Now They Tell Me!

In the late 1970s, this blogger was laboring in the groves of academe in the Collegium Excellens and he was growing weary of teaching the same damn courses (the survey of U.S. history) semester in and semester out. Seeking a little variety, this blogger drank the Kool-Aid offfered up by Joseph E. Hill, a juco prexy in Michigan. So, this slogger (before he turned blogger) proceeded to administer the CSM (Cognitive Style Mapping) questionnaire all of his students. What a disaster! Student complaints of brainwashing and worse ensued. Ultimately, this blogger moved on to another minefield at the Collegium: distance learning. Now, there are revisionist claims that learning styles are irrelevant to student success. If this is (fair & balanced) deferred disillusionment, so be it.

[x Chronicle Review]
Matching Teaching Style To Learning Style May Not Help Students
By David Glenn

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almost average believe best better classroom colleagues concepts design education enjoy evidence experiment experimental failed groups hypothesis idea instruction instructors kinesthetic kolb laboratory lead learners learning learning-styles matching model mr paper particular pashler professor psychology published research sternberg strong students study styles taught teachers teaching test university used verbal work

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If you've ever sat through a teaching seminar, you've probably heard a lecture about "learning styles." Perhaps you were told that some students are visual learners, some are auditory learners, and others are kinesthetic learners. Or maybe you were given one of the dozens of other learning-style taxonomies that scholars and consultants have developed.

Almost certainly, you were told that your instruction should match your students' styles. For example, kinesthetic learners—students who learn best through hands-on activities—are said to do better in classes that feature plenty of experiments, while verbal learners are said to do worse.

Now four psychologists argue that you were told wrong. There is no strong scientific evidence to support the "matching" idea, they contend in a paper published this week in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. And there is absolutely no reason for professors to adopt it in the classroom.

"We were startled to find that there is so much research published on learning styles, but that so little of the research used experimental designs that had the potential to provide decisive evidence," says Harold E. Pashler, a professor of psychology at the University of California at San Diego and the paper's lead author.

"Lots of people are selling tests and programs for customizing education that completely lack the kind of experimental evidence that you would expect for a drug," Mr. Pashler says. "Now maybe the FDA model isn't always appropriate for education—but that's a conversation we need to have."

Advocates of learning styles respond that Mr. Pashler is the one who lacks evidence. Robert J. Sternberg, dean of arts and sciences at Tufts University and a psychologist who has done a lot of work on learning styles, says in an e-mail message to The Chronicle that the researchers did not fully survey the scholarly literature, and thus "come across looking either biased about or largely ignorant of the field."

Mr. Pashler's study does not dispute the existence of learning styles. But it asserts that no one has ever proved that any particular style of instruction simultaneously helps students who have one learning style while also harming students who have a different learning style.

Of the hundreds of research papers that have been published on learning styles, Mr. Pashler says, almost none have randomly assigned students into one classroom type or another. Only that kind of experiment, he says, can suggest anything definitive about causation. And the few studies that have used an adequate research design, he adds, have mostly failed to support the hypothesis that teaching styles should match students' learning styles.

More Alike Than Different

Consider an experiment about teaching the structure of complex molecules. The matching hypothesis might predict that kinesthetic learners would absorb the concept best by building ball-and-stick models in the lab, while verbal learners would do better by reading a few pages about the logic of molecular design.

That sounds intuitive. But according to Mr. Pashler and his co-authors, almost every well-designed study of that type has discovered that one instructional style actually works best for both groups.

What happens, Mr. Pashler says, is something like this: Experimenters randomly assign students to a classroom that uses laboratory lessons or to a classroom that uses texts. At the end of the week, students are tested on their knowledge of molecular structures.

Among the students who are taught in a hands-on laboratory setting, it turns out that the kinesthetic learners enjoy their lessons much more than their verbal peers do. They also perform better on the test at the end of the week. Let's say that the kinesthetic students average a 95 on the test, while the verbal students' average is 80.

That might seem like strong evidence for the learning-styles hypothesis. Not so fast, Mr. Pashler says.

Look at the second classroom, where students learn about molecules by reading texts. Here, the verbal students enjoy the lessons much more than their kinesthetic peers do. But on the test, both the verbal and kinesthetic students average around 70. The verbal students are actually better off learning this concept in a laboratory, even though they enjoy it less.

In almost every actual well-designed study, Mr. Pashler and his colleagues write in their paper, "Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence," the pattern is similar: For a given lesson, one instructional technique turns out to be optimal for all groups of students, even though students with certain learning styles may not love that technique.

Matching Style With Content

What this means for instructors, Mr. Pashler says, is that they should not waste any time or energy trying to determine the composition of learning styles in their classrooms. (Are 50 percent of my students visual learners? Are 20 percent of them kinesthetic learners?)

Instead, teachers should worry about matching their instruction to the content they are teaching. Some concepts are best taught through hands-on work, some are best taught through lectures, and some are best taught through group discussions.

If the matching hypothesis is not well supported, then why do so many learning-styles studies show positive effects? Hundreds of studies that do not meet Mr. Pashler's stringent criteria for experimental design suggest—at least loosely—that students do better when instructors are trained in learning-styles theory.

One possibility is that the mere act of learning about learning styles prompts teachers to pay more attention to the kinds of instruction they are delivering. An instructor who attends a learning-styles seminar might start to offer a broader mixture of lectures, discussions, and laboratory work—and that variety of instruction might turn out to be better for all students, irrespective of any "matching."

"Even though the learning-style idea might not work," says Richard E. Mayer, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "it might encourage teachers to think about how their students learn and what would be the best instructional methods for a particular lesson."

In other words, learning-styles seminars might be effective, but not for the reasons that their designers believe.

Mr. Mayer helped lead a study six years ago that failed to find any relationship between instructional styles and the performance of "verbalizer" and "visualizer" students. He believes that Mr. Pashler and his colleagues have done strong work in debunking the matching hypothesis.

Bibliography Is Faulted

But not everyone is impressed by the new paper. Mr. Sternberg of Tufts (and a former longtime professor of psychology at Yale University), says in his e-mail message that while he holds Mr. Pashler and his colleagues in high esteem, he believes they did a poor job here.

Several of the most-cited researchers on learning styles, Mr. Sternberg points out, do not appear in the paper's bibliography. "The authors draw negative conclusions about a field they fail adequately to review," Mr. Sternberg says.

Mr. Sternberg and several colleagues have worked intensively on models of learning styles for more than a decade. In 1999, he and three co-authors published a paper in the European Journal of Psychological Assessment that found that students who were strongly oriented toward "analytical," "creative," or "practical" intelligence did better if they were taught by instructors who matched their strength. (In their paper, Mr. Pashler and his colleagues cite Mr. Sternberg's 1999 study as the only well-designed experiment to have found such a pattern—though they add that the study "has peculiar features that make us view it as providing only tenuous evidence.")

Susan M. Rundle, a learning-styles consultant who is working with instructors at Alabama A&M University, also says that the research base is much stronger than Mr. Pashler and his colleagues believe. And she adds that the paper's focus on the "matching hypothesis" is somewhat beside the point.

"In my work in higher education, I've found that it's difficult to get professors to match their instruction to their students," says Ms. Rundle, who is president of Performance Concepts International, which promotes a learning-styles model developed by Kenneth J. Dunn, a professor of education at City University of New York's Queens College, and the late Rita Dunn, who taught for many years at St. John's University, in Queens.

"What we do try to get professors to do," Ms. Rundle says, "and where we've been successful, is to become aware of their own learning style and how that affects the way they teach. What are some things that they can do in the classroom other than just lecturing?"

The Trouble With Tracking

The grandfather of this territory is David A. Kolb, a professor of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University, who began to study learning styles in the late 1960s. In an interview, Mr. Kolb agrees with Mr. Sternberg that Mr. Pashler's review of the literature seems too thin.

But Mr. Kolb also says that the paper's bottom line is probably correct: There is no strong evidence that teachers should tailor their instruction to their students' particular learning styles. (Mr. Kolb has argued for many years that college students are better off if they choose a major that fits their learning style. But his advice to teachers is that they should lead their classes through a full "learning cycle," without regard to their students' particular styles.)

"Matching is not a particularly good idea," Mr. Kolb says. "The paper correctly mentions the practical and ethical problems of sorting people into groups and labeling them. Tracking in education has a bad history."

Mr. Pashler, for his part, says that he and his colleagues are still open to the idea that some kinds of matching are actually effective. "Most of what we're pointing to in this paper is an absence of evidence," he says. "Here's what you have to show—and they aren't showing it. But there may yet be better studies in the future."

[David Glenn, who joined The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2002, has covered college teaching since April 2009. Before arriving at The Chronicle, Glenn was an editor at Dissent magazine and a freelance writer in New York, Milwaukee, and Northern California. His writing has appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Lingua Franca, The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review. Glenn earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Oberlin College.

Harold E. Pashler is a professor of psychology at the University of California at San Diego and his co-authors are Mark McDaniel, a professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis; Doug Rohrer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of South Florida; and Robert A. Bjork, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles.]

Copyright © 2009 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Empty Promises In The Lunchroom

Nearly one year ago, this blog featured an article by Joshuah Bearman. Now Bearman returns with an easy-to-understand parable of the Masters of the Universe who almost destroyed the world economy in 2008. Forget derivatives! Forget credit default swaps! You can have the cake of your dreams for a bag of Doritos! If this is (fair & balanced) drollery, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
My Half-Baked Bubble
By Joshuah Bearman

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bake became believe best bubble buy cafeteria cake chocolate chunky classmates couldn dad economy empty eventually everyone fantastic figured floor fruit give growing investors keeper krispies ledger lunch lunchroom market mom numbers people pieces promises record rice sardines share spencer table thought told top trading trapper turned wanted wrong zero

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“Sardines are better than candy,” my father said. “They’re oily, but nutritious!” Easy for him to say. I was 8 and had just moved to a new, fancier school. The socioeconomic shift was most apparent to me in the cafeteria, where there was a wide disparity between my lunch and everyone else’s. Ours was a Spartan household: no chocolate, cookies or extraneous sugar. For us, Rice Krispies cereal was supposed to be some kind of special indulgence.

My childhood happened to coincide with that historic moment in the early ’80s when the full ingenuity of modern science was brought to bear on lunch snacks. Fruit roll-ups had just hit the scene. Capri Sun was like quicksilver-cocooned astronaut juice with a cool dagger straw. Chocolate pudding came in palm-sized cups!

My dad was a physicist, so I thought he should know the formula for turning our flavorless Rice Krispies into Rice Krispie treats. And yet he packed me the same lunch day after day: one peanut butter and jelly sandwich, one apple, one box of raisins. When I complained, he solved the problem (and taught me a lesson) by giving me sardines instead. As if that was an upgrade.

So I became the weird kid in the corner, opening a tin of sardines, like a hobo — when I managed not to lose the key, that is. “Stick with sardines,” my dad said. “Cheap sweets are empty promises.”

But they didn’t seem so empty to me. Every day at lunchtime the cafeteria turned into an informal marketplace. My classmates laid out their wares on one of the big tables, displaying a panoply of forbidden processed delights. While I was busy trying to open my indestructible sardine can with a sharp rock, a brisk trading economy was under way.

“I am so bored with my Chunky,” a luckier boy would say, considering the options before him. “Maybe I’ll give Mr. E. L. Fudge a try!” And with a quick swap, the deal was done.

I must admit, it was a fairly efficient market. Everyone got what he wanted. Except for me. My sardines had zero value as trading currency. With no way into this economy, I had to watch from the sidelines.

Until one day, out of the depths of my isolation, I developed what you might call a creative business prospectus.

I’m not sure how I came up with this idea, but what I told my classmates was this: my mom is an expert baker, and at the end of the year she always bakes this incredible cake, the best cake ever, for me and my best friends at school. It’s coming, this wonderful cake. Can you picture it in your mind? It will be a great day. But in the meantime, I said, I will let you in on this special opportunity! If you give me, say, your Cheetos now, you can stake a claim on this fantastic pending cake. Like a deposit. One Hostess cupcake equals one share.

Just like that, I became a market maker, peddling delicious cake futures.

And people were buying! First came a round of vanguard investors. Then others followed, figuring they had to get in on the ground floor with this cake deal. From there it went wide. My table in the lunchroom became the hot new trading floor. The bell would ring and my classmates would line up with their items, eager to buy in.

At the beginning, of course, I figured I could really persuade my mom to bake such a cake, and so I’d dutifully record all the trading “transactions” in my Trapper Keeper. Twinkie = one piece of cake. Chunky = half-a-piece. Fruit roll-up = two pieces. Watermelon-flavored Jolly Rancher?! I don’t even want that. Zero pieces! I was setting the terms! It was like a dream come true.

Soon enough, however, the market was spiraling out of control. I started allowing customized cake shares. My Trapper Keeper ledger kept growing, and getting more complicated. The records described a wildly fantastic cake: hundreds of layers, rising to the heavens in all different flavors — chocolate mousse on top of meringue on top of half angel food and half red velvet. I was drunk with power, the creator of a bizarre lunchroom derivatives bubble.

Had anyone thought about it, it would have been clear that my mother, no matter how skilled a baker, could not fulfill my debts. But no one thought about it. We were all in too deep. I had to let the ledger keep growing.

The thing was, we all wanted to believe in this cake. For my investors, it was pragmatic: people were already into this cake for, like, 14 bags of Doritos, and they couldn’t just walk away from the whole idea. So they kept pouring more Doritos in and hoping for the best. Even I sort of believed in it — and I could see the numbers. I too was deluded, imagining the hero’s welcome I would receive when my mom and I eventually wheeled this amalgamated baked colossus into the schoolyard. I couldn’t face the truth.

This was the mutually reinforcing psychology that allowed the cake futures market to continue. Just like the Dutch tulip mania. Or the South Sea Bubble. Or the American housing market. We were trafficking in dreams. Is there anything wrong with that?

The answer, as we all know, is yes — there is something wrong with that. Like all bubbles, mine couldn’t last forever. Eventually, someone was going to blow the whistle.

Spencer. Spencer was both good at math and jealous; he’d always done well by the original cafeteria economy. Since everyone had been lured over to the fancy new derivatives guy, the old trading table had sat empty, and it was Spencer, Mr. Fundamentals, who did a back-of-the-napkin calculation to demonstrate how irrational our exuberance was. If you look at the numbers, he pointed out, my cake would defy the laws of physics.

At first no one wanted to believe him. If Spencer wants to be left out of the glorious new cake era, everyone thought, then, hey, fine by us. But then Spencer won a few people over with his sober analysis. And then a few more. And just as quickly as confidence in the cake was built, it eroded. We crossed the crash threshold and, overnight, belief in the cake evaporated. My classmates knew that the ledger was a sham, and they were not getting their investments back. The Fritos, Nutter Butters, Hostess pies — they were all gone, good snacks after bad.

The bigger the bubble, the harder the fall. I was an outsider before, but now I was a pariah. The old snack economy quietly rebuilt itself, and I was back to knocking my sardine can against the monkey bars out in the playground.

When my dad found out about my mischief, I got a lecture. It was one big “I told you so,” because, well, he had told me so. “Stick with the sardines,” he’d said. “Cheap sweets are empty promises.” Ω

[Joshuah Bearman is an editor and writer at the LA Weekly. He is also a contributor to McSweeney's and the Believer, both publications of unusual design and literary note. He has spent way too much time writing on such varied topics as the Presidential election, treasure hunting, and Mr. Winkle
the celebrity dog. Joshuah recently compiled an entire volume of writing on the Yeti, due out in September. He was also the first American journalist to blow the lid off the story of the Great Gerbil invasion of Xinjiang last year. He lives in a cave in Los Angeles.]

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It Takes One To Know One?

The Great Wikipedia tells us

Pointy-Haired Boss

The manager of Dilbert and the other engineers, and the main antagonist of the strip; his real name is never mentioned. In earlier strips the Boss was depicted as a stereotypical late-middle-aged balding middle manager; it was not until later that he developed his signature "pointy hair". He is hopelessly incompetent at management and is very bombastic. He does not understand technical issues but always tries to disguise this, usually by using buzzwords he also does not understand. The Boss treats his employees alternately with disdain or neglect; he is narcissistic, using them to his own ends regardless of the consequences to them. Adams himself wrote that "He's not sadistic, just uncaring." The Boss's level of intelligence varies from near-vegetative to perceptive and clever, depending on the strip's comic needs. His utter lack of ethics, however, is perfectly consistent. According to Adams, the pointy hair is intended to remind one of devil's horns.

Scott Adams created "Dilbert" in 1989. ("Dilbert" appears in 2000 newspapers worldwide in 65 countries and 25 languages.) Scott Adams received a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Hartwick College and later studied economics and management for his MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Adams was employed at Pacific Bell when he began to draw "Dilbert." It is no small irony that the only POTUS in the history of the Land O'The Free and the Home O'The Brave in possession of an MBA degree was The Dubster (hisself) — George W. Bush (MBA, Harvard, 1975). If this is a (fair & balanced) indictment of a confederacy of dunces, so be it.

[x TNR]
Upper Mismanagement
By Noam Scheiber

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assets began boom bottom business company competitive conglomerate consulting corporate curriculum decades economic finance financial general gm goal graduates hard harvard important industrial innovated invest khurana managers manufacturing mostly operations order people point problem process produced production rather re recent ron schools seat sector shows students tended top toyota world

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One of the themes that came up while I was profiling White House manufacturing czar Ron Bloom earlier this fall was managerial talent. A lot of people talk about reviving the domestic manufacturing sector, which has shed almost one-third of its manpower over the last eight years. But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them?

It’s not obvious that you would. Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that’s the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background. (Outgoing GM CEO Fritz Henderson and his failed predecessor, Rick Wagoner, both worked their way up from the company’s vaunted Treasurer’s office.) But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.”

How did we get to this point? In some sense, it’s the result of broad historical and economic forces. Up until World War I, the archetypal manufacturing CEO was production oriented—usually an engineer or inventor of some kind. Even as late as the 1930s, business school curriculums focused mostly on production. Khurana notes that many schools during this era had mini-factories on campus to train future managers.

After World War II, large corporations went on acquisition binges and turned themselves into massive conglomerates. In their landmark Harvard Business Review article from 1980, “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline,” Robert Hayes and William Abernathy pointed out that the conglomerate structure forced managers to think of their firms as a collection of financial assets, where the goal was to allocate capital efficiently, rather than as makers of specific products, where the goal was to maximize quality and market share.

By the 1980s, the conglomerate boom was reversing itself. Investors began seizing control of overgrown public companies and breaking them up. But this task was, if anything, even more dependent on fluency in financial abstractions. The leveraged-buyout boom produced a whole generation of finance tycoons—the Michael Milkens of the world—whose ability to value corporate assets was far more important than their ability to run them.

The new managerial class tended to neglect process innovation because it was hard to justify in a quarterly earnings report, where metrics like “return on investment” reigned supreme. “In an era of management by the numbers, many American managers … are reluctant to invest heavily in the development of new manufacturing processes,” Hayes and Abernathy wrote. “Many of them have effectively forsworn long-term technological superiority as a competitive weapon.” By contrast, European and Japanese manufacturers, who lived and died on the strength of their exports, innovated relentlessly. One of Toyota’s most revolutionary production techniques is to locate suppliers inside its own factories. The New York Times’ Jon Gertner recently visited a Toyota plant and reported that the company doesn’t actually order a seat for a new truck until the chassis hits the assembly line, at which point the seat is promptly built on-site and installed. “If the front seat had not been ordered 85 minutes earlier, it would not exist,” Gertner observed. Alas, these aren’t the kinds of money-saving breakthroughs the GM brain trust has ever excelled at.

The country’s business schools tended to reflect and reinforce these trends. By the late 1970s, top business schools began admitting much higher-caliber students than they had in previous decades. This might seem like a good thing. The problem is that these students tended to be overachiever types motivated primarily by salary rather than some lifelong ambition to run a steel mill. And there was a lot more money to be made in finance than manufacturing. A recent paper by economists Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef shows that compensation in the finance sector began a sharp, upward trajectory around 1980.

The business schools had their own incentives to channel students into high-paying fields like finance, thanks to the rising importance of school rankings, which heavily weighted starting salaries. The career offices at places like Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago institutionalized the process—for example, by making it easier for Wall Street outfits and consulting firms to recruit on campus. A recent Harvard Business School case study about General Electric shows that the company had so much trouble competing for MBAs that it decided to woo top graduates from non-elite schools rather than settle for elite-school graduates in the bottom half or bottom quarter of their classes.

No surprise then that, over time, the faculty and curriculum at the Harvards and Stanfords of the world began to evolve. “If you look at the distribution of faculty at leading business schools,” says Khurana, “they’re mostly in finance.... Business schools are responsive to changes in the external environment.” Which meant that, even if a student aspired to become a top operations man (or woman) at a big industrial company, the infrastructure to teach him didn’t really exist.

In fairness, all that financial expertise we’ve been churning out hasn’t been a complete waste (much as it may seem that way today). Many of the financial restructurings of the ‘80s and ‘90s made the economy more efficient and competitive. Likewise, it would be ludicrous to suggest that simply changing the culture of business schools would single-handedly revive U.S. manufacturing. As I explained in the Ron Bloom piece, that sector faces a variety of challenges, not least the mercantilist industrial policies of our foreign competitors.

On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that American manufacturing has a chance of recovering unless business schools start producing people who can run industrial companies, not just buy and sell their assets. And we’re pretty far away from that point today. Ω

[Noam Scheiber is a senior editor of The New Republic. He is a Truman Scholar and his MA (economics) is from Oxford University and his BA is from Tulane University (mathematics). However, he does not possess an MBA. Scheiber has contributed to numerous other news sources including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CNBC and National Public Radio.]

Copyright © 2009 The New Republic

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Welcome To Lake Gonbewo, Where All Children Are Below Average?

Professor Thomas Hazlett poses a difficult question: spend billions on broadband expansion or spend billions on improving infant mortality rates? What's a poor country to do? If this is a (fair & balanced) Morton's Fork, so be it.

[x Commentary]
We're Number Two?
By Thomas W. Hazlett

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15th access act america behind broadband communications competition countries cuba data deaths dsl economist falling generally global government higher household infant infant-mortality interests international internet korea million mortality networks oecd per percent policy president providers public race rankings rate re reduce regulated south states statistic survey system united university world

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At a swanky American resort in the summer of 2008, an elite policy discussion was underway, and the message could not have been more stark. The U.S. has fallen behind in the global broadband race and is now falling further behind. We are sinking to Third World status. Surely, the government must act.

This frightening but familiar refrain was being warbled almost by rote when the room was startled by an interloper. A Brit, heretofore silent, broke in: “I am extraordinarily fascinated by this discussion, which mirrors what we say about our broadband in England.” In a flash, the Brit’s comment crystallized the fact that we in the developed democracies now live in a reverse Lake Wobegon. Instead of believing that all the children are above average, we now believe that we’re all falling behind.

Asserting the desperation of America’s international position has long been a useful tool in political debate. This kind of global-ranking panic works splendidly even when false, as it was when Senator John F. Kennedy warned about the supposed missile gap in his successful 1960 campaign for president. Kennedy chastised the Eisenhower-Nixon administration for “losing the satellite-missile race with the Soviet Union because of... complacent miscalculations, penny-pinching, budget cutbacks, incredibly confused mismanagement, and wasteful rivalries and jealousies.” The handy statistic—No. 2 in a two-superpower world—packs punch. It is today the rhetorical weapon of choice by proponents of health-care reform or broadband regulation.

When the U.S. can’t even boast the download speeds of Estonia or keep up with Hungary in (reducing) infant mortality, how can we look ourselves in the collective mirror? Our system is failing.

Perhaps it is. But accurate diagnosis is the key to treatment. In the policy world, such statistical flashes can generate more heat than light. Often, the proffered ranking is a spurious correlation, also known as lying with statistics.

_____________

In an October 2008 report, the Center for Disease Control placed the U.S. 29th in infant mortality, tied with Slovakia and Poland, and trailing Hungary and Cuba. That stunning outcome was quickly seized: the U.S. health-care system needs to be more like the government-run systems in those lands.

Proponents of that view often shift into one-on-one comparisons of Canada and America. Canada, with mandatory public health insurance, experiences 5.3 deaths per 1,000 births; the U.S., with private insurance for most, sees 6.9 deaths, a rate 30 percent higher. This outcome is then attributed to cross-country differences in the health-care systems. “Canadian Health Care, Even With Queues, Bests U.S.,” writes Pat Wechsler for Bloomberg.com, citing infant mortality as 34 percent higher in the United States.

But infant-mortality differences can and should be explained by the American proportion of teenage mothers, which runs here at three times the Canadian rate. These pregnancies are less healthy, producing more premature, low-birth-weight babies. Within each birth-mother age category, the U.S. has generally equal or better infant survival, as a 2007 National Bureau of Economic Research paper by economists June and David O’Neill details. The problem of infant mortality remains. It should surely be reduced in the U.S., and serious measures should be undertaken to accomplish this. But the factors that cause it—adolescent pregnancies, drug abuse, smoking, drinking, and obesity—are probably not going to be fixed by changes in health insurance, public or private.

Focusing on the healthcare system requires nuance that, for those happily touting summary statistics, is not worth the stress. Michael Moore’s documentary "Sicko" revels in rankings that place Cuba ahead of America in the infant-mortality race. Indeed, in 2008 Cuba claimed an infant-mortality rate of 5.8 deaths per 1,000 births against the U.S. rate of 6.9. Setting aside questions as to which deaths count in the infant-mortality statistic—U.S. medicine makes extraordinary attempts to save low-birth-weight babies that would otherwise be deemed miscarriages—and the far higher mortality of birthing mothers in Cuba, just one adjustment is provocative: the rate for Cubans living in the U.S. is 4.2. Holding culture constant, the U.S. outranks Cuba.

That may not be much of a boast, but political opportunists and newspaper headlines trumpet just the reverse story. Alas, our PowerPoint Generation gravitates to bullet points and two-dimensional bar charts, even as we stumble our way through this multidimensional universe. CliffsNotes science drives crises where none exist and misses those that truly loom.

_____________

Virtually any social sphere is ripe for exploitation. Take the Nobel Prize race, a highly visible global competition for supremacy in the sciences (and, if you like, literature and peace too). The U.S. is utterly dominant in this rivalry, amassing some 320 medals of the 768 awarded through 2008. No other country has 35 percent as many.

But that doesn’t mean that the rankings cannot be used to punish the U.S. For, you see, when one uses per capita totals as the benchmark, the U.S. lags badly. We’re barely holding on to the 10th spot, and, as George W. Bush said about our broadband ranking in 2004, “that’s 10 places too low.” Not even Barack Obama’s sensational rookie season playing for the Stockholm Peace Prizers will reverse that.


It would be absurd to posit an emergency here; the U.S. is a magnet for scholars from all over the planet, drawn to our excellent universities and research communities. (By my reckoning, we boast 10 of the top 12 universities in the world.) But rankings not dissimilar are bludgeoning the U.S. in the “global broadband race.”

_____________

The latest “we’re falling behind” hysteria involves high-speed access to the Internet. The essential argument seems to be that without universal access to its wonders, America’s schoolchildren will not receive the education they need and deserve—and therefore the United States in the 21st century will, yes, fall behind. The argument would be ludicrous if it weren’t for the fact that colossal amounts of public money are certain to be poured into it to solve a crisis that doesn’t exist.

The $787 billion “stimulus” package contains a $7.2 billion nugget to boost broadband (cable-modem, DSL, and 3G wireless) networks. As Obama said when unveiling the package:

We will create millions of new jobs. . . .  We will also renew our Information Superhighway. It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online. And they’ll get that chance when I’m president, because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world.

The “broadband stimulus” is an act of budgetary triage that ultimately supplies a mere placebo for a purported global-ranking emergency. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), placing the U.S. at 15th in the world, tolls the crisis bell. Activists and interests hear their call. America trails Iceland? Do something!

There is no lack of ready advice, most of it perverse. But start with this: the OECD rankings are dubious. Better evidence is easily found. Taking broadband subscriptions across countries supplied for the first quarter of 2009 by the respected UK consultancy firm Point Topic, population from the CIA World Factbook, and household size from a United Nations database, one places the five wealthy large economies in this order:

The reasons for this rankings comeback? I focused on large economies similar to our own and on subscriptions per 100 households. This reflects the reality that the key issue is access to broadband and that members of a connected household all have access. Curiously, the OECD data focus on subscriptions per 100 persons. That means that if an 18-year-old college student leaves mom and dad at home to move alone into another broadband-connected apartment, the broadband penetration rate (among these three persons) then doubles from 33 percent to 67 percent. This gimmickry fails to reflect that there is zero change in broadband availability or usage.

More generally, this approach docks countries with larger family sizes (the U.S. and Japan, for example). That’s how the OECD knocks the U.S. to 15th, when its “household” rank is, according to Federal Communications Commission economist Scott Wallsten, between eighth and 10th using the very same data. And, among the five wealthy countries, it’s effectively tied for first with Japan.

Interested parties—from CEOs seeking special favors to political operatives seeking new government powers—howl in a cacophonous chorus each time the U.S. slips a notch. And when the U.S. actually held its ground (15th) in the OECD’s 2008 rankings, moving past Japan, nary a positive peep was heard. Indeed, President Obama simply switched surveys to obtain further slippage to justify his claim that America was falling further behind. In December 2008, the U.S. was an embarrassment at No. 15. By February 2009, the president, abandoning the OECD ranking for another from Point Topic, ominously noted that we had fallen to an appalling No. 19—behind Estonia, the Isle of Man, and first-place Monaco.

On sophisticated, multidimensional surveys, the U.S. tends to rank much higher. Hence, the America-is-failing thesis receives no succor from the Economist e-Readiness Index, which in 2008 ranked the U.S. market as tops. The U.S. also ranks at the top of the Business Software Alliance’s international IT ranking, highly in the World Economic Forum’s Networked Readiness Index (third in 2008-09, following Sweden and Denmark), and first in the University of Calgary’s Connectivity Index (2009).

What such rankings tend to miss, however, are the subtle deregulatory changes that help propel markets. It is simply forgotten that French and Japanese networks languished early in the WWW era, even as France’s government-owned telecom operator pushed its own top-down failure, Minitel. During this period, the U.S. chose to privatize government-held data networks and permit unregulated commercial exploitation, thus unleashing competitive Internet service providers, browserware, and the birth of the mass-market “network of networks.”

Unconstrained U.S. cable-TV operators then pioneered innovations in residential broadband. DSL growth in America surged next when it, too, was deregulated. In a December 2008 study, Anil Caliskan and I show that by year-end 2006, there were 25 million DSL households, some 10 million more than predicted by the regulated pre-2003 trend. Unregulation worked, and then deregulation worked even better. Properly interpreted, the international experience strongly supports this path.

South Korea has long impressed as a broadband leader. The OECD correctly explains the “Korean miracle” as the result not of government regulation but of “vigorous infrastructure competition with multiple independent DSL networks competing against cable networks.” This verdict—from the OECD’s first global-broadband ranking, issued in October 2001—noted that South Korea featured easily the highest use of broadband (in subscribers per 100 population). “The main factor that sets Korea apart,” said the report, “is the high level of competition between different infrastructure providers.” That this has been the approach of other countries, such as Canada, the U.S., and Sweden—all relatively successful in encouraging broadband build-outs—undermines the reflex regulatory call issued in response to more recent OECD rankings.

The U.S. has its share of policy blunders. Our affection for so-called “unbundling”—a policy to separate out the pricing of goods and services even if they are being provided through the same means by the same provider—which was pushed by regulators after the 1996 Telecommunications Act, was a boon to the communications bar but squandered competitive opportunities for everyone else. Unbundling was, mercifully, put out of its misery by a U.S. Circuit Court ruling in 2004. Following that decision, cable phone service popped up, with the result that more than 90 million households now have a choice between two fixed-line operators. With the mobile-phone-market take-off, new, competitive communications networks are rapidly making fixed lines themselves relics.

The federal government, focused on our allegedly slipping broadband rank, is now determined to do the opposite in relation to broadband. The policy of “net neutrality,” advocated by the new head of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, is designed to give the government the power to decide which forms of network management to allow and which to bar. This is hostile to investors’ interests and will reduce their capital outlays—which is to say, the rate at which bandwidth grows. This, in turn, is hostile to users’ interests. Somehow this is to protect the broadband Internet, where we are seen to be falling behind South Korea—a country without net-neutrality rules.

_____________

A well-crafted competition can yield great insight. Financial analysts compare company debt ratios and learn a lot about balance sheets. But an ill-crafted rivalry can obscure rather than illuminate.

Lyndon Johnson’s famous metaphor on affirmative action comes to mind: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” The value of the metaphor is its kernel of truth: a profound injury inflicted does not heal the instant a balm is applied.

But life is not a race, and no Handicapper General can rig our lanes for an equidistant dash to the finish. Indeed, if there is a Start or a Finish, none of us (it is to be hoped) will be there to experience it. The government’s tools can only make ad hoc interventions into the most complicated social relations. These can easily do more harm than good, robbing its liberated citizens of the chance to decide their own fate while discriminating indiscriminately. Can there be any clearer proof of this than the sorry state of quotas four decades on, not to mention the realization that if the government had simply succeeded in generally improving public education, those whom President Johnson had intended to favor would have benefited far more?

But the race has power of its own. Earlier this month, the UK—which took an ax to British Telecom, severing its local phone lines so as to create a heavily regulated platform (OpenReach) to host rival Internet service providers—was found to be floundering. According to an international survey analyzing 24 million data downloads for speed and quality, Oxford University’s Said School of Business found England in 25th place of 66 countries evaluated, badly trailing the U.S. The grim conclusion: “Study finds UK broadband lagging behind.”

As we drown in Lake Wobegon, the rankings collide. What justification is there for throwing public money after a higher broadband penetration rate when these subsidies could be used to improve, say, America’s infant-mortality rate? The answer is supplied by New York University economist Michael Katz, a former Clinton FCC official who has sharply criticized the “broadband stimulus.” At a forum earlier this year, Katz observed: “There are a lot higher social value programs we could be doing.” All we need now is a global survey that proves U.S. policymakers are 56th in the world in choosing the right race to the bottom to use as justification that their country is sinking fast. Ω

[Thomas W. Hazlett is professor of law and economics at George Mason University School of Law and director of its Information Economy Project. In 1991-92, he served as chief economist of the Federal Communications Commission. Hazlett received his PhD in Economics from UCLA and has held faculty positions at the University of California-Davis, Columbia University, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.]

Copyright © 2009 Commentary

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Roll Over, Theodor!

The Great Wikipedia tells us:

Theodor Seuss Geisel (pronounced /ˈɡaɪzəl/; March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) was an American writer and cartoonist most widely known for his children's books written under the pen name Dr. Seuss. He published over 60 children's books, which were often characterized by imaginative characters, rhyme, and frequent use of trisyllabic meter. His most celebrated books include the bestselling Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Numerous adaptations of his work have been created, including eleven television specials, three feature films, and a Broadway musical.

If this is a (fair & balanced) editorial call for torches and pitchforks, so be it.

[x Boulder Fishwrap]
The Fat Cat In The Hat
By John Sherffius

Click on image to enlarge. Ω

[John Sherffius began drawing editorial cartoons for the Daily Bruin, the campus newspaper at UCLA. After two years of working as a freelance artist, after graduation, he was hired by the Ventura County Star in Southern California as a graphic artist and gradually worked his way into editorial cartooning for the paper. In 1998, he was hired by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as the newspaper's editorial cartoonist, a job he held until 2003 when he quit the paper over editorial differences. Sherffius bridled at editorial insistence that he tone down cartoons attacking Republicans. Sherffius then went to work for the Boulder Daily Camera where his cartoons appear regularly and are syndicated nationally by the Copley News Service. Sherffius won the 2008 Herblock Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

Copyright © 2009 John Sherffius/Boulder Daily Camera

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Latest Dance Craze In Colorado Springs & Kabul: Twisting The Separation of Church & State

WaterBoardBoy shows us why Osama bin Laden referred to U.S. military forces as "Crusaders." Watch the video clip below of a "Bible study" in Afghanistan; the video clip went viral on the Arab Street, thanks to Middle Eastern news network, Al Jazeera. So far, no member of the U.S. force in Afghanistan has been disciplined for violating General Order No. 1. Instead, we have U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan coaching soldiers how to violate the spirit of General Order No. 1 (prohibiting deployed service personnel from “proselytizing”) while maintaining plausible deniability. So, it's "Onward Christian Soldiers" while the flag-covered caskets keep returning to Dover AFB. If this is a (fair & balanced) fools' errand into the wilderness, so be it.

[x Vanity Fair]
In Defense Of Foxhole Atheists
By Christopher Hitchens

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academy afghanistan air armed base become bibles cadets captain certain chaplains christ christian church colonel colorado constitution death evangelical extremist force found freethinkers general god hasan hunt james jesus major means military muslim number order people percent proselytize public question quite religious services springs states talk told uniform united war

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One Monday in May, I was setting off from Washington to Colorado Springs, home of the United States Air Force Academy. I had kindly been invited by the academy’s “freethinkers association,” a loose-knit group of cadets and instructors who are without religious affiliation. As I was making ready to depart, and checking my e-mail, I found I had been sent a near-incredible video clip from the Al Jazeera network. It had been shot at Bagram Air Force Base last year, and it showed a borderline-hysterical address by one Lieutenant Colonel Gary Hensley, chief of the United States’ military chaplains in Afghanistan. He was telling his evangelical audience, all of them wearing uniforms supplied by the taxpayer, that as followers of Jesus Christ they had a collective responsibility “to be witnesses for him.” Heating up this theme, Lieutenant Colonel Hensley went on: “The Special Forces guys, they hunt men, basically. We do the same things, as Christians. We hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them in the kingdom. Right? That’s what we do, that’s our business.”

The comparison to the Special Forces would seem to suggest that the objects of this hunting and hounding are Afghans rather than Americans. But it’s difficult to be certain, and indeed I am invited to Colorado Springs partly because chaplains there have been known to employ taxpayer dollars to turn the hounds of heaven loose on their own students and fellow citizens. As the Bagram tape goes on, however, it becomes obvious that Afghans are the targets in this case. Stacks of Bibles are on display, in the Dari and Pashto tongues that are the main languages in Afghanistan. A certain Sergeant James Watt, a candidate for a military chaplaincy, is shown giving thanks for the work of his back-home church, which subscribed the dough. “I also want to praise God because my church collected some money to get Bibles for Afghanistan. They came and sent the money out,” he beamingly tells his Bible-study class. In another segment, those present show quite clearly that they understand they are in danger of violating General Order Number One of the U.S. Central Command, which explicitly prohibits “proselytizing of any religion, faith, or practice.” A gathering of chaplains, all of them fed from the public trough, is addressed by Captain Emmit Furner, a military cleric who seems half in love with his own light-footed moral dexterity. “Do we know what it means to proselytize?” he asks his audience. A voice from the audience is heard to say, “It is General Order Number One.” To this Sergeant Watt replies: “You can’t proselytize but you can give gifts.… I bought a carpet and then I gave the guy a Bible after I conducted my business.” So where’s the harm in a man who is paid by the United States government to be a Christian chaplain strolling condescendingly through the souk and handing out religious propaganda as if it were a handful of small change or backsheesh? Probably not much more damaging to the war effort, or insulting to Afghan sensibilities, than the activities of the anonymous torturers who have been found operating elsewhere on the Bagram base. But it is taking the axe to the root of the United States Constitution, never mind General Order Number One. (Neither of these seems to be in force locally: no action against the uniformed missionaries has been taken.)

The film was originally shot by Brian Hughes, a maker of documentaries and a former member of the United States military who had fought in the Gulf War. It was made available to James Bays, one of Al Jazeera’s more experienced Afghan reporters. By the time I had landed in Colorado Springs, later that day, I expected that the thing would have become a national story and that the cadets, perhaps most especially the freethinkers club, would be talking about it. But I was mistaken twice. Only a few fringe anti-war malcontents had made anything of this outrageous clip, and there was a general shrug when I mentioned it. “That sort of thing happened to me a lot in Afghanistan,” I was told by Carlos Bertha, a veteran of the war who now teaches philosophy to cadets and who helped organize my talk. “I used to complain and sometimes the word would come down to lay off, but it was always ready to start up again.”

He was talking, however, about in-your-face Christian-fundamentalist displays at the entrance to the chow hall. Perhaps local Afghan hired helpers would have to see these, too, but the propaganda wasn’t being inflicted directly on them. So the question becomes two related questions: Is there a clique within the United States military that is seeking to use the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as an opportunity to mount a new crusade and to Christianize the “heathen”? And does this clique also attempt to impose its beliefs on young Americans in uniform, many of whom may even be Christian already? If the answer to either question is “yes,” then we are directly financing the subversion of our own Constitution and inviting a “holy war” where we will not be able to say that only the other side is dogmatic and fanatical.

To take the questions in reverse: A few years ago I wrote a book that mentioned an astonishing state of affairs at the Air Force Academy. But don’t take my word for it. An official usaf panel of inquiry, reporting in 2005, admitted that the commandant of cadets, Brigadier General Johnny A. Weida, had sent out an academy-wide e-mail reminding all hands of the upcoming and exclusively Protestant National Day of Prayer. He had further informed cadets that they were “accountable to their God” and came up with an ingenious call-and-response chant that went like this: “Jesus … Rocks!” Evidently quite a warrior. The head football coach, Fisher DeBerry, had improved on this only slightly by staging locker-room prayer-pleas to “The Master Coach” and hanging out a banner that read, “Team Jesus.” A screening of Mel Gibson’s incendiary, Jew-baiting homoerotic extravaganza, "The Passion of the Christ," had flyers in its favor placed on every seat in the Air Force Academy dining hall. A Pentecostal chaplain warned cadets that they should accept Christ or “burn in hell.” About the latter incident, the air-force investigative panel decided to be lenient, on the perfectly good grounds that such language is “not uncommon” in this denomination. And that, I suspect, is part of the problem to begin with: unexamined extremist Christian conservatism is the cultural norm in many military circles. One Lutheran chaplain at the academy, Captain Melinda Morton, resigned from the service after being transferred for protesting that the evangelical pressure was “systematic.” And, despite the tolerance for Pentecostal hellfire rants, by no means all forms of expression could be indulged; a nonbelieving cadet was forbidden to organize a club for “freethinkers.”

That has now changed as a result of the indoctrination scandal, which is why I was able to be at the Springs. The academy’s chaplains still would not allow our meeting to take place on the base, but that was fine by me, as it meant we could all meet out of uniform at the Old Chicago pub downtown. The last survey of student opinion found that of the 4,400 cadets, 85 percent were Christian of one kind or another, 2 percent were declared atheists, 1.5 percent were Jewish, 0.4 percent Muslim, 0.3 percent Hindu, and—note this—9.3 percent either indicated no allegiance or identified themselves as “other.” According to all measurements of opinion, the latter is the fastest-growing minority in the United States, and only slightly under-represented at the Air Force Academy. (The Pew report on the subject says that unbelievers in the armed services overall represent a higher percentage than that of the general population: this would track with my experience and disprove that silly old line about there being no atheists in foxholes.)

I am still not going to give any real names of cadets attending my little event: there were about 20 of them, mostly males. Two of the group, one Baptist and one Mormon, had given up their faith since enlisting at the academy. The others fluctuated between doubt and agnosticism and straight-out unbelief. They were good-humored, outspoken, and tough-minded: the sort of people who make you proud of being defended by a volunteer military. According to most of them, the situation had improved since the last scandal, or rather because of it. In an acronym-dominated world, the school’s spire (Special Programs in Religious Education) could now include meetings for unbelievers, but even so an S.C.A. (Scheduling Committee Action) had to be approved before they could be allowed to meet with your humble servant in a pub overlooked by Pike’s Peak. It seemed weird to me that people willing to fight and die for the United States should be treated as if they were children (or do I mean members of a “flock”?).



They all told me that they felt quite able to stand up to peers and community members who wanted to evangelize them. (The Colorado Springs area is home to James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” campaign, as well as to the fragrant Reverend Ted Haggard, crusader and, when entwined with male hookers, meth buyer as well.) What they would object to would be evangelizing from higher up. And there is ever stronger reason to think that, at the Pentagon, the fish rots from the head. It emerges that during the invasion of Iraq, one of Donald Rumsfeld’s directors of intelligence, Major General Glen Shaffer, began to attach fiery biblical excerpts to the photographs that accompanied the daily briefings. For example, on one document delivered to President Bush by Rumsfeld there was a picture of an F-14 “Tomcat” on the deck of a carrier, with the accompaniment of verses from Psalm 139: “If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast, O Lord.” Over a photograph of Saddam Hussein appeared the words, from the first Epistle of Peter: “It is by God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.” (I pause to note that this suggests that General Shaffer had no idea what hellishness Saddam Hussein had actually, apart from his inexplicable failure to accept Jesus as his personal savior, been responsible for.)

More alarming still is a book called Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel, by an air-force lieutenant colonel named William McCoy, publicity for which describes the separation of church and state as a “twisted idea.” Nor is this the book’s only publicity: it comes—with its direct call for a religion-based military—with an endorsement from General David Petraeus.

It is outrageous that brave and intelligent young officers, seeing such theocratic absurdity rampant among the top brass, could suspect even for a second that their road to promotion was a longer one unless they acquiesced in this use of public resources for the promotion of (a single) religion. And if that thought can arise in a military academy or the corridors of the Pentagon, how much more oppressive is it when the volunteer is far from home, on the frontier, on a firebase, or aboard a submarine or a carrier, and being told that this time the objects of conversion are also the people we supposedly came to rescue from the Taliban and al-Qaeda? Captain Melinda Morton was, before quitting the Air Force Academy, a missile-launch commander. She believes that there is a fusion between the two types of proselytization. The evangelicals, she told Jeff Sharlet—whose work on this has been path-breaking—see the whole military as “a mission field. They wanted to send their missionaries to the military, and for the military itself to become missionaries to the world.” If this bizarre ambition came anywhere close to being realized, it would make civilian taxpayers into mere hewers of wood and drawers of water for an armed but unelected religious elite, and it would make our soldiers into unwitting pawns in a very dangerous game where they were considered expendable cannon fodder for Christ. The only certain winners would be the death cultists of jihad, who are already marveling at their luck in being proved right about the Americans as “crusaders.” This is as near to mutiny and treason as one could hope to sail and still wear the uniform.

And please do not think for a single second that, if proselytizing in our armed forces is permitted to extremist Christians, the precedent will not be taken up by other fanatics as well. There was a time when a man named Abdurahman Alamoudi was operating freely in this country, and even being deployed as a “moderate” Muslim spokesman by the State Department. More than once received at the White House, he also helped found an outfit with the intriguing name of the Muslim Armed Forces and Veteran Affairs Council, which was used to select Islamic chaplains in the armed services. Mr. Alamoudi’s run of luck ended in 2004, when he was given a long sentence in federal prison for activities related to terrorism. Since then, serving officers like the now famous Major Nidal Malik Hasan have had to go online for their extremist spiritual advisers, such as the fugitive preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who issued a general religious permission to shoot down U.S. servicemen only a short time before Major Hasan rose to his feet and sprayed his fellow countrymen at Fort Hood. Awlaki later praised the gallant major as “a hero.” This was not the only evidence of an early-stage attempt at setting up jihadist penetration of the ranks, but, yet again, the authorities decided to treat Major Hasan’s alarming statements as if they were protected religious speech rather than early warnings of the effect of a homicidal theology. A psychiatrist gives a lecture at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, on the government’s dime, and exclaims proudly that Muslim fighters love death more than we love life … Not very Hippocratic.

Throughout modern American history, the armed forces have been a great engine for assimilation and integration. Segregation of blacks was abolished in the services long before it was done away with in the wider society. Hispanic soldiers who are not yet full citizens have won many awards for bravery in the field. Women—not always approved of by religious fanatics—have risen to occupy serious command posts at all levels. (Discrimination against homosexuals, another religion-based prejudice, remains official, but that is a political decision, not a military one, and even the British services now recruit gay men and women, so change is probably not far off.) It would be an unimaginable catastrophe for America if the ranks became an arena of contestation between competing religious sectarians, and the effect on morale in the field would be disastrous also. It is of high importance to stop it before it can get started, and this means applying the principle of church-state separation right across the military spectrum.

James Madison was the co-author with Thomas Jefferson of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, which became the basis of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Not accidentally the first clause of our Bill of Rights, this amendment unambiguously forbids any “establishment of religion” in or by these United States. In his “Detached Memoranda,” not published until after his death, Madison even wrote that the appointment of chaplains in the armed forces, and indeed in Congress, was “inconsistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principles of religious freedom.” He could never have foreseen a time when state-subsidized chaplains would be working to subvert the Constitution, and violating their sacred oath to uphold it. Let us be highly thankful that we have young soldiers and sailors and air-force personnel who, busy and devoted as they already are, show themselves brave enough to fight back on this front too. Ω

[Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. Hitchens was educated at The Leys School, Cambridge (His mother arguing that "If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it."), and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and graduated with a "gentleman's 3rd." Hitchens came to the States in 1981 to write for The Nation. Hitchens is the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, CA and is the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007).]

Copyright © 2009 Condé Nast Digital

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Meet A Real Nowhere Man/Woman: Your Congressional Representative!

The Great Wikipedia teaches us about "Gerrymander"

The word gerrymander was coined by a newspaper editor in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts electoral boundaries under the then governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced /Jerry/; 1744–1814), that included one sprawling supposedly salamander-shaped constituency. In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill into law that redistricted his state to benefit his Democratic-Republican party. One of the resulting contorted districts was said to resemble a salamander. The term first appeared in the Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812.

Click on image to enlarge.

The greatest Gerrymandering artiste in recent Texas history was U.S. House Majority Leader Tom ("The Hammer") DeLay (R-TX). Twinkle-Toes DeLay (after leaving the House under indictment for corruption, he competed on ABC's "Dancing With The Stars") worked with the Dumbo majority in the Texas Lege to redraw Congressional Districts in 2003 according to the population statistics provided by the Census of 2000. As a result of Twinkle Toes' machinations, 6 of 10 House Democrats targeted by the redrawn district maps were defeated in the election of 2004. The looming arrival of the Census of 2010 prompted Michael Lind to write a hypothetical letter from a U.S. Representative to his constituents. If this is (fair & balanced) sarcasm, so be it.

[x Salon]
Dear Nobodies
By Michael Lind

Tag Cloud of the following article

beloved bills campaign census choose college congress congressional constituents dear district favors firms friends gerrymandered give god going home house industry interest keep kids legislature lines lobbying lobbyist members money office party pay people percent photos plan really represent retired school state sure terms think town voters wall washington years

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Dear Constituents:

The district in which you live and which I represent in Congress is soon going to change its borders. Do not be alarmed.

As you may know, in our system the voters do not choose the government; the government chooses the voters. Every 10 years, following the federal census, the districts of members of the House of Representatives are modified to reflect changes in the population. As strange and unfair as it seems, the power of redrawing districts for the U.S. Congress is in the hands of the state legislatures.

The party that controls the state legislature engages in what is known as "partisan gerrymandering" — the drawing of district lines to maximize the chances that members of the controlling party will be elected to Congress. Thanks to the miracle of gerrymandering, the majority party can draw the lines so that members of the other party are a minority in most or all U.S. congressional districts in the state.

Thank God for partisan gerrymandering. I owe my many terms as your member of Congress to the fact that our beloved district is rigged. After the 2000 Census, members of my party in the state Legislature drew the borders of my district to avoid the neighborhoods of people likely to vote against me, with limbs going out to rope in likely voters. The district goes down the highway, veers away at a right angle, wriggles through a parking lot and down an alley, flares out to take in an apartment complex and then shrinks again to avoid a suburb. Some people think the district looks like a boa constrictor that swallowed a porcupine. Others think it looks like Bart Simpson squashed by a steamroller. I think it's beautiful.

I'm writing you now, my dear constituents, because, after the 2010 Census, my friends in the state Legislature, if they retain the majority, have promised to redraw the lines of our beloved district to give me an even safer seat, if that can be imagined. Some of you will be assigned by the Legislature to other newly gerrymandered districts. Not that I'll notice. Unless you've given me more than $10,000, I wouldn't know you from Adam.

For those of you whom the Legislature will choose to cram into my new district, there's good news — many of you never need to vote for me again, even if you support me. You see, the new district will be so heavily gerrymandered that it will be impossible for the other party ever to elect a candidate. As long as I get re-nominated by my party every two years, I'll be reelected as long as I choose to run — no matter how low the turnout goes. I could die and be mummified like King Tut and the voters that my friends in the Legislature have assigned me will return me to Washington in a sarcophagus.

Not that I really represent you people, anyway. Visiting the little town I pretend to represent is just a chore I have to put up with every two years, before getting back to my real job: representing the industries that pay for my campaigns.

You see, the real two-party system we have in this country involves the voter party and the donor party, and take it from me, your alleged representative in Washington, the donor party is way more important.

If any of you bothered to read my campaign finance disclosure forms, you would notice that only 20 percent of the contributions to my campaigns come from the district where you live. Eighty percent of the money I raise comes from outside the district — about half of it from ZIP codes in the greater Washington, DC, area. That's where the lobbies are located for the various industrial interests I represent on the various House committees and subcommittees that affect them: the investment banks, the pharma industry, the insurance industry. And my personal favorite, the payday loan industry.

My buddies in Congress and I allow companies to charge 4,000 percent total annual interest to cash the checks of poor people who are too ignorant to know they're getting fleeced.

As long as I keep them happy, my industry friends will pay for my campaigns. Of course, if I cross them, I'll pay a heavy price. They'll spend millions of dollars to defeat me. Oh, they won't spend the money on the candidate of the other party in the general election. They know that my district is so gerrymandered that my party will always win. Instead, if they want to punish me for standing up to them, they'll offer limitless money to somebody in my own party to challenge me in the party primary, knowing that if a rival knocks me out in the primary he or she is sure to be elected in the general. I know what they can do to me in the primary, and that's why I do whatever the industry lobbyists want.

Like submitting the bills they write in my name. Are you shocked that lobbies write the legislation that I introduce? Well, wake up and smell the coffee. Do you really think that my staff and I actually write legislation? I'll let you in on another little secret: I don't even read the bills that I introduce. They're really boring and technical. Besides, I don't have the time to read any bills, even my own, between committee hearings where I can grandstand for TV and fundraisers for my next campaign.

I'm not sure exactly where my friends in the statehouse will put my new gerrymandered district. I've told the guys drawing the new lines to make sure that my house is in my district. It would be a real pain to have to buy another house to keep up the pretense that I'm just one of your regular-guy neighbors. The secretaries and repairmen and nurses and such among you have no idea how hard it is to pay for two houses: one of them a crappy colonial in the town I pretend to represent, and the other an expensive townhouse in Georgetown, which is hard for me to pay for, even with a rich lobbyist as a spouse.

My wife's a lobbyist, you know. She works for one of the biggest lobbying firms in Washington. They pay her much more than I make as a member of Congress — partly for her work, but mainly because she's my wife. (Just kidding, dear!)

I wish I didn't have to keep a house in my congressional district at all. It's such a joke. We hardly ever visit. Our home is in Washington. It's where my children have grown up, and it's where they attend Sidwell Friends. I'm afraid, my dear constituents, that my DC-bred kids don't like you. They think you're crude. And they think you talk funny.

I love my kids. They're not that bright, to tell you the truth, but they'll get into my old Ivy League school because of their pedigree. Thank God for legacy preferences. Otherwise, they'd get knocked out of the competition by smart, upwardly mobile middle-class and working-class kids with higher test scores.

And once they're in college, we'll set the kids up with some Washington internships, to give them a head start over less privileged but more talented kids when it comes to elite careers. You know, the unpaid or underpaid internships, the ones that most American college students can't afford to apply for. That's one of the perks of being part of the bipartisan American establishment — college admissions and internships are rigged in favor of your not-so-bright but rich and well-connected offspring. God bless America!

At a town hall meeting a few years ago, one of you asked me whether I would be coming home to the district when I retired. After I've spent most of my life in Washington, do you really expect me to move back to a town where the new art exhibit consists of photos of a fishing trip on the wall of Dairy Queen?

Sure, Lyndon Johnson retired to the ranch and Harry Truman retired to Independence, Mo. But Johnson and Truman were hicks. My role models are sophisticated politicians. Look at Bill Clinton. Did he retire to Arkansas? He lives in Manhattan! He wants to be around the beautiful people, not the hillbillies. And Bob Dole didn't go back to Kansas, he has a condo in Miami. Gerry Ford spent his golden years in Palm Springs, not Michigan.

I'll tell you a secret, my dear constituents: My final campaign for Congress will mark the last time I'll ever set foot in our beloved district. As soon as I leave Congress, I'm planning to unload the house in your town. I hate to break it to you, but you live in flyover country and that's exactly what I'm going to do to you.

I don't plan to be in Congress forever. On the contrary, I consider my terms in Congress a mere apprenticeship leading to the job I really want as a lobbyist on K Street, where, as I mentioned, my wife already works. I've already built up a good résumé, doing favors for powerful lobbyists. A few more terms in the House, a few more choice committee seats where I can do big favors for the folks I'll be regulating, and the best lobbying firms in Washington will be fighting to have me as a partner.

I can't wait to move from Capitol Hill to K Street. The minute I leave public service, I can start raking in the megabucks from the industries I've been working for anyway all these years in Congress. Only I'll be able to take the money directly and I won't need to come up with phony-baloney public-interest reasons to do favors for my clients.

Best part of being a lobbyist? I won't ever have to feign interest in you voters again. No more boring Q&A sessions at HoJo's. No more checkered red flannel shirts and no more pancake flipping at the high school gym. Once I've left the Hill, the guard downstairs in our shiny green glass office building will keep you people away from my new corner office suite. And if you somehow should make it up the elevator, my secretary will tell you I'm out, and I'll hide in my office until you finally give up and go do something touristy like gawking at the Washington Monument.

I can't wait to decorate my new office in the lobbying firm. I can't stand my congressional office, packed with all the stuff from my district: the kitschy painting of the local lake, the photo of the high school baseball team. That stuff is there to make you, my constituents, feel at home, if any of you visit Capitol Hill. (This assumes that you can find Washington on a map).

Still, I plan to keep some souvenirs in my new office from my career as your representative in the United States Congress. Photos of me shaking hands with presidents, foreign heads of state, celebrity billionaires, sports stars and movie stars. Those will impress my industry clients, I'm sure. As for the photos of me at the nursing home and the elementary school — I mean, really, you don't expect me to put those on the wall when I'm a lobbyist? My clients would think I'm some kind of populist or socialist or subversive or something.

Nope, along with my celebrity photo endorsements I'm going to have an abstract painting on the wall. A big expensive one with gloopy colors draining all over the canvas. I don't like modern art, but it sends a signal that you're sophisticated and rich and global and all that.

Well, I can't think of anything else to write, my dear constituents. Some of you will be in my new district after the post-Census gerrymander. Some of you won't. Not that it makes any difference to me. Ω

[Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life (2008). Lind holds a B.A. from the University of Texas-Austin, an M.A. from Yale University, and a J.D. from University of Texas-Austin.]

Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Elementary, My Dear Moonbat; It's A Case Of Perfect Health Care!

On the Day O'Greed (12/25/09), "Sherlock Holmes" — starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson — opens in a theater near you. Tom Tomorrow wants to take advantage of the Holmes mania, so he brings back "Conservative Jones" in today's 'toon.

Back in April '09, this blog provided the inspiration for "Conservative Jones, Boy Detective" in Tom Tomorrow's alternative world.

Beginnning in 1963, Donald J. Sobol created Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown, boy detective, in a long series of children's novels. Only his parents and teachers call Leroy by his given name (which he dislikes); the rest of the neighborhood children refer to him as "Encyclopedia" because of his penetrating mind. "This Modern World" is a parallel universe and in that world, Tom Tomorrow gives us "Conservative Jones," Boy Detective. Jones has a trusty sidekick, "Moonbat McWacky," just as Sherlock Holmes had Dr. John Watson.

If this is (fair & balanced) ratiocination, so be it.

[x Salon]
This Modern World — "The Case Of The Perfect Health Care System"
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Click on image to enlarge. Ω

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow". His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Salon and Working for Change. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly.

Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002.

When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political weblog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001.]

Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves