So, Trump really does have a case of the major voter-fraud red ass. Maybe it started up again over the weekend to distract from the drubbing he (and Spicer) were taking for their ‘my huge inauguration crowd baloney’, or maybe Trump was just getting around to rehash mode from last fall when it became plain he got smushed in the popular vote totals by that evil woman, no less. Intolerable, frankly intolerable to a man of pride, accomplishment, and utter vision.
Trump’s Voter Fraud Tweet January 25, 2017
Anyway, Trump is nothing if not multi-media intensive, so he let loose this past Monday, January 23 during a soiree attended by lawmakers of both parties, as reported by the New York Times:
1/25/17 (emphasis added)
WASHINGTON — On Monday, President Trump gathered House and Senate leaders in the State Dining Room for a get-to-know-you reception, served them tiny meatballs and pigs-in-a-blanket, and quickly launched into a story meant to illustrate what he believes to be rampant, unchecked voter fraud.
Mr. Trump kicked off the meeting, participants said, by retelling his debunked claim that he would have won the popular vote if not for the three million to five million ballots cast by “illegals.” He followed it up with a Twitter post early Wednesday calling for a major investigation into voter fraud.
When one of the Democrats protested, Mr. Trump said he was told a story by “the very famous golfer, Bernhard Langer,” whom he described as a friend, according to three staff members who were in the room for the meeting.
In the emerging Trump era, the story was a memorable example, for the legislators and the country, of how an off-the-cuff yarn — unverifiable and of confusing origin — became a prime policy mover for a president whose fact-gathering owes more to the oral tradition than the written word.
The three witnesses recalled Mr. Langer being the protagonist of the story, although a White House official claimed the president had been telling a story relayed to the golfer by one of Mr. Langer’s friends.
The witnesses described the story this way: Mr. Langer, a 59-year-old native of Bavaria, Germany — a winner of the Masters twice and of more than 100 events on major professional golf tours around the world — was standing in line at a polling place near his home in Florida on Election Day, the president explained, when an official informed Mr. Langer he would not be able to vote.
Ahead of and behind Mr. Langer were voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote, Mr. Trump said, according to the staff members — but they were nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots. The president threw out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from.
Mr. Langer, whom he described as a supporter, left feeling frustrated, according to a version of events later contradicted by a White House official.
The anecdote, the aides said, was greeted with silence, and Mr. Trump was prodded to change the subject by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, and Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
Just one problem: Mr. Langer, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., is a German citizen with permanent residence status in the United States who is, by law, barred from voting, according to Mr. Langer’s daughter Christina.
“He is a citizen of Germany,” she said, when reached on her father’s cellphone. “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.”
She said her father was “very busy” and would not be able to answer any questions.
But a senior White House staff member, who was not at the Monday reception but has heard Mr. Trump tell the story, said Mr. Langer saw Mr. Trump in Florida during the Thanksgiving break and told him the story of a friend of Mr. Langer’s who had been blocked from voting.
Either way, the tale left its mark on Mr. Trump, who is known to act on anecdote, and on Wednesday redoubled his efforts to build a border wall and crack down on immigrants crossing the border from Mexico.
The story, the aide added, had made a big impression on Mr. Trump.
Golfer Langer, a gentleman with some manners, did his level best to stay out of this whole mess at first. Langer’s daughter said simply he was not a friend of Trump’s, and was too busy to answer any questions.
Trump first told the story as a first-hand direct Langer involved anecdote to the Prez himself. Then a WH aide modified the telling to Langer told the Prez over Thanksgiving (adding a realistic timing detail to bolster the veracity of the information), but that the story was about a friend of Langer’s, not the man himself. Thus the story is converted to first-person, second hand.
But the story had strong stumpy legs and would not die. Trump never quits, never backs down, never makes admits a mistake.
Finally, pressed beyond bearing about the snowballing foolishness of ‘evidence’ supposedly provided by a German national not entitled to vote in America, Langer was impelled to issue a formal statement on Thursday.
From the Huffington Post: (emphasis added)
Pro golfer Bernhard Langer released a statement Thursday disputing an anecdote used by President Donald Trump earlier this week during a talk with congressional leaders.
Trump spoke Monday of an anecdote that he attributed to Langer, described by the president as a “friend,” according to The New York Times. In the president’s telling, Langer said he had been turned away at the polls in Florida while others who didn’t look as if they should be allowed to vote were allowed to cast provisional ballots. Trump did not describe what the people who “shouldn’t be able to vote” looked like, but he mentioned some Latin American countries.
Langer, a German citizen, said in a statement issued Thursday through the PGA Tour Champions that neither was he the subject of that anecdote nor had he told it to the president. (emphasis added)
“Unfortunately, the report in the New York Times and other news outlets was a mischaracterization by the media,” Langer said. “The voting situation reported was not conveyed from me to President Trump, but rather was told to me by a friend. I then relayed the story in conversation with another friend, who shared it with a person with ties to the White House. From there, this was misconstrued. I am not a citizen of the United States, and cannot vote.”
An unnamed White House staff member told the Times, however, that he was with Trump in November when Langer told Trump the story about his friend in Florida, and that the president apparently got it confused.
Langer owns a home in Florida and is not eligible to vote in the U.S. His daughter also told The Times that he is “not a friend of President Trump’s.”
Trump has claimed repeatedly that as many as 5 million people voted illegally, robbing him of a popular-vote victory in the presidential election.
How diplomatic of Langer to say only that the information had been “misconstrued”. What a delightfully vague word to apply to alternative fact type situations. For the explicit record here is Langer’s entire and complete statement straight from the PGA TOUR Champions:
1/26/17 (emphasis added)
The following is a statement from PGA TOUR Champions member Bernhard Langer:
“Unfortunately, the report in the New York Times and other news outlets was a mischaracterization by the media. The voting situation reported was not conveyed from me to President Trump, but rather was told to me by a friend. I then relayed the story in conversation with another friend, who shared it with a person with ties to the White House. From there, this was misconstrued. I am not a citizen of the United States, and cannot vote. It’s a privilege to live in the United States, and I am blessed to call America my home. I will have no further comment at this time.”
O.K., then. Direct testimony, on the record, from the Golfer’s mouth. It didn’t happen to Langer. A friend told Langer a story. Second-hand. Langer told the story to another friend. Third-hand. The third party shared it with another party who connects with the WH. So, now the evidence is Fourth-hand. From there it somehow gets into Trump’s brain pan. At the minimum then, at least fifth-hand, assuming Langer’s friend of a friend at the WH has the very topmost connections and there wasn’t still another internal relay or two (like via Reince, Kellyanne, Steve or Sean, for example)
Mock Up of WH Tin-Can Telephone Intelligence Gathering Apparatus for President Trump
We now have the spectacle of a U.S. President getting worked up and ordering a thorough federal investigations of voter fraud based on fifth-hand unverified hearsay. He Twits (January 25), and sends the Vice-President in person to emphasize to fellow Republicans (January 27) Trump’s great personal concern and iron-willed purpose to get to the bottom of how a Trump.45 could lose by millions of fraudulent votes, always and only cast for Democrats. And then Trump himself redoubles and Twits again (January 27) with another empty-calorie voter fraud ‘study’.
Trump’s Voter Fraud Tweet January 27, 2017
If this kind of mindless presidential decision making process weren’t so serious, it would be laughable. It might even be too outlandish to make a Saturday Night Live sketch proposal.
Two Innocents Playing Tin-Can Telephone
For all the world, this resembles nothing so much as a game of tin-can telephone like we used to play as children to act like grown-ups.*
Representation of 17th Century String Telephone by Robert Hooke (1667)
Now, there is a serious history of mechanico-acoustic telephony (tin cans connected by wire or string), which goes back several hundred years. English scientific genius Robert Hooke, FRS**(1635-1703), invented a string phone as early as 1667. In the 19th century, there were short range (up to 3 miles) commercial acoustic telephones which were driven out of business by competition from the electrical telephone technology pioneered by Alexander Graham Bell.
This Presidential evidentiary comedy of errors is also just like the party entertainment game where the host whispers a message to one person, and that person turns and whispers the message to the next person in line, so on down the row. At the end the last person repeats the original message with typically hilarious garbled results for the guests’ amusement. Now that one is often played by teenagers and even adults, particularly in mixed gender company to establish a convivial party mood, and allow some socially sanctioned free clinches The inaccurate message results themselves almost never result in adverse consequences for the players or bystanders. But that is the party version, not the WH version.
Social Tin-Can Telephone Game (19th Century)
Trump is the last person in the information line, except for the lawmakers hearing him give anecdotal testimony in the first person, ‘as told to me by the injured party’ style. Except that in this circumstance Trump was either confused, or conflated, or suffered a memory lapse, or has somehow embedded a false memory, or is just mashing up bits and pieces of intense feelings to produce a pleasing summation.
Anyway, it’s no way to run an airline, much less a sovereign country. Who will Jeff Sessions investigate and charge for misleading the President on this one? Langer maybe better go visit Germany for a while until things cool down in the good ole’ U.S. of A. No telling what the damages might be. Only a billionaire could make it out.
Golfing Telephone Intelligence Ripples
It would be wonderful if this were the end of the story. The President was not wrong, just misinformed, so Team Trump will go find some other equally valid, but less disputable source for his profound and obviously quite valid voting fraud concerns.
But in the end Langer issued his formal statement, which allows of no reasonable alternate interpretation, through none other than the PGA TOUR Champions organization. That is to say, the old boy pros (Seniors) of the PGA. On their official website.
If you are not a golf aficionado, take a spin over to their website, and look at the 2017 Official Tournament Schedule. There are five new tournament host venues, including the super luxurious Trump National Golf Club outside Washington D.C.
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – PGA TOUR Champions announced today the 2017 tournament schedule, featuring 26 official tournaments and two “Challenge Season” events. The 23-event Regular Season will again highlight the Charles Schwab Cup Playoffs, which will be used to determine the season-long Charles Schwab Cup champion. The Tour will contest events in four countries and 18 states, with total prize money of $55.7 million
The 2017 season will feature five tournaments with new host venues, including Trump National Golf Club outside Washington D.C.,(emphasis added) Salem Country Club in Peabody, Mass., Caves Valley Golf Club in suburban Baltimore, Royal Porthcawl Golf Club in Wales and Phoenix (Ariz.) Country Club.
The season will begin with the Mitsubishi Electric Championship at Hualalai, set for the week of January 16-21 in Ka’upulehu-Kona, Hawaii. Thirteen-time PGA TOUR winner David Toms, who turns 50 on January 4, is expected to make his PGA TOUR Champions debut. Toms will be joined by fellow rookies Steve Stricker and Jerry Kelly during the 2017 season.
Oh dear, oh dear. Are Langer and the PGA Champions in Dutch now? They have officially, on company letterhead as it were (their website), said that Trump’s fantastical little story is not to be trusted, and was not delivered to Trump.45 in person directly, no matter what his memory tells him at this point.
Will there be consequences? Will the PGA pull out of Trump’s tournament venue? Will Trump cancel the PGA TOUR Champions? Will they have to re-negotiate the deal? Will Trump send the FBI, CIA, NSA and others go after one or both of these characters to get to the bottom of the contradictory stories by everyone other then the absolutely trustworthy DJT? Will subpoenas and indictments result? Will Trump finally say, one time for the rest of us, like Emily Litella***, ‘Never mind.”
Please Trump.45, just once.
America would sleep better, if only for a few days.
A tin can telephone is a type of acoustic (non-electrical) speech-transmitting device made up of two tin cans, paper cups or similarly shaped items attached to either end of a taut string or wire.
It is a form of mechanical telephony, where sound is converted into and then conveyed by vibrations along a liquid or solid medium, and then reconverted back to sound.
Before the invention of the electromagnetic telephone, there were mechanical acoustic devices for transmitting spoken words and music over a distance greater than that of normal speech. The very earliest mechanical telephones were based on sound transmission through pipes or other physical media, and among the very earliest experiments were those conducted by the British physicist and polymath Robert Hooke from 1664 to 1685. From 1664 to 1665 Hooke experimented with sound transmission through a taut distended wire. An acoustic string phone is attributed to him as early as 1667.
The highly similar acoustic tin can telephone, or ‘lover’s phone’, has also been known for centuries. It connects two diaphragms with a taut string or wire, which transmits sound by mechanical vibrations from one to the other along the wire (and not by a modulated electric current). The classic example is the children’s toy made by connecting the bottoms of two paper cups, metal cans, or plastic bottles with tautly held string.
For a short period of time acoustic telephones were marketed commercially as a niche competitor to the electrical telephone, as they preceded the latter’s invention and didn’t fall within the scope of its patent protection. When Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent expired and dozens of new phone companies flooded the marketplace, acoustic telephone manufacturers could not compete commercially and quickly went out of business. Their maximum range was very limited, but hundreds of technical innovations (resulting in about 300 patents) increased their range to approximately a half mile (800 m) or more under ideal conditions. An example of one such company was Lemuel Mellett’s ‘Pulsion Telephone Supply Company’ of Massachusetts, which designed its version in 1888 and deployed it on railroad right-of-ways, purportedly with a range of 3 miles (4.8 km).
In the centuries before tin cans and paper cups became commonplace, other cups were used and the device was sometimes called the “lovers’ telephone”. During the 20th century, it came into common use in preschools and elementary schools to teach children about sound vibration.
Sound waves are created as the air vibrates in response to a person’s speech or other sounds. A second person’s ear collects these sound waves and converts them into nerve impulses which their brain interprets as sound. In normal speech these waves travel through the air, but with a tin can telephone the waves are transmitted through an additional medium of cups and string.
When the string is pulled taut and someone speaks into one of the cans, its bottom acts as a diaphragm, converting the sound waves into longitudinal mechanical vibrations which vary the tension of the string. These variations in tension set up longitudinal waves in the string which travel to the second can, causing its bottom to vibrate in a similar manner as the first can, thus recreating the sound heard by the second person.
The signal can be directed around corners with the aid of a third can positioned on the apex of the corner. The string is threaded through the base of the third can so as to avoid coming into contact with the object around which the signal is to be directed.
Imagined Portrait of Robert Hooke, FRS by Rita Greer (2004)
**Robert Hooke, FRS was a 17th century English scientist, experimental genius, architect, physicist, astronomer, mathematician, microscopist, polymath, Renaissance man, and irascible old coot.
Robert Hooke FRS (28 July 1635 – 3 March 1703) was an English natural philosopher, architect and polymath.
His adult life comprised three distinct periods: as a scientific inquirer lacking money; achieving great wealth and standing through his reputation for hard work and scrupulous honesty following the great fire of 1666, but eventually becoming ill and party to jealous intellectual disputes. These issues may have contributed to his relative historical obscurity.
He was at one time simultaneously the curator of experiments of the Royal Society and a member of its council, Gresham Professor of Geometry and a Surveyor to the City of London after the Great Fire of London, in which capacity he appears to have performed more than half of all the surveys after the fire. He was also an important architect of his time – though few of his buildings now survive and some of those are generally misattributed – and was instrumental in devising a set of planning controls for London whose influence remains today. Allan Chapman has characterised him as “England’s Leonardo”.
Robert Gunther’s Early Science in Oxford, a history of science in Oxford during the Protectorate, Restoration and Age of Enlightenment, devotes five of its fourteen volumes to Hooke.
Hooke studied at Wadham College, Oxford during the Protectorate where he became one of a tightly knit group of ardent Royalists led by John Wilkins. Here he was employed as an assistant to Thomas Willis and to Robert Boyle, for whom he built the vacuum pumps used in Boyle’s gas law experiments. He built some of the earliest Gregorian telescopes and observed the rotations of Mars and Jupiter. In 1665 he inspired the use of microscopes for scientific exploration with his book, Micrographia. Based on his microscopic observations of fossils, Hooke was an early proponent of biological evolution. He investigated the phenomenon of refraction, deducing the wave theory of light, and was the first to suggest that matter expands when heated and that air is made of small particles separated by relatively large distances. He performed pioneering work in the field of surveying and map-making and was involved in the work that led to the first modern plan-form map, though his plan for London on a grid system was rejected in favour of rebuilding along the existing routes. He also came near to an experimental proof that gravity follows an inverse square law, and hypothesised that such a relation governs the motions of the planets, an idea which was subsequently developed by Isaac Newton. Much of Hooke’s scientific work was conducted in his capacity as curator of experiments of the Royal Society, a post he held from 1662, or as part of the household of Robert Boyle.
Hooke was irascible, at least in later life, proud, and prone to take umbrage with intellectual competitors, though he was by all accounts also a staunch friend and ally and was loyal always to the circle of ardent Royalists with whom he had his early training at Wadham College, particularly Christopher Wren. His reputation suffered after his death and this is popularly attributed to a dispute with Isaac Newton over credit for his work on gravitation, the planets and to a lesser degree light. His dispute with Oldenburg about whether Oldenburg had leaked or passed on details of Hooke’s watch escapement to others is another well-known example.
Newton, as President of the Royal Society, did much to obscure Hooke, including, it is said, destroying (or failing to preserve) the only known portrait of the man. It did not help that the first life of Wren, Parentalis, was written by Wren’s son, and tended to exaggerate Wren’s work over all others. Hooke’s reputation was revived during the twentieth century through studies of Robert Gunther and Margaret ‘Espinasse. After a long period of relative obscurity he has now been recognised as one of the most important scientists of his age.
Hooke was apt to use ciphers and guard his ideas. As curator of Experiments to the Royal Society he was responsible for demonstrating many ideas sent in to the Society, and there is evidence that he would subsequently assume some credit for these ideas. Hooke also was immensely busy and thus unable – or in some cases unwilling, pending a way of profiting from the enterprise via letters patent – to develop all of his own ideas. This was a time of immense scientific progress, and numerous ideas were developed in several places simultaneously.
Hooke’s Improved Compound Microscope with Illuminating Apparatus
None of this should distract from Hooke’s inventiveness, his remarkable experimental facility, and his capacity for hard work. His ideas about gravitation, and his claim of priority for the inverse square law, are outlined below. He was granted a large number of patents for inventions and refinements in the fields of elasticity, optics, and barometry. The Royal Society’s Hooke papers (recently discovered after disappearing when Newton took over) will open up a modern reassessment.
In 1660, Hooke discovered the law of elasticity which bears his name and which describes the linear variation of tension with extension in an elastic spring. He first described this discovery in the anagram “ceiiinosssttuv”, whose solution he published in 1678 as “Ut tensio, sic vis” meaning “As the extension, so the force.” Hooke’s work on elasticity culminated, for practical purposes, in his development of the balance spring or hairspring, which for the first time enabled a portable timepiece – a watch – to keep time with reasonable accuracy. A bitter dispute between Hooke and Christiaan Huygens on the priority of this invention was to continue for centuries after the death of both; but a note dated 23 June 1670 in the Hooke Folio (see External links below), describing a demonstration of a balance-controlled watch before the Royal Society, has been held to favour Hooke’s claim.
Drawing of a Flea Seen Through a Microscope (1665) by Robert Hooke
In 1665 Hooke published Micrographia, a book describing observations made with microscopes and telescopes, as well as some original work in biology. Hooke coined the term cell for describing biological organisms, the term being suggested by the resemblance of plant cells to cells of a honeycomb. The hand-crafted, leather and gold-tooled microscope he used to make the observations for Micrographia, originally constructed by Christopher White in London, is on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC.
Hooks’s Original Microscope (1665)
Micrographia also contains Hooke’s, or perhaps Boyle and Hooke’s, ideas on combustion. Hooke’s experiments led him to conclude that combustion involves a substance that is mixed with air, a statement with which modern scientists would agree, but that was not widely understood, if at all, in the seventeenth century. Hooke went on to conclude that respiration also involves a specific component of the air. Partington even goes so far as to claim that if “Hooke had continued his experiments on combustion it is probable that he would have discovered oxygen”.
A lesser-known contribution, however one of the first of its kind, was Hooke’s scientific model of human memory. Hooke in a 1682 lecture to the Royal Society proposed a mechanistic model of human memory, which would bear little resemblance to the mainly philosophical models before it. This model addressed the components of encoding, memory capacity, repetition, retrieval, and forgetting—some with surprising modern accuracy. This work, overlooked for nearly 200 years, shared a variety of similarities with Richard Semon’s work of 1919/1923, both assuming memories were physical and located in the brain. The model’s more interesting points are that it (1) allows for attention and other top-down influences on encoding; (2) it uses resonance to implement parallel, cue-dependent retrieval; (3) it explains memory for recency; (4) it offers a single-system account of repetition and priming, and (5) the power law of forgetting can be derived from the model’s assumption in a straightforward way. This lecture would be published posthumously in 1705 as the memory model was unusually placed in a series of works on the nature of light. It has been speculated that this work saw little review as the printing was done in small batches in a post-Newtonian age of science and was most likely deemed out of date by the time it was published. Further interfering with its success was contemporary memory psychologists’ rejection of immaterial souls, which Hooke invoked to some degree in regards to the processes of attention, encoding and retrieval.
***Emily Litella (Gilda Radner’s character) on Saturday Night Live (26 performances):
Emily Litella is a fictional character played by the late comedian Gilda Radner in a series of appearances on Saturday Night Live. Based on a person in her early life, Emily Litella is a popular character in Radner’s comedy repertoire.
Emily Litella is an elderly woman with a hearing problem who appeared 26 times on SNL’s Weekend Update op-ed segment in the late 1970s. Attired in a frumpy dress, sweater and Lisa Loopner glasses, Litella was introduced with professional dignity by the news anchors, who could sometimes be seen cringing slightly in anticipation of the malapropisms they knew would follow.
Gilda Radner (as Litella) would peer through her reading glasses and, in the character’s trademark high-pitched, warbly voice, would read a prepared statement in opposition to an editorial that the TV station had supposedly broadcast. These sketches were, in part, a parody of the Fairness Doctrine, which at the time required broadcasters in the United States to present opposing viewpoints on public issues. Litella would become increasingly agitated as her statement progressed. Midway in her commentary, it became apparent that she had misheard and/or misunderstood the subject of the editorial to which she was responding. A typical example:
What is all this fuss I hear about the Supreme Court decision on a “deaf” penalty? It’s terrible! Deaf people have enough problems as it is!
The news anchor would interrupt Litella to point out her error, along the lines, “That’s death penalty, Ms. Litella, not deaf … death.” Litella would wrinkle her nose, say, “Oh, that’s very different….” then meekly turn to the camera and say, “Never mind.” When Litella played against news anchor Chevy Chase (whom she often called “Cheddar Cheese”, he would be somewhat sympathetic to her. But when Jane Curtin took over the anchor role, she would scold Litella, “Every week you come on and you get it wrong,” to which Litella would reply, “Bitch!”
Other misheard topics to which Litella responded included “saving Soviet jewelry” [Jewry], “endangered feces” [species], “sax and violins on television” [sex and violence], “presidential erections” [elections], “conserving natural racehorses” [natural resources], “firing the handicapped” [hiring], and “making Puerto Rico a steak” [state]. About the last of these topics, she complained, “Next thing you know, they’ll want a baked potato with sour cream!”
Boy, could America use Emily’s take on our politics in a contemporary SNL Weekend Update gig during 2017. A little gentle humor instead of the bitter, enraged streams directed at too many groups in America, coming straight from the WH and administration.