Steve's Politics Blog

Naked Capitalism has the article Mussolini-Style Corporatism, aka Fascism, on the Rise in the US. This article has an introduction to, and then republishes the Thom Hartman article on Alternet Tea Party and the Right: The Sad Truth of Our Politics: It’s Basically Turned into a Competition Among Oligarchs to Own Everything: It could still happen here.

In all the years I have known about fascism, I have never seen the definition that clarifies what the word really means until reading this article.

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is, “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”

All I ever really knew was that fascism is what Mussolini did, but I never knew what exactly he did that was called fascism. Are there other people whose education about history was as faulty as mine? Do you suppose there is a reason why people in the 1950s and 1960s and beyond were never taught the true meaning?

Naked Capitalism has the article “Stunning” Rise in Death Rate, Pain Levels for Middle-Aged, Less Educated Whites.

One of the long standing patterns in economies showing economic growth is longer life spans, and falls are see[n] the result of severe distress and dislocation, as took place in the period right after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the expectancies of adult men fell by over seven years.

The US has just become the first country to approach this appalling record. A stark warning about the level of distress in America comes from an important study by Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel prize winner in economics, and his wife Anne Case.

Over the course of my career, I have seen the deterioration of the work place environment in terms of stress inflicted on even the best educated workers, let alone the ones with just high school diplomas or less. Based on my own observations, the result of this study seems almost inevitable.

For the strong anti-choice advocates, I have to wonder how “pro-life” they really are when they keep voting for politicians who keep advancing the redistribution of wealth from the middle-class to the rich. The middle-class is so stressed out by this shift that it is affecting their health.

From the oligarchs point of view, this seems to work out just fine. They don’t have to spend their money on expensive death panels, when the workers perform that duty for themselves and for free.

Junior College has the article Study says ‘everything in moderation’ may be bad dietary advice.

Dietary diversity and food count was also associated with higher intake of unhealthy and healthy food.

Otto added, “An unexpected finding was that participants with greater diversity in their diets, as measured by dissimilarity, actually had worse diet quality”.

Take that, you people who scoffed at our limited diet. With so many restrictions on our diet these days, low fat, low salt, low carbs, there aren’t that many things left to eat.

Venture Beat has the article As HP does the corporate splits, a look back at 10 years of ineptitude and lowlights.

The other company has selected the electrifying name: Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Oooh! Sizzling! Whitman will run this business, which will retain the server, data storage, networking, and software products. With some of these businesses in only moderate decline, this is known in investment banking jargon as: The Slightly Less Short End Of The Stick.

I think “the other companyu” is the one that will continue to pay my meager pension. I hope they live longer than I do.

If it goes belly up, at least I will have the picture from the article and the emoticon to remember.

Whitman goes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Daily Kos has the article The Truth about the Spring Valley “Officer Slam” Assault on a Teen Girl.

Not many news agencies have reported, or even wondered why she was asked to leave in the first place. As it turns out she had momentarily looked at her phone during class, and apologized for it at the time. Nor have they wondered why the phone issue, which she had already put away, escalated to an administrator and then the now fired school resource officer who had a reputation around the campus as “Officer Slam” for his tendency to throw students to the ground, assaulted her in the first place.

Is this the kind of thing that the parents in Sturbridge wanted or expected when they supported having a School Resource Officer on the premises of our schools? Now that they know, will any minds be changed about the appropriateness of an untrained police presence in our schools?

PC World has the article US Army tests swarms of drones in major exercise.

Their use on the battlefield raises the stakes in the push to detect, spot and control drone flight.

“This is a first step toward a continuing saga, trying to stay ahead of the bad guys,” said Hatchett. “We have much to do but we are now out of the blocks and moving forward.”

<sarcasm>It’s nice to know that gun control is now the least of our problems</sarcasm>

CNN has the video Bill Clinton concedes role in mass incarceration.

In listening to the justification that statistics show that a small number of criminals are responsible for a large number of crimes, does Bill Clinton show the tiniest understanding that many of the repeat offenses committed by these “criminals” are manufactured by the police? Like Sandra Bland’s great crime of not signalling a right turn, once you have been caught for doing something, you are forever targeted for anything else you might do that most people would never get charged for.

Think about the quote from a previous post Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks. The word “this” in the quote below could be equally well applied to the statistics that Clinton uses to justify why he thought at the time that mass incarceration was a good idea.

This breaks a cardinal rule of any research involving statistics: you cannot find your hypothesis in your results. … If your hypothesis comes from analyzing the data, then there is no sense in analyzing the same data again to confirm it.

Now you are ready to watch the following video and fully appreciate it.

None of the candidates can take great comfort from what Dr. Watkins says here. There is a temptation to feel that at least the other candidate is worse than you are on this issue, but nobody should be satisfied to be just the lesser of two evils. I suppose this also does not let us supporters of these candidates off the hook either.

The only thing to take away from this is to listen and learn, and then try to do something about it. Dr. Watkins has some suggestions. Maybe a candidate can pick up and run with some of them.

The Medium has the article Why 5 x 3 = 5 + 5 + 5 Was Marked Wrong: Viral Common Core Math Problem Explained. My issue with the common core math is whether or not you can prepare teachers to teach it any better than (or even as well as) you can prepare teachers to teach math the traditional way.

I debunk the answer given in the article.

In this case, the answer was marked wrong by an ill-prepared teacher. The equals versus equivalency is a completely bogus justification for marking the answer wrong.

Use the repeated addition strategy to solve 5 X 3.

5 x 3 = 3 x 5 = 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 5 + 5 + 5 = 15.

Of the five ways of expressing the number, all five are equivalent. There is no core mathematics principle that says adding 3 five times is more right than adding 5 three times. The order of scalar multiplication is commutative. Teaching that all five are equivalent, or letting the student find out that they are all equivalent is a very important underlying mathematical principle, called commutivity, that is essential for students of more advanced math to know.

The order of matrix multiplication is not commutative. That is an important distinction to recognize. The matrix multiply example below shows that changing the order of multiplying two matrices changes the result. This example can be downloaded into Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet program to check the formulae to see whether I have done the multiply correctly.

So what is true about one kind of multiplication is decidely not true of the other. To use one to show the principle of the other is to misunderstand matrix arithmetic.

This is a definite example of why we shouldn’t have math phobic teachers trying to teach math. They can see the examples in the teacher’s guide, but they really don’t understand the principles.

Note: Using matrices is a good way to express the solving of simultaneous equations. It is something that I spent half of an electrical engineering career doing. That is, I maintained and modified a computer program that solved the circuit equations of integrated circuits. Just about every integrated circuit design has been analyzed by a computer program like the ones I was responsible for. First I did it in several IC design companies and then I did it in companies that sold this type of software to these IC design companies.

If you do find an error in my math, don’t worry. I am retired, and don’t do this kind of work anymore. I assure you that when I did this kind of work, I had the math right.

<sarcasm>That bastion of liberalism</sarcasm>, The Wall Street Journal, has the article House Elects Paul Ryan as New Speaker.

The most ambitious plans in Mr. Ryan’s idea chest are based on a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy that inflames Democrats as much as it energizes Republicans. In closed-door meetings with House Republicans, Mr. Ryan has said he wants to overhaul the tax code, replace President Barack Obama’s health law, and rewrite federal poverty programs—and in the process draw a contrast with Democrats heading into the 2016 presidential election.

It is easy to figure out where he got some of his cockamamie ideas.

The Conversation has the article What should we make of Paul Ryan’s fondness for Ayn Rand?

Paul Ryan, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin who was just elected speaker of the US House of Representatives, has acknowledged his admiration for novelist Ayn Rand.

As an older teenager, I was taken in by reading Ayn Rand’s books, so I understand how easy it was to be duped by her.

What Ayn Rand didn’t say, and Paul Ryan doesn’t seem to understand, is something I learned as a sophomore in college. Some people just don’t have bootstraps.

I wonder if Paul Ryan would consider it worthwhile to have government supplied bootstraps for those who don’t have them. What Republicans and Paul Ryan refuse to get is that the Head Start program was meant to do exactly that, give culturally deprived (as they used to say) children their first pair of bootstraps.

It’s not that these children don’t already have enough intelligence to figure out how to make it and perhaps survive in the environment in which they find themselves. The problem is that they have no way of knowing about the existence of another environment and the possibility of getting to it. That knowledge is the very bootstraps that Paul Ryan thinks people ought to use to pull themselves up.

So this brings me to a recent example that might have some relation to boot-straps. The New York Daily News has the article Life is even harder now for the South Carolina teen assaulted by ex-Deputy Ben Fields — she’s in foster care.

In an interview with the Daily News, Todd Rutherford, the respected Columbia, S.C., attorney representing the assault victim of the recently terminated Deputy Ben Fields, revealed that his client, in addition to suffering injuries on her face, neck, and arm, is living in foster care.

The “adults” in the school may not have had the time or inclination to learn that this girl may be so traumatized by the experiences she has already had, that she doesn’t even know she should be looking for her bootstraps.

While her identity, no doubt, will eventually be leaked to the media, it’s the goal of her foster mother to protect and care for her as well as she can considering the circumstances, according to her lawyers. She communicated to us that the young victim is devastated and emotionally traumatized by all that has happened to her.

It looks like her foster mother is trying to give this girl what she has been missing in her life. The “adults” at the school just don’t seem to be willing to help. In a way, these “adults” may also be considered culturally deprived – of any sympathy let alone empathy.

The Daily Kos has the article About the School Resource Officer in South Carolina.

Best practices: If a student is refusing to obey a teacher or officer’s directive, rephrase the directive as a choice. For instance, the teacher or officer might calmly say to the student, “You have a choice. You can either come with me to the office to talk about your disruptive behavior or you can continue to sit here, and your refusal to comply will add more days to your suspension.” At no point should they invade the student’s personal space as that will only escalate the situation. They must wait for the student to comply. They should consider calling the school counselor or other professionals trained in dealing with students with emotional disorders.

In an email conversation I had with Jim Zavistoski, I said that what the police officer did was completely wrong, but what should he have done in that situation? This article is what Jim sent me. The brief article in The Daily Kos has a faulty link (here is the correct link to Student Handbook of the Richland School in Columbia, SC).