G’Mic pix versions

G’Mic Vector Painting
G’Mic Threshold Etch
G’Mic Sketch

G’Mic Sharp Abstract
G’Mic Pen Drawing
G’Mic Pencil Portrait
G’Mic painting
G’Mic Paint Brush
G’Mic Morphology
G’Mic Lylejks Painting
G’Mic Graphic Novel
G’Mic Graphic Boost
G’Mic Dream Smoothing
G’Mic Deformation Textured Glass
G’Mic Comic Book
G’Mic Colored Pencils
G’Mic Cartoon
G’Mic Brushify

To Shantanu Narayen, Scott Belsky, Anil Chakravarthy, and all the other thieves at Adobe.

I bought one of the first versions of Photoshop back in the 1990s and upgraded to every version through C6. The software was good and the company reliable.

Then they went bad. They changed from selling their software to forcing users to rent it. That’s where I drew the line, refusing to go beyond Photoshop version C6.

Adobe had built into C6 a “validation” thing where, if you wanted to move your copy of Photoshop to another computer, you had to unload it, install it on the new computer, then validate it with Adobe.

I did exactly that a few years ago, but the validation was no longer automated. I had to call Adobe to validate my copy of Photoshop. When I called, I was told Adobe “no longer supported” version C6.

Nice. When I would try to use the software I would be blocked with the message that I had to validate it. Which meant calling Adobe service. Which meant being told they no longer supported that version.

Which means Adobe effectively stole my copy of Photoshop. It is no different than if they had hacked into my computer and dismantled the software.

That’s actually what they did, if you think of it in terms of “pre-hacking.” They built into the software an ability to stop me from eventually using it if I didn’t buy into their rental scam. I’m sure they cynically compounded this scheme in the secure probability that every user would eventually have to change to a newer computer. Exactly the kind of scheme that has caused many of us to lose all respect for American businesses. The only thing you can count on these days from American enterprise is greed and indifference to anything but profit.

As far as Photoshop itself goes I really don’t care all that much. There are a multitude of software programs that do the same thing and that cost a lot less. Some of the best are even free. A few years ago, no longer able to use Photoshop because of Adobe’s corrupt practices, I started using Gimp.

This stupidly named free software, in my experience, does everything Photoshop did. At the same time that I changed to Gimp I switched over to Lenux, an open source free operating system that replaces Microsoft Windows (another corrupt, infuriating piece of American crap that actually does not work in case you haven’t noticed). I’ve been very happy with those changes.

So all in all I’m better off disconnected from all Adobe and Microsoft products. Life is better without them, but I resent the way both of those companies are able to dominate and thrive through thievery and greed. American needs a consumer protection agency with teeth to advocate for us. But don’t hold your breath.

If you are using Photoshop, give yourself a break and move to open source software. You’ll be happier, less stressed, maybe even get rid of your hemorrhoids. And save a lot of money.

Gnome Chomsky

gnome in the likeness of noam chomsky
gnome in the likeness of noam chomsky
Gnome Chomsky, semanticist and intellectual from MIT.

This garden gnome in the likeness (more or less) of Noam Chomsky has been with me for about 15 years. The name on the front, which is under the snow in this picture, says “Gnome Chomsky,” I am particularly fond of this gnomic icon of an American intellectual icon.

We don’t have that many of them, I’m sorry to say. Public intellectuals, that is. The larger pantheon of American heroes encompasses primarily people with money.

Gnome began existence in our yard in New York and now adorns our property in Wisconsin. (If you’re thinking, boy, what a contrast, New York to Wisconsin…yes.)

Out of all the years Gnome has been on display no one has ever commented on him or made mention of him. I guess I don’t know the right people.

charles e. henderson, ph.d.

Grip stick

Dowel with tape wrapped around it for hand strength.
One inch dowel wrapped in foam and tape for strengthening grip.

Injury to my right wrist and hand has weakened my grip so I made this grip-stick to exercise with. I hold it tightly while doing other parts of my workout. We may someday be back to handshake greeting and I want to be in shape when that time comes.

Looking at the picture of my hands reminds me I’m not twenty anymore. (That was loooong ago, I’m afraid.) But that does not bother me. I don’t seem to have that gene that makes a person willing to move heaven and Earth to avoid showing any signs or symptoms of age. Just because we live in a culture that reveres youth does not mean it is worthy of reverence.

So I’ll try to make my hand better but I’m not interested in making it look younger. Or any other part of me, for that matter. I find it interesting that I looked older than my age when I was young and now I look younger. Sometimes people don’t believe me when I tell them my age (not that it comes up all that often). My response to that is something I heard someone say when I was a kid: “You’ll believe it when you hear me get up.”

charles e. henderson, ph.d.

Covid-19 hypodermic needle

Covid-19 vaccine ready to jab.

Being essentially essential and all, I just received my second injection of the Pfizer vaccine to inoculate against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19.

I’m confident that by now everyone is familiar enough with all the terminology it is adequate to just say “covid.”

This as we are turning 500,000 covid deaths in the US. Outrageous!

It surprises me the number of people who still believe the pandemic is a myth conjured up by who-knows-who to do who-knows-what. That there are still people who remain so abysmally ignorant as to believe that mandated mask-wearing is an infringement of their freedom.

Well of course it is. Just as speed limits and taxes and laws against child rape are an infringement. Education has obviously fallen down somewhere along the line for these people who do not get it that laws and regulations are necessary to protect people from idiots.

Speaking of which, Texas has certainly got their comeuppance with this cold snap that has destroyed their basis for believing themselves to be special. Their belief in their exceptionalism has always been laughable. I know this first hand. I was born there. I know Texas. Which is why I will never go back there.

So now that the covid vaccine is being made available in greater numbers and maybe the end of the pandemic is in sight, will there be — as many are speculating — another Roaring ’20s? I’m guessing not. Or if there is, it will be cut short by something else. Living in dangerously warming climate in the grips of predatory, end-stage capitalism, there will be no shortage of potential disasters.

charles e. henderson, ph.d.

Pandemic Puzzle

“Houseplant Jungle.” One thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. Galison puzzle company.

We have worked several jigsaw puzzles over the past year as we have kept ourselves isolated from social contact.

I’m not that good at puzzles but Chris has excellent figure-ground perception and color vision. If you look at the picture you will notice that the upper right portion is almost completed. I did that part. The lower HALF of the puzzle is nearing completion and that’s Chris’s part. We have both spent about the same amount of time working on the puzzle.

The table under the puzzle board was painted by Chris. I provided the table. It is the table my sister and I grew up eating on. (Well, eating on plates on the table. You know.) We did our homework on it, too. When we did homework. Growing up in the Texas-Oklahoma panhandles you don’t have to do much homework if you’re good at football. (I was, Sis wasn’t.)

Chris might be pulling a Penelope stunt on this puzzle business. I suspect she sometimes gets up in the middle of the night and takes apart some of the puzzle she has completed. I suspect that because otherwise puzzles around our house would be completed much more quickly than they actually are.

charles e. henderson, ph.d.

Houseplant puzzle solved

completed puzzle of many houseplants

The “Houseplant” puzzle solved. Would that our more pressing problems could be solved as easily.

Who would have thought, a few years ago, that ordinary people in the state of my birth,  Texas, would be freezing and dying because of weather?
I guess it is a good thing global warming is not real, right? Maybe you guys could pray your way out of this. That’s what the mayor of Colorado City, Texas, suggested. Right before ye resigned in the middle of a mess.

The current weather in Texas reminds me of an old James Garner movie. He was a grizzled sheriff who, with two deputies, were out tracking some desperado. The weather was cold and awful and the two deputies kept up a constant litany of woe about their misery. Garner’s response was, “It’s just weather.”

I don’t suppose the folks in the Southwest would care to hear that right now. Twenty years or more of end-stage predatory capitalism has rendered the electrical grid in Texas only marginally functional in the face of “just weather.” It will be interesting to see if they have learned anything from this life-threatening utility debacle. (But hey, ya’ll ain’t regulated by the Feds!)

My guess is this will all slither down that slippery slope into the pit of forgotteness when the temperature goes up.

charles e. henderson, ph.d.

The Ashlawn guard rabbit

Ashlawn rabbit

This rabbit lives in a burrow—its entrance is about eight inches from the rabbit’s nose—just a matter of feet from my office window. I joke about it being our guard rabbit but in reality it is a rather meek animal. Rabbits come and go around here with regularity. It occurs to me their well-known fecundity is nature’s way of provide and abundance of fodder for more predatory creatures like raptors, coyotes, foxes, and so on.

I like seeing this rabbit, even though the little rascal’s eating habits are not kind to our shrubbery and bushes. Even though we put out vegetable scraps in the harder winter months, we know that when spring comes we will have landscaping fatalities caused by rabbits’ culinary indiscretions.

Ashlawn rabbit (name and rank unknown) on guard duty outside my office window.

There used to be more wildlife around here. We would occasionally see foxes go trotting by; hear an owl at night; see deer herds moving across Cemetery Ridge just above us; eagles, hawks, vultures, and lots of other birds, during the summer; squirrels and chipmunks of course; and lots of sandhill cranes. But not so much anymore. Residential development has driven most of the wildlife away.

But, for now anyway, we still have our guard rabbit.

Hazardous airports in populated areas

airplane debris sitting in a yard in broomfield colorado where it fell off a plane in the air.
Debris dropped in a populated area from a United Airlines plane February 20, 2021.

Today a United Airlines plane dropped several pieces of debris in the populous are of Broomfield, Colorado. It could easily have killed or injured someone or a pet, or done serious damage.

Airliners and in fact all aircraft, including military craft, should be routed away from populated areas. If airports have to be moved to do that, then move them. It is unreasonable for all of us to be subjected to the threats posed by air traffic, and to the noise and pollution they create.

We have a small private airport in our town and one end of the runway is only about 300 feet from the high school. That makes no sense.

Parents always seen ready to do battle for real or imagined threats to their children. Does it take a genius to see the unnecessary threats posed by aircraft?

C’mon, folks, let’s start trying to shape things up in this country.

charles e. henderson, ph.d.

Hypocrisy rampant on a field of duplicity

hyprocisy word on background of reddish texture

Hypocrisy used to have a bad odor. When someone was accused of being a hypocrite they would either deny they were or try somehow to free themselves of any justification for being called a hypocrite.

However that seems no longer to be the case, at least with people in the public eye. Some people staunchly support and defend one set of principles or practices, then oppose them and deny their truth or validity when that is more convenient. Classic hypocrisy. You would think everyone would know that. Know what hypocrisy is, recognize it when they see it, and at the very least try to hide their own hypocrisy if and when it crops up.

Three questions . . .

One, what is it that makes hypocrisy such an undesirable characteristic in a person?

Being now in numbering mode and all, I would have to say there are three qualities that give hypocrisy its badness:

1. Hypocrisy is unfair.

Fairness ranks pretty high on my scale of desirable qualities and hypocrisy is nothing if not the epitome of not-fairness, of being unfair. To use a sports example: the height of hypocrisy, and therefore unfairness, would be a sporting event where there was one set of rules for the home team, and another set of tougher rules for the opponent. No good American would accept that, so why is hypocrisy so broadly engaged and accepted these days?

“Playing by the rules” has become a common mantra. We want everyone to play by the rules, and we want the same set of rules for everyone. Basically that means no fair rigging the rules to suit your agenda. We don’t like cheaters, and we don’t like hypocrites because hypocrisy is a form of cheating.

2. Hypocrisy is dishonest. 

How can you trust someone who thinks it is okay to be unfair? If a hypocrite can take opposing positions on one issue, there is no telling when they will do it again. When the only reliable aspect of a person’s value system is that he will assuredly act in his own interests despite how bad the behavior is for someone else, that person is surely an undesirable. Undesirable as a friend, undesirable as a mate, undesirable as an employee or employer, and so on. Liars don’t make good anythings in the Western canon of human value.

3. Hypocrisy is insulting.

No matter the good values or qualities of a hypocrite, none of them can be counted on. If a person can hold opposing values on one subject, they can do it with others. That makes everything they say potentially duplicitous and devoid of logical reason. Their story varies from one audience to the next, from one situation to the next. Such treatment is an insult. There are more than enough insults to life on this planet without having to put up with hypocrites.

So, yeah, hypocrisy is a bad characteristic in a human being. More negatives could be generated but for me these three are enough to put hypocrisy clearly in the undesirable column.

Two, what’s going on in the hypocrite’s mind?

Does the hypocrite know what hypocrisy is?

The answer to this question depends, for the most part, on education. Some of the most egregious hypocrisy I’ve witnessed in the last decade or so has been perpetrated by Republican politicians. Most of them have been through the educational system, many with advanced or professional degrees, and must surely know the fundamental dictates of logic. They certainly must know what hypocrisy is.
On the other hand there are the woefully under-educated classes in America who probably slept through the class on hypocrisy. They probably know not what they do when they hypocrasize.New word. Neologism, if you please. You first saw it here. These are the people who, when accused of being hypocritical, probably respond with something like, “I can criticize whatever I want. This’s a free country!”

Does he know when he is being a hypocrite?

Is he aware of his hypocrisy? Formal logic is one of those categories of knowledge that is very hard to come by. I taught argumentation and debate at both the undergraduate and graduate level and I all-too-infrequently sensed that very many of the students were getting it. That might have been because of limitation in my teaching skills, but there is no doubt that in general students don’t enjoy, and certainly few grasp, the fundamentals of formal logic.

To avoid hypocrisy requires the tools of logic. One of the key ingredients is the syllogism. Syllogistic reasoning is deductive and involved in something like this (sort of): All human being are mammals. Mervin is a human being. Therefore Mervin is a mammal. Pretty simple stuff, and true. If you are reading this, take it from me, you are a mammal. Okay, if this statement jimmied your jammer, you are a clever devil and indeed onto something. Nothing in my example syllogism said anything about reading. We would need another premise or two to get to that. But you know it is true. If you don’t…were you one of my students?

If there is self-awareness, is the hypocrisy a strategy?

Not being aware of their hypocrisy, or that hypocrisy destroys credibility among those who are aware of it and despise it, is likely existent only among people with less education. Those more educated are likely to know what they are doing. That is, they know they are talking out of both sides of their mouth. Thus it must be a strategy.

At this point I am relying primarily on logic and reason; I have no empirical evidence about who does and who does not understand hypocrisy, nor can I speak with any scientific authority on what self-aware hypocrites are up to. I can only guess. But of course my guess is predicated upon nearly a lifetime of observing, studying and experimenting with human beings’ beliefs, attitudes and behavior at the highest formal research levels.

If you don’t have any idea what I mean by this, then it would not help you to know. So here’s my guess, and it breaks down into two parts:

Part 1. Human beings have an almost infinite ability to delude themselves.

It never ceases to amaze me just how completely some people can blind themselves to inconvenient facts. They can “fail” to see their hypocrisy relative to two opposing positions they hold, although they may be singularly astute when it comes to detecting hypocrisy in others.

Case in point. I was once part of a faculty that included one of the world’s foremost authorities on human communication and also an authority on scientific research methods. God help any of his graduate students who did not adhere rigorously to scientifically demonstrable evidence and the strictest use of logic and evidence in theory construction and hypothesis testing.

Yet this world renowned scholar and scientist was an unreconstituted, born-again Christian. In his professional life he could accept only a rigorously lawful universe in which everything was lawful and, if you knew enough, predictable. Yet in his religious life, steeped in Christian theology, anything was possible. Virgins can have babies, the dead can come back to life, magic is real, and so on; his “lawful universe” was put on hold when it came to his personal theology. This man epitomized the highest form of hypocrisy, one in which two mutually inconsistent forms of systematic thinking can exist side by side.

It is obviously possible for some people at least to compartmentalize various intellectual domains. Especially if one of those domains is the person’s religion. Somehow “religion” or “religious belief” has, in the Western world anyway, taken on a kind of untouchable status that makes it immune to criticism or questioning. It exists in a different part of the person’s intellect and is not subject to the same requirements as other internal belief systems.

This is how the scientific or religious hypocrite is untroubled by what would otherwise be sheer hypocrisy. In the mind of the true believer It is somehow okay for God to crap in his own nest; the world has to be lawfully predictable for us but anything is fair game for him. Or her.

My guess, part 2.

This involves what might be called strategic hypocrisy. It can be found in many forms perpetrated by just about everyone who is in any kind of authority position. It is practiced most egregiously by politicians. In my experience, when someone engages in strategic hypocrisy, they are counting on their audience not knowing about their other (oppositional) beliefs. Or proclamations.

In some cases — and we see this most obviously in extremists who believe only what they want to — it makes no difference that the person’s hypocrisy is obvious and publicly known. As long as the intended audience, the audience most important to the ends and goals of the speaker, determinedly will not believe the other side of the story. To them the part they don’t want to believe is fake news or its equivalent, so the hypocrite is safe. He can say one thing to one audience and the opposite to another. His auditors have been verbally drugged, either through propaganda or as a product of their own devising. They are the willfully gullible (but only by the ones they have been conditioned to follow).

Three, What’s to be done about hypocrisy?

In some respects hypocrisy is built into the human psyche so it is never going to be eliminated. But ignoring it is not an option when it is detrimental to a cause or relationship or a child’s psychological and moral development.

Exposure of hypocrisy is the best tactic in situations where that will work.

When a hypocrite knows he is being watched, and that his hypocrisy will be exposed if he engages in it, he is much less likely to be hypocritical. Let the hypocrite know you are watching him and it might change his behavior.

Unfortunately there are many situations in which exposure will not work. Another strategy is to sneak up on the hypocrite through successive probes of his latitude of acceptance.

Before getting into that, though, here is the absolute worst way to convince anyone of anything: Make your first statement something with which the other person strongly disagrees. Whenever you make such a statement, regardless of whether it is correct or not, you effectively turn off the other person’s perception of anything you say after that.

It is almost always a bad idea to make strong oppositional statements to anyone you want to convince of something.

Here is an example from an article on the pros and cons of COVID-19 vaccination, written by a medical doctor who bills himself as “an expert in the field of preventative [sic] cardiology and has published seven books. He gives lectures nationally and internationally.”

“It is my opinion, not shared by an ignorant, ill-informed few, that vaccination was the greatest advance in medicine of the last century.”

I don’t know what kind of cardiologist this guy is, but he knows bupkis about persuasion. His very first sentence not only confronts head-on anyone who might not agree with him, it also insults them by calling them ignorant and ill-informed. The only people who will read beyond that faux pas are his choir.

Graphic showing latitude of acceptance for Covid-19 vaccination.

As I said, approaching another person’s belief structure with a view to changing it can be done through his latitude of acceptance. Do an Internet search for this term and you will come up with a lot of information, but here it is in a nutshell: The latitude of acceptance is a window of receptivity to certain ideas. Here is an example using receptivity/opposition to Covid-19 vaccination.

The latitude of acceptance for this person begins at “A few vaccinations might be acceptable for healthy adults” and ends at “Vaccinations are okay for healthy adults. Beginning your campaign of persuasion with anything stronger will be immediately rejected. Plus, and this is important, rejection tends to be sticky and hang around for a long time. So be cautious and avoid outright rejection.

Very often there is no window of opportunity to shift a belief or attitude; the person is closed off to anything related to the topic. Sticking with the example of vaccination acceptance, suppose even the mention of vaccination was not in any way acceptable. In this case you will have to go around back and sneak in another way. by finding a bridge topic with a latitude of acceptance.

Say for instance the person has a pet dog of which he is quite fond. The dog periodically requires a rabies shot. This is, approached gently, a possible opening for the discussion of vaccinations, beginning with the dog’s and advancing eventually to vaccinations for people. This is a bridge topic that might, with a soft and gradual approach, lead to the acceptance of vaccinations for people.

This vaccination issue, by the way, is not simply an academic exercise, a mute point, or strictly hypothetical. Being the reasonable, intelligent person you are — you are, after all, smart enough to be reading this — you might think hey, why wouldn’t someone want a Covid-19 vaccine? So far over half a million people have died from the virus. But of the 75,000 people who were vaccinated, a month later less than five percent had contracted the virus, none were hospitalized, and none died.

Yet there remain about a third of American adults who either don’t want the vaccine or remain undecided about whether they will get it. That’s over a hundred million people on whom you can hone your persuasion skills.

If you agree, that is, that everyone needs to be immunized to bring this virus under control. If you are not convinced, please bear this in mind: Scientists, epidemiologists, physicians and other healthcare workers — virtually all (99.6 percent) say everyone must be immunized before any of us is really safe from this deadly disease. If you are not in one of the groups I just listed, you have only two choices. One, accept the word of highly educated, trained, dedicated specialists, or two, take advice from someone who probably would not know a virus from a Quonset hut.

Your choice. Make it as if your life depended on it. Because it just might.

No, I have not forgotten that this article is about hypocrisy. To bring it to a close let’s consider just one example of extreme hypocrisy related to the Covid-19 vaccine. Most parents claim to totally love their children and say they would do anything to protect them and keep them safe. Yet some are willing to withhold vaccination from their children based on what Derek Thompson of The Atlantic calls “a constellation of motivations, insecurities, reasonable fears, and less reasonable conspiracy theories.” (What Thompson calls “reasonable fears” are not so reasonable when they are dissected.)

Such parents should be put away and their children raised by more reasonable folk. Unless you can bring them around to a sensible position vis-à-vis vaccination.

There is a lot more that could be said about hypocrisy and ways to deal with it. So this article is certainly far from exhaustive. But it does perhaps give you some indications of the psycho-dynamics involved and ways to approach a deeper understanding of what hypocrisy is, where it springs from, and tactics for dealing with it.

As a postscript let me say that the subject of hypocrisy would be worthy of consideration by any academic or scientist looking for a research area. It should appeal to many disciplines, including philosophy (especially from a logic perspective),  and any of the social or behavioral sciences.

charles e. henderson, ph.d.