Facts vs. "Trump Truth:" Polling Data

Classy Trump decided the funeral of President Bush (I) was the perfect day to tout his new approval rating: 

Beyond the poor taste, of course, is the reality that his approval ratings are not even close to 50%. “The president is citing a poll from @Rasmussen_Poll, which said that Republicans would win the popular vote for the U.S. House,” said FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who once described Rasmussen as “biased.” “Instead, Democrats won it by 9 points.” (WP)

According to FiveThirtyEight, which has been updating its calculation of the president’s approval rating from all major polls, Trump’s aggregate approval rating is around 42 percent, as of Wednesday. The aggregate average is almost the same on RealClearPolitics, where Trump is at about 43 percent, according to polling conducted between Nov. 14 and Tuesday.

Unfriend Joins the Lexicon

Drumroll please . . . the word of the year, according to The New Oxford Dictionary, is unfriend: http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/11/unfriend-beats-out-birther-death-panel-tramp-stamp-for-oxford-word-of-the-year.php?ref=fpa. Defriend was the word that I have been using, but I will bow to the protectors of the English Language. To unfriend is an interesting new dynamic in the world today. No breakup at a coffee shop, no avoiding calls for months, no need to confront the ex-friend with a final salvo. Instead we simply click a button and then confirm the end of a relationship. And who says technology is impersonal?

Reinventing the Wheel?

For years I have been listening to people warn me against “reinventing the wheel.” It makes sense and though I cringe every time I hear it (I have a natural aversion to laziness in language; and the anti-intellectualism it hints at), I never considered the burgeoning crisis it might invoke. Recently I have become troubled that this common cliché might in fact be causing immeasurable harm to humanity. What if a better wheel is out there, but has been left undiscovered because of the demoralizing message spread so far and wide. Is the wheel we have been using for thousands of year really so great? Is there a better design out there waiting to push us forward into an unimaginable future? Probably not, but I really hate that phrase.

On a related note is the pervasive “thinking outside the box.” I have long believed that anyone that uses this phrase is in fact stuck inside a box from which it would take them several years to emerge – given the constricted logic and language available to them. Thinking outside the proverbial box is indicative of the instrumental rationality that forever keeps us inside the prison house (or box) of language and business mentality that in fact makes the world fully enclosed with that box.