Where We Are This Week 02/17/23
UAPs, detention, and the #gestapodancechallenge.
Too often political commentators, leaders, gurus, etc. claim to know all the answers. Most of the time it’s so they can dunk on their opponent Vince Carter-2000 Summer Olympics-style. You know, that dunk. But we’re too quick to cast blame before we know all the facts.
It’s easier to tear down than it is to construct. I should know, I’m in the middle of a remodel project; the demolition is the easy part. And if you’re in the throws of demolition with insufficient knowledge, odds are you’re not building anything afterward.
There’s a movement that’s growing in popularity in STEM fields known as ‘building in public’. It’s a move towards authenticity and transparency. Elon is doing it at Twitter. The process involves openly addressing your failings or deficiencies, and outlining the steps you're taking to correct them. If they work, great; if not, go back to the drawing board; but your comrades and users will better understand your commitment to improvement.
I’m trying to do that here; pulling the curtain back on the edification process. I think it’s important to discuss the things we don’t know. We'll never know the truth if we pretend to know it already. Case in point: Palestine, Ohio. Try as I might, I have no idea the level of severity of the disaster to my North. It’s too opaque for me to parse truth from sensationalism.
So, I’ll try to tell you when I’m clueless, and I’ll be happy to admit when I’m wrong - it’s an opportunity to learn. Besides, unless you’re jumping over a 7’2” Frenchman, the dunks aren’t worth it.
School’s In Forever
In last week’s State of the Union address, President Biden recommitted to bolstering the American public education system by providing universal preschool to the nation’s children and raising the wages of teachers across the board. Both of these policy prescriptions present their problems but we’ll start with the first.
Biden was intentionally vague when he said “studies show that children who go to preschool are nearly 50% more likely to finish high school and go on to earn a two- or four-year degree, no matter the background they came from.” While this could be true, it’s certainly not without dispute.
Studies like the Perry Preschool Project did show significant benefits to a more comprehensive preschool syllabus and application albeit with a strikingly small 60-year-old sample size. In Boston, around the early naughts, a study was conducted using preschoolers in the area. The results showed that while they didn’t improve test scores, the participants in the preschool curriculum were more likely to attend college, take the SAT, and graduate high school.
However, a study from the Department of Health and Human Services said otherwise, stating “the benefits of access to Head Start at age four are largely absent by 1st grade for the program population as a whole.”
Closer to home, still, a more recent Tennessee study showed that, by the sixth grade, students enrolled in the trial program were actually performing worse in math, science, and reading than their peer group.
Not exactly the incontrovertible evidence worth drafting legislation upon, is it?
But the case for more government subsidization of public schools only gets worse from there. As detailed by the journalist Emily Hartford in her series Sold a Story, Hartford reveals that according to tests administered by the U.S. Department of Education, 65% of fourth graders can’t read proficiently.
For an excellent summation of how we got here, I recommend Honestly’s recent episode.
That’s a staggering number. But one that doesn’t necessarily come as a shock if you contrast it with other performance figures of our public school system. PISA, an organization that tests 15-year-old children from all around the world, shows the U.S. public school system to be lagging behind our economic peers and rivals.
In 2018, the most recent dataset available, in an aggregated score that combines math, reading, and science, the United States placed a dismal 16th; that’s behind China, Singapore, Japan, Germany, Poland, and several others. Our best performance was in reading where we placed 12th. In science, Americans placed 18th, and in mathematics, we sunk down all the way to 37th.
Let’s go ahead and dispel the notion that we’re just not spending enough on education. As of 2020, teachers in the United States were making, on average, $62,000 a year; the seventh highest in the world. In 2019, Business Insider reported that the US spent an average of $12,800 per year per student, the second most in the world. But in total, America allocated $700 billion to education blowing the rest of the world out of the water.
In context with the preposterous amount of cash taxpayers are forking over, the performance of our education system isn’t disappointing, it’s appalling. And, now, we’re supposed to support the idea that our children’s future is best placed in the system that’s been failing them for decades?
Post-pandemic, the testing we do nationally known as the ‘Nation’s Report Card’ has shown drastic drops in performance across the board of our public education system. So, things aren’t likely to look much better when the next PISA report is published. But, this is America! We’ll blithely address what we think to be the issue and blindly throw money in its general direction, hoping it’ll go away without ever identifying the root cause.
Age Limits On Social Media
My generation is lucky. The majority of us got to grow up, and trudge through the public school system without the added snake pit of social media. Sure, we had Xanga, and Myspace, and the inchoate Facebook - before all of our parents got accounts themselves. But not my mom; good for you, Ma!
These sites could have been detrimental to our development but thankfully, we didn’t have smartphones at the time, and typically each home was a one-computer household with dial-up internet. Wasting time online wasn’t nearly as dopamine-inducing as it is today. I was busy deciding what moody song lyric would be my AIM away message that day, not how many likes my last TikTok video got.
We all like to think we wouldn’t have had those social media accounts if they were available to us, but we also like to think we wouldn’t have been Nazis in 1930s Germany if we’d popped into the cosmic pipeline a little earlier. No, they’re not morally equivalent, but the Third Reich thought experiment shows how few of us are invulnerable to social trends - not you and me, though, of course. Teenagers want nothing more than to participate in society with their peers, and, increasingly, social media is an integral part of that tender age.
A 2018 study by the AACAP stated that 75% of kids between 13 and 17 have at least one social media profile. TikTok alone is projected to have over 100 million American users by the year 2025; over 1/4 of the population. Social media as an idea isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I’ve repeatedly sung the praises of Twitter’s ability to share information or the media democratization YouTube has introduced. But, tell me this, dear reader, how emotionally fulfilled are you after thumbing through Instagram for an hour? or doom-scrolling Twitter? or gazing into the abyss of TikTok? Do we want that same languid, mindless depression for our kids?
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican, has introduced legislation setting the age restriction of social media users to 16. While his motive and aim are understandable, reactive legislation only contributes to the bramble of the body politic. Our representatives have to be able to separate emotional responses from measured policy. In order for society to sustain itself, our laws must be coherent from the standpoint of principals.
The question isn’t whether or not social media is a detriment to youth; that has been answered by
's serious research into the subject, and the latest CDC report on the state of mental health of young boys and girls. It's not a happy picture.
For example, conservatives might support this bill when the state is acting in congruence with their beliefs but would oppose the state teaching certain materials in school without their consent. The two notions are in conflict with each other in regard to principle.
The real question here, the crux of the matter, is if children can willingly consent to being manipulated and commoditized by megalithic corporations. There’s such an asymmetry of power and information between the social media company and its user that I’m not entirely sure an adult can give meaningful consent to the ways in which they harvest your data.
If an adult can’t truly do that, we shouldn’t let minors attempt it. And if we’re trying to get these corporations out of our children’s pockets, shouldn’t we get them out of their schools as well? Companies like Meta and Google have continued to build predatory relationships with schoolchildren by offering ‘student monitoring’ services for ‘free’ to public schools - think China offering 5G infrastructure to developing nations. Meanwhile, the students’ data are being harvested so that Facebook and Instagram can better accommodate their future consumers.
Why do you think public schools have Coca-Cola and Snickers available in every hall? Minors can’t consent to the predation of corporate interests, so why should we do it for them?
Space Invaders from Where Exactly?
Last week I decided on not writing about the Chinese Spy Balloon™ because I just had too many questions. But since flying objects keep appearing in American skies, and the US military continues to shoot them down - with much more urgency - I have doubled my aforementioned ‘too many questions’.
Unidentified anomalous phenomena. That’s the new term for UFOs - unidentified flying objects. I couldn’t find the quote from Hitchhikers Guide, but one of the governing bodies of Earth is said to have changed the terms for things abruptly once the public started to catch on. This sort of feels like that. The shift from UFOs to UAPs seemed to take effect around the time Commander David Fravor went public with his now famous ‘tic tac’ sighting.
Because UFO had become semantically linked to aliens, UAP appeared to be the new preferred term in order to tamp down any extraterrestrial conjecture. But because next to nothing has been revealed to the public, conjecture abounds.
Since many people in the media-sphere are quick to make assertions regarding the Chinese Spy Balloon™, and the following UAPs, let me present a list of questions I’d like to see answered before I come to any conclusions. This should demonstrate the absolute vacuum of significant information disseminated from the government to the public, and the fervent desire by the media and the public to make accusations and assertions despite knowing almost literally nothing.
Were the Chinese actively spying on the United States? If so, why did they use a balloon and not a satellite? Why would they use a device that is easily visible? If it indeed was a Chinese craft, was it to test the decision-making skills of the current administration?
Or was it to test the surveillance of nuclear military silos located in Montana? Was it actually a Chinese craft? Some reports say that there were parts aboard the craft that had English writing on them, does that mean some parts were made in the West? If so, does that mean American or Western corporations were enlisted in the construction of Chinese government materiel?
Or is it a false flag operation like the ones America has been known to do in order to gin up anti-China sentiment? Are the UAPs that have been purportedly shot down by China and Russia in recent weeks real? Or are they just running cover to hide their culpability?
Why did it take so long for the balloon to be shot down? Was the Biden administration running some sort of counter-intelligence while the balloon was still in air? Barack Obama didn’t give the order to assassinate Osama Bin Laden; in order to shoot down a foreign entity’s unmanned aircraft, does the Pentagon really have to run it all the way up the ladder to the president? We can dock a moving airplane onto another moving airplane in order to refuel but the American military is incapable of capturing a giant balloon without destroying it?
What are the subsequent UAPS that NORAD and the United States military shot down? Why did they act so quickly in comparison to the spy balloon debacle? If an increase in these objects is due to a change in sensitivity to our radars, were we really susceptible to attack by a slow moving balloon? If our radar surveillance systems have such glaring holes, how have they not been exploited previously?
What do ‘cylindrical’ and ‘octagonal’ actually describe? Are they balloons? Are they similar at all the to the ‘tic tac’ object? Do they have propulsion systems? Do they appear to have been operated remotely? After they were shot down, was the debris collected? Did the debris help identify the nature of the UAPs? Is there an innumerable amount of UAPs hovering thousands of feet above us at all times? Why, after constant coverage and national interest, have we ceased to be updated on the situation?
What will it take for the US government to become more transparent on matters of national importance? Is this all a distraction? Were any of these objects at any point a national security threat? Was 9/11 an inside job? Where are you hiding Elvis? Is it aliens? Is it aliens?
To a better next week.
Cheers,
~FDA