Statistics: Numbers Are Esoteric and Useful Only For Manipulating People

You totally never need to use math for the same reason you don't need to be able to write, cook, speak multiple languages, ties your shoes, feed yourself or operate a door knob: because none of these things are required for turning on a TV. However, it can be very useful if you don't like being constantly manipulated by politicians, advertisers, and car salesman, or losing arguments with jerks at your office.

Seriously, though, when did it become OK for an adult in the U.S. to be proud of not understanding something that plenty of 14 year old children are comfortable with (i.e. algebra)? Not being able to solve this equation:

5x + 2x = 14

does not mean that you have good social skills or better things to do with your time. It means that you are unable to do something that is essential for surviving in the modern western world: basic math. You should be worried about this. And, if you come from a middle class family and graduated from high school, you should be embarrassed about it.

If you cannot understand how to do a simple problem like this, how can you have any hope of understanding your mortgage, or even your grocery bill or your gas mileage? And worse yet, how can you understand a sentence like this:

"The top 1% of Americans control more wealth than the bottom 90%."

If you cannot parse basic statistics, you have no political options. Your only choice is to select the party that matches your religious views and accept whatever interpretation of the numbers they give you. You can't understand the debt ceiling debate, climate change, or any aspect of our tax policy. You can be convinced that it is totally reasonable to have 3 million adult Americans in jail, that arresting and deporting 11 million undocumented illegal immigrants is completely feasible (morality aside), and that a 4 degree rise in global temperature should be just fine.

You'll get screwed out of money, lied to by advertisers, and you'll vote for corrupt assholes who get rich while others starve. And since you can't keep score, you won't even know how bad you're losing.

From Congress with Love

A quick message to the small farmer from every American politician ever: go fuck yourself right in your too-broke-to-make-massive-campaign-contributions ass.

I'm paraphrasing, obviously. But did you every wonder why a pound of brussels sprouts grown 20 miles from your house costs $4, while a pound of Delicious Industrial Meat Product (c) produced in Kansas with corn grown in Iowa from McD's costs $2? Probably not because vegetables are incredibly energy intensive to produce relative to chicken nuggets.* Probably because corn subsidies reduce the cost of feeding livestock and make meat cheap, and tax breaks for coal and oil companies make it even cheaper, because you can ship and mass produce the corn and animal pieces from big, centralized farms and slaughterhouses.

You can try to get some of your money back by eating as much fast food as possible. Or you can refuse to get screwed and eat shit at the same time. Unless you don't make enough money to shop at the farmer's market with the NPR crowd, or you live in a densely populated urban area with a low median income where there aren't any grocery stores. Because then the message to small farmers is for you, too.

*Calling me a hippie in the comments will not be tolerated. I run this blog dammit.**
**Just kidding. Obviously I will rely on karma/The Universe/Our Mother Earth to smite you.

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