A life not wasted on education

There's been a bit of a buzz recently regarding a ground-breaking discovery by a young mathematician who goes by the name Hannah Cairo. You won't read anything about it in the linked article, but this teenager who is generally regarded as female is actually an imposter in that role, having started out life as a male whose Christian name has been so effectively wiped from the record that I will just be referring to him in this article as Cairo (in that, at least, I have literary company).
What interests me the most about this story is not that a teenager was able to solve a 40-year old problem in higher mathematics, but that doing so was able to propel him over several of the barriers that have been erected to keep free-thinking individuals out of higher education. Cairo, you see, will be entering a doctoral program in mathematics at the age of seventeen. What’s so unprecedented about this is that he not only doesn’t have a master’s degree in the field, the usual prerequisite for embarking on a doctrinal program—-he doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree. And for what it’s worth, he’s never even been to high school; he went directly from homeschool to taking advanced college math classes.
Now, the vast majority of universities to which Cairo applied did turn him down, citing the usual standards of their gatekeepers. But he was accepted by the graduate schools of Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, who were somehow able to make enough exceptions to their enrollment policies to squeeze him in.
Decades ago, I noted the irony of Lynn Conway bragging about being the only woman in her electrical engineering graduate program at MIT, when in fact Conway was a man named Robert at the time (it's also very interesting to note that Conway went on to become a tenured professor at the University of Michigan, without having jumped through the requisite hoop of first obtaining a doctoral degree). Now, I note the irony that an alleged female math prodigy can’t be celebrated as such because it would only bring attention the fact that he’s actually a male. The article can only emphasize Cairo’s youth as an unusual aspect of his accomplishment, not his alleged gender. And I have to wonder whether Cairo would have stood any chance of hurdling over the entrance barriers to the PhD program he’s now entering had he not been granted special handling due to self-inclusion in the protected class of transgender.
What does it tell you that, as a male, Cairo would have been sent back to high school to jump through dozens more hoops on his way to eventual stardom, but as a female, he found the hoops magically disappearing before him? The movie Some Like it Hot seems eerily prophetic on this note.

Another life that wasn't wasted

 “Wally” Funk wanted to be an astronaut. But in the 1950's, when boys hoping to get a toy space helmet for Christmas were building imaginary spaceships out of cardboard boxes, girls weren't expected to have any such ambitions. It didn't matter that she was already a pilot, having taken her first lessons at the age of nine. Or that President Eisenhower himself had written her a letter congratulating her on her expert marksmanship; she was a girl, and girls couldn't march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, OR fly o'er the enemy. And only military officers were being considered for the space program, so it just wasn't to be.

But Wally Funk had a secret weapon: longevity. Having been trained as a backup for the Mercury mission, and then turned away when there turned out to be seven men with the Right Stuff, she lived through the entire US space program, observing the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Shuttle Missions from afar, while racking up an impressive series of “firsts”: first in her class at Stephens College (graduating at age 19), first female Flight Instructor at a US military base, first female Field Examiner for the FAA, first female Air Safety Investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. And first place finisher, in a field of 80, of the Pacific Air Race. By the time the Shuttle program finally opened up to women, she was no doubt qualified in every way except one: she was now too old! She was turned down three times. And it's a good thing, by the way, that Christa McAuliffe, rather than Wally, got the nod to be the first civilian in space: she never made it, as the Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff, killing all aboard.

As for Wally, she lived on. And she kept flying, serving as the Chief Pilot for five different aviation schools. But she never gave up her dream. When the first Shuttle flight to be commanded by a woman took off, she was an honored guest at the launch. Finally, as the 21st century dawned, it looked as if civilian space travel might finally become a possibility. Wally took the money she'd inherited from her art collector parents, and royalties from her books, to make a down payment of the first Virgin Galactic space tourism flight. By this time she was in her seventies, and space tourism was still a decade off. But when the first flight finally took off with paying passengers, it was competitor Blue Orbit rather than Virgin Galactic. Their maiden flight set two records: 18-year old Oliver Daemen became the youngest person in space, and Wally, at 82, the oldest by half a decade (and it was a good thing for the record books that she was on that first flight, as the second, just a few months later, carried 90-year-old William Shatner). She had somehow managed to outlast the entire span of the male-only U.S. space program, AND to outlive the age restriction. In that way she was reminiscent of the first woman in space, who was sent along on an early robotic flight purely as a token, but kept on training long enough to see the Soviet space program open up to women, and became a fully qualified cosmonaut.

I was inspired to write this post when I noticed that, like Linus Pauling, Mary Wallace Funk got tired of not being allowed to study what she wanted to in high school, so dropped out and entered college at age 16. With all the progress they have made in so many other areas, in this way America have regressed: it's no longer possible for a frustrated genius to get into college without first ticking off the box of a secondary school education. At the very most, he or she can take limited college classes concurrently while completing secondary school, or complete it early by correspondence; just dropping out is no longer an option for bright young students like Linus and Wally.

I imagine there are a few exceptions in subsequent generations, but I suspect none from the 21st century.

A review of Contact, an alleged work of science fiction: Part One

I recently had the opportunity to view Contact, a movie that was released over two decades ago—almost the amount of time it would take for a transmission of it to reach the Vega system. I was struck from very early on in the production by the similarities between it and Isaac Asimov's famous story, Nightfall. I have written several posts reviewing that story, which are available here. I suggest reading them now, for background, before going any further. 

Now, I'll start out by saying that although I was aware of the movie when it came out, and that it was discussed in the Christian Media at the time, I've had no thoughts about it whatsoever for the past twenty plus years, so I trust that everything I say here will be uninfluenced by any other reviews. As I review Contact, I'll continue to allude to my earlier observations on this topic, which remain very relevant. Inasmuch as it's a long movie, I'll probably do this review in several installments. But, to begin at the very beginning:

The movie opens with the iconic roar of the MGM lion, framed by the Latin motto, Ars Gratia Artis--Art for Art's Sake. Not a single frame of the actual movie has yet been shown, but already we are being set up to believe that what follows is just pure entertainment--science fiction. But is it? Might there also be a deeper agenda, Art for the Sake of Persuasion? 

We then move into the opening sequence, which is a juxtaposition of animated video and archived audio. The animation is a zoom-out that begins with a satellite view of Cape Canaveral, tracking westward as the sun overtakes it from the east. Meanwhile the audio track is a montage of news broadcasts interrupted by brief bursts of contemporary music, working backward from the present day as the camera recedes from Earth, both tracks accelerating: the animation rapidly passes the Moon, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, Ceres, and Jupiter—already moving much faster than the speed of light—as the audio track has already reached a quarter century before present, to the Watergate Scandal of President Nixon, then immediately on to M.L. King's March on Washington. By the time Jupiter and its moons recede into the background we can hear an announcement of the assassination of President Kennedy. Then, as Saturn fades into the distance, we race through another two decades, passing through the McCarthy Era all the way to the beginning of the American involvement in World War Two. What is being hinted at is that news broadcasts are traveling into space at the speed of light, with the very earliest broadcasts leading the way into the rest of the galaxy. A bit of a stronger hint comes after the disappearance of Saturn, as the sun itself blinks out and we see a rapidly receding series of stars and galaxies as the audio takes us back through the Thirties to the earliest days of Radio. Then the audio itself gradually fades to background static, as we continue to back our way through a dusty nebula and into intergalactic space, where total silence reigns. Other galaxies zoom by with increasing rapidity, until the screen becomes a total blur which resolves into the left eyeball of our protagonist, the young Ellie Arroway. Meanwhile, the audio picks back up again as background static, resolving into the signal of a ham radio she is operating, with her voice now in real time, attempting to make contact with “anyone out there.” Thus the stage is set for a lifetime of hovering over a radio, seeking not only a signal from another rational being, but, most importantly, the opportunity for interaction therewith. And we see her determination as she scans the dials in search of a response, getting encouragement from her father to keep trying—then, when she finally lands a station out of Pensacola, he congratulates her for achieving the “farthest one yet.”

Okay, at this point in the actual screen-acting, we already move from the realm of science to science fiction, because that's just not how the propagation of ham radio waves works. One does not start out pulling in nearby signals, then progressively move to the outer limits on the country, then farther out into the hemisphere, and finally, with “a big enough antenna,” to the other side of the world. The propagation of radio waves on the frequencies of the amateur bands is such that one is actually more likely to land a station a thousand miles away, than an hundred. But, not to let the facts of science get in the way of a good story, the scriptwriters expect us to believe that Ellie will start small, and keep progressing until she is at the point of asking radio operators on the other side of the Universe to “come back.” 

But that's not Ellie's only goal: in the very next scene we see her asking her father, with growing excitement, how far out it is possible to hear: California? Alaska? China? The Moon? Jupiter? Saturn? Suddenly she grows reflective, and asks her dad the question only a ten year old could ask: Could we talk to Mom?

Ah, now the subject of Religion intrudes, because young Ellie is asking an existential question, one immeasurably beyond the reach of the technology that so fascinates her. Science she knows, geography and astronomy she is beginning to understand, but of the Eternal State, she is much the innocent child, asking questions far beyond her ken. Here her father fails her—being unable to give her the answer she wants—because he, like her, only believes in Science, and Science has no answers to any of the deeper questions of life. And here the movie reveals its main argument. Having, at the behest of her father, dismissed the possibility of making contact beyond the grave, Ellie turns to the next best thing: making contact beyond the Solar System. And here we stop to consider the implications.

”Hey Dad, do you think there's people on other planets?” she asks, again in all innocence. “I don't know Sparks, but it seems like if it's just us, that would be an awful waste of space.” And is precisely here that the movie lands on its main theme: this phrase will be repeated at crucial points in the plot, to drive the message home that somewhere, on a cosmic scale, there is a sense that it would be wrong for Earth to be the only populated planet. This doctrine is never proven, nor is there ever even seen any need to prove it. Ellie simply accepts it on faith, and goes on to make it the guiding belief in her life's work, which is to search for, and find, signs of intelligence in outer space. She will run into many obstacles in that quest—the entire plot of the movie consists of her overcoming them, one after the other—but she will never be shaken in her core belief that there MUST be someone else out there—and an unstated corollary to that belief is that they MUST be so immeasurably greater than humankind, both in intelligence and technology, that they will be able to bridge the unbridgeable gulf between us, and make meaningful contact. It only remains for us to let them know we are here, and to devotedly await their response.

Do you see where this is headed? One thing this movie does, and does well, is to demonstrate that humankind is incorrigibly religious: everyone is forced by their very nature to believe in a higher order of beings, ones whose powers and understanding are beyond our comprehension. And the movie will go on to demonstrate our absolute impossibility of approaching these beings using our own abilities, or of comprehending them using our own understanding. Atheistic Science is turned on its head, and shown to be just another religion after all. 

I think that's enough for the first installment; we are now fully seven minutes into a two-and-a-half-hour movie, and in the next scene we will see Ellie instantly transition to Dr. Arroway the astronomer, having finally achieved the ultimate in her muttered ten-year-old goal of "get[ting] a bigger antenna."

The New Math: The NIV and Sarah's Three Measures of Flour

"And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth."                   --Genesis 18:6 KJV

Okay, so the inquiring reader may want to know just how much is "three measures." How about turning to that bastion of contemporary scholarship, the 1978 NIV?

So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. "Quick," he said, "get three seahs[a] of fine flour and knead it and bake some bread."
 [a] That is, probably about 20 quarts (about 22 litres)           --NIV78

Dear me. Like the ill-fated Mars Mission of 1999, which overshot its goal, the CBT suffered from an inability to correctly convert to metric. Twenty quarts is in fact less than 19 litres. Kind of embarrassing for something billed as "The First Truly International English Version." Ah well, this one certainly didn't get past the revision of 1984, surely.

So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. "Quick," he said, "get three seahs[a] of fine flour and knead it and bake some bread."
[a] That is, probably about 20 quarts (about 22 litres)              --NIV84

Dear, dear me. The CBT's scholarship isn't looking so scholarly here, is it.  Well, the TNIV was the epitome of scholarly scholarship, correcting all the gross outdated language of that childish project, the NIV. It reads:

So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. "Quick," he said, "get three seahs[a] of the finest flour and knead it and bake some bread."
[a] That is, probably about 36 pounds or about 16 kilograms  --TNIV04

Oh. A measure, then, is now twelve pounds, rather than thirteen and a third cups (the way modern people actually measure flour). So we have now moved from ill-fated scholarship to pedantry. Are we really expected to believe that Sarah used up most of a 50-pound bag of flour just to slap together a meal for her husband and his three visitors? Come on! If they aren't even sure of the amount, why guess such a large number?

Well, the TNIV was a source of embarrassment alright, but its faults, thank heaven, have now been rectified once and for all in the NNIV of 2011. Right?

So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. “Quick,” he said, “get three seahs[a] of the finest flour and knead it and bake some bread.”
[a] That is, probably about 36 pounds or about 16 kilograms --NIV2011

EDITED ON MARCH 27-28, 2012
Okay, so the CBT don't turn out to be quite so stupid after all, but scholarly. VERY scholarly. What they were using here were DRY quarts. A 'dry quart' is one thirty-second of a bushel, or 67.2 cubic inches. In other words, more than a litre, rather than less. Cripe! Someone reading the NIV because the KJV was too hard to understand is not going to know that flour is OF COURSE always measured in 'dry' rather than 'liquid' quarts. Especially since anyone who ever measures out four cups of flour for a recipe uses a 'liquid' cup measure to do so. Furthermore, anyone turning to the more detailed notes under the "Table of Weights and Measures" in the back of the 1985 NIV Study Bible will be told that a dry quart and a liquid quart are, respectively, LESS and MORE than a litre.

If late 20th-century recipe books that actually called for a quart of flour didn't use dry quarts, and if the NIV editors couldn't even keep straight which was which, why ever would the New International Version use them?

END EDITS.

On a related note, there is one other place in the Scriptures where "three measures" is mentioned:

Another parable spake he unto them; The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.                          --Matthew 13:33 KJV

Well, we already know what "3 measures" were in 1978 over in Genesis. What were they in 1973 in Matthew?

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount[a] of flour until it worked all through the dough.” [a] Greek three satas (about a bushel)

Okay, I guess this is another measurement entirely; a bushel is 37 quarts [32 DRY quarts--ed.] or 35 litres. But where's the metric? Oh, it must not have come along until 1978:

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount[a] of flour until it worked all through the dough.” [a] Greek three satas (probably about 1/2 bushel or 22 litres)                                              ---NIV78,84

Good Grief! We've cut our bushel in half! Not quite in half, though, as 22 litres is  62 per cent of 35. More like two-thirds of a bushel, but who's keeping track?  Sigh. Let's see what improvements came along in 2001:

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds[a] of flour until it worked all through the dough.” [a]Or about 27 kilograms --TNIV, NNIV

Okay, so now everything is in weight rather than volume (did the CBT really commission somebody to go weigh a litre of hand-ground flour for this project?), with a litre of flour weighing 1227 grams.

Back to Genesis:
16 kilograms = 22 litres. That's 1375 grams per litre, pretty close when you're rounding off. But since when did half a bushel, or even 62% of a bushel of flour, weigh sixty pounds? By my calculations a whole bushel of flour (as if anyone ever measures it in bushels) should come up to only about 25 kg or 55 pounds.  Oh, I know. It all depends on whether Sarah measured it before sifting, or after! Maybe she measured it all in heaping teaspoons, and added some "for good measure."

Actually, all this misses the point of converting significant figures. Trying to specify, down to the litre or pound, how much flour was involved is taking literal translation to its extreme--something proponents of the NIV said we should never, ever try at home. The point is that Sarah prepared a huge amount of bread for Abraham's guests, and that it's possible to leaven a huge amount of flour just by putting a little active yeast in it to grow. But by trying to prove how scholarly they were, the CBT ended up with dunce caps on their heads.

More information on this subject is available in a subsequent post.

UPDATE JULY 2014
In this post I pointed out that the NIV's translation of kikkaroth (KJV cakes) conveys the wrong image to today's young person. Going back over this post, I see the same thing--except here the Hebrew word is 'ugowt. That's a plural word, so it should convey more the image of a huge stack of pancakes than a few loaves of bread.
When an English speaker makes pancakes or tortillas, he would never say that he is "baking bread," yet that is how the NIV has conveyed Sarah's action to the English reader.

Another state kidnaping case

A lot of my readers are not homeschoolers and therefore probably aren't aware of a child named Domenic who was torn from his parents' arms two years ago and held in state custody ever since. Their crime? Attempting to take him out of the country.
HSLDA has the story:

Family of State-napped Swedish Child Savors Small Victory

Christer and Annie Johansson have won a small but hopeful victory in their quest to regain custody of their nine-year-old son Domenic who was taken from them over 2 years ago in a dramatic raid while the family was seated on an airliner departing the Nordic country. Ruby Harrold-Claesson, the couple’s attorney, reported to HSLDA that the Gotland District Court ruled in favor of the Johanssons, allowing them to retain their parental rights of Domenic. “Gotland district court has ruled against the social workers and the social council and the Municipality of Gotland in their quest to terminate Annie’s and Christer’s parental rights for Domenic … I hope that this court decision is the beginning of the end of the gross violations of Human rights that Annie, Christer and Domenic have been subjected to at the hands of the social workers and the social council in Gotland,” said Christer Johansson’s attorney and President of the Nordic Human Rights Council Ruby Harrold-Claesson. Michael Donnelly, director of international relations at HSLDA, says this decision offers a glimmer of hope.

“I am hopeful that this is the beginning of the end to the horrific treatment these people have suffered at the hands of Swedish authorities over the past two and a half years,” states Donnelly. “The Johansson family has endured unspeakable tyranny over their decision to homeschool their child and then to attempt to leave Sweden. Sweden’s behavior in this case has been shocking.” The Swedish Social Services Committee first sought to terminate the parental rights of Annie and Christer Johansson in October 2011. The latest decision by the Gotland court against social services marks a significant departure from previous decisions in the Johansson’s case. Swedish courts had also previously removed Harrold-Claesson from the Johansson case. “The social services are afraid of me because I stand up to them,” said Harrold-Claesson. “There are few lawyers in Sweden who dare to. But in Jamaica where I grew up this kind of treatment of families is unheard of. Too many magistrates simply do the bidding of the all-powerful Swedish social services, and this case is no different from the scores I have litigated over the years.”

Magistrate Magnus Schultzberg dismissed Harrold-Claesson from the case in June after Gotland local authorities requested she be removed. The magistrate then appointed a public defender, Torsten Bäckstrand. However, under European human rights laws, defendants have a right to choose counsel. “I applaud Torsten Bäckstrand’s decision to resign after he was told by Christer that he wanted me to represent him,” said Harrold-Claesson. “The latest magistrate has recognized the family’s right to have me, and I applaud her decision to keep this family together, at least on paper, for now. We will continue this fight for justice until Domenic goes home.” The tragedy concerning the Johansson family began in June 2009, when then seven-year old Domenic was forcibly removed from his parents, Christer and Annie, while the family was on board an airplane bound for Annie’s homeland of India. Swedish police snatched Domenic without a warrant, placed him in state custody, and have not charged the Johanssons with a crime. Authorities have subsequently pointed to some minor dental problems and a spotty vaccination history as justification for continuing to hold Dominic in state custody.

HSLDA continues to work with the Alliance Defense Fund and Harrold-Claesson at the European Court of Human Rights representing the family in their lawsuit against Sweden. The case has not been provided any kind of schedule. The ECHR has the authority to order Sweden to pay monetary damages, as has happened in the past in similar cases, but could not enforce an order to have the child returned to his parents. The local court’s decision indicates a possible shift in the way the case is being handled and offers a breath of hope. One of the major reasons for the state-napping and continued seizure of the child was because the family homeschooled him. “Sweden’s government continues to go down a frightening path of educational tyranny as it implements harsh policies causing more and more homeschooling Swedes to flee the country. In the past several months, three families have relocated from Sweden to neighboring countries under pressure because educational officials have reported them to social authorities. The social authorities have virtually unlimited power to take children from families and cause great pain and suffering if they choose to,” Donnelly said. HSLDA has petitioned Swedish officials to reunite the Johansson family, condemning the continued separation of Domenic from his parents. As of October 2010, the Johansson’s case had been heard at the every level of the Swedish court system and the actions of social services upheld.

If you would like to send the family a note of encouragement, you may contact them at: Christer and Annie Johansson, c/o Rune Johansson, Alva Gudings 363, 623 46 Hemse, Sweden.

UPDATE JUNE 2012:
According to this CBN news report:
I received word this evening that the parents of Domenic Johansson, the Swedish homeschooled boy abducted by authorities in 2008, have won the case in which Swedish Social Services tried to have their parental rights terminated.
The five-judge panel decided 4-1 in favor of Christer and Annie Johansson, with judges reportedly questioning the grounds for taking Domenic away in the first place.
Social Services could appeal, but I'm told they usually do not when they have been beaten this badly.
The opinion was reportedly so favorable to the Johanssons that there is hope that Domenic will be returned home soon.

APRIL 2013
Domenic is still incarcerated.

JUNE 2016
Domenic has now spent most of his life in the custody of kidnapers. 

What can we say? Peer reviewed journals, supervised PhD's--junk?

Found online:

In one of the biggest cases of scientific fraud on record, a prominent psychologist has admitted fabricating data in dozens of studies.

Diederik Stapel, who was suspended from his post at Tilburg University in the Netherlands in September, was exceptionally productive. He was responsible for a succession of eye-catching studies on topics including stereotyping and discrimination, the effectiveness of advertising, and the circumstances in which people may perversely prefer negative feedback to praise.

Stapel was suspended after three junior researchers alleged scientific misconduct. But the extent of the problems became known only on Monday, when the university released an interim report concluding that dozens of papers, as well as 14 out of the 21 PhD theses Stapel had supervised, contain fabricated data.

"This is absolutely horrifying," says Laura King, a social psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. "We are talking about research that has major impact in the field of social cognition." Social cognition is the field of psychology that investigates how our mental processes affect the way we relate to one another.

In terms of the sheer volume of research implicated, Stapel's is one of the worst cases of scientific misconduct on record. The chair of the committee that has examined Stapel's work at Tilburg University told Nature that some 30 papers have so far been found to contain fabricated data. If these are all withdrawn, they will exceed the toll of retractions of papers by Jan Hendrik Schön, whose groundbreaking work at Bell Labs, New Jersey, on electronic devices made from organic molecules was found in 2002 to contain widespread fabrication and manipulation of data.

The case leaves red-faced collaborators cursing themselves for being so trusting. "I was duped," admits Hart Blanton of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, who expects to have to retract two papers he published with Stapel examining how "priming" people by showing them a picture of Albert Einstein can make them feel less intelligent.

Some of Stapel's recent work was certainly provocative. A paper published in April in the journal Science claimed that disordered environments such as littered streets make people more prone to stereotyping and discrimination. Although the Tilburg inquiry has not yet identified the studies that contain fabricated data, Science has already published an expression of concern about this paper.

In a statement released to the Dutch media this week, Stapel admitted fabricating data and apologised for the damage done to his colleagues and the field of social psychology. "I have failed as a scientist," he said.

Sarah Palin's Views on Abstinence Lead to Second Grandchild?

I just have to comment on this. Saying that abstinence education leads to pregnancy is like saying nutrition education leads to obesity; they're leaving out the actual cause, which is premarital sex and overeating, respectively.

In September 2008, Sarah's 17-year-old daughter Bristol announced that she was five months pregnant while her mother continued to support beliefs that obviously do not work within her own family. That year she also voted to cut funding to a program that helped support teen mothers, according to the Washington Post.
In the ultimate hypocrisy, Bristol went on to earn more than $260,000 in 2009 as an advocate against teen pregnancy while at the same time admitting that abstinence was not realistic.

More when I get to it . . .

Biographical Fiction and the Snakes of Vietnam

The Land I Lost by Quang Nhuong Huynh has been read by many an elementary teacher to her students. Probably all accept its stories as gospel truth, because the author really did grow up in the mountains of Vietnam.

Likewise, for many decades teachers have read the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder to their students, assured that what they related must be true because Laura really did grow up where she said she did. Now, however, we know that the Little House books were highly fictionalized, with changes in names, ages, and family relationships of the characters, as well as both lapses and inversions in the chronology. Time compression and composite characters are other typical features of dramatized biography.

We need to recognize The Land I Lost for what it is--novelized dramatized biography. How much of the account is actually based on truth, we can only guess. But we certainly shouldn't go adding the Horse Snake (which can kill by both constriction and venom, and is mesmerised by burning the fat of a certain fish) and the Two Step Snake (which can kill just by breathing on its victim) to our Vietnamese Bestiary, just because both animals play prominent roles in the book. In fact, it appears that almost nothing in the book is zoologically accurate. The book should be filed not under Biography, but Mythology--not that educators have learned anything from The Education of Little Tree.

And yet the ACLU has no problem whatsoever that teachers not only read it as literature during instructional time, but expect their students to actually believe it.

The myth of respectability

About one hundred years ago, Bible Institutes began to crop up in the United States of America. The impetus for starting them was to provide pastors with a biblical foundation for ministry, now that the mainline universities had more or less all switched to teaching modernism in their seminaries. There was no thought of accrediting the institutes, their founders having seen all to well what happened when religion became respectable.

Fifty or more years passed, and the federal government began getting involved in education. As more and more federal money flowed into the coffers of Bible Institutes, they came under more and more pressure to obtain certification as bona fide institutions of higher learning. Bigger schools had already long since started on the route of Bible Institute -> Denominational Bible College -> Nondenominational Liberal Arts College -> University. The smaller schools had all folded or been forced to forgo federal funding by 1995.

So here were are, with ministry students once again being forced to choose between a formerly Christian University that teaches evolution and social Darwinism, or a small struggling unaccredited institute run out of a local church. So short has been the turnaround, that most students at the Universities are unaware that their own school may have fit the latter description during the very lifetime of some of their professors.

But there is a lesson to be learned in all of this, and we need look no further than Sweden, where the government has been involved in education as long as there has been a State Church. The Örebro Theological Seminary never aspired to be a University, but did seek accreditation as soon as it became available. So respectable was their curriculum that the public schools sought for teachers of religion from among their graduates.

But all that started to change in 2009.

According to Christianity Today, “The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education reported in June that state-supported schools must favor religious studies over theological education.” The government agency is in charge of inspecting and promoting higher education in the Scandinavian country, evaluates universities and colleges, conducts quality assessments, and takes initiatives in updating teaching methods.

Higher education in Sweden is free of charge as the school system is largely financed by taxes. A result of the policy change is that “students could ultimately lose government allowances, a necessity in the Swedish system of higher education,” according to Christianity Today.

So, the power of the purse always comes in to play. The National Board of Higher Education in Sweden decided that the course of education at the Seminary was--of all things--too religious. No matter how we cut it, true religion just doesn't get respect. In order to keep the kroner coming, the Seminary had to bring in more classes on religious criticism and de-certify practical courses like Homiletics. So we are back full circle: the aspiring preacher must now take an unaccredited class in order to learn his trade. He may as well go to school in a Log Cabin. But he'd better hope it doesn't become the next Princeton University and Theological Seminary.

The most pro-abortion President and his aborted sibling

Barack Hussein Obama's Immigration File has been released following a request under the Freedom of Information Act. It contains some pretty damning information in and among such tidbits as:

- Barack Obama was deported from the US in 1964 after overstaying his student visa.
- He claimed to have been legally separated from his wife Ann in February 1964.
- He listed Barack II as a US citizen, even though no one disputes that he had Kenyan citizenship at the time.
- He was officially suspected of bigamy, as "no one could figure out how many wives he had."
- He alternately gave his birth date as June 18 in 1934 and 1936. See this post for details.
- He was considered "to be a slippery character."
- His Kenyan girlfriend flew to London in January 1964, presumably to have the child she was carrying for Barack legally killed. After this time, Barack "had money problems." Harvard was so disgusted with his behavior, they recommended he be deported.
- His address while at Harvard was The Koinonia Foundation. He also received stipends from the African American Institute, the Laubach Literacy Fund, and the Phelps-Stokes Fund--in addition to scholarships from the universities he attended.
- On some forms, he did not admit to being married. On one of these, he named his child as Roy Obama, with no wife listed.
- At the time his son Barack was born, he was in possession of a valid British passport.
- And, perhaps the most important of all: As far as the Immigration & Naturalization Service was concerned, Barack and his US citizen wife "Ann S. Dunham" had a child born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961. And they had been married since Feb 2, 1961.
- The INS considered deporting him as early as April 1961 for bigamy but he explained that he had verbally divorced his wife in Kenya before coming to the US, and planned to give up his then-unborn child for adoption. He was cautioned about "his playboy ways."
- His race upon entry to the US was listed as "Kenya."

We can tentatively draw some conclusions from this data:
1) Barack H. Obama I impregnated a girl while at Harvard and sent her off to London for an abortion. Due to his several sources of income, he was probably able to pay for it.
2) Ann Dunham was not the only girl Barack impregnated while at college, but apparently the only one who refused to have their child killed.
3) Barack, Ann, and Barry never lived together as a family. Barack was simply a baby-daddy and never supported Ann or Barry financially.
4) During the time period that his son Barry was born, Barack Obama I was not visiting Kenya, but working on a Dole pineapple plantation for $1.33 an hour (pretty good wages in 1961).
5) The INS has no record of Barack Obama leaving the US between his arrival in 1959 and his expulsion in 1964.

Finally:
Either President Obama's Kenyan Birth Certificate is a fraud, or someone has stolen information from his father's INS file regarding a trip back to Kenya in the summer of 1961. Given the two generations of slippery characters, either scenario is possible, although the latter is highly unlikely, given the information that remains in the file. But given the documented distance between Barack and Ann almost from the beginning of their relationship, it's highly unlikely he would have taken her back home for a visit right when she was expecting their illegitimate child.

In other words, it appears that Barack Hussein Obama II was born in America, after all. But that doesn't necessarily make him a Natural Born American Citizen, by his own definition as a presidential candidate.

Heaven-sent lightning, then and now

When James Otis died of a lightning strike in 1783, his eulogy ended with the following:

Yes, when the glorious work which he begun
Shall stand the most complete beneath the sun –
When peace shall come to crown the grand design,
His eyes shall live to see the work divine –
The heavens shall then his generous spirit claim,
In storms as loud as his immortal fame.
Hark! the deep thunders echo round the skies!
On wings of flame the eternal errand flies;
One chosen, charitable bolt is sped,
And Otis mingles with the glorious dead.

It had been several decades since Ben Franklin had proved that lightning was merely the discharge of electricity, but the centuries-old scientific theory, that lightning was specifically sent from heaven to a designated target, obviously still influenced the thinking of the educated class.

How far have we come in another 230 years?

Just last week, someone I know with an advanced degree joked about 'getting struck by lightning' for visiting church as an atheist.

Old ways of thinking die hard.

Monowi, Nebraska: Requiem for the small town

Monowi had always been a small town. But it contained, within living memory, a school, a church, and a general store. And a tavern, of course--the only business still operating. Elsie Eiler, the proprietor, is also the town's mayor. This gives her the unique privilege of renewing her own liquor licence every year.

You see, in addition to being Monowi's mayor, she's also the town treasurer and tax collector. As well as being the only resident taxpayer. She is, in short, the sole resident of Monowi, and has been ever since her husband died several years ago.

What happened to the thriving town of Monowi to shutter its store, its church, and its school? Why are all its streets overgrown with grass? Why have all of its houses been left to collapse, many of them still containing the possessions of their last inhabitants? And why is the only business still standing a tavern?

We can trace the demise of this town back to the excessive regulations that have gradually made everything in town unprofitable, except getting people drunk. And oh--by the way--state regulations make it so unprofitable to transfer Elsie's liquor licence that she's stuck with running the tavern herself until the day she dies. So when she dies, so dies the town. The irony is that her tavern has no lack of customers; they just, for one reason or another, don't happen to live in Monowi.

Nebraska can be a hard place to make a living--especially for farmers. The Amish who followed Yost Yoder from Juniata County, Pennsylvania out to Gosper County, Nebraska 130 years ago found that out. The dry plains just didn't yield the kind of harvests they were used to, and within 25 years they had all packed up and moved back to Pennsylvania, where even to this day their hard-working and simple-living descendants are known as "Nebraska Amish."

They were the first Amish to leave Nebraska, but they weren't the last.

More farmers moved into Nebraska in the years leading up to World War One. Railroads crisscrossed the state, making it possible for farmers to sell their harvests to consumers thousands of miles away. Those who could hang in there through the lean years would make it all back, and more, when they harvested a bumper crop with the latest machinery. But the War brought many changes to Nebraska, including the first in a series of regulations that drove hard-working farmers and merchants from the rural areas, and from the state as a whole.

It started with the decree from the Nebraska State Council of Defense that banned teaching foreign languages in all schools in the state. This draconian measure, unthinkable today, was intended to inspire patriotism in the populace. A year later, they even banned the use of foreign languages in churches.

The Amish had the unfortunate distinction of not only using German in their church services, but also teaching it in their schools (so that their children would know how to read their German Bibles). Despite the fact that they had come to America for the very reason of escaping service in the Kaiser's armies, they were now labeled--for purely linguistic reasons--as enemy sympathisers. When the government moved in to shut down their parochial schools, the peace-loving Amish had had enough. To a man, they left the state--and have never returned, except to visit the graves of their ancestors. No one noticed it at the time, but the depopulation of rural Nebraska had already begun.

The War was now over; the State Council of Defense disbanded--but the regulations, as they always do, continued to mount. With the Amish gone, tractors began moving in. Mechanization now made it possible for one man to do the work of dozens. Children were no longer indispensable farm hands, but liabilities. The country schools that the Amish had left the state to avoid attending withered and died for lack of students to fill them. And as the schools closed, it was no longer feasible for families to live in the rural areas. Commutes to school stretched out to fifty, sixty, even seventy miles.

Back in Washington, D.C., legislators were reaching deeper and deeper into the pockets of Americans across the country, but spending that money disproportionately in urban districts. At the same time, legislators in Lincoln continued, year after year, to add to the ever-burdening list of regulations that everyone in the state, urban or rural, had to follow. It just wasn't cost-effective anymore to operate small stores and groceries. Selling raw milk became illegal, putting small dairies and the farms that supplied them out of business. Before long there was hardly anything that could be done profitably in the sparsely settled rural areas, except for getting people drunk. The demand for that never went away--not even in the cities, where the growing populations depended more and more on the largesse of the population at large. Driven from downtown by the rising crime rate, business and employed citizens moved to the suburbs.

Such is the foreseeable end of the overregulated populace: abandoned, decaying small towns and city centers, inhabited by hopeless drunks. EDIT SEPT 2024: Here is a rare YouTube video featuring Elsie, still the only resident of Monowi.

A Great Mind That Didn't Go to Waste: A Lesson from History

Growing up, The White Man never considered the possibility that he would not attend college. It was, after all, what people in his social class did after graduating from high school. And he certainly would never have dreamed of stopping his education short of a high school diploma--especially with his level of intellect. In fact, he early on set his sights on that pinnacle of academic achievement, a doctoral degree.

But while he was in college, getting to know the woman was soon to become his wife and the mother of their large brood of children, he began to reconsider the whole idea of a formal education. After all, neither of his parents had graduated from a four-year college. And none of his grandparents even had high school diplomas--not even the schoolteacher who considered 11 years of formal schooling quite sufficient preparation for enrolling in summer courses at the state college that eventually granted her a degree in elementary education.

So it is that none of the White Man's children have attended college--nor even matriculated into high school. And it's unlikely that any of them will, with the way public education has gone in the past half century.

Let's step back just three generations, to when my children's four great-grandfathers reached school age. They were farmers, all of them, which meant that by age six or seven they were already participating in the daily and seasonal chores that were vital to their families' livelihood. School was a building usually no more than a mile or two away, taught by a young person, usually single, who boarded with one of the local families. Fellow scholars were neighbors of varying social strata and educational ambition, but a good education could be had by those with the time and determination to receive it.

Time could be a problem. One boy was repeatedly needed on the farm, even during those few months every year when school was in session, and as a result it usually took him around two calendar years to advance one school year. By age fourteen, when he left the schoolhouse for good, he had not yet attained the fourth grade. This lack of education was a disappointment to him for the rest of his life, as he was never able to attain to the profession of his choice, but was doomed to a live of drudgery in the factory or on the farm. Another boy, however, never aspired to anything higher, and was glad to be free of the schoolroom once he reached the upper limit for compulsory education. The others got somewhat farther, one of them even making it through high school by riding his horse every day into the nearest city.

But what all these boys had in common was the expectation that they would leave their home on a more or less daily basis to get their educational needs met by, and with, their neighbors. And this arrangement did not extend beyond eighth grade, at least for country folk. There were no school buses; one ancestor boarded in town, only eight miles away, in order to attend high school; she being a girl, a daily horseback ride of that length was out of the question. And those who did attend high school only did so in order to reach a specific career objective, like teaching in a modern big-city school.

Fast forward a hundred years to the present day. The neighborhood schools have all been closed, the buildings themselves now fallen into ruins or housing farm machinery. Now gigantic school buses, each one containing several times the number of children formerly enrolled in a country school, lumber down country roads, blocking traffic in all directions while they pick up children as young as five years old. These they disgorge at a spacious campus to be educated with and by people unknown to their parents. But in order to even get in the door, the tots will need a birth certificate, a shot record, proof of guardianship, and, within a few more years, a state-issued photo ID linked to a federal registry. These barriers to entry are enough to keep out any children who don't see public school as their best route to the career of their choice--and whose parents support their independent mindset.

And such is the case with my family. My children would far rather spend their time learning at home and on the job than be cooped up in a classroom, and, as one who spent eighteen years as a full-time student, I can't say I blame them. Within the lifetimes of the older ones, school has stretched out from the 9 months it was when my parents were children to the current 10 months of the year. The 3 R's are still taught--after a fashion--but more time is devoted to social engineering of malleable young minds. Rather than being something temporary a young person does to get started in the workforce, schoolteaching has become a profession with certification, continuing education, and union membership. School has become so expensive that, were I to pay for enrolling even half my school-aged children, it would cost more than I make. And alas, with all this, children graduating from high school--and often, even college--are no better prepared to make it in life than my grandfathers were, working sixty or more hours a week by the age of fourteen.

If there were a community school within walking distance, charging perhaps one fortieth of my income per child, without any of the modern barriers to entry, I'm sure that some of my children would attend it. And it would no doubt be of considerable educational benefit to those who took advantage of it. But alas, that era is gone and unlikely to ever return. My children are still receiving an education--and a considerably good one--but not the sort of education they will ever be able to pass on to anyone but their own children and grandchildren; even though, with modern technology, they won't ever have to work nearly as long or hard to make a living as their great-grandfathers did, leaving plenty of time for self-study and self-improvement for as long as they live. But let's step back and look at one man, contemporary with my children's great-grandfathers, who grew up in that environment and, as such, was able to share the fruits of his learning with the entire world.

Linus Pauling (1901-1994) did not grow up in the country, but moved from city to city with his parents while his father was settling on a career. His father died only a few years after Linus began school, but lived long enough to see that his son was destined for greatness; he advertised in The Oregonian for suggestions of reading material for young Linus, who devoured every book he could get his hands on.

Without the drudgery of farm chores, Linus was able to learn as much or more outside the classroom as in it. He wandered over to a shuttered steel mill and helped himself to enough chemicals to set up a basement laboratory, and mastered the art of testing milk for butterfat content when barely a teenager.

By age 16, Linus had learned everything the city high school would teach him--even then, he was frustrated by the administration's refusal to let him take the classes of his choosing--and he dropped out of high school to enroll in college. I love this part: the high school that wouldn't cater to his educational plan granted him a diploma forty-five years later, after he had become the first (and still the only) person to win two separate Nobel prizes, in different fields, all in his own right. I'm sure he didn't think much of the oft-repeated mantra that high school dropouts are doomed to the lowest strata of society.

Linus showed such ability that he began teaching college courses while still a student--sometimes a course that he himself had only just completed. And he was able to earn enough while a student to completely pay for his college education--another norm that has essentially been lost forever. I barely earn enough, even working a full-time job with seniority and benefits, to pay for just the tuition costs of one student--with nothing left over for living expenses.

Linus Pauling was a groundbreaking researcher in three scientific fields--chemistry, biology, and physics--in addition to being a forerunner in the field of grass-roots politics. He first conceptualized the helical structure of DNA, being barely beaten out by colleagues Watson and Crick in determining that it was a double rather than triple helix. He was even involved in the development of the atomic bomb, but later led the drive to end above-ground nuclear testing when he realised the danger that it posed to the public health.

In 1941, at the height of his scientific career, he developed a then-incurable kidney disorder and turned his attention to the role of diet in preventing disease: specifically vitamins, which were unknown when he began studying chemistry in the first decade of the 1900's. His research and experiments on his own body were so successful that he was able, at age 86, to write How to Live Longer and Feel Better. He actually lived longer after the diagnosis of fatal renal malfunction than he had prior to it.

By living when he did, Linus Pauling was able to become one of The Twenty Greatest Scientists of All Time. He grew up in an age where a teen was free to experiment, innovate, and even teach college as a high school dropout. That age, like the man himself, has now passed into history.

What if a child today, with the same gifts Linus Pauling enjoyed, were to try to succeed under the current barriers to education and scholastic employment?

What if, but for those barriers, one of my children might be the next Linus Pauling?

Update on Education

Yes, more than 15% of millionaires have college degrees. It's actually more like 90%:

Thomas J. Stanley, former professor of marketing at Georgia State University, shows that the critics of capitalism are dead wrong. Stanley, you may recall, is the author of a bestseller, The Millionaire Next Door. In his more recent book, The Millionaire Mind, he demonstrates that most millionaires are model citizens. Here are the results of his survey of more than 1,000 people who earn $1,000,000 a year or more...

- They live far below their means, and have little or no debt. Most pay off their credit cards every month; 40% have no home mortgage at all.

- Millionaires are frugal; they prepare shopping lists, resole their shoes, and save a lot of money; but they are not misers.

- 97% are homeowners; they tend to live in fine homes in older neighborhoods. (Only 27% have built their "dream home.")

- 92% are married; only 2% are currently divorced. Millionaire couples have less than one-third the divorce rate of non-millionaire couples. The typical couple in the millionaire group has been married for 28 years, and has three children. Nearly 50% of the wives of the super-rich do not work outside the home.

- Most are first-generation millionaires who became wealthy as business owners or executives; most did not inherit their wealth.

-90% are college graduates, and 52% hold advanced degrees; however, few graduated top of their class - most were "B" students. They learned two lessons from college: discipline and tenacity.

- Most live balanced lives; they are not workaholics; 93% listed socializing with family members as their #1 activity; 45% play golf. (Stanley didn't survey whether they were avid book readers, but I suspect that many are.)

- 52% attend church at least once a month; 37% consider themselves very religious.

- They share five basic ingredients to success: integrity, discipline, social skills, a supportive spouse, and hard work.

- They contribute heavily to charity, church and community activities (64%).

- Their #1 worry: Taxes! Their average annual federal tax bill: $300,000. The top one-tenth of 1% of U.S. income earners pays 14.7% of all income taxes collected.

- Not one millionaire had anything nice to say about gambling. Okay, but his survey also showed that 33% played the lottery at least once during the year.

We can see how the super upper-income families of this nation are not the ones contributing to crime, welfare, divorce, child abuse and a spendthrift society. But they are paying a lot of taxes and making a lot of contributions to solve these social problems.

Although Stanley did not cover this issue, I've also seen studies indicating that higher-income individuals live longer - five to 10 years longer than the average American (76 years), and they enjoy better health, fitness and quality of life.

--From Investment U email

Note: they learned 2 things from college: neither of which are necessary to graduate from college, and both of which can be learned without going to college.
In other words, the same qualities that made them millionaires helped them stick it out through four years of (for the most part) time-wasting studies.

By the way, like most of the millionaires surveyed, I have more than one college degree. But I'm not a millionaire; I live so far below the poverty line that I had to 'correct' someone else's pre-approved credit app just to get a credit card. I now have somewhere around half a dozen cards--it's hard to keep track, as I use only 3 of them at any given time. At one point my credit limit exceeded my annual income by several thousand dollars.