Bob Schwartz

Month: May, 2018

May 4, 2018

Trump After Two Terms as President

Imagine it is 2024. Trump is finishing out his second term as president. Eight years.

In a detailed and complex way, we may wonder what the lives of people in America and the world have been like during those years, day after day, thanks to his presidency. Wondering what we might do, what we might have done, to enjoy a different outcome.

But there is simple wondering too. Even at this point in 2018, it is hard to avoid seeing his face every day. Which led me to wonder: what face will we be looking at every day in 2024?

It turns out that a graphic designer at the Express newspaper in the UK has already helped us imagine that: “The intriguing image [see above] has been meticulously constructed by a professional graphic design artist, who specialises in biometric techniques to age the human face.”

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May 3, 2018

What If Trump Is God’s Answer to Somebody’s Prayers?

It is National Prayer Day. It is not worth repeating the hollow and hypocritical nonsense that Trump said today on the occasion.

A theological thought did cross my mind.

If God answers prayers, as many Trump supporters (and many non-supporters) believe, we can assume that a number of those supporters prayed for Trump’s election and for his continuing leadership of America. Those who do faithfully pray for outcomes know that sometimes those prayers appear to be answered and sometimes not. Almost all of those people will admit that how this works, whose prayers are answered and which prayers are answered, is a mystery.

What if Trump’s election and his continuing leadership of America are answers to somebody’s prayers?

Just a thought on this National Prayer Day. As many people, believers and non-believers, pray for this sad madness to end.

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May 3, 2018

A Nation of Grand Canyons

It is a cliché to talk about the gaps and divides separating Americans today across many dimensions. There’s money, of course. Education. Knowledge. Political ideology. Race. Religion. Value placed on truth, honesty, compassion, integrity, competence, equality, fairness, lawfulness, civility, decency. But there they all are, arrayed like a bunch of Grand Canyons, breathtaking in ways very different than the awesome inspiration of the actual Grand Canyon.

One great truth of our traditions is that it is a daily struggle to transcend whatever state of personal meanness, baseness and selfishness we are stuck in. Those traditions also tell us that we are capable of prevailing in that struggle precisely because we are, for the most part, naturally better than meanness, baseness and selfishness—if we can discover that. Those traditions also tell us that those gaps and divides—those Grand Canyons—can be bridged because those canyons don’t exist. Not that the differences aren’t there or that everyone is the same or situated the same. But that the differences that matter aren’t there and in ways that matter, everyone is the same and situated the same. Or haven’t you had someone be born in your family or die in your family? Or haven’t you been born and aren’t you going to die yourself?

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May 2, 2018

Why Trump May Not Fire Department of Justice Officials (It’s Not Impeachment, a Constitutional Crisis or the Rule of Law)

It increasingly sounds like Trump is ready to rush in and try to stop the Mueller investigation:

A Rigged System – They [Department of Justice] don’t want to turn over Documents to Congress. What are they afraid of? Why so much redacting? Why such unequal “justice?” At some point I will have no choice but to use the powers granted to the Presidency and get involved!

Trump actually has no idea what the constitutional powers of the three branches of government are. He may not even know there are three co-equal and balanced branches of government. The only thing he knows is that he is THE PRESIDENT and that is the most powerful position in the world, EVER.

Trump’s firing people responsible for investigating him is wrong, is incident to a constitutional crisis, and breaches the fundamentals of the American rule of law. That won’t stop him. But this might:

If Trump proceeds with his improper intervention, every responsible lawyer currently working on his behalf, and every responsible lawyer being asked to represent him, should and may leave and run the other way. Because by continuing or taking on that work in the aftermath of such action by Trump, they are complicit—even if tangentially and collaterally—in supporting those actions. There is a case to be made that by continuing in those circumstances, lawyers are in breach of their oaths (lawyers are all sworn officers of the court) and of the rules of professional conduct.

All of which is not meaningful or comprehensible to Trump. But he might notice that there are fewer quality lawyers willing to touch his legal problems, and that number will get infinitely smaller if he carries out his threats.

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May 1, 2018

Facebook Releases Oculus Go—Its First Self-contained VR Headset

This isn’t a review of the Oculus Go released today—Facebook’s first self-contained Virtual Reality headset, requiring no phone or computer.

This isn’t a review of the photo above of Mark Zuckerberg demonstrating the Oculus Go. (Note: you can use the Oculus Go wearing a t-shirt or the occasional business suit, if you are demonstrating it to a Congressional committee.)

This is a mention of the growing movement to travel to and colonize Mars, a movement Trump supports. Until that dream comes true, if we want to avoid and escape the depressing and often insoluble problems we are faced with, problems that some are daily making even worse, a self-contained VR headset—from Facebook!—seems like just the ticket.

“He’s in the bestselling show. Is there life on Mars?”

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May 1, 2018

Trump’s Shtarkers

There is news that the offices of Trump’s long-time New York doctor were raided in February 2017 by Trump associates. A great Yiddish word comes immediately to mind: shtarker.

The Hill reports:

President Trump’s longtime personal doctor in New York said a trio of Trump associates raided his office in February 2017, seizing the president’s medical records.

Dr. Harold Bornstein told NBC News that Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, a lawyer with the Trump Organization and a third man came to his office the morning of Feb. 3, 2017. They took lab reports and Trump’s medical charts, he said.

“They must have been here for 25 minutes or 30 minutes. It created a lot of chaos,” Bornstein said, adding that he felt “raped, frightened and sad.”

Stark in Yiddish means strong, and so one of the usages of shtarker is to mean “strong man” or “tough guy.” But it acquired another, more sinister meaning in the lexicon of crime. A shtarker is a strong-arm man, an enforcer, a thug.

It is a word definitely well-known to the Russian and Eastern European Jews who surrounded Michael Cohen in his family and business (see A Brief History of Michael Cohen’s Criminal Ties . It is a word that may not be known to all of Trump’s people,  but it is a concept that some of them understand, endorse and are not afraid to use.

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