Sixty million Trump voters are fools.

On November 8, a large portion of the United States electorate failed the IQ test. There are approximately sixty million of you. Some of those 60,000,000 votes are fraudulent, but the number of fools is not far off.

Whether your vote was for the establishment of a fascist state; to roll back the gains made by liberals in the "culture wars"; because you thought the gaudy, amoral candidate from New York City understands your dim sense of being an oppressed minority; or because you still believe in the idiotic Republican economic policies that bring disaster every time they are implemented, you have been bamboozled. Here is what we will all be getting: misery.

Abject misery.

Don't think that the ignorant brutes you have put into power will only punish your perceived enemies. It will be bad for everyone.

Perhaps you thought that Barack Obama did not understand the Constitution. Donald Trump and his thugs may talk about the Constitution, but they, if they even know what is in the Constitution, are not really interested in finding out.

Liberty is out the window. Maybe even your liberty. Probably your liberty.

Republicans like Paul Ryan see the Trump administration, with its accompanying Republican majorities in the House and Senate, as an opportunity to push through their economic policies. If they are successful, you will lose your Medicare; if you have Obamacare, you will lose it; you will lose the overtime pay that Barack Obama promised you; your Social Security may be in jeopardy; we will all probably experience another Great Recession or Great Depression.

But the loss of liberty is the worst thing. You may have thought you were voting for liberty for your own race or your own religion, but you will probably be surprised at the outcome. The creation of an official Christian state would mean the end of freedom of religion. You don't believe that, but it is true.

I hold some hope for an Electoral College Christmas Miracle, but if that doesn't happen, misery is coming. For everybody.

Properly directed praise

A co-worker of mine spent a long time in the hospital and under care of doctors for a very dangerous spinal infection. When she finally came back to work, in a wheelchair, but in good spirits, we were all happy to see her, and I told her so.

She smiled at me and said, "All the glory goes to God!" I am used to these declarations, and I usually don't let on that I think they are preposterous, but I'm sure I let my jaw drop for an unguarded split second before I regained my equanimity.

All the glory to the being who, if it existed, was responsible for the disease in the first place. No thanks to the tireless efforts of the medical professionals who saved her life.

I am going to quote, probably at too great length, the reaction of Daniel Dennett to a similar life or death situation.

To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and X-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to X-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India--and the United States, of course--and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other's work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan--you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who's counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.

("Thank Goodness", Copyright 2006 by Edge Foundation, Inc.)

Let's give credit where credit is due.

Office organization for the new president

p.g. montgomery

Anytown, USA

November 17, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump

Trump Tower

New York, NY

Dear Mr. President-elect,

I can see that you have been struggling a bit under the weight of your new duties, since President Obama gave you the bad news that you have to hire your own office staff. I think I can help you with your office organization.

I am a recent retiree with computer skills and also a background in property management. I can offer you my services as an office manager for $1,000.00 a month (I could use the money to supplement my Social Security payments, for sure!). However, if I do a bad job, you don't have to pay me. You can see that I have researched your business style!

Now, I recently heard that you are having trouble scheduling a meeting with the leader of Japan, not having been aware that meetings with foreign leaders are easily arranged through the Department of State. I admit that I, like you, have no experience in the Federal Government, but I am very skilled at the Google! These things can be looked up, and if you're too busy, I'm your guy!

Please consider my application, Mr. Trump. I don't think you'll get a better deal anywhere.

Yours sincerely,

p.g. montgomery

P.S., I do have a couple of requests for benefits should you hire me: I voted for Hillary, and I was very much looking forward to taco trucks at every corner. If you could arrange for one to be parked at the end of my street, that'd be great! Also, I don't think I could work with that douchebag Steve Bannon. If you really need to keep him around, please see that he is kept on a leash while in the office. Thank you!

p.g.m.

Thoughts on yesterday's electoral calamity

Donald Trump has won the latest battle in Pat Buchanan's Culture Wars. Those of us who have been around awhile can perhaps console ourselves that, while this battle was a big one and its result will be catastrophic, the war is never over.

A conservative acquaintance of mine makes the claim that the only group of people that it is not politically incorrect to ridicule is the poor white. We call them trash, rubes. Well, whatever we call them, they have had their revenge on the intellectual elites.

This revenge they have exacted is a curious one. They have chosen as their champion a man who is in no way like them. The rural districts of America have elected a city slicker from New York City, no less. A business cheat whose own open behavior and statements make his vileness obvious to all. The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States leaves the rational person with a lot of questions. Those questions must have answers. Here are some of mine.

A good number of people in the United States (the people who have spoken) do not tolerate neighbors who are different, but paradoxically, seem to admire those same differences in their celebrities. If a person wants to be different, he has to go big. If you are gay, be Liberace. If you want to be a sinful woman, be Miley Cyrus or Madonna. If you want to grab your own crotch in public, be Michael Jackson. Being an amoral bully and an alleged raper of underage girls might just get you elected president if you just go big enough.

Another habit of many, many people is to refuse to see things that are in plain view, and to believe in things that they can't see. The Killary mythology (she is a murderer, someone said to me) proves stronger in these people's eyes than Donald Trump's open amorality. Donald says, "I'm rich. I can grab women's pussies." Hillary is hounded by years of investigations that find nothing, and yet people are more afraid of her than they would be if she were actually a convicted criminal. The imagination is stronger than reality.

Finally, what are we to make of so many evangelical Christians voting for somebody who so obviously does not share their values? He cheats on his wives; he gropes and makes advances on married women; he peeps at his beauty contestants when they are undressed. And it should be plain to anyone that he is not a religious man. Why vote for him?

I have recently read a couple of essays that shed some light on the evangelical mindset and give us clues as to their strange, unexpected behavior.

Let's compare two different attitudes about people's behavior.

First, let's look at John Stuart Mill's Moral Influences in Early Youth: My Father's Character and Opinions. John Stuart Mill was not brought up with any religious belief or training. He recalls his father's attitude toward the behavior of others: James Mill judged a person by his outward actions, and those actions by their effect on others. James Mill was not interested in the motivations for these actions. Bad motives might bring about good actions, and vice versa; all that counted, in the end, was the action itself.

Contrast that point of view with the one criticized by George Eliot in her essay Evangelical Teaching. Her criticism of evangelical teaching centers on the opinions of the Reverend Doctor John Cumming (referred to in the essay only as Dr. Cumming). Dr. Cumming's view on a person's actions is that a good deed is worth nothing if done for its own sake, just because the doer has a benevolent heart. Good deeds are only good if they are done with the glory of God in mind. The doer must intend to advance the glory of God in order for a good deed to have any moral merit.

Now, this attitude suggests to me that any action, good or bad, may be acceptable if done to advance the glory of God. This brings us back to the Culture Wars, and to Sean Hannity's strange (to me) comparison of Donald Trump to King David. After all, said Hannity, King David had 500 concubines, and yet, the fallible king managed to do the will of God. Why shouldn't Donald Trump advance the glory of God? I firmly believe that evangelical Christians could cast their votes for the manifestly bad man Donald Trump because they think that he will be God's instrument in winning the war against secular humanism. We shall see how that works out.

Funny world. Not "funny ha ha."

The religious contribution to the modern world is negative.

When I was in ninth grade, we had a course called General Science, which was ably taught by a Mr. Doyle. One day he gave the class a little survey in which we were to rank the importance of various historical figures in their influence on the modern world.

There were modern figures like Einstein and Lincoln, intermixed with Biblical names: Moses, King David, et. al. You may recall that, outside of school, I did not enjoy an intellectual background. All I knew of ancient history was the Bible. The Greek philosophers, for example, did not yet exist for me. So, in my mind, the Biblical figures loomed large, especially since they were from so long ago, yet still were so present in our lives. I reasoned that the reputations of more modern figures had not stood the test of time.

Well, apparently a lot of the other kids reasoned the same way, because Mr. Doyle let us know of his distress at our choices.

As I look, also with distress, at the modern disdain for science and logic, it occurs to me that, beyond religion's promotion of things that are not true, it has artificially preserved a world view that existed among ignorant religious fundamentalists thousands of years ago. It's a view of life that, without religion, would presumably have died a quiet, peaceful death when its time was up.

Moses and King David are too much with us today. Judges and lawmakers want the Ten Commandments displayed in courthouses, although our modern legal system owes more to things that happened in England a few hundred years ago. Some people believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise.

The scientific point of view encourages us to observe nature carefully, then come to conclusions about the world. These days, there are far too many people who deny what is obviously in front of them, and instead believe only those things for which there is no evidence.

One way such thinking takes root is via our religious training. From the time many of us were small children, we have been conditioned to believe things that are false, and trained to twist logic so that it fits preconceived notions--notions that are false.

For me, these old ways of thinking are like the invasive vines that are choking the bushes in my back yard. It takes a long time to get rid of them. It is unwise to plant them, for sure.