Math: 1950-2007

My recent post about 1973 vs 2007 got a lot of traffic so here is something else in a similar vein. I didn't write either one of them, by the way, but I wish I had.


Last week I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58. The counter
girl took my $2 and I was digging for my change when I pulled 8 cents
from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel
and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register. I sensed
her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she
hailed the manager for help . While he tried to explain the transaction
to her, she stood there and cried. Why do I tell you this?

Answer: Because of the evolution in teaching math since the 1950's.

1. Teaching Math In 1950

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production
is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?

2. Teaching Math In 1960

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production
is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?


3. Teaching Math In 1970

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production
is $80. Did he make a profit?

4. Teaching Math In 1980

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production
is $80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number
20.

5. Teaching Math In 1990

A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and
inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the
preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of
$20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class
participation after answering the question: How did the birds and
squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes?

(There are no wrong answers. )


6. Teaching Math In 2007

Un hachero vende una carretada de maderapara $100. El costo de la
producciones es $80. Cuanto dinero ha hecho?

Millionaires Everywhere

A new study reveals that millionaires are far more common than you might think. There are 9.3 million of them in the U.S. That's one out of every 10 households. Los Angeles County alone has 268,136 millionaire households. And this is excluding the value of the family's primary residence.

For all you millionaires, congratulations. I'm sure you have worked very hard to get where you are and you try to use your wealth responsibly. However I do have a few questions amid all this money.

• Why is it that mentally ill people are standing on street corners begging for money?
• Why are young women aborting their babies because they think they can't afford to raise them?
• Why do our great cities have luxurious symphonies and opera houses while homeless people sleep in dingy shelters on cold nights?
• Why do thousands of African children die every day from malaria, a disease we know how to prevent and cure?

I think these are good questions and unfortunately I don't have the answers. Leave a comment if you want to add to the list.

Now It Makes Sense

I have been saying for almost two months that this Alberto Gonzales/US Attorneys scandal is serious business that will only get worse. Today the dam is starting to break with an article in National Journal.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed a highly confidential order in March 2006 delegating to two of his top aides -- who have since resigned because of their central roles in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys -- extraordinary authority over the hiring and firing of most non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department. A copy of the order and other Justice Department records related to the conception and implementation of the order were provided to National Journal.

In the order, Gonzales delegated to his then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, and his White House liaison "the authority, with the approval of the Attorney General, to take final action in matters pertaining to the appointment, employment, pay, separation, and general administration" of virtually all non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department, including all of the department's political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation. Monica Goodling became White House liaison in April 2006, the month after Gonzales signed the order.

The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level. Department records show that the personnel authority was delegated to the two aides at about the same time they were working with the White House in planning the firings of a dozen U.S. attorneys, eight of whom were, in fact, later dismissed. MORE

The best face you can put on this is that Gonzales gave two young, inexperienced staff attorneys almost unprecedented power over the legal machinery of the U.S. government. Given the lack of memory Gonzales professes about hiring and firing decisions, it appears he did little more than rubber-stamp whatever these two aides told him to do. The worst is that the Bush White House has politicized the DoJ to a degree we haven't seen since JFK appointed his own brother as Attorney General.

Steven Taylor at Poliblog asks four important questions.

1. Surely given the ongoing inquiry as to what was going one at DoJ, this memo seems to be rather relevant. Why weren’t these details revealed from the get-go?

2. Can anyone defend the notion that this kind of responsibility ought to be so thoroughly delegated to two fairly young and inexperienced persons?

3. Why would the White House liaison be involved in such a process if the idea wasn’t to ideologically mold the DoJ’s non-civil-service personnel?

4. Since we know that there was a concerted effort to hire DoJ personnel not from the best schools in the nation, but rather from specific Christian law schools, one again is given the direct impression that the issue at hand at Justice under Gonzales has not been the execution of the federal criminal code, but rather the furtherance of specific partisan and ideological goals of the administration.

Read his answers and then tell me that this is all no big deal. Rod Dreher suggests that this almost guarantees congressional subpoenas for Karl Rove and Harriet Miers. So far Bush shows every sign of digging in his heels. Bad move, Mr. President. This problem isn't going to go away, and you are only making it worse.

Unless... there is even more damaging info we don't know about yet. Given that it has been like pulling teeth to find out what little we know so far, I'd say there is almost certainly more. Stay tuned.

The DC Madam

This will be interesting. The so-called "DC Madam", Deborah Jeane Palfrey, is threatening to reveal her customer list and the first of what may be many highly-placed cads just resigned.

Palfrey is alleged to have run a prostitution ring for 13 years before her retirement in 2006 and supposedly has records reflecting "transactions" with thousands of highly-placed officials.

Palfrey has denied she ran a prostitution ring. Her company, Pamela Martin and Associates, was simply a "high-end adult fantasy firm which offered legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behavior and did so without incident during its 13 year tenure," she said.

Palfrey contends her escort service provided university educated women to engage in legal game-playing of a sexual nature at 275 dollars an hour for a 90 minute session, the Washington Post reported.

But Palfrey has also hinted that she has a record of the phone numbers of thousands of more than 10,000 customers that could embarrass more the a few of the US capital's high-fliers.

Friday, the US State Department announced that Randall Tobias, the embattled head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), was resigning for unspecified personal reasons.

However ABC News, which said Palfrey has provided it with a record of the numbers of calls to her private cell phone, reported that Tobias stepped down after they spoke to him about his allegedly contacting her number.

Tobias since 2003 also was President George W. Bush's first global AIDS coordinator, a job which drew criticism for his emphasis on faithfulness to partners and abstinence over condom use in trying to prevent the spread of the AIDS virus.

Before entering government he was chairman, president and chief executive of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, and also, from 1997-2000, chairman of the board of trustees at Duke University. MORE

Mr. Tobias sounds like a very wealthy and powerful man. ABC News has a little more detail on the "services" he purchased from Palfrey.

On Thursday, Tobias told ABC News he had several times called the "Pamela Martin and Associates" escort service "to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage."

Tobias, who is married, said there had been "no sex," and that recently he had been using another service "with Central Americans" to provide massages. MORE

Hmmm, "no sex," Mr. Tobias says. Where have we heard that before? Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he is being truthful. It still seems pretty stupid to call an escort service that offers "legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behavior" and have a woman come to his home for a private massage. What does he expect people to think?

Here's the problem, and I said this same thing in my pre-blog days about Bill Clinton and Gary Condit: People who live double lives like this make themselves vulnerable to blackmail. This is very dangerous for government officials who possess national secrets and are in position to make important decisions that affect many people. Even if we forget the morality of it, those we place in high office need to above reproach for purely practical reasons.

Mr. Tobias at least did the honorable thing by resigning. I feel sorry for his family and others that will be torn apart if more names are revealed by Palfrey. I also have to wonder why the background checks that are supposedly done on administration appointees did not reveal his proclivities - this sort of activity probably did not start recently. Either the FBI is doing incomplete investigations, or the White House know about it and appointed him anyway. Neither possibility is good. Another good question is whether the boards at Eli Lillyand Duke University knew what their chairman was doing to relax.

The saddest part is that I'm probably in the minority in being bothered by this. When other men are exposed like Tobias, the public reaction will probably be a big yawn. The Clinton scandal demonstrated that most of the American public doesn't really care if the president fools around as long as the economy is booming and his wife stands by him.

I look at it another way: any man who will lie and cheat on his own wife will not think twice about doing the same to the rest of us, whether he is the president of deputy undersecretary of whatever. People will say "he's only human like the rest of us." True enough, and I don't expect perfection. Still, is basic honesty is too much to ask of our leaders? Apparently so.

The Warriors

Darth Beckman has a long post quoting Fred Reed about how traditional "warriors" are ill suited for modern warfare. Reed used to write a column in Army Times (back when it was an actual newspaper) that nicely captured the best and worst of a soldier's life. I read it every week when I was in the service.

Reed has some colorful views, but he is not a wacky anti-military leftist. Keep that in mind when you read this article, because it goes a long way toward explaining our current problems in Iraq. Here's how it starts:

People ask how we got into our splendid mess in Iraq and why we can’t get out. The question is a subset of a larger question: Why, since WWII, have so many first-world armies gotten into drawn-out guerrilla wars in bush-world countries, and lost? Examples abound: France in Vietnam, America in Vietnam, France in Algeria, Russia in Afghanistan, Israel in Lebanon, etc. Why don’t they learn?

The answer I think is that militaries are influenced by a kind of man—call him the Warrior—who by nature is unsuited for modern wars. He doesn’t understand them, can’t adapt to them.

The Warrior is emotionally suited to pitched, Pattonesque battles of moral clarity and simple intent. I don’t mean that he is stupid. Among fighter pilots and in the Special Forces for example it is not uncommon to find men with IQs of 145. Yet emotionally the Warrior has the uncomplicated instincts of a pit bull. Intensely loyal to friends and intensely hostile to the enemy, he doesn’t want any confusion as to which is which. His tolerance for ambiguity is very low. He wants to close with the enemy and destroy him.

This works in wars like WWII. (Note that the American military is an advanced version of the military that beat Germany and Japan.) It does not work when winning requires the support of the population. The Warrior, unable to see things through the eyes of the enemy, or of the local population, whom he quickly comes to hate, wants to blow hell out of things. He detests all that therapeutic crap, that touchy-feely leftist stuff about respect the population, especially the women. Having the empathy of an engine block, he regards mention of mutilated children as intensely annoying at best, and communist propaganda at worst. MORE

Original article here.

WMD Re-defined

Here's a weird story. A suspicious package was spotted this week outside an Austin abortion clinic. Police determined it to be a homemade propane/nail bomb and it was disarmed safely. The device was powerful enough to have killed anyone nearby had it exploded.

The next day a suspect named Paul Ross Evans was arrested. From the news story, Evans appears to be nothing but a common criminal. There is no indication he had any connection to pro-life groups. (If there were, you can bet this story would be national news.) Why he would bomb an abortion clinic is still unknown.

Evans faces federal charges for "Using Weapons of Mass Destruction," with a potential sentence of life in prison. I find this a little confusing. My understanding is that "weapons of mass destruction" are nuclear, biological, or chemical devices that can kill thousands of people. A propane-powered nail bomb can certainly do some damage, but it's not going to wipe out an entire city. Yet the government apparently classifies it as WMD.

I think I see what is going on here. Recall that we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein allegedly possessed WMD. This turned out to be not exactly true. Now we know that it was true; all we had to do was re-define WMD to include items like propane cylinders and small quantities of nails. Presto, Iraq did have WMD and so do a lot of other countries.

Now Bush can order the invasion of all those evil nations that stockpile propane and nails. They may say their objective is to barbeque while hammering together birdhouses, but should we believe them? No, we can't take that chance. The risk is just too great. Cruise missiles are the best solution.

UPDATE 5/1/07: The hideous weapons are even more common than I thought. Now it seems assault rifles count as WMD. Wow, Castro has WMD just 70 miles off our shores! We must invade immediately! Not to mention the Mexicans, Canadians, and Bahamians. We're surrounded on all sides.