Pajama game

So the latest alt-med health craze is: high-tech pajamas.

I'm not making this up.  Under Armour has just released a Tom Brady-endorsed line of "Athlete Recovery Sleepwear," which according to the advertisement works as follows:

Far Infrared is a type of energy on the infrared spectrum that has several benefits for the human body.  TB12 technology was developed to harness it even when you’re resting. The soft bioceramic print on the inside of the garment absorbs the body’s natural heat and reflects Far Infrared back to the skin.  This helps your body recover faster, promotes better sleep, reduces inflammation, and regulates cell metabolism.

The main problem with this is that reflecting heat back to your body is what a good blanket will do.  It's entirely possible that ceramic-impregnated cloth does it more efficiently, but I'm not convinced that you're going to get any health benefit out of fancy pjs any more than you would out of a nice down comforter.

NOT Tom Brady pajamas.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

To be fair, there has been some research on the effects of far infrared on health.  Some of the results were suggestive -- especially those linking far-infrared sauna use with lowered inflammation -- but the main study I've seen cited has a good many woo-ish bits, such as the following:

For FIR used as a therapeutic modality the alternative terms “biogenetic radiation” and “biogenetic rays” have been coined and widely used in the popular literature. FIR wavelength is too long to be perceived by the eyes, however, the body experiences its energy as a gentle radiant heat which can penetrate up to 1.5 inches (almost 4 cm) beneath the skin.  FIR energy is sufficient to exert rotational and vibrational modes of motion in bonds forming the molecules (including the water molecules) as well as resonate with cellular frequencies.

What, exactly, does "resonating with cellular frequencies" mean?

Then there's this site, which is so loony that it falls into the "not even wrong" category.  Here's an excerpt long enough to give you the general gist, but not so long that you'll kill valuable brain cells by reading it:

FIR has vast penetrating and healing powers.  You know that if the Astronauts are taking advantage of the power of Far Infrared by using it in their Space Suits, there has got to be some value to it.  FIR emitting Bio Ceramic mineral compounds are even used to line the inside of their space shuttle to replicate the energy of sunlight.

We're also told that far infrared rays are "unique in that they travel in straight lines" (like all electromagnetic radiation, actually); that they "vibrate at the same frequency as the human body;" that they are "drug-free;" that they "reduce the acidity of the body" and that "a more alkaline body is healthier;" and that they "help heal burns and reduce scaring [sic]."

Well, I don't know about you, but that all sounds pretty convincing to me.

The difficulty of all of this is that the First Law of Thermodynamics, which is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions, indicates that any heat reflection you get from ceramic pajamas is not going to introduce any more energy into your person than the amount you lost to radiation in the first place.  Like I said, if you're cold at night, get a blanket.

I haven't mentioned the fact that the Under Armour Athlete Recovery Sleepwear will set you back $144.98, an expense that could be obviated entirely by doing what I do, which is ditching the pajamas entirely.  That may have been too much information, but it's probably still worth it if I've saved you 145 bucks.

So in summary: there may be some small benefit to wearing Tom Brady's pajamas, but even if the results are not the placebo effect they're unlikely to be anything you couldn't achieve other ways.  The benefits of far-infrared are still pretty dubious, and most of the positive results have been with far-infrared emitters -- like heat lamps and saunas.  If you're looking for a way to sleep better, put your money into a more comfortable mattress instead.  And for cryin' in the sink, don't fall for the whole "resonating with your body's cellular frequency" bullshit.

Although it could be worse.  They could have mentioned "quantum."

Schadenfreude

There's a natural human tendency to want the people who hurt us to suffer.  It's not nice, it's not productive, but it's pretty universal.

And now some psychologists have demonstrated that there is a neurological underpinning to our love of schadenfreude.

David S. Chester and C. Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky Department of Psychology set up a group of 156 test subjects to have the opportunity to gain (harmless) revenge for perceived hurts.  Each of the subjects was instructed to write an essay on a personal subject, and the essays were traded among the group for feedback. Unbeknownst to the participants, however, some of the feedback wasn't from other test subjects -- instead, the researchers had substituted their own, and harsh, feedback.  ("One of the WORST essays I've ever read," for example.)

The participants took a survey to rate their mood before and after the feedback.  After receiving an awful response, test subjects said (understandably) that their mood suffered.  But then the researchers allowed the recipients of bad feedback to use a computer simulation to stick pins in a voodoo doll symbolizing the person who had trashed their essay, and found that when they did that, their mood recovered -- almost to pre-feedback levels.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

A second experiment refined the response even further.  A group of 154 people were given a pill -- a placebo, of course -- but told that the pill would have two effects: enhancing their cognitive abilities, and stabilizing their mood.  They were then allowed to play a simple computer game, a three-person ball-passing game.

What they didn't know -- in addition to the fact that they'd been given a placebo -- was that they weren't playing against other humans, they were playing against a computer that had either been programmed to ignore them most of the time (the ball gets passed mostly between the other two "participants") or to play fair (the ball gets passed equally among all three).

After playing that game, and either getting frustrated and ignored or not, they were told to play a second game, involving being the fastest to press a button.  This time, however, the slowest player received an annoying burst of noise through headphones.  And the fastest player got a perk -- (s)he was able to adjust the volume to determine how badly the slowest player got penalized.

Both the players that had been treated fairly in the first game, and those who had been treated unfairly but given a "mood stabilizer," felt no need to adjust the volume.  But the ones who had been treated unfairly and not given the "mood stabilizer" indulged their schadenfreude to the hilt, cranking the sound up to 100 decibels.

"Together, these findings suggest that the rejection–aggression link is driven, in part, by the desire to return to affective homeostasis," Chester and DeWall write.  "Additionally, these findings implicate aggression’s rewarding nature as an incentive for rejected individuals’ violent tendencies."

The researchers emphasized that they were not recommending revenge as a way of improving your mood, and suggested that other options (such as meditation or reconciliation) might actually work better.  But they found that the old adage "revenge is sweet" is uncannily accurate.

So there you are.  Another rather humbling feature of human psychology.  What I find most fascinating about all of this is not that we like to see those who have hurt us suffer -- that's not all that surprising, frankly -- but that when told we're being given something that will stabilize our mood, our desire for revenge evaporates.  Illustrating once again the rather terrifying fact of how easily manipulable we are.  We have undeserved confidence in our impulses, motives, and justifications -- when in fact, a more reasonable stance considering the research is to doubt pretty much everything we feel.

Speaking truth to power

My mother's grandfather, Joseph Meyer, was one of a small community of French Jews near Donaldsonville, Louisiana.  His family, like many Jewish families, had their names changed in the 19th century -- Joseph's paternal grandparents were born Schillen Lévy and Mindel Bloch in Dauendorf, Bas-Rhin département, Alsace, France.  But the French authorities decided their names were too Jewish-sounding, and altered them by decree to Joseph and Minette Meyer.

Some of my Bloch and Lévy relatives chose to stay in Alsace, and a couple of generations further along one of my Bloch cousins, Céline Bollack, was born in the little town of Wintzenheim in 1893.  When the Nazis rose to power, Céline and her husband, Armand Simon, became involved in the French Resistance.  They passed out anti-Nazi literature, worked to organize people to fight the German infiltration into France, and even as circumstances looked darker and darker, would not be silenced.

In spring of 1944 they were in the town of Brive-le-Gaillarde, in the département of Corrèze in south-central France.  Brive-le-Gaillarde was a hub of the Resistance, and in fact had been the home of Resistance fighter Edmond Michelet (who was imprisoned at Dachau, contracted typhus, but survived both).

Armand and Céline were not so lucky.  They were arrested along with their fifteen-year-old daughter Irène in Brive-le-Gaillarde on April 4, 1944 for sedition and agitation (and not least because they were Jewish themselves).  They were transferred to a holding camp in Drancy, northeast of Paris, and on April 29 were part of Convoy 72 from Drancy to Auschwitz.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The Nazis were meticulous record-keepers.  There were 1,004 men, women, and children on Convoy 72.  Only 100 of them were chosen to work in the camp; the other 904 were gassed.

Armand, Céline, and Irène Simon were among the 904 executed shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz.

It bears mention, however, that even of the 100 who were allowed to live after arriving in the camp, only 38 survived to the liberation of the death camp on January 27, 1945.

What always strikes me about the Nazi atrocities is the complicity of ordinary folks.  It is easy enough to imagine horrific things being done by people who are truly evil; what is hard to wrap my brain around is how thousands of regular people, with families and friends and hobbies and jobs and pets, not only sat idly by while the Nazis arrested their neighbors, but actively helped.  These are the people who became informants, prison guards, collaborators.

These are the people without whom the Holocaust would never have happened.

I would like to say that such atrocities could never happen again.  But I see the same things going on today -- ordinary folks excusing elected officials for saying and doing terrible things; ridiculing, denigrating, or threatening people who speak up; agitating anger against those who look different or think differently.  If you believe that such behavior couldn't escalate into violence and oppression, if you think we've learned our lesson from the horrors of World War II, you're fooling yourself.  Those same tendencies are still with us, waiting to be whipped into a frenzy by leaders who gain power from inciting hate, making us afraid, and teaching us to distrust the truth.

The only way to stop this is to speak up and continue speaking up.  Such acts of courage are risky; my cousin Céline and her husband and daughter paid for their resistance with their lives.  But the risks -- whether they are minor ones such as ridicule and condemnation, or major ones such as imprisonment or execution -- do not abrogate our responsibility to stand up for what is right.

When I have attended Passover celebrations and the time comes for remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust, I have spoken the names of Céline, Armand, and Irène Simon along with the words "May they never be forgotten."  But I'll go a step further.  May we never lose our courage to do what they did, to speak truth to power.  We must not simply remember the ones who gave their lives for a noble cause, but be like them --  be unafraid to put ourselves in harm's way to stop those who would see our country and our world once again descend into a maelstrom of hatred, violence, and despair.

I owe most of what I know about my cousin and her family to the research of my dear friend Dr. Diana Wagner, Holocaust Educator at Salisbury University (Maryland).  She has been working with the Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center to hand-transcribe hundreds of documents related to the Holocaust, and to make those documents available through the World Memory Project.  I owe a debt of gratitude to Diana for not only my personal knowledge about my own family, but for all of the hours she has put in to make sure that these stories truly will never be forgotten -- and to help us to vow that we will never let such things happen again.

Art imitates life

I got a bit of a shock from something a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me yesterday.

I was emailed a link to an article claiming that a 1950s television show had predicted the future -- because it featured a character named Trump, a snake-oil salesman who convinced a town that he knew how to prevent an invasion of aliens (and the collapse of civilization).  All they had to do, he said, was to build a wall around the town.

My immediate reaction was that it was going to turn out to be like the similar claims made a couple of years ago that Adam Sandler had repeatedly predicted future events.  In other words, entirely bogus, complete bullshit, and made up from the get-go (the Adam Sandler claims came from a satirical website called Clickhole that was up front that they'd invented the whole story, but thousands of conspiracy theorists evidently missed that part).

But the weird thing about the Trump television show is...

... it's true.

The show was called Trackdown, which was an obscure western series starring Robert Culp as Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman.  And in the episode called "The End of the World," a huckster named Trump -- at least it was Walter Trump, not Donald -- comes into town claiming that there's going to be a worldwide invasion and subsequent destruction of civilization, and the only way to prevent the town from being destroyed was to pay him money so that he could oversee the building of a wall around the town.

"I bring you a message, a message few of you will be able to believe," Trump tells the townspeople.  "A message of great importance.  A message I alone was able to read in the fires of the universe.  And at midnight tonight, without my help and knowledge, every one of you will be dead."

When he's challenged on whether he's telling the truth, he says to the doubter, "Be careful, son, I can sue you."

Walter Trump, who at least doesn't look like the President-elect [image courtesy of Snopes]

The doubter, of course, is shouted down, and the townspeople fall for Trump's lies.  Later in the episode, we hear the following:

Narrator: Hoby had checked the town.  The people were ready to believe.  Like sheep they ran to the slaughterhouse.  And waiting for them was the high priest of fraud. 

Trump: I am the only one.  Trust me.  I can build a wall around your homes that nothing can penetrate. 

Townperson: What do we do?  How can we save ourselves? 

Trump: You ask how do you build that wall.  You ask, and I'm here to tell you.

Fortunately for the town, Hoby Gilman unmasks Trump's duplicity, and the con man is arrested and jailed.

Weird, no?  The whole thing has been vetted by Snopes, and apparently is 100% true -- in fact, on the Snopes link you can watch a clip from the show.

So a lot of woo-woo types are claiming that the show was prescient, as if television acted as some kind of electronic version of the Magic 8 Ball that was popular with kids when I was young.  (E.g., "Is Donald Trump's Mexican wall idea a complete and utter boondoggle?"  Magic 8 Ball:  "It is decidedly so.")

Be that as it may, the race is on by the wingnut contingent to scour other obscure 1950s television shows to see what else might be in store for us.

Honestly, however, all we're seeing here is the law of large numbers, plus a heaping measure of dart-thrower's bias.  If you have a large enough sample size and no parameters for narrowing down what you're looking for, eventually you'll notice weird coincidences; and of course we're going to pay more attention to cases where there was a weird coincidence than the tens of thousands of times there wasn't.  (I, for one, am glad that most television shows don't predict reality.  I would prefer not to live in a world where The Beverly Hillbillies, I Dream of Jeannie, or (heaven forfend) Lost in Space was an accurate predictor of future events.)

But I won't deny that it's peculiar.  And if it is going to play out the way it did in Trackdown, I wonder who our version of the Hoby Gilman character will be?

Lurking under the ice

So once again I've been sent a link several times with either "Oh, lord, here we go again" or "Ha!  This is real!  You skeptics are so dumb!" notes appended.  The link is to a story in The New York Post about a "massive anomaly lurking in Antarctica."

My first thought was to wonder how an anomaly can lurk, whether in Antarctica or elsewhere, and of course this put me in mind of H. P. Lovecraft's seminal horror story "At the Mountains of Madness."  In this tale some explorers head out to the Frozen Continent after the discovery of certain artifacts of great age, and upon investigation they find a massive city (I believe it's described as "cyclopean" and "eldritch," two of Lovecraft's absolute favorite words), following which they're one by one picked off and eaten by Shoggoths, who apparently lurk quite effectively.

So the usual stuff.  But the particular anomaly referenced in the Post article was discovered not through direct exploration but by use of a magnetometer, and the conclusion was that there is a large metallic object hidden (or lurking, as the case may be) underneath the ice in Wilkes Land, a region of eastern Antarctica.  It's buried at a depth of 900 meters, and is 250 kilometers across.

Which is pretty big.  Cyclopean, even.

Wilkes Land, also known as "Not My Idea of a Vacation Spot" [image courtesy of NASA/JPL and the Wikimedia Commons]

Some scientists have suggested that the anomaly is the remains of a huge asteroid -- perhaps twice as large as the one that created the Chicxulub Crater in what is now the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, and in the process did in most of the species of dinosaurs.  If so, the Wilkes Land Magnetic Anomaly is a good candidate for the smoking gun of the Permian-Triassic Extinction, which occurred 252 million years ago and is estimated to have wiped out 96% of marine life and 70% of terrestrial life in one fell swoop.  The timing certainly seems right, as do the characteristics of the site.

But of course, far be it from your average New York Post reader to accept something like the results of scientific study.  No, the lurking anomaly has to be something more mysterious.  Some of the suggestions have been:

• it's a massive UFO base
• it's an underground (or underice, as the case may be) city where the Nazis escaped to after their defeat in World War II
• it's where they moved HAARP after they decommissioned the one in Alaska.  (Yes, I know that HAARP studies the atmosphere, so it wouldn't do you much good buried 900 meters deep in ice.  Stop asking questions.)
• it's a portal to the inside of the Hollow Earth

Then there's the "UFO-hunting crew" that calls itself "Secure Team 10," which basically combined all of the above into one all-purpose loony explanation.  The Post explains their claim as follows:

Secure Team 10 suggested the Nazis built secret bases in Antarctica during World War II, which were designed to be used by flying saucers. 

The UFO hunters added: “There is some evidence of this coming to light in recent years, with images purporting to show various entrances built into the side of mountains, with a saucer shape and at a very high altitude.” 

“This begs the question: how would you enter these entrances without something that could fly and was the same shape as the hole itself?”

My general opinion is that it begs a great many more questions than that one, but do go on.

Secure Team also suggested the US Navy led a mission to investigate the mysterious continent. 

This expedition was called Operation High Jump, which conspiracy theorists believe was an attempt to find the entrance to a secret world hidden underneath Earth.

Have I emphasized strongly enough that this magnetic anomaly, whatever it is, is covered by a 900-meter-thick sheet of ice?

Anyhow.  Once again we have the woo-woos coming up with bizarre ideas, which of course is what woo-woos do, and tabloid clickbait like The New York Post enthusiastically jumping on the bandwagon to induce readers to provide them with ad revenue by clicking on the link.

And, as a side effect, inducing my readers to send it to me, which they've done (at the time of this writing) six times and counting.  So thanks to all of my loyal readers for keeping me informed on the latest missives from the wingnuts.  As for me, I think I'm going to lurk my way up to the kitchen and get another cup of coffee.

Standardized failure

Over the last few days in my Critical Thinking class we've been critiquing the educational system.  After all, who better to ask than a class full of people who've been immersed in it, been the beneficiaries of the successes and the victims of the failures, for ten or more years?  I find that most of them are reasonable and fair about the assessment -- neither lashing out without justification nor telling me what I think they want to hear.  Their criticisms are reasoned, well supported, and usually spot-on.

But nothing riled them up more than the documentary I showed them on the school systems in Finland.  (The link is to part 1, but you can access it all from there -- the entire thing is an hour long but is well worth the time.)  The documentary was the brainchild of Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard University, who went to Finland to see if he could find out why Finnish schools routinely rank at the top of any measure you want to apply to them -- whether it's test scores, rigor, success of students in college or career after graduation, innovation, breadth, or depth -- and why we, in a word, don't.

Finnish students at an outdoor celebration in Helsinki [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Wagner interviewed teachers, principals, education professors, students, and parents, and came up with the following rather surprising characteristics of Finnish schools:

• little to no homework
• few tests; the only major exam is the exit exam administered before graduation, which is highly rigorous
• long class periods, and fewer classes per day than typical American schools
• work centering on projects, application, and synthesis rather than memorization of facts
• a lot of projects that require meaningful collaboration (not just the much-hated "group projects" often found in American schools, where typically one or two members of the group do all the work)
• small class size
• informality (teachers are called by their first names)
• an intense and rigorous vocational track that students can enter in tenth grade
• flexibility of choice; students in the vocational track can take classes in the academic track, and vice versa -- and high school can take either three or four years depending on student choice
• a huge amount of trust.  Administrators trust teachers to do their jobs, and rarely do formal evaluations; teachers trust students to do their work, whether supervised or not

Of course, I immediately noticed the stark contrast between the Finnish schools and my own.  And I must emphasize that I am lucky to work in the school I do -- we have great students, few problems, and (I believe) a pretty good success rate (again, however you want to measure it).  But of the characteristics I listed above, virtually every one is the opposite of how we approach things here in the United States.

Which makes me wonder if the success we do have is mostly due to the resilience of the students, the dedication of the teachers to rise above adverse circumstances, and a heaping measure of dumb luck.

The one that struck me the most was trust.  Dr. Wagner was talking to one of the teachers over lunch, and walked back with him to his class -- and was astonished to find out that the teacher was twenty minutes late to his own class.  The teacher, for his part, was a little surprised at Wagner's reaction.  "They know what they have to do," the teacher said.  "I don't have to stand over them and force them."

And sure enough, he walked back into the room -- and everyone was busily working.

In American schools, one of the first things that will jump out at you is the lack of trust.  Rules and regulations abound for what you can and can't do, every minute of the day.  Teachers are of the opinion that as soon as they turn their backs, students will stop working.  Administrators feel like they have to micromanage the teachers to make sure they're doing their job.  The state education departments increasingly add evaluations and observations and "quantitative measures" of principals and teachers, so that everything they do is turned into numbers and used as a tool for reward or censure.  The implication is that no one can be trusted, and the more you watch, the more you control, the better the results will be.

It's been long established, of course, that no one works well while being micromanaged -- not children, not adults.  Dan Pink and others who analyze the corporate world have found incontrovertible evidence that when our every move is scrutinized, when it is evident that there is no trust, our productivity decreases -- as does our job satisfaction.

Why, then, do we think that children would thrive in such an environment?

The Finnish administrators whom Wagner interviewed were adamant that the most important piece in their success was trust -- but that it wasn't easy to achieve, because it meant letting go of the fear that when you stop watching, people will stop working.  But if you couple that letting go with making sure that what you are expecting students to do is meaningful, engaging, and interesting, the results are nothing short of spectacular.

The students in my Critical Thinking classes spoke with one voice after watching this documentary: Why on earth do we not try this here?  I didn't have a good answer for that except that we've all become so suspicious of each other -- teachers of students, principals of teachers, state and federal oversight administration of everyone -- that we've become locked into the system even though it demonstrably doesn't work.  Instead of decreasing testing, we've increased it -- and not in any kind of meaningful way.  Just last week poet Sara Holbrook found out that some of her poems were used on the Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, and when she read the questions, she couldn't answer them.

You read that right.  The students were being presented with questions about her poems and expected to select one right answer when the poet herself had no idea how to determine what the right answer was.  We have become so stuck on a linear, one-right-answer mode that we now do everything that way -- even though it clearly kills creativity, destroys enthusiasm, and (as Holbrook's example shows) isn't reflective of anything meaningful or even real.

It's easy to come up with excuses.  "Finland is wealthier than we are."  "Finns are a more homogeneous society than we are."  The documentary dismisses those out of hand -- actually, we spend more per capita on students than Finland does, and 16% of Finnish students learn Finnish as a second language.

But even if those were true -- even if the hurdles we face are higher than the Finns faced in reconstructing their schools back in the 1970s -- so what?  What, exactly, do we have  to lose?  What we have now is only marginally successful, and in many inner cities is a demonstrable failure.  Our dropout rates are on the rise, and our increasing reliance on trivia-dense "quantitative assessments" do nothing but alienate students and further convince them that school is boring, pointless, and has no connection to real life.

It's time to try something different.

And, after all, the Finns have demonstrated that what they do is successful.  Why not try their model?  Okay, maybe it won't work exactly as it's done in Finland, maybe it'll need some fine tuning and adjustment to meet the different needs of students in our country.  But why not try -- and why wait?  As the adage goes, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got."

The lying game

It's become almost axiomatic that politicians lie, but what I absolutely fail to understand is why we not only cast our votes for proven liars, but give them a pass when they're caught at it.

For the best example of this, we have to look no further than our President-elect.  I'm probably going to be accused of being partisan, here, but I don't care.  Donald Trump's record of telling outright lies goes back far before the election, and honestly, has nothing to do with whether he's a Republican or Democrat.  Here's a sample of the complete, egregious untruths he was guilty of before the citizenry of the United States chose him as their next president:

• He stated that "violent crime is higher than it ever has been before," when in fact violent crime peaked in 1991 and has been declining ever since.  In the U.S. you are half as likely to be a victim of violent crime as you were in 1991.
• He claimed that global warming was "a hoax created by the Chinese," and then when Hillary Clinton called him on it in a debate, said, and I quote, "I did not say that" despite the fact that the tweet was still in his Twitter feed.
• In an interview, he called pregnancy an "inconvenience," and then later lied and said he'd never said that.
• He denied using the words "pigs," "slobs," and "dogs" to describe women, and said "no one has more respect for women than I do," when in fact he did use those words, more than once.
• He claimed that the U.S. jobless rate was 42%, and didn't back down when he was challenged.  It's actually 5%.
• He was asked, under oath, if he had ever associated with people associated with organized crime, and responded, "No.  Not that I know of."  Two years before that, he was interviewed by journalist Timothy O'Brien, and was asked about his connection to Danny Sullivan, who has ties to the Philadelphia mob, and he bragged about it. "They were tough guys," Trump said. "In fact, they say that Dan Sullivan was the guy that killed Jimmy Hoffa.  I don't know if you ever heard that."  (And in fact, Trump threw a New Year's Eve party last week and invited Gambino family "business associate" Joey "No-Socks" Cinque.  Cinque runs a sham business called the "American Academy of Hospitality Sciences" -- which bestowed a five-star award on Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, and at the New Year's Eve party gave Trump a "lifetime achievement award.")

Had enough?  I haven't even considered the campaign promises he's broken already -- and we're still almost two weeks from the inauguration, for fuck's sake:

• Trump fired up his audiences before the election by pledging to jail Hillary Clinton -- "Lock her up!" was chanted at most of his rallies.  After the election, he said, and I quote: "That plays great before the election -- now we don't care, right?"
• This past summer, Trump proposed stopping illegal immigration by building a wall along the U.S./Mexico border.  "I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively," Trump said.  "I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.  And I will have Mexico pay for that wall."  Just two days ago, he announced that he was going to ask Congress to fund the building of the wall, at an estimated cost of $10 billion to taxpayers.  Confronted about this apparent breaking of a campaign promise, Trump (of course) responded by tweeting about it.  "The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!"
• Another of his big campaign promises was to "drain the swamp" -- by which he meant removing the corrupting influence of lobbyists, big money, corporations, and Wall Street from the government.  His cabinet picks include billionaires who donated to the Trump campaign, the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil, and a hedge fund manager from Goldman-Sachs.

And almost no one who voted for him is objecting to this bill of goods they were sold.  I don't care how much I supported someone -- if a candidate I voted for blatantly broke campaign promises before they'd even taken office, I would be pissed.

On the other hand, the one thing you hear his followers yelping about is his following through on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" -- something that is now appearing to be a near-certainty.  Sarah Kliff interviewed Trump voters and asked them about how the repeal was going to affect them, and uniformly they said it was going to be terrible.  When she asked them why they had supported Trump, given his unequivocal position on the subject, their responses can be summarized by what one woman told Kliff:  "I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many people's lives.  I mean, what are you to do then if you cannot pay for insurance?"

So wait just a minute here.  He lies outright, makes campaign promises and breaks them before he's even been inaugurated, but then he actually does something he promised he's gonna do, and that's what you object to?

Okay, look, I'm not saying other politicians haven't been guilty of hypocrisy, or haven't waffled, evaded, or lied outright:

But you know what?  "He does it too!" is not a defense. It's absolutely baffling why we, as citizens, accept such behavior, and more importantly, keep voting these same clowns in.  You hear people complain all the time about how corrupt politicians are, how awful Congress is, how you can't trust any of 'em -- and yet, overwhelmingly, incumbents were voted back in.  In 2016 90% of Senate races went to the incumbent, and 97% of House races -- even though Congress's overall approval rating was 13%.

Can someone please, please explain this to me?

But as far as Trump goes, I can say it no other way: he is a compulsive liar, a con man, who will say anything or do anything to get what he wants.  He is also dangerously impulsive, and already -- again, before taking office -- has endangered our role on the world stage and inflamed tensions with China, Russia, and the Middle East with his incessant loose-cannon tweeting.  We are all going to have to live through what all this will cause, and try as hard as we can to do damage control.  But I'm wondering when the Trump voters are going to realize that he has never had any intent to follow through on anything other than impulse.

To put it succinctly: you've been had.