Some Thoughts on the 2020 Election

by

Eric Paul Nolte

 

 

I am predicting that Donald J. Trump will win the 2020 presidential election that is to be held tomorrow, although I do not think the Democrats would likely concede the election then. 

How can I predict a win by Trump when most of the polls predict that the Dems will win?

The polls are notoriously inaccurate, and I know countless people who do not want to confess that they will vote for Trump, but will do so anyway. 

Think of the anemic rallies at Biden and Harris events.  Think of the astoundingly massive and thunderous rallies for Trump all across this land.  Do a web search for videos of some of these Trump rallies!  These rallies are astonishing!

Think of 2016. 

Think of the British Brexit election that declared their independence from the European Union, which won in a landslide that was opposite the predictions of the pollsters.

Without going into detailed analysis, I will simply state my conviction that the reason the Democratic Party should lose, and probably will lose, is because they have unleashed their Inner Totalitarians in this election.  Never have I seen such tyrannical policies being advocated as in their Green New Deal, which promises something like a communist takeover of industrial civilization for the suicidal and crackpot goal of ending fossil fuel consumption in order to stop carbon dioxide emissions and thereby “save” the planet from Homo sapiens.  The possibility of the Democrats’ winning the presidency and both houses of Congress, as widely predicted today, fills me with a deep dread.

My own politics amount to a cry for individual rights and freedom:

Who owns you?  You do, of course.  All individuals own themselves.  Our rights to our own life, liberty, and property are sacrosanct and are an aspect of our very nature as human beings.  Our rights are not gifts from generous governments, our rights precede the formation of any government, as John Locke formulated the matter in 1690.  Rights cannot be rescinded by any government, although every government in the world today attempts to negate our rights with varying degrees of despotism, grounded in the argument that rights are merely the arbitrary conventions granted by the largesse of the state.

As I always asked my daughters when they were growing up, "Why are you on this earth, girls?  You are on this earth to live your lives and be happy, so long as you are respectful of the same rights in everybody else."  Live and let live, lend a helping hand to others by your own lights as you are willing and able.  Unfold your own gifts for your own happiness--happiness meaning, as I now tell them, since they are adults capable of understanding such a higher abstraction, Aristotle's Eudaimonia, the satisfaction that comes with the achievement of a good life across the span of a whole life.  Without unfolding your own gifts and achieving your own happiness, you have nothing to offer the world. Be makers, not takers.  Be producers, not moochers or looters.  In other words, be honest traders and capitalists, trading value for value with others to mutual benefit.  Don't be communists, forcing other people against their will to do your bidding in order to make the world into your idea of a better place.  The fundamental evil in this world is to use other people against their will to obtain a predatory advantage.  What else is murder, but using someone else against his will, to gain a predator's gain?  What else is rape, but using someone else against her will, to obtain a predatory gain?  What else is slavery, but this same predation?  Theft?  Fraud?  Every evil is an instance of this terrible predatory impulse.     

Now, as for Trump—he is clearly a coarse man of limited sophistication in his grasp of many matters.  He has, for example, a misunderstanding of tariffs and trade in the context of wealth creation.  And yet, I believe he has done more good for the country than Leftists grant him.  He rubbed Arab noses in the nonsense of Obama’s policies in the Middle East.  Unlike Obama, he did not bow before the King of Saudi Arabia when they met (Obama bowed waist deep!)  Trump browbeat the Europeans into paying more of their fair share for their own defense in NATO.  He rescinded piles of meddlesome and crippling regulations in the US and thereby attracted countless American companies to repatriate, a policy which also attracted other firms, foreign and domestic, to flock here with venture capital for companies to create an economic boom not seen for decades.  Trump withdrew us from a disastrous Paris climate accord and from the terrible Iranian deal in which Obama granted the Iranians the power to build a bomb after ten years (I will defend these controversial views in another post.)  Far from instituting racist and sexist policies, he created an environment that resulted in the highest wages that Blacks and Hispanics have enjoyed since the beginning of record-keeping.  He saw to it that predominately Black colleges and universities received generous new funding (not a policy that would be approved of by libertarians who want government out of subsidies altogether, but can certainly be seen as a policy guided by the good intention to support and fan the flames of ambitious Blacks.)

Trump was savagely attacked by Leftists long before his election.  Think of "Russia, Russia, Russia," absurd impeachment grounds, and on and on and on.  I see no convincing grounds that he was guilty of any of these charges, although most on the left believe every accusation against Donald Trump.  Moreover, the dishonest attacks against him that came from the deep state machinations of the preceding administration have been characterized by many thoughtful observers as serious enough to make Watergate, by comparison, look like a trivial burglary of no great import—although the Watergate affair resulted in the tarnishing in shame and the taking down of a president and the jailing of something like 40 individuals associated with President Nixon. 

Now, think of just one little snapshot, among the flood of terrible leftist assaults on the Trump administration and their unwarranted defense of their own transgressions. Think of James Comey’s Congressional testimony in July 2016, listing a long string of felonious crimes by Hillary Clinton, and concluding that no prosecution was warranted because her “intent” was good. 

One picture stands in my mind as emblematic of these attacks against Trump and of the apparently unbridgeable chasm between the left and the right today:

At Trump’s State of the Union speech this year, after he gave an account of so many good things then going on in the country, especially the fact, as I said, that we were enjoying the all-time highest wages of Blacks and Hispanics since record-keeping began--here is the whole Democratic side of the House sitting in silence from beginning to end, except for their loudly booing the president now and again.  Finally, after President Trump finished speaking, here is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, standing behind the president, ostentatiously ripping apart  her copy of the president’s speech, a few pages at a time, her face a mask of contempt.

There is more.  Consider the irony of Antifa's alleged anti-fascism, which is overwhelmingly Orwellian in the reversal of Antifa's stated goals and its actual nature and actions.  We have seen nothing quite like these assaults since the period between the world wars, when fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were steering their countries towards all-out war.

There is avowed Marxism among the leaders of Black Lives Matter, such as that of the co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who proudly claims to be a "trained Marxist" (which I presume must mean a more rigorous and scholarly Marxism, not to be confused with the merely emotional or casual Marxist beliefs of so many.)  I found this claim of hers on the website of Black Lives Matter some weeks ago, and now this statement of Cullors' is apparently no longer there--as if they knew that such a claim might alienate some among those multitudes they have attracted by their false claim to be an anti-racist organization, and may therefore have removed this statement from the website of BLM.

Despite everything wrong with Donald Trump, I hope he wins because he offers genuine hope for real progress and because I believe that a victory by the Democrats this year would be the biggest disaster in this country since the ugly rise of the Jim Crow South, in the wake of the Civil War. 

 

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2020.1102

 

 

Happy Juneteenth!

Happy Juneteenth!--July 19th, 1865 was the day that slavery was officially declared to be ended, following Lincoln's initial emancipation proclamation on January 1, 1863 (which was more than two years before the Civil War actually ended.) This proclamation finally put an end to the official hypocrisy of slavery continuing in the face of the Declaration of Independence. Of course, the terrible aftermath of the Civil War has left scars to this day.

As a man who grew up in the Jim Crow South (I'm from Richmond, Virginia, which was, let it not be forgotten, the capital of the Confederacy) I witnessed more of the ugliness of this legally racist time than did many who lived outside the South.

Here is an article by Chris Cambell, from Laissez-Faire Today, that celebrates the powerful oratory of escaped slave and autodidact, Frederick Douglass, from a speech he delivered in 1853, eight years before the war began:

-----------------------------------------------------------

1776 - 1863: On American Independence

Laissez Faire Today
Juneteenth flag
June 19, 2020

--In 1853, Frederick Douglass delivered an incredibly fiery, provocative (and, yes, dangerous) speech at the time called, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

He said:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

“To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Of course, with slavery still rampant in the United States, he was right.

The ambitious words penned in 1776 had hardly been realized three generations later -- and in the very country which held them highest.

Fortunately, Douglass’ own words… and those of the many abolitionists in the United States… didn’t go ignored.

Frederick Douglass marker

The public pressure had been mounting, and at last, the seal was breaking.

On Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in the rebelling states to be “henceforth and forever free.”

In 1865, Congress sent the Thirteenth Amendment to the states for ratification…

Nothing could stop what was coming.

When Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, a good chunk of the country still didn’t even know what had happened.

In our era where news travels at the speed of light, it’s easy to forget just how slowly it moved back then.

And also -- though time has done little to change this one -- just how easy the truth was to obscure.

Many plantation owners waited until after the harvest to notify slaves of their freedom. Some waited until a federal government agent or Union soldiers arrived.

But it was on June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, that delivered the shot heard ‘round the states.

That was the day General Gordon Granger issued the following order:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”

After the order, it became common among black Americans to celebrate on June 19… later to be known as “Juneteenth.”

And this only began the process of fulfilling the wording of the United States Declaration of Independence, ratified long before on July 4, 1776…

And thus marking the beginning of the end of one of our young country’s greatest hypocrisies.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Some might tell you the American Experiment, as written in 1776, is dead.

We say, with apologies to Twain, such reports have been greatly exaggerated.

Texas deemed Juneteenth worthy of statewide recognition in 1980, becoming the first state to do so.

And today we celebrate, too.

Freedom is the natural birthright of every soul on Earth.

And as libertarian-leaning folks, we cheer on any reason to celebrate its advancement.

Happy Juneteenth.

Until tomorrow,

Chris Campbell

Managing editor, Laissez Faire Today

Laissez Faire Today is your daily free e-letter that explores current events and topics related to freedom, self-reliance and independent action.

© 2020 Laissez Faire Books, LLC. 808 Saint Paul Street, Baltimore MD 21202.

Some Perspective on Racism Today

On one side of my family, I have relatives who fought on both sides of the Civil War. We're talking about brothers killing brothers. My family had members from Iowa and Virginia. The son of the northerner was from Iowa who married the daughter of a family from Virginia.

Among the other side of my family, I have relatives who were five brothers who came to America from Germany and settled here three decades after the war and clearly could have had nothing to do with the war.

I could go into a lengthy discussion of how my German grandfathers could be held responsible for reparations to be paid to the black children of a family from Jamaica who came to the United States last year, but surely you can see how crazy this might be. Especially since it is also clear that most of the 600,000 men who died in the Civil War were Northerners who were fighting against slavery.

We have here a complicated and heated argument for who is to blame for the horrors of slavery and racism.

Let us acknowledge that these terrible things have existed from the beginning of civilization. These matters are not peculiar to America. Slavery was not merely a matter of white Americans or Englishmen enslaving black people from Africa.

Black Africans enslaved black Africans.

Muslims enslaved black Africans in far greater numbers than were sent to the Americas. Moreover, slavery in Saudi Arabia lasted until 1964--a full century after the end of slavery in America!

Among all our ancient ancestors, white people were enslaved in huge numbers.

Asian peoples enslaved countless peoples.

Native American peoples enslaved other native Americans in huge numbers.

Slavery was practiced everywhere in history.

Slavery was a disgraceful fact of all cultures everywhere.

Now, let's be searingly honest.

Racism is evil. Racism is evil outright.

Racism is not the only evil.

Racism is not even the worst of evils.

Who would deny that the worst evils are murder, rape, and slavery? Have I missed other evils worse than racism?

It seems to me that some of the protesters today, to say nothing of the rioters and looters we are seeing now, might be lacking some perspective on the crucial matters they claim to be protesting against.

Singing in the Sunroom by Moonlight, a Song With Just a Hint of Words

Singing in the Sunroom by Moonlight

A Song With Just a Hint of Words

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I have just written, performed, and published another little piece of musical fluff that is now available at SheetMusicPlus, the SMP Press.  It's for solo piano.

I call the piece "Singing in the Sunroom by Moonlight," an addition to the album I'm composing, called Songs With Just a Hint of Words.  For those who have treasured Felix Mendelssohn's collection of Songs Without Words, my album's title may win a smile at the fond wink I give here to the ghost of Felix. 

I have chosen titles for each of my album's pieces with an eye (and ear) to evoking something like a little meditation on some aspect of life, love, and the cosmos.  These titles are all meant to convey moods ranging from the evocative to the whimsical.

I write these pieces with the skills of the intermediate pianist in mind.  As with most of my music, my harmony can be chromatic and spiky, but it is tonal, melodic, and, all said, I strive to write intelligibly and to give you my most conscientious efforts not to make your ears bleed, or leave you baffled or suffering from musical vertigo... unlike many conservatory and university-trained composers of the last century who appear to believe that reaching the rarefied land of "serious art music" is an enterprise requiring a re-invention of the language on every page, and what Alexander Solzhenitsyn called "the relentless cult of novelty."  Not me, brothers and sisters.  

I love music that makes my heart sing, no matter whether it is children's songs, jazz, the counterpoint of Bach, the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Broadway shows, opera, hymns, the American songbook, and on and on.  In fact, I believe the essence of “good music” is whatever makes your heart sing.    

I am no musical snob.  As I put it on the header to my blog, I believe that music should make us swoon and inspire awe!  My aesthetics cheer Beauty and seek Uplift, wherever I can find it... but I am happy if it just tickles or gently strokes me.

I expect that I will put this latest piece of mine up on YouTube, but you can find it (and hear an audio file of it) at: 

 https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/look_inside?R=21765837

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2020.0515

Word count: 390

Learning to Trade Options

Learning to Trade Options 

at the Online Trading Academy

Eric Paul Nolte

I have been going full bore with another project that has captured me: taking classes on how to trade various financial assets at the Online Trading Academy (OTA).

Three weeks ago I ran another lap through a course on trading options up at the Phoenix office of OTA.  Despite the word "online" in their name, they have 50 brick-and-mortar campuses in seven countries around the world where they give classroom instruction.  

This is astonishing and wonderful material that they teach!  The classes are not cheap, but they are a damn sight cheaper than college.  Moreover, having paid for any one course, you can take and re-take these courses as many times as you want, so long as there is space available, and for me, as for most students, there has always been space available.  

Imagine going back to your old college and saying, "You remember that calculus class I struggled with like a mouse wrestling with a boa constrictor?  Do you think I could re-take it and see if I can understand it now?  I'd really love to understand calculus better!"

Right.  Well at Online Trading Academy, this is exactly how they operate.

Moreover, the company works hard to create a nurturing atmosphere for their students.  The material is hard, the courses are dense, so the company goes to great lengths to make their instructors and staff available to the students' every question.  And even more-- there are mountains of help available online in the form of hundreds of courses, videos, papers, and actual people who are there to help us out.  Every question I have had, no matter how stupid I may feel it to be, is answered patiently and respectfully. 

Most of the classes are five days long.  I've taken six initial classes, retaken all of them at least once, and I've taken the class on how to trade options five times so that I can come better to grasp this most difficult of the courses.  Options trading, as the instructors say, is a business that has more moving parts than a helicopter!  

I started taking classes back in Norwalk, Connecticut two years ago, around the time I retired from United Airlines. 

The classes I've taken include instruction in how to be effective at trading stocks, exchange traded funds, futures on commodities, forex (foreign currency exchange, and finally, as I say, the mother of all things fabulous in the trading world: options!   

OTA's core strategy for trading has actually been patented (you can download the patent for free--it's not a very long essay, and it's available at the US Patent Office's website.  The patent number is 8,650,115.)

One may find their patent illuminating, but I doubt that anybody among us mere mortals can learn how to put this knowledge into practice without taking classes, which I highly recommend.  

I believe that OTA's work is brilliant.  The core strategy allows us to see the footprints of the big institutional traders whose buying and selling of assets are what move markets. 

These footprints of institutional buying and selling show up in areas on the price chart that we can call demand zones and supply zones (akin to the idea of support and resistance.)  These are areas marked by a telltale pattern on the price chart that we learn to identify as a likely holding pen for unfilled buy and sell orders.  When the price moves into one of these well-defined zones, it is the likely point of a price reversal as the result of these unfilled orders getting triggered.  

We see these footprints of the likely buyers and sellers in demand zones or supply zones on a price chart.  This insight gives us the basis of a strategy that allows us to place trades that have a high probability of success.  We always place these trades in the context of a rigorously followed plan of risk management.  We don't place any trades that exceed 2% of the value of our account so that if the trade moves against us, we will have a stop-loss order that will take us out of the trade before we can lose more than a small fraction of the money we have put at risk--a number that is calculated as a fraction of that asset's daily average range of price movement.  Sticking to this policy of risk management, there is no danger that we will ever blow our whole account, as so many hapless traders do!  We never place a trade that does not appear to offer an acceptable profit-to-loss ratio.  We have a rational, tested list of odds enhancers and we have checklists to follow, some of which are applicable to all assets, and some that are specific to the asset class to be traded.  

I believe that our core strategy makes us much like pilots who live or die according to how well we follow the hard-won wisdom that is embodied in our procedures and checklists.  This strategy works.  

Many, perhaps most, college professors will tell you that the efficient market hypothesis means that nobody can have any better idea of where prices will go than predicting a drunk's wallowing down Wall Street, bumping into light fixtures and fire hydrants.  Some of these same professors will also say that technical analysis of price charts is akin to mystics' reading tea leaves in a bowl.  They are mistaken.  

Well, it is true that conventional technical analysis has problems, but our system does not embody the flaws of these conventional analyses.  

Yes, it's true that nobody can be certain where prices will move, but I think the matter may be analogous to the way pilots deal with weather forecasts.  

We use our price charts and our core strategy the way pilots use flight manuals and weather forecasts.  We know that anybody who absolutely trusts a weather forecast is the kind of fool who might think he can buy the Brooklyn Bridge.  But we know that the weather forecasts do tell us generally enough to calculate the fuel load we should carry in order to make allowances for adverse winds aloft and lousy weather at our destination and alternate airports.

Weather reports are flawed, but they are not as unreliable as reading tea leaves in a bowl, and they are crucial to rational flight planning.

As with pilots using weather forecasts, our price charts may not tell us with certainty everything that will happen down the airways.  We cannot know for sure where prices will move, but our core strategy and our list of odds enhancers allow us to position ourselves with a high probability of success, just like a pilot's use of weather forecasts, and to position ourselves against many of the adverse forces that can shoot down our trades.     

*   *   *

Before I close, I want to offer some thoughts on how this kind of work, the trading I'm learning how to do, is deeply misunderstood and therefore vilified by much of the world.

Many people think that this work in the financial world is meaningless paper shuffling by predators in business suits who steal other people's money in a way that is barely a millimeter away from being outright criminal.  We are thought of with the kind of derision that is reserved for the likes of Shylock, in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, or Gordon Gecko, in Oliver Stone's movie, Wall Street.  

I utterly reject this idea of finance.  I believe this derision can only be held by the hapless who are ignorant of the actual role that finance plays in the world.  

Finance is crucial to directing the flow of capital into those ventures that stand the best chance of producing goods and services that lift our lives to the most wonderful heights that the world has ever seen!  We live at the most abundant and fruitful time since Homo saps first emerged from the caves and began to create the civilized world with agriculture and everything else we have come to enjoy.  

Think of your iPhone or your automobile, or the airplanes that bring us all together!  Think of the advanced medicine and foods that have in just the last two centuries doubled and then tripled our life expectancy and given us the astonishing quality of our lives, compared to any time or place before ours!  

None of these improvements would have been possible on a global scale if it weren't for the miracle of high finance and the way it effectively directs venture capital.  Moreover, profit-seeking speculation considerably softens the severity of blows to the financial system that result from wrenching political events and the forces of Nature. 

There is a river of money out there, and I am wading in the shallows, learning how to ladle some of this heart-warming profit my way.

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word count 

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The Infernal Revenue Service, Acts of Congress, and Why I'm Going Back to Work

The Infernal Revenue Service,
Acts of Congress, 

and 

Why I'm Going Back to Work

Eric Paul Nolte

Just before Christmas, I was sitting at the kitchen table with our financial records and concluded that I should go back to work, at least for a couple more years.

Doing what? Flying is my best shot at finding work that pays anything worth talking about, of course.

The United States Congress, operating in their usual mode that says, "We know better than you how to run your life," passed an Act of Congress that mandates the retirement of airline pilots when they turn 65 years old. So I had to retire from United Airlines in January 2017.

It is infuriating and absurd that Congress has dictated airline pilot retirement. We have to pass a stringent medical exam every six months, and we must undergo flight proficiency tests several times a year. We get a line check in the airplane on a regular flight, and they put us in the flight simulator several times a year during which they throw every dirty, rotten, nasty life-threatening problem at us, and we have to be able to handle every airplane problem you can imagine (and many that you probably would never imagine!)

So if we pilots are physically fit and proficient at handling all the emergencies, and if we want to work and our employers want to keep us on the job, then what the hell business is it of the federal government to impose this further layer of regulation on an industry that may already be the most highly regulated business in the economy? Maddening.

I can still work as a pilot, so long as I have a medical certificate, but the jobs available to retired airline pilots mostly require us to work twice as hard for half the pay.

All looked well when Terri and I retired in June 2017 and we moved to our beautiful new home in Arizona with a magnificent view out the back window wall of the whole Santa Rita mountains with their majestic twin peaks of Mounts Wrightson and Hopkins. 

We retired with no debt, except for the mortgage on a house for which we put down half the cost. We would be able to make ends meet on our social security and a little pension. 

I have a smallish account for trading stocks and options, and now I can earn significantly more money than I lose, thanks to the trading system I've been studying for two years at the Online Trading Academy, but it will be a while before I can hope to grow my account enough to replace our income from the profits of my trading.

Then we ran afoul of the Infernal Revenue Service.

Oh, Brother! Big Brother! It turned out that we owed them an impressive amount of back taxes. (I am at least partly to blame, so I won't bore you with the details.)

We took out a Home Equity Line of Credit to pay the IRS, and now it is clear that for some time to come we are obligated to spend a little more money than we are taking in.

     So, hi ho, hi hee!--

     It's off to work with me!

     I'll spread my wings

     For the cash this brings,

     Hi ho, hi hee! 

A week ago, I saw online that Flight Safety International's Tucson branch was advertising for a flight instructor. 

On a lark, I drove out to the airport and just walked up to the FSI reception desk and introduced myself. I said that I knew about the job opening and that I just happened to be in the neighborhood--would anybody be around who could talk with me now? 

I carried under my arm a cardboard box about half-again the size of an ordinary shoe box, filled with all my pilot logbooks--13 of them! That's how many it took to log my 26,861 hours in the air as a pilot. 

Hold on, the receptionist said. A moment later, the Director of Human Resources walked up to the desk and invited me back to his office.

In the office, I put down the cardboard box with my logbooks, pushed it slightly to the side, and then pulled out my various pilot credentials. 

With a flourish, I laid these credentials down on the Director's desk as if I were dealing a hand of playing cards. 

Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap! 

Airline transport pilot's certificate; 

certificated flight instructor rated for airplanes, instrument and multi-engine flying; 

ground instructor, rated for advanced and instrument flying; 

flight engineer's certificate, rated for turbojets;

aircraft dispatcher's certificate; 

FCC radio operator's permit; 

Airline Pilot's Association union card; and 

my FAA airman's First Class medical certificate.

The Director's eyes widened a little at this display. We talked for half an hour and he said he thought that I am just what they're looking for. 

I had my interview yesterday at Flight Safety International's Tucson learning center, which has a staff of maybe 80 flight instructors and a gaggle of flight simulators for the Bombardier Challenger 601 and 604 (a bizjet version of a regional jet airliner, the Canadair RJ), and a few kinds of Learjet.

In a classroom, I gave a 30-minute presentation to four FSI instructors and the director of HR. I believe that my subject is among the most important ideas for air safety, namely, the matter of the atmosphere we create on the flight deck when operating as a crew. The essence of this Crew Resource Management is to deal with each other in a way that will enlist the active minds of everyone in the cockpit. This atmosphere is in contrast to the traditional attitude that one might call The Captain as God school of crew resource management, in which the captain is the boss who dictates everything while the underlings comply without comment. In effect, when the captain discourages challenge or comment, the airplane is in the hands of just one brain, and this limitation has led to some spectacular catastrophes in the air. I cited three of these accidents. I also spoke from my personal experience in the bad old days, flying with many of these old imperious World War Two captains when I was a wet young pup in the co-pilot's seat of DC-3s and Martin 404s (these are cantankerous, big old hairy airplanes dating back to the Second World War and slightly after, equipped with radial engines as big as battleship anchors.) It's so much better these days! So much safer! Not to mention a far more pleasant work atmosphere. 

This week I had to learn how to use PowerPoint to put together this presentation, but it was easy enough to make a rudimentary set of 20 slides from which to speak. The business of actually speaking in the classroom was easy-peasy-- just like the old days when I was an instructor for years.

After my presentation, we had lunch together (designed so that the prospective instructor--that would be me) would interact with the staff in a more informal atmosphere. After lunch, I was grilled by the four instructors and the director of HR with a set of formal questions.

I think my interview went well. 

They have to do a background check before they will make a job offer, but I think this should go well because I was a Federal Flight Deck Officer for my last ten years at Continental and United Airlines, and for this--becoming a pistol-packing pilot on the flight deck--the background check was formidable! It was a process that included a search of everything in my life back to childhood and a two-hour interview with a psychologist. (Incidentally, my training was at the same facility in New Mexico that trains all the Secret Service agents, all the Border Patrol agents, the Federal Air Marshals, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Bureau of Indian Affairs--just about all the armed agents of the federal government except for the military, the FBI, and the CIA.)

I should know by the end of the week if Flight Safety will offer me a job. 

I really want the job! 

Flight Safety looks like a great place to work, it's in my field, it's close to home, and we could really use the money!

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P.S. I was hired--hallelujah!  I start work on Monday, February 11th.

2019.0109
rev.0208

c. 1,400 words

Gandhi vs. Lamb Chop: A Little Sound and Fury About Philip Glass

Gandhi vs. Lamb Chop:

A Little Sound and Fury About Philip Glass

Eric Paul Nolte

Philip Glass is a renowned composer in the so-called minimalist stream of music that emerged some forty years ago.  At the age of 81, he continues to present new works and to perform and collaborate in the performance of his previous works.

In 2011, after watching a Met Live in HD broadcast of Philip Glass' Satyagraha, I slammed the opera and on my blog I posted my thoughts on the matter.  

In essence, I attacked Glass for squandering his superlative gifts on writing music that lingers in long, semi-comatose and repetitive loops.

Here is my conclusion in that blog post:

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Now Glass is a top-drawer talent of superb training and accomplishment.  He was in the last generation of students in the legendary Parisian atelier of the great Nadia Boulanger.  So how could such a well-trained and marvelous talent drive into such a ditch?

Philosophy, of course.  Philosophy, as always.  Philosophy, the mother of everything, the bedrock (or quicksand) on which all knowledge must rise (or sink).

So it was no surprise for me to learn that Glass majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago.  I will not now wander off into my baleful thoughts on the crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses of postmodern philosophy, but suffice it here to say that I will put a tall stack of dollars on the proposition that it is this bizarre contemporary philosophy that steered Glass' very great talent into this postmodern musical sausage machine.

Glass has the ability to create eight measures of beautiful and arresting music and, by a process of extrusion, squeeze out 20 minutes of musical catatonia.  At the end of this soporific exertion, there is no evidence of the man's wanting to go hide in shame.

I imagine that it is his crazy postmodern philosophy that has so stripped him of aesthetic conscience that his heartless musical cranking leaves him stripped of the ability to feel guilt or any desire to atone for these crimes against his own talent, this sad abuse of his shimmering gifts from the gods.

Instead of going into a thoughtful few pages on this baffling postmodern philosophy, let me offer instead a little meditation on Philip Glass and Shari Lewis, the creator of the hand puppet, Lamb Chop.  

Consider Gandhi and Lamb Chop ...

The last act of Satyagraha ends with an empty stage, but for the character of Gandhi, who is singing a rising scale passage again and again and again, and then endlessly again and again.  And then a few more times, for good measure upon measure upon measure.  Oh, and did I mention that the phrase repeats itself?

The tune is in triple meter, say 3/4 time, in 8th notes (except the last note, which is a dotted half note), with an upbeat before measure one; it's a rising scale passage from mi to mi, if you know these solfege syllables:

mi fa sol la ti do re meeeee ...

(on the white notes of the piano, this passage rises from an E to the E an octave above, which is the C major scale, beginning and ending on the third degree of the scale.  The upbeat is on mi, or E, the first beat on fa, or F.)

As I did my stretches and calisthenics this morning, this passage from the end of Satyagraha wrapped itself around my mind and refused to let go.  Words kept setting themselves to this musical passage that recalled Shari Lewis and her hand puppet, Lamb Chop.  Do you remember this Shari Lewis song? --


     This is the song that does not end,
     It just goes on and on, my friend.
     Some people (clap!) started singing it,
     Not knowing what it was,
     And they'll continue singing it forever just because
     This is the song that does not end....


sol la ti do ti la do ti ... (G A B C B A C B, on the white notes of the piano, using the moveable doh system of solfege.)

This song, made famous by Shari Lewis, starts on the 5th degree of the scale, and the first line ends, hanging expectantly on the leading tone.

Back to Philip Glass' concluding passage (although it may be a misleading overstatement to call this phrase "concluding.") 

These are my words, in blank verse, to fit this phrase from the end of Satyagraha:

(Remember, it goes, "mi fa sol la ti do re mi," with mi an upbeat to fa, the downbeat.)


Miss Shari Lewis would be proud!
Because this song will never end!
But surely Death will intervene?
And take this song away from me?
Before I die and lose my chance,
I need a chord from Five to One.
But what's it mean, this Five to One?
The odds against a closing theme?
God help me find a way to stop,
Before the Union locks the door
And leaves me here to starve to death!

Abandon Hope, who hopes to find
In Philip Glass, a work succinct!
Instead, we have much brilliant work,
Created by this best-trained man,
Where tunes that ought to last a breath,
If written by a Brahms or Bach,
When written by this Philip Glass
Go on at soporific length!
A little tune that ought to have
Proportions of a toy balloon,
Are Zeppelins, the Hindenburg!

So what explains this so sad turn
Of brightly burnished talent spoiled?
Postmodern academic thought!
Philosophy should help us find
Life-serving purpose, sight, and joy!
Philosophy should clear the mind
Of Bullshit no one can believe,
Just like the cant that poisoned Glass,
Extruded, endless sausage link,
But tangled as a tumbleweed:
Postmodern surf that drowns the mind.

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2018.1223