Tragedy and Farce: Dealing with President Donald Trump

In 2005, we gathered up all of our college credits and enrolled to complete our baccalaureate degrees. It is no surprise that academia is politically progressive and bringing with me a more open mind I learned a lot mostly about paying attention to questions. What is an art? What is a science? What is proof? What is evidence? What is a theory? 

I read The Art of the Deal soon after it was published, courtesy of my local branch library in Lansing, Michigan, and I was impressed: you can always make something attractive to someone else. Over the years, perceptual check marks tagged the news about Donald Trump’s real estate projects and then his television shows, but he was always only somewhere between Lee Iacocca and Madonna. Then he got serious.

 

Donald Trump was always a Democrat because of his involvements in real estate with planning & zoning commissions and labor unions. So, when he ran for the Presidency, it was clear to me from Day One that his concern was only for the best of all possible marketing. 

In my estimation, he did not want to face Hillary Clinton in the primaries where he could be beaten and discarded early on. Instead, he chose the Republican party because he knew that he could take out the lightweights such as Ron Paul, Ted Cruz, and Carli Fiorina. Even if he lost to Clinton in the general election, he still would have run as a major party candidate and earned a place in history. He was greatly helped in 2016 by Robert Mercer who brought him Steve Bannon. (See "Jim Simons and the Quants" on NecessaryFacts.) Bannon convinced Trump to broadcast a narrative that would resonate with the untapped reservoir of available voters. 

 

Just ahead of the 2016 general election, Michael Moore
warned Democrats (and others) why Donald Trump
would be elected.

Just ahead of the 2016 election, Michael Moore spoke to several groups, warning them of how and why Donald Trump was going to win by tapping into the unvoiced angst of the masses. 

"Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and said, 'If you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I'm going to put a 35 percent tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy them'," said Moore.

It is the art of the deal, a mass mediated hyper-reality in which the broadcaster Donald Trump played to the people what they told him that they wanted to hear. 

Donald Trump treated Marine Corps General James N. Mattis as if Mattis were an Apprentice. And Mattis was not the only one to be summarily fired. Nonetheless, on the second and now third time around, Trump still had the support of people who never thought that he would betray them. Of course, you can only betray your friends because your enemies already do not trust you. Trump had the support of anti-communist Venezuelans in Miami. Having lived here since fleeing Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro, they had businesses and homes. And then came the revokation of protections against deportation. Just ahead of the 2024 election, Donald Trump stood on a stage in Detroit with leaders of the Arab community, and they believed that he agreed with them. 

 

Those of us who advocate for laissez-faire capitalism easily point to the fact that successful marketing impels toward a common benevolent morality because you have to get along with other people. But there are businesses that succeed “one customer at a time” because there is always a (new) sucker born every minute. 

 

And then there is the “long con,” the somewhat complicated confidence game, portrayed in the 1973 movie, The Sting. In any negotiation, the Art of the Deal can involve offering terms that you do not mind abandoning as the cost of gaining the next and more important advantage. Donald Trump’s wavering and waffling upsets traditionalist markets because uncertainty is uncomfortable to most people. 

"An entrepreneur is born with the mentality to take risks, though there are several important characteristics: courage, faith in yourself, and above all, even when you fail, to learn from failure and get up and try again."  - Sheldon Adelson, 2013

Scientists and entrepreneurs live with the unknown and therefore with uncertainty. Einstein was married three times and retracted what he called his biggest mistake twice because he was wrong about being wrong. Get over it and move on. Donald Trump is willing to abandon a resource or a plan and try something new, something else. It is the very definition of pragmatism, a distinctly American philosophy. 

He has filed four bankruptcies. As the insurance magnate, Thomas Caldecot Chubb said, when his clerks were panicked because a ship had gone down with an insured cargo, “If there were no losses, there would be no premiums.” Investors sometimes suffer losses and at the level of  The Trump Organization  all investors practice their own due diligence. So, Donald Trump accepts the losses—2200 points on the Dow Jones for Friday, April 5, 2025—but what are the premiums that he expects? President Trump assures us that in the long run, this all will be good for America. 

• Some goods will not be subject to the Reciprocal Tariff. These include: (1) articles subject to 50 USC 1702(b); (2) steel/aluminum articles and autos/auto parts already subject to Section 232 tariffs; (3) copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and lumber articles; (4) all articles that may become subject to future Section 232 tariffs; (5) bullion; and (6) energy and other certain minerals that are not available in the United States. 
• “Made in America” is not just a tagline—it’s an economic and national security priority of this Administration. The President’s reciprocal trade agenda means better-paying American jobs making beautiful American-made cars, appliances, and other goods.
• These tariffs seek to address the injustices of global trade, re-shore manufacturing, and drive economic growth for the American people.-- White House Fact Sheet for April 2, 2025.

 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than
2200 points before settling for a 1600-point tumble

The economy is the active total of trillions of individual choices. Perhaps no stochastic theory is sufficient to predict the next fashion craze but it is possible to analyze the past, to explain it, and to test that theory against other (different) facts, especially when those are submitted as predictions to allow falsification of the theory.

 

The rubrics of the early 20^th century—broad socialisms and fascisms, anti-democratic coups and attempted coups, the contraction of international trade, the Great Depression, and ultimately, World War II and the Cold War—were not isolated events, unrelated to each other, causeless or chaotic and complicated beyond comprehension. 

 

The Roman senate continued to vote on consuls who really were emperors as the coinage was debased, plagues swept the population centers, earthquakes proved impossible to rebuild from, foreign hordes invaded the outer districts and then Italy. Decline and retreat affected the philosophers at Athens, the scholars at Alexandria, the jurists at Rhodes. In those days, all of that took lifetimes over generations, and each day seemed very much like the previous day. We understand it now by compressing the retrospective.

 

In high school history, I learned that the real “American revolution” took place in the minds of people between 1756 and 1775, when the leading thinkers and writers expressed the understanding that the Bill of Rights of 1689 would never be allowed to them. The events after the July 1776 were the War for Independence. 

The failed Continental dollar and the ephemeral money issued by new States (in paper and copper) presaged the Alien and Sedition Acts. In France, the same kinds of events ultimately brought regicide, the Directorate, the failed assignat paper money, and then Napoleon Bonaparte, initially as First Consul, and inevitably as the Emperor. Again, though, it took 20 years and through each of those 7000 days, people lived their own lives as best they could under the circumstances—which is always true.

 

Now we communicate at the speed of light with images and sounds enhancing and eclipsing words. Centuries, decades, lifetimes, days, hours, all are compacted into minutes and seconds as historical events become daily news and then hourly updates. 

 

It may become history that cash inflows to the government from President Trump’s tariffs, coupled with his drastic cuts to the federal workforces (both salaried and subsidized) will balance the federal budget and reduce the federal deficit while cutting direct taxes, and all of that will allow the general economy to expand and extend. It may be that a later round of deal-making will bring among nations a broad reduction in all tariffs.

 

However, reality cannot be cheated. I believe that the likely outcome will be an economic depression and eruptions of armed conflicts all of which President Trump will declare to be fake news, insisting that prosperity and peace are here and we are enjoying them.

 

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. 

...

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx. 

Transcription/Markup: Zodiac and Brian Baggins for Marx/Engels Internet Archive 1995, 1999; Proofed: and corrected by Alek Blain, 2006, Mark Harris, 2010. --https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf

 

Pamela Graves was my professor for Modern Europe
at Eastern Michigan University. She taught me that history
is a science and we write it in the past tense.

 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

When Did the “Great Depression” Begin? 

Venture Capital 

Capitalist Culture

The Remarkable Story of Risk 

The Cure for a Failing Empire 

Discoveries and Inventions

Discoveries are identifications. Inventions are creations. Fire existed in nature and its discovery by a human required a focus of identification. As animals, human ran from fire because they sensed panic in the animals that were fleeing even before they were first confronted by the challenge of wildfire. Discovering that burned meat (and vegetables) could be eaten probably resulted from dire circumstances and it was likely one cause of human interest in fire. Glacial cold would have been the other likely cause and the conceptual leap in understanding that fire would solve that problem was a heroic identification. Eventually, camp fires brought stories and some stories were funny. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

How Do You Make God Laugh? 

Gilda Radner: It’s Always Something 

Some Sociology of Academic Astronomy 

The Big Whimper of Modern Philosophy 

Two Books on Fermat’s Last Theorem 

Big Bang Theory: More Friends than Seinfeld 

“Money Talks” of the American Numismatic Association

As a longtime admirer of the works of Ayn Rand, I hold money in high regard. The origin of money is in ritual gift exchange, rather than in economic calculation, which came tens of thousands of years of later. That being so, it remains that periodic innovations in economic calculation caused quantum leaps in prosperity and general welfare. People are unlikely to kill or die for what they can sell or buy. 

But I never joined any organizations for numismatics until after 1992. For one thing, I was never a serious collector and still am not. I attended a couple of lectures by Clifford Mishler, then the president of Krause Corporation, publishers of hobby periodicals and books, and later president of the American Numismatic Association. He said that all collectors, whether of coins, stamps, automobiles, vinyl recordings, wine or anything else, share four passions: Completeness, Condition, Rarity, and Value. Those are not my concerns. If I have one of something, regardless of its condition or value, I have an artifact about which there is a story to be told. Coins in particular are the often the most common artifact of any society. You have to be a serious collector to find a truly rare coin. 

 

In 1992, I started hearing the ANA “Money Talks” radio program in the mornings as I was waking up to get ready for work. The ANA says: 

In 1992, “Money Talks,” a radio program on the history and lore of money, began broadcasting across the country on several local radio stations. The “Money Talks” broadcasts were typically 2-4 minutes long and consisted of coin stories that were recorded to educate and encourage interest in the hobby of numismatics.

 

I submitted about 20 scripts, and about half of them were produced for broadcast. The ANA granted me a literary award for a couple of them. 

https://www.money.org/money-talks-radio-archive/

I went on to write more full-length features about Peace Dollars, Large Cents, and other products of U.S. Mint. I also edited a monthly column, Internet Connections, which spotlighted safe and informative websites for collectors, typically, national mints or museums, specialty clubs, and sometimes the websites of dealers who were serious researchers.  

 

 https://archive.org/details/bestofanamtpart1

https://archive.org/details/bestofanamtpart2

The ANA rebranded “Money Talks” as a series of lectures at the semi-annual conventions, and many of them have been recorded and placed in video archives such as YouTube. 

Pay Warrants of the Texian Navy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWGzivjlOUI

The Texas Navy on NecessaryFacts 

Mutiny Aboard the San Antonio  

IRELAND'S POET LAUREATE by Michael Marotta 

 

"Our coins must pitch and spin to please the gambler, and pack into rolls to please the banker." Those were the words of Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 and was regarded as the greatest poet of his time. He was also in charge of the committee that designed Ireland's coins.

 

Yeats was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865. At that time Ireland was completely under the control of England. While working in England, Yeats joined other Irish patriots who eventually won independence for the Emerald Isle. A world-renown playwright and poet, Yeats was elected to the Irish Senate. He chaired the committee that chose the designs for the coins of the new Irish Free State.

Yeats had seen classical Greek coins while studying and writing in Italy during the late 1800s. He arranged for all of the artists on this project to receive ancient Hellenistic coins, so they could see for themselves the powerful images he wanted to bring to Ireland's coins.

 

For over seventy years, Ireland's coins changed little from the winning designs of Percy Metcalf, a young sculptor recommended by the British School in Rome and selected by Yeats' committee. The horse, bull, salmon, hound and other animals of Ireland's eight circulating coins were all joined by a common symbol of Ireland's poetic tradition: the Celtic harp.

 

William Yeats died on January 28, 1939, at the age of 73.

 

(Numismatist, historian, and jurist Theodor Mommsen, was granted a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902.)

 

A.N.A. MONEY TALKS Transcript No. 1400 

ANCIENT HEARTS by Michael E. Marotta 

Look around . . . heart symbols are everywhere on Valentine's Day. 

Maybe even on a coin. 

The first heart symbols that appeared on ancient coins were produced 2500 years ago in North Africa. 

The town of Cyrene was founded in the 7th century B.C. by Greeks. 

Their town was eventually destroyed, but it was near what today is the city of Benghazi, along the coast of Libya. 

The city enjoyed modest prosperity . . . until its inhabitants 

discovered the silphium plant. (The plant is extinct now, but its closest 

living relative is a key ingredient in Worcestershire sauce.) Silphium was 

used as an herb. Its stalk was edible. Its pungent sap was the basis for cough syrups, and gave food an interesting flavor. But the most important use for silphium was as a contraceptive. 

 

Modern research suggests that silphium actually worked, and because of this, it was in great demand. Attempts to cultivate it in Syria and Greece were unsuccessful. It only grew near Cyrene--and, starting in 500 B.C., it became a steady source of income for the townspeople. By Roman times, silphium had been harvested to extinction. 

Over the centuries, the silphium plant came to symbolize Cyrene. The plant appeared on the town's gold, silver and bronze coins, starting around 500 B.C. Often the entire plant was shown. But sometimes, only the seeds of the plant were depicted. The silphium's seeds were heart-shaped, and those heart-shaped seeds that appeared on Cyrene's coins eventually came to symbolize love--a symbol that's still with us today. 

 

Today's program was written by Michael Marotta. "Money Talks" is 

a production of the American Numismatic Association in Colorado Springs, 

America's coin club for over a century. Take a tour of ANA's virtual Money Museum on the Web at www.money.org.

  

Transcript No. 1329                              November 6, 1997

THE MYSTERY OF THE MINT       by Michael Marotta     

 

Imagine a world without coins.  It isn't easy.  Coins and paper money are basic to our civilization.  Yet someone had to invent coins, and the truth is that we just do not know why coins were invented.     

 

Coins first appeared about 2,600 years ago in the ancient country of Lydia, in what is today western Turkey.  But people in the Middle East had already been using gold, silver, copper and other common trade goods as money for thousands of years, going as far back as perhaps 8000 B.C.E.     

 

From our modern viewpoint, the advantages of coinage are obvious. But those advantages were not so obvious to ancient peoples. Today, there are several theories to explain the invention of coinage. Many people think that merchants invented coins by marking nuggets and ingots of precious metals.  The marks were promises of purity and value. 

 

Another theory is that coins were invented to serve temples. After all, ancient coins have gods and goddesses on them.  Temples amassed wealth from donations and the temples might have issued the coins as rewards for good behavior. 

 

However, some scholars today think that the first coins were given to the mercenary soldiers of Greek towns.  These coins may have been like military campaign medals -- badges of honor that may not have been intended to be spent as money.

 

Whatever the origins of coinage, the idea spread rapidly.  Within a hundred years, almost every Greek town from southern Russia to eastern Spain had its own mint.  Today, people collect ancient coins for their historic value and artistic beauty.     

 

This has been "Money Talks."  Today's program was written by Michael Marotta and underwritten by Whitman Coin Products, a division of GoldenBooks, quality coin supplies at affordable prices.  "Money Talks" is a copyrighted production of the American Numismatic Association, 818 N.Cascade Ave., Colorado Springs, CO 80903, 719/632-2646, ana@money.org,http://www.money.org.

 

 

ANA: MT: Use of Mintmarks                                    

Transcript No. 1648                                                      January 27, 1999

 

USE OF MINTMARKS  by Michael E. Marotta

 

    If you look closely at coins, you will find that some of them have small letters indicating the mint at which they were struck.  Mintmarks go back to ancient times.  They were used to prevent forgery as well as to honor the mintmaster.

 

    Mintmarks date to about the year 400 B.C.  At the time, Greek towns elected their moneyers or mintmasters to annual terms of office.  These men ometimes were the actual die cutters, but usually they were officials who oversaw the cutting of dies and striking of coins.

 

    The mintmaster might engrave his whole name on a die, or just the first letters of his name.  Sometimes he made a "monogram."  The purpose was twofold.  It allowed praise for the man who did the work and identified the person responsible in case the coinage later proved to be of short weight or impure alloy.

 

   When the Roman Empire stretched across three continents, it operated more than 20 different mints with over 50 different mintmarks for a period of 300 years.  We have identified the mintmarks of London in England; Constantinople in Turkey; and Alexandria in Egypt.

 

    Today most nations have only one mint.  Larger countries often assign letters of the alphabet to identify mint cities, starting with the nation's capital.  On French coins, for example, the letter "A" stands for Paris. An "A" on a German coin, on the other hand, usually means "Berlin."

 

    Some nations contract out the production of their coinage.  On some British and Canadian coins, for example, the letter "H" stands for the "Heaton" company.

 

    In the United States, the main mint at Philadelphia typically did not use the "P" mintmark until recent decades.  Today, most American coins have either a "P" for "Philadelphia" or "D" for "Denver."  Usually you will see an "S" for "San Francisco" or "W" for "West Point" only on special coins and proof sets.

 

    This has been "Money Talks."  Today's program was written by Michael Marotta and underwritten by Whitman Coin Products, a division of Golden Books, the right choice for coin collecting books and supplies. "Money Talks" is a copyrighted production of the American Numismatic Association, 818 N. Cascade Ave., Colorado Springs, CO 80903, 719/632-2646, ana@money.org, http://www.money.org.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Accounting for Civilization 

Debt: The Seed of Civilization 

Robert Leonard’s “Curious Currency” 

Numismatics; History as Market 

Money as Speech and Peacemaking 

The Future of Money 

Mere Gold is Not Enough: Hayek’s “Denationalization” 

Numismatics: The Standard of Proof in Economics 

Scripophily 

The Art of Finance 

Challenge Coins 

 

Not Conned by Seghal’s Coined 

My Numismatic Bibliography (Partial List) 

 

Check the Math

I took Sociology 304 Research Methods in the spring of 2007. The professor was Young S. Kim. We were assigned to review two research papers each week. In the first class meeting, Dr. Kim said that these were not to be summaries but must be criticisms. After class, I approached his desk and asked if undergraduates could competently criticize a peer-reviewed publication. He replied, “Check the math.”

 

I do not know that I found any mathematical errors because I only archived three of my assignments from that class and none of those identified any such problems. However, a few months ago, researching an article for the American Astronomical Society, I found this from 1948: 

• “Evolution of the Universe” by Ralph A. Alpher and Robert Herman, Nature, No. 4124 ,Vol. 162, November 13, 1948 identified errors in 
• “The Evolution of the Universe” by George Gamow, Nature, No. 4122, Vol. 162, October 30, 1948. 

(At that time, Alpher and Herman were doctoral candidates and Gamow was their advisor. Earlier that year, Physical Review published "The Origin of Chemical Elements" by Ralph Alpher, Hans Bethe, and George Gamow. Although he checked their math on a computer at the National Bureau of Standards, Robert Herman declined to belisted as "Delter." (Wikipedia citing Gamow here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93Gamow_paper )

 “The condensation-mass obtained from this corrected density comes out not much different from Gamow's original estimate. However, the intersectionpoint r_mat. = r_rad. occurs at t=8·6 x 1017 sec. ≅ 3 x 1010 years (that is, about ten times the present age of the universe). This indicates that, in findingthe intersection, one should not neglect the curvature term in the general equation of the expanding universe. In other words, the formation ofcondensations must have taken place when the expansion was becoming linear with time.”  

 

Interesting as that was to read, I was more impressed with the discovery that cosmologists in 1948 accepted an estimated age of the Universe at 3 billion (3*10⁹) years. The simple truth is that estimates of the size and age of the universe have been expanding. 

It is also interesting that their work required the radius of the known universe to be proportional to  [the square root of (minus one)] light years. Imagine that!

 

For more on Young S. Kim see:

Kim, Y. S., Barak, G., & Shelton, D. E. (2009). Examining the “CSI-effect” in the cases of circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony: Multivariate and path analyses. Journal of Criminal Justice, 37(5), 452–460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2009.07.005

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-15801-001

  

Previously on NecessaryFacts

 

Imaginary Numbers are Real; Pegasus is Not 

Two Books on Fermat’s Last Theorem 

Pi in the Sky over Austin

Elisha Loomis and the Pythagorean Proposition

 

Sigma Orionis

We think of Orion as a winter constellation because with shorter days it appears in the early evening sky. It is on the median at 9:00 PM on February 5, but even on April 21, it is just above the western horizon. In September, Orion rises above my eastern tree line by 5:00 AM, and before the Sun erases the night sky at 6:00 AM, it is high in the east. The group associated with Sigma Orionis just below the Belt of Orion consists of stars that are gravitationally bound as well as others that just happen to be there from our point of view.

SIGMA ORI (Sigma Orionis). Double stars are among the amateur's favorite targets, Albireo, Mizar always on the list. Multiples are better yet, and there are few more attractive than Sigma Orionis (which has no proper name), where you see a quartet of stars, the brightest of which is also a close double. Indeed, Sigma Ori, whose five stars together shine in Orion at bright fourth magnitude (3.66) just south of Alnitak in Orion's belt, is really at the pinnacle of a small star cluster that lies a somewhat-uncertain 1150 light years away. In turn, the stars and the cluster are a part of the Orion OB1 association, which includes many of the other stars in the constellation. Sigma's main component, "AB," dominates, the two a mere 0.25 seconds of arc apart shining at magnitudes 4.2 and 5.1. Both very young hydrogen-fusing dwarfs only a few million years old, the brighter is a magnificent blue class O (09.5) star, while the lesser is class B (B0.5). The pair orbit every 170 years at a distance of about 90 Astronomical Units. After correction for ultraviolet light from very hot (32,000 and 29,600 Kelvin) surfaces, they respectively radiate at a rate of 35,000 and 30,000 Suns. Temperature and luminosity give masses of 18 and 13.5 times that of the Sun, the sum of nearly 32 solar masses making the close AB pair among the most massive of visual binaries. Together they illuminate their surroundings, causing interstellar gas to glow. The next brightest stars in the system are Sigma Ori "D" and "E," bright seventh magnitude class B (B2) dwarf stars that at magnitudes 6.62 and 6.65 are nearly identical in brightness and have masses around 7 times that of the Sun. The similarity stops there. "E" is the prototype of the weird "helium-rich" stars that have strangely elevate abundances of helium. Even odder, the helium in "E" seems to be concentrated toward particular patches that involve a combination of the rotational and magnetic field axes. They may be related to cooler magnetic stars such as Cor Caroli, but no one really understands them. The last of Sigma's stars, "C," appears to be a normal ninth magnitude class A dwarf. In projection on the sky, "C" is the closest to the AB pair, and is at least 3900 AU away, while "D" and "E" lie at least 4600 and 15,000 AU distant. While the orbit of the AB pair is stable, the orbits of the other three are not, and long before they die they will probably be gravitationally sped up and forced out. "A" will explode first and may even kick "B" (which will explode next) out of the system. The other stars, wherever they wind up, will die as white dwarfs. The cluster seems also to contain numerous low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, that have masses only a few times that of Jupiter. -- http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/sigmaori.html

 

For early references to the open cluster, see, “On the supposed Variability of the closest Companion of σ Orionis” by W. R. Dawes, in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society for April 1860 (247 1860MNRAS..20..253W 1860/04 and “Correspondence - The Trapezium and σ in Orion” by D. A. Freeman, in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyfor May 1860 (248  1860MNRAS..20..285D 1860/05). 

 

Drawn with PointPoint from a recorded observation

In 1776, Christian Mayer described σ Ori as a triple star, having seen components AB and E, and suspected another between the two. Component D was confirmed by FGW Struve who also added a fourth (C), published in 1876. In 1892 Sherburne Wesley Burnham reported that σ Ori A was itself a very close double, although a number of later observers failed to confirm it. In the second half of the twentieth century, the orbit o  σ Ori A/B was solved and at the time was one of the most massive binaries known.[22] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Orionis

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Burnham’s Celestial Handbook 

The Andromeda Galaxy 

Asterisms 

What Color is the Orion Nebula?  

GARSEF 2025: The Greater Austin Regional Science and Engineering Fair

This was my 14^th year, and again on Thursday, I judged senior and junior high school competitors in Behavioral and Social Sciences and then on Saturday, I reviewed the upper and lower elementary entries. In other years I have served for middle school physics or engineering. (My degrees are in criminology and social science and I have some experience as a technical writer in the other areas.) Behavioral always has about 30 to 40 entrants served by three to five teams of six or seven judges. This year, the young scientists were better prepared and they presented themselves better than in the wake of Covid-19 which shut down the schools. Say what you like about the problems with socialized education, generally speaking, teachers are better educators than are parents and school is a better learning environment. That said, they still have not come up to the pre-Covid metrics for performance. 

 

In particular, none of them in this category presented project diaries (typically in bound composition books) or methods and results (in 3-ring binders). One did actually have about 1000 data items on their tablet computer but I had to repeat the question: “You say that you reviewed a hundred entries each from ten different people but where are they?”

 

AI was big this year. Based on our instructions, for most categories, the challenge was to sort out the results provided by an AI from the work of the student. In Behavioral, two of the competitors had no human subjects but instead trained AIs to respond like people (or so they claimed). As far as I could tell, the young researchers all think that AI is new and none of them had heard of ELIZA. 

 

Overall, in the senior division I was unwilling to advance any entrant to second-round judging, so two more judges were sent down to the hall to find some, which they did. My perception is that the middle schoolers did better than the high schoolers and the elementary entrants were the most promising of all. Parents tend to be more involved with the little kids, for better or worse. I did award a second place and tell the child to give the award to their mother but the youngster did know their stuff and did do the work, so, that counts. I also gave out to kiddos a couple of post-it notes with suggestions for future research. I am looking forward to seeing them (and their notebooks) next year.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Science Fair: A National Geographic Film 

An Abundance of Talent: the 2015 Austin Energy Regional Science Festival 

2017 Austin Energy Regional Science Fair 

Science Fairs and Science Frauds 

The Lightbulb Does Not Need to be Changed.

Q: How many sociologists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: The lightbulb does not need changing. It is society that must be changed.

 

I thought that I might pursue a doctorate here at the University of Texas because the school will pay for up to 5 credit hours per semester for an employee. The plan died aborning. I sent a letter to the sociology department and received a rejection in 15 minutes. The essential message was, “Go away.” 

My Query Letter

The Reply

 

When I was majoring in criminology at Eastern Michigan University, I had a lot of sociology classes, of course. One of my classmates was about a year ahead of me and we had a couple of classes together for a couple of semesters. One day, walking in from the parking lot, he asked me, “Why do think that conflict theory is the one they teach best here?” I did not understand the question.

Has a special interest in criminology

Conflict theory is among about 50 explanatory or predictive narratives that describe the facts about individuals in society. Pure conflict says that individuals are naturally aggressive toward each other and society (reified) holds us together by means of its institutions by preventing, mediating, remediating, or negating conflict. Variations include class conflict, gender conflict, race conflict, and others. Those become “critical” when they assert that the conflict is unnatural. Critical class conflict theory is congruent with Marxism, for example: fix society’s problems and conflict will abate and perhaps disappear entirely. But I could tell that my friend was asking a rhetorical question. And he asked another: “Why don’t we have a department chair?”

 

Has a special interest in criminal justice reform.

At EMU, sociology, anthropology, and criminology were all under the same office in the College of Arts & Sciences. At that time, no one wanted to be the chair. You would think that any tenure track professor would take the two-year rotation, even if they had been the chair perhaps ten years earlier. But no. As a new undergraduate, I was not in stream with the idle chat about department politics, but I knew that some of my professors were unhappy with their organizational leadership. Then came the defining crisis: a murder on campus.

 

Has a special interest in law and regulation.

As I recall, there was a general mandate from the University administration to all professors and staff not to talk to the press or other news media. But they are called “press” for several reasons and the reporters pressed the criminology department for quotable quotes. And my professor for White Collar Crime (Crim 307), Andreas Tomaszewski, offered his opinion. Then, his application for tenure was denied. He did still show up for class, but he basically stopped teaching. At the end of the semester, he moved to Canada. 

 

Has a special interest in juries.
I wonder if she has read
Young S. Kim, Gregg Barak, and Donald E. Shelton
from Eastern Michigan University on the CSI Effect.

The facts of the crime and the response of the University were at issue. EMU claimed that they did not want the perpetrator to flee, so they left the cause of death as “natural” as indicated by the (acting) county medical examiner. Eventually, another enrolled student was charged with the crime and convicted. However, EMU was fined over $800,000 for violation of the Clery Act, which requires the reporting of crimes. The university president, the EMU chief of police, and several others resigned. 

 

Has an interest in policing.

Here and now, my request for an informal meeting with the chair of the UT sociology department was answered by the acting chair because the chair is on sabbatical. Despite Dr. Lin Ken-Hou’s protest that UT is not the place to study white collar crime or misconduct in scientific research, several professors in the department do claim relevant interests. 

 

More to the point, if I had had the opportunity to talk out the options, even if it were true that none of their sociologists is interested in crime, that in itself would have been a good reason for me to do just that and complete some original and significant research for the department. 

Just one option would have been to work with the Institutional Review Board, which audits research and investigates lapses in ethics. 

That is especially relevant because UT is a research university, not a teaching college. Our classes here are taught by graduate assistants (and post-grads). At EMU, the school motto is “Education first.” If your name is in the book, then you are the person standing in front of the class. In my last year there (2010), plans were made to allow graduate students in physics to do some teaching but it was then a notable exception. Like Texas State University here in San Marcos, EMU was the old Normal College, the school where teachers were trained. When EMU sought to ramp up its game by joining a sports conference with more television money, they hired an athletic director at three times the salary of a department chair, $300,000 versus $90,000 per year. Wags with spray paint went around campus: Education first—and 10! 

 

So, it is here at UT. You can find a webpage about our Nobel laureates: https://news.utexas.edu/2019/12/09/longhorn-laureates/ In fact, none of them is here. The last two on campus both died. Steven Weinberg was enticed to retire here. He continued to write essays. John Goodenough taught chemistry at the the UT Cockrell School of Engineering and among his achievements was the invention of the lithium-ion battery. As for the other Nobel laureates, biology professor Hermann J. Muller was forced out for being a communist. (After quick turns in Germany and then the USSR, he returned to the USA. Later, Carl Sagan was one of his students.) UT alumnus John Maxwell Coetzee earned his doctorate here in 1969 and then went to South Africa. He was not allowed to come back because he had published a protest against the war in Viet Nam.

 

Back in 2005, when Weinberg was reputed to be the highest paid professor at $400,000 football coach Mack Brown was paid $2.1 million. Today, coach Steve Sarkisian is paid $10.6 million and quarterback Arch Manning earns $1.6 million from Name Image and Likeness (NIL) under NCAA rules in place since 2021. Weinberg was awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2020 just one of several such honors over the years. That being as it is, the fact remains that an undergraduate playing football earns three times more than the best paid professors and eight times more than the average professor’s salary. (See: https://texascollegesalaries.com/institution/17)

 

A card-carrying criminologist will tell you that crime knows no neighborhood. In other words, there are no bad neighborhoods, just different crimes in them. In the suburbs, they don’t beat up strangers, rob the corner liquor stores or snatch purses, they just work at corporations that dump toxins into the aquifer and then they try to delete their emails. That being so, it remains that you don’t find a lot of broken windows and absentee landlords in the suburbs. In poor neighborhoods, the people lack more than anything else social status and social capital. The broken windows theory explains why the sociology department does not welcome outsiders into their academic ghetto. You can argue the cause and effect of broken windows and broken homes but when a culture, a society, is in decline, fixing the windows will not solve the deeper problems.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

The Pretense of Sociology 

Sociology: A Defense and a Call for Reform 

Sociology is a Science 

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History