June 1998 Notebook Entries

June 1998 Notebook Entries

Notebook entry, June 15, 1998

Newswire reports tell us that Jaime Escalante is retiring from teaching. We should be erecting statues of this man who taught inner-city Latino kids advanced-placement calculus classes and proved for several years running that encouragement, focus, and desire can overcome almost anything that we as individuals face in our local environments on a daily basis. His work is living proof and a direct challenge to those who believe that intelligence is determined by genes, and that minority inner-city youths are in low income areas because of their low intelligence.. His retirement comes at a crossroad in American education. We, as a nation, are about ready to give vouchers to children so that they may travel to where they think they will receive the best education. This is a tough call. Yes, these voucher children will receive a better education in local environments where focus of resources towards education is understood..(read here, the territory of the dominate cultures) But, what they turn their backs on will be embittered souls convinced that they have been left even further behind -- once by a dominant culture, and then by members of their own ethnic or racial clans. The widening gap in the perceived resource differential will encourage those left behind to be easily moved to rage and despair. It is a ill wind that will blow over our already neglected inner cities, and I fear they will become black holes of even more open acts of desperation for America.

As for Jaime Escalante and the great accomplishment that this man has done, if you want to study more about this man, you don't even have to pick up a book--you can see the movie: Stand and Deliver. Edward James Olmos plays the mild-mannered math teacher. It is on Warner Home Video.

Notebook entry, June 12, 1998

Time magazine, June 15, 98 issue p. 34: The report titled "Revolt of the Gentry" by Tamal M. Edwards on the growing class war that is evolving over the effort to equalize public school funding in Vermont is most interesting. This "class warfare" that it reports on can be explained by my Resource Differential Tolerance Ratio Theory. As noted in my Notebook entry of May 30, 98, it is about the perceived differences between those that have the advantages of the resources creating a resource differential stress with those that do not have the resources. Once again people, it's not about skin color nor ethnic origins that appear on the surfaces of most conflicts, but we must go back to the primate struggles over limited resources.

Under the planned Act 60, which has created the rise in tensions, rich communities face higher taxes and reduced school budgets, while working-class comminutes would expect the reverse. The result is that the rich are crying the loudest, including novelist John Irving, who was quoted as saying: "This is Marxism. It's leveling everything by decimating what works..." while the poor are cheering that it is the right thing to do. The Irving quote is very typical of wealthy conservatives who repeat over and over, that, what works well, should not be penalized. But it is nothing more than the Resource Retention Rule: Those that have the Gold will resist all attempts at losing that Gold. For those that hold the Gold, get to make the rules. And those that get to make the rules, are the Dominates -- and that is clearly in their genetic advantage. You can read about my Resource Differential Tolerance Ratio Theory in my essay: Evolutionary Psychology, Capitalism, and Communism: An Introduction to the Resource Differential Tolerance Ratio Theory and the Resource Retention Rule at: http://www.evoyage.com/Capitalism.htm and also in my essay: Evolutionary Psychology and the Origins of Bigotry and Prejudice at: http://www.evoyage.com/bigotry.html

Notebook entry, June 10, 1998

Most of my time this summer is being taken up with learning the basics of e-commerce. It is more difficult than I had thought. It, of course involves the collection of secure servers and the acceptance by the public of giving credit cards numbers....etc... And, of course, it will take more than just spare pocket change. The bottom line for me is that there will be continued delays getting the retail section up and running. Faced with the amount of knowledge necessary, and the cost factor, it appears that the retail section launch will be set back indefinitely. In the mean time I will use the old time and true method used by NRP -- "Liked the free stuff?-- then contribute to help keep the place running."