biden

 Welcome back Old Dog.  Ravenswood is now on the air, and with enough opinions to wake up the blog a  bit.

I'll just pick one here and that will be Old Joe Biden.  I never had much of an opinion of him before he became veep.  As veep, I would often cringe when a news story lead with "Joe Biden, said today-", but there were also times when he spoke plainly as Joe Everyman in contrast to the intellectual Obama. that were moving.

I never thought that he would participate in the primary.  Having joined it I thought he had no chance.  When I cast my vote it was for Bernie.  But I did not feel so bad when he won the primaries because I felt that he probably had the best chance of beating Trump.

Well what is not to like about a guy beating Trump?  But outside of that it seemed like he was able to bring the moderates and progressives together and to deliver a coherent kumbaya message.  And there was something else: he believed in something.  I wasn't that crazy about his beliefs which seemed kind of cornball, kind of like the dems back in Kennedy days, but still it felt bracing to know that he was not just some windbag.

But I am not so fond of him now as I was then.  He seems a little lost, a little ineffectual.  He has this belief in bipartisanship, which is totally out of synch with today's political world.  And he is no longer able to hold the dems together, and overall seems out of it, and not to be aware of that, exuding a calm confidence which is disturbing.

But I don't think of him as a hack.  I think of a hack as a guy who acts like he is acting on high principles, but is just using them for his own means, and really doesn't believe in anything he says, but just picks the words that will work for the moment, someone like oh, Lindsey Graham.

But as is my habit I went to the google and found this

 a politician who belongs to a small clique that controls a political party for private

rather than public ends

And then I found this other thing

"Political hack", also called partisan hack, is a pejorative term describing a person who is part of the political party apparatus, but whose intentions are more aligned with victory than personal conviction.

These are not the same thing, and I expect that while the term may have once had a concrete meaning, now it is just used as an insult to apply to any politician you don't like.

And now on to more boring things.  Of course you cannot have a negative sheep, but if you wanted to express how your shepherding is going this year as opposed to last year and it turns out that you have four fewer sheep this year it sort of makes sense.  So if we want our mathematics to be useful we will have to add the negatives, and this gives us the set of numbers known as the integers as opposed to the natural numbers.  There are a lot of them but they are not all that different, just like a mirror image of the positives.  If you add or multiply integers you always get another integer, so everything seems hunky dory.

But there is an odd thing here.  When you subtract an integer from itself you get zero, which is neither positive or negative, and if you add it to itself or multiply it by itself, you just get zero again.  Odd, but easy enough to work with so it is also admitted as an integer, how much trouble can nothing be?  A lot as it turns out.