic base for the violin and cello to build upon.

Some Eccentrics.

I hesitate to make a critical comment about any performance of this piece.  Only a small number of musicians have the ability to present this music.  As with other activities requiring a standard beyond excellence, ability is not enough.  Years of practice and training are needed as well as single-minded devotion, good musical taste, and the luck to find partners who are equally talented and committed.  Artists who perform music of this quality make a gift to the rest of us.  I am going to offer some criticisms, but always in the context of a deep appreciation for the gift that these musicians offer us.

Several recordings present problems of balance among the instruments.  I mentioned that Edwin Fischer, one of the great pianists whose career just missed modern recording technology, can barely be heard on his 1947 recording.  The violinist for the Wandel Trio is drowned out by her partners on YouTube.  This is a “live” recording.  She is a superb violinist.  I attribute the imbalance to the recording rather than the performance.  I detect a similar issue, less pronounced, in the fine performance by the Gaon Trio.  I noticed that the violinist – Jehye Lee – has made a career in orchestras in southern Germany.  I speculate that her background in the orchestra inclines her away from singing out.

Schnabel-Szigeti-Fournier (1947) present a heartfelt performance – without the first movement repeat unfortunately – but put the first movement through a series of changes of tempo that I find unsettling.  Judging from the YouTube comments, no one else has been bothered by this feature.

Baschkirova-Vengerov-Pergamentchikov (1997) present a video recording of the work in what appears to be a studio, although it could be a drawing room.  Maxim Vengerov is said to be the greatest living violinist.  His greatness overshadows this fine performance.  He performs the entire piece with eyes closed except for a moment or two when the eyelids part by a fraction of an inch for a split second.  Obviously, it is up to his partners to maintain contact with him, since he is not going to maintain contact with them.  The pianist has her back to Vengerov, which may explain why she seems to be less affected than is the cellist by the lack of contact with their star partner.

An eccentric recording of the original version features Hamelin-Bell-Isserlis.  It is not the performance that is eccentric; it is the presentation.  An elderly gentleman named Eduardo Lozowsky presents the music on his channel “La Emoción de la Música”.  As the musicians perform, he inserts a picture-in-picture of himself wearing headphones and swaying to the rhythm of the music.  I found that this display did not increase my enjoyment of the 1854 version of the trio.

A final eccentric recording I will mention was extremely appealing until I got to the fourth movement.  The strings in the Yamamoto-Colombet-Sivkov trio are distinguished.  M. Colombet is the first violin in the Ébène Quartet (Quatour Ébène if you want to be technical), known for their probing and sensitive performances.  Sivkov produces a marvelous tone from his cello.  Ms. Yamamoto does not appear to me to be in quite the same class as her partners, but it is the cellist who turned me away from this performance.  The second theme of the fourth movement is a broad melody played in octaves in the right hand of the piano with a syncopated accompaniment by the left hand and the cello.  Maestro Sivkov for some reason hears this passage as a solo for cello with piano accompaniment and produces some notably ugly sounds as he converts the notes to that purpose.  It’s not a fluke – when the same theme recurs later in the movement, he does the same thing.  Ms. Yamamoto doesn’t help matters by making a nasty error in the same passage.  However, mistakes will happen in the course of a performance, so I don’t consider that fatal.  The odd behavior of the cello in the fourth movement causes me to rate this recording “Avoid”.

Some Favorites

I subscribe to Amazon Music and to YouTube.  When I developed an obsession over this piece earlier this year, I explored every recording that either of them had to offer.  After an exhaustive exploration, there are four audio recordings and four video recordings that I count as favorites and would recommend to anyone interested in this piece of music.  The audio recordings include (in chronological order):

Istomin Stern Rose (1967 release) – After more than fifty years, this is still my reference audio recording.  The pace is to my mind perfect.  Maestro Istomin is forward when he needs to be and reticent when he should be.  Leonard Rose’s cello has a warm and gratifying tone.  Isaac Stern does not disappoint.  The measured tempo allows Stern and Rose to work magic.  There are many moments when one partner is heard over the other at the beginning of a note only to change places before the tone dissolves into the next phrase.  I imagine they worked at this effect for months until they got the sound they were looking for.  I have encountered only one other pair that does this.  Incidentally, the same group can be seen performing this work on video in a later recording (1974).  Unfortunately, they do not take the first movement repeat in that performance.

Katchen-Suk-Starker (1969) – As I mentioned, I think this is perhaps the best of the “piano forward” renditions.  Starker produces a lovely bright tone from his cello.

Chung-Chung-Chung (1994) – The violinist is the older sister of this family trio.  The cellist is her younger sister.  The pianist is their younger brother.  The strings have a lovely rounded sound and the piano is appropriately reticent and extroverted in turn.  This is a very warmhearted performance.

Z.E.N. Trio (2017) – Their pace is somewhat brisker than my other favorites.  They combine forward movement, sweet intonation, and a deep respect for the music.  Incidentally, the name of the group is an acronym of the first names of the musicians — pianist Zhang Zuo, violinist Esther Yoo and cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan.

Among video recordings, I can recommend four outstanding performances.

The first two of these were recorded in 2016.  I’ll consider them as a pair because the two performances share the same violinist and cellist.  Lugansky-Kavakos-G. Capuçon provide a model performance that is reminiscent of Istomin-Stern-Rose in its balance, pace, and taste.  Wang-Kavakos-G. Capuçon provide a compelling alternative.  The two pianists are at the top of their game.  They are both fearless, in possession of limitless talent and flawless technique.

I listened to them in order on the same evening about a week ago.  On that hearing, I came away with a very slight preference for Lugansky.  He leans towards reticence, while there are a handful of moments in Wang’s performance where she seems a little too eager to make a point with her left hand.  In addition, the strings may play infinitesimally better for Lugansky.  Really, there is nothing to choose from between these two superb performances.  I’ll keep paying five bucks a month to Google to reserve the opportunity to compare them again at my leisure, free from commercial interruptions.

One interesting contrast occurs at the end of the piece, on the last page of the score.  When Lugansky gets to the last note, his left hand at the far end of the keyboard, his momentum nearly carries him off the bench.  The deep breath that follows seems to say that he has given this performance every ounce of energy he has.  There is nothing left in the tank.  He looks wan and drawn when he takes his bow.

Wang has an incident of her own on the last page of the score.  In any performance, her focus at the keyboard is piercing.  However, she will sometimes produce a small smile during a particularly difficult passage, as if to say to the composer, “Yes, you did make that a bit tricky.”  On the last page of the score in this performance, her problem is not one of technique.  Instead, the page is not lying flat and is in danger of turning over.  At a moment when Brahms has all ten of the pianist’s fingers busy, Ms. Wang has the presence of mind to blow a puff of breath to flatten the page.  Her page turner realizes what has happened and finishes the job.

I have already mentioned the Gaon Trio (Kim-Lee-Lutzker).  Their 2017 performance, recorded “live”, is very fine, full of energy and an obvious deep respect for the music.  I noted that the sound of Ms. Lee’s violin tends to be overshadowed by her partners, but that quibble aside, this is a performance worth hearing.  I plan to return to it.

My current favorite is a 2018 recording in performance by Rabinovich-Kenney-Herbert at something called ChamberFest Cleveland.  Their tempo is brisk but tasteful.  The partners are beautifully balanced and draw a full measure of the music’s emotional and intellectual power.  The string players have adopted the Stern-Rose technique of changing the emphasis of a note from one instrument to the other.  That little trick adds depth to the texture of the performance.  Like the others I have mentioned as favorites, this threesome demonstrates musicianship that transcends virtuosity, something this music demands.

Gerry Bresslour

2020 marked the first time in the 21^st century that a president failed to win re-election.  It’s a fairly uncommon event in American electoral history, although it happened four times in the 20^th century.  What makes the 2020 election unusual is that Mr. Trump received more votes when he lost than when he won.

In 2016. Mr. Trump’s total vote from all 51 jurisdictions was 62,984,828.  In 2020 he increased his national total to 74,223,251.  That’s a gain of more than 11 million votes, or 17.8%.

The four incumbents who failed to gain re-election in the 20^th century lost votes on their second try, some of them dramatically.

William Howard Taft received nearly 7.7 million votes in 1908.  Thanks to the intervention of former president Theodore Roosevelt as a third-party candidate, President Taft received fewer than 3.5 million votes in 1912.  That’s a reduction of 54.6%.

Herbert Hoover obtained 21,392,190 votes nationwide in 1928, when he carried 40 of the 48 states.  In 1932, in the midst of a severe economic contraction, his vote total was reduced by 26.4%, down to 15,761,254.

Jimmy Carter won 40.825 million votes in 1976.  Four years of pessimism, malaise, and stagnation combined with humiliation by the Iranian mullahs to reduce his vote total in 1980 to 35.480 million, a reduction of some 15%.

Finally, George Bush the Elder won 48,886,597 total votes in 1988 but only 39,104,550 in 1992.  His total vote declined by 20%.

Those precedents make it all the more remarkable that Mr. Trump increased his vote total by more than one-sixth in a losing effort.[1]

There is another unusual quality to the 2020 election, perhaps not an anomaly but worth noting.  In three of the four 20^th century elections where the president failed to be re-elected, his party suffered significant losses in the Congressional elections held in that same year.  Here’s a summary:

1912 – Republicans lost 62 House seats and a majority as Wilson (D) won the presidency.

1932 – Republicans lost a staggering 97 House seats and a majority as Roosevelt (D) won the presidency.

1980 – Democrats lost 34 seats but retained a majority when Reagan (R) won the presidency.  (Republicans had a working majority on issues where they could count on conservative Democrats, a political category that existed in 1980.)

1992 – This election was different from the other three.  Republicans gained 9 seats as Bush the Elder lost the presidency. The Democrats retained a substantial majority as Clinton (D) won the presidential election.  That result is not so unusual when you consider that Mr. Clinton was able to attract only some 43% of the total votes cast.  Mr. Trump received 46.9% of the 2020 vote.

2020 – Although the incumbent president lost, Republicans added 15 seats but did not gain a majority.

It’s numbers like those that give Mr. Trump and his supporters the idea that something was off in the 2020 election.  It has become an article of faith on the left that the 2020 election was the fairest ever (unlike 2016).  I have noticed that news coverage over this dispute often describes Mr. Trump’s position as “unsupported” “baseless” or “false”.  The Trumpists make it easier for their critics to enlist those dismissive terms when they focus their attack on electronic voting machines, claiming that these machines helped to commit fraud.  The charge about voting machines has been leveled before.  Democrats claimed that electronic voting machines assisted in the commission of fraud in the 2004 presidential election that went to the Republicans, although I don’t think anyone sued in connection with those charges.

Journalists who use words like “unsupported” and “false” are usually careful to apply them to claims of “widespread” fraud.  That is clever.  As President Obama pointed out in 2016, when Mr. Trump expressed worries about fraud (before either he or Mr. Obama could know that Trump would win), the American system of elections is diffuse.  Elections are managed at precinct, ward, city, and county levels.  Any attempt at widespread fraud is unlikely to succeed.  Fraud, if it occurs, is going to be local.

Evidence of electoral fraud is bound to be murky.  Voting irregularities come to light only when the vote is close and tempers are made raw as party organizers have to weigh hopes of victory and fear of defeat as counts and recounts trudge forward.  The side that is ahead can’t afford to admit that anything irregular has taken place.  The side that is behind is desperate to find some basis to change the outcome.   It’s not an environment in which clear thinking is to be expected.  Here are two examples from close elections where it is easier in hindsight to conclude that fraud occurred than to prove it.

After the 2016 Michigan presidential election results were tallied, but before Michigan’s electoral votes were awarded to Donald Trump, a minor-party candidate named Jill Stein demanded a recount.  This seemed odd.  She had won around one percent of the vote.  A recount might show that she was entitled to a few hundred more votes out of millions cast, but it wasn’t going to award Michigan’s presidential electors to her.  Nevertheless, the recount went forward.

The recount confirmed that Trump won Michigan, which was the result reported on election night (or perhaps it was the next day).  It also revealed something unexpected.  There were some 248 precincts in Detroit where the number of votes counted exceeded the number of votes cast.  The authorities investigated.  They found 34 individuals who had cast more than one ballot.  That closed the case, but it didn’t solve the problem.  It would take more than 34 rogue individuals to manufacture the fraudulent votes that were counted in so many precincts of Detroit in 2016.  Something irregular had occurred, but it was local to those precincts, not widespread.  Whatever it was, it was swept under the rug.

Something similar happened in the State of Washington in 2004.  The state routinely elects Democrats to statewide office.  In 2004, the election night count was a surprise.  It showed that the Republican candidate for governor had won by a few hundred votes out of some 2.8 million cast.  A machine recount reduced the Republican lead to about 40 votes.  A third count, done by hand, awarded victory to Christine Gregoire, the Democratic candidate, by 130 votes.

As the recounts unfolded, King County, where heavily Democratic Seattle is located, found previously uncounted ballots on several occasions.  Republican critics pointed out that the total number of votes manually recounted in King County exceeded by about 3,500 the number of voters known to have voted in the county.  That’s a significant number in an election where the final margin of victory was 130 votes statewide.[2]  Even so, the irregularities were not widespread.

In both cases, there is good evidence that someone somewhere tampered with ballots.  The problem is that it is not possible to determine which ballots were filled out by someone other than a voter.  If the rogue ballots can’t be identified, then it’s not possible to adjust the count by debiting the candidate selected on those phantom ballots.  Eventually, the results are certified by the official empowered by law to collect the election results and report them.  A strong desire to finish the process and move on will outweigh claims of theft and fraud.  Higher authorities like secretaries of state, governors, or judges are unlikely to look behind a certified vote.  They may be prohibited by law from doing so.

My assumption, which I admit is not proved, is that excess ballots in situations like this are the product of individual election workers, unobserved and unsupervised, not acting in concert with a large group of conspirators, just doing what some workers at ballot-counting stations had done for decades past and are likely to keep doing.  When things are slow, you fill out a spare ballot here and another one there as the day goes by.

As in most areas of life, the overwhelming majority of election workers are honest, conscientious, and reliable.  The rogue actors are likely small in number.  The key to running an accountable election is to limit the scope in which the small number of rogue actors can operate.

Unfortunately, the American system of elections has evolved in recent years to provide leverage to the dishonest.  For example, ballots are often deposited in collection boxes and then transported to another location to be counted.  It’s not hard to imagine a particularly zealous partisan adding to the load of ballots to be transported.  Even before collection, ballots might be pre-loaded and filled out in favor of a preferred candidate and deposited for collection.  There are many other ways to go about it.

Ideally, we would have voters go to a physical polling place on an appointed day, establish their identity, and fill out a paper ballot which is counted at the end of the day at the place where it was cast.  Results of local hand counts would be aggregated at ward, city, and county levels, but the ballots themselves would not be transported and would remain in safekeeping and available for audit until the results can be certified.  Bi-partisan observers at each level of the process would keep an eye on the count as it unfolds.  That’s how they do it in western republics like France, Germany, Sweden, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the like.  Their citizens trust the results.  They may not like them, but they accept them.

The trend in the United States has been to spread voting out over a period of weeks and to deliver ballots to individual residences, mailboxes, and residential institutions (such as nursing homes).  Each of those destinations becomes a polling place.  We deliver ballots to the voter rather than require voters to come to the polling place to collect and mark their ballots.

The American way of handling elections widens the scope for irregularities.  The advocates of reforming the process by spreading it out over time and space may have had good intentions – some of them – but the methods chosen by the political leadership of both parties have created conditions that make cheating easier to practice and harder to detect.

I offer this postulate for further study: The potential for fraud in any electoral procedure increases as the square of the area over which ballots are distributed and as the cube of the time from ballot distribution to collection and counting.  I look forward to reading the doctoral dissertation confirming this principle.  Name it after me if you wish, but I do not insist.

I am not advocating a return to a mythical golden age.  Urban machine politics has a long history of corruption in the United States.  The Democrats have been in charge of most of the nation’s cities for the last three-quarters of a century or more, but their Republican predecessors as urban political bosses were no better.  The principal mechanism for ensuring an urban political machine’s electoral success was the artificial expansion of the vote by making sure that supporters “vote early and vote often”.

The opposite approach was adopted by party bosses in the less urbanized South.  After the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted, states could not deny the vote to a citizen on the basis of race.  African-American citizens exercised the franchise in the South during Reconstruction and through the period of Redemption, well into the 1890s.  It took the white South a couple of decades to develop the idea of using literacy tests, property qualifications, and poll taxes to suppress the black vote.  C. Vann Woodward notes that there were more than 130,000 African Americans registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896.  In 1904 there were 1,342.  The Jim Crow system that dominated the South right through to the 1965 Voting Rights Act was the direct result of intentional disfranchisement of black voters.[3]

The Voting Rights Act was designed to destroy the voting system in the South that denied the vote to African Americans.  Over time, the Act has beaten back the old system of voter suppression.  Unfortunately, it has done little to address the types of manipulation that were practiced outside the South.  These methods could be called “ballot augmentation”.  They give a political operation scope to collect ballots that were not legitimate votes.  Through a clever piece of rhetoric, today’s proponents of “ballot augmentation” accuse their opponents of favoring “voter suppression”.  No one wants to be accused of preventing citizens from voting, so politicians who should know better acquiesce in a system that is subject to subtle but persistent efforts to augment the count, but not the legitimate vote.

I began by noting that the 2020 election was unusual because the incumbent received more votes in his unsuccessful second election than he did on his first, successful, try.  It was unusual, but not unique.  In 1884, Grover Cleveland was elected president and collected 4.914 million votes.  Although the voters rejected him in 1888, he increased his vote total to 5.34 million (and won more total votes nationally than Benjamin Harrison, the winner in 1888).  Mr. Trump’s many supporters may be cheered, and his even more numerous opponents appalled, to remember that Mr. Cleveland ran again in 1892 and won the rubber match to become the only president to fill non-consecutive terms.  He picked up only a few more votes when he won in 1892 than he received when he lost in 1888, but those additional votes came from the right places to ensure success.  As Jack Nicholson said in “Mars Attacks”, two out of three ain’t bad.

— Gerry Bresslour

[1] There were four elections in the 20^th century where the incumbent had been elected vice-president in the preceding election and was finishing his predecessor’s term.  In all four of those elections the incumbent won (T. Roosevelt 1904; Coolidge 1924; Truman 1948; Johnson 1964).  That doesn’t include 1976 when the incumbent Gerald Ford had succeeded to the presidency from the vice-presidency but had not been elected vice-president.  1904 was the first time a vice-president finished his predecessor’s term and then won an election in his own right.  The four 19th-century gentlemen who finished their predecessor’s term (Tyler, Fillmore, Johnson, Arthur) did not even receive their party’s nomination at the next election.

[2] In February 2006, about a year after Ms. Gregoire took office, the Seattle Seahawks went to their first Superbowl, number 40 (that is, XL), played in Detroit.  The governor was there in one of the prestige suites at Ford Field.  I think I recall that after a disputed play, the cameras cut to her suite while the officials were looking at the replay.  I don’t claim to be a lip reader, but it seemed to me that the governor was asking her companion “Why was there only one review?”

The Seahawks could have used the extra help.  They lost that game 21-10.

[3] In the interest of bi-partisanship, let’s note that the Jim Crow system was what kept the Democratic party in power in the South until the 1960s.  However, the Jim Crow era could not have begun without assistance from the U.S. Supreme Court in a number of critical decisions.  To mention only one example, in the 1883 “Civil Rights Cases” the Supreme Court held that the 1875 Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional.  That act outlawed denial of service on the basis of race at private places of public accommodation.  The 8-1 majority included four Democrats and four Republicans.

Casablanca is one of my favorite movies.  It is set in the city of Casablanca (what are the odds?) during World War II.  Casablanca is in Morocco, a French colony at the time.  Under the 1940 settlement with Germany, France retained its overseas territories.  However, France was under the firm control of Germany.  The city’s location on the Atlantic coast of Africa and its ambivalent political situation made it a natural crossroads for people trying to escape Europe’s troubles.

The main plot deals with a love triangle.  A rootless, cynical American named Rick (Humphrey Bogart) owns a bar in Casablanca.  (In another coincidence, it is named Rick’s.)  He is in love with a woman named Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), who may be in love with him, but is married to the idealistic anti-Nazi Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid).  She may also be in love with Laszlo.  No one is sure.

One of the most stirring moments in the film is the scene in the bar where a group of German soldiers led by the manifestly evil Major Strasser are engaged in an a cappella performance of a German patriotic song.

All of the good people in the bar are disgusted by this boorish display.  Laszlo (a patron in the bar that night along with the beautiful Ilsa) rises to his feet, marches to the band that is watching the Germans in grizzled silence, and says to the conductor, “Play the Marseillaise!”

The conductor looks to Rick, standing across the room.  Rick gives a small but perceptible nod.  The band starts to play the French national anthem.  All the decent oppressed people in the bar join in.  The Germans try to finish their song above the stirring strains of the Marseillaise.  They may have rolled through the French Army in the Ardennes.  They may have booted the British off the continent at Dunkirk.  But in Rick’s bar on that night, they have to give up.  The patrons finish singing their song while the Germans look on, their anger building.

It is a wonderful scene.  I saw the movie in a theater one time when the audience burst into applause when at the end of the Marseillaise the non-Germans in the film shouted “Vive la France!”

The movie also has tender moments.  It’s obvious to the audience that Rick and Ilsa had a very close relationship at one time.  We don’t know the details.  These come into focus through a song.  When Ilsa first enters the bar with her husband, she sees Rick’s piano player and asks him to play “As Time Goes By”.  Rick is in the back room.  When he hears the song, he rushes to the piano, unaware that Ilsa is standing there.

He shouts at Sam, “I told you never to play that song!”  Then he sees Ilsa and falls silent.

After hours, he turns to Sam and says, “Play it, Sam.  If she can stand it, so can I.”  (I will just point out in passing that he does not say “Play it again, Sam.”)

As the music plays, we enter a flashback.  Rick and Ilsa are driving through Paris in the spring of 1940.  They are laughing, enjoying life, falling in love.  May of 1940 was not an ideal time to find love in Paris.  The city was about to be occupied by the Wehrmacht.  The two lovers realize that they have to get out of town.

They make arrangements to meet the next day.  She stands him up, leaving him in a pouring rain with a note telling him goodbye.  We find out later what happened.  She had thought Victor was dead.  When she found out that he was alive, she abandoned Rick for her husband.  But what does her heart say?  The movie never really tells us.  Part of the folklore of the film is that right up to the movie’s climax, the writers, producer, and director hadn’t decided which way Ilsa was going to jump.  The ambiguity in the plot may be the result of indecision rather than artifice.

It’s a wonderful film. It’s been decades since I saw it.  I may have to renew my acquaintance.

What put me in mind of this great film is something that happened yesterday.

During the movie’s flashback, while Rick and Ilsa are in what turns out to be the last moments of their romance, loudspeakers all over Paris begin to broadcast a message to the populace.  It’s in German, so Rick doesn’t understand it.  Ilsa translates for Rick (and for the audience).

The Germans will be entering the city the next day.  They are setting out their expectations for how the populace is to behave.  It is clear from the tone of the public announcer’s voice and from the look on Ilsa’s face that this is not going to be a moment of joyous celebration for anyone except the victors.

I have an Alexa in my living room, the gift of a family member.  It is silent nearly all of the time.  Every once in a while, I use it for a video call with family, although I think everyone has decided that the video call feature on our phones is more convenient.

When Amazon delivers a package, I’ll get a two-note signal from the device telling me to look on my porch.  Rarely, it will send a sound to get me to look at the screen to remind me of things that Amazon thinks I may be running out of.  (Even when they are right, I will wait a couple of days so as not to encourage them.)

Yesterday, June 9, I was on a call for work one room away from Alexa when it (she?) began to talk at a very high volume!  It was a long message.  I had to race to the device to unplug it.  I couldn’t think straight with this booming voice coming out of the device.  I didn’t want to disturb my teammates on the call.  Also, my spouse was on her own call upstairs.  The thing was a menace.

As I ran to unplug Alexa, I realized it was telling me to watch the House hearings on the events of January 6, which would be broadcast on NPR that night.  Amazon wants us listening to that presentation.

It’s the only time that Amazon has used Alexa to intrude into my life to that extent.

When Alexa began to boom its voice into my house, it reminded me of the scene in Casablanca where the Germans address the people of Paris through the public address system.

When I finally plugged Alexa back in, I put it on “Mute” permanently.  That reminded me of the scene in Casablanca where the band plays the Marseillaise.

Gerry Bresslour

Remember the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes?  The tailors and courtiers who praised the style and good taste of the emperor’s clothing were all highly qualified with impeccable credentials.  The little boy who noticed – and said out loud – that the emperor was as naked as the day he was born was without credentials.  His rating: Not Qualified.

After the stirring Preamble, the first words in the Constitution are:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

A valid exercise of legislative power must pass two tests.  The power must be granted by the Constitution (“herein”).  The power must be exercised by Congress and not by any other entity.

Despite this provision, significant legislation is enacted by the federal government through agencies created by Congress.  The agencies are granted “rulemaking” authority – the power to legislate – but they must act pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act.

That’s the basis for the decision on April 19 invalidating the mask mandate on “transportation corridors” – airports, planes, trains, busses — imposed by the Centers for Disease Control.

This is not the first time the CDC’s attempts to regulate have been held invalid.  The CDC’s national ban on residential evictions was struck down. So was a moratorium on cruise ship operations.

The CDC’s operatives seem to believe that because they are “guided solely by science” they need not be guided by law.  In fact, they ignore both science and law.  Anthony Fauci made a public statement that judicial review of a public health order is illegitimate. (“We are concerned about that — about courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally public health decisions”.)  See Anthony Fauci Criticizes Court Ruling Voiding Federal Mask Mandate For Travel (yahoo.com)

The evidence for the efficacy of masks is laughably thin.  See: Do Masks Work? | City Journal (city-journal.org).  The CDC cherry-picks the studies they like and ignores those they don’t.  I believe they formed their conclusions before they marshaled the evidence.

However, the CDC’s position on masks was not the basis for the ruling that invalidated the transportation mask mandate.  The mandate was overturned not because of its substance but because the CDC did not follow the rules about the operations of federal agencies.

The scope of authority of a federal agency is narrower than that of Congress.  If Congress wants to enact a mask mandate, it can do so under its authority to “regulate Commerce . . . among the several States . . ..” (Constitution, Article 1, Section 8.)

We hope that when Congress acts on any subject, it will do so on the basis of reason, logic, facts, and data.  But it doesn’t have to.

Congress can impose a mask mandate because it finds the scientific evidence compelling.  Or it can act because a large mask importer is a particular friend of a committee chair.  They do that kind of thing all the time.  Remember federal subsidies for solar panels, domestic sugar, or ethanol?  The list is miles long.  As long as Congress stays within constitutional limits, Congress is empowered to enact a mask mandate for any reason it cares to cite.  It has not done so.

When an agency legislates – makes a rule – it is supposed to act in a prescribed manner.  It is supposed to derive its authority from an express statutory provision.  Rules are to be based on evidence. Before becoming final rules are to be exposed to comment from the public, including the businesses, workers, and private citizens who have to live with the consequences.  There are exceptions to the requirement for public comment, but the court held that those exceptions were not applicable to the mask mandate.

The CDC didn’t play by the rules.  It exceeded its authority and did not follow the prescribed procedure in adopting the mask mandate rule.  Its action is therefore invalid and of no effect.

This is not a case where a judge rated “Not Qualified” ignored and overturned the reasoned opinion of trained scientists who had sifted through mountains of evidence to reach a conclusion that resulted in an agency rule.

The issue is with how the CDC developed the rule, not with the content of the rule.

What was the statutory basis for the CDC’s action?  The answer surprised me.  The applicable statute dates from 1944.  It has been used to quarantine specific individuals, to destroy infected livestock, and the like.  It has not been used to control the behavior of millions of individuals who are uninfected and asymptomatic.

The statute that the CDC relied upon gives the agency the power to issue and enforce regulations necessary to “prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.”

So far, that looks pretty good for the CDC’s position.  The trouble comes in the next sentence, which tells the CDC what it may do to accomplish the mission it has been charged with.

“For purposes of carrying out such regulations, the [CDC] may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his [sic] judgment may be necessary”.  (The word “his” comes in because the original authority was granted to an individual, the Surgeon General.  Grammatical rules at the time used “his” to refer to persons of any sex.)

The CDC argued that the justification for the mask mandate comes down to the word “sanitation”.  The CDC has the power to sanitize areas that may be a vector for transmission of disease.  The CDC accomplished sanitation of airports, planes, trains, and buses by requiring everyone who enters any of those facilities to wear a mask.

Imagine that you hired a cleaner to sanitize your bathroom and their response was to place a sign on the door saying “No entry without a mask.”

That is the situation the American public finds itself in.  We hired the CDC to supervise the sanitation of areas that may be prone to the spread of infection and they ordered us to wear masks if we want to ride a bus.

The Justice Department will appeal the ruling from the “Not Qualified” district court judge.  Was no one in the department willing to point out that the ruling is eminently correct and that the CDC overstepped its authority?  No, they were too well qualified to take that position.

The department will take the case to the fifth circuit in search of judges who have the desired qualifications.

No matter the outcome, anyone who wants the protection of a mask is free to wear one.  Only if the “Not Qualified” judge is upheld do the rest of us get to assess risks and make a decision for ourselves, as free people living in a self-governing republic.

To repeat the words of Ronald Reagan, “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.”

Or are the words of Benjamin Franklin more to the point?  At the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he was asked what kind of government the convention had produced.  His answer was “A republic if you can keep it.”

Gerry Bresslour

I have heard it said that Covid was God’s gift to the Left.  Even so, the Lord helps those that help themselves.  If the goal is to control the population by spreading panic and fear, a good marketing plan is essential, and product names and labels are integral to a good marketing plan.

We were almost out of the woods on the mask-wearing front, but the guiding lights at the CDC decided they weren’t quite done with us.  From a marketing standpoint, I think they did well to focus on the now dominant “Delta Variant”.  After Delta, the pickings among the letters of the Greek alphabet are thin.

Few Greek letters have the same punch, the same power to persuade through fear, as Delta.  Think of “Delta Force”.  Something to be reckoned with.  Chi Force?  The Epsilon Factor?  Not likely to create the desired reaction.

I heard a Lambda Variation mentioned a couple of weeks ago.  It was making the rounds in Brazil.  But Lambda is not a scary letter.

So it is with many other Greek letters.  Pi?  The puns write (or is it right?) themselves.  Rho?  Reminds me of Rhoda Morgenstern, Mary Tyler Moore’s spinoff wacky next-door neighbor.  (Younger readers may want to google both references.  Well worth the time and effort.)

I grant you that Omicron and Omega could be pressed into service in a pinch and Sigma might be worth a limited run, but after we get through The Delta Variant, the ability to scare the public through the use of Greek letters is going to be touch-and-go.

The solution offered by the CDC to this new variant is to recommend – or is it mandate? – mask wearing.  This is like using a chain-link fence to keep mosquitos out of your yard.  The virus travels on packets that are smaller than the mask’s mesh.  Masks are not an effective way to block objects measuring a few ten-thousandths of a millimeter.

So why require masks?  Consider this excerpt from the psychiatrist Anthony Daniels (who writes under the pen-name Theodore Dalrymple):

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

A face covered by a mask is the overt display of inner compliance.  A population that will put up with an order from its government to take a meaningless action against this disease is a population that can be controlled and manipulated for other purposes.

A few months ago, Anthony Fauci said that Americans, despite their traditions of individual liberty, have to “do what they’re told”.  By him.  I have never heard a government official make such a statement (putting aside police or fire officials responding to an emergency).  There was a time when a comment like that from a government official would have caused an uproar.  Dr. Fauci would have been out of a job within weeks.  His next appearance would have been on an infomercial hawking pain medication.  Yet he remains in power, a medical adviser to the President.  He has proclaimed that he is Science incarnate.  The Scientific Word has become flesh.

The answer to the Delta Variant is the same policy that the country should have adopted once it became clear in the Spring of 2020 that the “curve” had been “flattened” – that we were not facing the end of civilized life as we knew it.  The smart policy would have been to ask those most at risk – the old, the ill, those with co-morbidities, and those with compromised immune systems – to self-quarantine and to let the rest of the population get on with their lives without shutting down, and  without requiring masks or social distancing.

Inevitably, there would have been some young, healthy people who contracted the disease.  A small percentage would have had symptoms requiring medical treatment, a smaller number would have been hospitalized, and a tiny number would have died from their infection.  That is true of any disease, including influenza, bronchitis, pneumonia, strep throat. In the face of risks from those conditions, government does not shut down the economy, deprive workers of their livelihood, or attempt to control personal medical decisions.

It appeared initially that Covid-19 was different.  That’s why everyone cooperated with emergency measures to flatten the curve.  When it turned out after a few weeks that Covid-19 was not Godzilla, emergency measures should have been replaced with a reasonable, measured, and tailored approach that took into account the low level of mortality from this disease for the vast majority of the population.  Instead, those hungry for power seized it.  The Delta Variant gives them an opportunity to keep the string going.

Ronald Reagan said, “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.”  It is one of life’s ironies that this noble idea is being put to the test by an unelected fellow in a white lab coat and a mask.

— Gerry Bresslour

Have you ever watched “Iron Chef America”?  In each episode, a top chef is selected to compete against an “Iron Chef”, a culinary master who is drawn from the show’s stable of regulars.  The two chefs, ferrous and non, are given a secret ingredient – the last episode I saw featured seaweed – and one hour to prepare a set of dishes based on the theme ingredient.  A panel of judges tastes all the dishes and then evaluates the chefs on the taste, originality, and presentation of their products.

The winner is usually the Iron Chef of the day, but not always.  Whichever chef loses a particular contest, the result must be bitter.  The loser is among the premier masters of his or her craft, someone whose cuisine is revered by thousands.  Yet on this occasion, the master fell short.

It’s the same for anyone gifted in a particular field.  The 100^th best golfer in the world – whoever that is – was the best golfer in their town, their county, maybe their state.  Yet that 100^th best golfer is probably never going to win the Masters or the US Open.  He or she is going to fall short when it comes to the biggest stage.

Many fine musicians don’t get recording contracts.  Brilliant writers can’t get published.  Superb athletes at every level find that they fall short of what it takes to move to the next level.

The higher one’s goals, the greater the chance for failure. Those who strive for excellence and perfection must accept that disappointment is the most likely outcome.

That brings me to the ruckus over the US athlete who turned her back on the American flag as she stood on the medal stand at the US Olympic trials.  The athlete (I didn’t retain her name, sorry) had placed third in the hammer throw.

She does not consider the United States worthy of her respect and turned her back to underscore her contempt.  The United States wants to be, tries to be, the best country in the world and to be thought of that way.  On this occasion, like the challenger to an Iron Chef, we came up short.

Despite the back-turning, there is a decent case to be made that the U.S is worthy of the respect of its citizens, even those who believe the country has let them down.

This was the first nation to be founded on the idea of human equality, that each person is the equal of every other person in their natural rights, the rights that are discoverable by unassisted reason, and that do not derive from the accidents of history or birth.  At its founding, the nation gave to all of humanity the free gift of the finest statement ever penned in support of that proposition.

But there was a flaw present at the moment when the document declaring those principles was published on July 4, 1776.  The gentleman who penned those words did not live up to the principles he announced.  It is a violation of natural law to govern another person without that person’s consent.  Yet, Mr. Jefferson and many of the signers of the Declaration took advantage of the provisions of enacted law to contravene natural law.

That posture was an unacceptable compromise with principle.  But surely a valid principle remains valid despite the inconsistencies and compromises of the person who frames it.  The country was founded on the enduring and unalterable truth that all persons are equal in their natural rights, among which, as Lincoln said, is the right to eat with one’s own hands the bread that those hands have earned.  Would it be unreasonable to give the country credit for declaring the principle, even though it did not live up to it?  After all, in 1776, no one else had ever declared equality as a political principle and no one else was even trying to.

Surely the country gets some small credit for taking the action in 1807 to banish the slave trade.  The only other country to do so was Great Britain, more or less simultaneously with the American action.

In 1820, the nation’s legislators, knowing that slavery was wrong but without a clear means to abolish it, reached a compromise to keep slavery out of the Louisiana Territory north of 36º30’ (apart from the newly admitted State of Missouri).  Perhaps that is worth some credit.

Still not good enough, I suppose.  Later, after taking territory in the southwest from Mexico, the country generated a new political party aimed at preventing the spread of slavery into any new areas.  In 1860, it elected a president determined to limit an institution that he described unequivocally as wrong.

On January 1, 1863 that president issued a proclamation ending slavery in areas then in rebellion against the United States.  Does the country get credit for that?

Still not good enough.  By December 1865, after a war that cost more American lives than any other in its history, the nation amended its constitution to abolish the institution of slavery forever.  We weren’t the first nation to do that, true, but it does demonstrate devotion to those basic principles of equality on which the country was founded.

After the Civil War, the nation further amended its constitution to ensure that formerly enslaved people would be citizens of the United States and that all persons subject to the jurisdiction of the nation would have rights of due process and equal protection of the laws.

That athletic back turned to the flag tells me that this was not good enough, either.

Now, it has to be admitted that after the passage of the post-Civil War Amendments in the late 1860s, the nation endured a long period of backsliding in the effort to actualize its mission statement of securing the equal natural rights of its citizens.  Thirty years after the abolition of slavery, the old South and a number of its neighbors adopted a system of state-imposed racial segregation, blessed by seven of the eight US Supreme Court justices who ruled on its constitutionality, that endured into the 1960s.

Might that athletic back be tempted to turn part way back toward the flag by the progress that the country made in the 1950s and 1960s, when a series of Supreme Court decisions combined with federal legislation securing civil rights and voting rights put the nation on the road back toward achieving the mission of equality?

As a young person when the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act became law, I was thrilled to witness the nation taking powerful and unmistakable steps to restore its promise and to live up to Mr. Jefferson’s words better than he did.  It was only a few years later than I was disappointed when the sterling principle of equality was replaced by racial and ethnic preferences.  And it was not only the federal government that abandoned individual equality in favor of group preferences.  State and local governments followed, as did private and public colleges and universities, and private employers.  Over the course of decades, I have been appalled to witness a system of  preferences evolve into one that overtly acknowledges the goal of distributing spoils on the basis of race.  The advocates of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project are not subtle on this point (or on anything else) and have the benefit of considerable cultural, political, and institutional tailwinds.

In contrast, what appalls me should have thrilled the woman with the hammer.  I think we should get credit for devotion to the principle of equal natural rights, but we can’t get as much as a wink of approval for it from her.  If, as appears to me, the country’s elites have abandoned the belief in equal natural rights in favor of group rights and a racial spoils system, shouldn’t that get at least one thumb up from Ms. Hammer?

Neither is good enough.  Like the 100^th best golfer or a chef who comes in second on Iron Chef America, this may be a case where we have to accept that we have come up short, even though we have done about as well as we could be expected to do.

I doubt that I will watch much, if any, of this year’s Olympic Games.  The fake internationalist idealism in service to greed and corruption is irritating.  The saccharine personal profiles that dominate the TV coverage have little appeal.  However, if I learn that the back-turning hammer-throwing celebrity athlete makes it to the podium, I will be happy for her, although I accept that the sentiment will not be reciprocated.

What I would like to know is, if the United States isn’t good enough, if a person thinks that its flag is worthy of a gesture of contempt, who is the Iron Chef?  Which is the nation on whose flag Ms. Hammer would not turn her back, and for whose support she would feel gratitude, were she a citizen of that country?

I own a fine-mesh strainer with a diameter slightly larger than a wine glass.  It’s a very handy tool for someone who likes to drink wine, because it separates the unwanted solids that occasionally accompany a bottle’s contents.  The bottom of an older bottle is likely to contain sediment.  Sometimes an old cork will crumble before it can be pulled.  Very occasionally, a piece of otherwise sound cork will find its way into a bottle when an impatient operator rushes the process of pulling the cork.

The sheer mesh of the strainer keeps those solids out of the glass.  However, I notice that some liquid will cling to the strainer.  The device is great at stopping large pieces from moving from bottle to glass, but it also stops some small drops of liquid due to surface tension.

So, would you say that my fine-mesh sieve is effective at collecting liquid?  If you have to answer that question yes or no, you can’t really say no.  It does stop some liquid.  You can’t say that it is entirely useless at preventing a liquid from flowing downhill.

That’s about the situation we are in with masks as a means to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.

As we know, the virus inhabits the respiratory system of an infected person.  When it leaves the infected body, it travels on droplets that measure 0.1 to 1.0 microns in diameter.  A micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter.  These droplets are as small as one-tenth of that size.

An N95 respirator with all of its edges taped to the face will stop droplets that small.  A cloth or paper mask lets droplets of that size through, whether heading toward the wearer or away.  However, cloth masks are not entirely ineffective.  A few droplets will cling to the mesh.  The masks we wear are about as effective at stopping these droplets as my wine strainer is at stopping the flow of wine.  Surface tension will stop a few droplets, but not enough to justify wearing the mask.  The sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci made this point early in 2020 but then changed his mind and decided to lead from behind.

There is very little reason to wear a mask as a way of keeping sub-micron sized droplets from getting to you or keeping them from getting to someone else from you.  Certainly, if you “believe in science” — if you believe in adjusting your behavior to accommodate the facts as revealed by scientific inquiry — there is no point in wearing any mask other than an N95 respirators and keeping it taped tightly to your face.

Yet, a recent survey found that 90% of people who have been vaccinated still wear a mask.  90%.  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made the point as well as anyone:  If you are vaccinated, you’re immune.  So, act like you’re immune.

Before you scoff at that last sentence, dear reader, because of the source cited, let me suggest that in your heart you agree.  Prior to March 2020, did you wear a mask to avoid contracting measles, mumps, chickenpox or the rest?  You didn’t.  You didn’t need to (and you don’t need to now) because vaccination has made you immune.  Or if you are, like me, transitioning from senior citizen to cranky geezer, you acquired immunity through infection when you were a child.

But those diseases are conquered, I hear you say.  Not for the unvaccinated, they aren’t.  They flare up from time to time.  That’s why schools require vaccination as a condition of registration.  But they don’t require masks to “stop the spread” of the measles.

Nor did you wear a mask to “stop the spread” of colds or the flu.  Those have not been conquered.  They are everywhere.  Catching a cold or coming down with the flu is one of those burdens that we all bear.  Perhaps you plan to wear a mask to “stop the spread” of the common cold after any remaining mask mandates are lifted.  That’s your choice, of course, but there is no basis in science for government to require the rest of us to conform.  Wearing a cloth or paper mask to prevent the spread of a virus that travels in packets that are far smaller than the mask’s mesh makes as much sense as wearing garlic.

The fact is that masks did not stop the spread of COVID-19.  High incidence of mask wearing does not correlate to low incidence of disease.  Some states with high rates of masking have low COVID-19 rates; other mask-wearing states have high rates.  Other factors are at work having nothing to do with mask-wearing.

Vaccination, however, does provide effective immunity.  Some lucky people have natural immunity to this infection (from T-cells).  Others with less luck have acquired immunity through infection.  The rest of us can obtain immunity through vaccination.  When you add up all the individuals who are now immune one way or the other (and so far governments count only those who acquired immunity through vaccination), the likelihood is that we have achieved “herd” immunity.   

Whether or not there is sufficient immunity among the population to reduce the risk of an out-of-control infection, wearing a mask has nothing to do with the gains in public health that we have achieved in the last few months.  Yet nine out of ten disagree.

I take a walk through my neighborhood nearly every day. I see that many of my neighbors – who appear almost without exception to be friendly, positive, purposeful, and conscientious — demonstrate their independence of mind by displaying yard signs proclaiming their unconventional beliefs.  (To be fair there are minor variations among these signs.  One size does not fit all when it comes to pre-printed independent thought.)  I have learned that you can buy them at Amazon.  Just search for “in this house”.

One of those beliefs is “Science is Real”.  When people proclaim that “Science is Real”, I don’t think they intend to include all of scientific inquiry.  I think they mean “We believe the scientists who tell us that burning fossil fuels is leading to uncontrolled global warming climate change.”

Of course, what’s “real” is not “science” as such but, first, the facts uncovered by methodical inquiry using the methods of science and second, the theoretical explanations and mathematical models that fit those facts and yield to us an understanding, tentative and subject to amendment, of the place we inhabit.

There is a lot of science that is anathema to my mask-wearing sign-planting neighbors.  Immunology?  Epidemiology? Embryology? Psychometry? Population genetics?  I wouldn’t count on a lot of support among the buyers and planters of pre-printed signs for the findings of any of these areas of study.

However, a computer model that shows a warmer earth 100 years from now counts as “science” and qualifies as “real”.  So does the belief that you can use a sieve to catch water or an off-the-shelf cloth mask to catch something that measures one ten-millionth of a meter in diameter.  These are illusions, nothing more.  Wearing a mask in these circumstances is equivalent to posting a sign in your yard, and about as effective.