The Dilettante Citizen

Raymond Chandler remarked, "There is nobody less curious than a doctor."  When I read that I thought, "No, just the opposite." But over the years, I think I'm beginning to appreciate what he means.

Belief can be a warm fuzzy feeling 

When a physician, has forty patients scheduled to be seen in eight hours, and he is confronted by a person he thinks is in the exam room because she has a cough, but it turns out she is actually short of breath and has just got back from a 20 hour airplane ride, and she has not just a cough but "dyspnea" the sense of air hunger, then the physician begins to regret asking more questions than the minimum. Now he is faced not with a 10 minute patient with a viral respiratory infection, but a possible pulmonary embolus (lung clot) which gets to be a 40 minute patient. He has, in the immortal words of The Wire's Bunk complicated and burdened his own life because, "There you go again, giving a fuck when you don't have to." 

If he then asks the patient to take off her shirt so he can listen to her lungs and he sees a pigmented lesion on her shoulder, a melanoma perhaps, then he has now got himself  a new problem, which will take yet more time,  and he still has that waiting room full of patients,  which is getting to look  like a runway at Logan in a snowstorm.

Better not to ask too many questions

Of course, in medical school, you are taught to be curious, to ask the next question, to uncover the most serious illness. Or, actually, I have to correct myself. Once upon a time, in the days of the dinosaurs, medical students were taught that. 
Now, in the days of commercial medicine, young doctors are taught to do a "focused" history and a "focused physical exam" which means, do not expand the inquiry, do not open that can of worms. "Keep your shirt on" for today's young doctors means listen to the chest with the patient's shirt on so you will not see the melanoma. If you do see that melanoma, tell the patient to come back for another visit: It's another fee for that problem, and you save time. Of course, if the patient doesn't get the message and never follows up once her cough is better, well she dies.

When I listen to a song like "Anything Goes" I am delighted and play it over and over again, but my son, a musician, hears it entirely differently. When he has me look at the sheet music and break it down, it becomes a lot of work. There is syncopation, and notes coming in with exquisite timing between other notes, the left hand playing against the right with precision. That song is work for the musician, pleasure for the dilettante listener.

I'm just enjoying the music 

My brother, a very sophisticated doctor, loves watching shows on business and finance in large part because, fundamentally, he's never been trained in that, so he loves hearing about it and he's fascinated. Had he gone to Wharton, it would just be work. But now he's a sort of instant expert because he's heard the show about some financial topic.

Listening to people who David Brooks would call, "Low information voters" talk about the virtues of Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton, you see the pleasure they get talking about what they know next to nothing about. A woman will say, "Well, Hillary's a crook. She belongs in jail," and she beams as if she's just said something brilliant and should be appointed mayor. 
How often have I heard some HVAC repairman tell me Social Security is going bankrupt and won't be there for him, or Medicare doesn't work,  when his parents are kept off his budget by Medicare?
And, here in New Hampshire, how often did I hear Obamacare called a disaster, when for all intents and purposes, Obamacare never got instituted here, not like in New York, where my sons could get the best health insurance they ever had for a quarter of the cost of their previous policies which covered almost nothing?

Knowing more, sometimes, is disturbing

Somehow, being incurious, cleaving to "what I heard" from some other ignoramus releases a warm and delicious feeling deep inside. 

Another scene from "The Wire"--at a meeting with the drug kingpin, Stringer Bell, some hopper or tout from the streets, who sells the drugs says something which reveals how little he knows about the business. This happens during a meeting which Bell has insisted be run according to Roberts Rules of Order. Bell explodes, and cuts off the hopper but the "parliamentarian" tries to intervene, "Uh, String, he did have the floor."
Bell erupts, "This nigger too ignorant to have the floor."
Ah, but for a moment the hopper felt fine, having expressed his uninformed opinion and having been taken seriously, until the consequences ensued. 
Ignorance, for a time, is bliss.

Prostitutes Are Not the Problem

Didn't see the press conference but from what I read on line Donald Trump was asked about Russia having videos of him having sex with prostitutes and rather than denying it he simply said he was a germophobe so not inclined to have sex with prostitutes for fear of getting a sexually transmitted disease.

If this is a true account of his response, you got to love it.


If, what he is saying is the reason I would not use a prostitute is not because it demeans women, or because it's immoral or for any other reason than I'd be afraid to get a venereal disease, all I can say is: This is a breath of fresh air.


This could be so liberating for prostitutes, and if we look as prostitution as a public health concern rather than some immoral group, then Mr. Trump has made his first positive step in his Presidency.


Can you imagine a President Cruz or a President anyone else taking this tack?

Media Melt Down: Note to Reporters--Nobody Cares about Russian Hacking

With their best soto profoundo voices, reporters are asking everyone they can get on camera from Trump team members, to members of Congress to simply other reporters, who they interview when they run out of officials to interview: Oh, so what do we think about the Russians hacking our election?

We knew something they didn't

The fact is, I do not care if Russia was behind the news that Hillary did this or that or that Panetta said whatever.


Those "leaks" simply reinforced previously held opinons--like the attack ads funded by the Koch brothers, none of it changed vacillating minds. Minds were made up and unchangeable long before any of that.


Proving the effect of free speech, even fake news, on the outcome of the election is one ongoing, unresolvable argument.

Counties (blue) won by Trump, Beige won by Clinton

Once upon a time in the United States, when there were only newspapers, or three channels on TV to form public opinions, a news story may have mattered. Not now, with Facebook, Fox News, Twitter, CNN, Rachel Madow.


There are simply too many sources. The proliferation of sources is the best antidote to any one source of disinformation.

Phantom's audience, world wide

Show me the Russians got into the pipes that funneled the vote counts to the main computers so Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan turned from blue to red, then I'll agree we have a direct effect on the outcome of the election.

They love me. They really love me.

Until then, the Republicans won because they underestimated the intelligence of the American public and they reaped the benefits of that low opinion, plain and simple.

The TV Time Machine: Seeing The Future In Designated Survivor

Two months before the unexpected 2016 election of Donald Trump a television show called "Designated Survivor" premiered with a story about a man who did not expect to become President of the United States who is suddenly thrust into that role.

The new President (Kiefer Sutherland) is temperamentally unsuited to be President, for exactly the opposite reasons Donald Trump was said to be temperamentally unsuited: rather than being impulsive and egomanical, he is overly cautious and simply too nice.

The show is dreadfully written:  the dialogue is written by people who never got past "Captain America" comic books--"You are now the President of the United States!" and "The White House has just been hacked!"  and "We are now at war! The terrorists have attacked!"
Presumably, some of the writers went to Cornell--the hero wears a Cornell sweatshirt--which only goes to show that an Ivy League pedigree is no guarantee of actual talent.

Long, lingering, simpering, scenes of the new President with his two comic book children are thrust upon the viewer. The President tries cooking breakfast for his two kids and he is a terrible cook. It's just too cute, cute, cute. There is an eight year old girl with a perpetually knitted brow, representing all the eight year old American girls who are worried about bad things in the world, who need Daddy to protect them, and who are constantly being told, "Bad people did some bad things, but we are going to stop them and make everyone safe again." These scenes involve lots of hugging and parents telling children they love them and children repeating back again they love their parents, too. 

It's all just so heart warming you could puke.

Then there is the comic book Nuk'em and kill-anything-that-moves general in his uniform, resplendent in all sorts of medals and badges and things, a humorless man who is simply "a bad man." 

who designs these uniforms?

Watching, as I am, concurrently, Season One of "The Wire" where Deputy Ops Rawls is introduced as a thoroughly malevolent Nuke 'em type of guy, I was again dazzled by how well a character like this can be done.  In his most threatening, malicious presentation, Rawls is clearly very funny and he thinks of himself not as the offender but as the offended party.  What is so masterful about "The Wire," about a really good TV series, is how many sides of people you are allowed to see, in glimpses, or in significant scenes.  The same Rawls sits Jimmy McNulty down later in the season, after McNulty's partner has been shot, and he tells McNulty, "Much as I would take pleasure in seeing an asshole like you suffer, 'cause Christ knows, you deserve it, you were not responsible for this particular fuck up. This was not on you."  And then there is a quick glimpse of Rawls, which happens so fast I missed it the first two times I saw that scene, just a glimpse in one episode of the third season, of Rawls in a gay bar. And if you noticed it, you got another insight into what made Rawls so angry.

Nothing like that goes on in the cartoon "Designated Survivor." It starts with an idea I'm sure many of us have had, looking at the State of the Union address, when the House of Representatives, the Senate, the cabinet and the Supreme Court all convene in one room and how many times have I thought, "Wow, one bomb and we'd have no federal government left."  And of course, there have been some times, I've thought, looking out over the Strom Thurmonds and the Mitch McConnells and the assorted creatures from the dark lagoons of Louisiana and Mississippi who are arrayed in that chamber and I've thought about that and thought: "Maybe not such a bad idea."
And then you realize: In fact, this is just what all those Rust Belt people thought and that's what they did this past November. And, much as you might revile Washington, what Washington really is about is the the triumph of Hope over experience. It's easy to just blow it up. What takes guts is trying to make it work.

The fact is, as a pageant, our democracy needs gatherings like this: the State of the Union address. We do not have a state religion. There are no royal weddings. But we do have the Capitol Building and every year there is that assembly. And after the attack on Pearl Harbor and after 9/11, there was that in your face assembly, where our leaders said, "No, we are not going into hiding. We are standing right here and speaking to the world." 

I'd love to see  a show which might explore the dangers inherent in a President who is unsuited to the job..  The descent into attacks on Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, the suffering of people thrown off their health insurance plans, the treachery of promising factory workers back their old jobs only to see robots replace them, all that could be effective, thought provoking television. 
Instead with have a President with goofy spectacles and his wife whose zygomatic arches are impossibly glamorous, who gets a phone call from her law firm's client who is about to be deported and within two scenes, that problem is resolved and there is another scene of a mother hugging her children, smiling through her tears. Oh, plueeeze.

The question is whether there would be an audience big enough for something better. 
"The Wire" never won an Emmy, and its following was a cult.  
"Celebrity Apprentice" and "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo"  found more Americans tuning in.

Thus goes the American Century.

Hermes Bag and the Homophobe Baker

When I argued that a baker should not be allowed to refuse service to a gay couple who ordered a wedding cake on the basis that he thinks homosexuality is an affront to God and gay marriage is an anathema, Anonymous argued this is really no different than Hermes refusing to sell its much coveted Belkin bag to "just anyone" with the money. 

Reading about this marketing ploy, and deciding whether it is a violation of the same principle,  I think I have to establish the facts of the case, which is always the first step in ethical and legal analysis.


As I understand it, this bag can be bought in London, only from sales clerks at the Hermes store. In order to buy the bag, you need a "personal relationship" with the clerk.  When the London "Daily Mail" sent a woman to the store dressed as a middle class customer, she was told the bag was unattainable. She was told the bag is made in France by special craftsmen and there were none currently available and "good luck" trying to get one.

1. As far as I know, the sales clerks approached did not say, "No, we do not sell these bags to Blacks or homosexuals."
2. The basis for denial was supposed lack of availability of a product in high demand.
3. At no time did the clerk say the reason she could not or would not order the bag for the customer was because she was "middle class."
4. The marketing strategy here seems to be this bag is a status symbol, and as such, social status has to reach the plane of celebrity status for the customer to be worthy of the bag. 
In that sense, this is no different from students who apply to Harvard, who are told they are not good enough because they did not score high enough on the SAT.  You have to prove yourself worthy to be allowed to complete the deal.

So, in this country--I'm not sure what the laws in Britain are--exclusivity is permissible even in "open" commerce, as long as the basis for excluding certain customers is not their race or their gender or sexual preference. 


This poses a problem for all women's colleges who refuse to admit male students. I'm not sure how they get away with this, given American law.


You may argue the sales clerk may not have said the woman was too low class to buy the bag, but that was the practice. The same clerk may have sold a bag to Catherine Zita Jones or Victoria Beckham. If the sales clerk had told the customer she was too low class to buy the bag, it would have been obnoxious, but in the United States, I'm not sure it would have been illegal.


Then you get to the problems of "red lining."  This is the practice where Blacks are not refused entry into homes for sale in certain neighborhoods, but they are consistently told the home was sold to another bidder, who happened to be White. In this case, the racist basis for the practice of excluding Blacks as customers is not openly stated, but it is executed by subterfuge.  To expose this sort of thing, you need statistics. You demonstrate that although 100 Blacks bid on twenty homes in Chevy Chase, not a single bid from a Black buyer was accepted. 


The same might be said of the Belkin bag--if no woman who is not a celebrity or married to a celebrity is ever told a bag is available, but five minutes after the middle class woman leaves the store, Catherine Zita Jones waltzes in and is able to order and receive the bag, then you can see the marketing strategy. But if the basis for the decision to refuse to sell to one customer in favor of another is not race, gender or sexual preference, at least in the United States, it's allowable.


No principle of anti discrimination has been violated. You are allowed to discriminate on some bases (fame, or the lack of it, social position, wealth, dress codes, smoking) but not on other bases--namely the three defined in the law.

Becoming My Father: The Seduction of the New York Times

As my father got older, he would sit in his leather chair with his feet up on an ottoman, in the most  sun lit room of his house and he would read the Sunday New York Times.  

He stayed indoors and read, which was fine with him. He took great joy in reading this  paper.

Mary Astor 

I vowed I would never descend to such a sedentary life, and I do start the day in my New Hampshire town with a walk, but I have to admit, the great pleasure is for my dog, who is wildly enthusiastic every time I reach for the collar and leash. I often find myself looking forward to getting back to open the Times.

This morning, the experience was akin to visual cocaine--there was so much to read about, so much exciting stuff.  

For starters, there was an article by Susan Chira, a "senior correspondent and editor on gender issues"  which brought to mind Jon Stewart's side kicks, like Samantha Bee and John Oliver, who were always introduced as senior correspondents of something--senior correspondent for White women's affairs, or senior correspondent for racial and nutritional issues.  

Ms. Astor had no gender issues

Ms. Chira informed me of the battle grounds being drawn for American feminists in the aftermath of Mr. Trump's victory:  
"There is despair, division...Hillary Clinton's loss was feminism's, too."
How had I missed that? 
"A man whose behavior toward women is a throw back to pre feminist days is now setting the tone for the country."
That bit was news to me.  We have someone who can set the tone now, for the country.  
After talking to women daily in Haverhill, Massachusetts, who seem to think the tone for Mr. Trump was set for him by their own live-in boyfriends, by the men they meet at bars or by their own husbands.

"More broadly, there is a fear that women's issues...reproductive rights, women's health, workplace advancement and the the fight against sexual harassment, among others--could be trampled or ignored."
Again, I hear no such things in Haverhill, where women get pregnant not because they can't get IUD's at Planned Parenthood and not because they cannot get oral contraceptives from a variety of clinics, but because they choose to get pregnant just as soon as they can get a job and find a boyfriend who agrees to help them pay for childcare.  
Marriage, career never enters into the discussion. For so many of the women I speak to, the plan is having the baby, living with parents or boyfriend's parents and work place advancement means hoping to move up from the cash register at Market Basket to a job stocking shelves and maybe to assistant manager.  
The good life means having a trailer at a camp in Maine for weekends. 
Sexual harassment at work, not so much. 

Ms. Chira notes the election fractured "gender solidarity" as white women voted (if you can believe exit poles) 53% for Mr. Trump, a much ballyhooed misogynist. 

My female friends in Haverhill don't talk much about gender solidarity or sisterhood. Their main focus seems to be their families, although these are not the traditional families I grew up recognizing.
And not a one of them has been able to define the word "misogynist" for me. But whatever it is, they don't think Trump is one. He's just like all the guys they grew up with. He's only interested in one thing from women, and that's okay with them, for a starting point. They can work on the guy later.

Now this is a feminist who has her own ideas

Ms. Chira also saw "the provocative possibility that many women believed that Mr. Trump would keep the country safe in part because of his paternalistic, alpha male persona--an that was an implicit rejection of feminism's attempts to redefine gender roles."

I'm not sure what gender roles Ms. Chira is talking about, but with so many of my Haverhill female friends as the main bread winners in their homes, supporting kids and an unemployed boyfriend, with many of these women working on assembly lines, as police officers, as construction workers, I wonder which women Ms. Chira is talking about. Maybe women who work in the office buildings of New York, but surely women in small town New England aren't bothered much by gender roles.

Maybe it takes a lunatic to talk to lunatics 

Next was an article by Bernard Avishai, who spoke of the way Jews in Tel Aviv and in New England looked at the issue of Israel building new settlements in areas the Palestinians claim.  Apparently, about 40% of Israeli Jews think Israel should be a state for Jews only, which ejects Arabs, Palestinians and ethnic cleansing, an Israeli apartheid is a Biblically sound idea. But the other 60% of Israeli Jews think an open society which welcomes all ethnic backgrounds and protest individual freedom is a good idea.  That is the prevailing opinion he finds among his friends who are Americans living in New England.

This made me think about my own attitudes toward Israel, which I haven't thought much about lately. In fact, the last time I thought much about Israel was when I read "Exodus" by Leon Uris at age 14, and then sporadically whenever there was a full blown war. In general, I recognize Israel is, or was, a democracy and so gets points for that, but I no longer assume, for reasons I cannot really place, that Israel is a priori in the right whenever a conflict with the Palestinians arises. 

I don't know enough about building new settlements, but I did hear David Brooks say on "The News Hour" that the settlements were not the big thing standing between the Palestinians and the Israelis, but there were things like Palestinian school books and curricula openly endorsing the destruction of Israel, the denial of the Holocaust and other things which annoy Israelis. 

Avishai mentions President Trump's selection for Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who believes Israel belongs to the Jews, as one state for the Jews and who says liberal American Jews who belong to a club called "J Street" and who disagree with him are worse than kapos." 
Kapos were the Jews in concentration camps who collaborated with their Nazi captors in organizing the extermination of other Jews.  
This is a sort of hysterical Jew who calls intermarriage between American Jewish boys and non Jewish (gentile) girls "the next Holocaust," because it will spell the elimination of the Jewish people through dilution of the gene pool, or something. Apparently among some Jews, there is the belief that the child is Jewish if the mother is Jewish.  Since you could never be sure who the father is, it was only the mother who counted. (Presumably, this rule arose before the days of gene sequencing.)
Mr. Friedman was Mr. Trump's bankruptcy lawyer, which means he helped Mr. Trump screw all those tradesmen who built his buildings and had to settle for less than half of what he promised to pay them, all legally. From such cloth are the righteous cut,nowadays. 
Anyway, Mr. Friedman emerges from the pages of the Times as a thoroughly unappetizing specimen, and I'll be sure to stay tuned. 

But Mr. Avishai's article was fun to read because it suggested American Jews are no longer Israel's lap dogs, if they ever were. 

But then there was the Book Review which had an unusually long and entertaining review by none other than Woody Allen,  of Edward Sorel's book about  Mary Astor and her "purple diary" in which she detailed her sexual escapades with a variety of Hollywood men, mostly married to other women.  
Over the past few years, I've been often disappointed by Woody Allen's movies, but this book review is enough to revive Mr. Allen in my eyes. It was quite sly of the New York Times to have him writing about a woman who as a 17 year old  embarked on a wild affair with John Barrymore "who was hugely older than she. " 
He does not say it and he does not have to say it, but of course, Woody Allen was widely vilified for his affairs with women who were much younger, who were too young for the tastes of many Americans.  What he is showing, but never outrightly saying is these things happen. 

Would have liked Mary Astor

Of course, Ma and Pa Kettle, straight out of the American Gothic, sitting on their front porches across the heartland do not approve of such things, and as Allen notes, "Free loving arrangement with his wife reads like Swahili to Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch, and the Porches were precisely who kept the nation's motion picture industry solvent. Many a Beverly Hills swimming pool was dependent on popcorn sold in the Bible Belt."

And so Woody Allen, speaking of Ms. Astor's predicament, was commenting on his own.

It is a delight to be living in the 21st Century, where I can download the Astor book to my Kindle and for now, I've stopped reading the Times and am swimming happily in the roiling waters of "Mary Astor's Purple Diary."

The Uses of Abstraction: Andrew Hacker's Insight

My readers by now will know one of my most annoying characteristics is beating dead horses into the ground. Howls of despair arise whenever I mention "The Wire" as if it was the only piece of literature ever written and now I'm back on to Andrew Hacker's "Math Myth." 

So, dear reader, you have been warned. This is another posting on thoughts provoked by my nth re reading of Professor Hacker, and some stories herein are not new to long time readers of the blog. 
(I know of only three, actually, but one thing about a blog is it gives you information about your audience, from which I conclude there may be as many as 200, unless the three re read the posts multiple times--I can see the number of "hits" and the countries from which they come. I'm still big in Ukraine, inexplicably.)

One of the many excellent points Professor Hacker makes is that algebra is unnecessary to solve many problems for which it can be used to solve problems. 
He also makes the point that some problems which can be solved by algebra do not even have to be addressed because you can use the information without knowing how it's derived.
He cites as an example the formula for calculating the consumer price index:
PC=[(IX{t+M}/IX{t}) {{12m}}-1]*100

(I have no way of doing super or subscripts so I substitute {} and {{}}.)

As Hacker points out, you don't need to be able to parse this equation to understand and use the CPI--the formula shows how it's calculated and kept up dated--any more than you need to know how chips and circuits work to use a computer.

When I was in medical training, the man who ran the cardiac catheterization lab insisted his fellowship trainees derive all the equations which applied to fluid flow dynamics before he allowed them to slip catheters into the coronary arteries of the patients. Of course, he was not very good at the actual catheterizations, or using that data to make clinical decisions, but it was a way he could intimidate people, and it staved off his dismissal for a few years, until people realized he wasn't very good at catheterizations. 

And you don't need to teach students algebra to get them to use abstraction to solve problems. Algebra is just one way to get kids using abstraction. Hacker isn't against teaching kids abstraction with algebra; he just says there are other ways to teach abstraction and you don't need to throw kids out of school because they can't use that particular  tool.

All this stirred two memories: 

#1  When I was 12 years old I got put into algebra. This was one of the early forms of "tracking" in our school system. Only 1/3 of the kids in 8th grade got put into algebra.  My parents arranged for me to be placed with a very charismatic teacher and I struggled and limped along, getting B's and C's but I did well enough to take the second year of algebra in 9th grade.  In one of the few acts of defiance of my early life, I refused. I insisted on repeating algebra 1, this time with the old, withered lady in whose class  I had originally been placed.  That second go round was amazing.  Algebra seemed so simple and obvious. I never got anything less than an "A" on any test in any grading period. I always assumed I simply had a better teacher. Until....
#2 Preparing one of my sons for his algebra test, age 12, I could see he was struggling with "word problems" and we went over one specific word problem multiple times, until he got it. 
It was one of those time/rate/distance problems: If two trains are traveling at different speeds away from each other and one is going at 40 mph and the other is going at 60 mph, how far away from each other are they after 30 minutes?  After much effort, he got it. 
(I should mention this was a kid who was discovered to be unable to read as a six year old--he had memorized the Dick and Jane books listening in group,  and he simply repeated the stories in reading group until his teacher caught him. He had and still has a prodigious memory.)

Anyway, the next day he returns having failed his algebra test and I look at it and has two trucks moving away from each other, the identical question, and another where the two trains are mentioned, but moving in the same direction but different speeds. 
"We went over this last night," I expostulated. "How could you miss these questions?You know this stuff!"
"But it wasn't the same question!" he objected, face reddening. "It was trucks, not trains."
I told this story to a patient of mine, a middle school math teacher, who until that day I had not much liked, because he reminded me of my own math teachers, with his pocket protector stuffed with pencils and protractors and his shirt buttoned up to the top button and his checkered socks and pants with legs several inches too short.  He was there about his diabetes, but he patiently listened to my story--he should have charged me for that office visit, rather than the other way round--and as he listened, a faint smile grew into a broad grin. When I finished, he laughed.
"How old is your son?"
"Twelve."
"He cannot abstract," the teacher said. "He memorized the solution to the problem without understanding the underlying principle. Give him a year. Let those brain cells mature a little more. He'll get it."

And that is likely what happened to me as well. Of course, the teacher was correct--a year later the kid did fine in algebra.

I now use simple algebra frequently, simply because it provides a faster way to get solutions to certain problems, but I use perhaps 5% of the "algebra" I was taught. What is taught under the rubric of "algebra" is a very wide net.

The other fascinating thing about the capacity for "abstraction" is that some people can do it in one realm, but not another. 

I know a man, one of the brightest human beings I know. He learned calculus with ease--where I could not get past page one.  He passed every part of his CPA exam the first time he took it, a feat, I'm told is quite rare.  His capacity for abstract thought with numbers and in certain types of problem solving is not just competent but superior.  His career depends on it, and he is soaring on the wings of that capacity.

On the other hand, we were talking about the issue of the Born Again Christian baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding and he refused saying he thought homosexuality was an anathema in the eyes of God and he would have no part in a gay marriage.

"I don't see why he couldn't have just said he was too busy," my friend suggested, looking for a "cheat route" around the problem.

"He could have," I said, "But he did not take the cheat route. He was making a point that he should not be required by law to do something he found morally objectionable. He could have said he was too busy with other work, but he didn't."

"Well, but it's his business. He can take what business he wants."
"Not if you advertise your business as serving the public. If you then refuse to serve some customers because those customers have certain characteristics, characteristics which they cannot change, like the color of their skin or their own sexual preferences, then that's illegal discrimination, by law."
"Well, but he can only make so many cakes."
"What's the difference between the baker and the guy who owns the lunch counter but refuses to serve Blacks at the lunch counter? Or the guy who owns a motel but refuses rooms to Blacks? 
The principle is that you cannot tell one customer you won't serve him because of his race or because of his sexual preference. 
You can say you won't serve him at your lunch counter because he is not wearing a shirt or shoes or socks--but that's something he can change. 
The principle is non discrimination on the basis of something you cannot change, and by the law, specifically race or homosexuality."

"Well, how can you even know why he refused to bake the cake?  He could give all sorts of excuses. I don't see why he couldn't do that."

This man could abstract in the world of numbers but he was having trouble wrapping his mind around the abstract principle of non discrimination on the basis of certain characteristics which society has voted to disallow.

 What I was waiting for him to say was:  The baker  could  post a sign in his store saying, "Cakes made for godly, heterosexual weddings only." Then he's not saying who he won't make the cake for only who he is willing to make the cake for

That would have been a tougher argument to crack. Then the refusal is not overtly against homosexuals; the hostility was only implied, linking the opposite of heterosexuality with ungodliness. 

It's not that he could not understand the principle, not that he could not go from the specific to the abstract, it's simply he had not been trained to apply a principle in that particular way. That would have been another course, not algebra.