John Carona: The Texas Chainsaw State Senator

--Edward Hopper


Republican Texas State Senator John Carona is, his website tells us, the proud father of five.  He was born and raised and educated in Texas and his photograph smiles benignly out at you with all the menace of a well fed hog.  But if there ever was anything to that vapid phrase, "The American Dream," then he must be the personification of the anti-dream, the nightmare.

What makes him so utterly chilling is the benignity of his face and the oh so reasonable phrases which emanate from that porcine maw, as he defends some of the most hideous practices this side of capital offense.


What he does is to shepherd through the legislature laws which wrest  the single greatest investment any family ever makes--their home--from families and he hands these ill gotten gains to his own business, which quickly takes possession, sells these homes on the court house steps and makes a breathtaking profit for Senator Carona, or for his front company. 

And the best part about it is, because he's in a position to write the law, it's all perfectly legal.

His official biography mentions his children, his education, his years of "public service," but it never mentions anything about military service. That's interesting because one of the most notable victims of his scheme turns out to be an Army captain, who got a telephone call in Iraq from his semi hysterical wife back in Texas telling him they had lost their home to "foreclosure," which confused  the good captain mightily, because  they had already paid off the home and had no mortgage. How could a house without a mortgage go to foreclosure? Clearly, there was some mistake.


Ah, that's the beauty of Senator Carona's scheme:  It catches you just when you thought you were safe. Apparently, in all the hubbub of the deployment to Iraq, the payment to the Home Owners' Association (HOA) got missed and it turns out, in Texas Senator Carona has a special law for you which puts your home, which you thought you owned, in the possession of your home owners' association,   should you ever fall behind with that $230 check, well then the HOA can, without the participation of even a judge, seize your home, sell it for a profit all before you can say, "The check is in the mail."

So for the grievous offense of being late with a check to a HOA, for $230, you lose your $300,000 home, all while fighting in Iraq so Senator Carona can, back home, commit a perfectly legal form of real estate rape upon your family and future. Right here in the home of the free and the land of the brave. As my grandfather loved to say, "We've got the best government money can buy."

I love the Senator's explanation for his actions, as quoted by National Public Radio:

"Associations are a collection of neighbors," says Republican state Sen. John Carona, who represents Dallas. "The goal has to be to work well together -- have a harmonious community -- and to create a lifestyle that people enjoy and want to be a part of." 

Well, we can all agree with the Senator how important it is to be a harmonious community.

As National Public Radio disclosed, however: "In addition to representing Dallas, Carona owns the largest HOA management company in the country -- Associa, which has more than 100 offices, 6,000 employees and 7,000 HOA clients in 30 states and Mexico.Carona defends the rights of HOAs to foreclose for delinquent dues, even for small amounts."

But the Senator is not being unreasonable, after all, seizing the good captain's house while the captain is dodging explosive devices in the defense of the homeland, 

"If an association did not have a means, a forceful means, to collect that money from any homeowner who, for whatever reason, couldn't pay, it places an unfair burden on every other owner in that association," Carona says. "And a burden, quite candidly, that those other members didn't bargain for." 

And what a burden that would be, missing out on that $230, suffering through a delay. 


Now, some may wonder about proportionate response. Okay, you're late with your library book, so we take your car. You're late with your home owners' association check, burdening us with that unpaid $230, so we take your $300,000 home.


And real quick, too.

And, oh yes, NPR mentions, "There have been complaints that some members of HOA boards have bought HOA-foreclosed properties for a pittance, and then sold them for a hefty profit."

Complaints?  You think?

What I want to know is this:  Why is this Senator not in jail?

Another question:  Would you ever want to live in Texas? Would you even want to visit? Would you even talk on a phone to someone calling from that state?

This is, after all,  the state which leads the nation  in legal executions. At least with the executions, you figure someone might have done something pretty bad. But what did the good captain do to lose his home and find his family homeless when he returns? Well, he placed a burden on the HOA, to say nothing of the burden he placed on the Senator's bottom line.

And the captain and his family should be well acquainted with burdens. I mean, for whom and for what does the captain think he is fighting for, anyway, if not for the Senator and for  the Senator's right to the captain's private property?

Isn't Texas where they have all the marching bands and the flags and phony patriotism at football games? I guess the great affection those Texans feel doesn't go much beyond the waving flags;  certainly that affection does not extend to the man fighting for that flag.

I don't know, but I think Texas may have just leaped ahead of South Carolina and Arizona as my nominee for the first state to ex communicate.

And it's the conservative Republicans who are always screaming bloody murder about the sanctity of private property and the violation of private ownership by unlawful taking, and the heinous role of government thwarting the ownership society.

  And here you have Senator Carona making his fat way with a form of legalized burglary which steals not just the TV and the jewels but the entire house.

Kind of makes you proud to be an American.

Or as it says on the Senator's license plates:  Don't mess with Texas.

Who would want to?

 

The Spider Wasp and The Existential Sensitivity

 Louisiana Heron--Audubon


David Attenborough narrates an astonishing DVD, Life in the Undergrowth, about insects. One sequence begins, innocently enough, without any portent of the dark things to come, Attenborough's soothing, proper British voice carrying you along, as he describes the adaptation of a certain larva which attaches itself to the underbelly of a spider. 

In the beginning, it all seems innocent enough, as the spider weaves its lustrous web,oblivious to its papoose, riding along. But, as things progress, the spider becomes disoriented, is no longer able to weave, owing to a neurotoxin released into it's circulation by the larva, which grows larger and larger, gradually sucking the vital fluids from inside the spider until all that is left is an empty husk of what was once a spider, and then the larva discards the spider husk and transforms itself into a wasp.

This relationship between predator and prey has been, no doubt, going on for at least a millennium, and while it is essentially  the relationship of predator to prey, it is not the "clean" kill of a lion snapping the neck of a gazelle, but a slow, agonizing, brutal and ruthless malignant disease. It is the stuff of horror movies, and in fact likely has been; I think I saw a version of this once where some alien explodes out of the abdomen of an unsuspecting space explorer to the horror of Sigourney Weaver and the rest of the crew.

Yes, I know, there are tapeworms and other parasites which sap their victims' strength, but they are symbiotic enough to allow their host to continue to live because if they kill the host, they have no more living thing from which to derive sustenance. 

This thing is more like the alien of Independence Day, which does not wish to negotiate peaceful coexistence. It is simply there to kill and feed and then discard its victim.

Now, I understand, in the natural world  there are no good guys and bad guys and one kills another without remorse, and goes on to breed its own kind and we apply our values to what we see based on our own cultural needs.

But really, this whole scene is horrific.


And watching this, my son, who is a college graduate, the victim of a liberal education--and we are still trying to figure out what he majored in. He created his own major, that much we knew, but really, we never knew what it was beyond something about the harmony of opposites--anyway, my son watches this sequence and observes, "Now there is one powerful argument against intelligent design, an omniscient creator and all that. This one story argues for evolution."

How does he figure that?


No God, in any culture, is that vicious. Oh, men have conceived of an indifferent God, and certainly men have thought of a  benign God,  who is the source of all good, but none really hold up a God who would design a bug which would suck another living being slowly dry. 

Now I argue, this is too grand a statement. After all, he did not major in comparative religion. There must be some religion somewhere which looks at the law of the jungle, the predatory nature of carnivorous life, which observes animals eating each other without punishment or remorse, and create a god or two to explain how that's okay. And the Greeks had gods who looked down on battlefield slaughter and even participated or at least encouraged it.

And there were those who saw the horrors of the concentration camps and asked how could there be a God in Heaven who would allow this?


Well, the concentration camps were a single event in history, not a way of life. This spider wasp repeats this behavior generation after generation.


And nobody says any spider wasp goes to eternal hellfire as a result.


But it is an interesting thought. If we are believers in a benign God. The creator who rewards the good life with Heaven and punishes evil doers with Hell, and who creates every living thing, who knows when a single sparrow falls dead to earth, then how do you explain this good God who creates the wasp spider and this horrible cycle of sucking the vital juices right out of an unsuspecting spider who is only trying to weave this gorgeous web every day? (A web, it must be admitted, he uses to trap some victim whom he will crawl up to and eat alive.)


What I wonder about is how many people have watched this DVD before my son and asked how you could believe in the Sunday school God once you know the story of the spider wasp?


Speaking for myself, I just thought, "That's pretty harsh," and popped another episode of The Wire into the DVD player. Predatory behavior is easier to stomach among the fictional denizens of the human being city.

Afghanistan: LBJ, Obama and the Obvious

I have never been in the military. Never been to war.

On the other hand, you don't have to jump off a cliff to know you don't want to do it.

The fact is, I've seen this movie before.

I've seen it every evening during college, when I gathered with my classmates in the TV room of our college dormitory and watched Walter Cronkite and the daily clips from Viet Nam.  And what we saw there made the truth obvious. We could see it so clearly. We could not believe President Johnson could not see it. We thought he had to be lying because the truth was so obvious and he kept denying it. 

Later, listening to the Lyndon Johnson tapes of his phone conversations in the Oval Office, it became apparent, actually, Johnson had been unable to see it. He was even more stupid than we thought he was. He was very smart when it came to farm bills and civil rights and a lot of other things, but when it came to Viet Nam, he was unfathomably obtuse.

He could not grasp what Walter Cronkite was telling him every single night: You cannot win a war when the enemy is embedded in the entire population, in fact derives from the population, unless you live there yourself.

We could win the Civil War because the South knew the Union soldiers were never going home. Well, maybe the soldiers were going back home, but that was just up the road, not half a world away.

Johnson asked his trusted friend, Senator Richard Russell, a good old boy from Georgia, what he thought Johnson ought to do about Viet Nam. And Russell replied, "Well, Mr. President, someday we got to come home."

"Yes," Johnson said. "We do."

"And the thing is, Mr. President," Russell said, benignly, "They know that, too."

Johnson clearly got the point.

Some far, smart as he is about some things, President Obama does not.

Homicide, The Book

Having watched and rewatched The Wire enough times it has become a sort of Rocky Horror Show experience, I felt I had to move on, so I read David Simon's Homicide, which, it turns out has many of the anecdotes which appear in the series, including that most wonderful of stories which Bunk tells about dispatching the mouse with his service revolver and leaving the dead mouse right there,  "As a warning to the others."

What really struck me was all the dust jacket testimonials from a variety of writers and social commentators, all of whom talked about the book as if it were a police procedural, a crime book, which, I suppose, narrowly viewed, it is. But that is like saying Oliver Twist is about child labor or Gone with the Wind is about ladies in hoop skirts.  It diminishes a great, sweeping social portrait with a keyhole view.

There is one lovely, devastating passage about Mount Auburn Cemetery in Baltimore, in which murder victims and paupers are buried, and where a detective Simon has followed vainly tries to exhume a body, which has been lost because it has not been buried in the plot it has been assigned and it turns out, probably very few bodies are buried where they are supposed to be buried, but there are few headstones and who cares?  And Simon observes these are people who nobody cared about in life and nobody cares about in death. His portrait of that muddy plot of earth as more than a metaphor but a concrete example of the heartlessness of life among the underclass in Baltimore makes Dickens look like Mary Poppins.

There is an echo of this in the Second Season of The Wire when Beadie Russell first becomes interested in Jimmy McNulty because it bothers him that the fourteen Jane Does found suffocated in a container ship box will wind up in the paupers' field, buried without a headstone, without anyone caring or knowing specifically where. McNulty, we know by now cares about things like this, and he is different from other police and government administrators and lawyers in that things like this still bother him.

And so is David Simon different in the same way.

I have never met the man, and likely never will. But I like him for what bothers him.

I also watched, recently, the movie Easy Rider another portrait of America, which in its own way, as a work of fiction is just as bleak a picture of America.  It may be fiction, but it looked a lot like the America I saw growing up in the South and traveling  in the West. And it evoked a lot of memories about hippiedom during the late 60's, which did not look like fiction to me.

The wonder is, looking at America through these prisms, anyone would ever want to immigrate here.

Maybe this is the answer to our border control problems: We send DVDs of Easy Rider to every Mexican and we try to get Homicide into the hands of Chinese, European and South American students

Or maybe we just load up planeloads of potential illegals and drop them off in Detroit, and say, "You can stay, but we'll be back in a week, just in case you change your mind." Those who stay, who remain strewn about, well they can be a warning to others.

Hey, I'm trying to be creative here.

Unprotected Sex: Beware of Big Numbers

Margaret Sanger

Nurse, advocate for Female Contraception

Anthony Comstock

New York Society for the Suppression of Vice

The good news is there is a new medication which can be used to prevent pregnancy--another morning after pill, but this one is more effective than Plan B and if you are the dithering type, you have a few more days to get to the drug store.


The bad news is the FDA hasn't made up its mind to approve it and is seeking expert opinion--Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson haven't called back.


If the FDA does approve it, it may require a prescription for it, which would of course mean you need a note from that daddy/mommy figure, the doctor, to say it's okay not to be pregnant.

As is true of so much of American discourse in the twenty-first century, we cannot simply think about this topic. We have to engage the services of experts. And those experts need things called numbers to really sound like experts, because: 1/ Nobody can argue with numbers, (because most people really do not understand numbers and get that deer in the headlights look whenever you throw some numbers in their direction.) 2/ You cannot sound like you know what you are talking about unless you have some numbers to wave around.

So the New York Times quotes an expert by the name of James Tressell, who not only has a number, but he's from Princeton. Princeton is where they've got Einstein's brain, in case you were wondering.

So this professor from Princeton is quoted by the New York Times (we have to assume, quoted accurately, because it is after all, the New York Times, where they have Scotty Reston's brain in a jar somewhere, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had Walter Lippman's brain,( although the Washington Post may have that. I'm not sure.) But some day they may have Gail Collins' brain in a jar at the Times and then you really will be able to believe every thing they have got printed there, 

But I digress.

So Mr. Tressell says, and I quote, or at least I paraphrase, that every night in this country of 300 million souls, one million, that is 1,000,000,  women have sexual intercourse without protection. No birth control pills, no diaphragm, no condom, no IUD, no Depot Provera, no nothing. Bare back.

Mr. Tressell does not say how many of those one million women intend to get pregnant and how many just aren't thinking too clearly.

The professor did not say how many of those one million women are menopausal, how many have no uterus, how many may have had their tubes tied, but I am going to assume, for the sake of discussion, he was talking about ONE MILLION WOMEN having sex, who could get pregnant.

And, he says, or maybe it is the Times saying, that the chances of a woman getting pregnant under these free form sexual experience conditions is about one in twenty. I'm guessing this includes all comers, if you will excuse the pun, by which I mean, 1 in 20 across all the days of the ovulatory cycle.

Whew!

No wonder the Taliban hates us.

Now, what is really staggering about all this is this question: How does Mr. Tressell know this?

The corollary question is: Wouldn't you like his job?

I mean, how would you go about figuring out how many women are having sex each night of the year across the fruited plains, in the mountains, from sea to oily sea?

I can only imagine.

Let me count the ways.

I guess you could start backwards, from how many pregnancies result in delivered babies, that is from the birth rates, but then you'd underestimate because there are a certain number who have abortions, take Plan B, lose their pregnancies naturally (and most women who lose one early don't even realize their were pregnant). So just counting live births would likely underestimate the number of intercourse events every night by a factor of who knows what?

Or maybe you could ask women in surveys, but don't women (and men) lie about sex all the time? I mean if you ask men how  often they have sex  you are going to get the typical macho twice a night with three different women, whereas the women may  not be willing to admit to sex at all or may be inclined to  under report. Who knows?

So, no, none of these methods would be likely to give even a halfway close real number.

So maybe...maybe the Center for Population Research has cameras.

Or seismometers.

Or who knows what?

It boggles the mind.

Personally, I have tried to count to a million once or twice, but I lost track of where I was, or got distracted, or fell asleep. So how does Mr. Tressell do it?

I don't know. But, we are talking about Princeton, the New York Times.

Got to be true. Most def. True that. Indeed.

Gay Marriage

Chop Suey--Edward Hopper


For my gay friends who have made a life together, I wish only happiness, good health, long life, success and happiness.

And for those frothing zealots who devote themselves to speaking out against legalizing gay marriage, all I can say is, "Don't you have better things to do?"

And then there is the "Defense of Marriage Act," aptly named.

Thing is, as much as I hate to admit it, the anti gay marriage people do have a point about what gay marriage means.

My first reaction, of course, was how does a gay couple being married threaten my own heterosexual marriage? And of course, calling two gays "Married," does not threaten anyone's marriage, does not cheapen the word. But what any discussion of any sort of marriage does is to expose to the light of day the whole notion of what marriage is, what it means and this is an institution which, in the bright light of day has quite a lot to fear.

A shudder always courses through me whenever I hear that phrase, "And now, by the powers invested in me by the state of...I pronounce you man and wife." And I think, what state should have the power to sanctify or bless or make legal or socially acceptable the relationship between two people, that most intensely personal relationship?

The fact is, no state has any business interposing itself between two individuals, has any business uniting them or making them stay together. Two people unite themselves. No state can or should try to do that. And if they decide to separate, the state has no business trying to keep them together against their wills.

Yes, if there is property involved in a subsequent break up, or if there are children involved, then laws have to cover that, but the contracts implied or signed do not need to be called a marriage.

So what does that word mean that's so important?

Ministers, priests, rabbis often say God has brought the two together to make one; the joining of the two is planned and desired by God. It is the invocation of magic, as if the priest knows the mind of God. To my mind, this is a gross affront to the Almighty.


People find each other, decide to stay together of their own free will; God has nothing to do with it--beyond the magic of providing all the coincidences which put people on collision courses.

I've heard a minister actually say to the congregation they have a responsibility to keep the wedded couple together, when, as he described, the husband finds himself at a party late at night without his wife but with some attractive young ladies around--the congregation should send him home to his wife. The minister actually spelled out the role other people should play in denying the husband the opportunity to be unfaithful. So there it was baldly--we as a group have a stake in making individuals tow the line.

And I sat there thinking: No, that is nobody's business. Nobody should be making judgments, except the people most intimately involved. Haven't we spent the last five decades trying to escape from the scrutiny of a social network of busy bodies telling the individual what he ought to be thinking and how he ought to construe his obligations for sexual and personal behavior? Was this revolution of the past decades not one of the most profound liberating experiences for how individuals lead their lives?

Which is why young people are not getting married as often, and it's not just the underclasses who don't bother with marriage, even when pregnancy occurs. Marriage is simply not something you ought to want anything to do with.

Pairing in public always struck me as such a show of personal weakness. It was for people who had such low self esteem they found it necessary to cling to someone, to bathe in reflected glory. It was the girl who had to screw the captain of the football team and hang on his arm so everyone knew she must be attractive if the captain chose her. What a pathetic puke. And it doesn't stop in high school--just watch the old gomers who buy their young wives and parade them around, tacitly proclaiming they may be old, bald, stooped but they have eye candy on their arms so they must be really attractive. Oh, spare me.

It's the public nature of marriage which is somehow, psychologically the salient feature of marriage. Personally, I don't get it. Two people meet at a bar, go home together, and nobody notices. They go to bed together and so far it's all very private. They take care not to be observed having sex. But then, they go and present themselves to all their friends, to relatives, to people they knew when they were younger, to co workers. They invite everybody they know and they quote poetry to each other in a performance for their entire social network.

Why? Where does this compulsion to involve other people come from? Where is this exhibitionist impulse welling up from? Wasn't it more exciting and intimate and happier to be just two people alone together finding happiness in each other? Or is that the problem? After a night or two of intensive screwing, the joy bleeds out and you need other people to keep cheering you on?

I just do not get it. Are we really such pathetic losers we need other people to keep telling us how happy we are?
So why would two gay people want to subjugate personal, individual freedom to mob rule?

What is the attraction of this thing called consensual validation? What do you care what other people think of you? It's a man's opinion of himself which determines his fate; thank you Henry David Thoreau.

The only answer I can imagine is when you are a person who has been ostracized, demonized and rejected by other people the acceptance of other people seems more important to you.

The problem is, if the electorate votes in a referendum against allowing you to call yourself "married," then the majority has spoken. You cannot force the lumpy proletariat to accept you. You might get a judge or even a panel of judges to agree with you that you have been unjustly excluded from rights and benefits of marriage, like visitation rights, rights to health insurance, rights to function as a parent, but all those things, any privilege of marriage can be legislated.

The word marriage, however, is something a group uses to describe a relationship it agrees to confer on people it accepts as having certain status. You cannot claim a general acceptance if a vote has rejected it.

Not unless you can show the electorate voted on a misunderstanding.

So if the majority of Californians want to say, "No, you are not married in my eyes. I don't like you," well then, you cannot force them to like you or accept you in social terms. In legal terms, sure you can force equal treatment. But granting status, social acceptance you cannot force, any more than you can force people to invite you to their private parties or clubs.

The big issue is, why would you care?

What group is so important to you you would fight to gain admission?

Who was it? Groucho Marx? Freud? Who said, "I would never join any club which would have me as a member" ?

If you're gay and you have a partner and kids and you are happy as a family, that ought to be enough. Don't waste your time or emotional energy trying to get nincompoops to say, "I love you."

Other people are simply not worth wasting time over. As Sartre once said, "L'enfer c'est les autres," which translates, roughly, "Hell is other people."

False Gods, David Simon, Atul Gawande

Listening to David Simon on Bill Moyer's Journal, one thing stood out among all the many truths Simon spoke: The use of numbers, statistics, has been used in corrupt and damaging ways which have undermined the very purposes of the institutions we created to protect ourselves.

This is made particularly clear in The Wire as it pertains to the way crime statistics have perverted and nearly destroyed police departments and this is true for public schools, which have been similarly damaged by the unintelligent and corrosive use of statistical measures, judging teachers by the tests scores of their students, and it was true during the Viet Nam war where "body counts" were used as evidence we were winning that war, when in fact we were losing it. Robert MacNamara was the epitome of the man who made  a career creating an image of himself as the smartest boy in the room, the man who could prove with mathematical "precision" how we could and would win that war.

One area which would seem immune from the criticism concerning the importance of statistics would be medicine, which is, after all a science, we would like to believe.  Another is finance and economics, which are, after all, in their very essence, numbers games.

But the problem is, numbers are really just dumb tools and they have to do with measuring things. But in order to understand the way things work, you really have to have a qualitative insight, and the quantitative tools cannot by themselves provide that.

The numbers are supposed to protect us from our emotional side, from the subjective, from biases. They are just the facts ma'm. 

Consider two instances of the uses of numbers which have been found to be very persuasive by those who wanted to believe, in a qualitative way, what these numbers were supposed to mean. Both instances arise from New Yorker articles by Atul Gawande.

Gawande, it must be understood, is a very nice man. He is well meaning, bright, earnest and when he is telling a story about an individual  patient, he can be quite moving and effective. That is, he is telling us something which has quality to it. But when he gets out of the operating room and tries to tell us about a whole, complex system based on numbers when he really doesn't understand how they were collected, he unwittingly misleads.

And the President reads Gawande. 

When Gawande strays into territory beyond his immediate experience, beyond the particular experience he has had with a particular patient, he begins to worship the false god of quantitative thinking, of misinterpreted numbers. 

The first instance is his article about a cystic fibrosis clinic which has far better numbers for survival than any other CF clinic in the country.  I forget the exact numbers, but if the average life expectancy at the average cystic fibrosis clinic is 34 years, then this clinic was getting 45 years, numbers like that.  A really impressive difference.  

To his credit, Gawande did not simply read the numbers, but he hopped a plane and visited the clinic to find out what this clinic could teach us about how to improve the quality of care for CF patients.  The numbers, after all, clearly told us this is this is by far the best, the highest quality care for cystic fibrosis in the country. The numbers were undeniable, and could only mean one thing. (Beware numbers which can only mean one thing. Remember, numbers are dumb.)

The patients at this clinic lived ten years longer than anywhere else; they got beyond death in young adulthood to middle age.  Following the head of the clinic, Gawande saw this doctor  examine the record on a patient who had been doing very well on her lung function tests but had over the prior three months deteriorated sharply. Questioning the patient relentlessly, it turned out she had acquired her very first boy friend, and she had moved in with him, and not wanting to gross him out with the "pulmonary toilet" she had previously performed on herself several times a day, she had done less and her lung function tests revealed the difference in her effort. 

The doctor was outraged. What have you done to make this clinic the best CF clinic in the world? You have let us down. You've let yourself down. Sure the coughing and wretching and hacking up secretions from your lungs may disgust your boyfriend, but we're talking about your lung function here. This set of testing makes our clinic look bad. We look like a failure. The patient broke down in sobs and we got no more information from Gawande about whether or not she ever returned to clinic. 

We really didn't need it.  It was pretty obvious that patient was either going to comply with her pulmonary toilet regimen or she would not have the nerve to ever show her face again at that clinic. 

So who benefited? If the patient slinked out of the clinic, never to return again (a distinct possibility, given her humiliation) she'd take her stinking numbers with her and rid the clinic of the stench, but who was served by humiliating her and throwing her off the train?

At least in that case, the numbers reflected what was actually happening, i.e. a loss of lung function which resulted from a loss of effort. But the loss of lung function might be a price that woman was willing to pay, even if it meant she would die at age 40 instead of 45. Is it better to die a virgin at 45 with great numbers or to have lived and loved and die 5 years earlier?

I could think of numbers which didn't even tell you what you thought they did: I signed death certificates for years while covering for other doctors who signed out their patients over the weekend by telling me Mrs. Smith might die over the weekend and I should sign the death certificate. With what diagnosis? Oh, I don't know. She's got a lot lot of things racing to be the cause of death, uterine cancer, heart failure, diabetes. Pick one and sign your name. So I picked one out, more or less at random and that diagnosis became her cause of death and got entered into the stream of information emanating from death certificates.  And then you read about "leading cause of death" or how many people die from heart failure and you know they are based on garbage in/ garbage out systems of collecting those numbers.

The more famous New Yorker article was the piece about the Texas communities, where one town had a hospital which billed the highest rates of Medicare cost in the country while a neighboring town was at the low end of the scale. Gawande tells us that by "every measurement of quality of care" the high cost hospital was no better than the low cost hospital. And he flies to Texas, has dinner with doctors from the high cost place and they "admit" they have probably been bilking the system, doing procedures which fattened their own wallets but did not much improve the health of the patients. And Gawande accepted their confessional as an admission of guilt by five doctors on behalf of the hundreds of doctors who were not at the dinner.

Of course, this plays to the longstanding suspicion about doctors doing unnecessary things to enrich themselves.

But the sad fact is, there are no good "measurements of quality" in medicine, or if there are any, they are very limited and you certainly could not judge differences between the two hospitals without looking much more carefully at individual patients. You'd have to do chart review and ward rounds at both places for months to get a sense for whether there was any real qualitative difference. That is, you'd have to be scrounging around the wards, and not just looking at numbers.

That's what Howard "Bunny" Colvin is talking about when he says statistics ruined policing in Baltimore. Used to be the cop sat on the stoop with the ladies in the neighborhood, and when there was a shooting, the cop had people who considered him a friend and told him who and what and wherefore. That quality of the cop on the beat could not be measured by arrest statistics. 

That is the difference between teaching kids probablity theory by tricking them into thinking they are not learning, when you show them the probabilities which govern the dice game of craps. How do you capture the creativity of a the classroom teacher to sizes up the psychology of his students and finds a way to sneak some learning into them?   In The  Wire, the teacher has the choice of teaching his students what they want to learn or teaching them nothing in a doomed effort to teach to the test. The test results generate statistics. Real learning in the classroom does not.

Juking the stats means lieutenants make majors and majors make colonels and it's great for career advancement and for running for re election but it's terrible for school children, teachers, doctors, clinics and for most important institutions in this country.

Our addiction to the manipulation of dumb numbers has corroded our society from within. It's why we are no longer the best in health care; it's a small part of the reason our schools are failing to do as well as they might otherwise.

We have gotten way stupid in our attempt to look smarter by quoting numbers.  Until you understand how numbers are collected, you are as dumb as the numbers themselves. And I use that word "dumb" advisedly, in the sense of dumb as in unable to speak. Numbers do not speak. Someone has to speak for them.

But we are Number One. Oh, yes. Now there's a number you can believe in.