How the 1% Educates Their Children

When states, municipalities and school districts (about 13,000 of the latter in the U.S.) are forced to increase class size, lay-off teachers (almost always the most recently hired), cut programs and reduce course selection, most people have to grin and bear it. Public education is the only option, and if it deteriorates, well, that’s life. That half the high school students in large urban school districts drop out is just the way it goes. And over the last thirty years, we have been falling steadily in world rankings from science and math to reading and writing competency. By some standards, from first to nineteenth in the developed world. Scholarships and student aid is disappearing in many colleges and universities, as such post-secondary educational institutions also face the harsh economic reality around them.

California cut so many classes from community colleges that it almost (“indefinitely postponed” after a storm of protests) began charging higher tuition for over-subscribed classes – usually those necessary for graduation – even above the rapidly accelerating cost of state education. In the private sector, some colleges have found another solution to higher costs: “Thanks to the recent recession, more colleges are giving seats to wealthier students especially international or wait-listed applicants who are willing to pay full freight. [In the fall of 2010], Williams College began admitting more international students who could pay full tuition, and will reintroduce loans into its financial-aid packages this year. Middlebury College and Wake Forest University began looking at wait-listed students' financial status as a factor in admissions last year. And Tufts University, which was able to admit all students on a ‘need-blind’ basis where they pledge to admit students regardless of their ability to pay in 2007 and 2008, has reverted to being ‘need-aware’ for some applicants meaning that it takes an applicant's financial status into account.” SmartMoney.com, February 11, 2011.

Money talks, but for the children of the 1%, it literally screams with delight. I recently looked at the top 20 prep schools (according to Forbes Magazine) – ranked by a combination of how many graduates placed in the top universities (called the “Ivy/MIT/Stanford pipeline”), student-faculty ratio, number of faculty members with advanced degrees and endowment – to see how expensive these schools really are and whether an ordinary mortal could think of sending their child (no, children… picture these costs for more than one child) to insure that they are on equal academic footing in college with these scions of America’s wealthiest classes… to make sure that the power elite cannot perpetuate their power and control through education. Well, guess what, the elite win, and everyone else loses. Here are the schools (note the number of such schools in and around Wall Street) and the tuition (some with board) numbers:

1. Trinity School, New York City, $36,120; $36,620 for Grade 12 (2010-2011)

2. Horace Mann, Bronx, NY, $37,275 (2011-2012)

3. Phillips Academy Andover [above], Andover, Mass, $32,200 day/$41,300 boarding (2010-2011)

4. Brearley, New York City, $32,200 day/$41,300 boarding (2010-2011)

5. Roxbury Latin, West Roxbury, Mass, $20,800 (2010-2011)

6. Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH, $34,890 (day)/$45,315 boarding (2012-2013)

7. Collegiate, New York City, $35,700 (2010-2011)

8. St. Paul's, Concord, NH, $44,400 (boarding only) (2010-2011)

9. Spence, New York City, $30,000 (day only) (2011)

10. Winsor, Boston, Mass, $32,250 (2009-2010)

11. Chapin, New York City, $33,400 (2010-2011)

12. Harvard-Westlake, Los Angeles, CA, $29,200 (2010-2011)

13. Dalton, New York City, $ 44,135 (2011)

14. Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, NJ, $38,725 (day)/$47,540 (boarding) (2010-2011)

15. Groton School, Groton, Mass, $37,200 (day)/$48,895 (boarding) (2010-2011)

16. Milton Academy, Milton, Mass., Upper School, $45,720 (boarding)/$37,530 (day) (2011)

17. College Preparatory School, Oakland, CA, $31,250 (2010-2011)

18. Noble and Greenough School, Dedham, Mass., $35,400 (day)/$40,500 (boarding) (2010-2011)

19. Hopkins School, New Haven, CT, $33,700 for the 2012-2013 school year

20. Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, Mass., $45,775 (boarding) (2010-2011)

So the only standards that have not fallen seem to be in the richest public school districts (where parents often chip in with cash and other subsidies) and private schools like the fine institutions noted above. For the rest of America, its contracting mediocrity with a pledge that they will have to compete head-to-head with the rising educational standards in our fiercest competitive global economic powerhouses. Unprepared. Under-educated. Unable to provide the skills that the future demands or earn the kind of living that would remotely support the lifestyle they grew up with. Go budget cutters, go… the elite will finance your campaigns, fight for increased austerity and additional budget cuts… because its saves them taxes, and they and their families are not really touched by the realities of such fiscal contractions… until the gates in their gated communities just aren’t high enough to protect them anymore.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I always wonder why societies seem incapable of learning lessons the easy way.

Crash: Not the Movie

In the competitive world of automotive advertising, safety seems to be a concern to most Western drivers. In the United States, we have been hammered by safety statistics for decades; some us remember the automotive safety efforts here in the United States pioneered by consumer advocate, Ralph Nader starting in the 1960s. There are now U.S. government and international safety standards alive and well in most Western countries and Japan, still woefully lacking in developing nations. While those of us in richer nations want safe cars, those in emerging nations just want cars.

With a little British spelling, here’s a great summary of current safety standards: “Since … campaigners like Ralph Nader began highlighting the need for stronger industry regulation to protect consumers, cars in the industrialised West have gradually become safer for occupants. This has been the result of a combination of safety technologies promoting ‘passive’ crash protection (e.g. crumple zones, seat belts, air bags) and ‘active’ crash avoidance systems (e.g. electronic stability control).These improvements have contributing significantly to reductions in road fatalities. For example in the United States the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that safety technologies saved 328,550 lives between 1960 and 2002…

“An … innovative and market-based approach to vehicle safety is consumer information provided by New Car Assessment Programmes (NCAPs)… The traditional car producing territories (US, Japan, EU, Australia) all have independent NCAPs which test and publish consumer star rating information for popular models of car. These NCAPs have proved very effective and innovative in creating a market for safety, encouraging car purchasers to choose safer products, and car manufacturers to provide them. The resulting improvements in vehicle crashworthiness and occupant protection have been a major contributor to fatality reductions in the industrialised countries over the last twenty years. For example, research for the Swedish Government into the impact of the European New Car Assessment Programme found that there is a 12% reduction in risk of serious injury for every Euro NCAP star achieved (maximum five stars). A 5 star Euro NCAP car has been estimated to have a 36% lower fatality risk than a car that passes the minimum front and side impact international standards of the UN World Forum for Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations… Yet many cars produced in newly motorising countries do not yet even meet these UN standards.” RoadSafetyFund.org.

But safety costs money, and in the developing world, consciousness is more focused on mileage, functionality and status rather than safety. In Latin America and South Asia, for example, the majority of cars have a one star safety rating. Safety has not yet embedded itself into the culture, and the affordability of cars is a relatively nascent phenomenon for many of the emerging markets.

But here in the United States, sometimes the safety ratings can be misleading, and much of that misdirection comes from the pre-2011 assumptions inherent in the crash test dummies used to generate the ratings by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: “Starting with 2011 models, the federal government replaced an average-size male dummy with a smaller female dummy for some tests. When[, for example,] the 2011 [Toyota] Sienna [mini-van] was slammed into a barrier at 35 mph, the female dummy in the front passenger seat registered a 20 to 40 percent risk of being killed or seriously injured, according to the test data. The average for that class of vehicle is 15 percent.” Washington Post, March 25th. But these tests weren’t applied before 2010, and they aren’t always applied to new cars either. The star-rating system only deploys a male dummy in the passenger seat.

“Consumer advocates say the female dummy’s subpar performance in some top-selling vehicles reveals a need to better study women and smaller people in collisions. Until recently, only male dummies were used during more than three decades of government testing aimed at helping car buyers choose between vehicles. The female dummy also mimics a 12-year-old child…In general, experts say, the smaller the person, the fewer crash forces the body can tolerate. When cars wrap around trees or utility poles, for example, smaller drivers and passengers suffer more head, abdominal and pelvic injuries but fewer chest injuries than average-size people, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Women’s less-muscular necks also make them more susceptible to whiplash, researchers say.

“A 2011 study by the University of Virginia’s Center for Applied Biomechanics found that seat-belted female drivers in actual crashes had a 47 percent higher chance of serious injuries than belted male drivers in comparable collisions. For moderate injuries, that difference rose to 71 percent… The average American man is 5-feet-9 and 195 pounds, and the average American woman is 5-feet-4 and 165 pounds, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics.” The Post. Differences clearly exist for folks of differing sizes, from large and perhaps obese drivers and passengers to the petite.

Our driving habits differ as well: “Government data from police-reported crashes also show women are at greater risk of being hurt, particularly when they’re not behind the wheel. In the driver’s seat, men outnumber women by a ratio of 3 to 1 in vehicle fatalities. Men also drive 50 percent more than women — an average additional 5,000 miles annually… While females comprise one-quarter of all driver fatalities, they make up half of all passengers killed, according to NHTSA. Because they’re on the road less, women are killed and injured at disproportionately higher rates than males, experts say.” The Post. Companies are reacting, and many have been doing their own differentiating tests for years, but effectively, the safety ratings are beginning to change to reflect the new measurements. Lower ratings today on a vehicle that had better ratings in prior years do not mean the car is less safe – just that the new standards are a lot tougher. For car buyers, particularly in the used car market, this is just a reminder to look behind the safety ratings to see how they might apply to your body physique.

I’m Peter Dekom, and looking behind the statistics usually is more valuable than simply assuming they are accurate in all circumstances.

Dwight David Eisenhower & the Military Industrial Complex

Every once and while, I get enough requests to bring back an old blog. The words of former President Dwight David Eisenhower seemed to evoke that request enough so.... here is that October 5, 2011 blog back again.

The name Dwight David Eisenhower ranks among America’s top generals of all time. “Ike” was born and raised in Abilene, Kansas, and after graduating from West Point, he rose to be the Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force (effectively in command of the European Theater and the invasion on D-Day) that began and completed the destruction of Nazi Germany in World War II. Ike went on to take on many varied roles, from Supreme NATO Commander to President of Columbia University. Courted by both the Republican and Democratic parties, Ike eventually succumbed to pressure to run for President, and at aged 62, running under the Republican banner, Ike began his service as our 34^th President, from 1953 through 1961.

Ike’s tenure as president included creating the single most comprehensive American infrastructure project, linking the entire United States through a system of super-highways (now known at the Interstate system), ostensibly as a national security measure, under the name of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. He was President when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, and he led this nation to accelerate its own space program. He also had a greater awareness of things military than perhaps any other President in the 20^th century, and what he saw actually terrified him.

Ike understood that World War II had put into motion a new economic and political force that threatened to reshape the nation; he foresaw how military priorities could negatively impact what he believed was a strong, egalitarian and democratic nation, leaving it vulnerable to greedy companies seeking to make their fortune in military manufactures that the United States, in his opinion, truly did not need. His fear was that if left unchecked, this “military industrial complex” would create a ruling elite that would distort America and her principals. I wonder how he would react if he knew that the United States currently accounts for between 44% and 47% (Wikipedia) of all military expenditures on earth. His worst fears appear to have been realized as senior Republicans and Democrats today rail at the mere thought of serious Pentagon budget cuts as somehow threatening to our national security.

I would like Ike to speak, in his own words, since there is no way I could say it any better. Below are excerpts from two seminal Eisenhower speeches, taken from opposite ends of his Presidency:

Addressing the American Society of Newspaper editors in May of 1953, President Eisenhower spoke these words:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

In January 1961, just days before the end of his term as President, Eisenhower issued these words of warning in his farewell speech:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

I’m Peter Dekom, and perhaps our electorate and those seeking to obtain or hold public office would be well-served to take Ike’s words very, very seriously in a world where the level of our own military expenditures is clearly no longer sustainable.

Same-Old, Getting Old

The Baby Boom Generation – of which I must admit I am a card-carrying member – is hitting a whole lot of walls, and the crash is not very pretty. Decimated by the housing collapse (where so many had “invested”), retirement savings destroyed in the financial collapse and desecrated in the labor market, Boomers are now facing pressures to reduce Medicare and contract Social Security benefits in a world where food prices, medical care, gasoline and pharmaceuticals are skyrocketing. Retirement is no longer an option for millions of Boomers, the ones who have been lucky enough to hold on to their jobs. For those even older that the Boomer generation, like the Los Angeles woman pictured above, life can be severely difficult without resources; her 57-year-old Boomer generation son stands by her side as well… also homeless.

The lingering of older workers also has a secondary negative effect on our economy: normally older workers retiring would open job opportunities for the next generation of workers, but in this tight economy, where retirement is not an option for so many, the door is equally closed to new workers on the other side of the age spectrum. President Obama said it best in his 2011 State of the Union address: “The world has changed.” But those words hold painful truths for so many.

“Baby Boomers like Hall are more likely than previous generations to keep working, or at least looking for work, as they get older. Since hitting a low of 29 percent in the 1990s, the labor force participation rate for older workers (those who are 55 and up) has risen to 40 percent today. The increase is partly due to employers offering stingier retirement plans than they once did.” Huffington Post, March 24^th.

If you’ve got a job and you are an older worker, you are likely to cling to that employment regardless of how nasty or repressive the workload has become, and we know that workers who remain on the job often pick up the load of those who have been laid off, without a concomitant increase in pay. Employers are now firing workers for very minor issues and using specialized firms to fight against any ensuing unemployment insurance claims, so folks tolerate what used to considered an abusive workplace much more easily these days.

And if you are an older worker who has lost that job, the world is particularly harsh: “The unemployment rate for older workers is lower than for their younger counterparts, but older workers' unemployment spells last longer. The average jobless person aged 55 and over during 2011 spent a full year unemployed, compared with 39 weeks for the broader workforce. Older workers are more than twice as likely as their younger counterparts to be unemployed for 99 weeks or longer, according to the Congressional Research Service. In February, nearly 2 million of America's 12.8 million jobless had been out of work that long.

“How does a person wind up in such a bad spot? It's not clear from the data. Education, surprisingly, doesn't provide guaranteed protection. The CRS found that unemployed workers with advanced degrees were no less likely than high school dropouts to become 99ers... From the perspective of workers themselves, age discrimination is the obvious explanation.” Huffington Post.

So our under-educated younger generations – reeling from tuition hikes and a deteriorating public education environment – are going to have to place their decreasingly-skilled lives on the line to pay for their prior generations’ deficits and may well have to look after aging parents and grandparents when retirement plans and government safety nets fall short… assuming they can even find work in an opportunity-impaired job market, which increasingly offers equally-limited-skilled labor from overseas at vastly lower rates of pay. We seem to be setting ourselves up for an even bigger fall in the not-too-distant future, one that won’t succumb to an easy fix. It will take decades to make up for the destruction we have inflicted on ourselves with nothing but short-sighted deficit-reduction decisions, leaving our infrastructure, educational system and scientific research capacities seriously damaged as the rest of the world rushes in to fill the void.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it pains me greatly to watch our nation slowly strangle itself to death with illogical decisions and misplaced priorities.

What We Seem to Be Telling Women to Think About Themselves

There’s lots of stuff about “the war on women” these days or those who battle over exactly what a woman can or cannot do with her own body when she is pregnant. Given the passion on both sides, it is exceptionally unlikely that there will ever be a meeting of the minds, an American consensus if you will, on these issues. The passion is born of what is sacred to the individual concerned, and logic and compromise simply do not exist in that space. What we can look at, however, is the underlying statistics behind where women think they belong in a society where scientific and technical expertise are becoming increasingly vital to our country’s ability to compete in the modern reconfiguration we call global economics.

The March 23^rd FastCompany.com, after examining a number of related studies, provided a statistical path about how society’s message to women essentially changes their self-perception as life progresses. In the primary and secondary years of education and since 1992, girls take more science and math classes than boys, get higher grades in those classes and even test higher in IQ tests. If these early life trends have statistical significance, it has to be that females have an intellectual edge and innate abilities over their male counterparts in these logical and complex areas of intellectual pursuit. But we typically envision scientists, mathematicians and engineers as men not women, and in fact, in a room full of 25 trained and practicing engineers, only three of them will be women. And when I say “we,” that pronoun most definitely includes how women feel about themselves.

While 29% of male college freshmen indicated a preference for a major in one of the above job categories, only 15% of female freshman suggest that this would be their choice. Even when women graduate with degrees in these fields, according to FastCompany.com, only 20% actually use their specialized degrees in their chosen careers. Women with these degrees are more likely move into financial or consulting work (where there is much less of a social stigma against women), leaving the hard science and engineering to men. At time when we desperately need that level of expertise for national survival, we need to take a hard look at this anomaly and understand exactly what it means and where this negativity came from.

The key transition in negative self-perception in women seems to manifest itself during the harsh years of puberty, where girls discover a need to be attractive, and perhaps where being a science whiz doesn’t fit that paradigm. The numbers seem to confirm that theory. While 72% of girls feel confident about themselves in the sixth grade, by the 10^th grade, that statistic drops to a sad 55%, a phenomenon that does not track for boys.

But that terrible statistic is nothing compared to looking at two test results, reported by FastCompany.com: the first, a standardized academic test, produced a 20% lower score for girls in these delicate years (and no change for boys), when they were asked to identify their genders on the test versus when that question was not asked. Wow! And on another self-assessment test, that same disparate result occurred in girls (and not boys) when they were informed before the test that males were better as this task than girls. What are we doing to ourselves? Why can’t a sophisticated and modern society get over sexual biases on job pursuits? Do nurses have to be women? Secretaries? We know the statistics in these latter career choices heavily favor women, but in a world where we are supposed to rise against such gender assumptions, it seems that society refuses to change the message we are sending to our daughters and sisters, and except for a brave few, our daughters and sisters are buying into that view of the world.

While theoretically, American colleges and universities graduate enough students in these critical fields, the number of engineering, scientific and mathematical jobs that go begging at any time in the current economy remains in the hundreds of thousands. If the women who trained for such careers actually felt good enough about themselves to work in them, think of how much more competitive the United States could be. Can we afford to let obsolete stereotypes tarnish our future? Think about this one for a second to see whether you have this bias as well. Picture a hot, really hot, sexy woman… who is a mechanical engineer (the lowest category in number of women). If you have trouble with this vision, you are part of the problem! And think of how confident she would have to be to live in that world.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we need to wake up before stupid simplistic slogan-directed solutions and ancient stereotypes take us so low that we simply cannot recover or compete in a modern world.

Tarnish on the Golden State

Weather and lifestyle once drew folks by droves to California, and technology and cutting-edge industries supplied the jobs. Today, California’s population has pretty much stopped growing. Taxes and the cost of living remain high, but job prospects and public services are teetering on awful, particularly education. Infrastructure has crumbled in many communities, and rather large urban areas – like Stockton – are facing real bankruptcy. What makes this particularly sad is that as corporations relocate (like Lockheed which vacated for Chicago) because of an excessive tax base, the state and municipal government have to seek their revenues from everyone who remains, causing the tax burden to increase, which in turn forces more companies to leave, etc.

The fact remains that California is one terrific place to live. It’s beautiful, multi-cultural in the best sense of the word, totally built for those who adore the outdoor world, from skiing to surfing, with some of the best universities in the land (Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, USC, Cal Tech, etc.). We have Hollywood and the Silicon Valley. We also have biggest welfare obligation in America; it seems that the unemployed and homeless would rather spend their time in a sunny climate where winter is tolerable and freezing to death or getting soaked to the bone is not a big risk. They don’t drive so much, so the unrepaired potholes are not a big deal. Oh, and our number of near-bankrupt municipalities, our unemployment rate, the quality of public education at every level… bad on bad.

The Wall Street Journal (March 13^th) provides the horrid facts and terrible numbers: “California's rising standards of living and outstanding public schools and universities once attracted millions seeking upward economic mobility. But then something went radically wrong as California legislatures and governors built a welfare state on high tax rates, liberal entitlement benefits, and excessive regulation. The results, though predictable, are nonetheless striking. From the mid-1980s to 2005, California's population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000.

“California's economy, which used to outperform the rest of the country, now substantially underperforms. The unemployment rate, at 10.9%, is higher than every other state except Nevada and Rhode Island. With 12% of America's population, California has one third of the nation's welfare recipients.

“Partly due to generous union wages and benefits, inflexible work rules and lobbying for more spending, many state programs and institutions spend too much and achieve too little. For example, annual spending on each California prison inmate is equal to an entire middle-income family's after-tax income. Many of California's K-12 public schools rank poorly on standardized tests. The unfunded pension and retiree health-care liabilities of workers in the state-run Calpers system, which includes teachers and university personnel, totals around $250 billion.”

There are no easy solutions to these issues, and at almost every turn, the cost of incumbent programs and past commitments so devastate the ability to build and design for the future that it’s difficult to envision a way out of this mess. One thing for sure, cutting the education budget is cutting the heart out of the earning power of the next generations; the above chart says it all.

But there is a path that starts with addressing the unfunded pension and fringe benefit packages, increasing the retirement age, reducing the benefit packages, stopping workers from piling on compensation in their last years to increase their defined benefit retirement levels… and perhaps we cannot even afford defined benefit plans at all anymore. Defined contribution plans are how most of the private sector lives these days. If the workers don’t like it, there is always filing for bankruptcy under Chapter 9 of the federal law. As for migration patterns of welfare recipients to warmer climates, some of that responsibility lies at the feet of the federal government, and mandating state support without providing the commensurate funding has to be a non-starter. California, for example, should not have to provide more than 12% of the federally-mandated cost of welfare/Medicaid (based on its overall population), and of course homeless people are going to pick warmer states to move to!

We need to shorten sentences, decriminalize a whole pile of drug-related crimes and generally reduce the number of crimes for which incarceration is the inevitable result… unless there really is a threat to society. We can no longer tolerate the high school dropout rate (hitting 50% in some major city high schools in California), because those $10-12K-per-student-per-year-cost-to-educate kids will morph into $40K-per-year-per-prisoner-to-incarcerate (not to mention the damage they inflict in the crimes they commit) or $20K/year welfare recipient. If miscreant students would otherwise be expelled (a really bad idea giving a delinquent extra free time), instead put ‘em in boot camps until they pass the GED exam and teach them some discipline and skills.

And start seducing job-creating businesses into the state by upgrading the colleges that feed these sectors (the Silicon Valley was born from the excellence of neighboring Stanford and Berkeley) and providing tax incentives that make sense. These are no longer options. We are out of time and money!

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s time for California and the rest of the United States to begin to undo many of its mistaken excesses in the past.

I Have Revenge on My Heart

These are the words of a local Waziristani (a Pakistani tribal district on the Afghan border) farmer, Noor Magul, who grieves death of three non-militant relatives who were killed last Oct. 30 when a [U.S.] drone struck the car in which they were traveling. New York Times, March 18^th. Drone strikes remain the lifeblood of NATO efforts to contain the “safe havens” in Northern and Southern Waziristan against remaining al Qaeda operatives, but more importantly Taliban forces, particularly the leadership, who mount attacks across the border from these ungovernable tribal areas. There have been almost 300 such attacks by U.S.-controlled drones, and almost all of them in this vital region. It is the hottest of hot buttons in U.S.-Pakistani relations, which many feel have become unmendable. It’s a question of national sovereignty and the collateral casualties for the Pakistanis, and a matter of military necessity for the NATO forces.

At a time when American/NATO efforts wreak of failure, talk still persists of transferring “defense” from NATO to the mega-corrupt Karzai regime – which literally controls the Afghan capital city of Kabul and the area around it… and nothing else – a notion that “requires” NATO troops to remain in Afghanistan well into 2014. Recent months have sparked the greatest levels of hatred against mostly American troops that the Afghan war has ever known. Riots, bombings and a Taliban directive to behead any Americans caught scar whatever positive feelings may have been generated by an occupying army of foreigners that never seems to leave. Between the inadvertent burning of surplus Qur’ans to the slaughter of 16 innocents purportedly by rogue American staff sergeant Robert Bales, even Hamid Karzi himself is calling for the NATO allies to quit his country. The Taliban, sensing inevitable victory, have withdrawn from peace talks with the West.

It is as close to absolute certainty that when the NATO allies leave the country, now or in ten years, our presence in Afghanistan will be more thoroughly erased than the vestiges of the Soviet ten year war in the 1980s. Almost every American knows it. The Taliban know it. Hamid Karzi knows it. We lost not only the war, but our efforts have effectively recruited tens of thousands (if not more) militants willing to die to kill American “infidels” anywhere on earth as well as the antipathy of masses of Muslims in the developing world. As we watch Iraq move steadily into the Iranian camp, we should really wonder what the aggregate of trillions of dollars of U.S. war effort actually generated in benefits for the United States. As the world changes, given our failed efforts in the region, the question returns: why should we even care about Pakistan anymore? Let’s leave and turn the region over to the locals.

But there is one fierce reality in U.S.-Pakistani relations: Pakistan is a nuclear power with a history of spreading the underlying technology to North Korea and Iran. Our billions of dollars of military and civilian aid to Pakistan once created a nominal ally in the “war against terrorism,” but it is equally clear that no Pakistani official could ever be elected if perceived by the electorate as “working with the Americans” in support of this policy. Why would the Pakistani government support a global bully with an anti-Islamic agenda, voters always ask. There are those in Congress who thump the table and self-righteously press that such massive aid must be conditioned on vastly greater involvement by Pakistan in our efforts to fight Muslim extremists who are hell-bent on our destruction. It’s time for these naïve representatives and an American constituency that hates to read history or look below the headlines to understand the real (and unstated) reason for our rather large aid package to unstable Pakistan: pure and simple, it’s a bribe to keep Pakistan from doing it again… from spreading its “Muslim bomb” to other rogue forces in the world.

So given this hidden agenda, one that would never pass muster with either Pakistani or American voters, the U.S. and Pakistan must go through the charade of fence-mending. Americans have seriously upgraded the pinpoint accuracy of their drones, dropping civilian collateral casualties to a trickle (not comforting to those who are “trickled”), and are willing to talk about just about anything else. Likewise, Pakistani leaders, trying to explain serious lapses within their own system that allowed Osama bin Laden to live openly in their midst for years, are willing to consider reopening dialog with their American counterparts.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has asked his parliament to address U.S.-Pakistani relations with an eye to improvement. “American officials hope that the parliamentary debate will pave the way for a normalization of relations by early April, end a months-long blockade of NATO supply lines through Pakistan and boost faltering efforts to draw the Afghan Taliban into peace talks. All those issues are critical to American plans to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan in 2014. But signs are that the Pakistani debate will be dominated by strident calls for an end to drone strikes.” NY Times. After all, we have to pave the way so that we can justify the bribe… it’s pragmatic international diplomacy at its best… and worst.

I’m Peter Dekom, and international relations are so much more than mindless knee-jerk reactions and self-righteous indignation.

Prostaglandin

Like the dulcet tones from a West Side Story melody, “say it softly and it’s almost like praying….” Sort of. Not! But for millions and maybe billions of men – and the women who love them – controlling the stuff may be a whole lot better than such musical refrains. But before I get to the punch lines, perhaps I should tell you what prostaglandin actually is, and drill down on that one particular type that is the focus of today’s blog.

Trusty old Wikipedia: “A prostaglandin is any member of a group of lipid compounds that are derived enzymatically from fatty acids and have important functions in the animal body…They are mediators and have a variety of strong physiological effects, such as regulating the contraction and relaxation of smooth muscle tissue... They differ from hormones in that they are not produced at a discrete site but in many places throughout the human body. Also, their target cells are present in the immediate vicinity of the site of their secretion (of which there are many).” Like so what, dude, make your point. Okay, okay… let’s just talk about one form of prostaglandin… PGD₂ (aka prostaglandin D₂). “In mammalian organs, large amounts of PGD₂ are found in the brain, in mast cells and found nowhere else. It is critical to development of allergic diseases such as asthma.” Wikipedia. Dude, I’m falling asleep here! So what?! I’ll tell you “so what”! It may be part of the ultimate cure for male pattern baldness is “what”!

Cut to: extreme close-up; bald man’s head. Dermatologists, working at the University of Pennsylvania, noticed that PGD₂ was more concentrated in balding areas that in areas where hair was present. Ooooooh! Baby! Bad PGD₂, bad boy! If only we could make the PGD₂ stop, they thought. Okay, they’re not exactly there yet, but…: “The discovery that prostaglandins might be the catalyst that sets baldness in motion, was a surprise to the researchers, who ‘hadn't thought about prostaglandins in relation to hair loss,’ said [Penn research dermatologist George] Cotsarelis… From there, researchers were able to identify the receptor — the cellular landing dock — for D2, called GPR44. Find a way to block that receptor, or somehow thwart PGD2's path to it, and, voila! —baldness doesn't happen. That, say the researchers, will be their next effort — to try topical treatments that block the GPR44 receptor. They hope the same approach might help find treatments that prevent hair thinning in women.” Los Angeles Times, March 21^st. Hmmm… balding in women… hadn’t thought about that, he said vainly. “Next effort”? Damn!

“Male pattern baldness strikes 80% of men younger than 70, causing hair growth to thin in a distinctive pattern. Currently, just two medications, Monoxidil (marketed as Rogaine) and Finasteride (marketed as Propecia or Proscar), are available to combat hair loss.” LA Times. OK, Dekom, like why does this really matter? It’s not like this is about world peace (not the basketball player!) or ending starvation and civil war. Well maybe, but hear me out. If you are losing your hair, and well feeling less attractive about yourself, you might be quicker to anger, which causes strife, increases the probability of war – particularly when you picture legions of “quick-to-anger” men checking themselves out in the mirror – so curing baldness is a massive step to greater civility and global harmony. Men (and women) with hair have so much more to lose! And anyway, mammals rock!

I’m Peter Dekom, and perhaps the world would be better off with a hair-raising experience.

Water We Talking About

As the global population continues to grow, developing nations expand their consumption patterns with economic success and global warming continues to dry out increasing availability of drinking and agricultural water, is the next set of resource wars/conflicts likely to center on this most precious of all life-giving values? A February 2^nd Intelligence Community Assessment (a declassified version was released to the public on March 22^nd), ordered by the Department of State and entitled Global Water Security, suggests that this indeed may be the case. The report adopts the conclusion on climate change embodied in a 2007 United Nations study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCG), which concluded that “Many … areas (e.g., Mediterranean Basin, the western United States, southern Africa, northeast Brazil, southern and eastern Australia) almost certainly will suffer a decrease in water resources due to climate change…”

Perhaps in the near-term, we may fall short of war, but water issues will exacerbate tensions and place political as well as economic pressures on regions of the world already hard-pressed with social issues: “[P]roblems with water could destabilize countries in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia over the next decade… While the report concluded that wars over water are unlikely in the coming decade, it said that countries could use water as political and economic leverage over neighbors and that major facilities like dams and desalination plants could become targets of terrorist attacks. Coupled with poverty and other social factors, problems with water could even contribute to the political failure of weaker nations.

“The public report, unlike the classified version, did not specify countries at greatest risk for water-related disruption but analyzed conditions on major river basins in regions with high potential for conflict — from the Jordan to the Tigris and Euphrates to the Brahmaputra in South Asia.” New York Times, March 22^nd.

Even here, the future could rewrite the future of major sections of our own country. Everyone focuses on the obvious problems and battles among California (north and south battling each other), Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, etc., but our vulnerability extends way beyond these areas. Entire regions of the United States could find their value propositions severely altered, the viability of lifestyles severely curtailed with entire industries facing virtual extinction as a result. Take one of the greatest water resources that is the mainstay of our grain-producing mid-western heartland – the Ogallala Aquifer (pictured above) – once literally the size of Lake Huron. When wind-driven pumps gently extracted water for irrigation purposes, the aquifer was able to replenish itself with relative ease. In the late 1920s and following years, however, the increased use of diesel-powered water pumps began what may now be an irreversible move towards eventual depletion, which some believe can happen within the next several decades. And without that precious resource, the potential of a massive dustbowl become more than a mere possibility.

Will our internal battle for access to water be a factor which pulls us apart or provides a common goal that might draw us together to seek solutions?The need to preserve, recycle and conserve our water supplies, the capacity to pull moisture out of the air, even in the driest climates, and our pursuit of desalination technologies will soften some of the realities of struggles over water resources… but some of those struggles, I suspect, will not be so gentle.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the world seems to be facing liquidity crises at every level.

Are Electric Cars Revolting?

Unlike hybrids, electric cars are completely dependent on the ability to recharge. They have limited range, and with the weight of the battery package, they often provide flimsy-to-sparse seating and on-board amenities to make up for the extra load. While they might not need the weight of a transmission – electric motors provide a strong and linear torque that does not require gears – they are not an appropriate vehicle for most drivers, especially those who like to take long road trips now and again. For those who actually purchase an electric car, it is almost always a second vehicle, suggesting that it is a government-subsidized toy for the environmentally-conscious rich. They also have less-than-spectacular sales figures, with the exception of the intentionally-low-volume Tesla. “The market for all-electric and plug-in electric cars in the United States is tiny, amounting to fewer than 20,000 sales last year out of total light-vehicle sales of 12.8 million. Even in optimistic forecasts, plug-in vehicles will account for less than 5 percent of the global market by 2025.

“Hybrids that do not require external charging, however, like today’s Toyota Prius and many others already in showrooms, are a growing segment. Forecasters say they could represent as much as 6 percent of the market by 2015 and 25 percent by 2025, in part because they are among the few vehicles currently on track to meet the government’s proposed new fuel economy standard of roughly 50 miles per gallon by 2025… Other propulsion technologies, like natural gas and fuel cells, are more likely to be seen first in heavy trucks and local delivery vans because of limited refueling options.” New York Times, March 24^th.

Even with expensive gasoline, battery technology is far from satisfactory. Despite billions of federal loans and subsidies, lithium ion batteries remain relatively bulky (smaller than they once were, however), expensive, unable to hold enough electricity to power longer trips and rely heavily on rare earth metals, which are pretty much in the hands of foreign powers who really like to control and limit exports of these substances (particularly China, which wants the manufacturing to remain in the PRC). When Li batteries wear out (ten-year life expectancies these days), they are hideously expensive to replace, and disposing of the old batteries raises environmental concerns from their latent toxicity. Bottom line: the weak link in the value of an electric car is battery technology, which still is far from ideal for use in the automotive world.

“[T]he state of the electric car is dismal, the victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate. General Motors has temporarily suspended production of the plug-in electric Chevy Volt because of low sales. Nissan’s all-electric Leaf is struggling in the market. A number of start-up electric vehicle and battery companies have folded. And the federal government has slowed its multibillion-dollar program of support for advanced technology vehicles in the face of market setbacks and heavy political criticism…

“Is this the beginning of the end of the latest experiment in the electric car, whose checkered history goes back to the dawn of the automobile age? Can the electric car survive only with heavy government subsidies and big consumer rebates? Are the Teslas and Fiskers and ActiveEs and Volts and Leafs destined to be the playthings of only rich technophiles with a couple of spare gas-powered cars at home?” New York Times. Indeed, until the battery issues are solved – an arena well-worthy of further government-supported research since the applications are not limited to cars – it does seem as if the electric car is simply not ready for prime time.

With a fairly easy and inexpensive ability to convert gasoline-burning vehicles into natural gas-powered cars, and given the abundance of natural gas in this country, we may need one more level of fossil-fuel-power until we can complete the transition to a fossil-fuel-free world. Preparing cars and filling stations for this transition would seem to be obvious, if we really want to control the price of powering our cars. We should be able to reduce emissions, but we really have to pay attention to letting the gas itself escape into the atmosphere (it is vastly more polluting that CO₂ in its unburned state). If the government really wants to bring down the cost of driving in America, there is a clear level of government investment that can implement that goal in the not-too-distant future.

I’m Peter Dekom, and research and support for an interim and transitional solution to expensive and polluting gasoline are essential.