What is an American Auto Company?

I see in the morning New York Times that the US government has approved the sale of most of Chrysler to Fiat. and that the bankruptcy judge has denied a claim of creditors that liquidation of the company, among other things, might yield greater value. The last time I checked, Fiat is an Italian auto maker. So we are not exactly saving an American auto company. What then are we saving?

Jobs, of course. I do not oppose this but we do need to be clear about what is going on. Had anyone suggested that we should be alert to the needs of Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai, all building cars in the USA and all suffering cutbacks, I suspect that the American people would have raised holy hell. However, the moment Chrysler and Fiat executives sign on the dotted line, Chrysler will join Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai and cease to be an American auto company.

There is another way of looking at this and that is to see any auto company building cars in the USA as an American auto company. They do hire American workers and, we hope, pay taxes here. The only downside is that should the world go to hell in a hand basket and we need the auto companies to start making tanks and other military vehicles, will these foreign owned companies agree to do this? There are complicating factors, less with Fiat than the Asian companies, and one is that we might be fighting China and China may threaten Japan and Korea should they in any way assist us. This war is very unlikely. More to the point, we could just nationalize the companies. In such a circumstances, there could be no blow back from Korea or Japan.

There are going to be some major benefits from Fiat ownership of Chrysler. The first is that there will be Americans working in the auto plants. Second, any technology Fiat has that is superior to what Chrysler had will surely be employed in the Chrysler plants. This technology will become de facto American technology. Third, any skills the American workers acquire will reside in the brains of these American workers. Should a set of American investors want to recapture Chrysler, they would acquire workers who are more skilled than before who are using more advanced technology.

You say, "But the profits will flow to Italy." I reply, "Who cares since American capital and jobs have been flowing out of the country for years and Italian capital will, in fact, be used to rehabilitate Chrysler's plants." In the 60's a couple of leftist friends trying to convert me to their way of thinking argued that nasty American companies were creating factories or buying farms in Latin American countries and rather than plowing the profits back into enterprises that benefit the people of these countries, these American companies were bring it back here. Moreover, we paid the people there a pittance. This is an hellaciously bad argument. First, note that American capital had already flowed into these foreign countries by way of building the factories or clearing the land and planting banana trees or whatever and these efforts employed people there. Second the businesses themselves employed people. Did they pay as much as they should have? "No," let's say, but when have any companies anywhere been any more generous to their employees than they had to?

As for acts of benevolence by foreigners owning companies here, I draw attention to this NY Times report last December:

workers at the Toyota Tundra truck factory here are taking classes: how to handle tools safely, how to get along better with colleagues of varying backgrounds. Some have even cleaned local parks and fed the hungry while Toyota paychecks.

I suggest that when we refer to American auto companies, we cease to refer to just those owned by Americans and include Fiat and the Asian companies mentioned earlier. What matters most is not who owns the company but the fact that it is that Americans who are being employed and that we are receiving taxes (I presume) from all cconcerned.

Dr. Mercola

I followed a link on Facebook to Dr. Mercola's web site provided by a relative who was impressed by the claims Dr. Mercola had made as to the true origins of certain "organic" products. The most shocking on the face of it was that Burt's Bees, whose various lip and hand salves were well-known to me, are produced by Clorox. That may seem like a bad thing, but how bad is it really? Clorox makes an excellent product though it is hard to see how one could get Clorox wrong. Add sodium hypochlorite to water and bottle. To its credit, however, during WWII when a shortage of chlorine gas arose, Clorox chose to reduce its production, rather than dilute its product. So, the fact that Burt's Bees is owned by Clorox may not be a bad thing at all.

Dr. Mercola's employs his assassination by association technique by noting that organic Horizon milk is made by the food giant Dean. He does not say what bad practices Dean is employing other than that large scale milk producers commonly feed grain to their cows rather than letting them graze. Dr. Mercola is a big time grass guy. He wants his beef to be grass fed and his milk cows to be grass fed. He makes some claims about the superiority of grass to grain as a feed but sites no solid research.

I invite you to read how Aurora organic milk cows are treated and fed. One thing seems clear and this is that the issues are very complex. The choice is not between grains and grass. In the winter in Wisconsin, there is no grass for cows to graze on so the choices are between hay (i. e., dead vegetable matter) of various sorts and grain.

Dr. Mercola trades on our suspicion of big business. He is right to question whether these large businesses can or even want to maintain high standards in milk production. But, he provides no solid research behind the answers he gives. One of Dr. Mercola's claims is that children should be drinking raw milk. He writes

There is no substitute for clean, raw milk as a food, so far as children are concerned. Science has not yet succeeded in providing, in the pasteurized variety, those essential qualities that are the only real foundation for a healthy child.

He doesn't say how we ensure the raw milk is clean and that's the rub. I have seen dairy cows being milked by hand and by machines and the opportunities for the invasion of bacteria and other contaminants is nontrivial. Dr. Mercola also urges that one buy locally. So, I am to imagine that I should hunt down raw milk that is locally produced. Good luck since it is illegal to sell it. I invite you to read the Wikipedia section on raw milk vs pasteurized milk. I have made cheese and would love to get access to raw cow's milk but any cheese I made would have to age for 3 months (according to my last information).

Dr. Mercola engages in a florid writing style in which careful reasoning doesn't play a part. He says

Much of our nation's nutritional deficiency epidemic is caused by a "Big Business" perceived need for cheap, mass produced, convenient food products.

First, note that Dr. Mercola puts "Big Business" inside quote marks. I just did the same thing in the preceding sentence, but there is a significant linguistic difference between the two. I am using quotes to indicate that I am citing the phrase he used but he is using quote marks as what a philosopher once called "scare quotes." Moreover, in capitalizing the "B's" he further evokes scorn. This use of "Big Business" evokes Orwell's notion of "Big Brother," a notorious political pejorative, typically used by liberals. Conservatives have "Big Government." Dr. Mercola is engaging in an irresponsible practice in what purports to give sound medical and other advice. One wants accurate, unslanted advice from any doctor.

Which brings me to the most damning feature of Dr. Mercola's web site. He is a huckster, who sells a wide array of things from tanning beds, natural foods like raw honey, nutritional supplements, vitamin sprays, and juicers among many other things. Those who find his health warnings persuasive very well may find his nearly hysterical arguments for the purchase of his products and objections to opposing choices will likely find his reasons for buying his products persuasive.

I hope you will read his appeals on behalf of his tanning beds -- why you should use them and why you should use his -- and a few other products to get a taste of his style. You might also take a look at the qualifications of the physicians used in his clinc. My problem is that any doctor who purports to treat patients and offer medical and nutritional across the nation should not be engaged in selling. I have run into this sort of problem with doctors who treat sleep apnea and sell the equipment that patients need. They have access to the data supporting or not supporting the use of the products they sell and few of us could interpret the data by way of checking on his or her honesty. One has to very carefully assess the ethics of your doctor, should you, like I, have sleep apnea in an effort to answer the question whether the doctor, who has a clear conflict of interest, is acting in your best interests. I have absolutely no confidence in Dr. Mercola. I am reminded of Dr. Atkins, who not only had a medical practice and wrote diet books, he also was associated with a company that makes products for dieters.

Academic Jibber Jabber

Ohio State University just voted to move from a 10 week quarter system (3 quarters per academic year plus an additional summer quarter) to a semester system, the specifics of which will be identified later. Absolutely no serious academic reason for doing this was given. Most prominent among the reasons for doing this is that it would enable students more easily to transfer credits to and out of Ohio State. That is not an academic reason.

The real reason was political

“We need to think really hard about turning our backs on the chancellor, governor and the legislature,” Faculty Council Chairman Dick Gunther, a political-science professor, told the group.

One Timothy Gerber, a music professor and chairman of the semester-conversion committee recommended this change, claiming

“We’re talking about a calendar that lets us do creative things and put students first while focusing on faculty success,” he said.

This is the sort of gibberish that gives academics a bad name. What in living hell are these "creative things" we will be able to do in a semester system that cannot be done in a quarter system. There very well may be some but Dr. Gerber doesn't -- maybe can't -- come up with one. I can see why the fraidy cats in the administration chose this man to lead the conversion effort. He would be easily influenced to "do the right thing" and cave to the politicians.

There is to me a certain dissonance to "creative things." "Creative" evokes a variety of notions of genuine importance such as "thinking" and "innovation" and "ideas" and "art" whereas "thing" is the dumbest word in English. But the real gibberish is

put students first while focusing on faculty success

I would think that putting students first would entail focusing, not on the faculty, but the students. It is also a lie that the university is going to put students first. Getting research money is way too important to the finances of the university for the administration to make that mistake. Moreover, it is in the self-interest of faculty to spend more time on research than on teaching except when preparing new courses. This isn't to say that the faculty doesn't care about teaching students. It is just not their main concern. The administration silently endorses this attitude by rewarding those who do research, especially those who bring in lots of money, for a good bit of this is legitimately raked off by the university to cover overhead.

The fact is that the quarter system allows for a much greater diversity in the education of students and theoretically even more contact hours between the faculty and students in undergraduate lecture courses. If in a quarter system of 10 weeks, undergraduate lecture courses were taught five days a week, as was common when I first arrived on the campus, there would be 50 contact hours between the faculty and his or her students. In a semester system of 16 weeks with 3 contact hours a week, there would be just 48 contact hours a week. However, if one believes, as I do, that learning requires cognitive gestation and that takes time, then there is reason to go to a semester system for it gives students 16 weeks to engage in this process. Moreover, writing good papers in more advanced undergraduate, to say nothing of graduate, courses is more productive in a semester system for the same reason.

The notion of "cognitive gestation" is vague and I can't make it more explicit but I do know from personal experience that there is "thinking" going on in learning that we are not explicitly aware of. When I was writing my dissertation, I had to face head on a problem I had not been able to solve in some 4 or 5 years of thinking about it (not all the time of course). At one point, with a Chicago Bears football game going on in the background, I had an "eureka" moment. Three facts passed through my consciousness at a "speed" I couldn't keep up with consciously but I knew that there were three facts that provided the solution to my problem that I somehow "knew" but just hadn't put together before. The trouble is that I didn't know exactly what these facts were. After 30 minutes of serious thinking I was able to bring these facts to full consciousness and see how they provided the solution to my problem. This was the result of thinking by me at a level I wasn't explicitly aware of. I have had many other instances of this and seen it in my students. Once, a student at the University of Illinois who had taken a syntax course from me a month or two ago passed by me some 30 yards away who yelled out, 'Professor Geis, I finally get it." It was a bit late for her grade but I was happy about it and she seemed to be too.

Obama Effect on AA's Test Performance

Vanderbilt University's professor Ray Friedman found that at key moments during the Obama campaign, performance on tests drawn from the GRE (Graduate Records Exam) by Whites and African Americans were indistinguishable, specifically when Obama was front and center in the news in a positive way. There was a drop off by African Americans during points when Obama was not at the center of the press's attention.

In the study, tests were administered to a total of 472 participants using questions drawn from Graduate Record Exams (GREs) to assess reading comprehension, analogies and sentence completion. The tests took place at four distinct points over three months during the campaign: two when Obama’s success was less prominent (prior to his acceptance of the nomination and the mid-point between the convention and election day) and two when it garnered the most attention (immediately after his nomination speech and his win of the presidency in November).

This result represents a striking repudiation of the view that African Americans are inferior to Whites intellectually. It also confirms the view of Liberals that racism continues to negatively affect African American's intellectually. I urge you to read the story for it applies, I would suggest, to how we educate minorities here and everywhere else on the globe.

It has long been noted that how children perform in school is strongly affected by the expectations of others as to how well they can perform. My parents both had college degrees and my mother had a master's. I grew up always knowing I would be going to college. Even financial reverses in the family did not affect this expectation. Can it be a surprise that I and all my siblings as well as other persons of my generation in my extended family graduated from college? I suspect that the record of our extended family had less to do with any native intelligence we might have had than in the examples afforded by our parents and the expectations placed on us.

The results of this study make clear that bridging the difference between Whites and Blacks economically depends critically on training our teachers to act as if they expect all of their kids to succeed and doing our best to see that teachers do this. Enough African Americans have entered the middle class in the last decade and before to suggest that the opportunities will be there for Blacks if they will take care of business in our schools. We cannot expect that glass ceilings for Blacks will not hinder them for there are conservative Whites with power who will erect as many glass ceilings as they can for Blacks (and women and others who are not White and male) However, where people with power can see that their self-interest can be advanced by promoting deserving African Americans, they will usually do so in my opinion. A striking number of Whites made that sort of choice on election day and seem, according to recent polling to continue to believe that promoting Obama was a good thing for them.

I began this sermon with a reference to my family's effect on my development and so must acknowledge that it is imperative that poor families be encouraged to focus on education as a goal for all of their children. We must also enhance the Head Start program as a vehicle to improve on what the families of disadvantaged children have done for them. There is much that needs to be done by African Americans themselves to help fix what is broken in their communities and their families. The larger society can't fix this. All it can do is provide the conditions that favor a positive outcome.

There was a time when Jesse Jackson promoted self-help for the Black community. Years ago, before he entered Presidential politics, I heard a speech he gave in California in which he argued that Blacks can't claim that going hungry inhibits the ability of Black children to learn, noting that hunger didn't stop some of the same children from growing up to becoming great athletes. That is the sort of message our most influential Black leaders need to get back to instead of seeking out opportunities to engage in "cry racism" politics. With Obama in place in the White House, we have a great opportunity for people like Jackson to preach this sort of sermon.

My Dear Galileo Galilei

My Dear Galileo Galilei, "It gives me great pleasure to inform you that we have reconsidered your case. A small mistake was made by our Vatican astronomers in the determination of the relationship between the earth and the sun. It was an easy mistake to make. I'm sure you will agree, since it was obvious to all that the sun moves from East to West in our skies whilst we remain in place. We regret that you were put in prison and that you were forced to recant under the threat of torture. As a result of the discovery of our mistake, it is our determination that you should no longer be confined to your home."

That wasn't the only mistake the Vatican made in the case of Galileo. They didn't much like his atomistic view of the universe. In recent decades the Vatican has tried to undo their mistake. Pope John Paul II blamed the Church's error on "tragic mutual incomprehension." This concession was beneath contempt since Galileo certainly understood the position of the Church. I suspect the church understood what Galileo was saying as well. Otherwise, why jail him, threaten him with torture in order to force him to recant, and then confine him to his house?

Thanks to protests of the faculty at Rome's La Sapienza University concerning the appropriateness of allowing Pope Benedict to talk there, the Pope canceled a lecture. It was argued that his hostility to science made him an inappropriate speaker at a public university. This seems to have put the Vatican in full retreat. At a Vatican conference on science, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the right hand man of the Pope, said Galileo was an astronomer, but one who "lovingly cultivated his faith and his profound religious conviction." Say what? How did they miss this fact about him 1633? I suspect he wasn't the only victim of the Inquisition who had profound religious convictions. By the way, what does "lovingly cultivated his faith" actually mean? Don't reply to this question. I can figure out some things it might mean, such as "he went to mass" and the like. The Vatican's sugar coating their grotesque acts during the time of the Inquisition with language like this is insulting to thoughtful person.

Good old Bertone also said, "Galileo Galilei was a man of faith who saw nature as a book authored by God." We dealt with this "language of God" nonsense in my last blog. The more religious folks talk about science and religion the stupider they seem to get. If nature were any kind of book then why in hell have we not come to understand all of nature? Does it have too many pages? Or is it that some of the chapters are written undecipherable languages? I need help here.

Charles Darwin is lucky he didn't live at the time of the Inquisition. He would have been burned at the stake for the idea that apes and men have a common ancestry (which isn't to say of course that we are evolved from apes). And the Catholic Church is lucky as well. Pope Paul, who tried to get ahead of criticism of the Church's treatment of Galileo, made peace (on his terms) with the theory of evolution by noting that it is more than just a hypothesis and is consistent with Church teachings. That has not been the last word on catholic views of evolution but the Catholic Church has the advantage of not being literalist in the way that fundamentalist Christians are.