The West Wing TV series

I have been watching the West Wing TV series again, this time in order, starting at the beginning. I have to say that Aaron Sorkin and his team really did a magnificent job of exposing to the TV public the complexity of the real-life political choices any administration faces. Politics is always a matter of trade-offs. Every action produces gains and losses. Every action produces unintended consequences. Every action has to be taken on the basis of incomplete information. Perception is every bit as important as reality. Support from allies is always provisional, and can disappear in an instant. Sometimes one has to accept a lesser evil in order to achieve a greater good. Sometimes one has to accept strange bedfellows in order to get things done. Sometimes one has to settle for half a loaf or nothing. The show does a good job of teaching that.

The show does have a bit of a liberal slant to it, but after all at the time it was the closest the liberals could come to getting one of their own in the White House. But beyond that, Sorkin did give many conservative issues and positions a pretty fair hearing.

I like it that he takes on difficult, sometimes even politically incorrect subjects and sees to it that his characters give both sides of the issue its best argument. So much of TV is a mindless wasteland. This series shows what TV can do when it turns its hand to useful causes.

It’s hard to know how it can get any worse…..

For a party that managed such a good showing in the 2004 election, it’s hard to know how the Republicans could have gotten themselves in their current mess so quickly. Attorney General Gonzales can’t seem to get his stories straight. Paul Wolfowitz went to the World Bank to clean up its corruption, and turns out to be as corrupt himself. Donald Rumsfeld had to be sacked (finally). Tom DeLay got caught playing illegal games with campaign funds. Scooter Libby is facing prison. Dick Cheney gets booed even in conservative Republican venues. Carl Rove spends most of his time trying to avoid testifying at trials and congressional hearings. And President Bush seems to be in denial about almost everything from the conditions in Iraq to global warming to the balance of payments problem to the problems of his Attorney General.

In general, the neoconservatives seem to have had their chance over the past six years, and have been found to be seriously wanting in both domestic and foreign policy, as corrupt as their Democratic predecessors, as well as incredibly naïve about the real world around them. What they have left us with after six years is a messy and expensive insurgency in Iraq, a weakened position in the Middle East, an overstretched military, a massive increase in government spending, an unwieldy Homeland Security bureaucracy, and a steadily declining influence in the world at large. Even their spin doctors can’t make this pig’s ear into a silk purse.

And none of the potential Republican candidates on the horizon to date look much better.

Not that the Democrats seem to be doing any better. Now that they control congress, have they set out to deal with any of the really serious problems the nation faces? No, they seem to be primarily bent on scoring cheap points against the President by passing liberal bills they know he won’t sign. In 2008 the Democrats are likely to offer us Hillery Clinton, who would make an outstanding Mafia boss, or Barak Obama, whose obvious glamour and appeal seems to mask an almost complete lack of substance. The only ray of hope I see on the Democratic side is perhaps John Edwards, who at least is willing to offer substantive proposals. But of course his opponents will bludgeon him with this honesty in the primaries, so he probably won’t get the nomination.

I fear it will be one of those election in which I would like to check the “none of the above” box.

TV con games

I was flipping TV channels the other day in hopes there was something on worth watching (there seldom is), and I happened across one of those ubiquitous Christian televangelists, so I watched him for a few minutes. I won’t mention his name, but there are a good many of them, and perhaps you have seen some as well.

It occurred to me that if he had been pitching anything other than religion, the FCC would have taken him off the air and the local district attorney would be charging him as a confidence man. He was milking the TV audience hard for donations, promising all sorts of benefits in return (God will bless you and make you prosperous and exalt you among the angels and …..) which he was clearly in no position to deliver.

Meanwhile, all sorts of little old ladies probably send him more than they can afford, since he clearly does well by it. He is wearing expensive clothes and has surrounded himself on stage with expensive, if thoroughly tasteless, furniture. And apparently, from one reference he made, he drives a stretch white Hummer given to him by his grateful followers. What a con man!

Why do we give religions a free pass on this sort of confidence game? If he were pushing any other product in this way, we would arrest him. But because it is religion, we accept it. This just doesn’t make sense!

The appalling state of middle school science education

One of my granddaughters is already being home schooled, and my other granddaughter is starting home schooling next year, both for the same reason – the public school classes just move too slowly for bright kids, and are forced to focus too much on No Child Left Behind test preparation, and crowd control, and trying (unsuccessfully) to “mainstream” special needs students, at the expense of meaningful education. Middle school, grades 7-9, is a critical period in a child’s education, and to waste that critical educational window of opportunity because of poor schools is unforgivable.

I have agreed to mentor my Virginia granddaughter with her 8^th grade science (mostly remotely, by web videoconference). So I have spent some time over the past few days looking at materials and curricula for this grade level. And I am appalled at what I find!

First of all, for the three or four states I have examined, the state standards that guide schools are uniformly meaningless, true bureaucratic products apparently produced by people who understand neither science nor the educational needs of middle school students. A mile wide and an inch deep – covering 50-60 unrelated topics and focused on cramming in science factoids and vocabulary (because they are easy to test), rather than teaching children how to reason, evaluate evidence, draw inferences, and other truly useful skills.

Then there are the mass market textbooks, produced on contract by multiple authors, many (most?) of whom are neither scientists nor middle school teachers, and then edited into a common style by an editor who often knows little or nothing about science, and dressed up with vacuous and irrelevant pictures and sidebars to make it “more interesting”. Some claim an impressive array of scientists as authors, but in a number of cases these scientists have had little to do with the work and have been surprised to find themselves listed as authors. Yes, it turns out this really is the way publishers produce most middle school science texts, and as a result they are riddled with errors and misconceptions and confusions, all dutifully recycled from one edition to the next, and one generation of student to the next.

And then there are the middle school science teachers, many of whom have never had even an undergraduate science class themselves, and who must rely on the textbook and curricula outlines to guide them through unfamiliar territory. No doubt they strive valiantly to teach their students, despite the bureaucratic morass that they have to work within, but the deck is stacked against them.

I have argued before that a nation’s future depends on how well it trains the next generation. Now that I have really looked at middle school science teaching, I fear for our nation. No wonder so many children lose interest in science by the time they reach high school. No wonder our graduate science programs are so heavily populated with foreigners. No wonder that a steadily increasing proportion of our good scientists and science entrepreneurs in places like Silicon Valley are foreign-born. No wonder the America public is so woefully ignorant of science and the scientific method, and so easily duped by religion-based claptrap like "creationism" and “young earth” beliefs.

Ancient engineers

People wonder how ancient civilizations could have built some of the wonders still around, like Stonehenge or the pyramids of Egypt or the laser-straight Roman irrigation tunnels that run for miles. That is because they confuse technological level with intelligence. The ancients had far less advanced technology, but they were just as smart as we are. Evolution simply hasn’t had enough time to significantly change our average intelligence level over the past few thousand years.

All it takes to build a perfectly vertical wall is a stone hung on a string to make a plumb bob. All it takes to build a precisely level base for something as large as a pyramid is to dig a connected trench all around it and fill it with water. All it takes to keep underground miners digging laser straight for miles is two candles at the ends of a stick one or two meters in length – as long as the miners keep the light from the two candles merged into one, they can drill a perfectly straight tunnel for miles. All it takes to move multi-ton stones are levers, rollers, ropes and enough manpower. All it takes to crack off huge blocks of stone in a quarry are a line of fires to heat the stone, and then cold water to make it crack along the heated line.

We should be careful about assuming that peoples, ancient or modern, who have less technology than we do are necessarily less intelligent. It isn’t so.

Protecting our daughters and granddaughters

All children need protection by their families as they grow through their young adolescence, but our young daughters and granddaughters need more protection because of the truly horrifying assaults they must endure in our culture. Adolescence is a vulnerable time for any child. It is the time when they are shaping their self-image and establishing in their own minds who they are and what sort of person they want to be.

In a truly rational culture this would occur in a loving, supportive family environment, with constant daily reminders to the child that they are OK. But in our culture it occurs among intensive advertising that drums into every young girl every day the message that, for women, beauty and youth and “sexiness” matter more than anything else. The models of perfect airbrushed beauty that they see every day in advertising and on TV and in movies set a standard that almost no human (including the models and actors themselves, without the fancy lighting, makeup, and computer improvements) could achieve, and as a result promote in many young girls a feeling of inadequacy that will blight the rest of their lives.

Look, for example, at the provocative clothes being pushed by merchandisers to girls as young as 9 or 10 – some of the outfits would be in bad taste on an adult porn star, and certainly are inappropriate for a pre-teen. Yet advertising, and then the peer pressure it creates, are driving massive sales for these kinds of outfits. In fact, as any mother already knows if they have been paying attention, it’s getting harder and harder to find age-appropriate clothes for young girls.

And then there is the destructive peer pressure at school and on the playground on all children, but especially on young girls, not to show too much brilliance or focus on education, lest they be labeled “nerds” and shunned. Nothing could be more effective at destroying the native curiosity and joy of learning that every young child starts with.

Nor is the danger only from the advertising and stereotypes of adults. In a phenomena seen repeatedly in the world, the oppressed often internalize their oppression and begin to oppress each other. Many women, and many young girls, have “bought into” these stereotypes, and as a consequence the abuse and pressure to conform from peers can be as bad and as destructive as any abuse from adults.

Parents (and grandparents) need to pay attention to this problem and be sure their young daughters and granddaughters are not being chewed up by the system. Some parents reason that their children ought to be “hardened” by experience to such assaults, on the grounds that that is the real world they will have to live in. I think that is defective logic. No one of any age is “helped” by abuse, but children especially are so easily damaged for life by such experiences.

Recommended: Beyond Iraq

I recommend Victor David Hanson's recent post Beyond Iraq. As usual, Hanson as a historian brings to his arguments a larger context than the typical evening news report. His point is that withdrawing from Iraq isn't going to make the Islamic terrorist problem go away. It was there well before 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it will still be with us for decades to come whether or not we withdraw from Iraq. So those who hope that a quick withdrawal from Iraq will see an end to our troubles are probably going to be disappointed.

Recommended: A History of Violence

I recommend Steven Pinker's recent essay A History of Violence. He dissects the myth that our present day culture has made us more violent than our distant ancestors. In fact, civilization has become less violent over time, though sometimess with one step backward for each two steps forward. But it is true that cruelties that were commonplace in earlier times are no longer acceptable these days, at least in the more advanced states of the Western world, and that is substantial progress.

The importance of outliers

In almost any natural distribution there is a “bell curve” - a central pile around the average and then a few outliers dribbling out at the high and low ends of the distribution - a few data points that are way out away from the great grouping around the average. For example, measure the height of 10,000 adult American males and most will pile up in the 5-6 foot range. But a small number will fall neared 4’6”, and an even smaller number will fall at 4’ or less. On the other end, there will be a small number at 6”6”, and a few out at 7’ or above. These are the outliers in the distribution.

I was thinking about this the other night when I read about a couple of scientists prominent in their own fields of study, though not in climate studies, who still don’t believe there is a global warming issue despite all the evidence. My first thought, of course, was to dismiss them on the grounds that there are always a few people at the fringes, no matter what the issue. I suppose if one looked hard enough one could still find people who believe the earth is flat, or that the earth is at the center of the universe and the sun and all the stars revolve around it.

But then I realized that outliers are important. Most of the time they are just plain wrong, and off the wall. But every now and then they are the voice of sanity when the rest of the crowd has gone off in the wrong direction.

In nature, mutations are always producing a few plants or animals that differ from the average in one way or another. Most of these mutations are not of any use, and many are in fact fatal. But every now and then they save the species. For example, some birds have timed their mating and hatching to occur just when the population of some species of insect is at its peak, so that there is a plentiful supply of food. A few birds every year get it wrong and their young hatch too early or too late, with a much lower chance of survival. But now that climates are warming the insect populations are peaking earlier, and the few outliers among the birds who hatch their young earlier are the salvation of that bird species, most of whom are now hatching their young too late for survival.

One of the dangerous things we have done with our food supply is to rely on monocultures – a few genetically uniform species of corn or wheat or rice planted throughout the country, even throughout the world. In the name of efficiency and high production, we have weeded out the outliers that might otherwise have saved our food supply when the next blight comes along.

So in the world of ideas I have developed an appreciation for the opinions of outliers, of people with unconventional, even unpopular, views. I usually don’t agree with them, and in fact many are off the wall and just plain wrong. But still, outliers of any sort are an important natural safety mechanism among humans as well as in nature, and we would be foolish indeed to eliminate them.