The Ticking-Bomb Man Cometh

 Black Sunday

I have decided to rewrite the moral dilemma of the Ticking Time-Bomb Problem. This was used - and probably still is being used - to debate the morality of using torture to persuade a terrorist who has planted a bomb ticking away a couple of hours in a crowded venue to tell us where the infernal device is.

We have touched on the goofiness of moral simulation in The Trolley Man Cometh   [http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-trolley-problem.html ]  already and I am going to subject everyone to it again.

Alan Dershowitz - whom we have all recently seen in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story - argued for torture. I copy part of a review of his book:

TORTURING THE TICKING BOMB TERRORIST: AN ANALYSIS OF JUDICIALLY SANCTIONED TORTURE IN THE CONTEXT OF TERRORISM
Chanterelle Sung

WHY TERRORISM WORKS: UNDERSTANDING THE THREAT, RESPONDING TO THE CHALLENGE. By Alan Dershowitz. New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2002. Pp. 260.

Abstract: Alan Dershowitz’s book examines recent acts of global terrorism and analyzes the reasons why terrorism is successful. In an effort to reduce the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks, Dershowitz discusses different proposals that would deter terrorism while striking a balance between security and liberty. One of Dershowitz’s most controversial proposals calls for the use of judicially sanctioned torture to force a terrorist suspect to reveal information that would prevent an imminent terrorist attack. This Book Review explores the justifications for judicially sanctioned torture and ultimately argues that such a proposal would be morally and legally prohibited.

Introduction

In the wake of September 11, 2001, FBI agents suggested that they might resort to torture to compel terrorist suspects to reveal information necessary to prevent a recurrence.1 A senior FBI aide stated, “it could get to that spot where we could go to pressure . . . where we won’t have a choice, and we are probably getting there.”2

While many countries have condemned torture, the reemergence of this issue in public debate reflects the extent to which terrorism currently threatens national security.3 In his timely book, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge, Alan Dershowitz analyzes the reasons why terrorism has succeeded thus far and offers proposals to deter terrorism while striking the appropriate balance between national security and civil liberties.4 Dershowitz confronts and raises many difficult moral and legal questions regarding the extent to which our democratic society can effectively deter terrorism while continuing to uphold fundamental values of liberty and privacy.5 He argues that it is possible to deter terrorism on both a macro level, by confronting different types of terrorism, and on a micro level, through controlling it on a smaller scale.6

Dershowitz begins with the premise that some terrorists are rational actors who crave attention to their cause.7 Policies that address the root causes of terrorists’ behavior, therefore, do not deter them but merely reward them with the attention that they crave.8 Thus, in order to deter terrorism and preserve national security, society must punish terrorists through collective accountability and incapacitation.9 To this end, Dershowitz offers various proposals to increase our sense of security without eroding the liberty that is central to a democratic society.10 ...

 (emphasis mine)

First, even economists are admitting that markets are not really based on the behavior of "rational" actors, and the so-called rational actor is a construct we use to make things easy to analyze, sort of like reducing turbulent water flow to linear equations.
To begin with this premise... well, he should have stopped, dropped, shut 'em down, and closed up shop! Right there!

Second, as pointed out in The Trolley Man Cometh,  and as evidenced by Mr. Dershowitz's use of a construct called "rational actor", we may change the scenario any way we desire. The sky is - literally! - the limit.

So all that remains to be done to refute the Ticking Time-Bomb Problem is to rewrite the script!
In the world of imaginary morals, NOTHING is forbidden. Ask the Marquis de Sade, ask the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, ask Mr. 50 Shades Grey.

In the alt-script of The Ticking Bomb, the terrorist has nano-bots within his blood stream that monitor the state of the organism (his body) and if stress applied to the body surpasses a certain level, the ticking bomb goes off ahead of schedule.

Or, the terrorist has hired a group of trained stochastic runners (or "couriers" as Mr. Trump prefers) to move the ticking bomb around to random crowded venues every 20 minutes or so. This group will -like - pose as a flash mob singing Mozart or some other innocuous thing that NO rational actor would think of linking to terrorism........

Morality is action.
Good actions are learned...
So, how are we educating the youth?

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The Trolley Man Cometh

Have been talking about the Trolley Problem. I find it very much like the Ticking-Bomb Problem.
In the Ticking-Bomb Problem, we had a moral situation where many people - I think including Alan Dershovitz - argued that we should be morally justified to use torture to elicit the exact location of the ticking bomb from the terrorist before the bomb goes off, killing quite a few people.
The whole thing is choreographed like Die Hard, but a lot of people take it seriously as a moral argument.

The Trolley Problem is similar to me in that it is a goofy language and imagination game of hypotheticals.

First, let us read about the Trolley Problem.

The Huffington Post
Behind the Absurd Popularity of Trolley Problem Memes
06/01/2016 07:15 pm ET | Updated Jul 05, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linch-zhang/behind-the-absurd-popular_b_10247650.html

The internet is no stranger to sudden bursts of popularity. From the hundreds of millions of views of Rebecca Black’s Friday to the million of fans of the science-based stick figure cartoon XKCD, we’re quite used to seeing sudden inexplicable jumps in popularity. Nonetheless, it it is still quite surprising to see the explosive growth of Trolley Problem Memes, a page built around variations of a simple ethical thought experiment, little known outside the corridors of academic philosophy.

The basic set-up: There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. What do you do?

Sounds pretty simple, right? But what if you add a twist? What if, instead of pressing a lever, you had to push a fat man down a bridge in the hopes of stopping a trolley? What if the situation is probabilistic instead of deterministic? What if you could combine questions of epistemology or metaphysics to a seemingly straightforward question of ethics? What if you could reference philosophy, pop culture and history, and add a dash of weirdly macabre humor?

This is the premise of trolley problem memes. You’d think it’d get old really quickly, yet at almost 2 months of age and over 40,000 followers on Facebook, TPM is very much alive and kicking.

It’s difficult to overstate just how remarkable this is. As of May 31st, Trolley Problem Memes has 44,020 followers (less than 2 months after its creation). The great utilitarian John Stuart Mill has a mere 25,000 followers, while Peter Singer, arguably the single most famous ethicist today, has just 31,000 likes on Facebook. The Facebook group Utilitarianism has just over 1,000 members, while the philosophically-inclined do-gooder group “Effective Altruism“ has about 10,000. Nihilist Memes currently has more followers (763,000 likes), but nihilism has always been more popular among the jaded angsty teen crowd. To put it bluntly, the popularity of Trolley Problem Memes is simply inexplicable.

To attempt to explain the inexplicable, I had a Skype interview with Aljoša Toplak and Haris Sehic, the two young Slovenian creators of Trolley Problem Memes: ....

and so on.

I myself envisage a situation in which I push old Fatty off the bridge on day 1. However, the police do not apprehend the terrorist who tied the blokes to the trolley tracks. Thus, on day 2 there are five more of the best citizens secured to the rails.
I push Fatty #2 off the bridge.
This continues until the fifth day dawns. The police have let the terrorist slip through their fingers, there are five people on the tracks, I am on the bridge above and - inexplicably - a number of chubby guys and dolls are sauntering by, even though my face must be well-known from the evening news.

So do I kill a fifth fat person? If I do I would negate the numerical advantage, morality-wise, of killing a fewer number of people. Now if I push, the fatalities would equal 5, the same they would have equalled on day 1 had I not pushed Mr. Arbuckle off the bridge.

And I have every right to re-write the scenario. It's all imagination anyway while we are arguing about it. If there really were a trolley bearing down on a mournful pentad, would we be arguing the morality of the case?


There is a lot of this moronic simulation of reality that goes on.
I mean, anything and everything goes in these scenarios of moral, politics, and religion, whereas in reality you would be lucky to have a couple of strands of a frayed safety line to pull you out of harm's way. In real life, the Personal Flotation Devices are always stuffed away up towards the bows of the boat next to the biffy - desperately in need of flushing! - and the fire extinguishers are nowhere to be found.

How would I handle the Trolley Problem? I would react as I have been trained to do throughout my entire life history.

That's why if we draw the Trolley Problem as it would probably really, really happen as in the lower panel of the drawing below:

and I would wish that the guy at the switch had a religious upbringing, possibly had been a Cub Scout and a Boy Scout, served as a deacon at his church,  and whose most vile curse was "Jiminy crickets!"

Upbringing and Education are EVERYTHING when crunch time cometh.

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It Takes A Whole Criminal Cartel To Raise A Child

From the enormous and influential gangster banks that have just been fined 5.7 billions of dollars - but no one goes to jail, of course - to a national past time that creates celebrity quarterbacks that cheat and lie about it, we provide an education for the coming generations.

There are articles which assert now that the New England Patriots are not protesting NFL discipline, because the head coach cannot entirely believe the account of his star quarterback.

The Clintons made $30 millions dollars last year due to - gosh, would you believe it!? - their folksiness and God's grace.

When I write the post The Critique Of Ouroboros
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-critique-of-ouroboros.html

I had not yet read Seymour Hersh's article trashing the official government-media-(intel-military-industrial-complex-yadda-yadda-yadda) account of the death of bin Laden. I wrote the post because I did read the criticism of Mr. Hersh, and I found the criticism so bizarre that I wrote about it.

It was so odd to me that I have looked into the matter, and I tend to side with Mr. Hersh.
The Columbia Journalism Review has harshly criticized the media and government:
http://www.cjr.org/analysis/seymour_hersh_osama_bin_laden.php
The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful

Seymour Hersh has done the public a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama administration has repeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we did get, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public...

How corrupt are we?

I mean, this is the bin Laden affair where barely a few months had gone by and all the Navy Seals had signed on to book deals and helped provide expert advice to the movie industry...

We live in a Stalinism of the morally deluded.

Since we have nothing of substance to function as a spiritual guide, we create anomalous fairy tales to be our guide. For example, in Syria, we follow the convenient fiction that Assad must be removed at all costs - just as we ten years earlier freely chose to be deluded that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 - and that forms our policy of catastrophe.

And we enforce those delusions!

And we teach them to the next generation.

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Why Johnny Can't Read Virgil Nor Star Trek

I was reading about chocolate:

When Chocolate was Medicine: Colmenero, Wadsworth and Dufour 
http://publicdomainreview.org/2015/01/28/when-chocolate-was-medicine-colmenero-wadsworth-and-dufour/

and I came across this:

...The very first translation of the Tratado  ( Colmenero’s Curioso Tratado de la naturaleza y calidad del chocolate )  was published in English by army captain James Wadsworth, whose travels to Spain had introduced him to the wonders of the cacao beverage: A Curious Treatise of The Nature and Quality of Chocolate. Written in Spanish by Antonio Colmenero, Doctor in Physicke and Chirurgery. And put into English by Don Diego de Vades-forte (1640).

Wadsworth published it under the feisty pseudonym Don Diego de Vadesforte, which may well be a metaphor for the drink: vādēs forte is Latin for “you will go” and “strong one.” Whatever the source of the name, the Latin offers the modern reader a good sense of the reputation with which chocolate entered British culture.

And I stumbled, quite sure that "forte" was not the vocative "O, strong one!" as if addressing a person, but was used as an adverb "strongly, bravely".

So vades-forte should mean "you shall bravely go".

It is most likely derived from Virgil when Dido, Queen of Carthage, addresses Aeneas, her new lover, thus:

"You shall boldly go... where no man has gone before"

which is the source of some puzzlement, given the reading and interpretation of the line. We wonder endlessly about Dido's remark of   more ferae   "the customs of the wild and untamed animals" in [Aeneid 4.550-52]

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Learning

The New Oxonian
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/the-epistle-to-the-epicureans/#comments

In June, 1214, the University of Oxford received its Charter from Pope Innocent III. But even though that’s a purely symbolic date and event, it marks the beginning in the West of a formal intellectual process that goes back to antiquity and, over time, produced the modes of analysis and styles of argumentation that led to a rejection of the epistemological status of faith as a mode of knowing, superior to reason, and of metaphysics as a way of description superior to natural philosophy.

I am quite proud of the Catholic Church's history in education and knowledge. I am proud of the Protestant history which ensued. I am proud of the tradition of Jewish learning and the contributions to our knowledge.
I am inordinately proud of the great Arab tradition that formed the bridge between antiquity and the present day.
It was this pride of accomplishment that led me to learn Arabic, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
Later I learned the German of Luther, Jakob Ammon, and Menno Simmons.

How are we all doing today?

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Why Johnny Can't Write

Common Core is under attack from all sides. Textbook squabbles are sweeping every state.

Education is more like a political caucus among people who do not have a great deal in common.

My nieces and nephews do not learn cursive writing, and this is supposed to free up time for more important topics. But their standard writing is pretty poor looking, and they do not seem to be learning any other important things.

What could be more important than writing, and thereby expressing oneself?

If we cannot write, we are slaves.

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Education Is...

... just about everything.

Education the word comes from Latin educere, educare,  meaning to lead (ducere, ducare) out of (e,ex)

Perfect. It leads draws things out of us, things we did not know we had, did not know we were capable of: music, philosophy, religion, painting, sports, reading, writing...

And not just the usual things. We can be parents, and we can learn to be the best. We can tend the sick, and we can find unusual abilities to do our best that had been marvelously hidden in some of us. We can work with people and neighborhoods, and some of us have the knack and it has to be developed.

When our education system does not work, we are not merely not creating enough engineers and technical people; we are not merely falling behind in science, although that seems to be the focus of the media when it talks about education.
We are falling behind in everything!

Bad education is tantamount to genocide of the mind it suffocates the people. Parenting is not developed, nursing the sick is ignored, science falls by the wayside, people are ignorant of reading and cannot express themselves in writing.

Bad education short changes every pursuit and activity in a society.
That is why countries with good educational system will eventually come to the forefront, not because they have merely more engineers, but because they have people who have discovered themselves, people who have been "drawn out" into the light of day.

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Education As Tradition

  Karl Theodor Körner

... and Education, and tradition in education, too.

Intelligent beings have the ability to believe, but they also have the ability to believe just about anything, no matter how benign or malign, pedestrian or outrageous, rational or utterly fantastic. The entire process of sensing, discovery, cognition, recall, processing, and establishment of hardened systems of belief unfortunately have no absolute methods of winnowing the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

We may believe in angels dancing upon pin heads as easily as fluctuations within a quantum vacuum.

So also may we believe in Freedom or Tyranny.

Consider Prussia and Germany, of which we read in the early 19th century:

The life-blood of Germany was never roused nor quickened with greater impetus, than when the old fatherland sprung to arms to assert its rights against the tyrannical sway of France, towards the close of the first Napoleon's career. For years she had groaned under the sway; but repeated defeats had taught her to succumb to the oppression which it seemed impossible to resist.

Hope at last gleamed upon her from the lights of burning Moscow, and in 1813 she rose, determined to throw off the yoke. In thus vindicating her outraged rights, she was nobly supported by the intellect and genius, as well as military prowess of her sons. The stirring lectures of Fichte, and the martial lyrics of Körner, were no less effective towards the liberation of their country than the valour and strategical skill of Lützow and Blucher.

Today is the birthday of  Karl Theodor Körner, to whom reference is made. He died in 1813 having fought for German freedom, written poetic lyrics to that cause, and honored so by all Germany.
(Not Karl Körner of the Waffen SS; if you google this name, include the "Theodor".)

Within 120 years the Nazi party came to power in 1933.
Within that space of 4 generations, how great a change!

Great discoveries such as the exaltation of Freedom over Slavery and Servitude need become Tradition and the new generations must be taught such truths, along with the truths of science, math, and ethics; the young must be exposed to the arts of Freedom and Respect for one's fellows along with literature, poetry, dancing, music, and the plastic arts.

When Faith, Hope, and Charity are lost, when love of freedom and respect for humanity is in eclipse, there are no remedial courses in our school of life... except for that college of hard knocks of the most grisly type.


Tevye, der Milchiger (the Milkman), was designed to show us the importance of tradition, and the fact that Tradition must be comprehended by the old and passed on to the young. Tradition is like Simcha Torah: the Law must be read  in the language that must first be taught by the learned to the young; then it may be passed down as a gift from generation to generation, and become alive again in the hearts of mankind.

And all our days may be zeman simchateynu; the season of our joy!


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Educational Genocide And The Teaching Of Cursive Handwriting

 To Waste A Mind Is A Terrible Thing

(1)
Even people that cannot write in cursive, but solely use the print form of writing - what I think we used to call "using block letters" when I was a kid -  often have illegible writing.

So many people are not even being taught to write in block letters, much less cursive.

That's why the whole question of cursive sounds phoney: educators already are failing with the simpler form of writing, so the question about cursive is posed to make a diversion.

(2)
Cursive is faster and quicker.
If a person need to write, then cursive would free them up to
(a) save time, and
(b) get their ideas down faster, which is important if the ideas are new and still malleable in the mind.

To deprive children of a fast and efficient form of setting down their thoughts is yet what I consider another form of "educational genocide" being perpetrated in this country.
The decline of all education is a CRIME, for it deprives people of the ability to elucidate their thoughts and refine them and try to make them precise. Inferior education destroys minds and people.

This entire business of restricting Voting Rights is a form of marginalization which does not even begin to approach the horror of wiping out the thoughts of entire generations of peoples!

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Tiger Moms Again

Data Challenges ‘Tiger Mom’ Parenting Methods
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/05/data-challenges-tiger-mom-parenting-methods/

When Amy Chua sounded her battle cry in 2011, first with the Wall Street Journal article “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” followed closely by her tongue-in-cheek parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the advocate of heavy-handed child-rearing met criticism for both encouraging draconian parenting and for reinforcing stereotypes. Slate reports on a recently published study by University of Texas professor Su Yeong Kim, whose research suggests that the methods used by “tiger moms” and “wolf dads” may not promote success in their children:

In March, she published her results; they will no doubt surprise Chua and her admirers. Children of parents whom Kim classified as “tiger” had lower academic achievement and attainment—and greater psychological maladjustment—and family alienation, than the kids of parents characterized as “supportive” or “easygoing.”

And a reprint, since we are talking of education:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success
By Anu Partanen

Dec 29 2011, 3:00 PM ET  
The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence...

Hmmmm......


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Sgt. Apone, Tough Love Principal of Regina High School

Sgt. Apone, Principal of Regina High School, Warren

I just finished listening to a news story on the ABC Detroit channel, wherein having armed teachers was discussed: it was seen as cheaper than having a policeman in every classroom.

So the guy sorta sez that if a teacher had laid down a burst of covering fire (the exact words are a little different), it may have distracted the guy, and then the lunchroom militia could have taken him out.

I like it when we take Fantasy for Reality.

I mean, we have already tried to turn reality into Ted Nugent's dreams, and it is not pretty so far. But what if we just take it and extend it into a reductio ad absurdum of having elementary school teachers act like the interstellar Colonial Marines in Aliens:

Using a Catholic Girls High School as an example,

Sister Mary Leanne, Principal, as  Sgt. Apone, leader of the Colonial Marine squad,

Mrs. M. Weinert, Advanced Placement English, as Pvt. Vasquez,

Mrs. C. Tarpley, Math, as Pvt. Hudson,

Mrs. S. Capizzo, Fine Arts, as Pvt. Hicks

Mr. Beveridge, Maintenance, as Pvt. Spunkmeyer

Vasquez

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Reindeer Moms... and Educators

Enough of Tiger Moms and Dolphin Moms; now we hear from Scandinavia and we hear something a bit more reasonable.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/


What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success
By Anu Partanen

Dec 29 2011, 3:00 PM ET  
The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.\

Hmmmm......
Could be a paradigm cracking moment.
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Reason and Education

Our world is not actually rational. What is it, then? I mean, what is it when we pretend rationality? Looking at the Libyan War, which I assume is over now, indicates that we use reason and logic to not only establish rules, laws, and norms, but also to escape from them (Geneva Conventions).

Escape seems to be fairly easy, for example ignoring the EPA and basic human health concerns in the case of hazardous hydrofracking, when we have a large pay-off. If we do not have a pay-off, we can also rely on a dysfunctional education wherein the long struggle to laws, rules, and norms is ignored and left to be forgotten.

When Education fails, we become reasonable rodents, prey of the viciously rich.
Education is not Propaganda. The aim of Education is to strip Propaganda of its bejewelled tiara of deceit.

More later, especially Geneva Conventions and our Wars o' the Week.
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Hillsdale Day: October 15

(The memorial day was to have been April 30, the anniversary of Lissa Roche's suicide, but there was a conflict. It is interesting to note that Glenn Beck seems to have a student from Hillsdale, briefly, but there is too much hidden about that part of his life.)

Modern Conservatism betrayed its true nature to view at the incident at Hillsdale College, Michigan, where in 1999, Lissa Roche killed herself.

She had been carrying on a 19 year affair with her father-in-law, George Roche III, the president of Hillsdale College.

...As one of his first acts as president, Roche brought in conservative author and icon Russell Kirk to teach at Hillsdale, but more importantly to give the world notice that Hillsdale was serious about being conservative. If Roche had been as serious about thinking as he was about fund-raising and public relations, he might have noticed that Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind, specifically the chapters on Edmund Burke and John Adams, had some significant things to say about the relationship between reason and appetite, lessons that would have increasing relevance to Hillsdale College under George III’s increasingly autocratic leadership. That meant that Kirk also had something to say about the two strains within conservatism—the libertarian and the traditional—which appetite and reason represented...

George Roche III was great, because he was a great fund raiser for the Conservative causes. He was lionized by Conservatives.
However, you cannot keep up a 19 year affair without people becoming aware. In particular, you cannot commit so heinous an offence as George Roche did, year after year, without people becoming aware of it, yet to frightened to mention it.
Money was God, and the Republican Party had only One God. They looked the other way.

Lissa Roche went out to the gazebo, a central place at Hillsdale, and killed herself.

The entire story is
Death at the Gazebo:Conservatism In Extremis at Hillsdale College
by E. Michael Jones
(note November 24 2011:  http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/2000/January/hillsdale.html 
is the location.)

I am not aware where it is available at the present time.
However, its importance is inversely proportional to the oblivion which modern society and media have banished it.

And this Conservative society loved Ayn Rand.
Just as the predators love her today.
Remember that Alan Greenspan was one of her foremost followers, and one of her main sources of economic information.

How the Servant Became a Predator: Finance’s Five Fatal Flaws

 by Bill Black

 http://www.nextnewdeal.net/how-servant-became-predator-finances-five-fatal-flaws

...As financial sector elites became obscenely wealthy through predation and fraud, their psychological incentives to embrace unhealthy, anti-democratic Social Darwinism surged. While they were, by any objective measure, the worst elements of the public, their sycophants in the media and the recipients of their political and charitable contributions worshiped them as heroic. Finance CEOs adopted and spread the myth that they were smarter, harder working, and more innovative than the rest of us. They repeated the story of how they rose to the top entirely through their own brilliance and willingness to embrace risk. All of their employees weren’t simply above average, they told us, but exceptional. They hated collectivism and adored Ayn Rand.

The Misperception Of Catastrophe

 Roman School; Boy at Right Carrying Lunch Impedimentum

We use the metaphor of the Roman Empire a good deal: its decline and fall, its paganism and opposition to Christianity; we love to either contrast our pure greatness to its alloyed form of eminence, or to parallel the crimes of those we disagree with to the crimes of Rome.

Yet, even though Rome did decline and fall, at the time the typical Roman probably did not see decline nor did he see fall. He probably thought change was for the better. Tempus fugit and all that, followed by a well deserved O tempora, O mores!
And even as the noose of the Imperium tightened around their necks and the severe Tiberius gave way to the corrupt Caligula, the Romans probably sat about drinking wine in the shade and formed committees to discuss reforms: reform the Imperium back to Republic, to reform the corn distribution, to reform the army, etc.

We suffer also. Our political leadership is a nonentity of fools who excel at self-enrichment. We slide into economic chaos and suffer the inane pratings of cheer leaders on Fox News. Worst of all, we cannot see the forest of disaster for the trees of our decline.

For example, people who count in Detroit discuss ways to improve the school system. They get together and meet. They hire new School Board Presidents...frequently, it seems. It seems business as usual. The graduation rate for Detroit schools is just under 25%. That is not a bit of slippage in standards; that is a complete disaster! The graduation rate might as well be 0%.
When you consider that among the 24.9% that graduate are included those they are moving along just to get rid of them and have not gained much from education, these figures show an educational system that has been destroyed, not one that needs a new President and some remedial measures. It is an educational Dresden after the bombing. It is Hiroshima. ...and the aftermath of the destruction is spread out for all to see.

The young are not educated...and now there are no jobs even for the educated! Yet the people of Detroit and the nation cannot face up to the fact that urban education has been vaporised and has disappeared. As we continue to plod our way to a dusky future, we shall see familiar signposts all the way and we shall not divine the imminent catastrophe...because we are God's chosen, because we are America and America never loses, because our minds are too small to comprehend the evanescence of pride.

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