The Razor

One of the best graphics I’ve seen regarding debt and cost of attendance. Animated to boot.

What is a double-blind, placebo controlled study?

A double-blind, placebo controlled study follows a specific set of procedures to ensure that the results obtained are dependable and free from subjective bias. It is considered the ‘gold standard’ of clinical research studies.

Until the study is complete, neither the study researchers nor the participants know who received the study test substance, and who received an identical dummy substance, called a placebo. This ‘blindness’ ensures that the personal beliefs and expectations of either the researchers or the study subjects do not undermine the objectivity of the results. [emph. add] – Baylor College of Medicine

Recently I was on the phone with a colleague I work very closely with, a woman around my age who lives in Los Angeles. She’s witty, very intelligent, spirited, and a die-hard Jewish progressive and a seemed surprised to hear that I watched Fox News. I reminded her that I was a libertarian, and Fox News is the most sympathetic news channel to libertarians, but she said Fox News was so biased it was “right wing propaganda.”

Later that day on Facebook a Japanese non-profit organization I follow posted a link to a Fox News article that mentioned the possible extinction of the Japanese people by the year 3011 due to declining birth rates. Japan’s declining birth rate and aging society is nothing new and has been predicted for decades. The causes of this are numerous: working women, high cost of living, high cost of raising children in Japan, easy access to abortion, and even porn. The source of the article was a report by Tohoku University in Japan that extrapolated the current birth rate forward and came up with the year 3011 for the demise of the Japanese people. Instead of discussing the article, however, several posters took issue where the article appeared: Fox News. One commenter wrote, “... it’s Fox news. I can’t expect anything newsworthy from them…” Another wrote, “I would prefer some more solid evidence. And the extinction of Japanese is nothing more than laughable BS. Fox news, you need to do better than scaring peoples like that. Time to do homework.” Finally, another wrote, “LOL FOX news once again succeeding at rotting feeble american [sic] brains.”

Hating Fox News is almost as much a central plank of American progressives as unrestricted access to abortion that progressives don’t even question this belief anymore. They support billionaire George Judenrat Soros’s effort to shut down the 100% privately funded news station while encouraging government support of NPR, a publicly funded organization which, even New York Times reporter David Carr and the Columbia Journalism Review admit, leans to the Left. One could argue that it should be possible for any intelligent person to separate their ideology and personal beliefs from their job and report in an unbiased fashion, and they would be wrong for the very reason that double blind studies are the gold standard in research.

Double blind studies were developed as analysis of study participants found that those administering a particular test were statistically likely to influence the results simply by knowing whether they were administering a placebo or the actual drug even without consciously intending to. Such bias occurred on the unconscious level, and a double blind study where the person administering the drug did not know whether she was giving the compound being tested or the placebo was the only way to rule out this bias.

So why should we expect journalists, liberal or conservative, to report completely objectively about news stories and events?

We shouldn’t and more importantly we should give up on the concept of unbiased news reporting completely, spreading only through the consolidation of newspapers by large corporations and the requirement of a journalism degree from an accredited journalism school to be hired as a reporter by them. For example, in 1886 my hometown of St. Louis had 18 active newspapers. In 1986 it became a one-newspaper town when the St. Louis Globe Democrat ceased publication. Towards the end of its life it shared the market with the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and while the latter appealed to Democrats the Globe was read widely by the city’s Republicans. When the Globe went out of business, the owners of the Post Dispatch promised that the Post would moderate its stances and broaden its appeal to former Globe readers, and for the first few years after the merger, the Post attempted to do so by adding columnists and reporters from the Globe. But it wasn’t too long before the Post resumed it’s leftward slant, leaving St. Louis without a local conservative newspaper.

Had this happened a century before it would have been a disaster for the city. However it came at a time when people had begun getting their news from a variety of news sources including TV, national editions of newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post, national broadsheets like USA Today,  magazines, and talk radio. A few years later the Internet came online, and everything changed. The explosion of web sites catering to every ideology no matter how fragmented or extreme could not have been imagined by the Founder Fathers 220 years before. Suddenly Republicans in St. Louis or anywhere for that matter had access to the Washington Times, New York Daily News, National Review Online, and aggregation sites such as Drudge Report, RedState, FreeRepublic, Powerline, and of course, Instapundit.  It didn’t matter if St. Louis Post Dispatch leaned left when it’s bias could be countered by facts easily found in other sources.

That doesn’t mean that these other sources can be trusted 100% just because they agree with your opinion, though. I might watch Fox News but I watch it critically, just as I read the New York Times but do so aware of the liberal bias. At a time when we are bombarded by facts coming from an assortment of sources each with their own bias and agenda it is more important than ever to read, listen and watch critically. While it may take some effort up front, it also exposes one to new ideas and perspectives that could be missed if one stayed in a cocoon of  opinions that perfectly matched one’s own. Such diversity of opinions and perspectives allow a critical thinker to construct a philosophy or  world view that is much more complex, robust, and ultimately accurate than any contrived through a single ideological filter whether liberal or conservative.

Bias isn’t a notion to be fought; it’s one to be recognized. Survivalists know that in the wild a trekker will favor one foot over the other making it impossible to walk a straight line. To account for the bias one realizes it exists then deals with it by carrying a compass or through techniques such as using a marker or a succession of markers to help move in a consistent direction. In the intellectual sphere there aren’t such markers but there is the compass of critical thought that works just as well to help us evaluate the source of information and discover biases, either hidden or explicit.

Bias exists, and anyone who believes that their favorite newspaper or website isn’t biased is just as deluded as those they claim who read or watch a “biased” news source are.

Every white person below the age of 50 or so understands why Elizabeth Warren lied about being a minority. Every college applicant forced to tick the “caucasian/white” box on an entrance application, every job applicant forced to do the same knows the cost of that mark, how the color of your skin determines whether or not your application is accepted or you get the interview. It’s hard to fight affirmative action quotas designed to redress racial discrimination decades or even centuries before you were born, so if you can’t beat the system, why not play it?

And that’s exactly what Warren did. Warren became a minority because it benefited her career. It made her stand out from all the other white faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania. More importantly it carried a certain cache important to a monied liberal like herself working with minorities in Philadelphia; a little street cred with her students that perhaps encouraged them to relate more to her. Sure she may have been playing fast and loose with the System, but that’s what everybody does, right? Besides, it was for a worthy cause: the minority students whom she would mentor and lead to better lives.

What Warren never considered was how playing the race card at UPENN may have kept a real minority out of the position. Faculty positions are limited so she beat someone out of the job. Faced with a real minority and a fake one like Warren, it’s possible that she was chosen for the position because she was blonde and blue-eyed and a minority as well. It’s the best of both worlds to some university administrators: a woman they can feel comfortable with who shares their same culture and upbringing yet a minority that they can add to their diversity statistics.

A lot of white people have stretched the truth in the cut throat world of academia. The only difference is that most of them don’t run for the US Senate a quarter century later and get caught.

Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens provides free advice to the Class of 2012:

Many of you have been reared on the cliché that the purpose of education isn’t to stuff your head with facts but to teach you how to think. Wrong. I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It’s not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It’s that they can’t connect the dots when they don’t know where the dots are in the first place.

Sometimes the best advice is that which you don’t want to hear. If that’s the case then the Class of 2012 – and future classes and their parents, should read the entire thing here.

Over the weekend I attended an open house at an organic farm specializing in making goat cheese. Since I live on a large inactive farm I’m interested in learning about all aspects of small scale farming, and having grown up in the St. Louis suburbs there’s much to study. As I have learned more about growing things, I’ve come to appreciate organic methods that minimize or eliminate chemicals and work with the forces present in nature in order to grow food. Don’t get me wrong: Mother Nature will starve you to death and dine on your bones if you let her, but there are strategies such as avoiding monoculture plantings and pesticides that whack beneficial insects as well as pests that are worth pursuing for a hobby farmer such as myself. Additionally I’m becoming more aware of the sourcing of my food, recognizing that we have completely lost the ability to eat what’s in season when at the local supermarket we can buy strawberries in November and whole ear corn in January. I live among farmers, and I have seen the gradual creep of large agribusiness and the depopulation of rural America. Neither are good omens for our nation’s future, and though they may be inevitable, I’ll be damned if I contribute to the process. So I’m gradually buying more locally, and the trip to the farm open house was a way to get some ideas on my new lifestyle.

When we arrived the place was hopping, with young men directing people to park on a newly-mowed hay field. We parked, and as I walked past the cars I automatically scanned the bumper stickers, a bit of a habit of mine. The first one I saw as expected was an Obama ‘08 sticker, but the next one I saw surprised me: a Gadsden flag of the Tea Party along with a sticker that read “God Bless Our Military, Especially Our Snipers.” North Carolina is much bluer than I expected when I moved down here, and I’ve learned that while I might live in a predominantly conservative part of the state it is full to the brim with people of all political philosophies and walks of life.

All were represented at the organic farm. There were gay couples and old hippies, as well as clean-cut military men and their families, their kids petting goats and chasing free range chickens. A man dressed in a checked shirt beneath blue overalls stood alongside a young woman with more piercings than a rural stop sign, listening to one of the founders of the farm talk about its history and how it has grown over the years. Hispanics mingled with blacks who in turn stood in line with monied white suburbanites and their kids to take a turn at the pottery wheel and throw their own pot. Smiles were everywhere, and the place seemed as alive as the show hive of bees that stood on saw horses in the middle of a vegetable patch.

I was an odd child growing up. Some of my first memories are not of clowns or birthdays but of political events. I watched Nixon’s visit to Beijing broadcast on network TV in 1972. Two years later I rushed home from school and flipped on the Watergate hearings instead of game shows or cartoons. I grew up living and loving politics, and had I been born with a more gregarious personality I would have pursued a career in it. Instead I was socially inept, perhaps even autistic, so politics could never be more than a spectator sport for me, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it.

But I’ve lost that joy. It has been years since I felt something other than doom and dread about politics, and the organic farm reminded me why.

We are divided, almost atomized these days. It has been years since we felt unity, the last time being the unity of grief by the 9-11 attacks. Since then our leaders have failed us. President Bush famously promised to be a “uniter not a divider”, but then went and did what he wanted to do in Iraq and in the biggest failure of his administration, presided over an explosion of government and spending. The Department of Homeland Security wasn’t a Clinton creation, it was a Bush one after all. While I agreed with his policies in Iraq at the time, Bush failed to support his actions at home against his critics. He just did what he wanted because he knew it was right, but didn’t even try to convince people otherwise.

Obama hasn’t even attempted to unite us. He took office reminding Republicans that he won and has governed accordingly, ramming through his signature health care legislation without a single Republican vote. A year later Americans clipped his power by taking away the House from the Democrats and ending their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but Obama didn’t miss a beat. Instead of moving to the center and working with the opposition to get legislation passed, he went to the extreme, and decided to wait things out to the next election, blaming the GOP and his Republican predecessor for the fruits of his own failure to lead.

Leadership in a democracy requires skills in the art of compromise. It’s hard to imagine but Ronald Reagan whom even Obama himself has claimed for his own never had a friendly majority in the House during his 8 years yet managed to pass budgets and legislation with bipartisan support with no less a political mastermind like Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. We have yet to have a single budget from the president even during the 2 years his own party held both the House and Senate.

In fairness to Obama he never was much of a leader. His career reflects the Peter Principle more than the exercising of leadership skills to make it to the top, always having a mentor in higher position who can push him further up the political ladder. Unfortunately Obama now finds himself at the top with no mentor other than his usual billionaire friends like George Judenrat Soros and Warren Buffet. While these men may support him with their financial acumen and deep pockets, there is no one above Obama that can protect him anymore so he must rely on his skills. The problem is that the process that led to his ascension to the highest office in the land avoided cultivating those skills.

George W. Bush had a similar rise through the ranks, although based on his name rather than mentors. Samuel P. Bush, George W’s great-grandfather, built a successful career as an industrialist and dabbled in politics during World War I. His son Prescott continued the path of mixing success in business with politics that lead to George Bush’s ascendance to the presidency in 1988. While George W. Bush showed the ability of a leader to make difficult decisions such as to attack Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, an upbringing where his name alone opened doors and convinced people made it unlikely that he would develop other leadership skills such as the ability to convince others and charm one’s opponents.

The last president that had such leadership skills? Bill Clinton. Clinton is a self-made man and rose through the political ranks solely on his wit and charm. During his 8 years in office Clinton was able to pass budgets and bipartisan legislation with die-hard partisans such as Newt Gingrich. Clinton understood how to work with Congress, and his domestic policy record proves it (on the other hand his foreign policy record was in retrospect a disaster, consciously ignoring the threat posed by al Qaeda even though numerous terrorist attacks occurred on his watch.)

We have gone 11 years with weak leadership and our nation has suffered. You can’t compromise with someone you call a racist. You can’t cut deals with a party you demonize as misogynistic and homophobic. Leadership doesn’t pit one group of people against another; it fuses them together in a shared purpose.

A true leader does more than call his opponents names and make grand promises in eloquently delivered speeches from teleprompters. He inspires but also delivers on his promises. He doesn’t hold grudges but also makes it clear that he will not be played the fool. He understands the responsibility that comes with his position and serves all the people, not just those who voted for him. Most importantly he appreciates and respects the ideals that bind us together as a people and a nation, recognizing that while we might disagree vehemently on issues big and small, we are all bound by the love of freedom and hope for a better future for our children and our country.

While it is clear that leader is not Obama, neither is it clear that it is Romney. But I do wish that both men could have taken a moment from their politicking to talk to the farmer selling hand raised beef, watched the Montagnard women weaving brightly colored fabrics, and tasted the red pepper goat cheese. Perhaps they would have understood that if we could put aside our differences at a goat farm founded by a woman driving around with two goats in the front seat of her Toyota looking for a farm in North Carolina, we are a people ready to be led, and who deserve a good leader.

After a lifetime of fighting debilitating shyness and social anxiety I have found a life that permits me to avoid human contact except on the rare occasions when I initiate it. Modern technology is perfect for people like me. I can be social without actually being social, leaving me to focus on what people are doing or saying without worrying or thinking about myself. Facebook has become a useful tool to keep tabs on memes floating around groups one usually no longer associates with. Since most of my friends are leftists of various stripes I watch as they share posts that are supposed to change the world. Most of the time I let these slide without comment since I understand that they lack a blog like this one to share their political thoughts and so are limited to Facebook posts.

Sometimes I slip.

A very good friend of mine shared a post that read, “Like, if you are a supporter of same-sex marriage. Share if you aren’t afraid to admit it.”

As a libertarian I have been a consistent supporter of the so-called “gay agenda” for decades because I’ve been around gays most of my adult life and I simply don’t see how one can support small government yet demand that it poke it’s bureaucratic head into the bedroom. Honestly I want to see the government completely out of the marriage business, and leave the sacrament up to religions to administer as they see fit.

But is this really necessary?

Changing people’s minds requires more work than sharing political messages among friends on Facebook. If I opposed gay marriage it is highly unlikely a Facebook post would change my mind. In fact, sharing a photo or message does very little because it’s preaching to the choir: how many of one’s friends posting this entreaty really AREN’T supporters of same sex marriage?

On May 8th North Carolina is voting to amend the state constitution to ban civil unions, domestic partnerships and other types of domestic legal unions, specifying marriage as the sole legal union between a man and a woman. I think this is stupid on so many levels that it makes me spit. Not only does it discriminate against gays and lesbians, it discriminates against straight, non-religious people who are committed to each other but view marriage as a religious vow. So instead of sharing the photo, I’m going to drive 15 minutes to the polling station, wait in line for probably another 15-30 minutes, and cast my vote on this one issue AGAINST a stupid law. That’s an hour of my time I’d rather waste doing something else but instead I’m going to vote. Given the opposition to gay marriage in my community where Baptist churches outnumber gas stations and fast food restaurants, there’s a good chance my vote will be only one of a very few opposing the measure.

I am a secularist. It’s a word that’s often misunderstood and abused by the religious minded and those who hate them. A secularist is not anti-religion. He or she is someone who believes there is a line between the sacred and the profane, and on one side there is religion, and the other politics. A secularist cares just as much when a religion is forced by the state to obey a law that undermines its core beliefs, as when a religion attempts to force its beliefs on the state. A secularist believes that both entities have their spheres in modern life, and trouble comes when they rub together.

The First Amendment of the US Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” This has come to be interpreted as the separation of Church and State put forth by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 in which Jefferson wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

Secularists can trace this doctrine back even further, to Jesus Christ’s answer to the Pharisees seeking to entrap him. “Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk. And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men. Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.When they had heard these words, they marvelled, and left him, and went their way.” Matthew 22:15-22. This doctrine was later expanded upon by St. Augustine writing four centuries later noting  the differences between an “earthly city” and the “City of God.” Martin Luther took St. Augustine’s ideas even further in his Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms which postulated that God worked his will through secular institutions as well as through divine acts. Luther also promoted secularism in his book “On Secular Authority,” writing that a government could not force spiritual beliefs on someone because such beliefs would be held insincerely and would therefore be invalid in God’s eyes. Luther’s ideas would then be picked up by John Calvin and other Protestant reformers, and later James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in the United States.

Even with a relatively clear and consistent philosophical lineage the United States has struggled with the concept of separation of Church and State almost since its inception. For the first hundred years of the Republic the First Amendment was viewed as applying specifically to the federal government; states were free establish official religions. Massachusetts supported Congregationalism until 1833. States continued supporting religion by enacting Blue Laws, abiding by religious holidays and providing other public concessions to religious groups. The Supreme Court finally began to weigh in on the issue, ruling in Reynolds v. United States (1878) that state laws prohibiting bigamy trumped religious laws (Mormonism in this case) that allowed it. It banned school prayer in public schools in its rulings in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963). Since then the Supreme Court has delineated a distinct line between religion and secular society. Nevertheless that line continues to be defined by lawsuits challenging the legality of public religious displays and the wearing of religious head coverings on the job, and the rise of gay rights requires further definition.

Marriage has been a component of government since Ancient Greece when Solon wrote a series of laws covering all aspects of daily life including marriage. Since marriage between men and women resulted in children, and children were necessary for the continuation of the State, the State took an early interest in marriage, an interest that continued through the centuries to the present. For most of history, God and the State were one in the same, and the idea of separating the two made little sense. It wasn’t until the modern era that the concept of marriage without the State could be imagined, but even today in states across the country one must acquire a marriage license from the state and have a religious ceremony conducted to make the contract binding. There is no other civil agreement that requires a cleric’s signature.

From a civic standpoint, marriage makes sense. It legitimizes property ownership and distribution. It tames young men and lays the foundation for the means to support children. It pools wealth. Studies continue to show that children from an intact marriage do better in school, and that on average a pair of married people are wealthier than two singles. But these benefits to society will not go away if the state gets out of the marriage business.

America continues to be a country of the religious. According to a Pew 2007 study only 16% of Americans claimed no religious affiliation. Marriage will not disappear. Instead it will fall under the complete control of religious authorities who can marry whomever they wish as they see fit. If a Protestant sect sanctions gay weddings, fine – but Baptists, Catholics and Muslims can forbid such vows without fear of persecution by the state. Separation of church and state cuts both ways, after all, and leaving marriage to the religions creates a barrier to prevent state meddling in religious beliefs.

What about the distribution of property? There’s already a document for that: a will. There are plenty of other existing legal documents that can be used to handle other situations usually covered in a blanket fashion by a marriage certificate like power of attorney and articles of incorporation. These documents can protect a pair (or more) of people regardless of sex, and treats them as equals before the law, something that existing law does not.

Disentangling marriage from the state and undoing 2,500 years of custom will not happen overnight, nor will sharing posts supporting the idea on Facebook change anything. But it is worth considering as the ultimate solution to the gay marriage issue and weakens the war on Christianity that gay marriage supporters unleash in response.

My wife is one of the most intelligent people I know, so when she speaks about a topic, I tend to listen. It’s only fair because after two decades of marriage I tend to ignore everything else she says. When George Zimmerman appeared at his bail hearing, she walked past the sofa and said, “You don’t sympathize with that guy, do you?” I said that I’m not sure what happened the night he confronted Trayvon Martin, but that it would be up to the Court to determine that. This didn’t please her in the least, and her normally sharp mind hid behind an emotional statement. “Imagine that was your son he shot,” she said. I said that wasn’t a fair way to judge Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence. “Imagine that Zimmerman was your son accused of killing someone in cold blood when he was protecting himself.” Feeling the moment escalate I dialed back by saying that if he was indeed guilty of gunning down Martin in cold blood, he deserved a lengthy term in prison, but if he was innocent, he deserved freedom.

As I told my wife, I honestly don’t know what happened that night. When the story broke there was bipartisan outrage. I remember watching Fox News anchor Shepherd Smith have a meltdown as he referred to 17 year old Martin as a child and spoke scathingly of Zimmerman. Skittles candy was mentioned so often it sounded as if Martin was a modern-day Hansel and Zimmerman was a pistol packing Old Witch. In the heat of the moment there weren’t conservatives and liberals there were only parents, and losing a child is the stuff of nightmares that wake us up screaming and chill our blood whenever a story breaks of a child killed, especially one near the age of our own. Years ago we lost sleep over the Grossberg-Peterson baby murdered in Delaware, a baby only a few weeks younger than our own. In the years since other children have been killed in accidents or murdered, and their deaths, even to complete strangers like us, were slaps to the face, reminders of our own blessing and luck. The experience of loving a child trumps political ideology. Politics are petty and meaningless when compared to the life of a child.

But past events have taught me to question initial reports, or preferably, to avoid them when possible because they are usually wrong. It takes time for the signal of the truth to be discerned through the noise, and the more high profile the case, the noisier environment the signal hides in. In some cases, such as the Jon Binet Ramsey murder the signal is overwhelmed and the truth is never known.

What happened that night has become a screen for people to project their own biases and fears thanks to the politicization of the murder by the Obama administration, the Justice Department, and race-baiter Al Sharpton. These entities have raised Martin’s death up to the status of icon for their own political gain, and their opponents have begun to do the same. Gun rights supporters initially left Zimmerman alone to take the heat of his shooting Martin, saying that Florida’s “stand your ground” self-defense law didn’t apply because the 9-11 dispatcher suggested Zimmerman avoid confronting Martin. But as gun control advocates began using the shooting as evidence to support the rollback of such laws, they pushed gun rights advocates to take the opposite position, providing at least some support for Zimmerman albeit reluctantly at first.

Coming to gun ownership later in life I am fully aware of the arguments on both sides of the gun issue. “I think he is just a vigilante,” the wife said, and she might be right. Carrying a loaded weapon does provide a measure of power, and that power might cloud judgement and embolden some to cross the line between self-protection to armed aggression. In most cases that line is clear, and in the cases that it’s not, any decent CCW class can provide needed clarity. As one firearms instructor once told me, “Every bullet comes with a lawyer attached,” so gun owners must be more responsible than those who don’t own guns when it comes to the law and know it to the letter. Responsible gun owners also understand that carrying and firing a gun is a last resort. It is the last option when all other options have been tried and none others remain. Guns have life changing consequences, for people at both ends of the barrel, and gun owners must exercise a level of judgement that they know will have to stand the scrutiny of police, prosecutors, judges and juries and ultimately one’s conscience.

None of us was there that night, but the question remains: Did carrying a gun cloud Zimmerman’s judgement? I have been in dangerous situations both in front of the gun and behind it. In the latter case I was with a desperate stranger who claimed to have survived an horrific ordeal, and the guns provided the only protection available in the creeping minutes until the police arrived. Both instances have taught me keeping a clear head in the midst of a traumatic experience where the outcome is unknown is a challenge requiring a tremendous effort of willpower and focus. It’s easy for people to judge when they already know the outcome of an event; it’s much more difficult when you are in the middle of the event, have little or no information to base your decisions on, the police are nowhere around and it’s dark.

Zimmerman needs this trial almost as much as the Martin family does. Perhaps everyone does. We need to learn exactly what happened that night, to put ourselves in Zimmerman’s – and Martin’s – shoes, and determine exactly how and why a 17 year old kid’s life ended. But unfortunately the echoes of that night will not end with a verdict. If Zimmerman is convicted many will think he was railroaded by an administration keen to please its minority base and a special prosecutor doing its bidding. If he is acquitted, many will believe that he got away with murder, adding Martin to the long list of innocents killed by whites over the centuries abetted by a judicial system that is unfair to minorities. Zimmerman has already been judged guilty by many and innocent by others. The verdict will only confirm their beliefs in the fairness/unfairness of the System, it will not change them. As I told my wife as I watched his bail hearing, I am going to try to keep an open mind about his guilt or innocence, but it won’t be easy, I doubt it will be popular, and it may not even be possible.

Cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Awhile back I wrote about the logistical challenge and potential profits of mining the moon. It’s nice to learn the idea has fallen on much more fertile ground. Google’s founders have teamed up with James Cameron and a bunch of other liberal billionaires to form a mining company with plans to mine asteroids.

Freakin’ cool.

Space enthusiasts have struggled to get their bearings after the demise of the Apollo program and the disappointment of the shuttle program. They’ve had to content themselves with government funded missions with increasing costs and decreasing utility as taxpayers have demanded Apollo-like bang for pennies of what the program costs.

It’s well past time the exploration of space became the prerogative of private enterprise, and if it takes flaming liberals like Sergey Brin, Larry Page and James Cameron to do it, so be it.

I have advocated the legalization of illicit drugs for a very long time. While my politics and party affiliations changed over the years, the belief that most if not all currently illicit drugs should be legalized has never wavered. Whether taking them decades ago or living the Straight Edge path for going on 12 years, I always believed that America would be a better place as a society if it legalized and regulated marijuana, cocaine and heroin.

Walter Russell Mead challenges that belief by comparing the arguments supporting legalization with the reality of prescription drug abuse. Try as I might I’m finding it difficult to argue with the points he makes. Mead writes, “Legally prescribed drugs are now regulated the way many legalization advocates think illegal drugs should be. The flourishing black market in prescription painkillers and the thousands of deaths associated with their use demonstrate that drug use will not be magically fixed by regulating currently illegal drugs. While legalization advocates argue that putting heroin and similar drugs on a prescription basis would reduce fatalities associated with their use, the high toll from overdoses of legal painkillers suggests that this argument is weaker than often believed.

The statistics about prescription drug abuse, to pardon the pun, are sobering. According to the CDC deaths from legal prescription painkillers now surpass those from heroin and cocaine combined. In 2008, 15,000 died from painkiller overdoses. In 2010 12 million Americans used legal painkillers to get high, and that year enough prescriptions were written to keep every single American stoned for a month. That’s 4x more drugs prescribed than in 1999. Today pain is the most common reason for physician visits in the US.

As with any complex issue, there is no simple solution. Until recently doctors had taken more of a “what we cannot cure we must endure” stoic approach with their patients when it came to pain. It wasn’t until the 1970s that doctors began studying pain and specializing in pain treatment and management. Progress has been slow. The foundation of pain management remains addictive narcotics with broad effects instead of the development of drugs that target specific pain. Worse, when used to treat chronic pain these medications may increase pain sensitivity. Even when pain isn’t chronic it may take months, sometimes even years for the underlying injury to resolve. If narcotics are the main treatment for pain, should we be surprised when a patient becomes addicted to pain medications?

There is a big difference between the perception of prescription pain medications and illicit drugs. Generations have been indoctrinated into viewing crack and heroin as “dirty” and socially unacceptable. It takes years for newer drugs such as methamphetamine and ecstasy to be recognized by society as a threat and subject to a mix of propaganda and truth to stigmatize the drug and curtail its usage. In the 1980s and early 1990s meth was underground and commonly used for all night cram sessions by college students and by long haul truck drivers. Now it has been stigmatized as a cheap high for rednecks a step above huffing paint. Prescription drugs have an aura of acceptability that illicit drugs currently lack but would attain if they were legalized. Legalization presents a legitimacy which in turn implies safety. People may naturally view heroin and cocaine as dangerous and consider Oxycontin as innocuous even though one can overdose on Oxycontin as well as heroin. People believe that because a drug is prescribed by a doctor it is somehow completely safe.

While it is possible that after legalization the negative perceptions of the formerly illegal drugs would remain, it is expected legalization would expand usage and abuse. Those favoring the legalization of illicit drugs need to accept this and modify their arguments to reflect this reality. One way to do this is to focus on the core arguments for legalization such as individual freedom and personal responsibility. In the case of prescription drug abuse, doctors need to recognize the danger of supplying patients with narcotics, including the likelihood that the drugs will fall into the hands of others. It is much easier for a physician to prescribe narcotics than it is to advise patients on non-medication pain management therapies such as deep breathing, meditation and exercise. Those that need more should be sent to pain clinics which specialize in pain therapy (and can be monitored closely by authorities).

People need to be educated about pain. Pain is a reality of life and in most cases such as injury it is an important component of the healing process. Dulling it at every opportunity may feel good in the short term but present long term dangers such as prolonged healing, re-injury or addiction. Similarly people need to learn the truth about pain medications. The narcotics on grandma’s shelves are just as dangerous as those being offered for sale on the street a few blocks down.

The solution for drug abuse, whether illegal or legal, is education along with treatment options offered by for-profit and charities. As far as solutions go it’s a lame one, but the alternatives such as the continued prohibition of illicit drugs and the jailing of addicts is far worse. Far better to increase awareness and encourage personal responsibility.

As a recovering alcoholic with 11 years of sobriety under my belt, personal responsibility is the one key component to wellness that gets ignored in the debate. To those sympathetic to the addict and those who take a hard line against illicit drugs, the addict is powerless to resist the drug so the addict must either be protected from his drug or kept away from it through its illegality. Hardly anyone dares tell the addict “You live in a world with your drug. You can have it and ruin your life, or not and live a decent life without it.” There is proof that addiction has a genetic component. For some it may have an epigenetic basis. But regardless of its origin, whether the addict was born that way or acquired it later in life, one is ultimately responsible for one’s own destiny, not Society.

UPDATE:
A documentary on the Oxy Express. The most chilling documentary I’ve seen in years.
An in-depth series on prescription drug abuse by the Delaware News Journal.

My wife is a family doctor working in a small rural practice owned by a regional hospital. While she has not yet been sued for malpractice she knows many doctors who have, and while the vast majority of these suits never reach court they still inflicted many sleepless nights and higher malpractice premiums on the innocent doctors. She recognizes that everything she does may have to be justified someday so that if she is forced to testify she can explain the rationale of her treatment. This is the essence of defensive medicine.

The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation in partnership with Consumer Reports has announced Choose Wisely, an educational initiative recommending physicians avoid 45 unnecessary tests and procedures the group believes are performed unnecessarily. These include routine EKGs and Stress Tests as well as prescribing antibiotics for minor ailments such as mild sinusitis. Oncologists are also encouraged not to perform cancer screens on breast cancer and prostate cancer patients diagnosed with non-metastatic forms of these cancers.

But as the New York Times article states, these recommendations are controversial and there is fear among some patients and doctors that they will be applied too broadly. The newspaper quotes Dr. Eric Topol, chief academic officer of Scripps Health who says, “These all sound reasonable, but don’t forget that every person you’re looking after is unique…This kind of one-size-fits-all approach can be a real detriment to good care.”

As a resident of the great state that raised John Edwards to the heights of power on the backs of doctors he sued for malpractice, I’m skeptical over this recommendation for a number of reasons. Dr. Topol makes an excellent point. Those who aren’t health care practitioners may fail to understand that patients often do not present with clear cut symptoms. There is a finite number or reasons your car won’t start in the morning such as the battery is dead, the tank is empty or the ECM needs replacement. But the human body is infinitely more complex. What may present as back pain from too much Pilates can turn out to be bone cancer that had metastasized from the esophagus, as happened to my father-in-law. The chronic tickle in the back of the throat that drove my mother-in-law crazy for months, turned out to be an atypical and rare form of breast cancer. Both were dead within months of their initial complaints both were misdiagnosed by their primary care physicians, though it is unlikely in either case the proper diagnosis would have mattered much. But both cases of cancer could have been treated had they been detected early. Obviously doctors cannot perform these tests on everyone because it would take too much time and cost too much, but this decision should be left to the judgment of the doctor and not interfered with by the government, an insurance company or a non-elected body such as the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation.

These recommendations will no doubt be cheered by insurance companies and the government (since Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare make the government a de facto insurance company I’ll lump it together with the likes of Kaiser Permanente and Blue Cross for the rest of the article.) Insurance companies can now refuse to pay for these tests or at the least requiring doctors jump through time-consuming and money-losing hoops such as requiring pre-authorization to do them. The article claims that as much as 1/3 of the $2 trillion spent on health care in the USA is unnecessary, so imagine the savings to their bottom lines these companies will enjoy by cutting nearly $700 million from their payments. The problem with this figure is that it’s like the old saying about half of marketing dollars being wasted, but no one knows which half. Because it is impossible to accurately determine which person needs a test and which doesn’t it will be impossible to reap the savings hinted at in these recommendations.

Doctors are taught the cliche, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” The problem is in the real world zebras aren’t limited to the Serengeti, they are mixed in with the horses here. And doctors are blind. The practice of medicine remains an art where such non-quantifiable processes as “intuition” still play an important role. A doctor might be presented with a healthy young man in his prime with no signs of heart problems, but something might trigger his intuition to call for an EKG. While rare, young people do make the headlines when they drop dead of cardiac arrest caused by a previously undiagnosed heart condition. The physician suspecting he might have a patient with an undiagnosed heart problem will have to fight to get the insurance company to pay for the EKG, skip the EKG and console himself that the young man is healthy, or do the test for free.

Imagine the doctor finds himself in the dock, facing an attorney hired by the family of his patient. “Why didn’t you do the test, doctor? It’s a simple test you could have performed in your office that would have saved the life of my client’s son. Yet you didn’t. Why?” The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation will not be on the stand, the doctor will, and parroting off the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s recommendations will not play very well to the jury.

So to avoid that possibility, the doctor will either have to fight the insurance company to pay for the test or will have to perform it gratis. Either way the physician is the one left bearing the responsibility for these recommendations. And 99% of the time the doctor will find that the patient’s heart is fine, in which case outside groups like Consumer Reports will wail about unnecessary tests. But the doctor knows that without tort reform she must do everything to protect herself including ordering tests which may seem considered medically unnecessary but will protect her in court. The tests might be medically unnecessary but until there is tort reform they will be legally necessary and will continue to be performed.

I have a BA degree in Political Science and in the decades since I got the degree it came in useful once: it allowed me to teach English in Japan, a university degree being the sole requirement at the time. Since then I’ve not used it during my career and I likely never will. I have no regrets getting the degree however, because I got it from a state school and graduated with debt I repaid in four years teaching, making $2,000 a month. After returning to the USA with the Kid and the Wife I began a career in IT starting at the bottom by working at a help desk. Over the years I built the career into something that I enjoy and has proven lucrative. The Wife and I also made an investment in her education, graduating medical school 8 years after taking the first steps to do so, albeit saddled with enough education debt to choke an accountant. Together we live comfortably although not extravagantly, and looking back I appreciate that our current circumstances are the outcome of a series of clear-headed decisions and sacrifices we made long ago leavened by a dash of luck.

Now the Kid is approaching college age, and it will soon be time for him to confront some of the same decisions we faced. One of those decisions will be whether to go to college, and for years I have been studying the education landscape with a critical eye in preparation for this day. During that time I have read voraciously and talked to newly minted college graduates and grad students. What follows is based on my experience

If you are a high school student, don’t go to college just because your parents think it’s the next stage in life or its what everyone else is doing. Your parents likely didn’t finish school with sums of debt that they likely couldn’t have supported upon starting their careers, and they are using their experience as a guide. Unfortunately the world has changed tremendously since they got their degrees in the 80’s or 90’s, and their experience can seriously screw up your life. As for going because it’s what everyone else is doing, do yourself a favor and look up “tulip mania” and educate yourself on economic bubbles. These bubbles all burst, eventually hurting those who follow the economic advice of the herd. There are whole industries dedicated to keeping those bubbles going and for encouraging the stampede of young people into education, just as there were Indians who used to stampede herds of buffalo off cliffs.

The simple problem with college today is that it is too expensive. Costs have been rising above inflation for decades, inflated by the cheap money made available for borrowing through student loan programs. Student loans seem innocuous, even beneficial. After all it often makes sense to borrow to buy something that will improve your salary and marketability in the future.

Take it from someone who has to write a large four figure check every month to pay off student loans: Student loans are an insidious form of credit. Most students and their parents wouldn’t dream of piling up tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt yet when they think about student loans they lose their senses. All critical thought evaporates.

What is wrong with student loan debt? Several things, but the most important is that you cannot discharge it through bankruptcy. Go on a bender with your Visa card and you can declare bankruptcy and have the debt erased with only a damaged credit rating to show for it, and even that can be repaired after a few years of sensible living. But student loans are for life. They can never be discharged, and all the so-called forbearance programs like Income-Based Repayment do is spread out the debt over a longer period of by piling on the payments you are missing onto the end of the loan. Add in compound interest and that $1,000 payment you are avoiding today will likely cost you $3,000 by the time you pay it off.

Which brings up the subject of compound interest. Even though I had two mortgages under my belt I was still shocked by this simple accounting concept when it came to handling the Wife’s student loans. It bit me in the butt even though I should have known better. Here’s how.

Imagine that you expect to finish undergrad with $50,000 in debt. $50k sounds manageable, right? Now let’s say that your lender is spreading those payments over 15 years at 6.8% interest. You will end up paying back nearly $80,000. So that $50k you graduated with isn’t really $50k. It’s $80k, 60% more than you thought. During that 15 years of repayment you are going to have numerous debts such as car payments and perhaps a mortgage. You will also have to pay for everything that your parents have paid for. Sewer bills, water bills, personal property taxes, health insurance premiums, dental bills – the costs of living that as a child you’ve never had to consider let alone pay. This is why a general rule of thumb is that your student loan payment should be less than 10% of your income. Add in the other rules of thumb that a mortgage should never take more than 25%, a car payment 10%, and the salary that isn’t allocated to a bill quickly disappears. So to support that $50k debt you are going to have to make $70k a year. See for yourself.

There is just one starting salary out of undergrad that will net you $70k a year: petroleum engineer ($97,900). And that’s today. By the time you graduate that starting salary will likely be much less because other students will have gravitated towards that major, boosting the supply of graduates for a limited supply of jobs, driving down starting salaries. Maybe something else will fill the void, but since you don’t know what it is it is impossible to select that major years in advance.

Maybe you can console yourself that there are plenty of mid-career jobs that pay well over $70k in the Payscale survey. The problem is compound interest. Mid-career is calculated at 15 years, so to get to a point where you can afford the payments, you will need to forbear early in repayment which will tack those payments on to the end of the loan, boosting the total amount you have to repay and saddling you with payments beyond the initial 15 years. That $50k becomes $100k or more.

Everyone says debt is bad but no one really says why. Debt limits your choices. I think this is the most important reason for young people to avoid it completely or at least realistically understand it before taking on substantial chunks of it.

Say that you decide after graduation that you want to take six months off and travel around Europe. Traveling is one of the best things a young person can do. It exposes him or her to new cultures and different ways of living that cannot be learned in the classroom or in a book. The experiences gained from seeing the world are priceless and often life changing. One not only learns about others, traveling teaches one about oneself. For this reason it has been a critical component of liberal arts educations for centuries, but one that has been forgotten except through expensive exchange programs that limit and control new experiences, neutering the benefits of travel while expanding the costs. But you can’t don a backpack and buy a ticket to Istanbul to visit your Turkish friend when you have student loans coming due.

Say you have a great idea and want to start your own business. Starting a business is hard enough when you have little credit history, but go to a bank for a small business loan to get your idea off the ground when you have student loans coming due and you’re just wasting your time. Not only will you not get the loan your business needs, you will have to choose IBR and add to your debt while you work to get your business going, or you’ll have to skip it altogether and choose the first job that provides you with a decent chance of paying the loans back. I have seen first hand student loan debt push medical students into more lucrative specialties just because they pay better instead of those like family medicine and pediatrics that pay much less but require the same debt load.

The statistics I’ve seen suggest that people will change careers several times over their working lives. I’m 15 years into my second, and even within my current career I’ve changed focus and types of jobs many times. I would have been unable to do that if I had been saddled with student loans, forcing me to follow the money instead of my interests. The economy that is evolving requires people to act quickly and nimbly to stay employed and develop new skills, and doing this is much more difficult with student loans holding you back.

Like many liberal arts majors I considered going to law school. If there is one field that I would discourage my son from entering, it is law because it is the worst investment one can make, and the statistics bear that out. As this post by Walter Russel Mead states, unless you get into the top handful of law schools you are wasting your money on a degree that will pay much less than professions that don’t require expensive graduate education. Lawyers have a median salary of $50k, and to get that $50k/year they incur $125k in debt. According to Payscale, one could major in physics, avoid the $125k in graduate debt and start out making $50k a year, with the prospect of doubling that by mid-career.

So what am I telling my own son? I am telling him to not go to college until he has a goal in mind and college makes economic sense to help him to achieve that goal. I am telling him that after he finishes high school he should expect to travel and to work so that he learns about the world and himself. He has shown interest in the military but I have tied that to college, insisting that he only enter the military as an officer. He can attend junior college and get exposure to new fields there for a fraction of the cost of four year schools. As for the social benefits of college, there are alternatives that don’t cost $45/hour. He can pay someone to be his friend and hang out with him for much less, and besides, college friendships are overblown. I have a small stable of friends, and all were met on the job, in high school, or in non-college related activities during my college years.

There are benefits to college, but these benefits have become too costly. There is simply no reason that a 22 year old should saddle him or herself with debt that limits choices until middle age. That’s not what college was supposed to do, but it is what it has become.

As the hours stretch into years Peggy Noonan writes, “There was the open-mic conversation with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in which Mr. Obama pleaded for “space” and said he will have “more flexibility” in his negotiations once the election is over and those pesky voters have done their thing. On tape it looked so bush-league, so faux-sophisticated. When he knew he’d been caught, the president tried to laugh it off by comically covering a mic in a following meeting. It was all so . . . creepy.”

Bush league, as in amateur – not as the previous President Bush would have done. For all his faults, and there were many recognized even by his supporters including me, George W. Bush and his administration were at least professionals. They didn’t just read about it in a book or lecture about it to an auditorium filled with hungover undergrads, they understood power and how to use it. Bush himself may have had a light resume, although not as light as his successor who hadn’t been the governor of one of America’s largest states, but at least his administration was full of experienced people.

Noonan continues,

“From the day Mr. Obama was sworn in, what was on the mind of the American people was financial calamity—unemployment, declining home values, foreclosures. These issues came within a context of some overarching questions: Can America survive its spending, its taxing, its regulating, is America over, can we turn it around?

That’s what the American people were thinking about.

But the new president wasn’t thinking about that. All the books written about the creation of economic policy within his administration make clear the president and his aides didn’t know it was so bad, didn’t understand the depth of the crisis, didn’t have a sense of how long it would last. They didn’t have their mind on what the American people had their mind on.

As a former Democrat and currently registered Republican I’m torn by the incompetence of the administration. I suppose I should be happy that it is so unqualified that its policies can be easily reversed when a Republican administration takes over. At the same time I’m scared that we have given the reins of the country to such a band of incompetents, feeling like a passenger in a car driven at high speed on a mountain road by a teenage driver.

I haven’t written about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida for the simple reason that I was as shocked by his murder as anyone else. I am not a racist no matter what some might say, and as a parent of a teenage boy myself I’m quite sensitive to seeing parents suffer the type of loss that is my own greatest personal fear. But I’ve learned from past experience to never trust initial reports, so I have been waiting for the dust to settle and the truth to be revealed. And waiting. And waiting.

The righteous anger that erupted immediately after Martin’s death has morphed into something else, something much more ugly. It is one thing to demand an investigation into his death, it’s another to call for his killer’s capture “dead or alive” as the Black Panther’s have, or to pass along his address – erroneously it turns out – to your 250,000 followers on Twitter the way Spike Lee has. This is the hysteria of the mob, and it is dangerous yet the politicians who don hoodies in Congress are so caught up in it that they are blind to it.

It is impossible to imagine Martin Luther King jr sending out the addresses of the men who killed James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in 1964 for a very simple reason: He had seen first hand the results of lynch mobs, and he knew their irrationality and power. He had seen innocent men tried, convicted and executed by the mob, and he knew that the greatest antidote for it was the application of slow but inexorable blind justice. Florida 2012 is not Mississippi 1964, so why are so many so desperate to turn the clock back? Convene a grand jury and let the Truth come out, but do not unleash the beast that threatens to devour everyone including those that set it loose among us.

Ever seen a lynch mob? This is how one starts. Someone innocent is going to get hurt, the outcome of most lynchings, and hysteria will be replaced by regret. But by then it will be too late, and those that think they are righteous today will have innocent blood on their hands tomorrow.

Update: George Zimmerman’s father: “I have never seen so much hate coming from the President...” The President could have used the controversy to rise above the rhetoric, to calm passions and bind the races together more tightly together than ever before. But that’s not who he is. He is a divider, not a uniter, and when the chance came to score some cheap political points he chose it. It is who he is, who he has always been, so it is folly to expect anything else.

Imagine Obama taking to the podium and recognizing the Martin family’s loss but reminding Americans that Florida 2012 isn’t Mississippi 1964. Black men don’t get gunned down like dogs in the street without Justice. Things have changed, and he’s living proof. There is no need for threats and intimidation; we are a nation of a laws written by men, not the law of the jungle. In our society everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and that includes George Zimmerman. The facts of the night of Trayvon’s shooting will come out, and when they do the Law will decide whether justice is necessary – not the mob.

To me it’s an easy position, elevating Obama’s stature to one of Reagan or Kennedy, and costing him nothing. But Obama is nothing like those presidents. He is and will always be an amateur who struggles wielding the delicate power of the Presidency that came naturally for those who came before him. It’s a shame. America deserves better. The Martin and Zimmerman families deserve better.

If you don’t read Walter Russell Mead, then by all means do so immediately because you are missing some of the best writing and analysis around. There are very few pundits I will sit through bad commercials to see, and even fewer writers that I will drop everything to read. Brit Hume and Charles Krauthammer are two pundits that stop me in my tracks at dinner time, and PJ O’Rourke and Walter Russell Mead are two writers that instantly overcome my ADD and allow me to focus on their essays. Unlike the others, Mead is actually a registered Democrat and centerist, so if you are expecting Conservative fire and brimstone, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Still, or perhaps because of his level-headeness his writing is persuasive and compelling. In short he’s just fun to read.

Two recent pieces worth reading: Top Saudi Cleric Issues Fatwa: Destroy Churches and Palestinian PM: Don’t Use Us to Justify Your Anti-Semitism. In the former, Mead imagines a dialog between a Christian and an Islamist that captures the zero sum nature of Islamism. The latter uses a dissenting voice on the Palestinian side to show that some Palestinians aren’t anti-Semites while many Europeans and Americans are.

Quit Rick. Now.