2025 Life Logs, Day 39: Dining-in at the Baranowski’s

by Judy Handley | Feb 8, 2025 | 2025 Sailing Logs | 0 comments

2025 Life Logs, Day 39: Dining-in at the Baranowski’s
Date: Saturday, February 8, 2025
Weather: Sunny; Temp 32, Low 29 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

Tonight, my dining-in group gathered at Peter and Karen Baranowski’s. My contribution was a lemony broccoli, white bean, and arugula salad. I had never made it before, so luckily it turned out to be quite tasty. The entrée tonight was a stuffed tiger shrimp dish which was also very tasty. We worked very hard to not talk about what is happening in our country right now as it is just too depressing. It seems like there is no end to the destruction. But, for tonight, I am going to put that out of my mind as those of us in this part of the world are bracing for a winter storm. We could get more snow tonight than we have seen for a while. So, I am going to go read myself to sleep in the hopes of waking up to a snowy world.

2025 Life Logs, Day 37: Taking a Break

by Judy Handley | Feb 6, 2025 | 2025 Sailing Logs | 0 comments

2025 Life Logs, Day 37: Taking a Break
Date: Thursday, February 6, 2025
Weather: Snow, Turning to Icy Rain; Temp 36, Low 33 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

I am taking a break from writing about politics tonight. But thankfully, thousands of people across the country are not taking a break. They are pushing back. People are protesting, the Congressional phone system has been jammed by thousands of calls, lawsuits are being filed, judges are stopping some actions, and on and on. I am so grateful for everything people are doing. But all of that cannot help those people in need around the world that have been abandoned by USAID due to Trump’s actions. It is sickening and shameful.

But I had some things that I had to do today, so I put all of this on the back burner and forged by way through the day. I had a PT assessment to investigate the source of stiffness in my neck on the left side. It took 30 minutes to drive to the Spaulding Center for the hour-long assessment, and then another 30 minutes to drive home. The physical therapist asked me question after question and finally decided that the stiffness is caused by the way I sit when working on my computer. She is recommending that I get a wireless keyboard and find a way to sit my laptop at eye level with the keyboard located lower. That way I will not be continually leaning down in order to see the screen. I’ll work on that this weekend because when I got home, I rearranged things hoping to avoid buying the new equipment. But I can already tell that my make-shift move is not going to help. I am going to have to buy the keyboard and laptop stand.

2025 Life Logs, Day 36: Options

by Judy Handley | Feb 5, 2025 | 2025 Sailing Logs | 0 comments

2025 Life Logs, Day 36: Options
Date: Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Weather: Sunny and Cold; Temp 30, Low 18 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

I have been writing this log every night for the past 7,050 days, and I have always tried to avoid politics. I’m sure I’ve noted major events, but not in long posts every night. That has just started happening this week. But things have changed, and I feel a civic duty to acknowledge what is happening to my country. Like many Americans, I am searching for what it is that I can do.

Today on Substack, Robert Reich posed a question and answered it. The question was, “What should Democratic lawmakers do now?” He said that he has spoken to a number of Democratic lawmakers and heard from them roughly four different strategic options.
Do Nothing … Negotiate … Express Public Resistance … Stop Everything

What follows are the four strategies under consideration as listed in Reich’s article.
1. Allow Trump to overplay his hand. Some Democratic lawmakers believe they should do little or nothing — and thereby let Trump, Musk, and the MAGA Republican Party go wild. That way, say the Democrats I’ve spoken with, Trump and company are guaranteed to overplay their hand. By the same token, MAGA Republicans in Congress should get as much rope as they want because they’ll eventually hang themselves. “Don’t interfere!” they say. “Watch the fun!”
2. Negotiate to contain the damage. Other Democrats tell me they want to be at the table when Trump Republicans in Congress are making significant decisions, to help steer them in the least-damaging direction. So, for example, they’ll negotiate a budget agreement to prevent a shutdown in mid-March, try to lift the debt ceiling to prevent government from defaulting on paying its bills, and hold whatever hearings they’re able to.
3. Express loud public resistance. A third group of Democrats wants a more public show of activism in resistance to Trump. They’ve been talking to me about helping their constituents get more organized and activated, staging loud demonstrations that draw the attention of the media, and appealing Trump’s illegal moves to the federal courts, along with tons of publicity.
4. Gum up the works. A fourth group of Democratic lawmakers wants to block everything Trump and his Republicans lapdogs seek, including confirmations of Trump nominees, spending priorities, and funding authorizations. “Stop everything!” they say.
Again, these approaches are not mutually exclusive. Democrats could adapt any number of these — or others. But these four do reflect four different overall strategies.

It was exciting to see how many Americans came out today in protest of all that is happening. The public resistance has begun. And tonight, our Democratic Senators are pulling an all nighter prior “gum up the works” to confirm Russell Vought as Director of the Office of Management and Business. He will still get confirmed, but no Republican Senator will be able to claim that they did not know what this man has said he will do if confirmed. I heard Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz talk about why this is so important. I had never heard the name Brian Schatz before, but tonight he is my quiet-spoken, but determined hero. His advice to all of us is to “Be angry, but don’t give-up.”

2025 Life Logs, Day 35: The Six Principles of Stupidity

by Judy Handley | Feb 4, 2025 | 2025 Sailing Logs | 0 comments

2025 Life Logs, Day 35: The Six Principles of Stupidity
Date: Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Weather: Mostly Sunny; Temp 43, Low 18 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

After watching the press conference with Trump and Netanyahu this evening where Trump declared that he thinks the United States should ‘own’ the Gaza Strip and turn it into a new ‘Riviera’, sending its people to live in other countries, stupid is one word that came to mind. Last week, the New York Times published an article by conservative opinion columnist, David Brooks, “The Six Principles of Stupidity.” So instead of writing about my day that ended with a great conversation with friend Lynne Kirwin in New Zealand, I suggest you read those principles. As Brooks says in the article, we are going to have to learn a lot about stupidity in the next four years.

THE SIX PRINCIPLES OF STUPIDITY
Jan. 30, 2025–The New York Times
By David Brooks, Opinion Columnist

This was the week in which the Chinese made incredible gains in artificial intelligence and the Americans made incredible gains in human stupidity. I’m sorry, but I look at the Trump administration’s behavior over the last week and the only word that accurately describes it is: stupid.

I am not saying the members of the Trump administration are not intelligent. We all know high-I.Q. people who behave in a way that’s as dumb as rocks. I don’t believe that there are stupid people, just stupid behaviors. As the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla once put it, “The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.”
And I am certainly not saying Donald Trump’s supporters are less intelligent than others. I’ve learned over the years that many upscale Democrats detest intellectual diversity. When they have power over a system — whether it’s academia, the mainstream media, the nonprofits or the Civil Service — they tend to impose a stifling orthodoxy that makes everybody within it duller, more conformist and insular. If Republicans want to upend that, I say: Go for it.

I define stupidity as behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next? If somebody comes up to you and says, “I think I’m going to take a hike in a lightning storm with a copper antenna on my head,” stupidity replies, “That sounds like a really great idea!” Stupidity is the tendency to take actions that hurt you and the people around you.

The administration produced volleys of stupidity this week. It renewed threats to impose ruinous tariffs on Canada and Mexico that would drive up inflation in America. It attempted a broad and general purge of the federal work force, apparently without asking how that purge would affect government operations. But I’d like to focus on one other episode: the attempt to freeze federal spending on assistance programs, and Trump’s subsequent decision to reverse course and undo the freeze.

When announcing the freeze, the administration stated its clear goal — to defund things like the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that Trump disapproves of. A prudent administration would have picked the programs it opposed and focused on cutting those, through a well-established process known as rescission authority. But the Trump administration decided to impose a vague, half-baked freeze on what it claimed amounted to more than $3 trillion in federal spending. Suddenly, patients in cancer trials at the National Institutes of Health didn’t know if they could continue their treatments, Head Start administrators didn’t know if they could draw federal funds, cities and states across America didn’t know if they would have money for police forces, schools, nutrition programs, highway repair and other basic services.

This Trump policy was like trying to cure acne with decapitation. Nobody seems to have asked the question: If we freeze all grant spending, what will happen next? Once the ramifications of that stupidity became obvious, Trump reversed course. And this is my big prediction for this administration: It will churn out a steady stream of stupid policies, and when the consequences of those policies begin to hit Trump’s approval rating, he will flip-flop, diminish or abandon those policies. He loves popularity more than any idea.
But it is still true that we’re going to have to learn a lot about stupidity over the next four years. I’ve distilled what I’ve learned so far into six main principles:

Principle 1: Ideology produces disagreement, but stupidity produces befuddlement. This week, people in institutions across America spent a couple of days trying to figure out what the hell was going on. This is what happens when a government freezes roughly $3 trillion in spending with a two-page memo that reads like it was written by an intern. When stupidity is in control, the literature professor Patrick Moreau argues, words become unscrewed “from their relation to reality.”

Principle 2: Stupidity often inheres in organizations, not individuals. When you create an organization in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to flatter his preconceptions, then stupidity will surely result. As the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: “This is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”

Principle 3: People who behave stupidly are more dangerous than people who behave maliciously. Evil people at least have some accurate sense of their own self-interest, which might restrain them. Stupidity dares greatly! Stupidity already has all the answers!

Principle 4: People who behave stupidly are unaware of the stupidity of their actions. You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is that incompetent people don’t have the skills to recognize their own incompetence. Let’s introduce the Hegseth-Gabbard corollary: The Trump administration is attempting to remove civil servants who may or may not be progressive but who have tremendous knowledge in their field of expertise and hire MAGA loyalists who often lack domain knowledge or expertise. The results may not be what the MAGA folks hoped for.

Principle 5: Stupidity is nearly impossible to oppose. Bonhoeffer notes, “Against stupidity we are defenseless.” Because stupid actions do not make sense, they invariably come as a surprise. Reasonable arguments fall on deaf ears. Counter-evidence is brushed aside. Facts are deemed irrelevant. Bonhoeffer continues, “In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”

Principle 6: The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence, it’s rationality. The psychologist Keith Stanovich defines rationality as the capacity to make decisions that help people achieve their objectives. People in the grip of the populist mind-set tend to be contemptuous of experience, prudence and expertise, helpful components of rationality. It turns out that this can make some populists willing to believe anything — conspiracy theories, folk tales and internet legends; that vaccines are harmful to children. They don’t live within a structured body of thought but within a rave party chaos of prejudices.

As time has gone by, I’ve developed more and more sympathy for the goals the populists are trying to achieve. America’s leadership class has spent the last few generations excluding, ignoring, rejecting and insulting a large swath of this country. It’s terrible to be assaulted in this way. It’s worse when you finally seize power and start assaulting yourself — and everyone around you. In fact, it’s stupid.

2025 Life Logs, Day 34: Understanding or Not

by Judy Handley | Feb 3, 2025 | 2025 Sailing Logs | 0 comments

2025 Life Logs, Day 34: Understanding or Not
Date: Monday, February 3, 2025
Weather: Mostly Sunny; Temp 38, Low 37 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

After I sent my log last night, I stayed up to watch a bit of the Grammy’s. Soon after I started watching, Shakira, a Columbian singer-songwriter, came on and what a show that was! While singing, she can move her body in every conceivable way. Wow! Maybe I’ll come back as Shakira in my next life.

That was enough of the Grammy’s for me, so I headed outside with Shadow. I knew it had been snowing, but I thought it was too warm to stick. I was wrong, as the world around me was snow covered and beautiful. And it was still that way this morning.

Staying with the beautiful them just a bit longer, late this afternoon Google sent me a video of this day in 2015. Windbird was in the middle of the Florida Keys anchored in Boot Key Harbor. On the way into the harbor, dolphins had come to greet us. I watched the video with a longing to return to that day.

But then, it was once again time to take Shadow outside. This time I was greeted with a melting world of white and a crunching sound of destruction. Shadow and I walked to the backyard to witness the long-abandoned house on the adjacent property being torn down. In just the time that Shadow and I played fetch, about a fourth of the house had been taken down and crunched into dumpster. It had probably taken weeks, maybe even months to build that old house which was once part of a downtown Falmouth motel. In just a few minutes it was turned into rubbish. And that jolted me back into the reality of what is happening to our government. It has taken almost 250 years to build the strongest and longest lasting democracy on earth, and in just two weeks we are watching it being dismantled chuck by chunk. And apparently nobody is going to stop this. I guess everybody else is just like me, watching and trying to figure out what is really happening.

And it appears Trump is not satisfied with the destruction of American government, he wants to involve the whole world with his tariffs. What is really behind them? I saw a post on a friend’s Facebook page this morning that at least helped me understand the Trump tariffs. At the same time that I saw that post, I read a piece by Robert Reich, What you need to know about Trump’s tariffs and the rest of Trump’s madness: The art of the deal, with him as dealer. Trump says he’s imposing the tariffs for the American workers. According to Reich, nothing could be farther from the truth. Reich says “he’s doing this for himself and for the world’s oligarchy, which, in turn, is busily siphoning off the wealth of the world.” Reich’s next question was how to stop this. His answer is that the first step is to understand it. And that brings me back to the post I saw on Facebook. I am copying it in full here as I found it very informative.

The introduction to the article by Professor David Honig of Indiana University says this is “the best, most cogent and elegantly simple explanation into the inexplicably destructive negotiating processes of the president.” The person writing the post then went on to say, “Everybody I know should read this accurate and enlightening piece.” I agree. It did help me understand what might really be going on, at least with the tariffs.

“I’m going to get a little wonky and write about Donald Trump and negotiations. For those who don’t know, I’m an adjunct professor at Indiana University – Robert H. McKinney School of Law and I teach negotiations. Okay, here goes.

Trump, as most of us know, is the credited author of “The Art of the Deal,” a book that was actually ghost written by a man named Tony Schwartz, who was given access to Trump and wrote based upon his observations. If you’ve read The Art of the Deal, or if you’ve followed Trump lately, you’ll know, even if you didn’t know the label, that he sees all dealmaking as what we call “distributive bargaining.”

Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser. It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and you’re fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trump’s world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves the more he wins.

The other type of bargaining is called integrative bargaining. In integrative bargaining the two sides don’t have a complete conflict of interest, and it is possible to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Think of it, not a single pie to be divided by two hungry people, but as a baker and a caterer negotiating over how many pies will be baked at what prices, and the nature of their ongoing relationship after this one gig is over.

The problem with Trump is that he sees only distributive bargaining in an international world that requires integrative bargaining. He can raise tariffs, but so can other countries. He can’t demand they not respond. There is no defined end to the negotiation and there is no simple winner and loser. There are always more pies to be baked. Further, negotiations aren’t binary. China’s choices aren’t (a) buy soybeans from US farmers, or (b) don’t buy soybeans. They can also (c) buy soybeans from Russia, or Argentina, or Brazil, or Canada, etc. That completely strips the distributive bargainer of his power to win or lose, to control the negotiation.

One of the risks of distributive bargaining is bad will. In a one-time distributive bargain, e.g. negotiating with the cabinet maker in your casino about whether you’re going to pay his whole bill or demand a discount, you don’t have to worry about your ongoing credibility or the next deal. If you do that to the cabinet maker, you can bet he won’t agree to do the cabinets in your next casino, and you’re going to have to find another cabinet maker.
There isn’t another Canada.

So when you approach international negotiation, in a world as complex as ours, with integrated economies and multiple buyers and sellers, you simply must approach them through integrative bargaining. If you attempt distributive bargaining, success is impossible. And we see that already.

Trump has raised tariffs on China. China responded, in addition to raising tariffs on US goods, by dropping all its soybean orders from the US and buying them from Russia. The effect is not only to cause tremendous harm to US farmers, but also to increase Russian revenue, making Russia less susceptible to sanctions and boycotts, increasing its economic and political power in the world, and reducing ours. Trump saw steel and aluminum and thought it would be an easy win, BECAUSE HE SAW ONLY STEEL AND ALUMINUM – HE SEES EVERY NEGOTIATION AS DISTRIBUTIVE. China saw it as integrative, and integrated Russia and its soybean purchase orders into a far more complex negotiation ecosystem.
Trump has the same weakness politically. For every winner there must be a loser. And that’s just not how politics works, not over the long run.

For people who study negotiations, this is incredibly basic stuff, negotiations 101, definitions you learn before you even start talking about styles and tactics. And here’s another huge problem for us.

Trump is utterly convinced that his experience in a closely held real estate company has prepared him to run a nation, and therefore he rejects the advice of people who spent entire careers studying the nuances of international negotiations and diplomacy. But the leaders on the other side of the table have not eschewed expertise, they have embraced it. And that means they look at Trump and, given his very limited tool chest and his blindly distributive understanding of negotiation, they know exactly what he is going to do and exactly how to respond to it.

From a professional negotiation point of view, Trump isn’t even bringing checkers to a chess match. He’s bringing a quarter that he insists of flipping for heads or tails, while everybody else is studying the chess board to decide whether its better to open with Najdorf or Grünfeld.”
— David Honig