US Education: a sandcastle at high tide, by 'Paddington'

Sackerson referred me to the following article, The intractable problem of finding a job with a university degree | Churchmouse Campanologist , discussing the relatively high rate of unemployment among university graduates.

I will preface my comments with a statement of my belief, which is that education is as important to the health of individuals and society as is exercise.

This lamentable situation should have been predicted, as it was inevitable.

Some of the pressures to increase percentages in higher eduation included:

By the 1980's, the 'good' jobs were being eaten up by automation (around 80% of the drain), and outsourcing. Small family businesses were driven out by the large corporations, often aided by political corruption.

College presidents were delighted by the prospect of moving up in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. They could then grow their power and status, usually by expanding adminstrative, staff, but rarely faculty. At latest report, Harvard University has more non-teaching employees than undergraduate students.

The finance industry saw the potential for getting their hooks into a large part of generations of students, and had their pet politicians write laws which protected their 'investment', even through bankruptcy.

Politicians were shown studies that indicated that college graduates had higher incomes, meaning more tax revenues, and committed fewer violent crimes. That made them desirable and controllable.

Parents were conditioned to believe that the only road to upward social mobility for their children was education. In the US, prior to the crash of 2008, this meant any degree in any subject.

And so we in the US moved from 15-30% going to higher education to 60%, with a stated goal of 85% or more. To assume that we could maintain the same standards as before is to deny the reality that there is such a thing as scholastic aptitude, a fiction maintained by many extreme liberals, and professors in colleges of education. The richer 'knew' that their children were better, and so didn't worry, until colleges actually looked at test scores, and many found out that they weren't. That was the beginning of the slide to mediocrity, not DEI programs.

Private universities still had the luxury of selective admission, until the costs rose too much, so didn't have to worry too much. The public ones, however, came under increasing political pressure from both the left and right to simultaneously increase graduation rates and competencies of those graduates. As anyone with knowledge of Statistics will tell you, this is, of course, impossible. The result has been an explosion of 'useless' degrees, and a dimunition of the quality of others, except those, such as Engineering and Accounting, who have professional licensure exams after graduation.

For a snapshot of reality, one has only to look at Math scores. Most US universities require a Math course to graduate. The lowest such is often called College Algebra, and is approximately at the level of the O-level of the 1970's. Only 15% of high school leavers have enough mastery to enter such a course, which translates to about 25% of students entering higher education.

I spent my career in a more-or-less open admission university, and dealt a great deal with this issue. The overall graduation rate for much of that time was about 35% in 6 years. The 25% who were able to take a Math course at the university level graduated in 6 years or less at a rate of about 70%. Those who did not took remedial coursework, and graduated at a 23% rate. To make that clear, the Math-competent students graduated at 3 times the rate of the others, regardless of their field of study.

The common response, when I presented this data to administrators, most of whom had zero Math background, was to 'teach slower', or 'teach better'. Never mind that I was unable to find anywhere on Earth that does better, nor that my colleagues had the highest teaching evaluations in the university, on average.

It is why I drink, and retired as soon as I could, only to watch all that I helped build collapse in ruin as bad decisions were compounded.

Math: Learning in US is undermined by flawed testing, by Paddington

If I were to single out one thing which holds much of US education back from excellence, it is the structure of tests.

So much of the testing used is multiple-choice, fill in the bubble style, which prevents students from being tested on developments in the Mathematical areas, and from expounding on ideas otherwise.

I think back to the tests that I took in French and German at O-level (age 16), which required translation in both directions, making up a story in the foreign language, reading a passage in the language and answering questions in English, taking dictation, and having a conversation. The English language test was similar, with the translation replaced by having to precis (summarize) a long passage in 150 words or fewer. This latter was a very valuable skill, and one which many people would benefit by learning.

Our Science and Mathematics tests required solving long problems, writing essay descriptions of experiments, and developing theories.

How could multiple-choice tests possibly be that challenging?

To be fair, or possibly reasonable, the tests were set up so that 35% or so was a pass/C and 70% was an A.

And then, when all is said and done, we have students who have had their parents/software/tutors do most of their work throughout high school (and sometimes college as well), yet cannot pass tests. Those students are then claimed to 'not test well', and are given special accommodations. We had cases of assistants provided by of Office of Accessibility simply reading the answers to students, line by line, during tests. When the latter happens, what is the point of testing or grades at all? When those enabled students finally hit a brick wall, the claim is that “tests don't check for learning”, when they most certainly can and do.

Math: train hard, fight easy, by Paddington

Before implementing solutions to a problem, it is wise to understand what the issues are.

In 1957, our government and business leaders began to recognize that high-level Science and Technology were essential to our economy and national security, requiring a large number of people trained in Mathematics, the language of Science. It also became apparent, and more so over the next 60 years, that the performance of US students in the subject averaged mediocre at best, when compared with other industrialized nations.

The conclusion that the experts came to was that there was too much rote memorization in US education, and not enough understanding. Interestingly, the many groups of Mathematics education reformers rarely include actual mathematicians. When they do, it is most often ones whose work does not require the use of tools such as the Calculus and Trigonometry.

The implemented solution was the 'New Math', and was a disaster, in large part because the teachers didn't understand what they were doing.

Later, when the situation stubbornly refused to improve, the new reformers introduced ideas such as 'lean and lively' Calculus (i.e. teach less) and taught students to use calculators and computer systems to do the rote calculations.

The end result has been that the percentage of students who have learnt the bare required facts and can do the basic computations has shrunk. Of the remainder, many have decayed their skills so far that they cannot correctly input expressions to their computing devices, and cannot understand the resulting outputs. God forbid if you ask them to do anything with fractions or percentages.

The underlying problem was that the 'expert' reformers did not understand that Mathematics is both a language and a mode of thinking. Except for the savants, its learning requires repetition of operations, by hand. After all, we don't expect people to learn instruments by listening to music, do we?

In years past, I had classes prepare a study sheet for first semester Calculus. Most could fit every definition, theorem and rule required on less than one sheet of paper. For how many subjects could one say that?

However, when I awarded 20% of the grade on the final (announced beforehand) to reproduce 3-4 of the definitions and statements of theorems, no more than 1 in 20 of the students could get them correct.

So much for 'rote learning'.

Marketing is self-serving BS, by Paddington

 For many years, I have wondered about the efficacy of advertising.

Then, I listened to a couple of the 'Freakonomics' podcasts, where they discussed experiments and statistical studies on this very subject. Those studies, and the reaction to them, are very interesting.

If advertising is actually effective, it appears to be only one-tenth as effective as is generally believed by those in the trade. However, the people in marketing in large companies, and those who sell them advertising, just 'know' that it works. They just can't explain how it works, nor provide any unequivocal data to support their conclusion. However, they maintain their cushy jobs on the backs of those beliefs.

One of the knock-on effects of this belief is that Marketing faculty at universities earn 1.5 to 2 times what Mathematicians and Engineers do, because 'everyone knows' how effective they are.

As I have said before, we are the nation of con men and used car salesmen.

US college math: If at first you don't succeed... by Paddington

There is current news on the intent of the state legislature to take over the State Board of Education, and the articles on the subject include a discussion of the 2021 Ohio Remediation Report. That report states that the percentage of students going to higher education and requiring remediation in Mathematics and/or English is declining.

Most of that gain appears to have been achieved by changing definitions.

When I started teaching Mathematics at the University of Akron in 1978, approximately 80% of the incoming students had not mastered Algebra I enough to pass a placement test into a college-level Mathematics course.

That 80% figure was national, often quoted as 'only 15% of 12th grade students were ready for a college-level Math course' (The difference in percentages was due to those students who didn't go to higher education).

When I retired in 2017, that 80% figure had not changed, despite the addition of lots of technology, and rounds of 'innovation' from Colleges of Education.

So, universities and colleges around the country were under pressure to 'fix the problem', and responded by generating courses which were not actually college-level, simply eliminating the requirement for a Math course, or re-defining what a Math course was. Others, such as the University of California system, have tried to hide the problem by 'just in time' remediation, which works about as well as one would expect.

After a half century of teaching and thinking about this problem, I wish I could have an answer, as a genuine solution would likely make me rich. I can, however, safely say that wishing it away doesn't help.

Reopen the talent mines! by Paddington

As Heinlein pointed out, the natural state of Man appears to be poverty.

Two hundred years ago, a person living on my property was 10 miles from the nearest small town. If he didn’t plan ahead, he would starve or freeze in the winter. Thanks to advances in technology, all but the very poorest of us now have access to clean water, cheap and safe food, and terabytes of bad information and pornography.

These advances were the result of government investment in basic science, including semiconductors, computers, nuclear energy and the internet itself. The researchers who did most of this were middle class through and through. Most engineers and scientists still are, and gain their training through the public education system. The well-educated children of the rich become lawyers, bankers, and sometimes doctors.

The contest between the creative geeks and the leaders of our societies go back over a millennium.

During the Middle Ages, many of the skilled workers were represented by the guilds, including the Freemasons. The Catholic Church kept their power in by controlling the spread of science and technology, while keeping the nobility largely illiterate. This balance of power shifted in the labour shortage that resulted from the Black Plague.

As the population increased, thanks to the dissemination of technology, the balance of power gradually shifted back, until the Scientific Revolution required skilled workers in large numbers. This led to the drive for public education.

In our lifetimes, we have moved to a Global economy, giving access to huge reservoirs of cheap labour. Our business and political leaders, most of whom do not know how to do anything practical, simply assume that the vast riches around them are the result of their own brilliance, and so are quite happy to move all of our jobs to other countries. They also work to dismantle the education system, and cut money for research, since this saves them taxes. The current economic crises give them the perfect excuse.

The problem is that simply preserving what we have as a society requires mining our meager talents every bit as aggressively as we drill for oil.

The Robot Will Teach You Now, by Paddington

In about 2015, our department was being pressured to offer online courses. When I read around the subject, it turned out that the results of such courses in Mathematics were much worse, in terms of total pass rates and retained material, than live ones. I was told by a resident 'expert' that this was simply wrong. When we did offer such a course, the drop-out and failure rates were much higher than the live sections of the course, even when offered by the same  faculty.

Fast forward to 2020, at the start of the pandemic, when one episode of the 'Freakonomics' podcast explored how universities would adapt to online learning. A resident 'expert' at the University of Arizona expounded that the bugs had all been worked out to offer comparable courses, especially in Mathematics.

The events of the past two years and decline in student achievement seem to indicate otherwise.

Email from America (12): The destruction of education in the US

When I moved to the US in 1978, teaching was a fairly well-respected union job that could keep someone solidly in the middle class. The pay was not huge compared with union truck drivers and auto workers, but school districts had a pay scale which rose with additional education, and seniority pay bumps every 1-3 years for the first 20 years or more, on top of cost of living adjustments. Pension and health insurance were totally paid by the school districts. Overall, the pay package was more generous in many places than I received as an Assistant Professor at a state university.

Then came the Reagan Revolution of the 1980's . A large percentage of the population became convinced that government, unions, pensions and taxes were all terrible things, which could be replaced and improved by the private sector. The conviction that 'private is better' extended to education, even though standardized measures such as the ACT show that public schools outperform private ones. Once one factors out special education, which most private schools do not do, the per-pupil cost is even comparable.

This hatred of government and taxes led many communities to fail school levies, meaning layoffs and benefit cuts, larger classes, and cuts in offerings, except for the all-important athletics.

These financial issues coincided with studies showing that the average results of the US education system were at best mediocre in world rankings.

This led to a great many self-proclaimed 'experts' to offer their solutions.

Those people included Bill Gates, with his conviction that we could replace teachers with AI. The past couple of years, including the lockdown period, have shown how important the human interaction is to learning and that he is dead wrong.

Other 'solutions' included requiring ever-higher largely useless qualifications for teachers, costing them a great deal of time and money, and making Colleges of Education further inflate their sense of importance.

2001 brought the delightfully-named No Child Left Behind act, yet another attempt to 'fix' education. Rather than adopting the European model of testing mastery at various levels, the act went the route of egalitarianism. Each state was allowed to set its own standards, with the utterly insane mandate that every single student, regardless of ability or disability, would demonstrate 'proficiency' by 2012. In one extreme case in Florida, a blind, wheelchair-bound, non-verbal and brain-damaged student was ordered by a court to have to take the tests.

While these awful tests did nothing to improve student performance, they could be used to punish teachers, who were 'obviously' the problem. This in turn led to teachers in some cities to game the system by teaching the specific answers to questions, telling students the answers, or erasing and correcting wrong answers.

Interestingly, when some quasi-private charter schools tried to improve student performance by a combination of bonuses for teachers and firing 'under-performing' ones, it also failed. It is almost as if bad student performance is not primarily attributable to the teachers.

Now add more pressure.

In the past few years, we have seen the rise of the helicopter parents (hovering over their children), the lawnmower parents (who mow down all obstacles in the path of their children), and the jackhammer parents (who smash their way through everything). Teachers are criticized by parents and GOP politicians for discussing sex, slavery, or actual history. Some have been physically threatened.

Not surprisingly, many are leaving the profession in droves, especially those in the STEM areas, who can make much more money in insurance analysis and other technical jobs.

And what is the solution proposed by Republican politicians in Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin and elsewhere? Require no college degree or other qualifications, under the argument that anyone admitted to college must know enough to teach every subject in K-12 education, even ones which they themselves have never taken. There are, after all, education consultants who specialize in training teachers to follow scripts to teach classes.

How could all of this go wrong?

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (11): Work avoidance and worker exploitation

 America has interesting and rather diverse views on physical labour.

While there is loud praise of the Protestant Work Ethic, an awful lot of the culture is devoted to 'get rich quick' schemes and various forms of confidence tricksters, whose scams generally feed off greed. And it seems that this has been the case for a very long time, from the gold rushes in California, South Dakota and Alaska to gambling on the stock market in the 'bucket shops' of the 1890's, and more speculation in the events leading up to the crashes of 1929 and 2008. Not to mention the lottery, the illegal 'numbers games', Florida swampland swindles, evangelists, multi-level marketing schemes, Ponzi schemes, telephone 'psychics' and so much more.

It is almost as if most people were trying to avoid 'good, honest work' and always have.

The Jamestown colony in Virginia was established in 1607 by a group of 'adventurers' (read junior sons of nobility who wouldn't inherit) to make money, yet they had no skills or tools, and eventually had to import Polish workmen to actually build things. Interestingly, this led to the first American strike, when the colonists decided to set up a democratic system, without giving those workers a vote.

The famous Plymouth colony, founded in 1620, consisted of very pious individuals, who came with no tools or skills other than firearms. They would have died, and almost did, had it not been for the local tribes making alliances with them, and a few sailors electing to stay, with their tools and practical skills.

And who did the bulk of the dirty work to build the country for the next 200 years? In the Northeast, it was indentured servants and other poor immigrants from Great Britain and Ireland. In the South, it was enslaved African-Americans and Native Americans. In the West, it was poor Mexicans and imported Chinese, who were then quite badly mistreated by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

The rapid industrialization of the late 1800's demanded a concentration of workers, who then started to think about unionization. This led to cries of 'socialism' and 'anarchy' from the wealthy, who used every power of the government to stop them.

In 1920, efforts to unionize coal mines in West Virginia led to the Stone Mountain Coal Company hiring the Baldwin-Felts agency to evict the families of striking miners from the company-owned housing. In the course of their actions, the agents claimed to have a warrant (which turned out to be fake) to arrest the Chief of Police Hatfield in Matewan, which in turn led to a gunfight known as the Matewan massacre. This inflamed the miners, who embarked on a campaign of sabotage and harassment.

In the midst of this, Chief Hatfield went to an adjacent county in 1921 to stand trial on a count of sabotage. As he walked up the courthouse steps, Hatfield and his friend were murdered by Baldwin-Felts agents.

This event made things even worse, and the violence increased. This culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, where a force comprised of volunteers and members of the West Virginia National Guard and State Police met thousands of angry miners, resulting in several hundred deaths. The former used leftover bombs and poison gas from World War I in the course of the battle.

Once federal troops arrived, the miners, many veterans, refused to fire on US troops, and returned home.

After the subsequent arrests and trials, union membership in the United Mine Workers dropped from 50,000 to 10,000 and stayed low until the depths of the Depression in 1935.

It was not until the mid-1950s that unions became respected and the hard physical jobs well-paid. And that only lasted for 20 years or so, after which the Reagan administration tried to copy the model of Margaret Thatcher and reduce their power.

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (10): Hedge fund managers run riot

Tracking the chaos...

A confluence of events in the early 1980's combined to produce an interesting result in the finance sector.

One was technological, in that the innovation in satellites and computers suddenly meant that assets could be moved around the world, virtually instantly. This reduced loyalty to any country or entity.

A second facet was an after-effect of the oil embargoes of the 1970's, which helped to drive up inflation. In those far-off halcyon days, it was common for workers to receive 'cost of living' adjustments annually. For many who were not hit as hard by inflation, this often meant a lot more disposable income, and lots of encouragement to invest that money.

A third was the decline of the unions, which took with them a lot of pension plans. Companies then copied this and replaced many white collar pension plans with 'portable' 401k plans.

Combined, these opened the niche market of investment to a whole new generation of hedge fund and mutual fund managers.

These fund managers (and their managers) have creamed off many of the gains of increased productivity in the past 40 years, to the point where they and their clients in the top 1% gain 60% of the passive gains in the economy, in what the economists call 'rent seeking'.

That group is in a position to completely dominate the economy. Thanks to their rented politicians, those passive income gains are taxed at a much lower rate than regular income. Notably, if the Republicans gain the majority, they have promised to try to eliminate those taxes entirely, as well as estate taxes, thus cementing the wealth into certain families for generations.

The wealthiest managers also have the power to effectively mint money. In a recent case, one of them bought rather a lot of stock in a certain fruit-memed tech company, and used that influence to force stock buybacks and layoffs, doubling their investment, but cutting the company's plans for innovation.

In short, there is a very small set of very rich people who have so much money on paper that they cannot spend it without crashing the market. So, what many are doing is buying massive numbers of assets using those stocks as collateral. The bad part is that they seem to expect those assets to produce income at the same rate as the stock market, which means that they are being pushed to destruction. Purchases include:

• pharmaceutical companies (resulting in huge price increases in many drugs, including insulin)
• restaurant chains such as Wendy's hamburgers
• medical testing facilities
• hospital systems
• medical groups (whose doctors are then reimbursed less and pushed for more 'output')
• dental groups (many of which are 'encouraged' to do things such as unnecessary root canal work)
• trailer parks (where many of the poorest live. They cannot move their trailers, so can be easily subjected to higher rents and maintenance fees)
• homes, especially in the Sun Belt (many are bought sight-unseen the instant that they go on the market, often for tens of thousands more than the asking price, then becoming very expensive rentals)

And the list goes on. All in all, it reminds me of the aristocracy in France and Spain up through the 19th century, for whom things did not turn out so well.

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (9): US medical price-gouging - you really want this for the NHS?

Tracking the chaos...

I came to the US from the UK in 1978 at age 21. Since I was relatively healthy growing up, I had only had minor experiences with the NHS, including a couple of visits to the emergency room for injuries.

I did see the mediocre treatment that my father had in an RAF hospital over 18 months of confinement in the 1960s, and remember by contrast the excellent treatment that my mother received when diagnosed with diabetes in the early 1980's.

All in all, it seemed to be a decent system for most people.

That is why I have been surprised to see so many negative comments about the NHS, and praise for private insurance.

All that I can do is to offer a different set of observations from my adoptive country.

Prior to the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), we had the following:

• approximately 10% of the population too poor to afford insurance (and not granted it by their work), and too rich to be on Medicaid
• some insurers kept up to 54% of premiums, with huge incentives to refuse payment
• maximum lifetime benefits, amounting to 10-15 years of treatment for something like hemophilia
• refusal to cover 'pre-existing conditions', which could include anything from pregnancy to cancer risks

The ACA has not been a panacea, but everyone now has access to at least a bad policy. All must cover pre-existing conditions, and do not have a maximum lifetime amount. In addition, children can stay on their parents' policies until age 26.

That said, the costs for some relatively simple events can still be catastrophic even with 'good' insurance, and medical bills still cause up to 60% of bankruptcies.

One remaining problem is that of 'out-of-network' providers. Suppose that you need to go to the Emergency Department, and go to the hospital which your insurance requires. Without your knowledge, any of the doctors who treat you might not be contracted with that insurer, and you could receive a bill, weeks later, for thousands of dollars.

Or, as happened with our first son, your specialist might charge an 'unreasonable' fee, which you would only find out long after the service is performed. Our eventual bill for a normal c-section was $10,000 because my employer had contracted with a mediocre plan.

Scroll forward to 2017, when I had heart surgery. The bill for a 3-day stay in the ICU was $150,000, not counting the surgeon, anesthesiologist etc. Luckily, I had good insurance at that time, and our cost was 'only' a few thousand dollars. A month later, my insurance changed, and the deductibles and co-pays for my rehab therapy alone were almost $10,000 in a few months.

Right now, we have excellent coverage, so covering my medications at $6,000 per month is no issue. A slight change, and the cost to me could be on the order of $1,000 per month, which is coincidentally the cost of those same medications to the NHS.

In short, the US medical system is phenomenal if you have enough money or just have minor health issues.

Sackerson adds: for more examples of the US medical industry's exploitative practices, see here: https://www.instantlymodern.com/trending/overpriced-essentials-horrifying/

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (8): Gerrymandering to get the Right result

Tracking the chaos...

Gerrymandering is the process of drawing legislative maps so that the legislators drawing the maps get to select their voters, rather than the usual definition of democracy.

There are several such strategies employed, most of which have been refined by the use of extensive polling and computer models. One is to 'pack' voters of opposing parties into compact districts, another to dilute the effects of those voters by dividing up the areas in inventive ways.

These can result in districts which look like squashed bugs or slime trails. For reference, here is Ohio's current map:

https://news.yahoo.com/congressional-maps-split-akron-summit-100050951.html
'...Under the House proposal, Akron would be divided into two districts with one stretching into Portage, Ashtabula and Trumbull counties, while another extends into several Appalachian counties south of the city. Both districts would favor Republicans...'

While the tactic has been used by both major political parties over the years, it has been polished to perfection by the GOP.

Such redistricting occurs every 10 years, after the census.

In North Carolina, the state supreme court has just struck down the new proposed maps, on the grounds that they violate the principle of 'free and fair' elections.

In South Carolina, a lawsuit against the new maps is moving forward. The claim is that the maps are racially gerrymandered, diluting black votes. This falls on the heels of comments recorded on the floor of the state house of representatives some years ago, in which exactly this approach was proposed.

In Texas, a lawsuit against their new maps is moving forward, also on the grounds of racial gerrymandering.

In Florida, Governor deSantis signed their new maps into law, despite a lawsuit. Among other issues, the new maps eliminated all black districts in the north of the state in both Congress and the state House.

In Ohio some years ago, over 70% of voters amended the state constitution, demanding that maps reflect as closely as possible the preferences of voters. Instead, the 5 GOP members on the redistricting commission have passed 4 separate sets of maps without either of the Democrat votes on the committee. All of them have been thrown down by the Republican-majority State Supreme Court. The maps give an advantage of 70-80% in seats to the GOP in Congress and the state House, while actual votes in the state are approximately 56% GOP and 44% Democrat. Lawmakers have protested the court's actions, and have proposed impeachment of the Chief Justice.

These are not the actions of a party which believes that they can win fair elections.

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (7): GOP wannabe Presidential nominees in crazy-policy bidding war

Tracking the chaos...

As the US lurches towards the midterms in November, the Republican governors of many states are outdoing themselves in extreme moves, trying to capture the nomination for President in 2024.

Currently leading the pack are Governor Greg Abbott of Texas and Governor Rick deSantis of Florida.

Some of the highlights in Texas include a very restrictive abortion law, which includes an incentive of a guaranteed payday of at least $10,000 to anyone who turns in someone else for 'aiding an abortion', such criminals to include taxi drivers. The accused party, according to the law, will still end up paying all legal fees, even if they are found not to be responsible.

In a similar vein, Abbott has declared that anyone who tries to help transsexual people is committing child abuse, and can also be turned in to the authorities for rewards.

To show his toughness on immigration, he assigned the Texas National Guard and the State police to patrol the border. To date, it has resulted in no major arrests, but has cost several billion dollars, five times the original budget. It has also resulted in many complaints from those on the border about the lack of actual support, and the suicide deaths of at least four guardsmen.

He has also required extra searches of the thousands of trucks coming from Mexico, resulting in backlogs on the order of weeks, meaning that the fresh produce in the vehicles is rotting and costing up to $8 million per day. The net gain has been a handful of trucks pulled over for safety violations, and no illegal immigrants intercepted.

Not to be outdone, deSantis started during the pandemic by firing a statistician who was releasing the actual figures on Covid deaths, rather than those which made the state look better. The suppression of data emanating from the University of Florida is still under investigation. He went on to hire an anti-vaccine doctor whose predictions and pronouncements on the pandemic have proven to be spectacularly wrong as state medical director. At the height of the resurgence, he threatened the cruise ship industry with sanctions if they insisted on Covid passports for passengers and crew. He backed off a little when the industry threatened to move its base of operations from Miami and other Florida ports to other states.

One of his next actions was to demand that the Florida legislature resurrect a WWII-era civilian guard of several thousand answerable only to him. That came on the heels of a new state law which allows people to use their vehicles run over people at protests without sanction.

His latest has been to sign education bills which opponents have dubbed “Don't say gay” and “Don't mention slavery”(including measures to fire teachers, of course). When the Disney corporation, Florida's largest employer, stated their support for gay rights, deSantis demanded that his legislature remove the 'self-governing' status of the 40 square miles of the Disney property.

This will mean that responsibility for all of the roads, water ways, policing, fire service, etc will fall to Orange County, as well as electricity and sewer service to 40,000 hotel rooms and thousands of businesses. Finally, several billions in bonds for the construction will also transfer to the county.

Is this the party of business or is the GOP set to implode?

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (6): Slavery and History, by Paddington

Tracking the chaos...

The United States has had a tortured history with slavery and its legacy, beginning long before the Revolutionary War and lasting into today.

For one tiny example, the Texas Board of Education ordered History textbooks for the entire state a couple of years ago, which explained that millions of Africans came to the country 'to work'. Technically true, I suppose, but missing the point.

The current culture war over Critical Race Theory appears to mostly be an effort by certain conservatives, especially in states of the former Confederacy, to ban discussions of racism and slavery.

Today's editorial in the Washington Post provides a lovely vignette in this area.

Montpelier is the Virginia home of James Madison, the 4th President, and was built by hundreds of slaves who lived and died there. While the historic site and museum are owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it has been governed by Montpelier Foundation for over two decades. In that time, the governing board of 25 people has had either zero or one African-American member.

Last year, they announced that the board would balance the majority white membership with descendants of slaves. The latter were to be picked by a committee, recognized by the foundation, consisting of leaders in the Black community from academia, business and elsewhere.

Last month, the governing board re-wrote their bylaws, and declared that they would be the ones to select their members, totally rejecting the 10 people recommended by the committee.

This has resulted in an uproar from all directions and a mass exodus of employees, leading to the situation of a former slave plantation now having exactly one African-American employee.

Some people just have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world.

The Hidden Truth of the 2020 US Election, by 'Jim in San Marcos'

The following is in part intended as a rebuttal to, or alternative take on, Paddington's 'Email From America (4)', on the party-political-motivated skewed voting arrangements in the USA. 

Jim's original is at his site here. 

The US is splitting apart.  On one side we have the Republicans, and on the other side we have the Democrats, News Media and Internet.  Normally the Republicans and Democrats balance each other out and the independents decide the elections.  Now we have CNN, MSN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Facebook and Twitter solidly on the side of Democrats.  These internet conglomerates censor the news by blocking users from distributing content that they deem misinformation or by omission, failing to report the news.  Basically, this is censorship.  The news media, through their biases, are influencing the thoughts of the country.  The funny thing is, these people probably only represent about 5 percent of the population. 

Most voters begin to think about elections a week before the event.  A majority of American voters don't follow politics, have no memory of the performance of their candidate over the last 4 years.  The news media and social media will guide them in choosing a candidate. 

Our last election had flagrant voter and media fraud.  The Democrats, the news media and the internet giants like Facebook and Twitter censored all of it.  They were against Trump. They censored the Biden laptop that exposed the corruption and graft in the Biden family before the election. It is now slowly coming to light.  People don’t fully appreciate how powerful censorship by omission is.  This helped swing the election to Biden.  You can see the newspaper bias when you read “Trump falsely claims that he won the election.” The word “falsely” doesn’t belong in the sentence.  That is for the reader to decide. Including the word, makes the sentence an opinion.

A lot has been discussed about the convenience of mail-in voting.  If you lived in a country like China or Russia, would you want mail-in voting?  Fill the ballot out wrongly and you might end up in a gulag rehab camp.  

Democrats and Republicans vote the party line most of the time.  With mail-in votes, you also have included people who would not make an effort to vote in person.  These are the votes to focus on.  10 million dollars will buy a lot of advertising and it is always questionable how effective it is.  Take the same 10 million and send out couriers to purchase those blank ballots. Figure they would pay up to $200 per ballot. Imagine a courier is given 2,000 dollars and told to show up with 10 ballots filled out with their parties’ candidates selected, that’s not hard to do. You knock on the voter’s door and offer to help them fill out the ballot, give the voter $100 and drop it off for free. Such a deal.  If you are poor, $100 is something tangible that can be spent.  It is only one vote, no big deal, take the money.  If you are the courier, any part of the $200 not given to the voter for their ballot, is the courier's, free and clear. 10 million dollars could buy 50,000 votes.  Zuckerberg spent $420 million on the 2020 election. 

The Democrats want voters to be able to vote without having a voter ID.  They also want them to vote absentee without any identification. In California, if you get mailed a ballot, you can vote.  That mail-in ballot is worth money, you can sell it. By forcing the voter to vote in person, the ability to buy votes disappears.  If you have a city of 100,000 voters, figure 60 percent will vote. With mail-in voting, many of the ballots of people who have moved or have died get returned to the polling place. Those returned absentee ballots are blank checks.  Who’s to say how many were returned to the election board? No one will know if those “votes” somehow get submitted and counted, especially if there is no voter ID or signature required.  This is what the Democrats want to do in every state: unrestricted, no-ID voting.

The Democrats in the past have been the party of repression.  After the civil war, The Democrats took over the south. They passed laws to keep blacks from voting, referred to as “Jim Crow" laws.  They also formed the Klu Klux Klan that went around terrorizing and killing blacks. They were for segregation in schools. Times have changed the Democrats used to represent the working man, now they represent big money and labor unions.

The thing not fully comprehended by outsiders, is the fact that many election districts have ways of keeping the local people in power.  A city that is run by Democrats for 50 years is kind of an indication that something is not right. It doesn’t matter how you vote; the same party gets reelected.  In that case, people stop voting, they consider it a waste of time. Think about it: if a city doesn't update the voter rolls, a lot of ballots get returned by the Post Office.  Who is to say that post office returned 100 or 10,000 ballots? Wink Wink, most voter fraud is at local levels.

The super-rich people in this country are now aligning with the Democratic party.  They are trying to fragment the rest of the population, by tearing down our historical statues and rewrite our history with critical race theory.  I don’t think we are ready for this. This isn’t what Democracy is all about.  Live and be free, not live and fear the "woke" people. 

Something is not right. And the further we go in time; more things seem to be falling apart. Biden is destroying the fabric of our democracy and everything else to boot. Obama’s quote about Joe Biden, “Don’t underestimate Joe's ability to F things up,” rings true.

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (5): Pharma's slaves, by Paddington

Tracking the chaos...

Insulin was discovered in 1921 by Sir Frederick Banting, Charles Best and J.J.R. Macleod at the University of Toronto and was later purified by James Collip. This discovery allowed millions of Type I diabetics to have a relatively normal life, when previously they would only live a year or so after diagnosis.

Banting refused to have his name on a patent because he felt that it was unethical for a doctor to profit from saving lives. Best and Collip sold the patent to the University for $1, citing similar feelings.
Fast forward a few decades, and many hedge funds have invested heavily in pharmaceutical companies, including every manufacturer of insulin in the US. In order to make the most of their investments, they have bought political influence to make competition more difficult, and have increased prices to maximize their profit.

Bearing in mind that the standard explanations of development costs and safety checks really do not apply for a drug developed 100 years ago, in which the newest changes are over 20 years old, one can note that the price of a vial of insulin in the Humalog brand went from $21 in 1999 to $332 in 2019.
And those costs have not risen at the same rate elsewhere. In 2018, the Rand corporation listed the 10 countries where insulin was most expensive: The USA $98.70, Chile $21.48, Mexico $16.48, Japan $14.40, Switzerland $12.46, Canada $12.00, Germany $11.00, South Korea $10.30, Luxembourg $10.15 and Italy $10.03.

On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted on a bill to reduce the copay (what the consumer pays) of insulin to $35. This move to reduce prices is part of the GOP platform, yet only 12 Republicans voted for the bill, and 193 voted against it.

And insulin is just the tip of the iceberg.

Hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli bought the rights to Daraprim, a decades-old drug used to treat a fatal parasitic infection, and raised the price for a pill from $13.50 to $750. He went to prison shortly thereafter - not for this disgusting behaviour, but for defrauding some investors in his hedge fund.

Mylan purchased the rights to the EpiPen self-injector (to treat life-theatening allergic reactions) from $50 per unit to $300 over a few years, resulting in massive increases in profits and huge rewards for CEO Heather Bresch, who just happens to be the daughter of quasi-Democrat Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The latter has been one of the two Democratic senators responsible for blocking much of the people-oriented legislation that the Biden administration has tried to pass.

Legal slavery ended in the US in 1865, but our lives and our health are still for sale.

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (4): Skewing the voting system, by Paddington

Tracking the chaos...

The Republican strategists have known for decades that demographics are against them. As society becomes more racially diverse and urban, it tends to become more liberal. This is the case in most places, including Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and the like.

On one hand, the policies of the party are primarily protective of wealthier white males and on the other, the New Deal and Great Society structures such as Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are very popular, so strategies to attract GOP voters have to be a little different.

For Nixon, it was the 'Southern Strategy', where carefully-coded terms such as 'urban', rather than racial epithets, were used to bring the racist Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) into the GOP fold.

For Reagan, it was the embrace of the Moral Majority, who were formed to maintain segregation in the leadership of the Southern Baptist churches, and pivoted to get attention focused on things such as abortion and gay rights.

For George W. Bush, the tactic was purging the voter rolls, especially in Florida, where a quarter-million voters were thrown off shortly before the election of 2000. Most were minorities, and many were actually eligible. It is arguable that this move alone won that election for the GOP.

Another idea has been to claim voter fraud, which has not been detected in any appreciable amount in half a century, and use that as a reason to restrict voting. Senator Lindsey Graham said in 2020 that Republicans would never win another election unless they 'do something' about mail-in voting. It is worth noting that at least four states use this system exclusively, with no problems.

'I don’t want everybody to vote,' the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. 'As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.'

In places such as Ohio, the congressional and legislative maps are so gerrymandered that, despite the actual voting numbers being about 54% GOP and 46% Democrat, the former hold about 80% of the relevant offices. While the people changed the state constitution to make the districts more fair, the GOP-dominated election committee has presented three sets of maps giving them an 80% advantage. Each set has been thrown out by the GOP-led Ohio Supreme Court. Their answer this week was to present yet another, similar, one.

So, with that in mind, GOP-led legislatures in at least 11 states have taken massive steps to ensure their victories, requiring voter IDs that target minority voters, putting fewer voting machines in minority districts, forbidding people from giving food or water to those in line, restricting hours for early voting, restricting mail ballots, dissolving the autonomous election boards and replacing them by ones controlled by the GOP and many other measures, all in the name of  'preventing fraud'. In states with Democratic governors but GOP legislatures, such as Wisconsin and Virginia, they have stripped the governors of much of their power.

Yesterday, Judge Mark E. Walker, of the Federal District Court in Tallahassee, Florida, struck down most of the new election law passed in that state.

We will see what happens at the appeals level.

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (3): misinterpreting the Founders and the Bible, by Paddington

Tracking the chaos...

This week brings the confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. The GOP members in the Senate have vowed to vote against her, even though she is more qualified than most of the more junior members on the Court. At stake is her refusal to embrace 'originalism', a philosophy that we should do EXACTLY as the Founders said, not necessarily what they intended. In support of this onerous and odious idea, the conservatives repeatedly make up quotes by people such as Madison, and simply lie about the rest.

Via Heather Cox Richardson, US historian: A 2019 speech by then–attorney general William Barr at the University of Notre Dame offers an explanation.

In that speech, Barr presented a profound rewriting of the meaning of American democracy. He argued that by 'self-government' the Framers did not mean the ability of people to vote for representatives of their choice. Rather, he said, they meant individual morality: the ability to govern oneself. And, since people are inherently wicked, that self-government requires the authority of a religion: Christianity.

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (2): exploiting 'States' rights', blamestorming on energy price hikes; by Paddington

Tracking the chaos...

GOP Senator Mike Braun of Indiana was questioned by reporters today, and expressed his opinion that rights to abortion, interracial marriage and contraception should be left up to each state, to avoid the homogeneity that Roe v. Wade produced.

Attacking the LGBT population is clearly the next step, but why stop there? How about we go back to slavery, which has been proposed by groups such as the Dominionists, who want the US to be ruled by the Old Testament rules?

In other news:

Responding to the high gas prices, GOP politicians are blaming the Biden administration for cutting US oil production, and the cancellation of the Keystone pipeline extension. These cries are echoed by their supporters, based on the feeding of the fires by Newsmax, Fox and other right-wing sources.

The fact that the Trump administration stated that the pipeline in question would do nothing to change the price of gas, and that the Biden administration has sold lots of drilling permits is, of course, not considered.

Meanwhile, Democratic politicians in Ohio are pushing to suspend the state and federal gas tax for a period to bring down the price and increase their chances of election. There is, of course, no way to guarantee that such a price decrease would make its way to consumers.

Quietly buried is an item reported by the Wall Street Journal that several oil companies have announced to their shareholders that they are restricting production to keep the prices elevated.

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (1): GOP States net beneficiaries of Fed finance, fake Covid research; by Paddington

Tracking the chaos...

A column in a West Virginia newspaper today noted the continuing trend over several decades that Red-leaning, conservative states, such as West Virginia, which espouse small government, are in fact beneficiaries of taxes paid by the Blue-leaning states like New York and California. The latter send more money to Washington than they receive in federal services, while the former receive more than they send.

Not coincidentally, those Red states have, on average, lower educational achievement, lower incomes, lower per capita economic activity, and higher measures of social ills such as teen pregnancy and violent crime.

Some appear to realize the dilemma. A close friend who was raised and educated in Ohio, and is now an important person at a large oil company in Texas, still chose to send his son to university back in Ohio.

In other news, legislatures in many states are falling over themselves to pass laws which make Ivermectin readily available to Covid patients, despite large-scale studies showing that the drug does not help, and examinations of the small positive studies showing that all had glaring errors, and some were entirely fraudulent.

In one Brazilian study being touted by proponents of the drug, they bizarrely told people taking the drug to stop taking it if they were infected with Covid, and then counted their hospitalizations and deaths as non-medicated. Another study compared the effect of Remdesivir to Ivermectin and noted that the latter patients did better. The study did not correct for the fact that the former drug is given intravenously to hospitalized patients, and the latter to outpatients.