Rob Sheldon is our physics color commentator. In response to this item, he kindly writes to say:
I was mulling over this topic this morning. In this case, why Hollywood continues to spend $100 million on flops. Surely someone could have read the script of the recent Wonder Woman sequel beforehand and noticed the stink bombs? But then, perhaps the audience is not the customer.
A few weeks ago, while listening to talk radio, the radio host was listing all the newspapers that received a total of $2.2bn from China. It didn’t go into advertising–there were no pages dedicated to that purchase. Rather, the money was intended to influence the current crop of opinion writers. It was advertising through the op-ed pages. The radio host assured me that this was intended to offset the loss in subscriptions that the same editors were suffering due to their unpopular op-ed pieces.
![The Long Ascent: Genesis 1–11 in Science & Myth, Volume 1 by [Robert Sheldon, David Mackie]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51G-veeEcdL.jpg)
Applying that same logic to Hollywood, the producers are not expecting to recoup their investments in Wonder Woman sequels, rather they are desiring to push the community in a certain direction. Or perhaps they expect to recoup their investments in markets I know very little about. In either case, US ticket sales were not the point.
The point I’m making is that in today’s world, I was wrong to think that newspapers get their income from subscribers, or that movies get their income from ticket buyers. That is how it used to be done, but not today. As the gap between the ultra-rich and the remaining 90% grows wider, movies or newspapers are like the free bread and circuses of ancient Rome–not exactly a capitalist business model.
Likewise, high school and college math classes used to be about mastering skills that would both further employment opportunities or possibly lead to a career in math. But college has converted their English departments into indoctrination courses, and college is no longer about education but about making workers for government and society. And workers don’t need math as much as they need to be governable. Math destroys their gullibility. Far better to eliminate the history knowledge, the math skills, the civics lessons that make them difficult to control. Talking to a retired St Louis public high school math teacher, the battle was first enjoined 30 years ago over Geometry–eliminating it from the curriculum. Why? Because it was the only course that taught logic, he said. The “woke” mobs didn’t exist in 1990, but even then, the elites had a plan.
After all, the elites have their own private schools that still teach math. Public schools, on the other hand, teach what the elites deem important for everyone else.
Rob Sheldon is also the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent and The Long Ascent, Volume II
Note from News: Media have certainly changed their role in society. It’s no surprise because – some of us have made this point numerous times – no one needs the newspaper to find out whether it will rain this weekend, what’s on TV, or where to buy Greek deli. The owners and staff are probably glad to be bought up and put to work. My guess is they’ll be part of a war on math if that helps keep them going.
See also: My “War on Math’ article at Salvo. Like most opponents, [a math teacher friend] attempts logical refutations. But logic is the prime target in the war. A bit of recent history might help…
Sheer nonsense. Lethally backwards.
What makes students less gullible and less governable is REALITY, not theory. The more experience they have with real work and real NATURE, the harder they are to fool.
The current holocaust uses ABSTRACT MATH to fool and dominate the masses. Models, simulations, predictions, case counts, a constant BARRAGE of precise and utterly meaningless numbers numbers numbers, ripping out synapses and neurons as they hammer incessantly into our heads.
The people who are NOT fooled are the old coots and biddies who lived through real epidemics. They know that immunity exists, and they know that “cases’ mean immunity, not danger.
Polistra seems to use a colloquial meaning for ‘theory’. In music, ‘theory’ means something more like ‘how to capture music and notation and how to understand such notation’. The meaning in hard sciences is more like ‘facts we know about how things work that are mathematical’, and for serious working mathematicians such as cryptographers, ‘mathematical facts we know about numbers, algebraic groups, probabilities, lattices, etc.’. Using Sheldon’s apparent meaning, which is more like a mathematician’s or physicist’s understanding of ‘theory’, Sheldon is right. Such theories are actual reality, not speculation, and a good grounding in such math is an excellent basis for debunking the math frauds used to fool the masses.
The war on math is more likely about weakening the country future native workforce. I am sure they are still teaching normal math in both India and China.
The Journal is Indian.
Oh, wow. Ya gotta get the Paradigm right before you can see the pieces slip into place.
Our betters are running “Brave New World”. And the Betas, and ONLY the Betas, need to know ANYTHING about Math. The huge mass of Gammas can’t appreciate Math as an intellectual exercise (because they ain’t Intellectual) and NOTHING about their daily drudgery BENEFITS from understanding the MEANING of what the Betas have done.
In order to keep the Gammas happy (or at least not UN-happy enough to start another riot), the Betas have to carefully CALCULATE everything the Gammas will be faced with during their work day.
If you make the silly mistake of REQUIRING juvenile Gammas to pass courses in crap they are NEVER going to use (i.e., Math above Arithmetic: No, Joe. 5 bucks is MORE than 3 bucks…), it will just make those Gammas ANGRY. And the Alphas REALLY don’t like it when the Betas make the Gammas angry.
I read “Brave New World” perhaps 50 years ago. While I write this I SUDDENLY realized that the Summer of BLM is in fact the REALIZATION of OUR Brave New World. Students don’t like flunking classes at your silly school? DROP all those classes. Everybody wins, and the Betas will continue to make sure that enough of society still works so Gammas can watch cable TV and Betas can commute to their offices and the Alphas can expect their airliner to actually ARRIVE in Paris if that’s where their ticket says they’re going.
I think it’s time to read “Brave New World” again. I hope it’s not too scary this time.
Mahuna, the world has changed and level of mathematical insight required to be productive is climbing. At the same time multimedia tech allows for transformation of education, starting with Algebra, apparently the most flunked course in US HS. We need people to be digitally productive and statistically literate. The Robinson approach tames infinitesimals and re-opens Calculus.BTW, in Russia — at least, as I was told years ago — every high school kid did several years of math at calculus level and physics too. That was connected to industry and the military needs. It is time for reformation. KF
Of related note;
If anyone doubts those sobering numbers cited by David Barton, here is the raw data on crime statistics for America from 1960 to 2019:
And if anyone doubts that SAT scores dropped substantially after the remodel of prayer from school in 1963, wikipedia itself states that,
On the other hand, and as David Barton pointed out in his lecture, the SAT scores for private Christian schools have consistently remained at the top, or near the top, spot in the world.,,, Consistently outperforming public schools, i.e. “college-bound seniors in religious and independent schools scoring substantially higher than the national average.”
And this following 2018 study from Stanford found that, “Adolescents who practice religion on a regular basis do better in school than those who are religiously disengaged,,”
Verse:
So, since prayer and/or religious belief is obviously very beneficial to a child’s education, why in the world was prayer ever removed from public schools in the first place?
Well, we have our so-called progressive liberal friends on the left to thank for turning America’s public schools into the second, even third, rate educational institutions that they are now..
Specifically, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, an appointee of FDR, and a former leader of the KKK, is largely responsible for inventing the false doctrine ‘separation of church and state’,,,
In fact, the term ‘separation of church and state’ does not even appear anywhere in the constitution but is a term that was lifted out of context from one of Jefferson’s personal letters to the Danbury Baptists, and then twisted almost 180 degrees out of its original context. The term ‘separation of church and state’, as Jefferson originally intended it, meant that the Danbury Baptists could rest assured that they were free to exercise their religion as they saw fit, completely free from any government interference. I.e. The first amendment was originally devised to protect the church from the state’s influence, not to protect the state from the church’s influence.
Thus in conclusion, the ‘war on math’ is, in reality, just an extension of the progressive left’s decades long ‘war on education’ itself when they removed prayer from public schools with the false doctrine of ‘separation of Church and State’,