How the war in Gaza is like the war on math education

The way my side lost the Math Wars is like the way we are losing the "home front" in Israel's fight for survival. The current discussion on the horror in discovering that people we thought should know better but do not know better, is one really important example. Please let me explain.

My side in the Math Wars (we never had a good name for ourselves) was comprised of university math professors, K-12 math teachers, mathematically sophisticated parents, and some people who served in policy positions in state governments (CA and MA). How on Earth did we lose the debate on math education? It's as if lawyers debated tort law with truck drivers, and lost.

The Math Wars began in the early 1990s with fights over textbooks, pedagogy, curricula, and teacher training. We wrote papers and op-eds, we presented to parents and politicians, we debated the Education Mafia. After several years of getting nowhere, I took a step back and wondered what the Hell was going on. We were experts in the field, and no one was listening to us.

In short, the collapse of math education was never a technical problem like the wrong textbooks or ineffective pedagogy---problems that are easily fixable. The one and only problem was the Education Mafia: that corrupt syndicate of the schools of education, the teachers unions, and the professional organizations like "The Dark Side of The Force" (my pet name for the NCTM, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics). 

In other words, it's not that America buys the wrong textbooks, it's that we hired the wrong people. We need astronomers but we hired astrologers.

No education reform is possible without reforming the Education Mafia, and the Education Mafia cannot be reformed. You cannot turn astrologers into astronomers. The only way is to get the Education Mafia out of education. But when I explained this to my comrades, my arguments fell on deaf ears. Understand: they did not refute me, they just did not respond. 

Now I had another mystery on my hands. Look, I may or may not be right, but after years of failure, you would think my comrades would be more receptive to an alternative discussion. That they were not, sheds light on allies who are not allies in Israel's fight for survival.

It turned out that all my comrades but one are on the political Left. To my knowledge, two are commited Marxists, the rest are "Yellow Dog Democrats". And the consequence is enormous.

You see, they are ideologically committed to the political structure of public education as it currently exists. They would never raise a hand against a union, and they want the continued existence of the "DOPE" (the U.S. Dept of Public Education). They want the Education Mafia to do the job of teaching children, but they want to tell the Education Mafia how to do their job. (We were painfully naive.)

In other words, my comrades, wonderful people that they truly are, are right about everything regarding the teaching of mathematics, and they are ideologically incapable of making it happen. The one thing that needed to be done was the one thing they could not do. They wanted to persuade the Education Mafia, not fight it.  We were doomed from the start.

Now consider the political fight for Israel. There is just too much about Israel and its fight for survival that violates Leftist dogma. And you can see how hard it is for our erstwhile allies to see through that.

In math education, everything is clear, and obvious, and present. You can read a textbook, you can walk into a classroom and watch the teacher, you can talk to the students. There is nothing abstract about it. My comrades know when the Education Mafia talk shit about math education. And they still can't see through their ideological blinders.

On the other hand, Israel is far away geographically, linguistically, and culturally. The Muslims are even farther away. It's difficult for any American to really know what's going on in the Middle East. It's ever so much harder for them to know that people like Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Andrew Napolitano, and Owen Jones are talking shit about Israel in Gaza. 

Thanks to the blizzard of propaganda blowing out of the Left, it is impossible to talk facts and logic when discussing Israel. It is more understandable, if not any less disturbing, that people we thought and hoped were our allies cannot see through their ideological blinders.  

We must find a way to help our erstwhile friends and acquaintances see through Leftist ideology to the justice of the Israeli cause. Otherwise Israel, and Jews all over the world, are going to pay a heavy price.

Whatever we have been doing up to now is not it.

Math Wars Redux

 According to this article about math education in the San Francisco public schools, students are falling behind, parents are upset, and the Education Mafia don't give a shit. In other words, in 30+ yrs of the Math Wars, absolutely nothing has changed.

Precisely, the Education Mafia don't care about your concerns. They do care a lot about the GAP in academic achievement between 

• high achieving White and Asian students on the one hand, and 
• low achieving Black and Brown students on the other. 

If the Education Mafia could reduce the Gap by raising achievement, they would gladly do that, but whether achievement rises or falls is a matter of utter indifference to them, just so long as the Gap diminishes.

With a hat tip to the TV series, "Star Trek", I call this overarching commitment to reducing the Gap, "The Prime Directive" of education.

Of course, it is impossible to raise achievement and reduce the Gap. Raising achievement can only increase the Gap. The only possible hope for reducing the Gap is to bleed academics out of the schools. And that, dear friends, is how, after many years, we reached the point in our historical development where students graduate high school unable to add fractions or construct an English sentence.

One remaining question is why was my side, in the Math Wars, singularly ineffective in altering this trajectory of failure. After all, my side was comprise of math professors, teachers, mathematically sophisticated parents, a few hangers-on like myself, and even a couple of people who held important positions in state government. 

We were all painfully naïve.

The central organizing doctrine of our strategy was to keep the Education Mafia in control of the schools. I.e., we wanted the EM to do the job, but we were going to tell them how to do it.

Words fail me.

In my own defense, I can only say that when I joined the fight, late in the 1990's, it had already started with a remarkable group of professors and parents in CA, Mathematically Correct, who were deep into textual criticism. I thought that was the battlefield.

It was only some years into the fight that I began to understand we made a terrible mistake. The problem was never the textbooks. The problem was the people choosing the textbooks.

When I started making this point, I got the same response from my comrades-in-arms as we got from the Education Mafia when we criticized their "sources and methods": Silence.

The ideas of the Education Mafia are intellectually vacuous (just think of Whole Language reading instruction), so they had nothing to gain, and potentially a lot to lose, by engaging with us, so they did not engage. But, why were my own comrades giving me the silent treatment? Eventually, I could not deny evident reality.

All my comrades-in-arms are personally wonderful and professionally accomplished people. And, if not out-and-out socialist (at least two were self-avowed), most 

• lean pretty hard towards the political Left, 
• are deeply committed to the doctrine of centrally planned education, and 
• are highly sympathetic to labor unions. 

Including, inexplicably, the teachers unions and other "professional" organizations like the NCTM, to whom I refer as "The Dark Side of The Force".

In other words, my comrades were politically the same people as the Education Mafia, except they were right about math education. And there's the rub.

The problem of education in general, and math education in particular, was never technical. Education is never going to be solved by 

• the right textbook, or 
• the right curricular structure, or 
• some magic pedagogical bullet. 

The education problem is a political problem. For children to win, the Education Mafia have to lose. But, if the Education Mafia, and the anti-Education Mafia, are cut of the same political cloth, winning was never in the cards.

Personally, I learned a lot in my 20+ yrs in the Math Wars, much of that redounding to the benefit of my son and to the children of some of my friends. So I can't be sorry about that. But, I greatly regret we had no effect on the public schools.

Centuries from now, when future historians start to tell the story of the collapse of the American Experiment, that narrative will begin with the collapse of public education.

Big Pharma Is Fucking With Us

I am now persuaded there is something wrong with Big Pharma in the U.S. 

I know, I know, I am very late to the party, but it's really not easy to understand the pharmaceutical business because nothing is what it seems. However, every once in a while, the curtain gets pulled back, and for a moment you catch a glimpse of "how the sausage is made." It is not a pretty sight.

Something like that happened a few years ago when "Pharma Bro", Martin Shkreli, raised the price of EpiPens by more than 500%. The solution was to put Shkreli in jail. The old USSR used to put people in jail for "economic crimes", so I feel sure there is a better way. At any rate, I can do a bit of curtain pulling, myself.

Several of my friends are smokers. I am deeply sympathetic, and I never nag them about it because I am well aware nicotine is the single most addictive drug in the human ecosphere. More addictive than cocaine or heroin. Besides, smokers know what they are doing to themselves and most want to stop, but very few can manage it permanently. It is a serious problem.

In the world of nicotine, there are alternatives to smoking:

- nicotine patches,
- nicotine gum,
- vaping, and
- nicotine nasal spray.

It is vaping that opens the door to some interesting analysis. 

There are vapers who "roll their own". I.e., quite legally, you can buy various kinds of nicotine liquids and flavor additives to mix your own vaping liquids. Some vapers even rebuild their cartridges, which burn out much like a light bulb. Rebuilding a cartridge is like replacing the filament in a bulb. However, I will not discuss cartridges.

For reference, you may want to keep the cocaine market in mind. Now, I do not have direct experience of this, but unless you have been living under a rock for the last 20 yrs, you must have a pretty good general idea about this product. (Newspaper articles, maybe you know somebody, maybe you have been treated at a party, etc.)

In Brooklyn, NY, in AD 2022, I hear that you can buy a gram of cocaine for something like $125. Because at no point in its life cycle is cocaine legal, the street product is certainly adulterated. With what and by how much is hard to know. For the sake of argument, let's suppose your gram is only 50% cocaine.

Furthermore, your price depends upon how much you buy. Even casual users might buy an "eight ball", 1/8 oz or 3.5 grams, in which case the price will go down a bit. In this analysis, let's suppose you pay $100 for a gram of powder which is really only 1/2 cocaine. Therefore, let's say cocaine costs in the neighborhood of $200 per gram. That is our reference point.

Now, consider cigarettes. Although cigarettes contain widely differing amounts of nicotine, the research says a smoker burns away most of it. The actual amount of nicotine absorbed by a smoker ranges from 1.1 mg to 1.8 mg per cigarette. Let's say 2 mg of nicotine per cigarette (you will see why, in a moment).

Typically, there are 20 cigarettes in a pack, so one pack actually delivers 40 mg of nicotine, or 0.04 grams. In NYC, a pack of cigarettes costs around $15. Therefore, a smoker pays $15/0.04g or $375 per gram of nicotine.

Nicotine gum comes in 2mg and 4mg pieces (there may be other strengths). Right now at CVS you can buy a box of 170 pieces of gum, 2mg nicotine per piece, for $75. This means $75/0.34g which is $221/gram of nicotine.

Also available for smokers who want to quit is nicotine nasal spray. This product is typically available in 10 mL bottles of 1% nicotine solution. That means each bottle contains 0.1 grams of nicotine.

In Canada, you can buy this product for $50 per bottle. That is $50 for 0.1 grams, or $500/gram of nicotine.

Via eBay, it looks like you can buy Nicorette nasal spray from the UK for about $320/gram.

In the U.S., you need a prescription for nicotine nasal spray---the same 10 mL of 1% nicotine solution. You can see what's coming. At CVS, you can buy one pack of 4 bottles of Nicotrol NS, or 0.4 grams of nicotine, for $514.31. This works out to $1,285.78/gram.

Finally, we come to vaping. But, not really vaping, just the supplies for vaping. If you were a roll your own vaper, you can buy 120 mL (4 oz) of a 10% nicotine solution (there is no dust so you don't need a mask, but you better wear gloves when pouring) for $40. This means $40 for 12 grams of nicotine, or $3.33/gram.

If you wanted to mix your own 10 mL bottle of 1% nicotine nasal spray, you would need $0.33 worth of nicotine solution. You can buy 10 mL empty nasal spray bottles on Amazon for $1 to $5 per bottle, depending on the type of bottle (glass or plastic) and how many you bought. So, you could formulate your own nicotine nasal spray for less than $1.50 for 0.1 grams of nicotine. That works out to $15 per gram.

Let's review:

                   cigarettes: $375/g,
                           gum: $221/g,
Canadian nasal spray: $500/g,
          UK nasal spray: $320/g,

          US Nasal spray: $1,285.78/g,

Cocaine: $200/g. 

DIY nicotine nasal spray: $15/g.

I guess what I am saying is there is one difference between the tobacco companies and the pharma companies on the one hand, and the drug dealers on the other. They all get you hooked on their products then gouge you mercilessly for it. But, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma are way more shameless about it.

In other words, your cocaine connection has more integrity than the mofos of Tobacco and Pharmaceuticals.

Whoopie Goldberg and the Uses and Abuses of "Race"

Poor Caryn Johnson, aka Whoopie Goldberg, never had a chance. The word "race" has been in the English lexicon for centuries, and always had a fluid meaning, depending on time and place. Traps were just waiting to ensnare the poor dear.

Race entered English from the French "racine", meaning root, as in what are your roots, as in: where do you come from and who are your people. It was often a synonym for tribe or clan, meaning a group of people with a common ancestor; a clearly biological sense.

But also, race often meant ethnicity. The English would speak of the English race, the Welsh race, the Scottish race. There are no biological differences between these groups of people. Rather, they differ in languages and customs, thus an entirely socially constructed meaning.

Sometimes, both meanings apply. For instance, tribe is a biological concept, but the importance of tribes is a socially constructed concept. That's what we mean when we say some societies are tribal and some societies are not. I.e., as a matter of biology, tribes always exist---your distant relatives always exist---whether you pay attention to them or not is a social matter.

In the 19th century, it was natural for biologists to want to construct a taxonomy of people, just as they had constructed taxonomies of plants and animals. If you can distinguish between deciduous and evergreen trees, between elms and maples, between dromedary and Bactrian camels, between lion and tiger cats, between wolves and dogs, etc., it seemed obvious you should be able to distinguish between peoples. These would be classifications, based exclusively on biology, and much bigger than tribe or nation. Biologists adopted the word "race" to this purpose, turning it into a term of art. I.e., biologists used the word differently from everybody else.

In the early 20th century, however, came the Nazis and other very unscientific people who tried to use the biological meaning of race for their own purposes, with horrific results. After WWII, the backlash was extreme, with similarly horrific results, if on a smaller scale.

I.e., the modern Leftists make the same kind of mistake the Nazis made, by confusing culture and biology.  Where the Nazis believed everything cultural was biological, the Leftists believe everything biological is cultural. The Nazis denied culture, the Leftists deny biology.

Once the Left denied biology in race, despite the evidence of their own eyes, it was but a small step to deny biology in sex, despite the evidence of their own eyes. Race, like sex, is whatever the Left say it is. Unsurprisingly, the Left define race in a manner convenient to their political agenda.

Let's review. Over the centuries, race has had both a biological meaning and a socially constructed meaning, sometimes both at the same time. The biological meanings are different, depending on who is using the word and why, and the social meanings are different, depending on who is using the word and why. You can see the problem.

Whoopie Goldberg is an obviously intelligent woman, but of limited education. While she is familiar enough with the modern Leftist definition of race, she is unaware of its arbitrary, self-serving nature, and she is wholly ignorant of its other meanings and uses. She certainly knew nothing of how the Nazis used the word. And that is how she got into trouble opining on the Holocaust. The poor girl did not know what hit her.

In her defense, Whoopie Goldberg is not any more ignorant than the other girls on "The View". In a better world, "The View" would not exist, at all.

Paul Krugman's Smoking Gun

This article is the smoking gun. Paul Krugman is a hack.

Nobody thinks the Nobel Laureate is a dummy. But, a lot of smart people have been scratching their heads for a long time over many of the strange things Krugman asserts in his non-technical writing, which seems so obviously partisan. My own theory is that political correctness is the only way this mildly autistic genius gets laid. 

I am not the only one to think so. First, 

"Anyone who has been paying attention will notice that a lot of economists are Aspies." Then,

"Turns out his wife is one of those light skinned black people [blue-eyed and long-haired], not unlike Rev. Wright, who are very angry. In fact, it seems that it was she who pushed him over the edge into becoming the crazy ass conservative hater he now is...What also stands out from the profile is just how Aspergery the guy is."

It remains that you cannot just wave away his arguments, preposterous as they are. But, to paraphrase Boris Shcherbina, this time "he made a mistake". Because he is smart, because he has always been able to push people around, intellectually, he has gotten careless. This time he writes an op-ed of evident banalities and "deepities" ("...a statement that is apparently profound but actually asserts a triviality on one level and something meaningless on another." Dennett explains.)

Let's go briskly through the article.

- Build Back Better "is primarily a plan to invest in America's future". 

Every politician always says this about every plan. Krugman does not say why it is different this time.

- It's for the children. Every politician always says this about every plan. 

Krugman does not say why it is different this time.

- Climate Change. 

Is a boondoggle.

- "There's every reason to believe that these investments would be highly productive." 

Like every boondoggle.

- "There’s overwhelming evidence that helping disadvantaged children makes them much healthier and productive when they reach adulthood."

Circular argument. He cites another baseless NYTimes article as his basis. 

- The prospect of civilizational collapse. 

Appeal to hysteria.

- Reducing dependence on fossil fuels. 

Magical thinking. No one anywhere has ever done any such thing, apart from nuclear energy, which they deprecate.

Finally, the hobgoblin of scoundrels: the ad hominem,

- "I guess reporting conventions require that journalists pretend to believe that Republicans have good-faith objections..." 

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman is a hack.

Q.E.D.

Student Loans Are Not Like Other Loans

Student loans are not like other loans.

Imagine you are a retailer of women's clothes and you want to finance your winter inventory. You have been in business for a while and you know what to buy and how much of it. You prepare financial statements that accurately represent your current financial condition and that predict, reasonably well, what will happen, financially, in the next three months. 

Based on your informed analysis, you think a commercial loan of a certain size is a good idea. With that loan, you will run your business, make enough money to pay back the loan and, with any luck, there will be some money left over (what we call "profit").

At the bank, you argue your case to a loan officer who knows how to read financial statements and who has pretty good knowledge of the retail business in your area. 

A commercial loan, therefore, is the embodiment of that old expression: Two heads are better than one. If that bank officer agrees to make the loan, it means two people believe the loan is a good idea: you and the loan officer. 

More, two people have skin in the game. If you cannot pay back your loan, that would be bad for you and bad for the loan officer. And, if enough loan officers make enough bad loans, it would be bad for the bank, as well.

You want to run your business. The bank wants to run their business. Everybody wants this loan to happen. But, it has to be a good loan. A bad loan is bad for everybody.

Student loans look nothing like this.

Most college-bound students have no clear idea if they will even succeed in college. They have no clear idea what degrees they will earn or what they will do with their degrees, once they graduate. They have no clear idea of the commercial value of their degrees. Most college-bound students look nothing like the retailer applying for a commercial loan.

Even more disturbing, there is no loan officer, because---and you really have to wrap your head around this one---nobody cares if the student will be able to pay it back (government guarantees, you see). The college not only does not care if the student pays back his loan (they are not the lenders), they do not care if the student graduates. For the college, every admission is a financial success. They will make money for as long as the student is enrolled and pays his fees. When the student graduates or drops out---it really does not matter which---they just admit another student.

In the world of student loans, the borrowers know nothing. The lenders care nothing. Only students have skin in the game. Nothing about education loans look like commercial loans.

If the education loan market worked anything like the commercial loan market, a prospective college student who needs to borrow money would have to talk to a loan officer who has excellent knowledge of the education market. The student would present real educational credentials (nothing about playing football or working in soup kitchens) and the loan officer would have an excellent idea of that student's chances of success in college.

By the way, colleges already know which students are likely to succeed, and which not. They just don't care. That is why more and more colleges are eliminating the need for standardized tests, which they ignore, anyway. The tests just get in the way of profits. 

And, that is why about half of all students who matriculate for the first time will leave college with nothing, after spending a considerable amount of time and money. And, about half the students who do graduate, finish college only after a lot more time (five or six years, not four) and a lot more money than they anticipated spending. For most students, college is a high risk gamble. And, for many students, it is a disaster.

Furthermore, the education loan officer, if he existed, would have an excellent idea of the market value of the student's intended degree. Oh, you want to spend $50,000 per year, for four years, to earn a degree in lesbian dance theory, from Podunk U? Good luck to you, but I am not giving you any money, since there is no chance you will pay it back. Even if you do graduate.

Colleges may know that many of their degrees are commercially worthless, I am not sure. I am sure the data are out there. I am just not sure anybody cares enough to compile it. But, if education lending were a sane credit market, believe those data would be compiled, just as commercial banks compile a mountain of data on all the various industries.

So, how can the education loan market even exist in its present form? It's the government, dear boy, it's the government. Any time something insane is happening in what should be a well organized credit market---like people getting mortgages they can't afford---you have to know that government is involved, in one way or another.

As things now stand, only students are hurt by loans they cannot pay back. So, why do students take out these loans, in the first place? Friends, there has been a massive, decades-long propaganda campaign run by the Education Mafia and abetted by government. This propaganda is the central element of the Politico-Educational Complex, now running on nearly $2 Trillion of student debt.

From the time they are in elementary school, children hear one message loud and clear: Go To College! It does not matter which college, it does not matter what you study, it does not matter if you have the interest or the aptitude, just Go To College. They hear it from their teachers, they hear it from their parents, and from their friends and neighbors. From everybody they trust, starting from when they are very young, students hear: Go To College. So, they go.

How will they pay for college? Don't worry about that. The government (who will do nothing to hurt you, of course) makes money available, and it will all work out in the end, trust us. So, young people sign on the dotted line.

If you think this all sounds preposterous, if you think I am a crackpot, I totally understand. But now, let's hear your explanation for nearly $2 Trillion of student debt, much of which was used to pay for worthless degrees (or no degrees at all), much of which will never be paid back, much of which is poisoning people's lives. You have to explain the kind of debt that means a generation of young people will not buy cars, not buy houses, not even get married and have children---because they cannot pay back debt that is breaking their backs. In other words, extraordinary events require extraordinary explanations. You've heard mine, I'll wait for yours. (I'm not really holding my breath.) 

Finally, before we consider possible solutions, think of the individual with a back-breaking student loan. He is not an idiot. He was not trying to cheat anyone. A young and terribly inexperienced person was depending on people he trusted to guide him. He thought he was doing everything right. 

Instead, everything has gone wrong. He is certainly not living the life he expected and that he thinks he deserves. He thinks, with considerable justification, that he is the one who has been cheated. And he is angry. Very, angry. Consequentially angry. He, and some 40 million people just like him. And they vote.

What to do?

I hope it is clear, at this point, that the young people taking out those ill-advised student loans are not the bad guys. They were not stupid or irresponsible, they were young and inexperienced. They were not trying to defraud anybody. Indeed, I think they are the primary victims in a confidence racket, run by institutional players, that transfers money from poor people to rich people.

Should these young people have known better? I suppose I have to say yes. And, however we solve this problem, it will have to cost them something, if only to make sure future students consider student loans with more care.

However, the real bad guys are the colleges. They knowingly admit students unlikely to succeed, and they offer worthless degrees at astronomical prices. Colleges are the major beneficiaries of the student loan racket. In one way or another, they have to pay a price. So, where to begin?

The First Rule of Holes states: Stop Digging. Meaning, the first order of business is to stop creating new student loans. This is the easy part. Starting, say, November 1, 2021 all new student loans can be discharged in bankruptcy. Now, watch that market dry up.

As part of draining this financial swamp, it would be great to do something about college admissions. I would like to see all colleges come with a money-back guarantee. There is a lot to unpack, here, but the basic outline would be something like the following.

A student who has not graduated should get his money back on demand. In return, his transcript is wiped clean. It would be as if he never attended.

Do not imagine this is cost-free to the student. Sure, the student will get his tuition back, but room and board, transportation, textbooks, lab fees---that money is not coming back. And then, there is all the time the student spent at that college. He is not getting that back, either.

Finally, note that if the student wants to start over at another college he would have to start from scratch because he does not have a transcript. He would have no credits to transfer. 

The student is spared from possibly ruinous debt, but he doesn't get out of it unscathed. This should make students think harder about taking out student loans, and about going to college, at all, but not destroy their lives.

The cost to the colleges may seem obvious, but there is more to it. Colleges will quickly notice which students are more likely to demand refunds, and they will quickly notice which degrees are returned more often. Fairly quickly, I predict, colleges will stop admitting students unlikely to succeed, and they will stop offering commercially worthless degrees.

As for graduated students, many people do not understand the worthlessness of their degrees until they try to get a job. Therefore, a graduated student should be able to ask for his money back within, say, four years of graduation.

When the graduated student asks for his money back then his transcript is wiped clean and his diploma is revoked. As with the undergrad, the graduated student does not get back his time or his ancillary expenses, which are considerable. He also has to explain to prospective employers what he did for four (or five or six) years. None of this will be easy, but at least we are not destroying their lives with unmanageable debt.

Now, some people may object on the principle that you can give back credentials but you cannot give back an education. It looks like students could game the system and get a tuition-free education. 

Not to worry, there is plenty of evidence---it's a virtual certainty you have see some of it yourself---that a college education, per se, is worthless. That is why, for example, the average college student spends less than twenty hours a week---including class time (!)---on education related activities. You might think college students learn nothing because they put no effort into it, but the truth is just the reverse. Meaning, students respond rationally to college.

Students do not pay for a college education, they pay for a college degree. It's the degree that signals prospective employers they should consider you for the job. So, you give back the degree and you give back everything. 

So, that is how we stop growing new student debt. It remains only to figure out what to do with existing student debt.

I do not see many options, here. The debt will have to be forgiven, mostly or entirely. The one thing I want to make sure of is that taxpayers do not eat all the debt. 

Most students have already been paying on their student loans, sometimes for years. So, former students have been absorbing plenty of pain. 

I think the people who most benefited from this educational Ponzi Scheme, the people who are most responsible for it, have to be made to absorb their fair share of the pain. In one way or another, the colleges must be made to pay.

The Schools Cannot Be Reformed

In a thoughtful, erudite essay in "The Atlantic" magazine, John McWhorter explains what NYC schools should do to help more Black students enter the vaunted specialized high schools.  I like John McWhorter, a lot.  He is a smart guy who usually has something interesting to say.  Not this time.

His analysis is correct and his suggestions are eminently reasonable.  The problem, as the kids are wont to say, is:  BTDT ("been there, done that).  It has all been tried, before.  All of it.  Result:  zero, zip, nada.

American public education has been in a state of continuous reform since John Dewey published "My Pedagogic Creed" in A.D. 1897, 122 years ago.  (Wikipedia describes Dewey as a "philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer.")  I mark the modern phase of education reform to 1957, when the then USSR simultaneously launched Sputnik into orbit and propelled the U.S. into the "Space Race".

With the paranoia of the Cold War, the U.S. turned on the taps and a torrent of money started flowing into an education system that, until then, could best be described as somebody's hobby.  Like an anabolic steroid, truly massive amounts of money made the schools of education consequential in a way they had never been before, and the teachers associations turned from amateur interest groups into powerful labor unions and the most effective political lobbyists in the country.

The public schools we have, today, are not the result of ignorance or inattention.  They are what the Education Mafia made them.  Professors of education dedicate their professional careers to studying education.  They hold colloquia and symposia, they publish peer reviewed papers, on the basis of which they design curricula, write textbooks, and train teachers. 

John McWhorter, intelligent man that he is, cannot tell these people anything they have not already thought of, long ago.  Which brings us back to NYC's specialized high schools and why Black students are statistically invisible in them.  There are only two possible explanations.  Either (a) there is something wrong with Black people, or (b) there is something wrong with the schools.

My money is on (b). 

With few exceptions, American public schools are educationally inert.  Let's be clear about what that means.  You are thinking, wait, Ed, we know some schools are better than others.  True, but not because of the schools, per se, but because of the students, themselves.  The students make the schools, not vice versa.  The children of wealthier, educated, professional (mainly White) parents bring more with them than the children of blue collar and welfare (mainly Black) parents.

One depressing, and unimpeachable, example is the work done by Todd Risley and Betty Hart, who demonstrated that by age 3, there is a 30 million word gap between the children of middle class professional parents and the children of welfare mothers.  Not just numbers of words, but also quality and diversity of the words (welfare children tend to hear the same words, over and over).  This is a consequential gap that only increases over time.

We desperately want the schools to compensate for these disadvantages.  They cannot.  In other words, the more a child depends on the schools for his education, the worse it will be for that child. 

To put it bluntly, we have hired the wrong people for the job.

This thought came to me some years ago during a discussion on academic placement.  I pointed out that, starting in 1st grade or kindergarten, a school needs to know only the child's birth date, and they can fully determine the entire arc of that child's educational career for the next 12 yrs.

How can this possibly be right?  The schools take into account nothing about a child's interests, abilities, and achievements over time.  Who does this?  Imagine going to a physician and, as you start to describe your pain, he stops you and says all he needs is your birth date.  On that basis he will know exactly how to treat you.  You would run away from that doctor as fast as you can.

I characterized this educational (mal)practice as "the astrological theory of academic placement".  Bingo!  Think of it this way:  we need astronomers to run our schools but we hired astrologers.  Astronomers are scientists.  Astrologers are superstitious charlatans.  And no amount of "reform" will turn astrologers into astronomers.

John McWhorter is pissing into the wind.  The schools, as they are presently constituted, cannot do what he wants them to do.  If they could, they would have done it, already.

Listening to AOC

 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was interviewed by Briahna Gray, of The Intercept, at the 2019 South by Southwest conference, where she made some astonishing remarks.  Two are highly revealing.  The first one tells us a lot about what she knows.  The second one tells us a lot about who she is.

What does AOC know?

At minute 58:56 in the video, AOC explains that if we handle the coming workplace automation correctly, we will enjoy boundless wealth, 

"Our technological advancement as a society has outpaced our system for handling finite resources. Because now we are approaching infinite resources...Capitalism is based on scarcity, and what happens when there is enough for everyone to eat? What happens when there is enough for everyone to be clothed? Then you have to make scarcity artificial. And that is what has happened. We have created artificial scarcity."

To paraphrase the physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, AOC’s description of the world we live in “is not good enough to be wrong”.  “Infinite resources”, or anything remotely like that, describes no world human beings have ever inhabited, or are likely ever to inhabit.  Infinite resources, and the idea that capitalism is based on scarcity, are such outlandish concepts, they are strong indicators of AOC’s thinking.

AOC studied economics at Boston University and may have heard this common definition in her Econ 101 class:  economics is the study of how societies allocate scarce resources with alternative uses.  Scarcity is the central organizing concept.  If there were no scarcity, there would be no need to study allocation, in the same way that if there were no diseases, there would be no need to study medicine.

In the same class, or some other class, she may have heard that capitalism is one of several ways societies organize to respond to scarcity.  It is hard to shake the notion that the poor dear failed to fully grasp both concepts, economics and capitalism.  And, in her confusion, she conflates them and concludes that capitalism is “based on scarcity”, an incoherent concept.  From that, it is but a short step to seeing “greedy capitalists” working to create artificial scarcity. 

But, infinite resources, however strange that idea may seem to us, is a natural flower in the Marxist garden.  Marxism begins by taking wealth for granted, and bends its thoughts entirely to redistributing it.  We saw this recently in New York City when our Marxist mayor, Bill de Blasio, in his State of The City address, said,

 “Here’s the truth, brothers and sisters, there’s plenty of money in the world. Plenty of money in this city.  It’s just in the wrong hands!”

 Marxists, consumed with the problem of redistributing wealth, have little time and energy left for thinking about how to create wealth.  The problem with that, you see, is that people have to consume wealth to live.  Sooner than later, redistributing wealth is not enough, you have to make more of it, or you run out.  The thought that somebody in public office is formulating policy on the theory that “there is plenty more where that came from” should make your blood run cold.

One last point, here.  Around minute 58:00 in the video, AOC says we should be excited about the wealth created by robots because,

“What it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing and investigating in the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in.  Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.”

     Anybody with even a passing familiarity with Karl Marx will recognize that scenario.  In his essay, “The German Ideology”, there is a passage where Marx begins, as usual, by criticizing the capitalist mode of production, specifically, the division of labor,

 “For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.”

 Ah, but come the revolution,

 “while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

In other words, AOC delivers an early 21^st century update to a mid-19^th century fantasy.  Marx thought a magical socialist society will create unlimited resources that will free us from drudgery.  AOC thinks magical robots will do that for us. 

Therefore, you can be sure of two things:  AOC learned Marxism much better than she learned economics, and Marxist fantasy will work just as well today as it worked in the previous hundred years.  And if that does not make your blood run cold, nothing will.

What kind of person is AOC?

   AOC’s second comment, which actually comes a bit earlier in the video, sheds some light on her personality.

Starting around minute 52:23 AOC delivers her heartfelt conviction that 

“we are capable of so much as a country...so much more than what we’re doing right now...we are capable of all of these things.”  

To illustrate her point she talks about President Kennedy and his mission to the moon,

 “...and the position should be not let’s not do it because we haven’t figure out all the details yet.  How about the goal is let’s figure out all the details because we’ve decided we’re going to the moon and we’re going to get there before the end of the decade...”

 That is an inspiring homily, but then AOC wades into some facts,

    “When Kennedy said we are going to go to the moon by the end of ten years, people thought that he was crazy.  He didn’t have a plan.  So many of the technologies required to get there weren’t even invented yet, but it was taken seriously enough as a mission...”

Let’s unpack this little story. 

     Rocketry was a fast-developing field of science and engineering since the German “V” rockets of World War II. At war’s end, there was a mad scramble for German rocket scientists, and it can be fairly said that the Space Race was a competition between America’s German rocket scientists and Russia’s German rocket scientists.

     In the early years, Russia’s German rocket scientists were winning.  In 1957, they launched into earth orbit the first artificial satellite ever to exist (Sputnik).  In 1961, they launched the first human being (Yuri Gagarin) to ever orbit the earth.  And there were a number of important firsts in between. 

     The Space Race was part of the Cold War, and there was more than a little urgency about it, some might say hysteria.  Shortly after WW II, the U.S. created the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and after the Sputnik shock it was re-organized into NASA.  Plans for a manned moon landing were being formulated during the Eisenhower administration.

     After Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth, President Kennedy tasked his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, to organize committees of scientists, engineers, and NASA administrators.  JFK called upon politicians from both sides of the aisle.  The technical specialists formulated plans and budgets and assured JFK of the technical feasibility of getting to the moon.  The politicians assured him of total popular and political support.  Indeed, they urged him to do it.

     So, in May, 1961, one month after Gagarin orbited the earth, when President Kennedy proposed to put a man on the moon “before the end of ten years”, this much was patently clear,

• nobody thought he was crazy,
• he certainly had a plan,
• he had broad popular and political support,
• rocketry was an already existing and quickly developing field of science and engineering; and
• he had a massive technical and bureaucratic infrastructure to get the job done.

     Oh, and he also had a massive amount of money to spend.  In 2009, NASA estimated the Apollo program cost $170 Billion in 2005 dollars ($206 Billion in 2016 dollars).  And the NASA budget, in those days, could be expressed as some significant percent (4-5%) of the entire federal budget.

Certainly, there was a lot of work left to do, after the announcement, but here is one thing that absolutely, positively never happened:  JFK did not pull the idea out of his ass and then try to cajole everybody into following along.  Putting a man on the moon was a far more complex enterprise, and far better organized, than AOC closing her eyes, tapping her heels together, and wishing for a “Green New Deal”.

What about AOC’s charming fable of JFK?  To paraphrase the immortal words of Mary McCarthy in her criticism of Lillian Hellman, 

“every word of that story is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” 

So, is AOC a liar? Actually, that is a tougher question than it seems, but AOC is certainly of a type we have seen before.

     During my years as a partisan in the Math Wars (Oh, you have not heard of that war?  That’s because my side lost ignominiously, too bad for American school children), I met some wonderful people, among them University of Rochester Professor Ralph Raimi, of blessed memory.  Cultured and literary, Ralph was the real thing:  a Renaissance Man who held dual appointments in the departments of mathematics and sociology, and he was a charming essayist.  (And yes, he is related to Sam Raimi.  Quite the high achieving family, I’d say.)

Around 1995, Ralph wrote an essay about Isaac Newton's unpublished calculus book (a thing that never existed).  Do not deny yourself the pleasure of reading Ralph, but here is the gist of it.

One day, Ralph was listening, on the radio, to a man complaining that publishing companies, motivated only by profit, stifle ideas that could change the world.  He drives home his point,

 "... and publishers have been making such mistakes ever since one turned down Newton's Calculus on the grounds that nobody needed a new calculus book..."

Ralph was thunderstruck. Like AOC’s JFK fable, not a single word of that man’s story is true.  Ralph deconstructs this wondrously, but it is the moral of the story we want.  Ralph writes,

 “The Expert probably didn't worry too much about whether his story was true or not; he figured it could be true, which was good enough. The story illustrated what to him seemed an important truth: that publishers can make mistakes in judging the value of a new manuscript, and that electronic publishing will help prevent such mistakes from holding up progress. So the story contributes to real truth, as The Expert saw it, and that's the only kind of truth that counts...
 “So, in pursuit of the higher truth, our Expert conjured up a seventeenth century populated by students of "calculus," to whom a publishing industry was evidently supplying a rich choice of textbooks. Within that seventeenth century he conjured up a Calculus written in vain by a Newton whose works, like those of most geniuses, were ignored by practical men. It is hard to pack so much misinformation into a few words, but the Expert did it."

“It is hard to pack so much misinformation into a few words, but the Expert did it.”  As with the “Expert”, so with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Again I ask, is she a liar? 

It sure does look like it, but let’s be fair.  To be a liar, in the classical meaning of that word, AOC would have to be aware of the facts and intentionally choose to tell a story contrary to the facts, probably to gain some unfair advantage over somebody.  I doubt this is the case. 

More likely, like Ralph Raimi’s “Expert”, AOC is simply indifferent to facts.  If she happens to be aware of the facts, and they are helpful to her, she would be happy to use them.  If the facts are against her, she will ignore them.  And, if she is ignorant of the facts, well, she is much to busy to research them.  AOC is on a mission to save the world, and she inhabits a moral plane that rises above mere facts.

How should we feel about that?  To quote the Geena Davis character in the 1986 remake of “The Fly”, when it comes to people who rise above mere facts, “Be afraid.  Be very afraid.”  https://youtu.be/--hMJPUBwMc  Why?  The great Russian writer, Boris Pasternak explains it.

Early in the movie, “Doctor Zhivago”, based on the eponymous book, Lara is in love with Pasha Antipov, who later becomes the Trotsky figure, Strelnikov.

Komarovsky, the lover of Lara's mother, appears to be a selfish, grasping cad, but turns out to posses some redeeming personal qualities.  Komarovsky insists on meeting Pasha, and the three, Komarovsky, Lara, and Pasha, meet in a restaurant.

Komarovsky sees the radical in Pasha and does not like it.  After Pasha leaves, Komarovsky warns Lara off him, saying,

"There are two kinds of men and only two. And that young man is one kind. He is high-minded. He is pure. He's the kind of man the world pretends to look up to, and in fact despises. He is the kind of man who breeds unhappiness, particularly in women."

Of course, Komarovsky was right, as the rest of the movie tells.

I do not think the world despises AOC, but she is the same “kind of man” as Pasha Antipov.  She is high-minded.  She is pure.  She is deluded about the nature of the world we live in.  And she will breed a lot of unhappiness in a lot of people when her plans crash and burn---the inevitable fate of all plans that rise above facts. 

Marxism rises above facts.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rises above facts.  And, when her delusional plans crash and burn, as they must, so will our lives.  Just ask the people of Venezuela.

Good (Socialist) Intentions Will Get You Killed

I cannot get Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ("AOC") out of my mind.

New York, city and state, had a deal with Amazon.  Part of the deal involved relief from state and local land use regulations (that entail a lengthy, exhausting, and expensive review process), environmental review, and various building regulations.  You should know, a lot of building regulations mean what you think they mean:  let's make sure the building doesn't fall down on people's heads.  And, a lot building regulations are a horror of extortionate giveaways to special interests.  E.g., for many years, exhibitors at the Jacob Javits Center had to pay union electricians, at their exorbitant rates, to plug their lights and computers into wall outlets.  Probably, Amazon did not want to deal with the extortionate shit, so they extorted back.

Mainly, to build their second headquarters in NYC and bring in 25,000 well-paying jobs, Amazon would get tax abatements to the tune of $3 Billion.

Upon hearing of Amazon pulling out of its deal with NYC, AOC walked up to a microphone, flashed her million dollar smile, and exuded happiness and victory.  She thinks tax abatements means there is a pot of money, sitting somewhere in the mayor's office, and that our mayor would actually give Jeff Bezos $3 Billion (in 10s and 20s).  And now the deal is off, these $3 Billion are available to hire teachers, repair the subway system, and "put a lot of people to work, if we wanted to."

Sooner or later, if it has not happened already, somebody will wonder, "Why wouldn't we want to?"  Why haven't we used this money already?  What are we waiting for?  The subways need fixing why haven't we fixed them?  The schools need teachers, why haven't we hired them?  The mayor of NYC, Bill de Blasio, a self-described socialist, why does he leave that pot of money just sitting there?  Why does he not use it for the betterment of the people he represents?

In contemplating this question, AOC can proceed in one of two ways.  One, she could think that, perhaps, she misunderstands something and proceed as a college educated woman should, to disabuse herself of some uncommonly stupid ideas (there is no pot of money in a closet of the mayor's office).  Or, she could see "enemies of the people" hiding under every bed.

Since 1917, when V.I. Lenin took power in Russia, murdered the royal family, and murdered more Russians in his first six months of power than the Tzars killed in the previous 100 years, socialists have never re-considered their world view.  With the utter certainty of religious faith, socialists Know they have the key to human happiness.  And when their plans do not work out (they NEVER do, since they are based on false ideas), the only possible explanation is sabotage by "enemies of the people".

They start by killing a few people.  As their failures continue, as their frustrations mount, as they become habituated to murder, they kill more and more and more.  That is how Stalin killed more Russians (more than 20 million) than Hitler, how Mao killed way more Chinese (about 60 million) than Tojo, how Pol Pot killed one quarter of the entire Cambodian population (about 2 million), and how Nicolas Maduro has made some three million Venezuelans run from starvation.

The socialists Know they are right, and they will kill and kill and kill until you get it right.  And that is what I see in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's million dollar smile.

Abortion Is Like A Car Accident

Working through the reproductive choices modern American women actually have (my previous essay) was a fascinating exercise, for me.  A revelation, really.  As always, every answer raises new questions.

If women have this blizzard of reproductive choices, how does an unplanned pregnancy happen, in the first place?  On a hunch, I googled “unplanned pregnancy alcohol” and “risky sex alcohol”.  I.e., I’m guessing that booze has something to do with it.

A 1984 study says, "Nah".  But, this seems impossible since the widely accepted number is that 25%---yes, 1/4---of all pregnancies are unplanned.  Note, this study is old and small.

Digging further, I found this item from the National Center for Biotechnology Information,  a division of the National Institutes of Health,

“A study of drinking habits and sexual behaviors of heterosexuals found that women and men who frequently combined alcohol use with sexual encounters were generally less likely to use condoms during sexual intercourse...
“In 1998, an estimated 400,000 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 had unprotected sex after drinking alcohol, and an estimated 100,000 had sex when they were so intoxicated that they were unable to consent (Hingson, et al., 2002). In a study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 23% (5.6 million) of sexually active teens and young adults ages 15–24 in the USA reported as having had unprotected sex because they had been drinking or using drugs at the time.”

and so on.

Other studies come to the same conclusion.  E.g., "Binge drinking leads to unwanted pregnancies."

Clearly, alcohol and, probably, other drugs contribute to the shocking rate of unplanned pregnancies.  In other words, unplanned pregnancies are a lot like “DUI”, driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Interestingly, in October, 2017, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation, reported (it’s a PDF download)
“alcohol-impaired-driving fatalities accounted for 28 percent of all motor vehicle traffic fatalities in the United States in 2016.”

So, 25% of all pregnancies are unplanned, and alcohol is involved; 28% of all driving fatalities involve alcohol...unplanned pregnancy sure does look a lot like DUI.  And, people get killed in both cases.

In real life, even if they are not killed, a lot of people do not just walk away from a car accident.  Many people suffer permanent, life-altering injuries.  Spinal cord injuries could mean partial or complete loss of the use of arms or legs.  I knew a young woman whose head went through a windshield, and she lived with permanently impaired short-term memory.  Death and disfigurement.  The horrors, of car accidents, are legion.

Now, consider the following thought experiment.  Suppose John survives a car accident, but he is seriously and permanently injured.  Given the bizarre nature of his injuries, doctors could cure him completely, but they would have to kill somebody else to do it, some innocent third party.  Should John and his doctors proceed?

Is that a bizarre or irrelevant thought experiment?  I think that is pretty much what an abortion is all about.

One of the great apologies for abortion is that a baby permanently changes a woman’s life.  For many young women, this change is deeply unwelcome.  It could mean not going to school, not getting a better job.  If the father is not involved, an unplanned child could doom the mother to a lifetime of poverty.  The consequences of an unplanned pregnancy are serious.

But, kill the baby---an innocent third party who was not even at the party---and all her disabilities are cured.  Just like John, from the thought experiment.

A Woman's Right To Choose 2

Responding to my essay, “A Woman’s Right To Choose”, a friend recommended the documentary, "Lake of Fire", which seems not to be streaming anywhere so you have to buy the DVD.  I bought the DVD.

“Lake of Fire” is a pretty good documentary on some of the issues of abortion, so it is beside the point of my first essay.  I was not exploring issues of abortion.

Abortion is a major front in the Culture War we have been fighting most of my life.  There is an ancient sentiment that “Truth is the first casualty of war”.  The Left frames this battle as one of “reproductive choice”, I have long felt there is something insincere about this framing, and I wanted to think about it.  Writing is how I think about a subject, hence the essay.

“Framing” is a synonym for “spin” is a synonym for propaganda.  My only purpose was to deconstruct one element of the Left’s propaganda on abortion.  I.e., I was examining the propaganda about abortion, not the issue of abortion.  It was, for me, a very useful exercise.

Unless someone can punch holes through my argument (I welcome the effort), I was amazed to realize (it seems so obvious, now) that modern American women have a veritable blizzard of reproductive choices.  And not trivial choices, but choices that are astonishing in scope and consequence.  Choices that are personally and civilizationally consequential. 

So, whatever else the issue of abortion is about, it is not about the spectrum of women's reproductive choices.  It is about something much narrower.

This thought exercise also enabled me, for the first time, to think about abortion in its pristine nature, free from the encumbrances and obscurities of social, legal, and moral issues.  I.e., never mind all that other stuff, what, exactly, does abortion accomplish?

Abortion, per se, does one thing only:  it ends a pregnancy.  But, every pregnancy ends.  To put it more precisely, therefore, abortion shortens the term of a pregnancy.

Most women discover their pregnancy around 5 or 6 weeks into it, sometimes later.  Some obese women may not know they are pregnant until they give birth.

The CDC reports that 91.1% of abortions are performed in the first trimester.  In the second trimester, 7.6%.  And 1.3% in the third trimester.  Since 24.6% of all abortions are performed within the first eight weeks, it follows that 66.5% of all abortions are done in the third month of the pregnancy.

I think it is fair to say that a large majority of women save, at most, six months of pregnancy by getting an abortion.  Abortions in the second trimester might save a woman three months or so.  And third trimester abortions will save---days?

Six months is not a trivial amount of time to put one’s life on hold, if that is necessary.  But, the exact consequences of such a delay must vary widely, from woman to woman.  In some cases, a six month delay might be onerous, in others, hardly at all.

Some might argue that abortion is not about a six month delay in getting on with your life.  Once the baby comes, the woman is committed for some eighteen years.  But this raises the obvious question:  why is a woman more willing to kill her baby than give it up for adoption?

Thus, the objective observations end and the moral questions begin:

• Is a human life worth six months of your time?
• Why is a baby easier to kill than to give up for adoption?

 I leave these questions to the reader.

A Woman's Right To Choose

I would like to say a word about a woman’s reproductive choices.

In the U.S., an adult woman can choose to marry, or not.  If she wants to marry, she can marry whomever she wants, male or female.

An adult woman can choose to have sex or not, whether she is married or not.  If she is not married and chooses sex, she can have sex with whomever she wants, male or female.

If she is married and chooses to not have sex, she may not stay married, but that would be part of her calculation.

If a woman wants to have sex but not get pregnant, she has a cornucopia of contraceptive choices.  She can choose permanent contraception or temporary contraception.  Sterilization is a permanent form of contraception.  There are a couple of options here, too.

If she choose a temporary form of contraception, she can choose physical barriers, chemicals barriers, and hormonal barriers.  Physical barriers are the male condom, female condom, diaphragm,  IUD, cervical cap, and the cervical sponge.

Spermicidal jelly is a chemical barrier.

Hormonal barriers come as pills, implants, patches, and injections.

Contraception methods may be combined.  Eg, a spermicidal jelly may be used with a cervical sponge.  Also, some IUD’s release a hormone.  There are many possible combinations.

Finally, there is the “Morning After” pill, which exists in a gray area between contraception and abortion.

An American woman can choose to get pregnant, whether she is married or not.  And, she can get pregnant whether she has sex or not.

If the woman wants to get pregnant without sex, she has at least two choices:  artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization.

A woman can choose to have a baby, without carrying it, by hiring a surrogate for the pregnancy.

If a woman delivers a baby, she can choose to keep it or not.  I am not saying the decision is easy, but there is most definitely a choice.

There is finally, this question:  can a pregnant woman kill her baby to force an early end to her pregnancy? Do keep in mind that every pregnancy ends, in nine months at the latest, so the question is entirely one of convenience.  Opinion is divided.

Clearly, when it comes to reproduction, American women have a blizzard of choices.  Does anybody else think it is strange that a major political movement is motivated by this one need for abortions of convenience?  And, they claim to fight for “reproductive choice” as if, without abortions of convenience, none of the other choices matter.

A Working Hypothesis on Socialism

I do not understand how any 21st Century person, of sound mind and reasonable education, can be a socialist.  We have run the experiments, the data are in, we have the results, we know the answer:  socialism fails 100% of the time.  And yet, not only do we still have socialists, but socialism seems to be gaining in popularity.  It boggles the mind.

My thoughts tended to circle around two ideas:

1. How deep does the ignorance have to go, and 
2. How deep is the desire for power at any price?

I now think it is something else.  I think the question revolves around two other ideas, just as depressing, really, but less sinister:

1. The human desire to get something for nothing, and
2. A society that is too complicated for too many people.

First, the human desire to get something for nothing is very nearly irresistible.  As with sex, only the power of religion can contain it.  Not every religion.  I have in mind primarily Protestantism, and I hope a couple of my friends are right that Judaism works as well.  But, as the force of religion wanes in our society, the power of socialism waxes.  I think the waning of religion is one important explanation for the growing popularity of socialism.  And the strategy of politicians to promise something for nothing, always a danger, has become dominant.

On the second point, I am personally aware of many cases in which intelligent, educated people are shockingly ignorant of basic facts about the world we live in, but it was a conversation with my son about a year ago, on healthcare, that crystallized my thinking on this point.

Forgive me for saying that my son is a pretty smart guy who took his graduate degree in biomedical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.  UPenn is a first class school, especially strong in the life sciences and business (Wharton is there), so he was surround by ideas on healthcare, and he paid attention.

One day, we were chatting about American healthcare.  I admitted to him that I---a college educated man---do not understand how the system works.  His simple and astonishing response was, "nobody does."  Friends, that is a hell of a statement and, almost instantly, all my other thoughts, about our complicated society, rallied to his comment like soldiers rallying around the flag.

Capitalism is the central organizing idea of our society, yet it is more misunderstood by more people than almost any other socially important idea.  Socialism is very easy to understand.  The analogy I like to use, in comparing capitalism to socialism, is the flat vs the round theories on the shape of the earth.

A flat earth is easy to understand:  you can see it and feel it.  Most of us live as if the earth is flat.  Frankly, it does not make any difference, to most people, which theory is correct, so they rightly ignore the whole subject.

On the other hand, 2,500 years ago, a few people knew the earth is round.  And they knew this not merely as a competing superstition, but as fact.  In a simple and lovely exercise in spherical geometry, involving shadows at the bottoms of wells, Greek mathematicians not only proved the earth is round, but they  worked out the circumference of the earth within 10% of the modern figure, I seem to recall.  Not many people, then or now, can understand the mathematical argument.

Ah, but who needs a mathematical argument, these days, when you can see the round earth in pictures taken from space?  Too true.  But recognize the fantastical scientific and engineering infrastructure required to take those pictures.  So my point still stands, very much so:  in one way or another, it is a far more difficult intellectual challenge to understand a round earth than a flat one.  And, space pictures or no, lots of modern, young Americans are still not sure.

Just the same with capitalism and socialism.  Socialism is easy to understand:  let's just get together and fix the problem.  Are there poor people?  Give them money.  Are there sick people?  Give them doctors.  There is an apocryphal conversation between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway:

Fitzgerald:  The rich are different from you and me.
Hemingway:  Yes, they have more money.

suggesting that Hemingway cut through Fitzgerald's effete complexification.  Socialism just can't be more obvious.  And yet, everybody fails at implementing it.  Everybody.

On the other hand, capitalism, the theory that every person pursues his own self-interest, is a byword for selfishness.  How can you help your neighbor by being selfish?  Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, had to conjure an "invisible hand" for explanation,

"Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

What?

You can see a flat earth, it's the round earth that sounds like superstition.  You can understand people working together to solve problems, we do it all the time.  It's the "invisible hand" that sounds like superstition.  Like religion, actually.  The same religion that warns you never to possess things you did not earn by the labor of your own hands.

Capitalism requires a difficult explanation.  Just try reading Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" or
F.A. Hayek's remarkable work, "The Road to Serfdom".  I think most people are no more able to read Smith than to understand the Greek argument in spherical geometry.

The American nation was founded by a small intellectual elite who could read Adam Smith, and understand a geometric argument.  Benjamin Franklin met Smith twice and conducted an extensive correspondence with him.  Their respect and admiration was mutual.

So, it comes down to this.  That small intellectual elite: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, and Benjamin Franklin, created a society in their image.  The rest of us are more or less uncomfortable guests.  Most of us do not understand capitalism, do not understand healthcare, do not understand compound interest, or how to use a credit card responsibly.

Do not imagine, however, that lack of understanding is restricted to the "lower" classes.  E.g., there were several strange reasons for the housing crisis of 2008.  Three of them were

1. several million people bought houses they could not afford, 
2. financial institutions traded in securities they did not understand, and
3. a federal agency, the Federal Reserve Bank, that did not understand the market it was supposedly regulating.  

From high school dropouts to economics PhD's, the complexities of their personal and professional lives, in 21st century America, simply eluded their grasp.  For them, for most of us, socialism will come as a physical relief.  We will be poorer but more peaceful in spirit.

There is a passage in "The Fellowship of the Ring" that predicts our fate.  The Lady Galadriel is queen of the Sylvan Elves.  Her great powers derived from the Ring of Power in her possession, one of nine.  All nine Rings of Power were slaves to the One Ring, a ring of great evil.

Galadriel understood the One Ring had to be destroyed.  And, when the One Ring is destroyed,

"...then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten."

The Border Wall

A quick word on the border wall the president wants to build.

One of the main objections Democrats have against the wall is that walls do not work.  Their arguments are preposterous, but I do not want to go down the list, point-by-point.  Rather, I want to give some context.

After the Muslim attack of 9/11/2001, it quickly got out that America had established some "Black Sites", unacknowledged locations outside the U.S. where unnamed people tortured information out of "unlawful enemy combatants".  The revelation caused immediate outcry.

One argument for the Black Sites went as follows.  Suppose Muslims planted a "dirty bomb" in a major American city.  If it exploded, at least a million people would be severely affected, with an immediate 10,000 fatalities.  In your custody is a Muslim with information that would enable you to pre-empt the bomb, if you could get the information out of him.  Would you torture one man to save one million people?

The Democrats answered "No", explaining that torture does not work.   

What?!  Everybody knows torture works.  Every spy novel you ever read, every Cold War movie you ever saw assumes torture works (that's why the hero carries a cyanide tablet in case of capture).  Every real life terrorist group, like the Italian Brigate Rosse and the German Baader-Meinhof Gang, organizes in a clandestine cell system precisely because they know torture works,
"Thus, a cell member who is apprehended and interrogated (or who is a mole) will not likely know the identities of the higher-ranking individuals in the organization."

"The basic principle behind cell organization is simple: By dividing the greater organization into many multiperson groups and compartmentalizing information inside each cell as needed, the greater organization is more likely to survive if one of its components is compromised."

What does "compromised" mean, daddy?  It means you put electrodes on the guy's testicles until he talks.  (After the second jolt, you won't be able to shut him up.)

The moral of the story is this: don't waste your time listening to Democrats.  And, yes, of course walls work.

Alright, one last word:  a border wall will not cure cancer.  I mean, a wall is a tool like any tool.  It will not solve all our problems.  It will not even solve all our immigration problems.  Like any tool, it has to be used correctly and it has its limitations.  So, the issue is not whether a wall solves everything.  The question is whether it is one more effective tool in a box of effective border control tools.

And that is an discussion the Democrats will never have.

Bullshit Is In Our Blood

I cannot understand Post-modernism.  Two of the greatest modern intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett, have admitted they do not understand it.  What they really mean, of course, is that PM is bullshit.

In fact, we know PM is bullshit.  In 1992, the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed “Social Text”, then and now one of the pre-eminent journals of PM.  And in 2017, Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose successfully perpetrated a more elaborate hoax along the same lines.  In both cases, Alan Sokal and Boghossian et al, intentionally wrote obvious bullshit and tried to get it published in reputable, post-modernist, journals.  They succeeded. 

Clearly, every post-modernist, from Michel Foucault to Women’s Studies professors at your local community college, is talking shit. 

Now, this is very odd:  people hear this bullshit and believe it or, at the very least, defer to it.  Why?  I think we are programmed to believe that if we cannot understand a person, it must mean he knows something we do not know, and we are at a terrible disadvantage.

From the moment we are born we are surrounded by adults who nurture us and protect us from a large and frightening world.  And we cannot understand what they say.  Eventually we come to understand, of course, but it takes a long time.  By the time we are eighteen years old, we have spent a life time believing that people we cannot understand know important things.

As students we extend this experience.  From the time we are in fourth grade trying to work out fractions to college trying to calculate a line integral, we struggle to understand our teachers.  Or, maybe it’s physics or micro-economics or problems in metaphysics, we spend much of our lives listening to people we respect but often cannot understand.

Finally, even in adulthood, we depend on specialists whose language is almost impenetrable to us.  Doctors, lawyers, accounts, we hear them using English words but the sense of it is often quite beyond our grasp.

World-wide, there is a long tradition of learning other languages in order to study.  The Romans had to learn Greek.  The Europeans had to learn Latin and Greek, later French and German. 

The Japanese had to learn Chinese, a language as difficult for them as it is for us.  Turks and Persians had to learn Arabic.  Today, everybody learns English even if their mother tongue is Tagalog or Khoisan (the African “click” language).  Always, there is a language barrier to knowledge.  We are used to respecting people we cannot understand.

In a different domain of human knowledge, several religions are known for “speaking in tongues”, a tradition that goes back at least as far as the classical world of Greece and Rome.  Again, someone you cannot understand is presumed to convey a message of special importance.

A whole lot of people, for a very long time, have believed, for one reason or another, that special knowledge requires a special language, often difficult or impossible to understand.  This expectation is so old and so widespread, it is bred in our bones.  That is why I believe when Jacques Derrida and all his post-modernist friends talk shit, our first reaction is not to laugh in their faces.  Instead, we harbor a deep and abiding suspicion they know something we do not, and it is important.

So, that is why we let them get away with bullshit.  But, why do they do it?

The writer, Isaac Beshevis Singer, once wrote than whenever he cannot understand a person’s behavior, he assumes some kind of sexual perversity is the reason.  Along this line, here is professor Gad Saad in conversation with professor Daniel Dennett, speculating that Derrida and the post-modernists invented their gibberish to get laid.  They start discussing PM around minute 15:00 and Saad starts speculating about their true, sexual, motivation shortly after minute 24:00.

The desire to get laid may or may not be the real reason the post-modernists talk shit, but it is always my own go-to assumption when nothing else makes sense.  And post-modernism does not make sense.