The foaming-at-the-mouth social justice warriors, poverty pimps and generally deranged members of the left have it wrong when they declare math as racist any time the numbers don’t support their hysterical insanity.
More accurate would be to borrow from pudgy Al Gore, the patron saint of climate change – and how to profit from misguided attempts to arrest it – and declare math An Inconvenient Truth.
The movie of that title, an ode to the genius of Gore, was long on hyperbole and emotionalism. I will confess never to having watched the exercise in out of control ego, but those who have held their noses and watched cite numerous stretches in presentation regarding temperature and sea level rise, ostensibly due to man-created climate change.
Gore is widely credited with “raising awareness” with his film, which is the term leftists use when spending vast amounts of money does not solve or ease an alleged problem, but instead makes it known that there are some who perceive a problem to exist.
They have no way to mathematically quantify, so they retreat to vague terms such as raising awareness.
Be similarly wary when some money-spending exercise is justified for “empowering” someone or some cause.
Alas, for those who would like to keep such things on a vague and intangible level, and others who seek in general to deny reality, there is math around to point out many failures.
I came across a particularly enlightening article about the long-running story of failure that is the Chicago public school system. It told the story by the numbers.
Offered a chance to go on television to interact with the author of a damning article posted on Wirepoints.org, a spokesman for the Chicago teachers union told a staff member of the TV station “Luck Wirepoint.” Actually, he said a word that rhymes with luck, but begins with an F.
Said spokesman told the TV guy the quote was on the record, and so it was.
The article in question points out – mathematically – a failure of a school system. Begin with Manley High School, with an enrollment capacity of 1,296, but an actual enrollment of 64 students! According to 2019 figures, perhaps the most recent available, just 2 percent of students at Manley were proficient in reading; just 1 percent in math.
And then, according to the story, there is Douglass High School, with a student capacity of 888, an actual enrollment of 44, and ZERO student proficiency in either reading or math.
Now those are inconvenient truths.
There are so many examples these days of math providing inconvenient truths.
Clueless Joe Biden has been responsible for releasing 257,000 illegal minors into the United States.
Today, Clueless Joe is expected to forgive $10,000 in student debt and extend moratoriums on repayment, thereby proving a lot of college students don’t have the academic chops to be there due to being unable to understand that loans are to be repaid.
Aside from trying to buy students’ votes, Wheeler Dealer Joe has presided over the release of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve in an attempt to buy votes with lower gasoline prices. This has left the SPR at the lowest level since 1985, at about 453.1 million barrels of oil. Good thing we’re not facing the possibility of war or supply cutoffs.
The United States is preparing $3 billion more in aid to Ukraine even as whistleblowers and a story from earlier this month on CBSnews.com concede much of the nearly $30 billion sent to Ukraine to date hasn’t gotten to the intended recipients.
But perhaps the most outrageous number in the news is 5, as in the number of days in jail Mr. Nancy Pelosi was supposed to serve after pleading guilty to DUI and causing injury. It gets worse when you know that Mr. Nancy was given credit for two days served, two days for something called “conduct”credits, and reportedly will slip in eight hours of work for the fifth day.
Mr. Nancy also is reported to have to pay $1,700 in restitution, which is about what Mrs. Nancy spends on one of her late-night ice cream gorging sessions.
No, math is not racist, but it does expose a lot of inconvenient truths.
Sam Ross Jr's site 