Music and cognition

When educational budgets are cut -- which they are, every year -- inevitably what is hit the hardest are programs for the arts, music, theater, and other electives.

This is ridiculous, and I say that as someone who spent thirty-two years teaching science, a so-called "core" subject.  And I don't mean to criticize the importance of having a good "core" education; we all need to be able to read and write, do mathematics, understand the history of humanity, and have a basic and broad grasp of scientific principles.

But that's not the be-all-end-all of education, or at least it shouldn't be.  I mean, consider not what gets you a job, what allows you to do mundane chores like balancing your checkbook, but what actually brings joy to your life.  What are your hobbies, things you spend your spare time doing, things you'd spend much more time doing if you had the leisure?  My guess is very few of us fill our free time doing chemistry experiments, even admitted science nerds like me.  No, we paint, sculpt, garden, play an instrument, sing in the choir, play or watch sports (or both), cook elaborate meals, write stories.  And while those do take a basic 3-Rs education -- I wouldn't be much of a fiction writer if I had a lousy vocabulary or didn't know how to write grammatically -- for many of us, our real fascinations were discovered in the classes that go under throwaway names like "electives" and "specials" and "optional courses."

So cutting these subjects is, for many students, taking away the one thing about school that makes it tolerable, and robbing them of the opportunity to find hidden talents and undiscovered passions that will bring them joy for a lifetime.

But a study has shown that it's more than that.  Research by Katherine Sledge Moore and Pinar Gupse Oguz of Arcadia University, and Jim Meyer of Elmhurst College, has found that music education correlates strongly with the development of flexible intelligence -- and that those gains translate across disciplines.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jacob Garcia from Reus, Spain, The Cello Player, CC BY 2.0]

In "Superior Fluid Cognition in Trained Musicians," published in the journal Psychology of Music, the researchers found that the degree of experience a person has in playing music (or singing), the higher they score on a variety of metrics -- episodic memory, working memory, attention, executive function, and processing speed.

It's hardly surprising when you think about it.  As the researchers put it, fluid intelligence skills "are highlighted in musical training," which involves "quickly comprehending a complex symbolic system, multitasking, reasoning, and more."  I can say from personal experience that performing music -- not just playing it at home for your own entertainment -- takes those skills up an additional notch.  I was a performing musician for years, playing flute in a Celtic dance band called Crooked Sixpence.  Being up on stage requires that you think on your feet, and often make lightning-fast alterations to what you're doing.  As an example, most of what my band played were medleys of three or four tunes, and we almost never planned ahead how many times we were going to play any one of them (nor who'd be playing melody and who'd be playing harmony).  Our fiddler, who was more-or-less in charge of the band, just gave me a wiggle of the eyebrow if she wanted me to take a solo, and said "hep!" if we were switching tunes.  Sometimes the inevitable happened -- the fiddler and I both jumped to harmony at the same time, or something -- but almost always, one of us recognized it in under two seconds and slipped right back into playing melody.  Despite the complexity of what we did, the times we had a real crash-and-burn on stage were very few and far between.

So this study is spot-on.  And its conclusions are further evidence that we should be expanding arts and electives programs, not cutting them.

Not, honestly, that I expect it will have an effect.  Sorry to end on a pessimistic note, but the educational establishment has a long track record of completely ignoring research on developmental psychology in favor of "we've always done it this way."  The most egregious example is our determination to start foreign language instruction in seventh or eighth grade, when we've known for years that our brain's plasticity with respect to learning new languages peaks around age three or four, and declines steadily thereafter.

Or, as one of my students put it, "So we start teaching kids languages at the point they start to suck at it."

A close second is that researchers have been saying for years -- with piles of evidence to support them -- that children need recess or some other unstructured play time in order to improve overall behavior and attitudes about being in school.  Not only that, but recess time correlates with better scores on tests, so like music, it's an investment that pays off across the board.  Nevertheless, schools across the country have been gradually reducing unstructured leisure time, in some places to twenty minutes or less per week, in favor of devoting more time to preparing for standardized tests.

Now there's a way to make kids look forward to going to school in the morning.

I'd like to think that this research will influence educational establishments and (especially) budgetary decisions, but I'm not holding my breath.  Any change on that count is likely to be very slow to come.  But still, every piece of evidence counts.  And anything we can do to foster the development of fluid intelligence, positive attitudes, and confidence in children is movement in the right direction.

****************************************

Run to the museum

Two recent studies suggest the popular wisdom that if you want to improve your health, mood, and sense of well-being, get out and do stuff, is substantially correct.

The first is (to me) the more impressive study, because it actually looked at the electrical output of the test subjects' brains, so we're seeing at least a hint of the underlying mechanism.  In "Play Sports for a Quieter Brain: Evidence From Division I Collegiate Athletes," which appeared in the journal Sports Health last Monday, a team of neuroscientists at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) found that the FFR (frequency-following response, a measure of neural crosstalk between the parts of the brain responsible for interpreting complex sensory stimuli) was substantially higher in athletes than non-athletes, and increased in both groups after strenuous exercise.

The authors suggest that the higher FFR in athletes occurs because sports in general require focused attention, thus a diminishment of the "neural background noise" all our brains engage in.  The ability to turn down this chatter and devote more energy and brain activity to sensory interpretation could certainly explain how athletes develop their preternaturally fast and accurate reflexes.

It also explains something that I've witnessed more than once, as a fan of Cornell University hockey.  The Cornell students are notorious for their jeers -- um, cheers -- that make fun of the opposing team in any way that is convenient.  In particular, the opposing goalie is ridiculed incessantly (starting, but not ending, with referring to him as a "sieve"), but almost always the goalie is capable of somehow shutting out the roar of insults coming from the student section.  I've always wondered how they did that so effectively -- almost never do the goalies even react, much less try to interact, with the students.  They seem entirely undistracted by it.

But the Sports Health study suggests that a laser-like focus is a neural feature of a lot of athletes, so well-developed that it shows up on an electroencephalogram.  I still wonder, of course, if we're not mistaking correlation for causation -- it could just as easily be that people are attracted to sports because they already have the ability to focus and ignore neural background noise, rather than playing sports causing that ability to develop.

Either way, it's an interesting study, deserving of more research -- especially if it could be demonstrated that engagement in sports improved neural focus, which would give some hope to ordinary mortals like myself who like to run but get distracted if a squirrel farts.

The other study I present with the same qualifier; the convenient conclusion could well be a correlation/causation error.  Still, it's an interesting finding.  In "The Art of Life and Death: 14 Year Follow-Up Analyses of Associations Between Arts Engagement and Mortality in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing," which appeared this week in the British Medical Journal, researchers at University College of London found that engagement with the arts -- even something like regular museum visits -- was correlated with a lower risk of mortality from all causes, even when they controlled for age, prior health conditions, and socioeconomic status.

The study followed six thousand British citizens, all aged fifty or over, for fifteen years, and the differences in survival rate were not small.  Individuals who were occupied in some way with the arts had a 31% lower mortality rate than those who did not.  The mechanism is uncertain, although there have been other studies that correlated brain activity of all kinds (even doing crossword puzzles or sudoku) with a lower rate of dementia.  The naysayer in my mind, however, feels compelled to point out that it could be that people with conditions that will ultimately prove fatal -- even before they're diagnosed -- might be less compelled to go out and take sketching classes than those who are (unbeknownst to them) facing long-term good health.  Just as in the crossword puzzle studies; there is some indication that horrifying disorders like Alzheimer's start to show in measurable ways far earlier than anyone thought, so it's understandable that someone who is starting the slide into losing his/her cognitive faculties wouldn't be inclined to do a crossword puzzle even if they're not consciously aware yet that the decline has begun.

But still.  It could be the other way around, which is certainly how the popular media is portraying it.  And there's nothing to be lost in buying a year's worth of museum passes, or signing up for that sculpture class you've been considering; just as with the other study I referenced, there's nothing but benefit to joining an intramural soccer league or a running club.  Keeping physically and mentally active certainly improves your quality of life, and even if you won't end up with the focused attention of a Cornell hockey goalie or living to age 103, it's still worth doing.

So I suppose that means that I should get my ass up out of this chair, turn the computer off, and go for a run.  Or work on the clay mask I've been making for the last couple of days.  Either is probably preferable than sitting here immersing myself in the news, which has been my fallback, and is not good for either my mood or my blood pressure lately.

*****************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun, and a perfect holiday gift for anyone you know who (1) is a science buff, and (2) has a sense of humor.  What If?, by Randall Munroe (creator of the brilliant comic strip xkcd) gives scientifically-sound answers to some very interesting hypothetical questions.  What if everyone aimed a laser pointer simultaneously at the same spot on the Moon?  Could you make a jetpack using a bunch of downward-pointing machine guns?  What would happen if everyone on the Earth jumped simultaneously?

Munroe's answers make for fascinating, and often hilarious, reading.  His scientific acumen, which shines through in xkcd, is on full display here, as is his sharp-edged and absurd sense of humor.  It's great reading for anyone who has sat up at night wondering... "what if?"

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Science, the arts, and creativity

'Tis the season for school budget votes, when school districts find out how much they're going to have to cut from the instructional program, and younger, low-seniority teachers find out if they're actually going to have a job in September.

It's a fraught time of year for anyone in education, and I say that even though it's been a very long time since I've had to worry about my job, and as a "core teacher" (more about that in a moment) I've never had any concerns about my subject being cut.  But when I see the effect this has on other teachers and the morale of the school in general, it breaks my heart.

What is even more troubling is the distinction being made between "core" classes and electives, sometimes called "specials."  The attitude is that the "core" -- English, Social Studies, Math, and Science/Technology -- is somehow more important than the other classes.  And calling the other classes "specials" is disingenuous at best; to quote Eric Idle's character in Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, "You're not foolin' anyone, you know."  Whenever there are budget cuts, the "specials" are the first to go.  The message is that we can do without art and music and other electives, but everything else is sacrosanct.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mukul urp, CLASSROOM, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What's tragic about this is that the opposite is apparently closer to the truth.  Educational researcher Andreas Schleicher just addressed the UK House of Commons last week to bring to light this very issue -- that not only are the arts and music and so on critical because they're creative and fun and are often the high point of students' days, but they give students essential skills for flourishing in today's job market.  And since that's ordinarily the one thing the politicians accuse schools of failing at, this got some people to sit up and take note.

"I would say, in the fourth industrial revolution, arts may become more important than maths," Schleicher said.  "We talk about ‘soft skills’ often as social and emotional skills, and hard skills as about science and maths, but it might be the opposite...  the true ‘hard skills’ will be your curiosity, your leadership, your persistence and your resilience."

Schleicher also spoke out against the drill-and-test mode that is becoming the norm in the United States, and apparently in the UK as well.  He suggests that our desperation to convert everything into numbers -- what the educational policy wonks call "measurable outcomes" -- has led us to emphasize the subjects in which that's easier.  Math and science, especially, can be focused on "getting the right answer," giving you an easy metric to measure success -- if that's the kind of success you're looking for.

"When you look at the types of tasks that British students are doing better [than other countries], they are more those that are associated with the past than the future – the kind of things that are easy to teach and easy to test," Schleicher said.  "It is precisely those things that are easy to digitise...  [But] the modern world doesn’t reward you for what you know, but for what you can do with what you know."

In other words, the creativity you can bring to bear upon a problem, and your ability to see connections in disparate realms.  "Lateral thinking," it's often called.  But this is the kind of thing we educators usually fail to teach -- because it's hard to incorporate into your typical lesson, and hard to measure.  Much simpler just to keep students thinking inside the box, thinking that every problem has exactly one right answer, and (to quote another brilliant educational researcher, Sir Ken Robinson), "It's at the back of the book.  But don't look."

The saddest part, for me as a science educator, is that science itself is not usually taught as a creative endeavor.  In many classrooms, science is a list of vocabulary words and standardized solution methods, both of which could be memorized and regurgitated without any real understanding taking place.  But the truth is, the best science is highly creative, and requires a leap, questioning assumptions and looking at every piece of our understanding in the light of curiosity and exploration.

A classic example is Albert Einstein.  Before Einstein's time, physicists had been puzzled that all the experiments done to determine the speed of light found that it was constant -- that its speed didn't vary depending on whether you were moving away from or toward the light source.  How on earth could that be?  No other wave or particle acted that way.  So they came up with convoluted ways around what they referred to as "the problem of the constancy of the speed of light."

Einstein turned the whole thing on its head by saying, "What if it's not a problem, but simply inherent in the behavior of light itself?"  So he started from the assumption that light's speed is constant, in every frame of reference, even if you were heading toward the light source at 99% of the speed of light.

The result?  The Special Theory of Relativity, and the opening up of a whole new realm of physics.

To quote Arthur Schopenhauer: "Talent hits a target no one else can hit.  Genius hits a target no one else can see."

Hard to see how today's educational system, with its mania for the memorize-and-test model, will produce the next generation's Einstein.  The next generation's Einstein will be lucky if (s)he gets out of school with an intact sense of creativity and curiosity.

So Schleicher is exactly right.  We should be increasing arts and music education in schools, not cutting it.  "STEM" curricula and other "core" subjects are important, don't get me wrong; but the emphasis they get is seriously unbalanced.  And for heaven's sake, let's stop considering something real if we can test it and measure it.  I'll end with another quote, this one from writer, researcher, and professor Robert I. Sutton: "To foster creativity, you must reward success and failure equally, and punish inactivity."

***********************************

In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Music and cognition

When educational budgets are cut -- which they are, every year -- inevitably what is hit the hardest are programs for the arts, music, theater, and other electives.

This is ridiculous, and I say that as someone who is in his 32nd year of teaching science, a so-called "core" subject.  And I don't mean to criticize the importance of having a good "core" education; we all need to be able to read and write, do mathematics, understand the history of humanity, and have a basic and broad grasp of scientific principles.

But that's not the be-all-end-all of education, or at least it shouldn't be.  I mean, consider not what gets you a job, what allows you to do mundane chores like balancing your checkbook, but what actually brings joy to your life.  What are your hobbies, things you spend your spare time doing, things you'd spend much more time doing if you had the leisure?  My guess is very few of us fill our free time doing chemistry experiments, even admitted science nerds like me.  No, we paint, sculpt, garden, play an instrument, sing in the choir, play or watch sports (or both), cook elaborate meals, write stories.  And while those do take a basic 3-Rs education -- I wouldn't be much of a fiction writer if I had a lousy vocabulary or didn't know how to write grammatically -- for many of us, our real fascinations were discovered in the classes that go under throwaway names like "electives" and "specials" and "optional courses."

So cutting these subjects is, for many students, taking away the one thing about school that makes it tolerable, and robbing them of the opportunity to find hidden talents and undiscovered passions that will bring them joy for a lifetime.

But a recent study has shown that it's more than that.  Research by Katherine Sledge Moore and Pinar Gupse Oguz of Arcadia University, and Jim Meyer of Elmhurst College, has found that music education correlates strongly with the development of flexible intelligence -- and that those gains translate across disciplines.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jacob Garcia from Reus, Spain, The Cello Player, CC BY 2.0]

In "Superior Fluid Cognition in Trained Musicians," published two weeks ago in Psychology of Music, the researchers found that the degree of experience a person has in playing music (or singing), the higher they score on a variety of metrics -- episodic memory, working memory, attention, executive function, and processing speed.

It's hardly surprising when you think about it.  As the researchers put it, fluid intelligence skills "are highlighted in musical training," which involves "quickly comprehending a complex symbolic system, multitasking, reasoning, and more."  I can say from personal experience that performing music -- not just playing it at home for your own entertainment -- takes those skills up an additional notch.  I have been a performing musician for years.  (If you're curious, I play flute in a Celtic dance band called Crooked Sixpence.)  Being up on stage requires that you think on your feet, and often make lightning-fast alterations to what you're doing.  As an example, most of what my band plays are medleys of three or four tunes, and we almost never plan ahead how many times we're going to play any one of them (nor who'll be playing melody and who'll be playing harmony).  Our fiddler, who is more-or-less in charge of the band, just gives me a wiggle of the eyebrow if she wants me to take a solo, and says "hep!" if we're switching tunes.  Sometimes the inevitable happens -- the fiddler and I will both jump to harmony at the same time, or something -- but almost always, one of us will recognize it in under two seconds and slip right back into playing melody.  Despite the complexity of what we do, the times we have a real crash-and-burn on stage are very few and far between.

So this study is spot-on.  And its conclusions are further evidence that we should be expanding arts and electives programs, not cutting them.

Not, honestly, that I expect it will have an effect.  Sorry to end on a pessimistic note, but the educational establishment has a long track record of completely ignoring research on developmental psychology in favor of "we've always done it this way."  The most egregious example is our determination to start foreign language instruction in 7th or 8th grade, when we've known for years that our brain's plasticity with respect to learning new languages peaks around age three or four, and declines steadily thereafter.

Or, as one of my students put it, "So we start teaching kids languages at the point they start to suck at it."

A close second is that researchers have been saying for years -- with piles of evidence to support them -- that children need recess or some other unstructured play time in order to improve overall behavior and attitudes about being in school.  Not only that, but recess time correlates with better scores on tests, so like music, it's an investment that pays off across the board.  Nevertheless, schools across the country have been gradually reducing unstructured leisure time, in some places to twenty minutes or less per week, in favor of devoting more time to preparing for standardized tests.

Now there's a way to make kids look forward to going to school in the morning.

I'd like to think that this new research will influence educational establishments and (especially) budgetary decisions, but I'm not holding my breath.  Any change on that count is likely to be very slow to come.  But still, every piece of evidence counts.  And anything we can do to foster the development of fluid intelligence, positive attitudes, and confidence in children is movement in the right direction.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker.  This book is, in my opinion, the most lucid and readable exposition of the evolutionary model ever written, and along the way takes down the arguments for Intelligent Design a piece at a time.  I realize Dawkins is a controversial figure, given his no-quarter-given approach to religious claims, but even if you don't accept the scientific model yourself, you owe it to yourself to see what the evolutionary biologists are actually saying.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The budget from hell

I know many of us are reaching outrage saturation with the horrorshow that is the current presidential administration, but the recently-released budget is so awful that even the pessimists have been taken a little aback.

Entitled "America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again," this document accomplishes nothing but punishing groups that pissed off Trump in one way or another, repaying corporate interests for their support, eliminating protections for minorities, the elderly, the poor, and the environment, and slashing medical and scientific research programs to the bone.  Put more simply -- in the words of Washington Post writer Eugene Robinson -- this budget makes America "dumber, dirtier, hungrier, and sicker."

Think I'm exaggerating?  Here is a (very much abridged) list of programs the budget would eliminate entirely:

• "Energy Star" home appliance energy efficiency program
• Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program
• Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Program
• National Endowment for the Arts
• National Endowment for the Humanities
• Corporation for Public Broadcasting
• Great Lakes Restoration Initiative
• Community Development Block Grant Fund
• NASA Office of Education
• Appalachian Regional Commission
• Institute of Museum and Library Services
• Economic Development Administration
• Global Climate Change Initiative
• McGovern-Dole Food for Education Program
• Minority Business Development Agency

If you doubt that this is anything more than a symbolic flip of the middle finger at Trump's enemies -- mostly what Robinson calls "fancy-dancy elites who define and consume high culture" -- consider that the budgets of three of his top-priority cuts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, total a little less than $750 million annually.  To put that into perspective, that's a little less than four times the amount that Betsy DeVos contributed to the Republican Party in her successful attempt to purchase the position of Secretary of Education.  It's right around the same amount that Trump himself holds in personal and corporate loans, and is half what his son-in-law, Jared Kurshner, paid for 666 Fifth Avenue back in 2006.

But as the infomercials used to say, "Just wait... there's more!"  Trump's "Make America Great Again" agenda also apparently includes hacking away at medical and scientific research.  The National Institute of Health will have their budget cut by 19%, jeopardizing grants supporting university research into new medications, diagnostics, and treatments.  The Department of Energy would see an 18% cut in every program they oversee -- except the maintenance, development, and production of nuclear weapons.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then there's the elimination of programs like Meals on Wheels and Head Start.  Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney was asked by CNN's Jim Acosta how he can justify cutting funding for programs that help children and the elderly.  Acosta said, "Just to follow up on that, you were talking about the steel worker in Ohio, coal worker in Pennsylvania, but they may have an elderly mother who depends on the Meals on Wheels program or who may have kids in Head Start.  Yesterday, or the day before, you described this as a hard-power budget.  Is it also a hard-hearted budget?"

Mulvaney responded, “No, I don’t think so.  I think it’s probably one of the most compassionate things we can do.”

Acosta, understandably, was aghast.  "To cut programs that help the elderly and kids?" he asked.

Mulvaney shot back, "You’re only focusing on half of the equation, right?  You’re focusing on the recipients of the money.  We’re trying to focus on both the recipients of the money and the folks who give us the money in the first place.  And I think it’s fairly compassionate to go to them and say, 'Look, we’re not gonna ask you for your hard-earned money, anymore, single mother of two in Detroit … unless we can guarantee to you that that money is actually being used in a proper function.'"

Yes, you read that right: the Director of the Office of Management and Budget just said that providing education to preschoolers and meals to infirm elderly persons is "not a proper function" of taxpayer dollars, and to cut such programs is "compassionate."

What is most appalling about all of this is that most of the programs on the chopping block are hardly big-ticket items.  And even if all of these cuts are maintained, it's not going to reduce spending, or the burden on the American taxpayer, because you still have to factor in Trump's call for a 9% increase in the funding for the military -- already by far the biggest recipient of federal funds -- a total amount of $54 billion.

Oh, and I haven't even told you about the coupling of a huge increase in military spending with a proposed cut to the State Department -- an amount totaling 28% of their budget.  The approach seems to be "fuck diplomacy, we need firepower."

Appalled yet?  Maybe you'll reach the tipping point if I tell you about Trump's three weekend getaways at his own Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, costing taxpayers $10 million, and the projected $183 million a year we're paying to put Melania Trump up in Trump Tower because she doesn't want to live in the White House.

So the whole thing isn't about money, waste, or smaller government; it's about ideology, revenge, greed, and saber-rattling.  As Washington Post writer Alyssa Rosenberg put it: "Maybe [Republicans] don’t care about the arts personally, or the tourism revenue that can flow from a museum that has federal support, or the opportunity for kids in their district to get a glimpse of something that allows them to see the world in a new way.  Maybe it’s just too much fun to tweak liberals or too painful to target corporate subsidies in a way that might make big donors cranky.  But if we’re going to have this idiotic conversation every time Congress takes a crack a passing a budget, I wish we could just admit that cutting federal support for the arts and humanities is a way to fight the culture war, not to tackle the federal debt."

So the whole thing is a disaster, unless you are (1) a military contractor, (2) the CEO of a fossil fuel company, or (3) independently wealthy.  For most of the rest of us, the "Blueprint for Making America Great Again" simply adds to a military budget that already is higher than the next eight countries put together, and kills programs that foster health, research, a clean environment, the arts, and protections for children, minorities, and the elderly.

All of this puts me in mind of the quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which is as pertinent now as when he said it, sixty years ago: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.  Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."