Police

Does she really frighten these robocops that much? 

Police, it must be admitted, have a tough job.  

I've known plenty of cops over the years, from New York City cops who were cops because their fathers and uncles and brothers were cops, to suburban cops, to undercover cops, to FBI agents, to small town cops. Women cops, men cops. Old cops, young cops. There are lots of different types of cops, but most of them shared a pretty jaded point of view of humanity. They saw the raw side of life and had to deal with some pretty insane people and some pretty stupid people and some violent nasty people and some who were all three.

The "Police Log" which runs in a the Portsmouth Herald, unadulterated, gives some insight into what cops have to deal with. My favorite posting was: "Called to see woman who claimed her neighbor called her 'obese.'"

We also know cops from "The Wire," which is the best portrait I've ever seen of cops, and matched what I saw completely, and this is no surprise since the show was created by and written by a police reporter (David Simon) and a cop (Ed Burns.)

But one thing which typifies American cops is they are different from English cops, and different from the cop on the beat so many of us knew in our youth.

Now they are the heavily armed cops who look like they are in the employ of the Empire, those robo cops with the body armor.

His father murdered by police

For some time, I've thought, "We'd be better off without any of these guys around. Keep them in the station house. Call them in when things really get hot."

Of course, the other problem is the station house, where cops can strip down your daughter if they drag her in for rolling through a stop sign.

When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he listed the affronts to dignity and human rights perpetrated by the King, but he did not list strip searching. That omission was addressed in the Bill of Rights, with the fourth amendment which prohibited unreasonable search and seizure, but in the 18th century they were not talking about the virtual rape of women in jails; they were talking about soldiers ransacking your house--a violation to be sure, but nothing compared to what goes on daily in our local jails across the country.

And now we have murderers with badges stopping cars for broken tail lights or for no good reason at all, the real threat to life and limb today.

Bad cops: Nothing really all that new

We really ought to think again about how we arm our police and about what their job and their personality should be.  

Unthreatening: The Very Image of a Good Cop

If Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton could return today, how appalled would they be by what we allow our police to do in what they conceived as a "free" country.

Hamilton

Maybe, what we ought to do is to disarm our policemen, or allow only a Taser and a club.  If we are really worried about their safety, keep one cop with the gun back in the car and let the less threatening, unarmed cop walk up and get the driver's license.  For cops walking the beat, let them walk in pairs. 

If we were really worried about their safety, rather than their egos, we'd disarm our police.

Who's Afraid of the Second Amendment?

Likely, they would be appalled by the NRA

Antonin Scalia was many things, but one thing most people can agree upon is he was a man of "faith."  The mayor of Dallas, speaking after the shooting of five police officers proclaimed that like his police chief, he too is a man of faith, which is Southern for "I am a good man."

Scalia was famous for being an originalist, which in his mind, apparently was not exactly the same thing as being a strict constructionist.  For Scalia, the Constitution should be interpreted as a reasonable man of the 18th century would have interpreted it. This means that had the Constitution said no man could be beheaded, hanged or shot, that would mean the government could not execute a man by any of those techniques but it might also mean the reasonable 18th century man might also conclude he could not be boiled alive or drawn and quartered, as what the authors of the Constitution were doing were trying to delineate humane executions. 

So, while there were subtleties  and nuances in Scalia's idea, he was still cleaving to a document, to a text, as if it were a holy scripture, and he was trying to stay anchored in "original meaning" as if that is even possible from the vantage point of the 21st century. 

Kensington, NH

Such thinking meant that in the case of the Heller vs  District of Columbia, Scalia found that the Second Amendment implied a right for any individual citizen to own a gun, virtually any gun. And yet, here is the entire text of the Amendment:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

I am no legal scholar, but my copy of the Constitution is only 34 pages long and nowhere in that document can I find any declaration of rights or any passage in which the authors provide a reason for a particular declaration. 

There is only one other place  in the Constitution --the Preamble--where any sort of explanation is given, and in this case it's not to explain a particular right, but to set for the general aims of the government the authors wished to create:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

This Preamble gives the reasons, and after that, except for the Second Amendment, no more explanations. Why? Because if you are looking for a reason for why the freedom of speech shall not be abridged, you have only to look at the Preamble. But in the case of the 2nd amendment, the authors felt they had to explain that one.

  The 2nd amendment is unique in that it actually explains why the Constitution grants this particular right, i.e. because in order to have a militia, you've got to allow members of that militia to keep their guns at home, presumably, they were thinking of muskets over the fireplace, not cannon. Any reasonable 18th century American would understand that.

The insanity of saying we ought to feel bound to what men living at the time of Washington, Madison, Adams, Hamilton and Burr were thinking in their world is mind boggling. In their time, Arms mean muskets, cannon and swords. Could Jefferson, Madison or Hamilton have imagined a time when a man might order over the internet an assault rifle which could fire on hundred rounds in under 30 seconds and laid waste to an entire regiment, not to mention a police department or a playground full of eight year olds in less than a minute?  Would Washington have signed a document which would allow a man living in an apartment in New York City to acquire a thousand rounds of ammunition, a hundred hand grenades and a dozen rocket propelled grenades?  

Why would Scalia or anyone in his right mind want to tie himself to a century before amplification of the human voice, photography, television, mass communication, social networks played such a potent role in the national life?

Scalia explained, in part, that the Supreme Court is the least democratic branch of government and he was very loathe to empower 9 unelected judges to over rule the will of Congress or the elected President. So hewing closely to the text was a way of restraining the judges from making new law without the consent of the governed.

Osgood Road, Kensington, NH

Of course, this applied when the court approved of same sex marriage, approved Obamacare, approved of statutes discriminating against homosexuality, because, for Scalia, the elected bodies of the states or the Congress would never approve of this, so who was the Court to force these things upon an unwilling country?

But the whole idea of the Court and the Constitution is to say, "This is something you cannot vote about. There are limits to what can be done in the name of popular will." So the idea of having separate public schools for blacks and for whites under a separate but equal doctrine is unfair and struck down. (Brown vs Board of Education.) And the idea that a slave cannot sue for his freedom in the Supreme Court because a slave, being property and not a man, has no standing to sue (Dred Scott)--that has to be decided by a court, for better or for worse.

Of course, there is no more political branch of government than the Supreme Court. The simple expedient of reading a one paragraph description of any court case with significant social content and asking a reasonably interested citizen, like myself, to predict how Justices Alito, Thomas, Roberts will vote and how Justices Soto-Mayor, Kagan, Ginsberg and Breyer will vote, with 90% accuracy provides proof enough.  In fact, there is no more predictable branch of government than the court.

Exeter, NH 

Reading the most excellent "Fallen Founder" by Nancy Isenberg, about Aaron Burr is a lesson in just how different these 18th century men were from men today. Of course, there are basic threads of humanity which connect them to men of the 21st century, but their ideas about honor, sex, propriety, loyalty, freedom of speech, gossip, economy are all very foreign to life in the 21st century.

They were doing the best they could, and they learned from the oppression of British rule as well as from the enlightenment, but they were very different from us. If I could time travel back to Philadelphia in 1776 to 1783, I would likely find myself disoriented and I would have to remain very quiet, for every sentiment I expressed would betray my alien status.

Likely, I would feel more comfortable talking to Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Thaddeus Stevens, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Emily Dickensen. (Oh, I'd love to visit her in Amherst.)  But the men who wrote our Constitution--I'd be biting my tongue.

What this country really needs is not a good 5 cent cigar. What this country needs to do is to face reality. Reality in this case means we recognize the Court is what it has always been: Just another political instrument.  Justice Scalia was right to worry about the un-elected nature of the court, about 9 entrenched, possibly isolated judges making rules and by those rules, laws for the country. But the way Scalia saw to deal with this was to try to rationalize his gut votes as the will of Jefferson and Hamilton.  But what we need to do is to tie the Supreme Court to the will of the people as determined by elections:  When a new President takes office, give him the right to appoint justices who will vote on the court. 

 We need a new process for the Supreme Court--9 voting justices, 2 appointed each term by the President, only the most recent 9 voting.  If a President gets two terms, he gets 4 of 9 justices. If we have a liberal President, a Franklin Roosevelt, he gets justices who will not block his recovery programs. If George W. Bush gets elected, well he can try to move the country to the right and the Supreme Court will cheer him on. But at least we are not dealing in fantasy--nobody who watches the court can believe these are simply umpires calling them as they see them.  Judging cases is not governed by a defined strike zone; it comes down to judgments and those judgments are ingrained and embedded in the philosophy of the Justices. Let's not try to deny that, but let's not be stuck with the same justice for 40 years. Nothing in the Constitution would require an amendment to do this. No number of justices, nothing about their voting status is specified.

Cape Fear, NC

We need to disarm our citizens to the extent an extant 300 million guns will allow, but at the very least we need to control the flow of bullets. 

We'll need a Supreme Court which will allow this to happen.

And we need to disarm our policemen, as the Brits have done successfully, so our cops are no longer viewed as a lethal threat but as benign social workers. 

Bernie talked about a revolution because he wanted to reign in Wall Street. That was no revolution. What I am talking about--that is revolution.

Yesterday's Murders: Old News

What do they know about policing we do not know? 

TO understand the significance of the shooting of 6 Dallas policemen last night by looking at the television coverage, one would think the story is one of how the police dead can be spun in the discussion of police murdering Black citizens.  Some of the coverage has made this into a "Black Lives Matter vs Police Lives Matter" story.

The palpable concern on the part of all the talking heads on TV was, "Oh, this is too bad because now the conversation shifts from how beastly the police are to how we have to protect the police, how we have to give them more license to be violent and how we have to stop worrying about Black lives matter and start worrying about police lives matter, so we've lost the argument."

Of course, all of this is nonsense and only highlights the stupidity of television news people who ask the wrong questions and see the wrong issues. The fact is, there is no argument: Murder is murder.

Significantly, Donald Trump said nothing about the Baton Rouge murder or the Minnesota murder, but he did say the shooting of the Dallas police was "an attack on our country." In doing so Mr. Trump was trying to gain political advantage from the six dead. He was trying to transform the act of murder into a symbolic act. But this sniper was not attacking America. He was  simply a murderer. 

Remarkably, the sniper in Dallas was quickly located and he was killed by a bomb wielding robot, after negotiations failed. 

According to Wade Goodwin, the Dallas NPR correspondent, the Dallas police had  actually been reasonably progressive,had been very open about police shooting citizens statistics; so they were, in a sense, an unlikely target.

But, of course, when you come to young lunatics  who plan to murder,  you cannot expect them to mind the demographics.  This sniper was not  like the crazies who flew the airplanes into the twin towers: Those lunatics could be said to be making a political statement. This particular lunatic was not making a political statement any more than the lunatic shooter at the Orlando night club, just another maniac with a gun. 

Which is not say there is no background to the shootings:  Goodwin did describe a scene at a 7/11 store which followed the shootings. The plate glass front of the store had been shot out by a stray sniper bullet and looting by neighborhood people began quickly. Thirty police responded and stood in front of the store to prevent further looting but then a crowd of youths, who were apparently intent on continuing pilfering, gathered and started taunting the police about the officers who were shot. 

So there is resentment and hate in Dallas. But there is resentment in Lawrence, Massachusetts and, for that matter in Hampton, New Hampshire,  but if you kill a policeman you are merely a murderer, not a revolutionary.

We had the chief of police in Greenland, New Hampshire killed by a white lunatic with an arsenal of guns some years ago. Donald Trump did not claim that was an attack on our country. The man was just exercising his second amendment rights, I suppose. Just another guy with gun. 

I also saw footage on TV of a Black teenager who was grinning ear to ear as he held up his arms as if he were firing a rifle, describing what he had seen of the snipers.  It was the imbecilic glee of a kid who just loves mayhem.  You got a glimpse of what police have to deal with--the young,the ignorant, the stupid, who can be quite lethal.

Of course, none of this has anything much to do with what we saw on the videos 48 hours ago, videos of police murdering, in separate incidents, two Black men.

The fact is, murder is murder, whether it is a white cop murdering a Black citizen or a Black man murdering a white cop. 

You can make the case, as some of the pundits have tried to do, and others will continue to do, that the killing of the white cops was a response of the rage of the Black communities, which feel the cops are an occupying force and who have no faith in the cops. But when a man pulls a trigger as a sniper in Dallas, he is not a soldier expressing the will of a group, or a revolutionary expressing the rage of an under class: He is simply a murderer.  He is not the bull driven to rage by the banderillas he is simply a mad dog who has to be put down.

The fact is, the response of the Black community, if such a thing exists might be better expressed by that amazing woman who sat in her car seat and video'd the murder of her boyfriend by police in a suburb of St. Paul, MN.  Clearly, she could not call 9-11 for help. 9-11 had already arrived and it was the problem.  So she called out to the internet for help. She might have believed there were other people out there, some of them white, who might help her. 

If NPR radio is to be believed, fewer police have died in the line of duty over the past five years than in previous years. Police are actually not being killed, even with the six dead in Dallas with increasing frequency.   But that does not matter when you think about Dallas. Statistics are scant comfort to the families of those dead cops. Murder is murder, not revolution, not a political statement, not an expression of the rage of an underclass. It is simply murder. No way to justify the snipers. No way to justify those cops who  are murderers. 

Each case is separate, must be tried separately. 

Once again, we might think again about the way policing is now done in this country, in every town and city.  We might learn from others, like the English. We might learn from the past, when we had cops on the beat who knew the members of the community personally.  But even if we do all the right things, as long as there are guns and as long as there are lunatics, we will have murder.

Police and Their Guns

Oh, yes, clearly a visible threat to two officers

Watching the video of two Baton Rouge policemen shooting Alton Sterling to death, while he was pinned helplessly on his back I had to think of the professor of criminology they had on The News Hour tonight, who warned us that the investigation of this act is still on going, that we still do not know what preceded the actions shown on this video and I could only think: Like that could even matter. 

FBI investigators should, no doubt, approach their investigation to the event with an open mind, whatever that is, given the video footage, but you don't need 4 years of college, or a law degree or a degree in criminology to know what you see before your eyes. I don't care if the man had shouted "I've got a bomb!" or "I'm going to kill you!" There is enough on the video to show he was tackled to his back and laid out on the ground and with two sizable (white) cops in total control of him and one reaches for his own gun, draws it from the holster and shoots Sterling in cold blood. 

Thugs with a Badge?

There are two videos of this event easily viewable on the internet and in one you can hear a woman sobbing, "They shot him!"  The astonishment in her voice crosses all racial and class barriers. It speaks volumes. She had seen enough to know this was an unexpected outcome.

One would think this video would be the only piece of evidence you'd need to present to a jury of peers. Just play it two or three times and say, "I rest my case."

We are witnessing cold blooded murder by at least one policeman, who should be in jail.

But this is not an isolated event. We have been told for years, at least since the O.J. Simpson trial white police commit wanton acts in Black communities but now we are in the video age and we can see what our fellow Black citizens have seen, and it simply cannot be denied. For Mr. Sterling, justice can be served if his murderer is quickly brought to trial, convicted and sent to prison for life.

But when we think of Mr. Sterling as one example of a larger problem, then we are talking about formulating rules for a larger problem. I would think we now have enough evidence of a pervasive enough problem we should think anew about how to respond to the problem of armed police who behave badly often enough to consider police a threat to public safety. 

Dead for selling CD's 

The problem is clearly not police training, or not enough sensitivity training. The problem, I would hazard a guess is in the nature of the sort of person who wants to be a policeman, to carry a gun and shoot it. 

We do we arm police?  Presumably, there are two reasons: 1/ So they can protect themselves against murderous thugs they are trying to arrest 2/ So they can protect others.  

Unarmed and Usually Unharmed

In England Bobbies are not armed and somehow very few are ever killed. Of course, this may have changed as England has become more diverse.  But, if the internet is correct, English police, when they need armed assistance call in their equivalent of the SWAT team. America is not England, but  as I understand it what the Bobbies do is  surround the miscreant  and overwhelm with numbers or box him in.  England also invested in lots of public cameras so felons could be identified and tracked down later.  

I'd like to see the statistics--and police departments are all about statistics now--which demonstrate that policemen fired their weapons and saved their own lives or the lives of innocent citizens more often than they fired their weapons and killed the innocent.

When statistics regarding ambulances were analyzed, decades ago, it turned out more people were killed by speeding ambulances than were saved by those ambulances and after that ambulances were forbidden to speed through crowded streets, and death rates for both innocent bystanders and passengers declined.

Of course, if we disarmed American policemen, likely a lot of men who would want to be police would no longer want that line of work. I would have to say: Good riddance.

Knucklehead's Guide to the 2016 Election

"Hamilton," the musical got me thinking about what a truly patriotic vote would mean this election.

Hamilton was a man of great energy, likely pretty manic (or bipolar, as we would call him today) with a certain disdain for the hoi polloi, born of his early exposure to the seamy side of humanity in Barbados; growing up poor and desperate he had no romantic illusions about what the underclasses are like. Like Franklin, Burr and Lafayette, he was a man of avid sexual appetites, and would win no prizes from the pulpit regarding his "character."

Jefferson, his rival and political enemy, apart from his curious attachment to slavery, Sally Hemings etc, was more the man of "character" with whom voters could identify as an icon of virtue, a renaissance man, architect, writer, philosopher, theologian. John F. Kennedy put it succinctly, looking out over a dining room filled with Nobel prize laureates in the White House, he said,

 " I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

 And yet, had I to vote for a President, I would, with the perspective of time and history, have voted for Hamilton over Jefferson.  While it is true, Jefferson had the vision and wisdom to buy the Louisiana Purchase from France, thus assuring America would become the continental colossus it became, he did so in an act of uncharacteristic executive over reach,  which Hamilton would have approved. Jefferson did not consult Congress or become too concerned about proper channels, or  advice and consent. He simply acted as an executive, or some might say, as a king.

But Jefferson's idea of what the United States should become was a nation of upright farmers, free from the heavy hand of government, tilling the land, as he did, or as his slaves did for him, while Hamilton saw clearly the critical role of finance, the need for a national bank.  

The Continental army, which had suffered as no other American Army has since, was in revolt, marched on Congress because they had not been paid for a year and faced debtors' prison as soon as they were discharged and their anger so so great Congress had to flee Philadelphia for Annapolis and there could be no fixed national capital because the Congress could not raise funds to pay the army and so became, literally, a fly by night institution.

Hamilton saw the need for a central, federal government, a permanent army and a permanent Congress and a permanent capital, none of which Jefferson, in his proto libertarian mode of thought necessary.

John Adams, an upright citizen if there ever was one, loathed Hamilton and decried his inclination for intrigue and back room dealings and in some cases apparent duplicity.  But without Hamilton, the nation would have sunk beneath the waves of insolvency and much as you might hate this early version of a Wall Street oligarch, we needed him and his system of finance. Curiously, Hamilton did not enrich himself personally, but his system allowed others to grow rich and allowed the country to achieve real power and stability through sound finances.

So, had Hamilton actually ever run directly against Jefferson, I would have voted for Hamilton, because I would have known, whatever my misgivings about his inclination for "intrigue" and political wheeling dealing, he was the best choice for the country.  

When you look at the choice between Ms. Clinton, with her cozy relationship with Wall Street, her $225,000 "talks" to the capitalists, you might see a Hamilton like figure and you may find it difficult to vote for her.  

Donald Trump has been called a unique and original figure, but he is not unique or even original.  Rush Limbaugh, had he run for President, would be in about the same place as the Donald is today. They are cut from the same cloth, but, of course, comparing Donald to Rush is like comparing the choir boy to the archbisoph.

What is really disturbing about Trump is not Trump but the Trump Chumps, who scream their lungs out at his rallies, the knuckleheads and skin heads in the mosh pit. Are these just anomalous mutants or do they actually form only the most visible elements of a multitude?  This is what elections are all about.

One can only hope even the knucklehead, when he returns home, will be capable of flipping on the youtue of Hillary in the last couple of hours of her Benghazi testimony and you can see, whatever you think of her, she knows her stuff.  You can well imagine her analyzing the problems presented a President cooly.  She is a woman who can manage a strain. She made those noxious, ignorant, blustering Republican members of the House Oversight committee look like amateurs, which, of course, they were.

Thinking of the Donald confronted with Putin moving into Ukraine or maybe Poland, or ISIS moving into an alliance with the Taliban in Afghanistan, you can only imagine what the Donald would do.

In the end, one would hope, once they've had their fun at the rally, the knuckleheads will calm down and cast a vote for the good of their country.

Beyond the Math Myth: Workforce Planning

Nobody here got at chance to take the SAT exam

Andrew Hacker once remarked he wasn't sure the storm he stirred up about the misuses of math and math testing--as it has become a coin of the realm--is something he would have chosen as his top priority, but the ramifications of his simple, honest, clinical observations in his book, "The Math Myth"  created a shock wave that has been more powerful than anything he could have predicted. 

It is as if he were Oppenheimer, looking through the observation hole,  as the first atomic bomb goes off in the desert and he says, "Oh, my God, what have we unleashed?"

So it is with the whole mythology of math, that "math is the language of science and technology" and so every student who wishes to graduate high school or enter college and certainly every student who wishes to distinguish himself by going to an elite college has to be conversant in that language, and not just a single language but it is as if he has to be good at Greek, Latin, French, not just English.  Math is, says one of the educators he quotes, now used the way Latin once was--to discourage and eliminate smart people who simply don't have the patience or talent for it. There was a time anyone who wanted to be a physician had to excel at Latin. 

And, of course, there may be many different types of intelligence. While some psychologist think "intelligence" is a single trait, others, like Howard Gardner think there are multiple types of intelligence and someone may have much of one type and little of another. 

Autistic people and  idiot savants may be extreme examples of people who have astonishing capacities and baffling deficits. Gardner described eight types of intelligence which might cluster in an individual but in some people only a few are highly developed: bodily intelligence (dancers); linguistic, musical, mathematical (or logical, if...then); naturalistic (sensitivity to the natural world); spatial (knowing where you are, where you came from and how to get back, from a fixed point); interpersonal (sensing how others are reacting and what they are thinking, something some autistic kids may lack); intrapersonal (understanding one's own emotions and thoughts.) 

She had the right stuff for her job

One needs only read the book by Frans de Waal, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Intelligent Animals Are?" to understand the nuances and breadth of what intelligence is, not just in human beings but across species.

Because we hope to match people to work they can be successful doing, the whole notion of intelligence is critical to tooling up our economy for maximal success and efficiency and it is critical to the individual as he or she starts down a path toward a career or the lack of one.  This used to be called, "Manpower" when most jobs were held by men and women stayed home, but now it's called "Human Resources."  It's one of the determinants of whether or not the United States will be able to compete in the global marketplace.  Can you get enough people to be competent in enough areas where competence is needed to successfully make automobiles, airplanes, software, create financial systems, create health care systems? 

He had the right stuff for his job

What Hacker points out, almost in passing, in The Math Myth is that the policy makers in the United States, in government and in education and in industry and in the professions have been rank amateurs when it comes to the whole discipline of "manpower."   We have all bought into the idea of the importance of "STEM" education, science, technology, engineering and math without ever stopping to actually analyze whether STEM education is as important as its advocates claim.  In 2014, 19.5 milion American adults had scientific or engineering degrees, but only 5.4 million (28%) were working in STEM fields. There simply were not enough jobs for all the techno heavy graduates we had trained. And the rewards of those jobs were oversold.  Engineers, it is true start at high salaries out of college but those high starting salaries never increase and 10 years later, many of those engineers are working in jobs which have nothing to do with engineering or technology. To increase their salaries or to advance in their careers most engineers have to shift to management, a whole new skill set for which they have not been trained and for which they  may have no special talents. 

Of course, the PhD in philosophy who drives a cab and the law school graduate who sells real estate has become a cliche, but the fact is the mismatch between what schools are training students for and what they can become is widely known.  Hacker tells of a community college which started training students to be software engineers or welders or whatever because a local industrial giant complained they could not find workers to fill all the jobs they had, but once they had started graduating classes with hundreds of appropriately trained graduates, the company decided to fold up its tent to to relocate overseas.

Machinists never out of work 

Committing yourself to two or four or ten years of education is always a bet, always a gamble, and the more narrow your preparation the greater the gamble. Sometimes the gamble pays off. My friend who went through four years of college, four years of medical school, a year of internship and a year of residency decided he would devote himself to mastering a single technology: colonoscopy. It took him six months to get proficient and about a year to really master it. For thirty years that technology remained essentially unchanged, and he was able to buy a large coop on the upper West Side and a house in the Hamptons all because he bet on colonoscopy as a cash cow. Had some new technololgy come along which proved superior, he would have been out of luck.

Another friend trained to be a surgeon and had a good 20 years using techniques it took him 5 years to master, but then laparoscopic surgery arrived, with demands for a whole new set of intelligences--laparoscopic surgery is more like playing a video game and touch, spacial relationships are no longer so important as being able to handle the joy stick. Those surgeons who had been trained in the old "open" techniques became obsolete over the course of 5 years as the new technology supplanted the old. Their bets were good for 20 years but many of them could not afford to retire when they found themselves put out to pasture. 

The most appalling thing is that the very institutions which were designed to foster analysis and dispassionate inquire, the academic institutions, colleges and universities failed at that core, essential mission when it came to embracing STEM and the math myth and whole variety of untested beliefs.  Directors of admission accepted the SAT exam as the only measure of "intelligence" and drew a line at a math score of 690  and verbal of 700. This simplified their job of winnowing down applications of 16,000 to a single college. But, of course, it also meant they eliminated a lot of gifted students who were simply not gifted in the SAT math score of 690 department.  There is a scene in the Bible where a general realizes he can only cross the river with half the soldiers he has gathered there, so he says, choose all the soldiers who are drinking from the water with cupped hands and leave behind all those lying face down drinking.  An arbitrary device for separating people. The SAT is just as arbitrary. 

People often point to the fact that both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg got into Harvard as proof that however flawed the admission process is, it can at least identify special talent.  Of course, the fact is those two were very gifted in math in the way which allowed for high math SAT scores and which allowed them to ace calculus, to solve polynomial equations and to code software.  But the rest of the class who were not quite as gifted did not go on to found Microsoft or Facebook. What of them?  Did Lin-Manuel Miranda, who read the same biography of Hamilton millions of others had read but was able to conceive of rendering that story as a Hip Hop musical, did his math SAT exceed 690? And if it had, was that part of his intelligence important to what really made him successful?  

And of course for every Bill Gates, we can think of those folks who were culled out because of a math score below 690, who clearly belonged at an elite college. In high school, I dated a girl who clearly was one of the most articulate, insightful, verbal people in my class. Her intelligence was nuanced, considered, analytical and she was very funny.  She was in the "advanced placement" courses and everyone from those classes applied to the Ivy League and Stanford and Amherst and Swarthmore and schools like that. To everyone's astonishment the best school she got into was Carnegie Tech. She had something to prove, and she transferred to Barnard, graduated Columbia Law and went on to a stellar career and made more money than, I would hazard a guess, 505 of the 520 people in our graduating class. In fact, she may well have made more money than the total of the 505 below her. 

You can say, well, so the system worked. It was the "Girl Named Sue" thing--she had something to prove. I would say, the system failed to identify talent and she was only the most extreme example.

Looking at exceptional cases and trying to make manpower policy based on those is a fool's errand. When it comes to large numbers of people, we need to look at the numbers Professor Hacker looks at which clearly must mean that we are in fact training way too many engineers for our economy to absorb and we may well be selecting the wrong people for the jobs they are being shunted into.

The former chief of Radiology at one of the nations most elite medical schools was, every year, faced with the prospect of choosing from among 400 applicants the 10 residents in radiology he would train.  Those 400 came from the 20 most famous brand name medical schools. Most of them were the sorts who never had less than an "A" since kindergarten and who had high SATs and high test scores in medical school. He could have almost put all the names in a hat and blindfolded chosen any of them because there was so little difference among these "perfect" applicants.

But then, one year, somehow, a different sort of applicant slipped in. He had played linebacker at North Carolina State in college and he was Black.  When he started, first year, he was probably number 9 or 10 in the class, with respect to his knowledge of anatomy and pathology. But he was very coach-able. When he got something wrong, as all new residents do, he learned from his mistake. He was almost pleased to be corrected. "Oh, yeah. Right. I got that now." When his perfect classmates got something wrong, they fell apart. They were not accustomed to failure in any academic pursuit. Every month the big Black linebacker got better and by the end of the residency he was among the top 3.  

So, did the chief of radiology go out looking for new prospects from among Division One football players? No.  He could not bring himself to make that leap. The linebacker might be the exceptional case. There was simply not enough data to know what to do. 

But it is cases like this which can or should cause academic institutions to do studies to develop new metrics to think anew about what they are doing.  To date, none of the American universities has done anything of the sort. What they care about is the US News and World Report rankings. Careers rise and fall on this commercial product, which nobody in academia effectively questions. There is a hurdle to jump over and nobody asks: Why? 

Nobody, that is except Andrew Hacker. 

The Past Isn't Even Past: Foyle's Next War

Inspector Foyle (Michael Kitchen)

As far as I know, Emily Nussbaum has not yet reviewed "Foyle's War"  but now, with a new season available on Netflix, I feel compelled  to note the return, at least until Emily can get around to doing it justice as I cannot.

The fact is, such notice cannot wait, as Foyle is one of the best things on TV, especially now that House of Cards and Game of Thrones have run their course. 

Foyle's War began with the unpromising premise of following a dour detective on the English home front during World War II, when all the action was happening at the front, and Foyle was left behind, a country inspector detective chasing down killers and thieves when wholesale killing and thievery which dwarfed anything Foyle could uncover, was happening just across the Channel.  But Foyle turned out to be irresistible and when the war ended, he took off to America to pursue an American politician and murderer who happened to murder someone on Foyle's beat and Foyle was not about to forget.

Back in England now, with the war just over, the cars and politics are all very much 1945, but the issues are America, 2016, with the second episode centering on a secret British government unit which tortures people in pursuit of the cold war with Stalin.  The enemy now is the Soviet Union. Recruited by Mi-5, the British CIA, as soon as he steps off the boat from America, Foyle points out to the woman who is determined to recruit him that Mi-5 spurned his application during the war, but gradually he is drawn in and cannot resist the cases presented as puzzles for him to solve.  And he is reunited with Samantha Wainright, (Honeysuckle Weeks)  his former driver during the war, who eventually winds up working in Mi-5 and, of course, becomes the Watson to his Holmes, although, she is much more useful and important to the solutions of his cases than Watson ever was. 

As always, there are several plot lines with intersect and weave in and out, among them in this second episode, the post war election which threw Churchill out of office and swept in Members of Parliament like Samantha's husband, who wants to establish a universal health service, and his arguments sound very much like Bernie Sanders. If only people could realize how much a National Health could change their lives...

The discussion which closes the episode is so typically Foyle, as he quietly presses his boss about the wisdom, morality and practicality of trying to obtain information by torture in a free country.

Honeysuckle Weeks: What a Great Name

By the end of every episode, I am determined to be more like Foyle: taciturn, capable of sympathetic listening, non committal. It's against my nature:  I recognized the type.  In "Hamilton" Burr tells Hamilton to "smile more, talk less."  Hamilton is voluble, opinionated, wears his beliefs and emotions on his sleeve, where Burr says as little as possible.  Hamilton asks Burr what he stands for, how he cannot take a stand when so many important issues are pressing in. And I recognize, I'm not like Burr. I'm like Hamilton, undisciplined, too quick to expostulate.  Burr, Foyle, are not spontaneous. They are calculating.  But in Burr's case there's a moral vacuity; in Foyle, he is just holding his fire until he can get off his best shot.

But, unlike Burr, who infuriates Hamilton for remaining silent when he ought to take a stand--qui tacit consentit--(Silence implies consent), Foyle's silences and minimal responses speak volumes and you know, by the end of every episode, he will confront the villain and use his quiet observations to unravel and reveal.

It's also nice that a sixty something, balding guy who is agile and active enough to get around, but certainly not capable of chasing down a bad guy or a space invader can hold your attention over the course of an hour. 

This is a masterful piece of work, this Foyle, a historical piece only in form--but what they are really talking about is today.