Paris burning, Trump in church

Remember Paris Hilton?  She was 'so in' as long as she was drunk and out of her wits, doing homemade porn and partying without end.  Then they took the heiress to jail and she announced that she had cried all night and read the Bible and was going to change her ways.  The media dropped her like a hot potato, never to be heard from again.  Overnight, Paris burned. And now it turns out she has voted for Trump!  “Could it be—“ I’m voicing this like they always ask on those cable TV specials about space aliens: Could it be that they influenced Einstein????—“that Paris grew up and realized what she had to lose?” Like a fortune?  Like her soul? Like her sanity?

Lewinsky too.  She voted Trump.  Kanye West woulda if he hadda.  Alas poor Hillary, I knew thee well. She underperformed among women, Afro-Americans, and young people, but she did really well among pollsters.  Well, yeah, and she had trouble with Wikileaks, but doctors say this is common if you are 69 years old.  Trump won. The Cubs won.  Hell hasn’t frozen over but it’s 36 degrees.  Obama chastised Hillary saying she didn’t go to enough fish fries and county fairs.  He did.  Wow! I agree for once with Obama! But then Miss Shirley asked rhetorically, “Did Hillary have the stamina?”  Excellent question. 

Take consolation, Democrats.  This is the first time a billionaire has been asked to move into federal project housing formerly inhabited by a black family at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  And Hillary is going to build a big, beautiful wall between her Foundation and the FBI.  Mexico has already capitulated.  They read that stuff about her and called up Washington and agreed to build a wall and pay for it no matter who won.

So now we have moved on.  “If you like your legacy, Barack, you can keep it.” The Clinton Family Foundation has changed its name to Clinton Legal Defense Fund.  And some young kids in many cities, who didn’t bother to vote, are trying to protest and change the election results.  Good luck with that. “Hey, let’s burn down some cities run by liberals for years.  That’ll teach people not to vote for Trump!”  And Trump is picking Cabinet appointees which Chuckie Schumer is going to oppose and filibuster.  Um, Chuck, you guys changed the Senate rules, remember?  There can’t be any filibusters of appointees.  Straight up or down vote and 51 wins it.  Guess who has 51 now?  Don’t you remember you and that Harry Reid changed this? 

I’ll say this, with so many things coming back in style these days, I can’t wait for intelligence and morality.  Plus I heard the two scariest Halloween costumes this year, an IRS agent and the kid who showed up at Clinton’s headquarters dressed as a lie detector. Trump and Pence went to church today together. When people in my Sunday School class today started saying things about voting for Trump, and everyone seemed to have voted for him, Pastor asked if he was a perfect person then.  Everyone laughed heartily.  So if Trump went to church, he is in the right place, just like all the rest of us.  Maybe we got the boat upright this time.

Electoral College

They used to teach this in school but evidently don’t anymore because so many think we’d be better with Popular Vote determining Presidential winners.  The Founders had to have all the states behind their effort to write a constitution.  You can’t very well form a country out of 7 of the 13 colonies.  In this urgency they wrote a constitution that both recognizes popular vote for Representatives and state vote for Senators.  And they decided against popular vote for Presidents.  Instead they constructed an Electoral College as a special convention numbering as the sum of Reps and Senators from each state.  State popular vote gets the electors.  Why this method?

Simple.  They didn’t want the country ruled from one corner or one area of large population.  The President has to be President of all the people.  We can’t have a situation where the guy elected decides the people in the rest of the nation are nobodies, just flyover country—you guys in Dakota can vote if you wish but your vote doesn’t much count.  If USA were a popular vote Presidency, there is no reason to campaign in Utah or Kentucky.  Instead, all campaigns would be for the 15 large metro areas that professional sports calls “Large Markets”.  Win a big majority in those and you win it all.  If there were two candidates with close popular vote, like Trump and Clinton, they wanted the person whose colors covered the map most.  Take a look at this last election.  Though Hillary may have won the popular vote by 2,000,000, she has no states between the coasts except for NM, CO, MN, and IL.  Such a regional President would lack the ability to unite the country, the Founders reasoned. You have to win a majority of the Electoral College votes.

That majority of the College also means the political parties must be widely appealing.  In Europe they have parties of strict doctrine—socialists, communists, greens, farmers, labor—and nobody wins more than 27% of the vote among 8 parties running. But in USA, in order to rule, you must have a party that appeals broadly to many people from wide areas of the country.  That causes constant turmoil in our parties with conservatives or moderates or progressives vying for accendancy, but  we work it out.  In the rest of the world, parties are strict in belief and don’t try many new ideas. Parties are like tribes of fierce loyalty.  No independent voters, like in USA.

The Electors are not dullards. They are real people.  In case the President-Elect dies or turns into something really evil, they are free to vote their conscience. There has to be a transition time between the Presidencies if the new guy is to get organized.  If not, then we have to have a Parliamentary system like United Kingdom of Great Britain with cabinets and programs already in place. That sudden change has not made for peaceful transitions in many European countries.  Americans like to think of ourselves as one people, not warring factions vying to get the upper hand.

European democracies have also taught another lesson on why we are wise to have Electors.  If popular vote rules and nobody gets a majority—such as this last election, what do you do?  Do you allow the 35% guy to take office?  The other 65% will have no respect and the nation will effectively be leaderless like Poland in the face of Nazis attack.  Or do you make the further demand that any government formed must have the majority of votes?  In that case Trump or Hillary would be in negotiations to get Gary Johnson to form a coalition government—thus push vote total over 50%.  Coalition governments have a history of mundane gridlock to disastrous in Europe.  When Hindenburg needed a partner in 1933 he chose Hitler who had 14% of the vote.  Hindenburg died, Hitler diabolically burned down the Reichstag (legislature building) with all the opposition party members in attendance, decried the tragedy but emplaced his Nazis in power and declared martial law.  Coalition governments are how you get a 14% guy in power by trick or brute force.  

So add it up.  Presidents with wide appeal, big-tent parties, campaigns spread out over the land, transition time to govern, national unity and strong leaders/no coalition governments. This is why America is exceptional—an exception to the rule in governments—and darn well worth it.

Solutions for Education

What follows are some thoughts on education and why it continues to yield lesser results by Charles Murray, sociologist and expert on IQ and testing.

            If you test people for different abilities, you will find one has musical talent; another, athletic; another, interpersonal skills.  And none of these are related.  But there are 3 common abilities --verbal, mathematical and spatial reasoning skills—that correlate.  Doing well in one implies highly likely to be above average in the others. Together, we could call these the Academic Abilities.  And this is the source of IQ measurements.  Students with high IQs succeed in school.  This talent is fairly fixed among individuals. 

            Almost everyone knows what it is like to be poor at some aptitude.  You were the last kid chosen in sports.  You are tone deaf and can’t see the poetry in music.  And kids who aren’t chosen by the teacher for an answer, soon realize their lack of academic talent.  It’s demoralizing because “smarts” has a lot to do with not only status but credentials for success later in life.

            If you think schools just do a bad job when students don’t score well, talk to teachers who have struggled with lower academic ability students.  Progress is slow. Concepts won’t be remembered the next day. Now nobody would insist that we can make a klutz into a super athlete, or a shy kid an extrovert. Only in our public schools do we romantically insist that we can make low academic ability students into geniuses.  It simply isn’t true. And this is the problem with No Child Left Behind.

            We should define what is meant by verbal/math/spatial reasoning.  Here’s a problem from an 8^th grade achievement test.  “If a company had 90 workers last year and this year they have 10% more, how many workers does the company have?” If you say 99 congratulations. 2/3 of 8^th graders can’t answer this.  Note this tests reasoning ingenuity.  It has been discovered that 90% of students can identify last year’s 90 workers; a large portion can calculate 10% (= 9).  But the final step of adding the two together is what stumps so many.  Now we could “teach the test” by teaching problems of this type, but there are thousands of other reasoning questions, so the overall score is little changed. Bottom line, a large majority of students can memorize a large amount of material. But ingenuity is rarer.

What then separates schools with good scores vs. those with poor ones?  Excellent question.  It was first investigated in the Coleman Report of the 1950s, to investigate differences in academic achievements of rich kids and poor. Everybody in Congress, who sanctioned the study, had theories.  Credentials of teachers, curriculum, facilities, money spent per student or per teacher—none were found to correlat with achievement.  Family background was far and away the most important factor in school success. Subsequent studies of adoptions proved that IQ is partly due to environment.  If you live in a upper middle class neighborhood, have parents greatly interested in your education and spend time with your learning, you’ll have higher academic achievement. Subsequently attempts to increase ability in students from poor backgrounds in programs such as Head Start have been spectacularly unsuccessful.  (Spending per student in Head Start is 3 times that of an elementary common ed, yet 2 years hence, has no measureable improvement in student scores! It’s little more than day-care for the poor.) Yet we also know there are truly bad public schools with low achievement.  These have violent classrooms, nonexistent standards, incompetent teachers and competent ones who have given up. 

We could start forming conclusions here, but let’s talk college first.  Ever since the 1920s colleges have said that to comfortably do the coursework, you need an IQ of 115 (upper 16%, SAT 1180).  110 can struggle and get a degree.  Even 105 can achieve it by targeting easy courses and majors.  About 50% of high school graduates try college.  With diluted courses, this now yields 35% graduation rate. (It was 25% in the 60s) But that means that 2/3 of students join the workforce soon after high school.  Here’s the weird thing.  High School counselors promote college to 90% of students.  Meanwhile the liberal arts education of colleges—teaching a wide body of general learning--has atrophied.  Most public schools no longer teach the lesser version of this “core knowledge” of our culture.  Why teach this?  You need a core knowledge of things like Huck Finn, Wall Street, smoke-filled room politics, Minutemen, Mount Everest and Mecca, to be able to function as a knowledgeable citizen.  This is core knowledge of our culture which was taught prior to the 1980s. Public schools avoid much of this because it has controversy.

Now let’s talk education solutions based on these findings.  First, nearly all students have aptitude at memorization especially in lower grades. Public schools need to return to teaching core knowledge.  Add ethics to this and demonstrate it by providing an environment that is safe, orderly and respectful.  Everyone is entitled to a place where they can learn all they dare to learn and be respected.  If you’re not a Mensa it doesn’t mean that you can’t become a truly good person.  Teaching the forgotten half how to make a living is also in order.  “If you like to operate machinery, do you realize you can make a lot more being a crane operator than a pizza delivery man? Show up every day, work hard, get along with everyone.” Career tech has been an unvarnished success.  It should be further supported.  Sending the message to young people that they should go to college no matter what (Ahem, politicians and guidance counselors) is a bad message.   On the other hand, with gifted students we should encourage them to go as far and fast as possible, letting them find limits in ability. Helicopter parenting and self-esteem teaching (possessing a big opinion of oneself) techniques are ruining students.   Studies show that kids avoid doing anything of risk where they might crash and burn when they get constant accolades.  Even the best need to crash and burn a few times (learn limits) to instill humility.  Leaders, geniuses who aren’t humble, who don’t sympathize with ordinary folks, are tyrants in behavior.  Another area of lack in public education is verbal rigor.  USA’s verbal reasoning skills have been on a downward trend because we have come to accept just about any form of verbal expression.

Finally, expand choice. When people talk about “common sense” they mean a practical wisdom (born from cultural knowledge) that applies logic in an appropriate manner—rightly assessing the consequences of a course of action.  This is what comprises the success of private schools, largely through the template of the paragraph above.  They don’t make IQs go from 100 to 140.  They make more functional citizens and impart Christian faith.  They teach history, which is the way we develop vicarious experience. They teach core knowledge, recognizing that certain issues are so fundamental to the human condition that people must think about them. 

Personal note: I think Murray has come pretty close to the solutions.  I had the privilege of attending a parochial high school that was like the Harvard of high schools.  University physics major was fun and breezy after St. John’s Academy. They performed, on Turbo, the things Murray advises for the gifted half of students. My wife taught first grade at a local parochial school.  She had problem students she took under wing after school.  Big strong carpenters and small engine repairmen still happily holler greetings at her at Walmart to this day. I remember them when they were 3 feet tall.  This is how people should turn out.

None of this is to say we shouldn't pay teachers fairly or support school building projects.  But the real keys are letting teachers be free to teach, good class environments, and having parents who take an interest in the child's education.

Understanding polls

This follows a Karl Rove book of several years ago and Catherine Shaw’s Campaign Manager. She is a Democrat.  The first thing to realize in polling is that not everybody votes.  240 million adults over age 18, 187M registered, but only 126.46M voted in 2012 election.  (75% of adults are registered. 65% of Registered vote in typical Pres. election.) The second thing you need to know is that only about 1/3 of the people asked to respond in a poll do so.  Thus, the task of making an accurate data base is difficult.  If Hispanics represent 14% of population but vote 8% of the time, and your poll of 1000 voters had 7% Hispanics, do you weight them by doubling or do you multiply their influence by 1.14? Af-Ams typically vote at 12% of the total vote, but represent 13% of the population.  However, in the Obama years, they voted heavily representing 14% of the total vote.   And do you weight it according to minorities or age or something else?  Seniors vote heavily and millenials vote sporadically. Jews are just 2% of the population but vote at 3% of the total.  Altogether, there is a huge guessing game of weighting the groups and putting in fudge factors to reflect participation. 

You are excused if you are thinking at this point that polls mean nothing. Gallup has dropped out of the Presidential polling, but for none of the above reasons.  It was once easier because the pollsters could get a copy of county voting records.  Voters are listed by party, address, and number of times they have voted.  So if a phone call to an address was picked up and the voter identified themselves, the pollster could assess likelihood of voting.  “Mrs. Jones voted  twice out of the last 4 general elections so she has a probability of showing up this time of ½.”  Cell phones, disposable phones, unlisted numbers have shredded this scheme.  On-the-street interviews are good, but people don’t have time, answer (in public) according to what they think the pollster wants to hear and have very low response rates.  Internet polls have no controls for partisans who do multiple votes.  All of this is chancy science.

Poll results are often all over the map in variation.  Real clear politics takes an average of recent polls to assess a race.  But even if they get more accuracy, they don’t tell you about a very important fact.  When an incumbent is below 47%, even if he’s ahead, he is probably in trouble.  Rove summed this up by studying outcomes versus final polls taken.  If an incumbent polls 48% he has a better than 50% probability of winning.  If it is 43%, this shrinks to less than 10%.  The reason for this is that when people answer a poll and give a well-known incumbent, say, 46%, this means that 54% are looking for “other alternatives.”  Typically the number of undecideds will go 60-85% for the challenger.  So as I write this, Senator Burr of NC and Sen. Ayotte of NH lead their races by a percentage point.  But with 45 and 46% respectively, they are less than half probable of winning. I’ll give you a self-depreciating example of this.  When Steve ran for the House in 2010, the State Republican Party did a 100 person phone poll of our district.  No demographic corrections were done.  They found he was behind 39 to 43%.  Steve thought he had lost and I would have agreed if he’d have shared this with me.  But the state party rejoiced—he had a chance!—and soon he was talking to some big donors for direct mail funds.  It turned out he won by 53-47%.  That is, of the 18 points undecideds (100-39-47=18), he won 14 of them.  (Golly, we were so uneducated about political science when we won that first race!  We didn’t know that the probability of beating a 3^rd term House member was less than 1%.  And Luttrell had won with 60% of the vote in 2008!)

They do exit polls on many things.  One question is “how far in advance did you decide to vote for the guy you did?”  Answers vary from “I decided 40 years ago, I’d never vote for another Democrat!” to, “Never heard of him. I didn’t know who I was voting for when I checked his name.” Results are consistent however.  The number of people who decide within the final two weeks of an election is usually 1 or 2%.  Almost everyone has their minds made up two weeks out.  But Television never says this!  Indeed, they broadcast a myth about polls changing radically the last week.  Why? They get advertizing money from campaigns wanting to convince that last tiny group of undecideds.  And campaign season is like the Christmas season for broadcasters.  They make big bucks.  And they spread a myth of the Independent as a careful standoffish voter who can’t decide.  This is only true of about 1 out of 5 Indies.  Indies come in a lot of flavors.  Some are hidden partisans who just don’t want to get in an argument with their dad or wife by joining the other party. So they play coy.  As an Independent they can “constructively” criticize dad’s party.  Or they are at odds with both parties—fiscally conservative but socially liberal, or have some single issue that neither party addresses.  Independents vote only half as often as partisans.

The pollsters and TV guys play a game with viewers, claiming that “polls are tightening in the last week!”  More likely, the pollster knows that his results versus outcome will be measured closely and decide his future business.  He is trying his best to weight for “likely voters” (previous polls were ‘registered voters’ or ‘general public’) and get an accurate poll.  Previous polling done in earlier months for a new organization are often just to feed their talking heads.  Pollsters give the sponsors polls that reflect the sponsors point of view.  They tell them what they want to hear. Changes in polls can then be cited by the news organization for reason for the candidates to spend more money in last minute advertizing. 

And then pollster just sometimes blow it.  Brexit was supposed to have Remain win by 5%.  They lost by 5%.  Reagan was supposed to lose to Carter by 5-10% and won by 12%.  In both cases, enthusiasm was sky high for the eventual winner compared to the loser.  As mentioned, Romney lost because his base didn’t turn out.  That affected the weighting factors.  JFK had huge Catholic turnout which swamped anti-Catholic turnout, but he still wouldn’t have won had he not carried Illinois which was determined by dead people voting in Chicago.  Gore won the popular vote but it was not just FL that killed him with narrow loss.  He narrowly lost his home state of TN—which would have won the election for him.  Botton line: It’s the election that counts.

Luther cockroaches Dems Trump

Secular Libs voted God out of their Democrat platform 8 years ago. No more objective moral standards!  They criticize others (Trump with his sex talk) who have standards but can’t be held to any objective standards themselves because they hold none.  It’s an interesting strategy. But does it meet reality?

             Is anything real?  For if there is reality, reality contains rules and principles.  If it contains rules and principles, there is a reason for science and theology.  If nothing’s real, then all bets are off.  But if there is a reality, there must be some objective standards that govern the universe. Where then can they be found?  All the world’s religions say they are to be found in revelation.  At some place, in some time, in some person, secrets were revealed about how to behave, how to seek further truth, how to live.

            Recent evidence from the emails of Clinton’s staff and Podesta, shows their scorn for Catholicism and Evangelicals. That’s a big enough chunk of Christianity to say that this crew doesn’t think much of Christianity in general.  Or if they do it is just to narrow the scope of their belief like the guy who says “I’m a Christian because I admire Jesus.” Good luck with that stategy in the presence of the Living God.  I think God reveals His almighty, all-knowing nature in the Judeo-Christian scriptures.  The absolute perfection claimed by God quashes any notions of relative one-upsmanship by a human.  This is much like my reaction would be if one talking cockroach stood up and told me he was a more righteous roach than the others—so he should be saved. SQUISH!!

            As we arrive at the 499^th anniversary of the Reformation (rather arbitrarily set as Oct. 31, 1517) it might be worthy to note how a terrified monk found grace about 3 years earlier.  Luther read a famous proclamation by Paul in Romans 1:16 “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel.  It is the power of God for salvation, to everyone who has faith” Of course Luther believed this.  He was a doctor of theology and a monk.  But it was the verse after this that mystified him, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.”  To Luther, the righteousness (right living, holiness) of God was a terrible thing to encounter.  How could any human stand in the presence of such a God if God is indeed Just?  This is the same problem, just a differing solution from those who would reject God and any objective morality.  One is terrorized.  The other pretends it doesn’t exist.

            But one night, we think it was in October of 1514, cold enough that Luther lit a fire in his study, he found the answer.  The catalyst was Ps. 70:1 which simply expresses a yearning for deliverance by God, “Be pleased, O God, to deliver me! O Lord, make haste to help me!”  Suddenly Luther saw that God’s terrifying perfection and justice could not be met by any human attempt.  The morality was too great, too demanding.  You couldn’t even remember enough to confess to cover your sin.  But God delivers.  And what Romans is saying is that this is revealed from faith and to it at the same time.  That is, faith (trusting God for deliverance) and trying to act moral shows us all the more how inadequate we are, yet leaves us clinging to God’s deliverance all the tighter—“from faith to faith.  Thus it is not our righteousness that fulfills God’s justice but His own. God was so loving He came to deliver the cockroach humans with His own costly death.   And through faith He hands us this—“the righteous shall live by faith.”  God, not giving us what we deserve is Mercy.  God, giving us what we don’t deserve is Grace. So it is that Christians, forgiven themselves, tend to be a forgiving lot.  When Trump says he isn’t proud of his yap, apologizes, even though he tends to still have trouble controlling his mouth, many of us Evangelicals forgive. 

            The amoralists, weirdly enough, often try to claim a higher moral ground.  They want to save the planet from global warming and pollution.  They are not racist/sexist/homophobic like those deplorable Christians. It is as if they want to create their own new 10 commandments.  And if they find any sexual sin by Christian standards, like bragging about your sexual prowess in an abusive way, they are quick to condemn.  This, despite their own group’s (Bill Clinton, Weiner, Frank, Kennedy and many others) wild malfeasance which draws no ire. It’s worse than roaches.  At least they all run when the light is turned on.

            What we really do need in this country is a revival.

Colombus Part II Epilogue

In the early 16^th century, all universities and institutions of learning were run by the church. They wove their ideas about doctrine with their “picture” of the universe.  A new idea was often labeled heresy.  In 1514, a Polish monk who had taken a Latin name, Copericus, speculated about how the sun made a better center of the universe than earth, but he feared so much he didn’t publish his idea, nor was he able to do any mathematical calculations of the orbits.  The accepted model at the time was from Ptolemy, a Roman philosopher.  It held that earth was the center of the universe. The moon didn’t float in space; it was attached to crystal (like totally transparent glass) sphere and revolved around earth as did the sun.  Planets like Mars had a trajectory in the sky that backtracked often as they revolved around earth.  So the thinking was that Mars was attached to a glass sphere that rolled within its main orbital sphere—a ball rolling within a ball—hence the retrograde motion.  All this was only approximate.  Astronomers had to speed up and slow down certain planets to make measurements fit.  The stars were fixed on a faraway sphere. 

An Italian, Geordano Bruno, overheard Copernicus and began to openly talk about a solar system.  He went to England as a visiting scholar (though he was later found to be a fraud).  An Austrian court poet, Joachim Vadianus, published a pamphlet advocating a round earth composed of both earth and water in spherical shape.  It was unread except by a certain Phillip Melancthon, Europe’s leading Greek scholar, who was tasked at Wittenberg College to teach the President, Martin Luther Biblical Greek, and to revamp the curriculum.  Melancthon published a textbook on astronomy with an illustration of Round Earth saying this was the only explanation possible (a pear earth would wobble).  Meanwhile Bruno made it back to Italy, was tried by the Inquisition and burned at the stake.  And then Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation,  Catholic scholars pointed to Melancthon’s book and surely this proved that the rebels were heretics. After all, if the earth moved, there would be a headwind and birds would be blown off trees! 

But an English mathematician, Digges wrote an explanation in his father’s almanac that Bruno wasn’t so dumb.  Motion is relative.  If you hang a plumbline on a moving boat, it doesn’t stream off the end of the boat.  There was no profession of “scientist”  at this time.  All these natural philosophers were just bookkeepers (Galileo), mathematicians (Kepler, Brahe) or munitions designers (Napier).  The Protestant world of merchants and farmers, with its reliance on a personal walk with God, was much more open to new ideas than the Catholics who ran universities with philosophers. Finally in 1543, Copernicus assented to publication of his book upon his death. He was friends with Luther.  They lived just over 100 miles apart.

In 1571, Tycho Brahe, a young Danish mathematician noticed  a new star in the constellation Cassiopea.  Day by day it grew brighter until it was visible by day (a supernova).  Brahe used parallax triangulation to measure the distance.  It had zero parallax and hence it was in the far heavens.  This was stunning.  God lived out there and the highest heavens were supposed to be unchangeable!  But Brahe had done an accurate calculation of something everybody had seen. The Danish king took Brahe under his wing and bought him the best instruments available.  In 1577, a comet appeared and Brahe calculated distances as it traveled, apparently piercing the Ptolemaic spheres! The Jesuits argued vehemently against this Protestant, but then a German, Johannas Kepler, 1604, used Brahe’s highly accurate measurements of the orbit of Mars to show three laws of planetary motion that absolutely killed the old Ptolemaic theory. When the Italian, Galileo observed the phases of Venus in 1610, the new solar system was proven beyond a  shadow of doubt.  The sun was the center with planets floating like fish in the sea around it.  Once again, the Inquisition attempted to silence Galileo and forced him into an unwanted retirement.

At this point, the science revolution began to be strongly carried in England and Netherlands.  The commerce and inventions that went with scientific advances were the work of commoners, rather than monks and clergy.  Harvey studied blood circulation; Leewenhoek invented microbiology; Newton and dozens of others did mechanics; Boyle studied gases; Toricelli created vacuums and the barometer. 

Within 100 years, belief in witches and trolls, fairies and leprechauns, alchemy and spontaneous generation of mice had died out.  People’s thinking had changed.  They wanted evidence to go with belief.  They wanted to see the experiment. And so it is that we moderns now think differently than our ancestors of a few hundred years ago.  And thus the West exploded in technology and organization over the Middle East and the East. It was the invention of Science.  

The real significance of Colombus, Part I

Colombus Day is coming next week.  For all my public school education, I was told that Colombus’s sailors thought the world was flat, but Colombus thought the world was round and thus became a hero when he was proven right. 

            Wrong on all counts.  The sailors knew the world was curved.  Just climb the mast, dummy, and see much farther land.  You are looking around the curve of the earth.  Every sailor knew this. What is less well known is that Colombus did not think the world was round.  He thought it was pear-shaped.  This is what scholars of the day taught.  And his heroism wasn’t in proving a round earth.  His discovery of land proved that the old Aristotelian model was untenable—but he never realized this. 

Here’s what really happened. The Scholastic scholars of his day held that the earth consisted in 4 somewhat concentric spheres according to the 4 elements of Aristotle.  Earth was the inner sphere, surrounded by water, air than fire.  But of course that would be Water World with oceans covering everything.  The obvious Eurasia-Africa earth system led them to postulate that the earth sphere was off-center and protruded through the oceans.  It was like a basketball inside a beach ball and the basketball poked the side of the beachball on one side giving a pear shape. Colombus proposed going to the Orient by sailing west and the pear earth model predicted nothing but water all the way to China.  Thus Colombus thought that Santa Domingo was an island offshore of Asia and in 3 subsequent voyages found Mexico and Central America.  He died thinking he had discovered Asia and proven the pear earth. 

Though Eurasia was high-standing, it was thought that as one progressed out into the open ocean, the sea rose (Aristotle said water was lighter!) Hence we still use the terminology of sailing the high seas. In 1503, the very jealous Amerigo Vespucci stole and published Colombus’s landfalls as his own.  Vespucci had proposed exactly the same kind of voyage as Colombus to Portugal and they refused to fund him.  So he felt cheated.  In 1507, Waldseemuller, a Dutch cartographer made a map of these landfalls and said, Look, This is either a very large island or a continent! Colombus found a continent where none should be.  Clearly something was wrong with the earth model. That would revolutionize thinking and invent the era of science in the century following.

 

Meanwhile, Colombus was granted governorship of Santa Domingo and he was a tyrant ruler who basically killed off the native population.  Thus the stage was set for repopulating the Caribbean with slaves from Africa to raise sugar cane.  But his discovery and all the gold of the conquistadors led British, Dutch, French to spur on their own voyages of discovery.