Geology and the Mueller Report

Let's start with My Favorite Mueller Memes. It's a tie. Here they are:



...and...



I read a great piece in Mediaite today, via Instapundit, about what the press will and will not learn from the release of the long-awaited Mueller report last weekend. In short, the press will learn nothing; they're too invested in a conspiracy theory of their own making, according to Caleb Howe, author of that very worthwhile opinion piece. Howe points out that conspiracy theorists, confronted with a reality that fails to conform to their expectations, don't reexamine the core of their theory; instead, they construct new side-theories to explain why reality is being so uncooperative. Both of these memes speak to this behavior. The top one, I admit, assumes a degree of self-examination that I doubt is present among the collusion faithful; but the message of both is that suddenly, after hagiography after hagiography holding up Mueller as the Savior of Our Republic, his report is now being recast as either compromised by Trump administration pressure or a secret message to Congress urging them to go forth and seek impeachment, or dismissed as unimportant and readily ignored.

So that's where we are, according to the collusion faithful (and is there any other kind of collusion supporter? Have you heard of anyone's mind's having been changed by the release of the Mueller report?). The conspiracy to hide evidence that the President of the United States is a Russian puppet, this poor benighted group must believe, goes all the way to the top.

Howe's close examination of "Russiagate" press failures - he's generous there; it's tempting to call it press collusion to produce a desired result, the unseating of Trump if possible but at least the turning of Congress - would be tremendously useful to media outlets whose credibility has been battered by their own behavior. And it will be ignored. I would love to see the press act as the gadflies they believe themselves to be - if they could embrace their own sense of "journalistic ethics" and bring themselves to gad about both sides instead of just one, that is; but I don't hold out a lot of hope.

In geology, there's a concept called "unconformity." An unconformity is the evidence in strata (rock or soil) of a gap in time, evidence that something no longer present used to be there. There are three primary types of unconformities, each indicative of a different set of events:

• Angular unconformities occur when strata, layers of rock, are tilted or deformed by tectonic action - say by the uplift of a mountain range. Then erosion and more deposition of strata happen, leaving horizontal layers lying on top of tilted layers. It's easy to spot.
• Nonconformities occur when there's a flat surface between igneous or metamorphic rocks and overlying sedimentary rocks. The sequence of events is like this: igneous (formed by crystallization of magma, like basalt or granite) or metamorphic (formed by the "reprocessing" of previously existing rock by heat and pressure at depth, like slate and marble) rocks are uplifted by tectonics, forming a mountain range. Erosion happens over millions of years, leaving them more or less flat. Then deposition happens, such as silt deposited by a river on a floodplain, and the deposited sediment becomes rock, shale in our floodplain example, after more millions of years. This too is pretty easy to spot; when you see layers of sandstone, shale, or the like lying on top of granite with a nice flat surface between them, you're looking at a nonconformity.
• Disconformities are the tough ones: flat layers of sedimentary rock over flat layers of sedimentary rock, but nevertheless with "lost time" in between. In the field, they often have to be inferred from subtle evidence, such as a rusty color at the top of one layer that indicates that that layer was once exposed to air, or evidence of ancient soils such as trace fossils of roots, or an improper sequence of rock types (just trust me on this; I'm happy to go into detail if there's interest). Maybe you can use fossils to infer a gap in time if you know a lot about fossils and you're lucky enough to find one that has a known extinction timeframe in the lower layer followed by one that has a known, and later, appearance timeframe in the upper layer. But these guys are hard to spot.

What kind of unconformity does the Mueller report represent? The objective reader (if there are any) and the reader who took at face value President Trump's repeated statements that neither he nor anyone on his team colluded with Russia will see it as either an angular unconformity - that is, the Democrats will now pivot to the interesting position that the President "obstructed justice" somehow though there was no underlying crime to obstruct justice over - or as a nonconformity - they'll pivot instead to the less interesting position that they'd better look for something completely different to impeach him over. The shaken collusion fan will see it as a disconformity - something happened, they just know it did, but the evidence is so subtle that it'll require a lot of lab work to prove. (And the true believer will deny that there's any gap between pre-Mueller and post-Mueller.)

But certainly the end of the Mueller investigation represents a boundary between two unlike things. There's no question in my mind that it will not represent an end to Democrat public figures' speculation about Trump's putative crimes; I think, instead, it will represent the beginning of those Democrats' speculations taking place in an atmosphere in which ordinary Americans won't believe them uncritically any more. Even those ordinary Americans who bought the collusion story are going to be a little more wary now. I hope.

Because as Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone surprisingly points out,

Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.

Openly using such language has, all along, been an indictment. Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants.

Violence against language - jk, lol

Spencer Case, writing at Quillette, addresses the idea of concept inflation. This is a subject close to my heart - ask my husband; I am so strict as Language Police around our place that I might as well be Language Gest-

Self-censoring before I finish that word; I wouldn't want to Godwin myself. The point is, I'm constantly haranguing about how words have meaning. Now, I'm not saying words have intrinsic or unalterable meaning; I'm perfectly willing to accept the natural evolution of meaning that accompanies natural language. But let's take a look at the genetic engineering (so to speak) of language for particular ends, shall we?

I want to start by defining terms. Language, for purposes of this post, I'm limiting to verbal language; "body language" and things like the "language" of art are too subjective for this discussion. By "evolution" I mean a gradual, and undirected, drift from one state or set of characteristics to another; this definition is functionally opposed to both "intelligent design" and "domestication," in which change is directed toward a particular end. And finally, let's posit that words are the "genes" of language: the building blocks, the carriers of information that can be transmitted to others. If a word is understood in one way by the speaker or writer, and in another way by the listener or reader, then information has not been accurately transmitted.

Case asks his readers to imagine an alternative form of the fable of the boy who cried wolf, in which a bunch of shepherd boys who, unhappy about the lack of attention they're able to command when the problem they face is not wolves but, say, dogs or coyotes (both less of a threat to their flock than actual wolves), decide together to start calling dogs and coyotes "wolves." At first, just as in the original fable, the villagers come running with their pitchforks whenever the kids shout "Wolf!" - only to see that the threat is less than they understood it to be. And just as in the original fable, they grow inured to the kids' shouts and eventually stop responding at all, so that when the real threat shows up, the shepherd on duty has to fight it alone. The shepherds have inflated the concept of "wolf" to the point where their audience, through experience, now accepts their new meaning, and the word has lost the urgency of its original meaning - to the detriment of everyone.

Case is talking, of course, about the word "violence," which we're now given to understand can apply not just to physical attacks (such as a "violent crime") or physical conditions (such as a "violent storm"), but also to a firmly stated difference of opinion or a "repugnant" opinion stated all by its lonesome. See, for instance, this - trigger warning! - New York Times opinion piece about "when speech is violence": the writer, a professor of psychology, believes that

[b]y all means, we should have open conversations and vigorous debate about controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence.

And when she says "literally," she means literally literally: earlier in the piece, she talks about telomeres shortened as a result of chronic stress, and about the power of words to produce chronic stress in the body. Hang on, it's worthwhile to quote that whole bit:

...Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons — and shorten your life.

Your body’s immune system includes little proteins called proinflammatory cytokines that cause inflammation when you’re physically injured. Under certain conditions, however, these cytokines themselves can cause physical illness. What are those conditions? One of them is chronic stress.

Your body also contains little packets of genetic material that sit on the ends of your chromosomes. They’re called telomeres. Each time your cells divide, their telomeres get a little shorter, and when they become too short, you die. This is normal aging. But guess what else shrinks your telomeres? Chronic stress.

If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?

So the syllogism is "Words => chronic stress; chronic stress => bad health effects; therefore words => bad health effects." Fair enough, from the standpoint of logic. But it rests on another set of relationships that isn't a syllogism: "Chronic stress => harm; violence => harm; therefore chronic stress = violence." And that one is not in evidence, but we're asked to accept it anyway. Finish up with one more syllogism: "Words => chronic stress; chronic stress => violence; therefore words => violence" - but the middle set of relationships is still hanging out there, undemonstrated.

I'll note that the writer links to a Psychiatry Online article reporting on a study that found changes in white matter, as well as behavioral effects, correlated with higher incidence of verbal abuse by peers in childhood. This link encompasses her phrase "words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system."

So that's the scientific basis for calling speech "violence" - though, notice, there's already a perfectly good term for this kind of action - "verbal abuse"; and also notice, the term "violence" is not typically understood to mean low-level but constant erosion (chronic stress, in this case) such as is commonly seen in cases of abuse. In other words, society understands that "abuse" and "violence" mean different things. "Violence" means a discrete act or condition. "Abuse" means either a pattern of harmful behavior that may include incidents of violence, or, in a special case, a single incidence of an act otherwise defined as "abuse." (What I mean by that particular expansion of the term "abuse" is that a spouse, for example, who has been subjected once to a type of behavior that we commonly call "abuse," such as being struck by the other spouse, may still be considered to have been "abused" even though that act only happened once. I'm avoiding talking about child sexual abuse here because that subject is terribly fraught and, because of the enormous power differential between child and adult, and often a size differential as well, even sexual contact by an adult that wouldn't cause physical pain or harm to another adult, might usefully be considered violent when suffered by a child.)

The expansion of the term "abuse" to include single incidents of abusive behavior is language evolution in action. Society has come to agree on this expansion as we have come to agree on the idea of what constitutes abuse. The expansion of the term "violence" to include disagreeable speech is not language evolution, but, as I said at the very beginning, "genetic engineering" of language, changing language on purpose to suit a particular end. Make no mistake, the writer in the NYT isn't talking about individual bullying; she's talking about the societal act of "permitting a culture of casual brutality" (her whole statement is, "There is a difference between permitting a culture of casual brutality and entertaining an opinion you strongly oppose. The former is a danger to a civil society (and to our health); the latter is the lifeblood of democracy.") - with no agreed-on definition of what constitutes "casual brutality." She uses Milo Yiannopoulos as an example without providing any example of his speech that promotes "casual brutality"; the reader is expected simply to agree that Yiannopoulos's speech is self-evidently a "danger to a civil society" because it is "violent" by her prior resort to logic - the one that leaves the important middle terms un-agreed-upon.

And of course, returning to Case's essay, the effect is to devalue the word "violence" so that we all just end up ignoring it. In the short run, we all pick up our pitchforks and come to the defense of those against whom "violence" is being perpetrated - those threatened by the so-called "wolf" - but when we see that the poor victims are just milling around, a few of them looking upset but most of them just keeping an eye on the nearby dog, we shoulder those pitchforks, roll our eyes, and go back to our work. The anti-GMO crowd should take note: words do have meaning, and you forcefully change that meaning at society's peril. Way to go, shepherds - when one of your sheep is being ravaged by an actual wolf, good luck trying to get our attention.

Mismatch: does it matter, really?

Outside of STEM, I mean.

When I say "mismatch," I'm talking about when a student's abilities (as measured via test scores and grades) and a school's expectations don't match up. Gail Heriot over at Instapundit posts frequently on this subject; the effect of a mismatch that goes against the student's assessed abilities (I say it this way because it's certainly possible for the mismatch to go the other way - for the student's abilities to be greater than the school's expectations - but I don't know what the result of this kind of mismatch is) is that that student is much more likely to end up at the bottom of her class and to have poorer outcomes generally.

The upshot is that traditional college affirmative action, kindly intended to give disadvantaged students a leg up at a critical time with the expectation that from there on out they'd be on a more or less level playing field, instead results in fewer people of color, et cetera, in challenging fields and high-level positions within those fields. And it seems self-evident that this would be the case. Someone is going to be at the bottom of every class. To hope that that person will turn out to be the high-achieving kid who goes hog-wild at college and loses all that high-achievingness, rather than the kid who started out not able to keep up with the high-achiever, is not a plan. It can happen - my son has a high school friend who got into UMich on his significant merits and left two years in because he just... flamed out, lost all motivation and desire for the life for which he and his parents had been preparing him. But it is not a reasonable part of a policy.

So put me on record as agreeing that AA should be scrapped, not just on philosophical grounds but on practical ones.

But now we learn of Varsity Blues. It involves, of course, the exact opposite starting conditions from affirmative action: the kids involved were the very picture of Advantage, yet their fool parents still didn't let them compete for college entrance on their own merits. (Of course they didn't - what they were going for was entrance into an exclusive club where the bouncers controlling the velvet ropes were admissions officers and the quality of entertainment - pardon me, education - inside was less important than the fact of being inside.)  And they're insulated from bad outcomes by money and connections. Besides, I'd be seriously surprised to learn that any of them planned to get a STEM degree. So, considering that they're all going for "soft" majors from which they never plan to mine any actual knowledge or training, does the mismatch matter?

This isn't an academic question for me - no pun intended. The goal of our oldest was a school with a highly rated undergraduate business/finance program, and he's finishing up there now. He's been offered a great job (better than any I ever had in the workaday world) after graduation. And I vividly remember his rants in high school about the "cycle of advantage."

Now, we're not Lori Laughlin-rich or anything... but because he was our oldest and we were therefore constantly experimenting and improvising, we succumbed to the rants and paid for a private SAT tutor and a program that purported to help him hone his "story" for college essays. I have no idea whether these things did a bit of good; his grades and his first-draft essay would have gotten him into the school he attends. But even if he had been marginal for that school, and even if the money we spent on these potential advantage-builders had had a direct payoff in admission to the school, what would have been the risk of bad outcomes for him, with a mere undergraduate finance degree on the line? What about the disadvantaged kid who also "only" wants a business degree but knows that a business degree from, say, Texas A&M will mean more in the employment world than one from Sac State (my alma mater)?

That's where it gets dicey. And frustrating. That disadvantaged kid isn't wrong. She might be starting out without the money my kid's family has, but if she graduates from a higher-tier school she can gain exactly the same connections my kid did, and get exactly the same first job. And with a less demanding degree program than STEM, the phrase "if she graduates" takes on a much less ominous tone. Who can't get a business degree? I'm not saying business is easy, believe me; but I am saying a business degree is, compared with even a lowly civil engineering degree. And the business degree, not demonstrated business acumen, is the requirement for those initial employment opportunities. After that first job, her acumen either will or will not carry her the rest of the way. Business degrees don't do much, if anything, to weed out those who won't ultimately be good at business.

So now there's a class-action suit taking shape against the universities that have been revealed so far to have compromised their admissions process. It's Stanford students suing; they say that these other schools' unethical behavior deflates the value of their degrees. A Stanford degree "means something" because Stanford, like the rest, is relentlessly self-promoting, actively courts big donors, attracts high-level research by being able to foot the bill for it because of said big donors, admits only the "best and brightest" high school graduates (and now we know, if we didn't before, the dilution of that phrase) but then coddles them carefully, refusing to let them fail because if they fail, the school's reputation falters.

No, really. I know a guy who went to Stanford and, suspicious at the low level of rigor he was experiencing, said he tried to fail his classes. He not only passed, but got B's. Yes, he was smart, and yes, they were non-STEM classes - but even affirmative action students, whether traditional or moneyed, will have to meet some standard to get into a school like Stanford. So the big question is, what is that standard really? What is a Stanford degree worth, really?

I suppose I should be happy that this scandal, in the longer term, may result in a real leveling of the academic playing field: high-tier universities are being revealed as the diploma mills they've always been, only different from the Evil For-Profit diploma mills in the amount you have to pay for that sheepskin. (And heck, you used to have to build a new library or something! The universities must be falling on hard times.) But it's profoundly depressing to see not only what some parents will stoop to in order to keep their kids away from the great unwashed, but what supposedly great universities will stoop to to get these absolutely normal, but rich and connected, kids inside.

Somebody thinks I'm a lefty!

I haven't posted in... gosh, apparently two years, I see now, because I've been working on other writing projects (which might or might not ever come to fruition), but today the weirdest thing happened.

I was reading a post on PJMedia about a daycare worker in Michigan who caused the shutdown of the facility where she worked by stabbing a couple of children with thumbtacks. The description of what she did makes it sound as if she did it not because of anything the children did - she didn't get mad at them and come at them with tiny little shivs, which would be awful enough - but rather just to hurt them. Commenters on the story immediately went to race as her reason. She could be of a different race from the children she hurt, or their parents; but she could also be of a different socioeconomic class from them, and that could be what put her over the edge into criminality and cruelty.

I used to direct a preschool, so I have a little background in this area. It happens that there was no socioeconomic divide between the staff I had and the families we served - but preschool workers don't make a lot of money, and it might be easy - apparently was easy for a few of our parents, at first - to believe that the difference between what the preschool teachers and aides made and what they, the parents, made was indicative of their relative worth. So it wasn't hard for me to imagine that such a divide, which certainly does exist in many preschools, and I'm guessing even more in straight daycares, could have pertained to this now-shuttered daycare. And it wasn't too hard for me to imagine that a worker, perhaps already coming in disgruntled by a feeling that she wasn't "appreciated" enough, could have been dissed by a parent and decide to take out her aggrievedness (I may just be coining that word) on the child, regardless of her race or the child's.

So I commented thusly. And the weird thing was that two people immediately jumped to the conclusion that I was defending the worker despite my repeated statements that there was no excuse for what she'd done, and one concluded that I'm a lefty! I love it!

The first commenter said, "You're full of yourself, and it shows. Your reference to 'typical imperious parent' shows your baked-in sense of self importance, mixed with a touch of pseudo-intellectual bigotry. I'm certain you were happy to take their money." I might've deserved that; what I'd written originally was,

And I still spent an inordinate amount of time emphasizing (subtly) to parents that their appropriate mode of interaction should be to look teachers and aides in the eye, get to know them, and treat them with basic respect - after all, we were going to know their child intimately. It wasn't common, in our school, but it did happen from time to time that we'd get other schools' (or, more likely, other daycares') typical imperious parent who hands off his or her child silently, scrolling on the ubiquitous cellphone, as if the person taking charge of that child for the next several hours and giving that child interesting things to do instead of parking him in front of a screen isn't even worthy of a glance or a response to her friendly and direct greeting.

...and a bunch more. So yes, I was speaking from my own perceived position of experiential "authority," and I did come across as pretty lah-di-dah. So I answered that first commenter,

Sorry for how I came off, IC - I should have said "typical" (with quotes) instead. I was one of those parents before I was a preschool director. With my oldest child, I was very caught up in my own worries - hadn't wanted to put the kid into daycare but I had to work while my husband was in school - and I can't for the life of me remember the name of my child's primary teacher/caregiver; I don't think I ever paid her more attention than the bare minimum needed to be sure that my son was actually transferred into her care.

What I was trying to do, I'll say again, was to use my personal experience to highlight a situation that I know does pertain at times in daycares and preschools, as well as among a lot of us, including me, who mindlessly accept service from others.

Et cetera.

The second commenter stuck with it for quite a while. His first comment:

Typical lefty snob from the education/indoctrination collective, the type of clown that has given us morons like AOC. You work for the parents missy, you pompous twit. What an insufferable POS you are. A Masters in Early Childhood Education? Hilarious, do they get better pay for working in the drive-thru?

Oh, if he only knew. Of course, the one undeniable charge he eventually leveled was that I'm long-winded... Here's the whole string.