September 2018 - Journal

The CRISIS of Election Security

As the midterms approach, America’s electronic voting systems are more vulnerable than ever. Why isn’t anyone trying to fix them?

I suggest you read this excellent article in today’s (2018-09-30) New York Times. In light of the Russian meddling in our 2016 Presidential elections, this issue–the security of our voting process–which I’m sure most of us have taken for granted for all of our lives, is more important now than ever. In fact taking just about anything for granted has become a very costly habit in this second decade of the 21st Century.

The author of the article, Kim Zetter, has covered cybersecurity for more than a decade. She is the author of “Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon.”

I urge you to read this article. Faith in the integrity of our voting process is imperative if we want to live under a truly democratic government.

APHORISM

aph·o·rism [ˈafəˌrizəm]

NOUN
a pithy observation that contains a general truth, a statement of some general principle, expressed memorably by condensing much wisdom into few words. Examples:

“The child is father to the man.” (William Wadsworth)

“Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” (George Orwell)

“Sure he [Astaire] was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did … backwards and in high heels” (Bob Thaves)

Straying afield from ourselves . . . what could we learn if we would?

Years ago, in the spring of 1989, I was reading a new book I’d just bought by one of my favorite historians, Peter Brown, Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, and scholar of Late Antiquity. I was reading, The Body and Society, Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, and I’d just begun the book, still in the introduction, when I came upon the following lines:

“After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain knowingness . . . and not, in one way or another, . . . in the knower’s straying afield from himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on thinking and reflecting at all.”

The quotation is from the philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault, whose writings and theories addressed, in part, the relationship between power and knowledge.

At that time in 1989 I’d just finished my novel, Mercy, which would come out the next year, and I was taking a breather from work, catching up on neglected reading which always piles up when I’m in the middle of writing a book. The entire quotation leaped off the page. I underlined it. I put an asterisk by it. And I wrote it in my journal.

Over the years, I’ve come back to it again and again. I use it to question and re-examine my prejudices. To question the way I think about everything, and as I get older, to wonder if I am still capable of “thinking differently than I think”. This is important to me, because I’ve often wished others did, and if I wish it for them, I can not avoid wanting it for myself as well.

In our present era of polarization in politics and culture, when all of us seem to be gnashing out at each other from our lairs of dark and selfish prejudices, wouldn’t it be valuable for us to learn to think differently than we do, to perceive differently than we see? Wouldn’t it be valuable for us to TRY, at least?

What Alexis de Tocqueville knew . . . .

“If I were asked . . . to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people [the Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.”

Apparently de Tocqueville was a more perceptive man in 1835, when America was still a new democracy, than many men are today, 183 years later. Or, maybe, he just had a firmer grip on his ego. Or maybe, both.

John Adams said. . .

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murder’s itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

But we must also remember: this was written in a letter from Adams to John Taylor, 17 December 1814. America had not yet established itself to the Western end of the continent, nor populated itself from shore to shore and all points in between. Adams couldn’t have envisioned what we’ve become today.

It’s been almost 200 years since Adams wrote this, and the great American experiment is still underway. We can only hope we will become the kind of democracy he couldn’t envision, that we are better than he imagined

New theory of Dark Personality reveals the nine traits of evil people in your life

Having written a number of novels involving characters with “dark personalities”, I found this article recently published in BigThink.com worth sharing. The sad reality is that people with high D-factor scores do not live in isolation. The damage they do to the people who interact with them reverberates widely and deeply. They can cause a lot people a lot of misery. This article lists some of the warning signs. All of us would do well to know these signs, understand them, and learn to recognize them in others. It could save us, and those we love, a lot of grief. Below are excerpts from the article. DLL

by PAUL RATNER

Do evil people exist? While the answer to this may depend on your religious background and what you understand “evil” to be, scientists have figured out that people have a “dark core” to their personality. What’s more, a General Dark Factor of Personality (D-factor) exists that can tell the extent of a person’s dark traits, which cause questionable ethical, moral, and social behavior.

What is the D-factor?
The research team from Germany and Denmark defined the D-factor as “the basic tendency to maximize one’s own utility at the expense of others, accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications for one’s malevolent behaviors.”

Those who get high scores on such a rubric look to achieve their goals at all costs, even if they harm others in the process. Their goals might also be, specifically, to harm others. The team also predicts that such people would not want to help others in need if it doesn’t benefit them and will derive no “utility” in the success of others. They won’t really be happy if something good happens to anyone but them.

The psychologists established that the D-factor observed in the human population not only serves as a unifying theme among the dark traits, it also works with the principle of “indifference of indicator”. This term is typically used in the context of the ‘general factor of intelligence’ (g-factor), whereby scoring highly on one intelligence test usually means you’ll score higher on other intelligence tests. Intelligence types are related, and no matter what tests you administer to gauge it, the g-factor will still be there—its existence is independent of the tests used to measure it. The same goes for the 9 malevolent traits in the D-factor. The researchers discovered that people who score highly on a single dark trait tend to also score highly on several other dark traits, suggesting that there is a common core of darkness: dark traits are related.

How the study was carried out . . . (see article link above in my remarks, as well as this article by Scott Barry Kaufman in Scientific American .)

The 9 traits of malevolence
These are the 9 traits comprising the D-factor, along with the definitions used by the scientists:

1. Egoism: “the excessive concern with one’s own pleasure or advantage at the expense of community well-being.”
2. Machiavellianism: “manipulativeness, callous affect, and a strategic-calculating orientation.”
3. Moral disengagement: “a generalized cognitive orientation to the world that differentiates individuals’ thinking in a way that powerfully affects unethical behavior.”
4. Narcissism: “ego-reinforcement is the all-consuming motive.”
5. Psychological entitlement: “a stable and pervasive sense that one deserves more and is entitled to more than others.”
6. Psychopathy: “deficits in affect (i.e., callousness) and self-control (i.e., impulsivity).”
7. Sadism: “a person who humiliates others, shows a longstanding pattern of cruel or demeaning behavior to others, or intentionally inflicts physical, sexual, or psychological pain or suffering on others in order to assert power and dominance or for pleasure and enjoyment.”
8. Self-interest: “the pursuit of gains in socially valued domains, including material goods, social status, recognition, academic or occupational achievement, and happiness.”
9. Spitefulness: “a preference that would harm another but that would also entail harm to oneself. This harm could be social, financial, physical, or an inconvenience.”

How dark is your personality?
If you’d like to test yourself to see how malevolent you might be, the psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman devised a short version of the D-factor test in his article for Scientific American. The more you are in agreement with multiple items on this list, the higher your D-factor score is likely to be:

The Dark Core Scale
1. It is hard to get ahead without cutting corners here and there.
2. I like to use clever manipulation to get my way.
3. People who get mistreated have usually done something to bring it on themselves.
4. I know that I am special because everyone keeps telling me so.
5. I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than others.
6. I’ll say anything to get what I want.
7. Hurting people would be exciting.
8. I try to make sure others know about my successes.
9. It is sometimes worth a little suffering on my part to see others receive the punishment they deserve.

The Electoral College: Top 3 Pros and Cons

Nearly two years out from the 2020 Presidential elections, the questions of the most appropriate way for U.S. voters to count and tally their Presidential votes is again coming to the forefront. Below, I’ve reprinted an article published on September 1, 2017 on procon.org website on this subject. DLL

The debate over the continued use of the Electoral College resurfaced during the 2016 presidential election, when Donald Trump lost the general election to Hillary Clinton by over 2.8 million votes and won the Electoral College by 74 votes. The official general election results indicate that Trump received 304 Electoral College votes and 46.09% of the popular vote (62,984,825 votes), and Hillary Clinton received 227 Electoral College votes and 48.18% of the popular vote (65,853,516 votes).[1]

Prior to the 2016 election, there were four times in US history when a candidate won the presidency despite losing the popular vote: 1824 (John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson), 1876 (Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden), 1888 (Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland), and 2000 (George W. Bush over Al Gore). [2]

The Electoral College was established in 1788 by Article II of the US Constitution, which also established the executive branch of the US government, and was revised by the Twelfth Amendment (ratified June 15, 1804), the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified July 1868), and the Twenty-Third Amendment (ratified Mar. 29, 1961). Because the procedure for electing the president is part of the Constitution, a Constitutional Amendment (which requires two-thirds approval in both houses of Congress plus approval by 38 states) would be required to abolish the Electoral College. [3] [4] [5] [6]

Pro 1 The Founding Fathers enshrined the Electoral College in the US Constitution because they thought it was the best method to choose the president. Using electors instead of the popular vote was intended to safeguard against uninformed or uneducated voters by putting the final decision in the hands of electors most likely to possess the information necessary to make the best decision; to prevent states with larger populations from having undue influence; and to compromise between electing the president by popular vote and letting Congress choose the president. [7] [8] [9] According to Alexander Hamilton, the Electoral College is if “not perfect, it is at least excellent,” because it ensured “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” [7] The Founders wanted to balance the will of the populace against the risk of “tyranny of the majority,” in which the voices of the masses can drown out minority interests. [10]

Con 1 The reasons for which the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College are no longer relevant. Modern technology allows voters to get necessary information to make informed decisions in a way that could not have been foreseen by the Founding Fathers. Also, while Alexander Hamilton in 1788 saw the electors as being “free from any sinister bias,” members of the Electoral College are now selected by the political parties and they are expected to vote along party lines regardless of their own opinions about the candidates. [7] [4] [16] Just as several voting laws that limited direct democracy in the Constitution have been modified or discarded throughout history, so should the Electoral College. As a result of Constitutional amendments, women and former slaves were given the right to vote, and Senators, once appointed by state legislatures, are now elected directly by popular vote. [15] The vice presidency was once awarded to the runner up in electoral votes, but the procedure was changed over time to reflect the reality of elections. [17]

Pro 2 The Electoral College ensures that all parts of the country are involved in selecting the President of the United States. If the election depended solely on the popular vote, then candidates could limit campaigning to heavily-populated areas or specific regions. To win the election, presidential candidates need electoral votes from multiple regions and therefore they build campaign platforms with a national focus, meaning that the winner will actually be serving the needs of the entire country. Without the electoral college, groups such as Iowa farmers and Ohio factory workers would be ignored in favor of pandering to metropolitan areas with higher population densities, leaving rural areas and small towns marginalized. [11] [12] [13]

Con 2 The Electoral College gives too much power to “swing states” and allows the presidential election to be decided by a handful of states. The two main political parties can count on winning the electoral votes in certain states, such as California for the Democratic Party and Indiana for the Republican Party, without worrying about the actual popular vote totals. Because of the Electoral College, presidential candidates only need to pay attention to a limited number of states that can swing one way or the other. [18] A Nov. 6, 2016 episode of PBS NewsHour revealed that “Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have made more than 90% of their campaign stops in just 11 so-called battleground states. Of those visits, nearly two-thirds took place in the four battlegrounds with the most electoral votes — Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina.” [19]

Pro 3 The Electoral College guarantees certainty to the outcome of the presidential election. If the election were based on popular vote, it would be possible for a candidate to receive the highest number of popular votes without actually obtaining a majority. [11] This happened with President Nixon in 1968 and President Clinton in 1992, when both men won the most electoral votes while receiving just 43% of the popular vote. [11] The existence of the Electoral College precluded calls for recounts or demands for run-off elections. The electoral process can also create a larger mandate to give the president more credibility; for example, President Obama received 51.3% of the popular vote in 2012 but 61.7% of the electoral votes. [14] In 227 years, the winner of the popular vote has lost the electoral vote only five times. [2] This proves the system is working.

Con 3 The Electoral College ignores the will of the people. There are over 300 million people in the United States, but just 538 people decide who will be president. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than one million votes, yet still lost the election on electoral votes. [14] Even President-elect Donald Trump, who benefitted from the system, stated after the 2016 election that he believes presidents should be chosen by popular vote: “I would rather see it where you went with simple votes. You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.” [20] Just as in 2000 when George W. Bush received fewer nationwide popular votes than Al Gore, Donald Trump will serve as the President of the United States despite being supported by fewer Americans than his opponent. [2]

The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College as a compromise between electing the president via a vote in Congress only or via a popular vote only. The Electoral College comprises 538 electors; each state is allowed one elector for each Representative and Senator (DC is allowed 3 electors as established by the Twenty-Third Amendment). [3] [4] [5] [6]

Number of electoral votes allocated to each state.
Source: USA.gov, “Presidential Election Process,” usa.gov (accessed Nov. 18, 2016)

In each state, a group of electors is chosen by each political party. On election day, voters choosing a presidential candidate are actually casting a vote for an elector. Most states use the “winner-take-all” method, in which all electoral votes are awarded to the winner of the popular vote in that state. In Nebraska and Maine, the candidate that wins the state’s overall popular vote receives two electors, and one elector from each congressional district is apportioned to the popular vote winner in that district. For a candidate to win the presidency, he or she must win at least 270 Electoral College votes. [3] [4] [5] [6]

On Monday Dec. 19, 2016, the electors in each state met to vote for President and Vice President of the United States. Of the 538 Electoral College votes available, Donald J. Trump received 304 votes, Hillary Clinton received 227 votes, and seven votes went to others: three for Colin Powell, one for Faith Spotted Eagle, one for John Kasich, one for Ron Paul, and one for Bernie Sanders). On Dec. 22, 2016, the results were certified in all 50 states. On Jan. 6, 2017, a joint session of the US Congress met to certify the election results and Vice President Joe Biden, presiding as President of the Senate, read the certified vote tally. [21] [22]

Footnotes:
1. Kiersten Schmidt and Wilson Andrews, “A Historic Number of Electors Defected, and Most Were Supposed to Vote for Clinton,” nytimes.com, Dec. 19, 2016
2. Rachael Revesz, “Five Presidential Nominees Who Won Popular Vote but Lost the Election,” independent.co.uk, Nov. 16, 2016
3. National Archives and Records Administration, “The 2016 Presidential Election,” archives.gov (accessed Nov. 16, 2016)
4. National Archives and Records Administration, “About the Electors,” archives.gov (accessed Nov. 16, 2016)
5. National Archives and Records Administration, “Presidential Election Laws,” archives.gov (accessed Nov. 16, 2016)
6. National Archives and Records Administration, “What Is the Electoral College?,” archives.gov (accessed Nov. 16, 2016)
7. Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist Papers: No. 68 (The Mode of Electing the President),” congress.gov, Mar. 14, 1788
8. Marc Schulman, “Why the Electoral College,” historycentral.com (accessed Nov. 18, 2016)
9. Melissa Kelly, “Why Did the Founding Fathers Create Electors?,” 712educators.about.com, Jan. 28, 2016
10. Hans A. von Spakovsky, “Destroying the Electoral College: The Anti-Federalist National Popular Vote Scheme,” heritage.org, Oct. 27, 2011
11. Richard A. Posner, “In Defense of the Electoral College,” slate.com, Nov. 12, 2012
12. Jarrett Stepman, “Why America Uses Electoral College, Not Popular Vote for Presidential Election,” cnsnews.com, Nov. 7, 2016
13. Gary Gregg, “Electoral College Keeps Elections Fair,” politico.com, Dec. 5, 2012
14. John Nichols, “Obama’s 3 Million Vote, Electoral College Landslide, Majority of States Mandate,” thenation.com, Nov. 9, 2012
15. Joe Miller, “The Reason for the Electoral College,” factcheck.org, Feb. 11, 2008
16. William C. Kimberling, “The Manner of Choosing Electors,” uselectionatlas.org (accessed Nov. 18, 2016)
17. Sanford V. Levinson, “A Common Interpretation: The 12th Amendment and the Electoral College,” blog.constitutioncenter.org, Nov. 17, 2016
18. Andrew Prokop, “Why the Electoral College Is the Absolute Worst, Explained,” vox.com, Nov. 10, 2016
19. Sam Weber and Laura Fong, “This System Calls for Popular Vote to Determine Winner,” pbs.org, Nov. 6, 2016
20. Leslie Stahl, “President-elect Trump Speaks to a Divided Country on 60 Minutes,” cbsnews.com, Nov. 13, 2016
21. Lisa Lerer, “Clinton Wins Popular Vote by Nearly 2.9 Million,” elections.ap.org, Dec. 22, 2016
22. Doina Chiacu and Susan Cornwell, “US Congress Certifies Trump’s Electoral College Victory,” reuters.com, Jan. 6, 2017

“You have no privacy . . . get over it.”

These words spoken by Scott McNealy, the founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems, way back in 1999, open an article by Sue Halpern in the new issue of the New York Review of Books, in which she reviews four new books on privacy.

The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America
by Sarah E. Igo
Harvard University Press, 569 pp., $35.00

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech
by Cyrus Farivar
Melville House, 281 pp., $27.99

Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Battle for Privacy
by Mary Ziegler
Harvard University Press, 383 pp., $45.00

Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies
by Woodrow Hartzog
Harvard University Press, 366 pp., $35.00

Because every intimate aspect of our lives is being collected and absorbed and processed and monetized by the digital services that have become essential to our modern lives, the issue of our privacy will continue to be increasingly important to us. As we learn the dangers of the digital media we’ve embraced, hastily, greedily, and without fully understanding it, we are only now realizing how much of ourselves we have freely given to them, often in return for nothing more than amusement.

Halpern says, “A survey recently published in The Atlantic found that ‘78.8 percent of people said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the privacy of their information on social media, and 82.2 percent said they self-censor on social media.’”

Read this article, and the books Halpern discusses. Surveillance tech owns us. Only by understanding what we’ve done to ourselves through ignorance and unquestioning gullibility, can we hope to correct our mistakes

Teacher’s pay? As Professionals or Babysitters?

A teacher recently sent me a text message with a picture of a handwritten sign addressing this issue at a gathering of teachers in another state. Here’s a slightly fuzzy recreation of the sign.

The message very cleverly gets across the idea of how little the public and lawmakers of our state and national governments value the men and women who educate their children. This short-sighted neglect of such a critical profession defies common sense.

As I write this, Texas, where I live, has just signaled that it is probably going to cut our education budget by $3.5 billion over the next several years because property taxes in our booming state are skyrocketing, so they will easily cover the $3.5 billion loss. At the same time, the Texas Education Agency is asking for an additional $54 million to help schools provide students with mental health counselors (because of increased school shootings throughout the state), to increase the number of law enforcement officers, and to arm teachers in schools.

If Texas booming economy enables it to have a boom in property taxes as well, why not use that $3.5 billion windfall to increase teacher pay instead of taking it out of the Education budget altogether? Is that a failure of imagination? Yes. Is that an example of misplaced priorities? Yes. Is that an example of greed over vision? Yes.

Maybe if we paid our teachers more, they could teach the next generation of legislators that investing in the minds of our future leaders would lead to a more intelligent use of resources, and a more compassionate government.