Ruthless

Writing in today's NYT, Thomas Edsall lays out the details of how the Republicans in Congress have raped and pillaged the American economic system.

The details, of course, will put the "MAGA" crowd to sleep. They won't listen anyway, no matter how simple you make it.

For citizens less ardently attached to the President and his party, some of the explanations may prove disturbing. There are schemes which just beg smart lawyers and accountants to financially rape the system: If you own a factory, you can sell equipment to your wife or your friend and then lease it back, so that machine never has to leave your factory, but you can deduct the full cost of it from your income tax. Government paid for capital investment, no risk to you; it only costs the little guy whose taxes pay for this.

You can declare yourself a corporation--as Mitt Romney once informed us, corporations are people, and that is now coming true with a vengeance--or you can become a contractor rather than an employee and your income tax rate drops from 36% to 21%.

But best of all, about 1/3 of the Senators just wrote themselves tax breaks which range from roughly $50,000 to 500,000. Wow, what a great job! You can actually write yourself legal ways of not paying taxes.

Which all goes to show, the Republicans were right all along. The poor deserve to be poor and the rich deserve to be rich.  The Republicans planned long and fought hard to win the Congress and the Presidency. They fooled enough people some of the time to steal legally what they coveted. 

They have all the scruples of Vikings on a longboat. But they are smarter than the Vikings--they don't burn the village; they just sack and rape, pillage and plunder.

The ancient Romans had an expression for it: Audaces fortuna iuvat. Fortune favors the bold.
The Republicans, you have to admit, are bold.
The Democrats are wimps. They deserve everything that they get.

Does Public Education Dumb Down America?

At the risk of sounding like an ultra-libertarian, or fundamentalist religious person, I have to ask the question: Does public school education, as we currently see it in the United States, actually diminish the intellectual capacities and development of our nation's children?

Let me begin by laying bare my own prejudices:
1. My mother was a public school teacher.
2. From the 1930's to 1950's a job as a public school teacher, particularly in big cities, was a plum--it offered security, a middle class wage, summers off and getting teaching jobs was highly competitive. The faculty of the best public high school in our home town--Bethesda Chevy-Chase High School--was comparable to faculties at many good colleges.
3. My own schooling from K-12 was in public schools.
4. My oldest son went to the same public schools I did.

So I have a worm's eye view of public schools, with a decided bias in their favor.

Looking at studies of how well educational efforts succeed, comparing achievement in the USA vs European vs Asian school children is discouraging, from an American point of view. Of course these studies are likely flawed and may be comparing apples and oranges, but the United States consistently comes out looking like a mediocrity, despite high levels of spending. We get far less out of our spending on education than the Europeans and Asians do, if we can believe cross cultural testing.

Schooled by fish --Obadiah Youngblood

There are less scientific, but possibly no less revealing ways of assessing the educational effects of public education in different countries. One of these is listening to people interviewed on TV or radio from England or Germany or Iceland and comparing the capacity for expression, clarity of thought, and the references and allusions you hear people making.

I have learned I am not the only American to listen to these foreigners interviewed and find myself thinking: These Brits (Icelanders, Germans)  are just consistently smarter than we are. Or at least they sound that way.

Listening to the parents of Dutch, Swedish, Irish children who get parked in American schools while their parents are doing a tour of duty at the World Bank or the Embassy or some international company, you understand they are not favorably impressed by American education.  They try to say as little as possible, but if you really probe them they say it: You spend so much time accomplishing so little.
The more time our kids spend in these schools, the dumber they get.

I'm not ready to draw firm conclusions from such diverse and unsystematic sources, but I am struck by how many fewer hours Scandinavians, Brits and German kids spend in school every day and every year and I wonder whether the "crowd control" aspect of American education has somehow purloined the quality of the education we inculcate.
Look at those TV shows where kids from local high schools compete with one another as teams representing their schools and listen to the questions they get asked. At least they are fill in the blank answers, but still, the questions are narrow points of knowledge: What was the name of the man who accompanied Mallory to the top of Everest? Sure, nice if you know that, but really, what does it matter?

My son and I visited a classroom once where the teacher asked the students, who had been reading letters sent home from the commander of a Negro regiment what they had noticed about the attitude of the officer and the students answered: "He began by calling them "niggers" but after a few battles he was calling them heroes and he said he was honored to lead them.
"In my school," my son said, "They would have asked the name of the major's horse."
That is the difference between smart and stupid. No other way to describe it.

Watching kids in Iceland get out of school in the early afternoon, watching them walk home, walk to the swimming pool, the playground, where they played with other kids without parental supervision, listening to kids (who learn English early) and observing their enthusiasm for what they are learning is an experience which makes anyone think: What is their secret?

Remembering my own high school days, arriving at 9 AM leaving class at 3:30 going off to team practice until 6:30, home by 7 PM and homework until midnight. Five hours of homework which was essentially busy work. Designed to keep you busy, not to enlighten.

I particularly recall my science courses: We had the usual chemistry teacher who was just a chapter ahead of us in the text book and could answer no questions.

But we had a young graduate of the University of Maryland who was all about teaching us the newest and most sophisticated biology she had just learned in college. But her idea of rigor was piling on volume of reading to be done at home prior to class and then lecturing during class. I cannot recall anyone asking questions. We had 50 pages of reading to do every night, five days a week and 100 pages for the weekend. We got lots of knowledge, lots of volume laid on us. But quantity is not quality.

When I got to college and majored in biology, I got to understand what quality meant, and that turned out to be nothing like what I was told was the most rigorous, fantastic high school  biology course in Maryland.

In fact, the more our biology teacher piled on, the less we learned. The more guilty we felt and the more we decided the study of biology was an ordeal, not an awakening.

Of course, compared to our middle school biology courses, which consisted of memorizing long lists of species and genus, classification and descriptions, the high school biology course was a joy.

The trouble was, these teachers were themselves not very well educated. They thought memorization was learning. They thought "content" was immutable, like learning Greek, would always be with you.

In college we learned concepts, and it was like going from Latin recitations to "Blue Planet."

Maybe it's the first sign of on rushing Alzheimer's but as I watch American TV, listen to radio, I find myself saying: These people are really stupid. 

Not so much with the BBC or with foreign programs.

Some how, we are surrounded by so much stupidity, it is becoming the norm.
It cannot all be Trump's fault
Can it be he  is simply  the result, not the cause?

Just How Red is Alabama? New Math.

Interesting graphic about the Congressional districts in Alabama.
What it shows explains why Alabama has six of seven Representatives in the House wearing the red Republican ribbon.

So, if district #7 has 3 million citizens and the remainder of the state, those empty rural counties, have 2 million, then District 7 gets one Democratic Representative and the other districts get 6 Republican Representatives. 


That's math even I can understand.
Our House represents empty spaces.
Those 6 Republicans represent a lot of barns and fields and ponds and hog farms. 
If the state of Alabama is primarily its people, then the Representatives of Alabama are illegitimate. If the state of Alabama is constituted by acres and mules and dusty roads, then it all that is what is represented in Congress by its 6 Republican representatives. Five million souls, 3 million Democrats, 2 million Republicans--that means, to me Alabama should have 4 Democratic Representatives and only 3 Republicans.

Instead they have 6 Republicans. 

Marcy Kaptur: Profile in Courage

I wasn't in the meeting, just heard the leaks about it, but apparently Marcy Kaptur, a long serving Democratic Representative (Ohio) spoke out at a meeting of Captiol Hill women, Congresswomen, staffers, and said while she was as outraged as anyone about the stories she's heard over the years about male Congressmen and staffers in the grips of testosterone storm, she recognizes that when a woman gets dressed in the morning, her clothes make a statement about her and if she has "cleavage down to the floor" that might evoke a response in a male.

Representative Kaptur

She was not, of course, blaming the victim, but that's the way her shocked colleagues heard it because they are so swept up in the hysteria, a veritable Salem witch trial atmosphere, they refuse to hear the other side of the equation.

Nobody is excusing lascivious behavior by libidinous males, but when you present yourself as a sexually provocative female, you must accept some responsibility for the response you elicit.

Professional Journalist

Meghan Kelly has got to be the ultimate in all this: She could not understand why men propositioned her, did not treat her with the respect her journalistic professionalism earned her. 
One might ask, in the first place, exactly how much of a profession journalism is. After all, in England they are called, "news readers" which is really what many journalists are. Fox News exploded the idea of a well trained discipline by dressing up pretty blondes in red dresses showing lots of  leg to do "the news." Not to group a pro like Gwen Ifil with that crowd, but it's not like you have to go to Columbia Journalism School and pass an exam to be a "journalist" or a congresswoman.


The respect you get is the respect you earn. The profession does not earn you that prestige simply by membership. You have to earn esteem.


That doesn't mean you should be groped or raped--A prostitute is every bit as violated by a rape as any woman. Permission must be granted.


But in some cases women by their dress or their behavior invoke a sort of power play and tacitly dare men by titillation. That, too, is aggressive behavior, no less so because it is unspoken, or subtle.


"Me too," has gone too far.


The feeding frenzy which tore Al Franken apart along with efforts to get at a lunatic pedophile has got to end.
Blood in the water is one thing.
Indiscriminate accusations are quite another.

FAKE MURDER

This morning on NPR I heard a voter in Alabama questioned about how he, as a Christian, could vote for the accused child molester, Roy Moore.
He said, "Well, it's like this: I got a choice of voting for a man ACCUSED of child molestation versus the man who I KNOW to be a murderer--because he supports abortion--he's an accomplice to the murder of untold millions of babies."

How would I respond to this voter, were I any Democratic candidate for Senate or for dogcatcher or for  President?

I would say,
"Excuse me? A murderer? 
Well I can understand you think life begins at conception and therefore the removal of a two cell conceptus is the taking of a human life.
But I do not believe that. 
My religion tells me something different.
My faith--and my mind--tells me that a two cell thing is not a human being.
I do not believe, I do not agree with you that an 11 week fetus which is about the size of a small salamander and looks no more human in real life than a tadpole, is a human being.

You say you know the mind of God, well, excuse me but I do not believe you have a private phone line to God. You do not have God on your speed dial, nor does he call your number.  
Not you, nor your pastor knows a goddamn thing about what God says that I do not know.
What arrogance: to claim God speaks to you and not to me!

If you believe abortion is infanticide, do not have an abortion.
Speak out against it. 
But do not force your religious belief on me or call me a murderer because I disagree with you, because I do not hear God's voice in my head. 
And don't insult my intelligence by saying the Bible says abortion is wrong.
The men who wrote the Bible, and it was men who wrote that book, not God, had no idea about fertilization or the soul entering the egg with a sperm.
So believe what you want but don't call anyone a murderer because he doesn't go to your church."

That's what I'd like to hear some Democrat say some day. Have the courage of your convictions.
Have some balls and get mad about it.

Immigration [#6]

#6 Democratic Party Principles
Immigration
The first thing Democrats should say about the immigration problem is there is no immigration problem.

There is a perception problem.

The first thing Hitler and his buddy Goebbels did was to dream up a problem to blame all the other problems on: The Jews!

Trump and his buddies have done the same thing. 
Joe Arapaio and Paul LePage have ridden to prominence singing the same song.
Oh, those nasty immigrants!

Fact is, we had much more immigration of people who were less likely to succeed in the past: Look at those pictures from Ellis Island.

We had the Irish wave, the Italian wave, a Jewish wave from Eastern Europe, a Scandinavian wave. 

Each new group was vilified at first, then assimilated. All contributed big time.

No, we cannot throw our borders wide open.

If we allowed every person who wants to enter the USA from India alone, we'd like have close to a majority Hindi speaking population. Same for China.

We do not want to see sudden, huge shifts in our ethnic, linguistic, cultural makeup.

But if we do it gradually enough, carefully enough, we can celebrate diversity rather than fear it. 

And diversity is our strength. It gives us an competitive edge over every other country.  

Diversity should not be allowed to stay in silos, however. Anyone coming here has to agree to try to assimilate and most of all, to tolerate every opinion, no matter how foreign, no matter what his/her religious beliefs. 

Tolerance is the basic requirement for living in America.
The last thing this country needs is a lot of superpatriots who think they are more American than anyone else.

Drugs and the Opioid Crisis [#5]

#5 Democratic Party Principles
Opioid "Crisis"

Did you ever wonder where this new pestilence of opioid deaths came from?
Did it come to surface the way the Black plague does, occasionally, with a reservoir of disease living in fleas which live on rats?
Or did we invent it?
Or was it always there, but nobody noticed until it was not just Black inner city kids dying but beloved White suburban kids?

I do not know the answers to this question.

I do know that if we really want to address the two separate problems of 1/ Drug addiction  2/ Opioid overdose deaths, we will need to make some basic choices, not just use ban-aides. 

We will first have to decriminalize drug abuse and treat this problem as a public health problem.

We will have to commit billions to the part of the health care system which treats drug addiction, just as we devote resources to the treatment of other life long problems like diabetes and alcohol addiction. 

We will have to ask the hard questions we ask of all medical therapies and programs: What is the evidence they work? What better solutions might be out there.

Right now, we've got programs which work to keep people "clean" only for as long as the patients remain in the programs, but the relapse (recidivism) rate is nearly 100%