Bushe-Barnum Multiplier (~2)

The Bushe Barnum Multiplier is the factor by which you must multiply P.T. Barum's Law to account for the number of Trump voters in America.

Barnum's Law, "There's a sucker born every minute", yields just 525,600 suckers per year (we'll assume he limited it to American suckers).

If 74,000,000 Americans vote for Trump, that would be 141 years of suckers, too high, so the rate of suckers must be higher than 1 per minute. Voting age range is about (78-18) 60 years, yielding a Bushe Barnum Multiplier of (114/60=) 1.9.
Hence, there are about 2 suckers born every minute.

Bushe-Barnum Multiplier (~2)

The Bushe Barnum Multiplier is the factor by which you must multiply P.T. Barum's Law to account for the number of Trump voters in America.

Barnum's Law, "There's a sucker born every minute", yields just 525,600 suckers per year (we'll assume he limited it to American suckers).

If 60,000,000 Americans vote for Trump, that would be 114.155 years of suckers, too high, so the rate of suckers must be higher than 1 per minute. Voting age range is about (78-18) 60 years, yielding a Bushe Barnum Multiplier of (114/60=) 1.9.

Hence, there are about 2 suckers born every minute.

Bushe-Barnum Multiplier (~2)

The Bushe Barnum Multiplier is the factor by which you must multiply P.T. Barum's Law to account for the number of Trump voters in America.

Barnum's Law, "There's a sucker born every minute", yields 525,600 suckers per year (we'll assume he limited it to American suckers).

If 60,000,000 Americans vote for Trump, that would be 114.155 years of suckers, but the voting age range is only about (78-18) 60 years or so. The rate of suckers must be higher than 1 per minute, yielding a Bushe Barnum Multiplier of (114/60=) 1.9.

Hence, there are about 2 suckers born every minute.

If You're Smart, You Became that Way

Most people say I'm a smart guy.  Most people think I was born that way and all smart people are born that way.  That is never the case, even when people pretend that is true.  You are born stupid and only become smart through working at it.

I remember tough neuropsychology tests in college.  I was a top student in my class.  Like all tests in similar courses (that is, non-math courses), I read the material before class, listened and took notes at every class.  A few days before a test I would review the readings and notes and make a set of questions that I thought would appear on the test along with my answers on a stack of index cards or at least some notebook pages.  I did not stop studying the cards until I knew them all, often walking around from class to class with a stack of index cards in my hand.  (I suspect the best part of my learning was done by my fingers while making the cards.  The act of writing, the feel of the cards and their placement in the deck.)

I hated that redheaded female classmate.  She would just breeze into to the test and say, "Ah!  I had no time to study at all for this!  My mother was sick, I've been sick, I've been working so hard and fell asleep at 7 last night and couldn't study."  She always had a long sob story to get some attention.  She was very self-centered.  When the grades came back, hers were about the same as mine - maybe better half the time.  She pretended like she was naturally so smart that she could do as well as me - the guy who always had the index cards in his hands.

I was so jealous.  Here's a girl who can read the book once and pass the test.  There were guys like this in my physics class too.  And some nerds in my computer science class seemed to whip out code in an afternoon that took me a week to write.

But all of these stories of natural genius college kids are untrue.  They are just trying to build up their own ego while they put yours down.  These kids are so smart that they know what's written in a book they never read?  Do they live on Mt. Olympus?

The next semester I worked in the same lab as the redhead.  Then, as now, I code at all hours so I would often come into the lab at 10PM or 11PM.  Guess what I found?  The redhead studying her ass off for the test the next day.  Papers and scribbled everywhere.  The first time I saw this she instantly knew she her secret was uncovered and her cheeks became as red as her hair.

The nerdy programmers?  Later I found out that their rich parents had gotten them a $3,500 computer and programming courses starting 4 years before college.  They shouldn't have even taken the course they should have taken harder courses to challenge themselves and grow, but slacked and took an ego-boost review class instead and shoved it in every rookie coder's face.

Like most smart people, I thought I was stupid and I needed to take every step and use every minute to catch up to everyone and pretend like I'm a smart person. This is the Imposter Syndrome that achieving individuals share.  To me, it was born from a paranoia, a fear of failure, and a willingness to succeed.  I don't think of this as bad, hard to live with sometimes, but it is the grindstone that sharpens the sword of your mind and helps you succeed.

The difference between natural and acquired learning was made clear to me when I applied for graduate school and took the standard GRE test, similar to the SAT.  I scored around 600 out of 800 on my verbal SAT n high school, without study, but scored 780 on my verbal GRE - which is much harder - by using an enormous stack of cards.  Was I naturally 45% smarter because of my tremendous natural brain growth from 18-22?  Of course not.   I always had the potential to be smart but I needed to work at it to reach my potential.

Women like to turn this universal syndrome into sexism - and as soon as they do, then sexism exists in their minds and it is very effective.  They don't even need a man in town to be sexist to them.  Sexism can exist in a vaccuum of 1.  It's the same with racism.  Sexism and racism exist, but much more within us than outside of us.  Provincialism, language-ism, religion-ism, whatever, they mostly hold you back only if you let them.

Recognizing out Violence, the Forward to Nonviolent Communication by Arun Ghandi

Mahatma Ghandi's grandson, Arun Gandhi, wrote a Forward to "Nonviolent Communication" that is so great, my good friend Karen Wagner recommended Marshall B Rosenberg's book to me 5 years ago and I still haven't gotten past the Forward (and I really need to!). I think it says a lot of things about the world at large and our politics now and our personal and social lives, and that has been true every time I've read it.

I'm changing, will you? If we all change, we'll all change faster for the better.

Forward to Nonviolent Communication Marshall B Rosenberg's By Arun Gandhi

As a person of color, growing up in apartheid South Africa in the 1940 was not something anyone relished. Especially if you were brutally reminded of your skin color every moment of every day. To be beaten up at the age of ten by white youths because they consider you to be too black and then by black youths because they consider you too white is a humiliating experience that would drive anyone to vengeful violence.

I was so outraged that my parents decided to take me to India and leave me for some time with Grandfather, the legendary M.K. Gandhi, so that I could learn from him how to deal with the anger, the frustration, the discrimination, and the humiliation that violence color prejudice can invoke in you. In the eighteen months I learned more than anticipated. My only regret now is that I was just thirteen years old and a mediocre student at that. If only I had been older, a but wiser, and a bit more thoughtful, I could have learned so much more. But, one must be happy with what one has received and not be greedy, a fundamental lesson in nonviolent living. How can I forget this?

One of the many things I learned from Grandfather is to understand the depth and breadth of nonviolence and to acknowledge that one is violent and that one needs to bring about a qualitative change in one's attitude. We often don't acknowledge our violence because we are ignorant about it; we assume we are not violent because our vision of violence is one of fighting, killing, beating, and wars - the types of things that average individuals don't do.

To bring this home to me, grandfather made me draw a family tree of violence using the same principles as are used for a genealogical tree. His argument was that I would have a better appreciation of nonviolence if I understood and acknowledged the violence that exists in the world. He assisted me every evening to analyze the day’s happenings—everything that I experienced, read about, saw or did to others—and put them down on the tree either under “physical” (if it was violence where physical force was used) or under “passive” (if it was the type of violence where the hurt was more emotional).

Within a few months I covered one wall in my room with acts of “passive" violence that grandfather described as being more insidious than “physical" violence. He then explained that passive violence ultimately generated anger in the victim who, as an individual or as a member of a collective, responded violently. In other words it is passive violence that fuels the fire of physical violence. It is because we don’t understand or appreciate this concept that all our efforts to work for peace have either not fructified, or the peace that we achieved was only temporary. How can we extinguish a fire if we don’t first cut off the fuel that ignites the inferno?

Unless, as he would say, “we become the change we wish to see in the world,” no change will ever take place. We are all, unfortunately, waiting for the other person to change first.