TX Gov. Rick Perry Takes Credit for Billions of Deaths, Time Travel

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has sent plenty of criminals (and apparent non-criminals) to his state’s active death row, but now he’s taking credit for billions upon billions of deaths – mountains, literal lakes of corpses. Per the San Antonio Business Journal:

“Our principled leadership has created an environment that allows us to compete for jobs, investment and business, and defend the economic climate that has made Texas the top exporting state in the nation for the eighth straight year.”

And what environment might that be? What climate pushed Texas to the top? Why, the prehistoric environment that shaped Texas billions of years ago, the climate that bred and killed the vast biomass that would one day become the Lone Star State’s vast petroleum deposits. If we look at the actual components of the export portfolio that makes Texas #1, we see that black gold accounts for the lion’s share of what is getting shipped out. In this regard Gov. Perry’s principled leadership has consisted primarily of governing a state that’s sitting on a bunch of oil. Which can only mean one thing: Rick Perry has a time machine.

Do not mess with Rick Perry. He can make it so you were never born.

 

Conservatives vs. Teabaggers

With apologies to Chris Rock…

It’s like there’s a civil war going on in the US right now, and there’s two sides: there’s conservatives, and there’s teabaggers. The teabaggers have got to go.

Nothing makes a teabagger happier than not knowing the answer to your question. “Hey, what’s an example of your running mate having ever endorsed financial regulation?” “I’ll try to find some and bring ‘em to ya. Keepin’ it real … American! Not like those Northern Virginians!” Teabaggers love to keep it real. Real dumb.’Cause teabaggers don’t read. Reading is like kryptonite to a teabagger.

You can’t have a political platform when you’re around teabaggers, you can’t have a theory of government, you can’t have a budgetary policy! Well, you can have it, but you better move it in at three in the morning, call it the American Freedom Act and hope teabaggers think it’s going to buy Bibles for heterosexual Marines. Can’t have actual policy! Why? Because teabaggers will break into your political base and claim it’s socialism.

Teabaggers that ran for election under your party brand will get you kicked out of your safest district, come over the next day and go, “I heard you got beat.” Teabagger, you know you wrecked that campaign! You didn’t hear it, ‘cause you were doing it.

You can’t go meet with the leader of the nation you love, you know why? ‘Cause Teabaggers will throw a primary challenge at you. “It’s so great we’ve got a conservative, we gotta throw a Teabagger in here!”

You know the worst thing about Teabaggers? The worst thing? Teabaggers always want credit for things they’re supposed to do. A teabagger will brag about stuff a normal person just does. A teabagger will say something like, “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s death panel.” You’re opposed to state-sponsored euthanasia, huh? Bully for you! Welcome to the same page as everybody else! “I’ve been so focused on state government, I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq!” What do you want, a cookie?! If you want to lead the nation you have to be able to do more than one thing at once! You can’t just pick your top few favorite issues and ignore the rest and still hope to lead, you low-expectation-having mother#%&*er!

 

Friday DeTox: Billy Hallowell – Toxicon

	Theory:	Journalists are too irreligious to report properly on issues involving religion.
	Credentials Required to Support this Theory:	A doctorate in cognitive psychology supported by extensive field work
	Actual Credentials:	A B.A. in Communications, an M.S. in Social Research, a case of religious exhibitionism and an axe to grind

 

 We all know that you’re supposed to send a thief to catch a thief. But should you then send a third thief to report on the subsequent capture? Billy Hallowell thinks so. 

The GOP’s web-enabled wunderkind has rubbed shoulders with the Heritage Foundation and MTV’s  ‘Real World’ – but while his interests are many and diverse, the ones that he allows to sit beneath his name at williamhallowell.com are: ‘faith’, ‘American politics’, ‘media’, and ‘society’. A reasonable argument could be made that any one of these things is actively destroying any or all of the others, but Mr. Hallowell is particularly concerned about the relationship between doors one and three. Specifically:  

“…Past Gallup polls have shown as many as eight in ten Americans claim allegiance to Christianity.  Clearly, these numbers show the need for proper journalistic understanding and presentation, especially when covering stories rooted in Christian themes. Not enough journalists are regular church goers.”  

The primary target of Hallowell’s ire is ‘God’s Warriors’, Christiane Amanpour’s 2007 CNN mini-series. Its primary fault, Hallowell feels, is “an enhanced level of relativism” – particularly when it comes to “equating the deaths as a result of radical Islamic fascism to those of contemporary Christianity and Judaism.” No doubt the victims in question would be hard-pressed to identify the distinction to which Hallowell alludes, and Hallowell himself does not pursue the matter. Even assuming that it is indeed fundamentally preferable to be killed by Christians or Jews, however, one key question remains:  

What makes him think that religious persons would do a better job of reporting on religion?  

There seems to be a hint of gonzoism in Hallowell’s journalistic philosophy. As a general rule, objectivity and detachment are celebrated in the field – but Hallowell finds this arrangement unsatisfactory when it comes to coverage of religious issues. He argues that “a lack of [religious] diversity” in the newsroom (by which he appears to mean “not enough Christians”) leaves the American news media unequipped to bring sufficient understanding to bear on matters of faith. He does not, however, make much of an effort to back up this contention, which may be because it makes very little sense.  

How many convicted murderers do we have reporting from crime scenes? How many war correspondents carry rifles? In fact, there are only two areas of the news media that are dominated by practitioners, namely ‘sports’ and ‘politics’ – in which realms the retired jocks and the unelectable hacks are celebrated precisely because they’re lousy journalists. A deep and emotional partisanship regarding the subject of your reportage makes for great entertainment, but it doesn’t win a lot of Pulitzers. Is there some reason to think that religion is somehow different, and that an abiding (religious?) attachment to the subject matter improves a journalist’s integrity rather than degrading it?  

Well, is there?  

Maybe. I don’t know. More to the point, neither does Billy Hallowell. He’s got a big ol’ problem with the way religion is portrayed, and he’s got a theory of how to fix it. Unfortunately, that theory appears to be based more on wishful thinking than peer-reviewed studies of journalistic psychology. Billy Hallowell is a man of faith, a blogger of note, and a toxicon.

 

Basketball, Oil Changes, and Voting: How Toxicons Screw Things Up

"Do, or do not. There is no try." - Yoda, Jedi master and wishful thinker

Yoda was wrong. There is definitely ‘try’ – unfortunately. We’ve looked at the dangers posed by the ‘perception-gap handicap’ between actual and perceived competence; thinking that one can do something one can’t, or thinking one knows something one doesn’t, can lead otherwise intelligent people into the jaws of grizzly bears. Living up to one’s full potential (or even just continuing to live) is not a simple task, but fortunately it’s a pretty simple equation. Getting things done, and having them be the right things, is all about Operational Competence (OPCOM):   

OPCOM = Actual Competence (AC) – Perception-Gap Handicap   

If this incredibly unscientific equation is to have any value, however, it needs to have some values. First and foremost, let’s establish a mechanism for assessing Actual Competence (AC). For our purposes, competence can be represented as a percentage – a competence of 100% is the unattainable ideal of perfection in the relevant area, somebody who reliably performs as well as is conceivably possible. Conversely, a score of 0% indicates an absolute lack of capacity to perform in a given area. In real-world terms, a healthy adult might possess a 95% competence at tying their shoes, and a 0% competence at elephant-juggling.  Between these two extremes, ability might be distributed accordingly:  

		Examples: Area / Scope
AC	Level of Competence	Knowledge of Physics / Human Knowledge	Basketball / Human Ability	Personal Hygiene / Human Practice
10%	No Clue, No Chance	Average adult human	John McCain (old, slow)	Divine in ‘Pink Flamingos’
20%	Rank Amateur	Average undergrad physics major	Average adult human	Brad Pitt in ‘Snatch’
30%	Hack	Average graduate physics major	Barack Obama (solid fundamentals)	Jeff Bridges in ‘The Big Lebowski’
40%-60%	Zone of Professionalism	Average professional physicist	Matt Bonner (journeyman pro)	Average adult human
70%	Expert	Artem Ponomarev, Physicist at NASA Johnson Space Center	Shane Battier (aging All-Star)	Christian Bale in ‘American Psycho’
80%	Legend	Willard S. Boyle, Nobel Laureate	Kobe Bryant (lousy husband, good baller)	Jack Nicholson in ‘As Good as it Gets’
90%	All-Time Great	Albert Einstein	Michael Jordan	Jake Gyllenhaal in ‘Bubble Boy’

    

Note the importance of indicating the relevant scope of competence. For these examples, 50% competence represents a ‘generic professionalism’– a reasonable expectation for an average person with meaningful competence in this area. Thus, the average auto mechanic has a competence of 50% at fixing cars, while the average layman’s competence in the same field would be closer to 10%. So, what would happen if that layman decided to do an oil change? Disaster.   

Trust me.   

Let’s define the Perception-Gap Handicap that ended up costing me hundreds of dollars and my dignity. This handicap is clearly a function of the distance between AC and PEC; additionally, its magnitude will be influenced by just how lofty that PEC is (I was wrong to think I couldchange my oil, but at least I didn’t think I could fix the transmission). So, since we’re working with percentages, let’s assess the Perception-Gap Handicap as:   

|[(AC – PEC) * PEC]| / 100   

Which gives us an OPCOM formula of:   

OPCOM = AC – {|[(AC – PEC) * PEC]| / 100}   

Translation: The outcome of my efforts won’t just reflect my actual ability; it will suffer from any failure on my part to understand my own limitations. How much will it suffer? That depends. For example: say I enjoy playing basketball, and spend a lot of time playing pick-up at the YMCA (scope is amateur pick-up players). I’m quite the hotshot (AC=60), but I’m not quite as good as I think I am (PEC=70). Let’s do the math:   

OPCOM = AC – {|[(AC – PEC) * PEC]| / 100}   

= 60 – {|[(60 – 70) * 70]| / 100}   

= 60 – |(-10 * 70)| / 100   

= 60 – (700/100)   

= 60 – 7   

= 53   

So, my OPCOM is 53 – not bad, but I’d be better if I didn’t let an overinflated regard for my mad skillz lead me to jack up bad three-pointers and try to dunk in traffic. Still, I’m still an asset to my team. But what if the numbers were different? Let’s go back to my failed oil change. My youthful arrogance and instructions from the internet gave me a false sense of competence; I thought it would be easy. I thought that, within the scope of changing the oil on an old Chrysler Concorde, I (AC=10) could fully expect to do a successful, workmanlike job (PEC=50). Let’s see what happened:   

OPCOM = AC – {|[(AC – PEC) * PEC]| / 100}   

= 10 – {|[(10 – 50) * 50]| / 100}   

= 10 – |(-40 * 50)| / 100   

= 10 – (2000/100)   

= 10 – 20   

= -10   

That ‘-10’ – that negative OPCOM – is exactly what it sounds like. Costly failure, damage done without the goal being obtained. I thought I knew something I didn’t. That toxic confidence made me a toxicon, someone whose contribution to a process could only make things worse. I’ll say it again, to myself and to everybody: if you can’t do, don’t try. If you haven’t gone to med school and completed the relevant rotations, don’t go performing surgery on people. If you’ve spent the last six years on the couch, don’t try to run a marathon. The results will not be what you’re hoping for.   

NEXT: We examine what happens when millions of non-economists develop strong opinions about America’s fiscal policy, then vote.   

 

Grizzlies and Disney: Why Toxicons Get (Themselves and Others) Eaten

When Alexander Pope said that “a little learning is a dangerous thing” he neglected to mention that even a great deal of learning can be fatal if it leads to unwarranted assumptions of competence. Timothy Treadwell, a naturalist who spent thirteen years living among and observing wild grizzlies, may have known and understood bears better than anyone in the world. He no doubt understood that, though they can be aggressive at times, grizzlies will almost never kill a human. In fact, in 2003 the only people to be killed by grizzly bears were Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, his girlfriend.

The tragic deaths of Treadwell and Huguenard give a double lesson. Class IV incompetence kills two kinds of people: the people who think they know something that isn’t really true, and the people who believe them. In the 85-year history of the national park where the couple died, no human had ever been killed by a grizzly; it took a self-designated expert and his trusting partner to break that streak.

Treadwell, who knew more than anyone else about living among grizzlies, was fatally incompetent – far more incompetent than an average person – at not-dying among grizzlies. In this case, as in most cases of Class IV tragedy, a person’s actual competence (their true ability in a certain field, which we shall henceforth refer to as ‘AC’) is rarely the cause of the trouble. However much or little one actually knows, it is perceived competence (PEC), and its distance from AC, that sends things to hell in a handbasket. Modern society operates smoothly on the presumption that most people aren’t competent to practice law or fix a car – we channel matters requiring such specialist attention to the relevant minority of competent practitioners. Thus we are able to maximize the operational competence (OPCOM) that is brought to bear on a situation.

What is OPCOM, and how is it distinct from AC? As has been noted, a gap between AC and PEC has an inevitably negative effect on performance, and this is true even in instances where AC is relatively high. The value of OPCOM can be defined as:

Operational Competence = Actual Competence – a Perception-Gap Handicap

Translation: The quality of the result of a person’s effort in any given area is equal to that person’s full potential, minus the damage caused by an inability to accurately assess that potential. This perception-based handicap can be the result of overrating or underrating actual competence as can be seen in every full-length animated Disney feature between 1991 and 1996:

• 1991 – Beauty and the Beast – The Beast thinks no woman could love him; Garcon thinks no woman could resist him.
• 1992 – Aladdin – Aladdin is a ‘diamond in the rough’, a lowly street-rat whose true self is that of a prince; Jafar, who fancies himself an infinitely cunning puppet-master, ends up getting tricked.
• 1994 – The Lion King – Simba must rediscover his kingly nature after slumming it as an insectivore; Scar thinks himself to be truly deserving of Lion King-ship, but his reign is marred by drought and hyenas.
• 1996 – The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Quasimodo, the embodiment of goodness, believes himself to be one of God’s mistakes; Frollo, the embodiment of evil, believes his will and God’s to be one and the same.

 

It should be noted that all the abovementioned characters are classic toxicons. For obvious dramatic reasons, the self-underrater is generally the sympathetic hero while the self-overrater is generally the sneering, doomed villain, but both have falsely bought in to an erroneous narrative borne of ignorance. 1991-1996 was the Era of Toxicon-Driven Narratives at Disney. Interestingly, in this same time period Pixar released Toy Story, in which one of the heroes (the inimitable Buzz Lightyear) actually starts off as a self-overrater. True to form, he must be reduced to underrater status (I can’t help anyone) before he can finally ‘reach his full potential’.

Let us take our algebra-of-competence a step further and identify the components of the perception-based handicap:

• Magnitude of gap between perceived and actual competence – The value of one’s error in assessing one’s competence.
• Expected performance – The more competent one thinks one is, the bigger the impact of errors in perception will be.

 

That a larger degree of error in assessing actual competence would result in a larger handicap is self-evident. Regarding the ‘expected performance’ factor, this acknowledges that the more competent a person believes themselves to be, the greater confidence they will have in their conclusions, and consequently the greater impact their handicap will have. So, for example, an equivalent gap between perceived and actual competence in the field of medicine will have less significance in someone who thinks they know how to treat a hangover than in someone who thinks they know how to perform an appendectomy.

 

Friday Detox: Tommy Newberry – Toxicon

	Theory:	The Obama administration is plotting to bring socialism to our nation and punish decent, religious Americans for working.
	Credentials Required to Support this Theory:	A telepathic link with the President, plus doctoral-level experience in the fields of political theory and social psychology
	Actual Credentials:	Years of experience as a motivational speaker and author; also certification as an EMT and ambulance driver, and a black belt in Choi Kwang Do

 

Tommy Newberry can mess you up. At least, I’d assume so, unless Choi Kwang Do is the Korean art of sensual massage. Fortunately, thanks to his EMT and ambulance-driving skills he can subsequently stabilize your shattered body and drive it to a hospital. Then, while the doctors are fixing your arms, Tommy can fix your life.

As a professional ‘Life Coach’, Tommy can fix your career. And your kids, and your marriage. He will help you make your Personal Mission Statement. He will give you confidence, and help you harness your true potential. And trust me, you’re going to need every bit of that potential to survive when President Obama’s sinister plan to destroy the moral and economic fabric of America comes to pass.

It might be natural to dismiss the author of ‘The War on Success: How the Obama Agenda is Shattering the American Dream’ as a hack who has jumped on a wave of extreme-right anger to sell a few books. There is reason, however, to suppose that Tommy really believes what he’s written, because ‘believing things’ is pretty much his goal in life. Before he ever came to believe that these United Stated face imminent catastrophe, he shared with his public a list of 480 ‘thoughts’ that he has. There’s a certain amount of redundancy in this list (to be fair, that’s a lot of thoughts), but many of them provoke thoughts of their own:

• I plan my TV watching
• I think lovely thoughts
• I memorize scripture
• I feel turbo-charged
• I am free of all toxins
• I am in this moment right now
• I focus on absolute truth
• I am a creative genius

It’s not all about Tommy, however. The man is a walking blessing machine. His prayers bless others, and his joy blesses others; his marriage, nutritional habits, and ‘early morning ritual’ bless others too. And he is not too busy blessing others to be grateful for the good things in his own life: Tommy is grateful for his family and his friends, and also for his red blood cells, roll-over minutes on his cell-phone, pay-per-view movies, and Whole Foods grocery stores. He is also grateful for ‘secret intelligence gathering that goes on that we don’t know about’, and that ‘God made boys to be boys and girls to be girls’.

The more you learn about Tommy and his thoughts the more you realize that these aren’t ‘I thought it would be nice if we had a picnic’ thoughts. These are beliefs, and Tommy holds, promotes and sells them aggressively. In the midst of them all we have two in particular:

• I praise God for knowing everything about everything
• God is working through me

Tommy isn’t the first to confuse his thoughts with God’s, but he’s one of the most open about the fact. Everything Tommy says, does, and believes is dedicated to the principle that one should never, ever doubt one’s own absolute knowledge of what is right and what is true. This knowledge, of course, must come directly from God; non-divine sources of understanding are to be held with deep skepticism. Tommy even went so far as to write and publish a ‘Prayer for Discernment’, which begins:

Father God,

Help me to live intentionally, particularly when it comes to what I read, watch, and listen to on a consistent basis. Guide me to allow into my soul only those words, sounds, and images that support who you want me to become.

Tommy isn’t just utterly ignorant of any possible factual basis for what he says in his book – he has the most pious contempt for what he’d have to do to get it. That America’s President is planning to usher in a new and horrible era of ‘Big Government’, in which hard work is punished and various shadowy entities will divide the fruit of their labors among the shiftless proletariat, is capital-T-True. A fella doesn’t need to know much to know that. In fact, this fella would discourage you from knowing anything at all.

After all, why should Tommy bother with reality? He’s a creative genius! And he is, most certainly, a toxicon.

 

War on Death: Health Care as Military Spending

This means WAR! Sort of! Let's pretend!

Got your popcorn? Ask any media outlet, they’ll be happy to tell you that tonight’s SOTU speech is the most important of President Barack Obama’s career. So was the last one, of course, and next year’s promises to be significant-er still. Nevertheless! Any primetime address to a joint session of Congress is must-see-TV, especially considering the attention Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) got last year when he felt the need to share his feelings with the rest of the class. Given the support Wilson’s outburst won for an otherwise pretty unremarkable political career, don’t be shocked if one or even several aspiring political divas decide to make a grab for the limelight. Just in case, I’m sure Obama has prepared a heckler line or two; my humble suggestion would be:

“Hey, let me do my job – I don’t come down there when you’re teabagging and slap the…”

Ahem.

Of course, we don’t know exactly what the President will say, but we have a few clues. The biggest story tomorrow morning, assuming the Republican caucus doesn’t decide to moon our nation’s leader, will probably be a budget freeze for non-military discretionary spending. Is this good policy? Good politics? Nobody will be sure (because nobody who could really make that judgment honestly works for a major cable network). If nothing else, however, it provides what might be an interesting opportunity for some creative fudgemaking on the administration’s part. After all, push has come to shove on the President’s agenda for health care reform, and Obama’s on the ropes. Maybe, just maybe, this … means … war.

What war? The War on Death! Why not? We’ve had so many wars on so many things, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that war justifies any measure anybody might conceivably take. That’s why wars are so popular with people who don’t know what they’re doing. So what if you get confused, freak out, and start punching somebody’s grandmother – we’re at war, dammit! WAR!

The non-partisan Dictionary.com offers a couple of definitions for the term ‘military’, and one of them is ‘of or pertaining to war’. Ergo, budget directed at a War on Death (health care reform? who dat?) would be military spending. And if you don’t agree with that assessment, maybe you should look in the mirror and ask yourself why you love death so much. This is America – we have a culture of life. You’re either with us, or you’re on the side of the Reaper. That’s right, Deathie, we’re on to you, and this great country has no use for your sort. Oh, you can talk about your so-called ‘freedom of speech’, but if the Founding Fathers had intended for people to die they would have written it into the Constitution. You heard me: we are a Living nation. Live free or die, you can’t have it both ways.

USA! USA! USA!

 

Knowing what we don’t know: Classes of Incompetence

How we talk about things influences the way we think about them. Just ask Winston Smith: if your vocabulary won’t allow you to articulate something (say, something double-plus ungood about Big Brother) you’ll barely be able to think it, let alone communicate it. It is shocking, therefore, that the English language obstructs the description of some of the most basic and most important manifestations of human incompetence.

One of these is that which the term ‘toxicon’ was coined to indicate: somebody who firmly believes in a nonsense-explanation of something about which he or she knows practically nothing. Toxicons are all around us – but the best we’ve been able to do at labeling them has, hitherto, been to say that they “don’t know what they’re talking about.” This is incomplete and insufficiently devastating, and that fact may be responsible for the news media’s fascination with investigating politicians’ motives without ever considering their basic competence. Everybody asks what partisan concerns might motivate a decision; nobody asks whether the decision-maker might just be flat-out ignorant of the facts upon which such a decision should rest.

Another problematic area is that of ‘stupidity’. ‘Stupid’ is a stupid word – it means everything and nothing. A dog that won’t learn to play dead, a kid who hasn’t learned how to spell, and a Nobel Prize-winning thinker with whom one disagrees are all ‘stupid’. Stupidity is a conceptual mélange with myriad components, but let’s focus on one in particular: ignorance.

The notion of ‘ignorance’ is itself a compound concept, but one which is more easily wrangled. Humans are guilty of four basic types of ignorance:

Class I	Ignorance of the problem
Class II	Inability to identify a solution
Class III	Inability to implement the correct solution
Class IV	Confidence in a false solution

 

To facilitate this conversation, it is important that the relevant technical language be versatile and easily applicable – hence, in discussing human folly, each of these categories of incompetence can be employed as both a descriptive noun and as an adjective. E.g.:

• Tim doesn’t know how to change a flat tire. What a Class III!
• Our friend Sally says that she and Susan went out a few times, they really enjoyed themselves … and now Susan won’t return Sally’s calls! We don’t know what went wrong, we’re all totally Class II.
• Class IVs are responsible for some of history’s greatest atrocities. Witch hunts, anybody?

As for the categories themselves, Class I incompetence is usually short-lived (though the same is true, in many cases, for its practitioners). Contaminated wells and hidden sinkholes have a way of drawing attention to themselves sooner or later; in the words of Christopher George Latore Wallace, “if you don’t know, now you know.” Some time-bomb problems may hide behind their more well-known colleagues – the diseases we associate with advanced age, such as Alzheimer’s, went largely unremarked during the millennia when human life expectancy rarely exceeded fifty. No doubt we face many such death-sentences, which will jump out at us as science continues to prolong our lives. In a century or so, when we’ve conquered breast cancer, the pink ribbon will be superseded by an orange one to remind us of the tragedy of spontaneous-combustion that can afflict people as young as 130.

Class II incompetence, in contrast, can be illustrated by the famous The Broad Street cholera epidemic that was resolved when John Snow thought to remove the handle from the public pump that was distributing sewage-infected drinking water. Nobody had previously suspected the underlying causal relationship; everyone knew that the graveyards were overflowing as fast as the cesspits and simply failed to make the connection. That was an example of ingrained cultural Class II; from an individual perspective we have the ‘Doctor, doctor’ joke:

Patient: Doctor, doctor! My eye hurts whenever I drink tea!

Doctor: Next time, take the spoon out of the cup.

And, of course:

Patient: Doctor, doctor! My leg hurts whenever I eat ice cream while juggling puppies upside down on a roller coaster!

Doctor: Well … don’t do that, then.

This brings us to Class III incompetence. Class III is the most productive category of human folly, the necessity that gives birth to invention. Humankind, individually and as a whole, is at its best when a specific challenge beckons – if we’ve figured out what the problem is and what must be done to solve it, creating the means of doing so is a talent that defines us as a species. Whenever a Class III problem emerges, brilliant humans leap at the chance to work themselves to death trying to solve it. Class III incompetence is the stuff that great tales are made of: we know that we need to throw the One Ring into Mt. Doom and send a photon torpedo into the Death Star’s thermal exhaust port … if only we could figure out how to do that.

Class IV incompetence – what somebody once referred to as “what you know for sure that just ain’t so” – presents a unique challenge. It may not always represent the greatest immediate danger to life and limb – although thousands of flame-broiled witches might argue the contrary – but it is uniquely resistant to rectification. Whereas Class I tends to cure itself, and Classes II and III attract the attention of the greatest minds of any given generation, when Class IV takes root in a human brain it holds on with grim determination. Like the parasitic blood fluke, a flatworm which shields itself from the human immune system by coating itself with its host’s proteins, Class IV incompetence hides among a person’s actual competences like ET in a closet full of stuffed animals. Because of this, Class IV is the most difficult type of incompetence to overcome – and consequently the type most likely to accumulate within a society, doing its damage even as it hobbles efforts to displace it.

 

Andre Bauer – Toxicon

	Theory:	Sponsoring lunches for the children of low-income parents encourages these parents to reproduce more frequently.
	Credentials Required to Support this Theory:	Advanced degrees in sociology and behavioral psychology, plus extensive field work to substantiate his claims
	Actual Credentials:	An unspecified bachelor’s degree from the University of South Carolina, and possible studies at Houdegbe North American University in Benin

 

Metaphor can be an excellent way of helping your audience to understand what you’re saying. For example, it is thanks to the use of parables by Jesus Christ (such as those of ‘the rich fool’ and ‘the workers in the vineyard’) that modern-day Christians abhor the accumulation of wealth and are uniformly supportive of minimum wage laws. The tricky thing about a metaphor, however, is that it has to actually illustrate the point you’re trying to make. For example, if you’ve been working out and are perspiring freely you might describe yourself as sweating like ‘a whore in church’, but not like ‘a Canadian at the Million Man March’. Sure, the combination of moderate physical exertion, an atmosphere of excitement, and the balmier DC climate might drive a Canuck to schvitz, but that isn’t what it sounds like you’re saying. So you shouldn’t say it.

You probably shouldn’t compare state-sponsored lunches for low-income children to ‘feeding stray animals’ either.

Speaking of things that might make one sweat, Andre Bauer – South Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor – is probably giving his Right Guard a run for its money at the moment. He told a town hall crowd in Greenville, SC that:

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

Let’s ignore for the moment (if only for the moment) that Mr. Bauer appears to be advocating that we use starvation as a method of controlling the population of low-income South Carolinians. Forget insensitivity – is there any reason to think that Bauer’s basic assumption is correct? He’s arguing that, by subsidizing the cost of raising a child, the state is encouraging the beneficiaries of such a program to produce more children. But is this accurate?

Bauer’s outspoken opposition to abortion makes it clear that he doesn’t object per se to the poor bearing children that they lack the financial means to support. He must, therefore, see the matter of free lunches for kids as important as a systemic game-changer in the broader economy of reproduction. However, the subjects of Bauer’s statement (in his own words) are incapable of long-range planning, and assessing the net future value of subsidized school lunches in deciding whether or not to invest in another child seems like a pretty involved financial calculation to me. Is he partly right? Dead wrong? I don’t know. More importantly, neither does he.

Bauer’s probably a pretty bright guy. I’m especially intrigued by his studies at the Houdegbe North American University in Benin which he cites on his LinkedIn page – it’s possible that he’s doing challenging work in this very area, and just couldn’t find a degree program to his liking in this hemisphere. The fact remains, however, that the socioeconomic and psychological issues that govern humans’ decisions whether or not to bear children are complex and involved. It seems prohibitively unlikely that a man who advertises the fact that he was a cheerleader in college but won’t say what his degree was in has truly built the base of knowledge and understanding that he would need to support this theory.

Long story short: Andre Bauer, Lt. Governor of South Carolina, doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s a toxicon.

 

Friday DeTox: Jerry Doyle, Toxicon

	Theory:	America’s economy, culture, and educational system have been destroyed by Democrats. Also, it’s bad when people in the media indulge in hyperbole.
	Credentials Required to Support this Theory:	Advanced degrees and decades of experience as an economist, a political scientist, and a developmental psychologist, plus an intimate acquaintance with the Speaker of the House.
	Actual Credentials:	An undergraduate degree in aeronautics, and professional experience as a jet pilot, stockbroker, radio host, and space-cop.

 

I get most of my actual work done in coffee shops and bookstores. Jerry Doyle has been glowering at me from a rack at the front of my local Borders for a week now, so I decided to see what he’s so upset about. I wish I knew Jerry personally. I could give him a big, heterosexual hug and tell him to cheer up – things may be bad, but he has no earthly reason to suppose they’re as bad as he thinks they are.

Jerry Doyle is not a knee-jerk political hypochondriac like, say, Glenn Beck, who can’t read about a political catastrophe without realizing that it’s happening right now in the US. He’s more of a worry-wart. He sees something like the bank bail-outs or anti-smoking regulations, and then convinces himself that they herald – nay, have already wrought! – the destruction of all sorts of things about which he cares lots and knows little.

Another indication of just how much of a toxicon Jerry is can be seen in the wide variety of subjects he’s freaking out about. It could be argued that a focus on the interaction of government intervention and macroeconomic dynamics may rest upon a wealth of independent research – there is no reason to suppose this, but it’s possible. But can we really be expected to believe that Mr. Doyle has put in the same effort to educate himself in the fields of child psychology and pedagogical theory? A career that has bounced from a cockpit to Wall Street to a failed run for office to a radio talk show – not to mention the five years he spent shooting aliens – suggest that single-minded dedication to the intellectual mastery of complicated subjects may not be his strong suit.

Jerry Doyle seems sincere, and upset. If you see him, hug him for me. Remind him that he doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about. He’s probably an excellent pilot, and he’s the finest EarthForce groundpounder ever to dodge a Denn’bok. Nevertheless, when it comes to whether or not America is being destroyed, he’s a toxicon.