ON PRAYER (Biographical)

My late wife and I had quite opposite views on prayer.  She believed that if millions of people prayed for the same thing it must have an effect.

I, however, granted that praying might do some psychological good for the person saying the prayer and even might mentally benefit two people if the praying is done out loud.

So I guess I would say that it is possible for a prayer said out loud to many people might have some effect on all, many, or several in the group.  If I was affected by a church service, however, it was from the sermon and not the prayers.  But prayer is not going to create miracles.  No amount of praying will regrow a leg, for example.

I add to grace at meals, "And lead us to Middle East Peace."  I've been doing this for more than a decade, but, then, I am only one person.  I thought for awhile that the Arab Spring might eventually take hold.  I thought that making ourselves energy independent would allow us to withdraw militarily from the Middle East.  But in neither case, does there appear to be anything positive happening, though maybe it is early years.

U.S ECONOMY KEEPS ROLLIN' ALONG BUT THERE IS A JOB PARADOX?

The Remarkable Recovery continues another month.  The preliminary jobs reports for June shows an increase 222,000 new jobs, handily beating estimates.*  And wages increased nicely too at an annualized rate of 2.5%.  Even better, the figures for the previous two months were also raised.  The thing is that the report could be even better if we had a better trained work force.**

• By 2020 there will be 1.4 million computer science–related jobs available in the U.S. but only 400,000 graduates with the skills necessary to fill them.

I have long been interested in motivation, based on my personal experience.  If you are strongly motivated, you can make up for low brainpower IQ (Of course there is a limit to what motivation).  In the late 1960s, I participated in a program to motivate 5th graders in a large low-cost housing development in Denver.  Then around 2000, I participated in a reading program for 2nd graders in a school in a low-cost housing neighborhood.

A parents best friend is to be in a neighborhood where children are motivated.  In such a case the likelihood of your children being motivated is greatly enhanced.  In the neighborhood where I grew up, I think my whole gang rose to the level of their abilities.  In some cases it was Ph.D. and in other is might have been a two-year certificate, but everyone took things as far as they could go.

All us oldersters know that if we need to know something about our cell phones or computers, we should seek out a 10 yr old.  Since children are so motivated to learn about tablet computers and such, it would seem easy to get a workforce trained in computer science.  The main problem is in getting such things to them in such a way that the youngsters can interact.  It seems like there are attempts to do this.

But there is also a paradox about the shortage of coders and other computer science specialists as graduates have difficulties in finding jobs:

With coders (A.K.A. computer programmers) in such high demand, you’d think it would be obvious to “start ‘em young” and put high school students on a path to a rewarding career. And yet, according to Computer Science Education Week, computer science classes don’t count toward math or science high school graduation requirements in 22 states, including Colorado, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. It is no wonder that computing occupations are among the highest-paying jobs for new graduates, fewer than 3% of college students graduate with a degree in computer science.***

* http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/07/us-nonfarm-payrolls-june-2017.html
** http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/07/heres-what-the-unemployment-rate-is-not-telling-you-about-job-losses.html
*** http://fortune.com/2016/04/27/tech-skills-gap-stem/

PARABLE OF PRODIGAL SON AND OTHER SON (Biographical)

One of the most famous stories in the Christian Bible is the story of the Prodigal Son (Prodigal means "wasteful extravagance").  Here is my take, but feel free to read more authentic renditions (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Prodigal_Son).

A wealthy father has two grown sons.  One says he wants to enjoy his inheritance now and not wait for the father's death.  The father complies.  So that son goes out into the world and fritters away his inheritance on "unworthy" women, drugs, and alcohol and finery, but loses everything when he runs out of money.  So he sees the error of his ways and returns home in contrition.  The father meets him and showers him with things, including a feast of a fatted calf.

But what of the other son who is heart broken.  He had stayed home and looked after his father and the family business, doing well, and obeying his father's commandments.  He never was so much as treated to a spit roasted goat to share with his friends.  I call him the Dutiful Son.  The Dutiful Son is upset and doesn't even attend the Prodigal Son's feast.

My sympathies have always been with the Dutiful Son who well deserved some praise and celebrations from the father, but my mother would have said, "Doing good is its own reward."

Among other things, we are asked to believe that the Prodigal Son was forever cured and had no recidivism, something I very much doubt.

So which was I?  Well, I went into a profession that almost guaranteed I would be far from home, but I did take care of myself and didn't have to return home defeated, so you can't say I was the Prodigal son who lived in wasteful extravagance.  So it doesn't really fit.

My late brother never moved far from home and took care of my mother, even seeing her once a week in the nursing home and looking after her medications (He was a medical doctor), whereas I saw my mother maybe twice a year.

Before my mother went into the nursing home, she would visit me for a week.  I had a love/hate relationship with my mother, but when she was away I could forgive her and she did many wonderful things for me.* But before the week's visit was over, I would have to forgive her all over again because of her "artistic" personality.

Clearly my brother was the Dutiful Son.

* http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2013/03/side-boards-poem.html
http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-sword-biographical.html
http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2009/11/my-career-as-pianist.html

PUGNACIOUS POLITICS

What were your first thoughts about the clip showing Donald Trump wrestling down the man with the CNN face?*  My first thought was that someone had uncovered this clip and showed it to embarrass the president.  My second thought was that it was some of the dirty FAKE NEWS the president rails against.  Imagine my surprise that the clip was in a tweet from our president!  Shocked is a word hardly strong enough.

Well maybe it follows from Trump's election run in which he urged violence against demonstrators.**  So the trend toward violent politics continues (see Decline in American politics)***

So getting physical in politics and encouraging a foreign government to get involved in our politics are added to our decline politically.  It is getting difficult to think of ways our politics can get even worse.  A shooting war?

* http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/02/politics/trump-wrestling-tweet/index.html
** https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000004269364/trump-and-violence.html
*** http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2017/06/decline-of-american-politics.html

PARALLEL GOVERNMENT

CNBC has a remarkable article by David Roberts apparently based on Michael Bloomberg:*

Even before President Trump announced that the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, it was clear that he intended to lead the US on a  fossil fuel bender. He has made it crystal clear that the federal government has no interest in addressing climate change.

But every action has an equal and opposite reaction; his announcement on Paris has sparked an extraordinary amount of counter-organizing. In recoiling from Trump, states, cities, and institutions are entering into closer cooperation. A coalition is forming, a Blue America, and at least on climate change, it is going beyond mere resistance to a more proactive role, negotiating with the international community on its own behalf, like a separate nation.

It is, in foreign policy terms, a remarkable development — and while it seems to offer some near-term hope on climate change, it carries troubling implications for the ongoing stability of the country.

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In the same vein, Ivo Daalder had a fantastic piece in Politico Magazine** on the need for cities to organize themselves and engage in purposeful foreign policy. Urban areas, he notes, have more in common with one another across national boundaries than they do with rural areas in their own countries. They all face traffic, congestion, and pollution. They all depend on a steady influx of outsiders and thrive on innovation and higher education. Not one of them is interested in the Trumpian recipe of xenophobia and fossil fuels.
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The commitments of the US subnational climate diaspora [states and cities] are voluntary as well. But by organizing and transparently sharing information about progress (assuming the coalition can pull itself together to do so), it could trigger a dynamic very much like the one Paris seeks to trigger at the international level: Pride and peer pressure, not the threat of legal penalties, will drive ambition.
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At least currently, Blue America has more people but less political power. That's partly what the subnational organizing is responding to.

It is often said, metaphorically, that America is becoming two separate countries, with different values and visions, occupying the same territory. But what if that becomes less metaphorical?

What will happen when Red and Blue America starting thinking of themselves as separate countries, and acting that way, consolidating their power and negotiating independently? What happens when they really start fighting?

It's a little dystopian, as it carries the whiff of a second Civil War. But as we've learned about dystopias this past decade, they need not happen all at once, dramatically. They can happen in creeping increments, each of which allows for enough of a pause that it comes to seem normal.

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Still, I can't imagine that having two parallel governments operating in the world's most powerful country is going to stay peaceful and symbolic for long. Red America — especially in its intemperate and vengeful current incarnation — is going to notice that Blue America is being hailed as an international hero for saving the US commitment to Paris. It's going to notice that Canadian officials are spending an awful lot of time with mayors. It's going to notice subnational climate and trade agreements forming under its nose.

Trump is going to notice that even though he won the presidency, the world keeps talking to the governors and mayors who oppose him. I worry it will not end well.

It is interesting that I am not the only one who has noted that such political divisiveness as we see today happened before and resulted in the Civil War.  I'm not sure how such a war would happen today, but somehow it could involve rural areas against metropolitan areas (as noted in the articles cited).  This would be difficult because rural areas supply the food and urban areas supply the goods.

* http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/03/blue-america-reaches-out-to-the-world-ignoring-trump.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climate-paris-idUSKBN18W2DQ
** http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/06/why-cities-need-their-own-foreign-policies-215234

WOMEN ENTREPENEUR HARASSMENT - II

The problem with the sexual harassment of women entrepreneurs is more common than you might think.*  This has caused Reid Hoffman to propose three rules:

To Hoffman, this means three different things for VCs:**

1. VCs should interact with entrepreneurs the same way a manager would with an employee. Sexual relationships and business relationships should not mix.
2. Those who see VCs behaving inappropriately should share that information with colleagues.
3. Limited partners should take a zero-tolerance attitude toward this behavior, and stop investing in VCs who behave badly.

Perhaps there is hope in that one of the harassers has said:

Now, a venture capitalist is at the center of sexism claims. Half a dozen women have accused Justin Caldbeck, formerly at Bain Capital, of making unwanted sexual advances when they went to seek out funding or advice from him, according to a report in The Information. (In a statement Caldbeck said: "It is outrageous and unethical for any person to leverage a position of power in exchange for sexual gain, it is clear to me now that that is exactly what I've done.")**

* http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2017/07/women-entrepeneur-harrassment.html
** http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/02/three-things-reid-hoffman-thinks-vcs-should-do-to-stop-sexual-harassment.html

WOMEN ENTREPENEUR HARRASSMENT

I find the sexual harassment of women entrepreneurs to be shocking:

One female entrepreneur recounted how she had been propositioned by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist while seeking a job with him, which she did not land after rebuffing him. Another showed the increasingly suggestive messages she had received from a start-up investor. And one chief executive described how she had faced numerous sexist comments from an investor while raising money for her online community website.

What happened afterward was often just as disturbing, the women told The New York Times. Many times, the investors’ firms and colleagues ignored or played down what had happened when the situations were brought to their attention. Saying anything, the women were warned, might lead to ostracism.

The reference even names some names.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/technology/women-entrepreneurs-speak-out-sexual-harassment.html?mi_u=29112017&_r=0