InfuriatedSciTeacher

I'll take the tea, keep your "party" to yourself...

2011-08-18T21:17:00.000-04:00

Ah, how the tide turns... http://news.yahoo.com/poll-tea-party-less-popular-muslims-atheists-135203079.html

Everyone's favourite mock populist party is facing the wrath of the rest of the nation, which it should have faced once the views were fully exposed. The comments on the yahoo article demonstrate that normal people think very little of the Tea Party, and that Tea Party Republicans are keeping their hand in the sand. If you're one of them, I have to point out something that should be painfully obvious: nobody likes you. No, really, they don't. You've won elections on a national scale, I'll grant that, but there're reasons behind that amounting to little more than poor choices. The energy the 'movement' produced was viable, real, raw energy; such energy led Tea Party backed candidates to win primaries, and, left with no one else to vote for, the rest of the Republicans/conservatives/Libertarians came out in force to ensure that the election wasn't won by some 'liberal' (American liberals rarely are, but we'll get to that in a bit, I sense a long rant coming)

Some further commentary directed at the members of the Tea Party is necessary here, not that it will sink in to anyone's mind. Firstly, there are few politicians in the U.S. that are liberal on anyone's scale but your own. What you call liberals are centrists, people that are liberal by comparison because your views are not just antiquated, but seem to have ignored two hundred years of post-Enlightenment thinking. Adam Smith and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (why do you like Paine, being that he was an avowed atheist? I thought you hated us?) were not the end-all of Enlightenment thought, incidentally, but nevertheless you cling to those ideals and those ideals alone. There is almost a fervent worship of the free market system, a system that hasn't really been tried since the early 1900's when we realised we were being completely ass raped by huge corporations, both as consumers and as workers. Look, pure Communism was so ignorant of human nature it's hilarious (REALLY?! People are going to take what you give them and not want anything else? We saw how that worked out), but without some sort of safeguards against the Enrons and Standard Oils of today, you won't be paid what you're worth and you won't pay "what the market demands" for goods; you'll be paid whatever they want to pay you and you'll pay the highest amount for which something can be sold and still turn a decent profit. Corporations are about making money for themselves, and they're not going to care if that means you personally can't afford your blood pressure medication, or that nice new scooter that Medicare just bought for you because your cholesterol laden, chain smoking, obese ass isn't capable of walking through Walmart on it's own to stock up on Lucky Strikes and twinkies. Besides, it was never about you, or this pseudo-Populist bullshit that sucked you in, was it? You're the pawn here, a complete and total shill for the Dominionist pricks that want to seize control of every last nation on the planet save one, so that when their zombie overlord returns from the dead (again) everything is ready for the global war he promised to bring. Palin, Pawlenty, Bachmann, or Perry: not a one of them, or any of the other manipulative clowns behind this movement (Pat Robertson can be counted amongst them too) gives a flying fuck about your personal rights once they have power. By all means, put them in charge. Just don't bitch and whine when they bring the Dark Ages back in the 21st Century, and don't be surprised when anyone with a brain not turned to mush by Rush Limbaugh and Faux News decides to seek asylum somewhere that might be free of the taint you've begun.

Let's dissect the Tea Party as it stands: the typical (read nearly everyone) member of the Tea Party is white, rather well off, conservative (yes, yes, I know), and apt to be highly religious. The core of the movement stems from populism-- the elected members of the party rode in on a tide of frustration-- but there are more sinister factors at play. Aside from the ties to traditional religion, worth discussing in their own right, nationalism, xenophobia, and a profound hatred for anything intellectual (whilst referring to anyone that disagrees with pejoratives demeaning their intelligence) are the glue the tie the movement together. The actual ties to religion are also a key to understanding this movement: a large portion of the members are born-again, Dominionist Christians that firmly believe that the United States should be ruled by Christians under Old Testament laws. This clashes a bit with the beliefs regarding upholding the constitution and state's/individual rights, but those are frankly a mask. The end goal of this party is not to eliminate "Big Government", it's to install their version of it. Social welfare and entitlement programs, pay-in benefits like Social Security, even education programs; nothing that provides for anyone but themselves is considered an acceptable use of their tax money. However, the limits in spending don't seem to apply to military excursions to anywhere they have brown people.
The association is sadly overused, but there are parallels well worth drawing, so I'm doing it. Here are, verbatim, Lawrence Britt's 14 defining characteristics of Fascism, as taken from study of Italy, Spain, and Germany at the height of Fascist power:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread
domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

I'll let you fill in the pieces yourself, but the only ones that seem to be missing in the Tea Party movement are 13 and 14. Those are only missing because I'm refusing to count GW Bush's regime as part of it, otherwise I'd think that appointing all of daddy's buddies to cabinet counts for cronyism, and screwing with voting machines in Ohio and failing to count votes in Florida seals up fraudulent elections. 6 is a bit iffy too, upon reflection, which might be why certain people are perennially complaining about the "liberal media". Fox News makes a good start at it, though.

Another important facet of this political philosophy is the belief that taxes are immoral, illegal, etc (or at least taxes in excess of the traditional 10% tithe demanded of Xians). Corporations needn't pay taxes, churches needn't pay, nor should individuals have to pay income tax. That's all fine with me, but then how do you expect to fund anything? The highway system isn't self-maintaining, yet I'd imagine most of the people in the Tea Party (save for the ones running it) have to use it. Your precious freedoms are going to be quite a bit less valuable when you can't run off to a wilderness area to hunt, because you've allowed some corporation to log, mine, and drill every available strip of land that isn't your own backyard.
The supporters of the Tea Party, while seduced by the image of an America that never existed, do have one piece of history on their side: they, like our founders, are a bunch of rich white men that don't want to pay taxes.

Has Atheism Become a Religion? A Response to David Lose

2011-05-27T13:17:00.000-04:00

In short, no.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/atheism-religion_b_867217.html

Lose makes his non-argument (this is an oft-recycled canard more than anything else) based on what he considers four pieces of evidence. In the interest of fairness, we'll consider them.

1.

As recently reported in the New York Times, military personnel who identify themselves as "Atheists" have requested chaplains to tend to their spiritual needs.

This is the only thing he states that makes me question, and it doesn't make me question long. Demanding equal representation under the law, even in the military, isn't the same thing as being religious. I do wonder what the 'spiritual needs' of other atheists might be, but this seems more a play to legitimize a position that isn't accepted in military doctrine than anything else.

2.

The U.S. Government reports that in 2008 those identifying themselves specifically as "Atheist" composed the 18th largest group of 43 possible categories of "self-described religious identification."

Where else are we supposed to self-identify? The question deals with religious belief, and our lack of it. I'm not going to write 'atheist' under my profession, age, or other demographic questions. As Lose grants, this is also one of the options listed under the 'none' response. So you ask religion, we say we have none, we're atheist, and you say we're religious? Spectacular reasoning there.

3.

Similarly, it's worth noting the degree to which Atheists routinely, strategically, and often vociferously position what is often described as their "secular-humanist" views against religious traditions.

Vocally speaking out for rational thought, and aligning it against magical thinking, doesn't make rational thought a religion. It's offering an alternative to that religion. Some that espouse secular humanism couple that with a set of what they consider core values, but having an ethical philosophy is likewise not a religion. If you take the magical thought out of, say, Buddhism, you're left with something that still isn't religious despite it's roots. We'll get to why shortly.

4.

Finally -- and you probably knew this was coming -- consider all the comments made by self-identified Atheists on articles published in the Religion section of the Huffington Post. Seriously. Either Atheists have way more time on their hands than the rest of the population or they've got something to prove.

Yes, we certainly have something to prove, in the sense that we're a denigrated minority in much of the world, as well as a minority that has been expected to sit quietly and pretend that we don't exist. The assertion that being assertive in an us-against-them fashion is a feature of new religions ignores that it is also a feature of civil rights movements and tribalism in general. We're loud and resistant to religious thought because that religious thought is an all pervasive feature of the societies in which we live, and often based solely in one religion. Thus we speak not only for ourselves, but for the numerous religious minorities that also don't want your faith installed as an official part of public life. Granted, those minorities may want their faith installed instead, but seeing to it that all are excluded levels the playing field.

To advance an argument of my own, atheism isn't a religion because it lacks certain features that are essential to religion: ritual, a dogmatic creed, and faith. Lose grants the first two points, and then attempts to explain why atheists have a faith of their own:

It conveys that both a conventional religious worldview and atheistic worldview require a measure of faith. I don't mean this simply about the rather limited question of whether God exists, but rather about whether the material, physical dimension of life immediately apparent to our senses is all there is.

Mr. Lose seems to think that requiring evidence that there is something beyond what our physical senses can detect, even when extended by instrumentation, requires faith. Yet this is the exact opposite. We're not stating a positive belief that there is nothing beyond our physical world, we're stating that you have no convincing evidence to the contrary.

Religious faith -- and I'd argue atheistic faith -- doesn't begin and end with the question of God or a spiritual dimension to life. One needs also to construct an interpretation of life (describing its purpose, goal, worth) and set of values by which to live that life.

So you're arguing that atheism involves faith because atheistic faith involves constructing an interpretation of life and values? Beyond the obvious circularity of that argument, it is possible to construct values and a view of life of components that are evidence-based, and therefore not rooted in faith.

Religious faith -- and I'd argue atheistic faith -- doesn't begin and end with the question of God or a spiritual dimension to life. One needs also to construct an interpretation of life (describing its purpose, goal, worth) and set of values by which to live that life.Professing belief in God, as well as rejecting such belief, each requires equal measures of imagination and nerve. As it turns out, doubt is not the opposite of faith; certainty is. For this reason, we can hold out the hope that religious and non-religious believers alike may recognize in each other similar acts of courage and together reject the cowardice of fundamentalism, whether religious or secular. Being able to disagree respectfully is a small but significant step that believers and non-believers could take as they, together, contemplate admiring, understanding, and preserving this wondrous world we share.

Ahhh... the actual point of your article. Lose wants us to have more respect for religious ideas because we share some of the features (according to him). Well, my arguments on this blog share features with Lose's argument; both arguments are constructed of words in the English language, for example, and both will be openly available on the internet. This doesn't suggest that I should respect an argument made without a shred of credible evidence simply because it has things in common with mine. Religious thought is indeed thought, it simply lacks a basis in reality, but it is the differences between that thought and secular, rational reasoning that create the disparity, not the similarities. I'm sorry, David Lose, but if this is the best you can come up with, then I'm not buying either of your arguments, or the final one from consequence. Your article is tone-trolling at it's best, and if your main concern is that we're not being respectful of your beliefs rather than your inability to justify them rationally, then you've completely missed the point.

Pat Condell "You'll turn to God"

2011-05-17T15:36:00.002-04:00

Bigots on a Bus

2011-05-17T15:17:00.001-04:00

Well... multiple of each there. I took a couple hours out of my day to attend, in protest, a rally sponsored by Return America and the North Carolina Family Council, that was intended to support SB106. What is this wonderful piece of legislation, you ask? SB106 is the bill that would allow the North Carolina version of Prop 8; in essence it would draft and put out for referendum a constitutional amendment defining marriage as solely between one man and one woman. But, Dave, you're not gay? No, I'm not. I also don't agree with legislation stemming from religious ideals, nor do I agree with walking all over someone's legal rights because they happen to find people of the same gender attractive.
(more below the fold)

The rally was pretty much what one might expect from a group of born-again nutjobs with an agenda to create a theocracy: of the thousands there, a token few weren't Caucasian, most were relatively well dressed, carrying signs with their definition of marriage on them, or sundry other Christian messages. That, in and of itself, isn't offensive... this is a public assembly after all, they have the right to do that and to be heard. Their message, however, was darkly amusing:
" People think we don't like gays. They're right, we don't. We love them (oh the facial expression was priceless here) because this book commands us to."
" We don't oppose homosexuals. We oppose anyone that wants to undermine the authority of this book" *holds up teh babble*
"Those people in the legislature are friends of ours. We need to support them, and encourage them to do the right thing, no matter how many nasty editorials the media writes about them. We need to encourage them to support this bill; we need to pray for them and for this legislation"
"They don't want this bill to pass, because in every other state in the south, something like this has gone to vote and passed by 70%"
" The legislators aren't here to do their will, they're here to do the will of the people. The people want this."
(insert random comments about persecution of Xians that I'm not directly quoting here)

Favorite sign of the day:

Sin brings God's Wrath on the Nation

*goofball deifying caps included*

The 'counter-protest' wasn't as large or vocal as it might have been... there were at most 30 of us, mostly homosexual, a few allies, of various ages (and to be fair, our makeup was as pale as the rally's). A few were standing behind the stage, quietly, with one girl holding a sign. The rest attempted to enter Halifax Mall (note: this is a public place) and turned away by Raleigh PD because we didn't have a permit to assemble there. This resistance evaporated once we fetched the news crew from News 14, and materialized immediately when the camera left. Those of us that weren't asked to leave at that point were escorted out when a couple of teenage girls with us walked through the crowd holding hands, placing all of us squarely across the street from the exit, right next to the church buses that brought most of the crowd. Others were turned away at other points in time, largely because they held signs, a rainbow flag, or wore a shirt that ran counter to the 'message' of the rally. A-News (http://apartmentj.com/_shows/anews/index.html) and the Triangle Gay/Lesbian Newspaper have video and photographic evidence of Raleigh PD physically removing another protester from a public sidewalk.

Necessary synopsis aside, today's events raise interesting, if frustrating issues:

Apparently the city of Raleigh, or the state of North Carolina, only respects a citizen's constitutional right to assemble if they have a permit for it? I can't fathom how that would hold up in court, but I'm also not personally willing to get arrested for it without a lawyer that pledges his/her services, pro bono, to try the case.
These people really think what they're preaching is love? For that matter, these people think?

In retort to the sign, if the main concern here is that their vengeful sky-daddy has shitty aim, and will punish 300 million people for the "sins" of significantly fewer, I'd say we're safe here.

The take home message? Homosexuality is a naturally occurring state of being; there are neurological differences that can be attributed to the amount of testosterone to which someone is exposed in the womb that correlate with sexual 'preference'. Banning gay marriage is tantamount to banning interracial marriage: you can make an argument for it, but it doesn't make you any less of a bigot. If all they intended to do was pray about it, it wouldn't bother me much. It's the declaration of the will to insert their deity into secular politics at any level that I detest. (For those that are going to argue that such an insertion is the will of the people, it may well be, but there's a clause in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution that prevents that, for good reason).

A majority taken collectively may be regarded as a being whose opinions, and most frequently whose interests, are opposed to those of another being, which is styled a minority. If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach?

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Excellent use of a degree...

2011-02-19T14:10:00.000-05:00

Since I can't reply how I'd like to this in the class forum, I'm doing it here. Briefly.

Hi Everyone, Dr. Joe Collins will be visiting class Monday night to discuss his phenomenology study about "Calling". I have posted his dissertation for you to look over. He is a graduate of NC State, now teaching at Gardner-Webb and creating and playing dulcimers. Here's his dulcimer website: http://www.jcdulcimer.com/ ...He's a testimony that there is life after the doctorate!
He may post other readings as we move through the weekend. These will be for your further understanding of this phenomenological framework for those of you considering this approach for your own research.
Nancy

'Life after doctorate'? If my life after obtaining my degree consists of creating and playing dulcimers, I'm wasting several years and a large amount of someone's money... In fact, I'd think you could create and play dulcimers without the benefit of anything other than some metallurgy and music classes, available at your local high school (well, the metallurgy probably isn't anymore, but there have to be community ed. art classes that could get you to that point, right?) Oh my, doesn't Monday night's class sound enthralling. Who'd like to pretend they're me for an evening? Be loud, rational, and make faces at all the airy-fairy BS spouted by, well, nearly everyone else in there (but particularly those who've earned their degree in whateverthefuckthey'veearneditin) and you'll play my role well. Oh, and I'm sorry Dr. Fire, but there's absolutely no chance in nonexistent hell that I'm going to read something posted for my supposed edification within two days of a weekly class. Get your shit together and post it at the beginning of the week, and realise that not only do we have classes besides yours that place demands on our time, but that in the interest of our sanity we might find something to do other than dealing with your web board. For example, I'm currently coloring concentric circles in highlighter on pages of one of last week's readings, and going to the shooting range shortly.

Since you brought it up...

2011-01-25T23:13:00.001-05:00

http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnHawkins/2011/01/25/7_non-political_differences_between_liberals_and_conservatives

A blogger who writes for townhall.com recently posted what he considers to be 7 non-political differences between liberals and conservatives. I think those would do well to be subjected to critical examination.

1) Conservatives are more patriotic than liberals:Conservatives tend to focus on the positive things about America, while liberals focus on the negative. If the first thoughts that came to your mind when you thought of America were “slavery,” "imperialism," and "unfairly using too much of the world's resources," you probably wouldn't like America very much either. Conservatives, on the other hand, look at the fact that we saved the world in WWI, WWII, and the Cold War, take pride in the fact that we have contributed so much to the planet, and believe America has had a tremendous positive impact on history. The conservative view produces love of country. The other view produces a deep seated dislike of our nation.

Gee, that's great... you're optimists. Or you've failed to see the reality in front of you, which is that the rest of the world doesn't much like us because of an imperialist, unilateral foreign policy. Am I less patriotic than some/most conservatives? Perhaps, but I don't consider that to be a bad thing, and it doesn't mean I don't want 'murica to succeed, it means I view it in a more reasonable light. Rampant nationalism doesn't have much to recommend it, historically speaking.

It's socially acceptable for liberals to lie about conservatives: Whether you're talking about theNew York Times, The Washington Post, or the Daily Kos, it's considered to be perfectly acceptable to lie about conservatives. That's because, as Charles Krauthammeronce said, To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.
If you think your opponents are evil, you tend to be okay with using tactics that you would describe as "evil" under other circumstances to fight them. If you're up people you compare to Nazis, it’s easy to tell yourself that lying to beat them isn’t so bad. If you're in a dispute with people who you believe are just too stupid to understand what's going on, you feel compelled to try to explain yourself a little better.

Logic fail in the highest order, sir. It's not socially acceptable for liberals to lie about anyone, but if you listen to O'Reilly, Beck, or Limbaugh, you'll see that it's publicly accepted for them to lie through their teeth about nearly everything whilst being intolerant bigots. I believe your affliction is called projection. You clearly don't feel compelled to explain yourselves well, or you're incapable of doing so. And frankly, I don't think conservatives are evil, I think most of them are relatively stupid/ignorant. Having your head in the sand isn't evil. On the other hand, the people who serve as the mouthpieces of conservative ideology are absolutely deplorable.

3) Conservatives are results-oriented. Liberals are not:If you understand one thing about liberals, understand this: Liberalism is nothing more than "childlike emotionalism applied to adult issues." That's why they don't care very much about whether the programs they advocate work or not. Proposing programs isn't really about what will help the most people to liberals; it's about making them feel good about themselves. On the other hand, conservatives are results-oriented, which is why they tend to be so down on the government, which is inevitably slower, more expensive, and less effective than the private sector at pretty much everything.

No, results matter a great deal. Programs that work would certainly be better than ones that don't, but politicians of all forms tend to hamstring programs so that they have no chance of working, and base the decision to launch or terminate programs on their electoral needs rather than the needs of the people the programs purportedly serve. If the private sector did anything that supplanted government-run programs that actually worked, it might be a better alternative. Alas, it doesn't seem to turn a profit, which is the point of private sector organisations in most cases, so they don't. Either that, or they're run by religious organisations and the help comes with strings that it shouldn't.

4) Conservatives care about the Constitution. Liberals don't: Conservatives believe that we need to try to interpret the Constitution in the way that the Founders intended it to be read and if we want to change it, then we need to pass a Constitutional Amendment. Liberals believe in a "living Constitution," which is functionally no different than believing in no Constitution at all. If you believe in a "living Constitution," you think it is okay to do whatever you want for political reasons and then come up with a legal justification afterwards, which you'll then call "constitutional law."

Judicial Review, Marbury v. Madison 1803. Read it, understand it, and realise that the people that made the ruling were the founders. In response to the final allegation, no, it means that the Constitution needs to be interpreted in a manner that is commensurate with the problems of the 21st Century rather than the 18th.

5) Liberals are much more misogynistic than conservatives: If you're a prominent conservative woman, you will be deluged with rape threats, death threats, attacks on your family, attacks on your looks, and offers to give you a good screwing as a public service. In other words, what you've seen with Sarah Palin is actually the same thing that happens to most prominent conservative women, but on a larger scale. That's not to say that liberal women don't get some of the same treatment, but it's several orders of magnitude worse for women on the Right.

That's largely because liberals claim the "feminist" mantle and so, if they're feminists, then obviously they can't be "anti-woman" no matter what they actually say, right? Even worse, most of the actual feminist women on the Left tend to either participate in the abuse or, alternately, turn a blind eye to it as long as it's aimed at conservative women.

I'd love to see the data that spawned that comment, but I'm betting you don't in fact have any. Being a misogynist stems from your actions, not whatever philosophy you claim, but lets examine that of the typical conservative: 1) pro-life= women don't have the right to decide what to do with their bodies medically because we value the lives of an undifferentiated bunch of cells more then theirs, and b) the traditional patriarchal view of women as belonging in the home; barefoot, pregnant, or at least 'Leave it to Beaver'. That's not misogyny?

6) Conservatives are happier people than liberals: Despite all the claims you hear that conservatives are angry, cruel, and mean, conservatives are much happier people than liberals. This is something that has been consistently proven in studies and, let's face it -- anyone who knows a lot of liberals and conservatives will tell you that it's not a surprise. Conservatives love the country they live in, they're more likely to be Christian, and they take responsibility for their own lives instead of griping that the world is terribly unfair. If you want to be a happy person, you're more likely to be a happy conservative than a happy liberal.

Hmm... first off, that's a rather trivial difference. But being and old white male in power should make you happy. You're in charge. The studies cited in the article are also from a similar source, and when you find the real study, the difference comes more from geographic location than anywhere else. People in the South/sunbelt are happier than elsewhere, which would make sense as they get more sunlight (https://health.google.com/health/ref/Seasonal+affective+disorder). Those people are also, regardless of income, largely white, uber religious, and conservative. If you parse out the data for those factors, the only other one that sticks is religiosity; yes, religious people seem to be happier than non-religious. If it takes a faery tale to make me happier, I'll pass. I'd prefer to know what's actually going on in the world and not depend on the fantasy of a better life after this one is over.

7) Conservatives are better Christians than liberals: Certainly there are debates about social conservatism and Christianity on the conservative side of the fence, but Christian conservatism is considered to be a honorable and important part of the Republican base. People are going to hate to hear this, despite the fact it's absolutely true, but Christianity and liberalism have become largely incompatible. That's because there are so many liberals who are implacably hostile to Christianitythat liberal Christians are left with one of two unpalatable choices. Either they can water their Christian beliefs down into thin gruel so as to be compatible with liberalism or liberal Christians can choose to be cringing dogs and keep their mouths shut while their beliefs are regularly insulted, demeaned, and attacked by their fellow liberals. Neither option should be acceptable to someone who has a strong Christian faith.

Before declaring liberalism and Christianity incompatible, you should probably have examined the tenets of your faith, which demand penance, taking care of the poor, and some other things that conservatives want to leave up to the private sector rather than making a contribution themselves. But since you said it, I'll go ahead and do what you said liberals do: your faith is a complete fiction, you worship a Bronze Age asshole that supports genocide: a jealous, bigoted sky-daddy with serious sexual repression issues, and you're proud of that. You think that a 4,000 year old (in parts) document trumps the accomplishments of modern science. If you subscribed to it in full, you'd have to support the notion that the Earth is flat, that the sun revolves around the Earth, and that you should put to death homosexuals, people that work on Saturday/Sunday, and children that talk back to their parents. By all means, be a better Christian that I am (since I'm not one), it lets us all know what a deranged fool you are.

One side or other needs to be rational...

2011-01-10T17:58:00.001-05:00

Dear fellow left-wingers,
The recent shooting (I hate the overuse of the word tragedy, and I'm refusing to use it in this case) in Arizona my be the result of a deluded neo-nazi/tea party loon, but let's be frank here: those spewing right-wing rhetoric are no more responsible for the actions of a violent psychopath than those promoting left-of-Lenin politics are to blame for the actions of someone that might listen to them. If you'd like someone to blame, place it squarely on a) said violent psychopath, b) our lack of health care that failed to identify and treat someone that is clearly mentally ill, and c) whichever douchebag reviewed this man's pistol permit and concluded that despite a record of mental issues, he should be allowed to own a weapon.
Is political rhetoric inflammatory on both sides? Yes. Is it possible that someone who is a paranoid schizophrenic might take right-wing talk radio a little too seriously? certainly. OTOH, unless someone can produce direct quotes that were intended to incite someone to violence, CAN IT. (Yes, Palin's "Don't retreat, RELOAD" tweet is ridiculous, but it's also the product of a mind simple enough to think that it was witty rather than particularly violent).

But he's only worried about teh childrenz!

2010-12-09T14:44:00.000-05:00

Rachel Maddow deals rather well with this man, considering what a complete twit he is... Note the persecution complex and cries of "I'm thinking of the children" coming from someone who wants to have homosexuals jailed for life or put to death. It's only in Uganda you say? Yes, but his backers are not, and have their fingers in a number of Congressional and gubernatorial pies (pun intended). For those that don't want to bother watching this deplorable fool, the highlights are thus:

He accuses homosexuals of 'recruiting' children in schools by paying them American dollars to become gay.

He believes that homosexuality can be 'cured'.

His 'kill the gays' bill is based on his interpretation of Biblical law, which unfortunately seems to match what's written in Deuteronomy and Exodus. I'm not about to pollute my blog with verse; feel free to find it yourself.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Laws of Nature: Nomic or Gnostic?

2010-12-02T23:01:00.002-05:00

Some of the issues with Foster's argument have been left alone due to the instructions of the professor for whom the paper was written. These are apparent in any case.

John Foster, in The Divine Lawmaker, believes that he has made headway on a philosophical account of natural laws by taking natural laws as causal regularities that are (or were) enacted by a universal creator. While this may be satisfying to the theist, both as a teleological proof of a deity and as an account of natural laws, it is lacking in the way of parsimony and explanatory power. There is utility in Foster’s nomic account of laws as causing regularity in the universe: it is possible to present an account of natural laws that properly describes what the laws of nature are and excludes those regularities that are accidental. After a careful examination of Foster’s views, along with some pertinent criticisms of them, this paper will attempt to make sense of Foster’s account of laws without the need for the involvement of a supernatural agent.

Foster’s Account of Regularity in Nature

Foster notes the existence of regularities in nature, a pattern of instances of our experience in which a given substance (or more than one) acts in a manner that is consistent with other recorded instances. This is difficult, in Foster’s opinion, to deem coincidental, and thus the existence of such regularities requires explanation. Non-basic regularities, those that can be reduced to the interactions of more basic regularities, can be effectively explained in this manner.

What of the basic regularities? Foster finds these more vexing:

The interesting issue arises when we reach the level of the basic regularities-those regularities which cannot be explained in terms of others. These will need to be accounted for in some other way… For the fact that any specific regularity was in principle explicable in terms of others would not mean that the overall regularity of the world was self-explanatory (p.148).

In effect, Foster is arguing that explaining regularities in terms of others is not satisfactory to him because it fails to explain why there is regularity in the world at all. Simply creating an explanatory regress in which one regularity is explained by more basic regularities does seem to leave a vacuum of explanation at the most basic level, presuming of course that such a basic level exists.

Foster, in accepting that there are basic regularities, is left with the need to explain their existence in a coherent manner. Although briefly offering the possibility of a supernatural entity, Foster first explores a naturalistic account of natural laws.

In clarification of what is meant by natural laws, Foster states:

In this sense, laws (if such there be) are what govern or control events in the natural world: not a matter of things happening to be regular in certain ways, but of things having to be regular in these ways. So the law of gravity would consist, not in the regularity of gravitational attraction, but in the necessity of this regularity-in the fact that bodies have to be subject to a force of mutual attraction, and that the strength of this attraction has to be a function of their masses and distance in the specified way (p. 150).

In light of this explanation, Foster is presenting laws as necessary in some sense. They do not simply explain the existence of regularities, but they are also responsible for the existence of such regularities. The uniformity of behaviour of objects under the influence of gravity, for example, results due to the necessity that they are attracted to one another. Regarding the manner in which such natural laws are necessary, Foster states:

Well, the first thing that needs to be stressed is that the necessity involved is not a form of strict or absolute necessity. The claim that it is a law of nature that bodies always behave gravitationally, or are subject to the relevant gravitational forces, does not imply the absolute impossibility of cases in which this regularity fails: it does not imply that there are no possible situations, of any kind, in which bodies do not behave in this way, or are not subject to these forces. (p. 152)

Given this view, Foster states that, while the laws appear to be enforced in our world, it does not follow that they will hold sway in all possible worlds.

It is also put forth that, since we can imagine worlds in which a given natural law does not exist, we can also imagine that natural law can be contravened, as in the traditional view of a miracle as created by a supernatural entity. As Foster states:

Not only are laws contingent, but I think that we can also envisage the possibility of a law being contravened. If this were not so, then the traditional notion of a miracle, as a case where a law is overridden by the intervention of a supernatural agent, would not make sense, and it seems to me that it does. (pp. 152-3).

Foster uses both the ‘all possible worlds’ argument, and the ‘miracles happen’ argument to support his claims that laws of nature, as described using only naturalistic concepts, cannot be taken as strictly or absolutely necessary.

In an attempt to support the necessity of natural laws through naturalistic means, Foster turns to Armstrong’s ‘Universals Approach’. Armstrong holds that laws of nature can be viewed in terms of relations between properties in the known world. If all F’s are G’s, then there is a relationship between the property of F-ness and the property of G-ness. Armstrong’s use of ‘holds in relation N to’ is interpreted by Foster as ‘necessitates’. Foster critiques Armstrong thusly:

For what he is claiming is that it is precisely by thinking of laws as relationships between universals that we are able to grasp their real nature; and representing laws as such relationships will not help to illuminate that nature if, as in this case, the relationships selected can only be understood in terms of the holding of laws. The difficulty is in seeing what other sorts of relationship are available to play the role that Armstrong envisages (p. 155).

Foster believes that the application of Armstrong’s view results in an understanding of natural laws that is bound to be circular; natural laws can only be understood in terms of a relationship between universals, yet this relationship can only be understood in terms of natural laws.

After dismissing Armstrong’s account because we cannot understand what such relationships are, Foster moves to another naturalistic account of laws: that laws are the result of causation. By this account, an object struck by another object is moved because the first caused the second to move. In order for a causal relationship to count as a natural law, this would have to be by imposing a regularity as such, rather than causing each instance independently, since causing each instance independently would not “yield a necessity with the right kind of generality for a law” (p. 155). This account of laws is incomplete, in Foster’s view, because it fails to provide a mechanism by which the law is instantiated.

Having eliminated the existing naturalistic accounts of laws that fit his view of laws as necessary, Foster falls back to a theistic explanation of regularities. While not denying that the existence of natural laws is possible, he reasons that the only way to explain the existence of natural laws at this point is to assume that they were created, along with the world, by the Judeo-Christian God that imposes the laws on the natural world.

2. Beebee’s Criticisms

In criticism of Foster, Beebee points out that, as far as explanation of how laws are instantiated, Foster’s account is as unsatisfying as Armstrong’s. In order to overcome this, Foster would need to explain how God creates the laws, and would then still need to explain how those laws impose the observed regularities in the natural world. It is Beebee’s view that Foster fails to demonstrate how God is to causally impact the actions of the particles that obey natural laws, as Foster does not propose that the Universe was created and left to run, nor are the vast majority of particles that obey natural laws of the type that can consciously obey commands issued by a supernatural agent. As Beebee puts it:

God is not, on Foster’s view, doing anything to the intrinsic natures of objects; he thinks the very same objects with the same intrinsic natures might (had God so wished) have behaved quite differently. So God seems to be causing some very general feature of the universe: that it unfolds in such a way as to deliver a particular set of regularities. It is not clear to me that we can really make sense of this, for, as we use the terms ‘cause’ and ‘effect’, effects are required to be specific, local facts or events or states of affairs (p. 454).

This is a reasonable criticism in that Foster’s argument has the same result (despite a different source of error) that he sees as problematic in Armstrong’s account; it is not possible, given Foster’s account of natural laws, to understand how they come about or are applied to the world.

It is also demonstrated in Beebee’s critique that Foster has done nothing to halt the explanatory regress created by the existence of regularities in Nature. While he posits that there might be natural laws put in place by a creator, he does nothing to explain how that creator came to exist, even if we were to determine that the method for instantiating laws is trivial (p. 456).

3. New Criticisms

Foster’s account of natural laws has other flaws as well. Firstly, the assumption is made that there are only two means by which we can explain regularities in the world, and that one of these is that they were put in place by a supernatural entity (in Foster’s thinking, the Judeo-Christian God). While there might be some plausibility to a teleological argument for the existence of a deity, Foster is begging the question of the existence of such a deity in order to use that deity to explain the regularities found in Nature. Using God to explain the existence of natural laws, and then turning around to use the existence of those natural laws as evidence for the existence of God seems to be circular.

Foster’s reasoning seems to mirror scientific inference-to-the-best explanation for other events/particles that are not directly observable, but there is an important distinction here: scientists making inferences regarding the nucleus of an atom began with observations that led to the supposition of that nucleus and then built further predictions around that model that were later observed to be true, whereas Foster is using only the selfsame evidence for both pieces. For example, JJ Thompson’s model of an atom included the concept of positively charged mass throughout the atom, and it was only after Rutherford’s ‘gold foil’ experiments, which established that positively charged alpha particles did not deflect or rebound with the frequency expected for a solidly constructed atom, that serious consideration was given to the idea of a small, dense centre to each atom. Operating under Rutherford’s model allowed those who would eventually develop the current quantum mechanical model a starting point, but each new piece of evidence was used to revise the model and explain observations made after that revision. Continued support of atomic theory and the realisation of predictions made based upon that theory then allows for the initial phenomena to be observed using that model without the threat of circularity. As an alternate example, scientists do not use comparative DNA sequencing as evidence for evolutionary theory and in the same breath use evolutionary theory to explain the similarities and differences in DNA sequences for ostensibly related species; other means of establishing evolutionary theory predate the use of such molecular evidence, and the validation of predictions made from that theory serve to support the theory as a whole.

Doubts about his theism aside, Foster’s account of natural laws is still unsatisfactory. We are left with questions of how God “lays down the law, and how we are to understand the manner in which the laws impose regularity on the world. Upon reflection, it appears that Foster has managed to double the number of unanswered questions presented by the naturalistic account of regularity before we come to questions of how God came to exist. It is difficult to see how one might attempt to address such questions without resorting to special pleading or multiplying the unsupported claims needed to explain this account. If we are to be left with an unexplained explanation for the regularities in the world, it would be more parsimonious to have one rather than three, given that they explain the regularities themselves equally well.

Foster’s teleological argument for God, although intended as a halt to the explanatory regress created by the existence of regularities, has the same flaw as any teleological argument: it is wholly based on an argument from incredulity. Foster makes statements such as “The fact that we always get the same outcome in the same conditions, over such a large number of cases, makes it almost impossible to avoid the conclusion that there is something responsible for keeping things regular in the relevant way.”(p. 146) He also says, “It seems to me that there is only one way of making sense of the notion of a law of nature.” (p. 159), and “Well, it would be hard to think of the cause or causes as lying within the natural realm” (p. 159). While these statements may seem reasonable on first examination, a lack of imagination does not invalidate an argument nor would rationalisations of how laws might create regularities be an empirically satisfying form of explanation. Foster’s claim that regularity-as-coincidence is implausible does not make it impossible, nor does it lend credence to other equally implausible accounts of those regularities. Foster, in short, bases his transition from natural to supernatural explanations on the implausibility of the natural explanations and his inability to conceive of a natural means for regularity to exist, rather than evidence in favour of a supernatural explanation.

The final critique of Foster’s account of laws of nature is the easiest to make and directed at the portion that Foster himself calls the most controversial. As quoted above, Foster believes that natural laws can be contravened, because “If this were not so, then the traditional notion of a miracle, as a case where a law is overridden by the intervention of a supernatural agent, would not make sense, and it seems to me that it does.” (p. 153) This is born solely of Foster’s presumption of the veracity of Judeo-Christian mythology in a form that would not necessarily be accepted even by those who subscribe to many of the same beliefs, and has no place in an attempt to create an objective account of the laws of nature.

4. A Workable Nomic Account of Natural Law?

In his dismissal of Armstrong, Foster ignores what could be an important point regarding the laws of nature. Armstrong’s definition of laws as relationships between universals does not give a satisfactory account of what laws really are. However, Armstrong’s account could be modified to become a workable nomic account of natural laws. As the main worry associated with Armstrong’s account lies with ‘stands in relation N’, that place holder needs to be effectively and satisfactorily defined.

Armstrong’s use of ‘necessitates’ in place of ‘N’ may or may not belie a desire to hitch his argument to the nomic concepts he purports to be avoiding, yet it gives us a starting point from which we might seek to define ‘N’. If we define ‘N’ as necessitates, in that something that is intrinsic to F-ness necessitates or causes the property of G-ness, we now have a coherent account of laws. In regards to important vacuous laws, Newton’s First Law of Motion for example, they get in because there is something intrinsic to inertial bodies that ensures they have no acceleration. Unimportant vacuous laws, of the sort we might seek to exclude through making all definitions of science purely objective, are not counted by this approach, because there is nothing in the nature of the entity that necessitates the property attributed to it. For example, ‘All plaid pandas weigh 5 kilograms’ would not be counted as a law because nothing intrinsic to pandas being plaid necessitates a mass of 5kg. Likewise, accidental truths, like all the gold in my fillings having belonged to Julius Caesar, are also excluded as there is nothing in the nature of my fillings that necessitates that they can only be made of gold atoms once owned by Julius Caesar.

A concern that will arise here is that the use of a nomic concept introduces subjunctive conditionals. However, given the failure of nonnomic accounts to say anything interesting or useful, is this truly a worry with which we should be concerned? It seems that it might not be, as adherence to strict positivism is unable to get the job done. A more salient concern would be that this account fails to explain the origin of natural laws beyond ‘They just are’, or ‘Laws of nature are part of the fabric of the Universe itself’. To that, there is a ready reply: however it came to be, there must be a Nature in which the laws act for such laws to exist.

5. Conclusions

Foster seeks to explain regularities in Nature through a deity that imparts natural laws (or the regularities themselves) after dismissing natural accounts as inadequate, but he fails to provide satisfactory explanation while ignoring the possibility that such regularities are coincidental because he finds it implausible. Instead, a nomic version of Armstrong’s account gives us an effective version without adding a supernatural layer of explanation. While it may be intuitively more satisfying to think of something causing the regularities in Nature, it does not necessarily follow that they have to be caused at all apart from their interplay with one another, or that they cannot simply be part of the Universe itself.

References

Batterman, Robert, "Intertheory Relations in Physics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Beebee, Helen, “Review of J. Foster: The Divine Lawmaker” ,Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 60 (2009), 453–457

Carroll, John W., "Laws of Nature", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Foster, John, “Regularities, Laws of Nature, and the Existence of God” ,

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 101 (2001), pp. 145-161

New Life for Liberals...

2010-11-02T20:30:00.000-04:00

In light of the recent surge of the Tea Party, Democrats, and liberals in general, seriously need to find an answer to that energy, however misplaced it may be. This is my solution.

We are the future of America, not trying to recreate an ideal that never existed. Wrapping yourself in the flag may gain you some votes, but it's also the path to Fascism, and we should refuse that path.

Core Values:

- All people should be treated equally and equitably. Thus, restrictions to marriage, voting, and holding office based on sexual orientation and religious persuasion need to be abolished immediately as they run contrary to the founding principles of this nation, and, more importantly, to common decency and ethics.

- In an effort to continue the above, the income tax system should be abolished and replaced with a value-added tax on all purchases. This is the only permissible tax on citizens, and as it is based on spending rather than income or property, it is entirely voluntary in an important sense: if you don't want to give money to the government, don't spend any.

- A complete overhaul of the criminal justice system aimed at breaking the cycle of crime, and the poverty from whence that cycle arises. Criminals will be given reasonable sentences, and billed for their room and board while incarcerated, after the first year. In order to allow the prisoner a means of doing this, they will be afforded the opportunity to learn a trade or complete a degree during their imprisonment, and then paid for their time, less the real costs incurred by housing them. This not only gives the prison system a chance to be self-financing, but provides a means to be a productive member of society when released. Prison manufactured goods will be sold on the open market. Citizenship rights will be stripped from no one, including felons, once they have served their sentence.

- Decriminalisation of illegal drugs, and the legalisation of marijuana. We spend far too much money on law enforcement for something that we cannot hope to control. Prohibition is not an effective solution, therefore: those arrested on drug offences will be sentenced to in-patient rehabilitation, not prison. Those convicted of trafficking or selling large quantities may still be subject to criminal penalties, as above, and in addition all liquid assets will be seized and donated to the rehabilitation programs that treat their customers.

- Real and reasonable social welfare programs: a) universal health insurance for all, administered by the government and paid for by tax dollars. Those under 18 and over 65 will receive completely free care and prescriptions, all others will pay a co-pay, up to a yearly limit. This is about eliminating a predatory health insurance industry and ensuring proper preventative care and treatment for all. Thus, health care providers will be paid on a per patient basis, and as an incentive, pharmaceutical companies will be awarded grants from NIH/NSF just like other researchers. These are for the public good, not profit, and should be treated as such.
b) Unemployment/disability insurance should continue, with the requirement that those taking benefits attend a workshop, weekly, aimed at job-seeking skills and/or training for a new career. Frankly, with the current computer technology, there's no reason to claim physical disability... unless you're mentally incompetent or quadriplegic, you can certainly operate a keyboard or man someone's customer service line.

- Dismantle the military-industrial complex, beginning with aggressive foreign policies and empire-building. This doesn't mean that we don't need a military for defensive purposes, nor even does it mean that we might not need bases on foreign soil, but we no longer need to enter into a war simply because the president feels the need to assuage daddy's pride. All acts of war require a formal declaration of such in Congress, as written into the Constitution. We need not inform the enemy of this declaration, but it ensures that one man or woman doesn't get to play a game of soldiers with real people again. To make up for the lost productivity in the economy, I suggest retooling all those brilliant minds and the factories that produce their inventions to generate clean, domestic energy sources. Removing the dependence on foreign oil will remove much of the need for the military in any case, and let's face it, the idea of clean coal is a joke. Ethanol/biofuels are a band-aid for this problem, what we really need are renewable, non-polluting energy sources.

- Government spending and size of government are not the problem, what we choose to spend government money on the the efficiency with which government business is conducted are. Not only should a government protect it's people, it should also serve their best interests, as determined by them.

We call them IDiots for a reason

2010-09-21T23:17:00.001-04:00

Satirists used to be clever, but this one seems not to have the knack. It might be fun to respond to his canards, however.

The troublesome issue of intelligent design (known simply as ID) is one that every science educator needs to be prepared to deal with. The issue threatens our society on several levels. For example, how can our nation hope to compete in an increasingly technological world unless our budding new scientists believe life is a purposeless cosmic accident? The very integrity of science is in danger. In fact, the continued existence of civilization might be at stake.

True science must always provide purely naturalistic answers, not simply follow the evidence where it leads. Unless we restrain the range of acceptable answers to scientific problems, we cannot guarantee appropriate, scientific conclusions. Such is our duty as educators. The following suggestions should make your job of shaping young minds somewhat easier.

We aren't troubled by you at all, at least not any more than we might be troubled by bedbugs or mosquitoes. Your existence is unfortunate, sometimes we feel the need to swat you when you're being particularly irritating, but you haven't a leg to stand on. Funnily enough, we do follow the evidence where it leads, and that isn't to your deity.

1. Be vague about what exactly is meant by the word "evolution".Use the term in the most expansive way when referring to support for or the importance of the theory ("evolution is supported by a vast amount of evidence" or “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” ). You can imply that any kind of evolution (cosmological, chemical, biological) is strongly supported by the evidence, but when pressed to defend this, drop back to the less significant but well-proven things like antibiotic resistance.

Under no circumstances should you allow any distinction between what your opponents will call microevolution (small, observable changes like antibiotic resistance) and macroevolution (major changes whose causes and even existence can only be inferred); that way you can imply that the strong support for the former is really support for the latter as well. You should implicitly assume (as you were taught) that many small changes can (and did) lead to new highly complex systems, and allow no questioning of this assertion.

Ah ,yes, screaming for evidence that is sitting right in front of you. Might I suggest actually reading the literature on the topic, since you claim to be scientists? Knowing full well you won't, have a look at articles on biogeography, DNA and molecular biology, and fossil evidence. I've kept the references simple, although they may be above the reading level of the average fundie. As for not being clear what is meant by evolution, I'll happily retreat to biological evolution by natural selection as understood by the modern synthesis. We don't allow distinction between micro and macroevolution because it happens to be a false distinction. If you'd like better evidence of that, there're always the Lenski experiments and Endler experiments, both of which deal with organisms with a more rapid generational turnover than humans. If you're trotting out the Humean problem of induction here (last sentence of the quote), you're going to tar yourself with your own brush.

2. Be prepared to reframe the argument. If you should encounter any doubt or criticism of "evolution", immediately reframe the criticism as being a promotion of intelligent design. Then stress that "intelligent design is not science", which was, of course, scientifically proven by Judge Jones in the Dover case. This has the important effect of rendering as non-science all possible criticism of our side! Logically, it works like this:

any criticism of "evolution" = promotion of ID
but ID = religion
therefore any criticism = religion!

Try to find occasions to repeat "ID is not science" in class as often as possible; if necessary, practice this several times each day in front of a mirror until you can say it convincingly. Because science has come to mean absolute truth, everything else is at best mere opinion, so it is critical that you keep ID out of the science category.

But when establishing that ID is not science, try not to use actual science to make your point. The more that facts are discussed, the more obvious it will become that both sides use the same facts, and that the different viewpoints result from philosophical biases rather than good or bad science. If your students at any point realize that ID is based on science as much as "evolution" is, you may have made converts of the most dedicated kind for the other side. The best approach is to immediately relegate ID to the category of religion or philosophy, and never let the issues be discussed.

Demarcation can present its own issues, yes. I'm perfectly happy to let ID be science. Feel free to run properly controlled experiments. test your hypotheses, and publish in the peer-reviewed journals that the rest of us use. Of course, that would mean subjecting your complete lack of evidence to criticism, or more likely getting completely flamed in the review process for not bothering to examine the body of work on whatever you're attacking (see Behe at Dover on irreducible complexity of the human immune system for an example). If we're deciding what is and isn't science, we can't use actual science to make our point, because that's called circular reasoning, rather we have to resort to philosophy of science and epistemology. ID could be considered science of the poorest form: working from an a priori supposition and then using the evidence that stems from it to support that supposition. This is what we call circular reasoning, kids.

3. Avoid the tough issues. If despite your best efforts the issues begin to be discussed, do your best to keep the conversation away from dangerous topics like "how did life get started?" and "how did complex features like cellular machinery come about?". Again, it helps to be rather vague about what you mean by "evolution"; when you point out that evolution is well-supported by the evidence, use examples of minor observable changes (bird beaks, etc.) while implying that the major, unobserved changes are also well-supported. In general, try to subtly downplay the complexity of living things.

For example, you can imply that the abundance of life on Earth means that the complexity must not be such a big deal. The popular notion that there has to be life on other planets will work in your favor, as will the abundant science fiction your students are no doubt familiar with. For example, the recent discussions of the possibility of life on Mars can easily be presented as the likelihood of life there, especially if you stick to the headlines rather than the articles themselves.

Your students' inexperience with the facts will help. If by chance there should be a more knowledgeable student in your class with the nerve to speak up, imply somehow that the student is either ignorant or superstitious. For example, you might say something like "religious fundamentalism has a place, but not in science class."
Your first "tough issue" isn't in fact within the realm of biological evolution, so that's a fun aside. Nevertheless, if we wish to address that, you might consider that a) the problem is being addressed, albeit slowly, and b) a gap in knowledge does not automatically validate your claims, it simply means we don't have an answer to that. The notion of complexity being too much to evolve amounts to an argument from ignorance (look up logical fallacies, please), despite the fact that we have clear examples of such evolution. Since you're repeating yourself, I'll refer you again to the Lenski experiments, wherein a new metabolic pathway arose in the cultured bacteria. That's pretty complex, it didn't work in each and every sample, and it blows a gaping hole in your non-argument. I suppose you'll dismiss that by calling it microevolution, despite no naturally occuring E. coli possessing that pathway. And no, I don't think religious fundamentalism has its place anywhere, including a science classroom. Espousing the viewpoint that your invisible friend created all life on earth because you can't imagine it happening another way is ignorant and superstitious.

4. Be prepared to misdirect the conversation. If things get bad and your class begins to question how random events could ever result in really complicated living things, there are at least a couple of effective strategies. One is to mention how all scientists accept evolution. If one of your students should happen to know that 700+ PhD scientists have signed a "dissent from Darwinism" statement, respond that these are only a tiny minority and imply that they are probably religiously motivated.

(As an aside, our universities simply must begin doing a better job of screening these people out, and look into revoking the degrees of trouble-makers.) Another effective ploy if ID begins to be discussed is to divert the conversation with the trustworthy "Who designed the designer?". You can easily use up half a class period that way, and be prepared next class to direct the conversation more appropriately.
  Your 700+ "scientists" include a large number of people who have PhD's in something that isn't in fact science, or were awarded by places like Patriot Bible University. Have a real read of Kent Hovind's doctoral dissertation for an example of their scholarly work, just don't do so with a mouth full of liquid.
  (spoiler:
Hello, my name is Kent Hovind. I am a creation/science evangelist. I live in Pensacola, Florida. I have been a high school science teacher since 1976. I've been very active in the creation/evolution controversy for quite some time.
)
That, and you're making an argument from popularity. Why not just point out that more than half of U.S. citizens believe in a creator? It would be equally unimportant, but lack the assumed authority of people claiming to be scientists, that's why.
Asking who designed the designer is a reasonable question for anyone who wants to halt the explanatory regress created by positing one in the first place. For that matter, positing a designer is less parsimonious than posting an undesigned universe, and therefore a hypothesis to be rejected even if it managed to explain all the facts as well as not positing one.

5. Do not hesitate to mischaracterize ID's motives. Although ID proponents, unlike creationists, are really quite good about sticking to scientific arguments, it is to your advantage to not distinguish between the two. In fact, we recommend that you always append the term "creationism" to ID so that it reads intelligent design creationism.

I would happily do so, if you hadn't done so already. You aren't sticking to science because you haven't bothered to find anything out or publish results of the research you haven't done. That, and stating that life was created is, well, creationism. Putting make-up and a dress on a pig doesn't make it a beauty pageant contestant.

6. Remember who is on your side; rely on your allies.
  I'm not going to quote this entire section because it's absolutely fucking ridiculous. If this is intended as a faux communication to actual K-12 science teachers, then preparing them for each and every one of the absurd canards you and yours are likely to trot out is a great idea. We don't ask science teachers to be scientists, whether or not we actually should, and the topics involved are broad enough to escape anyone's discipline unless they make a point of knowing what you might want to ask. Is it better that our teachers remain ignorant of the scientific consensus on (fill in topic here)? Yes, you probably think so.

Not my normal post

2010-09-19T20:44:00.000-04:00

... but this one is important. If you happen to be a resident of Wake County, NC, and reading this, you need to carefully consider who we elect to the Board of Education this fall, given the situation on the board over the past year or more. Get the scoop on each here. I urge you to pay careful attention to a candidate's stance on diversity and busing, as it has a profound impact on the well-being of all students in Wake Co. While neither group of students (low socioeconomic status or high) may make significant academic gains by being placed in the same schools, students of low SES stand to make important gains in social capital (the ability to navigate mainstream society) and those of higher SES are likely to have a greater understanding of segments of society to which they don't belong. Those of a liberal bent don't need this urging, but to those who aren't, ask yourself this: Is paying for busing now better than paying out larger sums in welfare-related programs and funneling money into failing neighbourhood schools later?

And Darth Ratty would know...

2010-09-17T00:19:00.001-04:00

Pope Joseph Ratzinger has declared that the "extreme atheism" in UK and other places is akin to Nazism. No, really, Godwin's law has come to life, and of all people to make the comparison, it happens to be someone who was a member of the Hitler Youth and the German Army circa 1944. Compulsory or not, you might think someone that had those experiences would be a tad more tactful in invoking the analogy.
   Let's talk about this...
   We can leave aside the previous experiences of the Pope, but a rudimentary examination of his comments reveals a few very obvious errors.
  1) "The tyrannical rule of the Nazis sought to eliminate God." Since the motto on WWII German belt buckles was Gott mit Uns (literally 'God is with Us'), it seems rather unlikely that a political party that had the express consent and collaboration of the Catholic Church was seeking to eliminate religion from anything. Feel free to make comparisons to whatever Marxist regime you please, but the Nazis used the church to their own ends and had no desire to eliminate it, especially since it was helping them to exterminate, well, everyone it wanted to exterminate. You might note that they were rather successful in that endeavour as well, but that's beside the point, if you don't wonder if they might have been less so if the church had chosen not to turn a blind eye (in official cases) or help (in a large number of cases. After all, these was the same religious organisation that condoned pogroms in Eastern Europe only a generation earlier.) The analogy falls apart on more important grounds as well; atheists, however extreme Ratty might consider actually speaking their mind to make them, can't be tyrannical because we aren't in power anywhere. The Christian persecution complex is fucking hilarious in this particular case, since they outnumber atheists in pretty much any nation of consequence and certainly those about which the old codger was speaking.
2) The more important point: an organisation dedicated to spreading its point of view worldwide for the last millennium, responsible for several wars and more deaths than the Nazi regime to which it compared others (think Spanish missionaries here) has decided that atheists who choose to speak their mind are "imposing their views on others." Irony, thy name is Benedict.

  The British Humanist Association has already made a rather apt statement that I'll use to close this point, since I can't put it any better:

The notion that it is non-religious people in the UK today who want to force their views on others, coming from a man whose organisation exerts itself internationally to impose its narrow and exclusive form of morality and undermine the human rights of women, children, gay people and many others, is surreal.

I'd wondered about the decision of the Catholic Church to put in power someone who was intimately associated with the Nazi Party and the former head of whatever the Inquisition calls itself these days, and frankly, I don't wonder now. If they agree with this man, they're absolutely bugfuck crazy, and at least they're making sure we can't mistake that fact.

For a bit of geeky humour, see any similarities here?

To the man in the big white house...

2010-09-11T00:24:00.001-04:00

Dear Sir,
  While I did indeed vote for you, mostly because the anti-science cranks you were running against were far more objectionable than you, you should be aware not only that you are reviled by those that supported the last inhabitant of that house of yours, but are swiftly losing the support of many of those that might have otherwise supported you. Personally, while I am not offended that you had Rick Warren speak at your inauguration (this is a nation of Christians, although not politically a 'Christian Nation'), I was not a fan of the mixing of politics and religion on that day either. You made scant reference to the nonbelievers amongst the American public, which might have won you some accolades from us if it weren't for your recent conduct.
  Firstly, while the burning of books of any form is a detestable form of protest, it is within the rights of those who wish to protest to do so. The real issue here is that those who plan to do the burning would give birth to live kittens by the dozen if someone were to do it to their book of myths and magical thinking. More so, there is a problem when we find it necessary to protest the construction of a building near the site of a national catastrophe because it happens to be of the wrong religious persuasion. Don't get me wrong, I don't support the building of any more monuments to peoples' imaginary friends than already exist, but it matters little whose imaginary friend it happens to be.
  Slightly more recently, you made the unfortunate comment that we are indeed "One nation under god." Unfortunate, because many hoped you might help us as a nation rise above sectarian nonsense; unfortunate because sectarian nonsense involves comments that deliberately leave out the 15% of your subject population that has transcended the fairy tales of our past and no longer accepts that statement as true. Pandering though it may be, there are better ways of stating your approval for the 'tolerance' (read: lack of hypocrisy) eventually shown by the conservative Xian douchenozzles that wanted to burn someone else's book of lies. That, and the scare tactics used to prevent that were equally detestable; those who are enemies of this nation because we are anathema to their particular brand of sky-fairy aren't going to hate us more for the burning of a few books when their hate is already beyond imagining.
Signed,
An Atheist who is not so much perpetually angry as disgusted with, well, society in general

Reason Obfuscates: How the Rationalist Paradigm is Limiting Understanding in Education Research

2010-09-10T20:43:00.000-04:00

The rationalist dogma that pervades education research is a methodological throwback to the masculine sciences, ignoring important critical perspectives and smothering the experiences of the individual in attempts to generalise to a larger population. Critical perspectives on education, rather than quantitative measures, allow us to tell the story of the student without judging them in terms of neo-Smithian society, describe their experiences in a rich, holistic manner. Contextualising student experiences in capitalist dogma precludes understanding of their sexual identity, just as teaching within the confines of the patriarchal system destroys the ability of the feminine to emerge in the sciences. The fictions perpetrated in the name of the sciences do no justice to the cultural realities of the individual, nor to the economy of society.
Instead, we should seek to deconstruct the cultural significance of our subjects, care about our subjects, and remove the stigma of failure in a research setting. 'It matters not that you've established nothing, so long as you've described everything,' says Jones. Likewise, Blanchard states 'The rampant masculinity and demand for evidence in reason in the sciences is contrary to the beautiful intituion and conjecture of the scientist, and thus should be eliminated to improve the discourse between scientist and science." The rationalist paradigm in research demands that we make the attempt to generalise to other situations, despite constructed reality being unknowable and without meaning if it lacks the context of cultural analysis. If a proper postdialectic discourse is to be established in education, we must recognise the futility of the educational rubicon and desublimate the matrilineal tradition in our work.
It is important to denote the deconstruction of class from the deconstruction of patriarchality in society, and the influence of each on the constructed experiences of the individual. In this there is no room for the objectivist agenda, nor should we pay heed to the crass oversights of science in the textual narrative of the persona. The only way toward a creative hermeneutic in education lies in subsuming the hegemony of rationalism.

In which I disagree with the Education Research Establishment

2010-09-07T18:34:00.006-04:00

Education research is, largely, the laughing stock of the academic community, and I'm sorry to say that we deserve it. For some reason, it was decided that education research should not follow the model of the natural sciences, nor should it prescribe to the model of the social sciences.
Failing to adhere to a natural or physical science research model makes sense, in some ways. Educators are not studying purely natural phenomena, nor are tightly designed lab experiments feasible or particularly meaningful in determining the efficacy of educational practices. There is something to be said, however, for taking a leaf from ecology in our studies of large populations of students, if we were to treat those students as part of an ecological community that has its own social niches, other 'organisms' (teachers and administrators), and a complex set of interactions. However, this is not the most pragmatic approach when other techniques have been developed to study populations of human beings.

It is the rejection of the social science model that is most disturbing. Education researchers chose long ago, whether consciously or not, to separate themselves from psychologists and anthropologists, whose methods might be useful to the study of human behaviour and interactions. Furthermore, this separation occurred prior to the cognitive revolution in psychology, so much of what is (poorly) co-opted from psychology stems from the behaviourist period; education researchers who perform experiments that mimic psychology still treat interactions as stimulus-response, with little or no reference to what's actually occurring in the black box of the mind. Likewise, techniques borrowed from anthropology fail to encompass the whole of the student experience, along with other failings to be discussed below.
Firstly, education research would be well served to follow the protocols of cognitive and experimental psychology, rather than simply teaching some aspects of developmental psych to teacher-candidates and forgetting the rest of it. For example, Piaget's timeline of cognitive development is taught, complete with ages where each stage might occur, but we fail to accurately apply these when studying learning in children, or for that matter when planning curricula. This foolishness needs to end. More importantly, we as researchers could at the least be informed by, if not work alongside, the newer disciplines of cognitive psych and cognitive neuroscience, which are explicitly devoted to understanding how the mind/brain works, rather than simply the behavioural outcomes of an accepted or proposed teaching practice.
For illustration purposes, let's attempt a thought experiment: Suppose you have developed a revolutionary new teaching practice that stems from the observed manner in which younger children learn language; children appear to learn language simply from immersion in a culture that uses that language, and through exploring the possibilities. Before we attempt to apply this method to learning something else, sat maths, what would you need to know? Would it be appropriate to find out whether we actually learn language through immersion or whether something else is going on that simply looks like that? How about whether humans can, in fact, learn something other than language in the same manner? Is there a period of development for which this capacity, even for language, is switched on and after which it is dormant? What would the consequences in terms of performance (the cliche of student achievement) if students are not equipped with the cognitive skills to learn a new concept in that manner, or if the cognitive module that allows for exploratory learning is switched off or degraded after a certain age?
None of these have been addressed by the researchers who promote what is known as constructivism, or discovery learning. Rather, the relativist philosophy that we construct our understanding of the world through our experiences (and interactions with others, in the case of social constructivists) governs the prescribed teaching methods. This completely discounts any chance of the brain having hard-wired learning mechanisms, or that it might have different hard-wired mechanisms for different types of learning. The objection that will come from those who might have dabbled in neurobiology without grasping the finer details or examining the research is that the brain has a remarkable plasticity and rewires itself based on environmental factors. This is indeed true, but the rewiring is in response to new stimuli and not creating new modules, but building upon those that are already there.
Perhaps more damningly for education researchers is the current trend that leaves out even the possibility of making proper quantitative studies of learning feasible. The Journal of Research in Science Teaching, which is the flagship journal of science education in the U.S., shows a distinct bias towards qualitative, descriptive studies that have far too small a sample size to be applicable to any situation other than the specific one examined. For a practitioner-researcher who is conducting action research in their own classroom in order to tweak their teaching style to better suit their students, this would be acceptable, but it is a complete and total waste of time for a discipline-wide journal to publish this drivel. An interview with four inner-city Hispanic females about their views of science is exactly that: the views of four people on science. I can't use that information in any way other than to pad my CV if I happen to have written it.
Anthropology, being a study of cultures and groups of people, might be better suited to study situations that arise in schools other than learning. Want to study bullying, its causes, and ways to curb it? Well, apart from the psychology of power dynamics, it is clearly useful to understand the social situations that beget and abet bullying in an effort to diffuse those situations, thus reducing the practice. Unfortunately, education's version of anthropology is deeply rooted in ideas born of feminism and post-modernism, (critical ethnography, caring theory, and other such nonsense) and purposely abandons the methods of the social science due to what appears to be a protest of a white male dominated discipline. Seriously, folks, that's tantamount to committing academic suicide. We can't generalise from a data set of 10 people, no matter how descriptive you think you can be, nor is it useful to understand how you think white male society is keeping these kids down unless you can establish that they do in fact learn better in a group of nothing but those like them. If that were the case, you might be able to establish the point that it would be useful to re-segregate schools based on ethnicity and gender, provided (and I seriously doubt this last caveat would happen) we ensure somehow that what is provided is truly equal.
So how do we as educators fix this mess and actually gain the respect of the rest of the academic community? Treat our discipline as another social science: one that understands the value and use of statistical methods, one that welcomes the work of psychologists and neuroscientists who can tell us what is happening in our students' brains, and one that uses the methods of psychology and anthropology to understand the problems we all face, rather than pretending that we're an isolated discipline that has nothing to gain from outside influences. Let's dump the bizarre association with feminist philosophy that impedes our progress. This doesn't mean that we don't have to be sympathetic to the differences between genders and cultures in our teaching, but by emphasizing that we're all human together we can start to erode those deficits that do exist. Incidentally, apart from some aspects of spatial reasoning, those deficits do not appear to be biological in nature, so they can be overcome with earlier exposure to those areas where each gender or culture is deficient. There are fewer females than males in the sciences in large part because we as teachers fail to make it interesting to them, not due to any lack of ability or artificial means of keeping them out. Most importantly, it might just be possible to develop teaching methods that are informed by how the mind actually learns, and tailor them by subject area to those means, rather than pretending we have a one-size fits-all solution. We can drop all the pseudoscience around things like learning styles, stop claiming "Johnny/Mary can't learn this the way you want to teach it because of (insert bullshit sociological theory here)", and make some real forward progress on how to teach children effectively. That is, after all, why you claim to have pursued this profession. Stop asking "what will this publication do for my professional reputation," and start asking "what can we as a research community learn from this."

An Open Letter to the Tea Party

2010-09-06T14:15:00.003-04:00

To those involved in the 'movement' known as the Tea Party,
I can and do empathise with your frustration and anger directed and the political process in this country, and I fully support your right to publicly declare your opinions, no matter who distasteful I might find them. We should have that much in common, but the evidence of your practices would incline me to believe that you don't feel I have any right to opinions that differ from your own nor do you think I should be allowed to voice those opinions.
Perhaps what is required is a rational, evidence-based understanding of the issues on which you choose to make your stand, as excerpted from the Tea Party website.

Non-negotiable core beliefs
Illegal Aliens Are Here illegally.
Pro-Domestic Employment Is Indispensable.
Stronger Military Is Essential.
Special Interests Eliminated.
Gun Ownership Is Sacred.
Government Must Be Downsized.
National Budget Must Be Balanced.
Deficit Spending Will End.
Bail-out And Stimulus Plans Are Illegal.
Reduce Personal Income Taxes A Must.
Reduce Business Income Taxes Is Mandatory.
Political Offices Available To Average Citizens.
Intrusive Government Stopped.
English As Core Language Is Required.
Traditional Family Values Are Encouraged.

Common Sense Constitutional
Conservative Self-Governance

Let us begin at the top of this laundry list of talking points: illegal immigrants are here illegally. Due to current immigration policies and the location of most of those who wish to immigrate to the United States, this is in fact true. However, what is being neglected is whether or not they should in fact be here illegally, or whether we might consider amending our immigration policies so that the door to legal immigration is not shut on these individuals. You call for deportation, others might call for finding a way to let these people enter and stay in a manner that does not contravene the law, since they happen to perform tedious, labour-intensive work that is vital to our nation's economy, as immigrants (including many of your own ancestors) did within a couple generations of arrival in the United States. Illegal immigrants, particularly Hispanics, aren't taking jobs that the rest of us want, they're cleaning toilets, harvesting crops, and working construction in hundred degree heat for less than minimum wage. If you happen to be Irish, Italian, German, Polish, or any of any European stock aside from English and perhaps French (and I mean pure lineage all the way back), there's a strong probability that your ancestors did many of the same tasks (substitute shovelling coal, working in a factory, or laying railroads if you must).
Pro-domestic employment is indispensable to whom? Certainly not those corporations that have chosen to move their industrial operations overseas, or they'd have continued to employ Americans and remained here. This conflicts with items further down your list, as I will demonstrate when we reach those points.
A "stronger military" is essential if we plan to fight a large-scale conventional war or several smaller conflicts scattered across the world. Thus, this point is only valid if we choose to follow a jingoist foreign policy, act unilaterally, and generally irritate those with whom we should be cooperating economically.
I hate to break it to you, but you are most definitely one of the special interests you wish to eliminate, and so are the petrochemical robber barons that you elected President in 1988, 2000, and 2004.
Gun ownership, in terms of hunting weapons and those reasonably deemed useful for home defence, is a right guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment to the constitution. The idea of something being sacred is frankly rather silly, and needs no further discussion because it is at best a non-idea. But, in all fairness, I will address your meaningless notion: if the framers of the Constitution did indeed mean for us to arm ourselves in preparation to overthrow a potentially tyrannical government, modern military technology has put that beyond the financial means of the people for whom it was intended. You can't afford a tank, nor do you have the slightest clue what to do with one if you did.
Downsizing government is a mantra amongst fiscal conservatives, but it is mildly ironic that you pair this mantra with the call for regulations on national language, a larger military, keeping corporations in the U.S. and restricting who they are allowed to hire, and closing the borders. All of these require a larger government in some areas. What you really mean is that you want those aspects of government that provide services for those who have been historically downtrodden by you and your ideologue compatriots to be downsized.
I'll lump two together here: you call for a balanced budget and no more deficit spending. The majority of our deficit spending over the last thirty years has been in support of the military industrial complex and to finance our military and economic interests overseas. Hello, self-contradiction. Again, you simply don't want any of your tax money to do to those brown people across town who can't afford enough to eat on their own.
Bail-out and stimulus plans are illegal? Odd, they were passed by Congress, which makes the fucking laws. You might find a refresher course in American government to be useful. If the term you're searching for is "unconstitutional," you might re-read the Supreme Court Decisions on implied powers, namely McCulloch v.Maryland 1819. This, by the way, falls within your time frame of framers and founding fathers, just so you know (Marshall and Hamilton).
Reducing personal taxes would be nice, we can all agree on that. Perhaps a restructuring of the tax system so that people pay more for what they spend and use than what they earn could be arranged. Reducing both personal and business taxes might make finding money for the larger, stronger military you want a bit difficult, however.
Political offices should by all means be available to "average citizens," if by average citizens you mean that everyone has a chance to run and be elected to office. On the other hand, your view of "average citizen" is restricted to people who look, think, and talk like you, isn't it? The main problem with this idea is that the average citizen, even if we remove your probable racial and religious qualifiers, is still a flaming idiot. I don't particularly want Joe the Plumber making decisions that affect the whole of the country, because it's rather likely that his grasp of international politics and basic economics is somewhat worse than his grasp of, say, installing copper pipe. For some reason, you've decided that above-average citizens, at least intellectually, aren't as valuable as John Mainstreet from Podunk, USA. I'd be interested to see how such an experiment would turn out... preferably from a safe distance (Mars, for choice, since he'd also have access to thermonuclear weapons).
Stopping intrusive government is a great idea. Let's begin with the Patriot Act, passed by neo-cons to allow spying on people within the U.S. regardless of citizenship or intent. I don't really want the F.B.I. reading my email, because frankly it's none of their business what I choose to write. My actions, on the other hand, are well within their jurisdiction.
Requiring English as a core language is yet another way of saying "we don't want any more Hispanics here, and the ones that are here need to leave." These people didn't grow up speaking English, and they need time to learn it. Until such time, they can't really function as members of our society, legal or not. This has the same effect, and quite probably same motivation, as literacy tests for blacks in the Jim Crow South. I can understand why you don't want them to vote, they won't agree with you on all kinds of issues. Disenfranchisement is a useful means of silencing possible political opposition, but don't expect the rest of us to sit back and pretend it's ethical or acceptable.
Ah, traditional family values... and "encouraging" means legal enforcement? The bridge to the theocracy you so dearly want lies that way. Whose traditions? Those of Abraham, where it's all right to sacrifice a son to your invisible friend? Those of Lot, for whom it was deemed moral to give his daughters to the mob to be raped so that his male guests would be left alone? Those of the Southern Baptist Convention, which believes that the man is the head of the household, women should be pregnant, barefoot and silent, and that homosexuality should be illegal because their invisible friend likes to interfere in peoples' bedrooms? Honestly folks, Leave it to Beaver was fiction, and subjugating slightly more than half of your population because they happen not to have a penis isn't economically viable even if it were ethical. I suspect you'd also like to bring back lynchings, ban inter-racial marriage, and expand those places where non-Christians don't have a chance in your fictional hell of holding office as well. Keep your prying noses out of other peoples' business, and you can shove your "traditional family values" in the same place that your fabricated account of the "America that was" came from... your imagination.

Some other points to address

The Tea Party dream includes all who possess a strong belief in the foundational Judaic/Christian values embedded in our great founding documents.

Where in those founding documents, particularly the ones carrying weight of law, are those foundational Judaic/Christian values? Of our "founding fathers", Washington, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, and Jefferson were all Deists or Atheists (Deist to be fair). Some thoughts from those founders:

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries." -James Madison

"I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." Thomas Paine

" Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries." Treaty of Tripoli, 1796, as authored by John Barlow and signed by John Adams, ratified by Congress.

You were saying? Oh, right, all the "In God we Trust" and "One Nation Under God" stuff... well those are more recent additions. "In God we Trust" was added to paper money in 1957 (although it was placed on some coins during the Civil War solely in the Union, which also used religious sentiment to justify abolition and the war in general). "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, in part as a means of further separating us from the (at the time) Communist enemy, since Communism recognises religion as nothing more than a means of socio-political control. Sorry folks, but the "Judaic/Christian foundation" is, like that 1950's dream world you invented, completely in your mind. Glen Beck's call for a "return to faith" does nothing better than show his ignorance.

He believes the responsibility of our beloved nation is entrenched within the hearts of true American Patriots from all walks of life, every race, religion and national origin, all sharing a common belief in the values which made and keep our beloved nation great

Deifying capitals should frighten anyone with an ounce of sense, and the statement about including everyone reeks of bullshit when your movement consists almost solely of white Christians, just to point out the inconsistency.

"Obama is a Muslim."
"Obama is a Communist."
"Obama is an Atheist."
"Obama isn't an American citizen because we don't have his birth certificate."

I don't particularly want to defend Obama, but I do want to attack your ridiculous arguments. It is ideologically contradictory for someone to be both Muslim and a Communist (Communism is atheistic in its outlook). It is entirely possible that he could be both a Communist and an atheist, neither of which damage his credentials whatsoever. I suspect the issues you have are that 1) Obama isn't a neo-con lackey and 2) Obama isn't white. The resistance to H. Clinton wasn't solely because she was female, but it does seem like she might not quite fit your "traditional family values" view of what a woman is supposed to be like, as Princess Palin does. The greatest absurdity of all is the "birther" nonsense. You forget, people had to run against Obama that weren't Republican. Can you really imagine that Clinton, Dodd, or Richardson wouldn't have exposed that Obama was disqualified for office in order to win in the primaries?
Some things that might be more worrying about your movement: the constant barrage of terms like patriot, the iconography from WWI and WWII posters on Tea Party affiliated websites, and all this 'bring back our glorious past' drivel. You're treading dangerously close to the core tenets of Fascism with your rhetoric, although I suspect the propagandists involved are aware that they've stolen a few lessons from Goebbels.

The view through your underpants must be great...

2010-09-05T19:39:00.005-04:00

Excerpt from a Facebook post and conversation (I'll leave the usage and grammar alone, as it's too easy a target):

Brandy S. i cant believe that they are putting this shit up!!!! its FN RETARDED!!!!!! LETS JUST LET THE BASTARDS WHO BLEW US UP HAVE A PLACE TO WORSHIP WHERE WE GOT BLOWN UP AT!!!! ITS ALMOST LIKE A SHRINE FOR THEM FOR WHAT THEY DID TO US!!!! F THAT BS

I'm flying this flag to oppose the Muslim worship center at Ground Zero.
I am the 420,516th person to fly the flag in opposition of Muslim mosque at Ground Zero. I hope 5 million will join me! No app install required.
4 hours ago via Being Conservative - Fly the Flag · Comment · Like · Fly your Flag
Brandy S. i wonder how long it will take an american to blow up there stupid little shrine!!!!
3 hours ago · Like
April D. That's OBAMA for ya! Obama= One Big Ass Mistake America!
2 hours ago · Like
Brandy S. Hell yea!!!!
2 hours ago · Like

NOTE: In deference to another with the same name as the original poster, I have replaced all surnames with their initial.

   Where to start? There's this funny little clause in the Bill of Rights regarding freedom of religion, and the practice thereof that protects the building of a mosgue, synagogue, church, temple to Cthulu, or whatever other building of worship you want to construct wherever you want to build it. Presuming that no one's contravening any zoning laws (and they appear not to be), there is no legal reason why someone can't build a mosque at/near Ground Zero, nor should there be.
   Frankly, I'm not a fan of Islam (in fact I'm quite the opposite), but lumping every last Muslim in with those who committed the attacks on the World Trade Centers is a bit absurd. There're no outrageous protests against building Xian churches near the Oklahoma Federal Building, despite the fact that Timothy McVeigh and company were (at least nominally) Christian, and there's a very simple reason for that: those who perpetrated the attacks on the WTC spoke a different language, ate different foods, and looked different from the average American. Sorry folks, you're being racist fucktards rather than putting forth any sort of rational argument. The use of multiple exclamation points indicates you're wearing your underpants on your head ( or perhaps a tinfoil hat), and the bizarre reference to Obama just confirms that your brain has been addled by Faux News and the rhetoric of the Tea Party. It's a freakin' shame that so many of those who share my citizenship share those views, because the deluded, drooling masses of neo-con fools will certainly be out in full voting force this November. Wrapping yourself in the flag doesn't make your intolerance and hate any less ugly, nor does it make your attempts at revisionist history and the nostalgia for a nation that never existed isn't fooling anyone with half a brain. Those tactics seem hauntingly familiar though, say circa 1933?
   The call to violence in return for the building of a place of worship is a bit worrisome as well... it's almost like we think we're at war with all Muslims, rather than a select group of terrorists. If you're reasonable, liberal by most standards, or happen to belong to the vast groups of brown people, non-Christians, homosexuals, or anyone else that doesn't quite fit the conservative Christian agenda you might want to consider leaving this benighted nation. Don't take that as a "love it or leave it" comment, I'll be along shortly.

I'll give this a try...

2010-08-29T01:35:00.004-04:00

It's been a while since I read The God Delusion, so I'll have a go at something that was brought up in my philosophy of natural science class on Thursday: The ontological argument.
It reads something like this (Anselm's original, as taken from wikipedia):

1. If I am thinking of the Greatest Being Thinkable, then I can think of no being greater
1a. If it is false that I can think of no being greater, it is false I am thinking of the Greatest Being Thinkable
2. Being is greater than not being
3. If the being I am thinking of does not exist, then it is false that I can think of no being greater.
4. If the being I am thinking of does not exist, then it is false that I am thinking of the Greatest Being Thinkable
Conclusion: If I am thinking of the Greatest Being Thinkable, then I am thinking of a being that exists

   I'll grant 1 and 1a, simply because it's workable logic. The flaw in this argument comes with #2, which is an unsupported assertion in and of itself. if 2 is false, then so are 3,4, and 5. Perfection does not necessarily equal existence; in fact, from experiential evidence, nothing that exists in the physical world would meet a true definition of perfection.
"(insert special pleading and whining about how dietyX doesn't exist in the physical world)"
   That's all lovely, but something that interferes with the physical world, as the judeo-christian god does, has to have a physical manifestation, at least in the form of energy, which is also not perfect. Energy in any given form is conserved overall, but lost to whatever system it inhabits through entropy, which doesn't sound particularly perfect to me.
   Let's pretend for a moment that the physical manifestation of said deity was actually a carpenter-mystic in a remote corner of the Roman Empire about two-thousand years ago, just for the sake of the argument. I'm granting something here that I fully deny in other cases, but it makes it fun, and the post longer than a paragraph. If that were actually true, it would mean that the physical version of this most perfect being was subject to doubts, fears, and allowing itself to be nailed to a plank of wood after being beaten and humiliated. Again, this is not perfect.
   More fun with perfection: this perfect being is supposedly perfectly omnipotent, and perfectly benevolent. That would mean that there is nothing beyond the ability of said being, and that said being is kind beyond what we can possibly conceive of as kind. Yet said being also allows nasty, horrible, evil things to happen on a daily basis (leaving aside all of those that are attributed to said being in holy writ and by fools like Pat Robertson). So this perfect being is either not omnipotent, and therefore cannot stop the evil that men do, or is not benevolent because it simply doesn't give a shit. Either way, not a positive argument in favour of its existence. Moreover, omnipotence is, in and of itself, logically contradictory. If you can do anything, you can then make an object that you cannot move, which means you aren't omnipotent (paraphrased Dawkins here, there are more eloquent ways of expressing that notion). The professor, when confronted with this, had to add a qualifier to the statement, claiming that the deity in question can do anything that isn't logically contradictory. Against this I would have to set a proper definition of omnipotence, and the list of logically contradictory things attributed to said deity.
   Sorry Plantinga, despite my not wanting to read your drivel in the first place, you're still wrong on this one.

This douchenozzle works at a public university?

2010-07-11T20:21:00.003-04:00

http://townhall.com/columnists/MikeAdams/2010/07/01/an_immodest_proposal/page/full

Mike S. Adams is a professor (passed over for tenure) at UNCW, my alma mater. He's also an ultra right-wing Dominionist bigot:

I can’t stand atheists. And I plan to do something about them. Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court has given me a powerful tool to use in my war against the godless. Earlier this week, the Court ruled that a public university may require all student organizations to admit any student as a voting member or officer. The decision applies even to a student who is openly hostile to the group's fundamental beliefs.
So, when I get back to the secular university in August, I plan to round up the students I know who are most hostile to atheism. Then I’m going to get them to help me find atheist-haters willing to join atheist student groups across the South. I plan to use my young fundamentalist Christian warriors to undermine the mission of every group that disagrees with me on the existence of God.

Gee Mike, really? That's too bad, I can't stand foul, overbearing Fascists who wrap themselves in a flag and drape their neck with a cross... I plan to email the provost and chancellor demanding that you be fired, organise a number of people to do the same, and get anyone I can to refuse to donate to UNCW until you're no longer employed there.

That means an invading group can turn a smaller, weaker group into second class citizens on campus. That’s what I intend to do to those groups who do not believe in God.

Well, at least you've set an attainable goal. In fact, that's already been managed through most of our country, and certainly in NC, where you can't hold public office without professing belief in a god.

The Court acknowledges that such “accept all comers” policies may not in fact be desirable for maintaining robust debate on public college campuses. I concur. And I like it that way. I do not seek robust debate. I seek power over the godless heathen dissident.

Ah... a clear admission of a dominionist agenda. Thanks, Mike.
While there are enough patches of Glen Beck like humour in that article that Adams may be able to wriggle out by crying "satire", the university would be doing its students a favour by dismissing this tool. One last thing, Mike: we're not impressed with your "prof of the year" award... quality faculty aren't determined by popularity contests, but rather by their contributions to academic journals. Try posting your CV on your page rather than your NRA membership.

Raleigh PD, inspiring confidence

2010-07-07T23:15:00.002-04:00

Evidence?

2010-04-24T19:32:00.004-04:00

   I spend so much time tearing into other people's ludicrous claims on here that I thought I'd espouse some of my own; these are to some degree a tongue in cheek stab at the less scientific aspects of evolutionary psychology, while also being an unsupported hypothesis of my own.

   Humans are much like lemmings. Not in the sense that we're small rodents, but in the sense that we are the animals in the urban legend about creatures that are so blindly obedient to their programming as to follow one another over a cliff edge. We're so enamoured with disaster (see a large portion of what is put out as entertainment by Hollywood) that we sidle closer to whatever the disaster is with a curious expression on our faces. Humans are the ones who hear an odd noise in the night, and rather than hiding sensibly, we go to investigate it only to be shot by the person who merely wanted to make off with the silverware. We slow down to sneak a peek at the carnage at the scene of a car accident, sometimes causing another in our distraction. People escalate what should be mild disagreements over things like, oh, putting our glass in the wrong spot in the bar or flirting with someone's significant other (often without knowing that he or she is attached) into a life and death struggle, or at least what would be without the intervention of people paid to do so. Our territorial pissings and petty jealousies are part of our programming, as much as the lemmings' programming (in urban legend at least) is to follow the same ancient migration routes without regard for where they actually lead now.
   Now, while this is based on simple observation, one can promote a hypothesis from the ideas above. Perhaps people are so stupid as to stand around the burning building that has a fair chance of exploding not out of curiosity, but because we are all imbued with the propensity to ignore danger because it helps the rest of the species when some of us act that stupidly. This is naive group selection at its finest, but doesn't require that there are different behaviours programmed in us, rather that we all share that tendency from a distant common ancestor, and that it has prevented human overpopulation in times of famine, climate change, etc.
   Take it with a grain, nay a shaker, of salt.

They're more bigoted too...

2010-04-15T11:31:00.004-04:00

NY Times says that Tea Party Backers are wealthier and more educated than the population as a whole... I think this article bears examination.
Firstly, this was determined by a phone survey, which included a whopping 1500 people (ok, almost 1600), which calls into question the validity of any of the data based on sample size and how representative the sample actually is of the American people. I'll be fair, and pretend that these issues don't exist for the sake of argument:
According to the survey, about 18% of the population supports the Tea Party movement, stemming from the bailout and continuing into resistance of Obama's health care initiatives. There's nothing cited in the article to substantiate the headline, whatsoever, so we're left to take the author's word for that. If it proved true, it would lend some credibility to the assertion that this is a class issue more than anything else (Yes, Jacqueline Holman, it means I'd have to agree with you on parts of this, since that's where the evidence lies). I'm inclined to buy the first half of that thesis, based on the selfish greed that drives the whole "I don't want to share my money with people who didn't earn it, even if it keeps them alive" sentiment behind the Tea Parties. I'm not terribly inclined to accept the better educated aspect, as it also cites that those people involved in the movement tend to be older Americans, who, quite frankly, didn't need to be better educated to compile the wealth that some of these people have. It could just as easily be a function of the good old boy networks, particularly since 80% of the people who identified with it were white males, and 98% were white.
Some of the other numbers are equally interesting... such as that 25% of them think that Obama is favouring blacks or the 90% that think America is headed in the wrong directtion. This reeks, unfortunately for those involved, of "I don't want teh Black as POTUS". Too far you say?

They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.

Some of the other quotes are rather telling as well:

“I just feel he’s getting away from what America is,” said Kathy Mayhugh, 67, a retired medical transcriber in Jacksonville. “He’s a socialist. And to tell you the truth, I think he’s a Muslim and trying to head us in that direction, I don’t care what he says. He’s been in office over a year and can’t find a church to go to. That doesn’t say much for him.”

Well, Kathy, you first need to support that initial statement with something, and then find some evidence other than his nonattendance of church to support the idea that Obama's a Muslim. Personally, it sounds a whole lot more like he doesn't believe much in terms of religion, particularly since he actually acknowledged nonbelievers in his inauguration speech. But you wouldn't think of that, because it's unthinkable to you that someone wouldn't believe in doG at all. What's more fun is the assertion that socialism and Islam are linked, because there's a complete lack of evidence correlating the two. In fact, I would argue that proper Christianity, that is actually based on the things attributed to their zombie lord, would be rather socialist, because many of those statements involve letting go of wealth and caring for your neighbours. (This might actually count as a point in favour of Xians, if they bothered to follow that part).

“The only way they will stop the spending is to have a revolt on their hands,” Elwin Thrasher, a 66-year-old semiretired lawyer in Florida, said in an interview after the poll. “I’m sick and tired of them wasting money and doing what our founders never intended to be done with the federal government.”

A revolt of 60-some year olds? Oh NOES... whatever will we do? Perhaps cut off their medical care, and let them die out?
Speaking of medical care, isn't it a bit hypocritical that people who are against socialised health care in any form (and this new act hardly counts) are the same ones who are crying "hands off my Medicare/Social Security"? Those are socialised programmes as well, and according to the Tea Partiers, worth the price that's being paid for them. I agree with them on the last point, it's the selfish sentiment of the first with which I take issue.

But Christians Aren't Dangerous... wait..wtf?

2010-03-29T22:54:00.006-04:00

Christian Militia accused of plotting to kill cops.

Nine alleged members of a Christian militia group that was girding for battle with the Antichrist were charged Monday with plotting to kill a police officer and slaughter scores more by bombing the funeral — all in hopes of touching off an uprising against the U.S. government.

Classy, especially the plan to bomb a funeral, that's a nice touch. There are sure not to be any children or anything like that at one of those. Before we simply condemn these people as domestic terrorist wackjobs, and claim that religion has nothing to do with it, we should examine some of what the people associated with them say about this group, as well as what the group itself says.

"It started out as a Christian thing," Stone's ex-wife, Donna Stone, told The Associated Press. "You go to church. You pray. You take care of your family. I think David started to take it a little too far."

Started?! No, lady, I think he's gone well beyond started here.

Hutaree says on its Web site its name means "Christian warrior" and describes the word as part of a secret language few are privileged to know. The group quotes several Bible passages and declares: "We believe that one day, as prophecy says, there will be an Anti-Christ. ... Jesus wanted us to be ready to defend ourselves using the sword and stay alive using equipment."

A secret language that other people aren't given to know, there's a spectacular way to make your followers feel special. Actually, all sarcasm aside, that may be the only intelligent thing this loon put together, if he didn't believe it himself. Notice the reliance on Iron-Age mythology to support their position?

The wife of one of the defendants described Hutaree as a small group of patriotic, Christian buddies who were just doing survival training.
"It consisted of a dad and two of his sons and I think just a couple other close friends of theirs," said Kelly Sickles, who husband, Kristopher, was among those charged. "It was supposed to be a Christian group. Christ-like, right, so why would you think that's something wrong with that, right?"
Sickles said she came home Saturday night to find her house in Sandusky, Ohio, in disarray. Agents seized the guns her husband collected as a hobby and searched for bomb-making materials, she said, but added: "He doesn't even know how to make a bomb. We had no bomb material here."
She said she couldn't believe her 27-year-old husband could be involved in anything violent.
"It was just survival skills," she said. "That's what they were learning. And it's just patriotism. It's in our Constitution."

Of course. How could something based on the idea that this life isn't important in the face of one you'll live after you die be dangerous? What could possibly be wrong with that? They're just a bunch of good Christian men practising survival skills in the hopes that they get to use them when they bring about the downfall of the U.S. and plunge us all into a civil war. And the Marxist guerillas in Central American were just a bunch of poor people who decided they wanted to practice survival skills in case their democratic (or dictatorial) but capitalist regimes fell apart, rather than a bunch of violent individuals who were preparing for a coup. (Notice I've avoided the fascist comparison here, because it's too easy, not to mention overused.) The man's wife is clearly not in denial, either.

Rather than continuing to quote from the news story, let's have a look at the website of this group, shall we? (Warning: the writing quality on that site is on par with with of a middle school drop-out, and the thinking doesn't even meet that pithy standard. Some things cannot be unseen.)
Hutaree Home Page

The site itself has a camouflage background, complete with links that explain their bizarre doctrine and a reference to something called the "Christian Colonial Republic," which is something I certainly don't want to see come to fruition. Among their listed information sources are the World Nut Daily (unsurprising, that), Jack VanImpe Ministries (you can find him on cable Xian broadcasts along with Benny Hinn and the rest of them), and Real Truth magazine, which appears to be nothing short of really conservative, really obsessed with apocalyptic fantasy, and really like something out of a Hal Lindsey novel.
The doctrine of the Hutaree reveals that they think they're actually out to save the world in the name of their zombie god, and that they will in turn receive eternal life for their efforts. Remember, Xianity isn't supposed to be dangerous (see quotes above).
As for the passages from teh Babble, for any religious readers, we can give those a fair examination as well. The site itself cites Luke 22:35-37 as the reason why they are supposed to prepare themselves for war in the name of their deity, which reads:

And He said to them, “When I sent you without money bag, knapsack, and sandals, did you lack anything?” So they said, “Nothing.” 36, Then he said to them, “But now, he who has a money bag, let him take it, and likewise a knapsack; and he who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one. 37, “For I say to you that this which is written must be accomplished in me: ‘And He was numbered with transgressors,’ For the things concerning Me have an end.”

(followed by the statement that this clearly justifies the position of the militia).
Context might have some bearing here: this passage is part of the discussion before Jesus' betrayal and the Peter's denial, where he seemingly tells his followers to defend themselves against the priests that are coming to take him. The verse immediately following the quote states that two swords is enough, which might also seem to imply that there is no need for everyone to arm themselves, or , just possibly, for them to form a militia? I'm certainly not a theologian, but they seem to be taking things just a wee bit out of context.
The synopsis? These people are seriously deluded, and while they have severe right-wing leanings, the stated reason for their training, and ostensibly for their planned attacks, is explicitly religious. Can we quit pretending that these are just harmless stories that give people comfort now?

But

2010-03-29T22:54:00.001-04:00

Jim Jefferies on Religion

2010-03-29T16:57:00.001-04:00

Not original for me, but worth having archived... Enjoy.

Well, the Pledge is safe...

2010-03-16T10:20:00.002-04:00

The Federal Court of Appeals for District 9 ruled against Newdow. Again.
The Yahoo article is more depressing yet, and I'd happily rebut some of the fucktards on there if they could grasp the words.

Here's a better suggestion for their pledge:

From "Life in Hell", 16 Dec 94,

I pledge allegiance to and wrap myself in the flag of the United States Against Anything Un-American and to the Republicans for which it stands, two nations, under Jesus, rich against poor, with curtailed liberty and justice for all except blacks, homosexuals, women who want abortions, Communists, welfare queens, treehuggers, feminazis, illegal immigrants, children of illegal immigrants, and you if you don't watch your step.

Just for lolz

2010-03-08T20:22:00.003-05:00

I've been wanting to share this sign since I saw it. 95th and Columbus in NYC.

Hitch's updated 10 Commandments

2010-03-04T17:51:00.001-05:00

Not as funny as Carlin's, but more thought provoking all the same.

Fun with Physics

2010-03-01T15:05:00.003-05:00

I don't post on things like this often, but I should do so more. My students completed an inquiry lab today, wherein they were asked to use foam pipe insulation to construct a "roller coaster" track for a marble, and then later determine how Newton's Laws apply to making their design work, as well as calculating the kinetic energy of the marble at the bottom of each hill. Here're some videos (I'm not posting the ones that clearly show faces, as I'm not certain who has given permission and who hasn't. Besides, the permission slips were from the school system, and this isn't their site.)

And no, they don't always work as planned.

An Excellent Summation

2010-02-27T19:35:00.001-05:00

How does homeopathy work?

Further questions?

Ideological nonsense...

2010-02-20T09:02:00.005-05:00

is ideological nonsense, regardless of the source, and it crosses lines of religious belief, political affiliation, and education level.

Self-identified Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to have 4-year college degrees.

Low-income voters tend to favor the Democratic Party while high-income voters tend to support the Republican Party. President George W. Bush won 41% of the poorest 20% of voters in 2004, 55% of the richest twenty percent, and 53% of those in between. In the 2006 House races, the voters with incomes over $50,000 were 49% Republican, while those under were 38%.[55]

from Wikipedia, so we can take it with a grain of salt (the figure is from a Pew survey).

The point of sharing this is to debunk the notion that the feelings of anti-intellectualism, exemplified by Palin, have roots in a class/educational divide. The teabagger, Glen Beck bullshit spewed forth by Repubs is certainly a function of something, but the data suggests that Repubs are also more likely to be educated and have a greater income than those who are not subscribing to an anti-intellectual agenda. They may hate what they perceive as liberal and educated, but they themselves are also educated, and make the same or better money than those they disparage. Irrationality is irrational, however you choose to frame it. Some people need to adjust their bullshit detectors to home in on liberal bullshit, rather than just that put forth by the right.
To relate this directly to a previous post and it's comments: It's nice to be able to say that the reasons behind the attempted segregation in Wake Co. and the backlash against Ms. Hussain are for reasons of class, but both are coming from the same source: middle to upper class, college-educated whites. Race issues anyone? Perhaps not, as that requires examination as well, but let's not project our beliefs onto the situation without examining the data.

Sayonara, Del Burns

2010-02-16T20:43:00.003-05:00

Superintendent Del Burns, of WCPSS, has resigned, stating that he cannot in good conscience work for the new school board. Whilst I am not a fan of Dr. Burns, I do feel badly for the citizens that did not elect the new majority of right-wing, anti-education bigots to the school board; everyone's children are going to suffer the consequences of a knee-jerk election.
Dr. Burns is largely, although not solely, responsible for the well-intentioned but poorly considered attempts at school reform centred around the PLT/PLC system of Rick DuFour. Like many education reforms before it, it was adopted long before the verdict was in on the efficacy of the approach, and based on the data available at All Things PLC, namely anecdotes and the most ad hoc of regression trends, the verdict is that DuFour has concocted a lovely scheme to make money that does little for learning. In that regard, I'm not sorry to see the man leave.
On the other hand, he is/was a voice of reason on the topic of diversity, choosing to continue WCPSS policy of shipping students a fair way from their homes to balance schools ethnically and economically. This, while not something that has an effect on student academic performance as evidenced in Greensboro and Charlotte, does prevent the creation of low-income sewers of schools that can't attract quality teachers (read: nearly every inner-city school you can imagine) and promote an understanding of the rest of the world in all types of students. Neighbourhood schools, especially if you read the comments on the above and every other N&O article on education, are code for "I don't want my kid goin' to school with no darkies." It's unfortunate that de facto segregation was the most attractive option to voters this past fall, since those of us who didn't think it was that great an idea didn't storm the polls like those who did.
From the comments on the site

Burns has been just like all the other life long "educators", out of touch with the needs of the kids, parents, and communities in Wake Co.

Really?! Why do ignorant fucktards feel that because they happened to go through school, they know more than people whose profession and life's work are in education? This is perhaps the most frustrating thing about working in education.
More "Joe the Plumber" right-wing, blue collar bullshit

One of the things I've been noticing lately is that some people seem to feel that college degrees trump intelligence, experience and integrity.

That's right buddy, your personal experiences as a car salesman or construction worker trump the combined learning of academia and the actual classroom experience of former teachers. Well done.
Wake County, you're going to end up getting what you asked for... unfortunately it isn't what your children deserve. Good-bye, Del Burns, and hello to the South before Brown v. Board. Luckily, I won't be sticking around to welcome in the return to a bygone era of fascist family values with you. Perhaps you can pray about what to do when most of your qualified staff follows suit over the next few years. After all, you've done nothing so far, why not continue?

Why I Shouldn't Post This...

2010-02-15T20:19:00.006-05:00

As I was about to write this post, which I fully intend to write, I noted this lovely article in the N&O
: A Middle school teacher in my district was suspended for comments posted to her Facebook page. This isn't unusual in and of itself, it's been done elsewhere before this. The difference is that she posted comments related to students leaving a Bible on her desk (from her surname she is certainly of Middle Eastern descent and ostensibly Muslim?) and that the parents of her students were "bigoted, stupid, and uncaring." She also mentioned that she was "able to shame her students". Now, investigation of that final comment is the only thing that seems to be a legal reason for suspension, since the others amount to her right to free speech and/or her being persecuted, not the other way around. I don't doubt that Wake Co. has a legitimate excuse for her suspension, but I seriously doubt their motives.

Now to the meat of the post: I attended a January graduation ceremony because a number of my former students were graduating. For the most part, they were graduating early, not a semester late. The part of this that stuck in my head, however, was that there was a graduation speech delivered, not by a member of the faculty or graduating class, but by a pastor at a local church of which our principal is a member. Yes, that's right, a member of the clergy was asked to give a "message", for which he chose the life of David, complete with passages and Biblical references. While I'm not sure where else he would have found information on him, since most of what we know of him is from that fictional source. The speech included some decent worldly advice, but also some outright Christian messages, as well as direct reading of a Psalm. From what I remember, that pretty well matches what a sermon is.... how is this legal? Our public schools should not be a recruiting ground for local churches.

UPDATE PZ Myers of Pharyngula has picked up the first part of my post... although not due in any way to me: here

Change of plan...

2010-02-15T20:14:00.001-05:00

I'm not going to continue posting the Evo Ed series at this point, as I've submitted it to JRST for publication... Once copyright issues are ironed out, I'll continue in that vein.

Draconian policies?

2010-01-06T19:40:00.003-05:00

WCPSS mandates a long-term suspension for a number of violations of the student code of conduct, and while many of these are offences for which most people would agree a child should be suspended, the repercussions of long term suspensions aren't well publicised. Students who are suspended for 365 days are placed in an alternative education setting; this punishment doesn't necessarily affect their academic progress. So, why then, are students who are suspended for less than 365 but more than 10 days not provided a reasonable means of getting an education? If a student is merely suspended for the rest of the school year, they're allowed to take 2 courses online. This assumes, of course, that the student has internet access, and that for some reason they only need to earn 2 of the 8 credits they can usually gain in a school year. If a student has internet access, but is suspended for the remainder of the year before the first semester is over, they can get a total of 2 credits, and if they don't have internet access they can't even earn that. WCPSS penalises students by automatically holding them back a year for certain offences, in essence. That has to be changed.

Definition of Irony

2009-12-29T22:32:00.002-05:00

Ben Stein has been the root of games of creationist 'whack-a-mole' and here he is referencing it in his commercial for Free Score. Incidentally, this isn't the legitimate site for free credit reports, so don't buy into his BS. Anyone out there who can verify Stein's credentials as an economist, because I haven't seen him in anything other than commercials, Expelled, and The Wonder Years ?

I was starting to feel a bit stupid...

2009-12-08T13:32:00.004-05:00

Donald Hoffman provies what he regards as a strong criticism to Dehaene on the Edge.org site here. The initial attempts at refutation revolve around the idea of quantum computation, wherein Hoffman states that quantum computation (citing a study in Nature in 2007) is responsible for photosynthesis in plants and green sulfur bacteria, and therefore could be coopted by natural selection for other purposes, such as consciousness. Well, that's a nice thought, but doesn't that bold an assertion require some sort of proof? Perhaps beyond the contributions of evolutionary game theory to thought experiments, which is what is proposed by Hoffman? If Hoffman wants to claim that the brain is a quantum computer, regardless of objections made by Dehaene about quantum computers not functioning at the temperatures needed for organisms to maintain chemical reactions (i.e. life), then Hoffman, or someone who does more than theoretical masturbation, might want to examine the human (or some other supposedly conscious creature's) brain for the wave functions and transmissions thereof that are the hallmark of quantum computing. That is, after all, what those researchers who published to Nature did.
No, the portion that made me feel stupid for a moment was Hoffman's referral back to his 2006 paper on "The Scrambling Theorem" (Science Direct Link). This beast reads like a post-modern masterpiece, and with good reason despite the claims of empiricism: He has nothing on which to actually base his argument. I don't mean he doesn't have much evidence, I mean that he literally hasn't a shred. Hoffman merely states the following: to disprove reductive functionalism in consciousness (the idea that one can reduce a cognitive process to the mathematical function, however complex, that explains it. In effect, that cognitive processes are mathematical functions carried out by neurons), one simply needs to be able to imagine that consciousness can work in another manner, thus making it logically possible (anyone see the flaw in that one?). He then goes on to say how, if he can logically and mathematically demonstrate that people can have different colour experiences from the same stimuli, yet perform the same on colour tasks, then he has effectively disproved reductive functionalism. Beautiful... and here's where I thought I was lost. Hoffman then jumps directly into a model that supposedly backs his claim, but fails to demonstrate how any of the pieces of his model are tied to reality, and that's purely because, as he admits later, they aren't empirically tied to anything at all. Translation from academia to English: Hoffman made this up, out of his own imagination, which brings us right back to the argument he claims he wasn't using. Sorry Donald, but just because I can dream up another way that might coffee might brew or my herb garden might grow doesn't mean that the manner in which we understand those processes is incorrect because of it. I can fully imagine Hoffman's paper being written by a 16 year old with a thesaurus and a horrendous grasp of elementary logic, but that doesn't make it so, althought it does, to some degree, resemble the product.
The invocation of probability at the end doesn't make this any better; If we want to show that Jack sees orange when Jill sees blue, we need to measure the signals coming from both of their optic nerves upon viewing identical wavelengths of light, and then test how each individual responds to the stimuli. ("what colour do you see?" "orange"). Hoffman's general point is that we can't tell, even from that sort of experiment, that Jack and Jill are in fact experiencing the same stimuli, and I suppose that's correct. It is, however, certainly not correct that it then precludes the conscious experience of either of them from being the same as the function used to represent that experience, it simply means that we've somehow substituted, via the internal system of the mind, a different value in the function for each of them. Hoffman, then, has demonstrated that we can't use the same function for each person, and that's about as useful as Hume demonstrating that we, logically, can't know anything. It isn't, at all.

* Whenever someone chooses to use an analogy on the internet, it is, shortly afterward, demonstrated just how poorly constructed that analogy actually is. If that doesn't occur in this case, I'll put it down to a lack of readership.*

Discussion of "Signatures of Consciousness", Stanislaus Dehaene

2009-12-04T14:22:00.003-05:00

Edge discussion and original talk here.

Stan Dehaene always deals with interesting, deep problems in a novel and efficient manner. His last two publications deal with the evolution of a number sense in primates and the evolution of reading ability (a proposed volutionary change based on a cultural phenomenon), and now Dehaene attacks the problem of consciousness in terms of a global neuronal workspace. The quick and dirty version of his argument is that, based on fMRI and temporal EEG measures, it seems the consciousness exists as a kind of neural workspace in the mind; consciousness is something that parallels (or is?) our working memory and exists independently of neural processes and responses, following behind the initial response to stimuli by an average of a quarter second.
I have great respect and admiration for Dehaene, but there's a major flaw in his discussion (and since his talk is speculative, that's acceptable): He explains well the purpose of consciousness, and perhaps even what we might define as conscious, but he fails in any meaningful manner to demonstrate what causes it.
Sam Harris has a critique of Dehaene's points in terms quantum computers, which I won't even attempt to address.

Wen the Eternally Surprised?

2009-11-30T20:59:00.003-05:00

My first post in a month, and it's pure, unadulterated fluff. Literally.

Then again, the cat is exhibiting the only correct reaction, as we have never experienced each moment until it occurs. Buddha has claws...

Happy Hallowe'en, don't eat the candy!

2009-10-31T14:40:00.001-04:00

This would be hilarious if it were a joke... unfortunately someone actually believes this.

Chirality and Life

2009-10-29T13:45:00.003-04:00

Marcelo Gleiser is, if not more intelligent, certainly more educated than I am. Thus I'm a but surprised to find such fundamental errors of thinking in his latest SEED article, here. Gleiser states, quite correctly, that all the proteins that make up life could, chemically, be right-oriented or left-oriented. He also cites his and colleagues' research that the early Earth appears to have contained molecules of both chiralities, and then asks why life only has left oriented molecules present. Marcelo, how is this not at least semi-obvious?
Let's start with a fundamental assumption; Life began once and only once on our planet, created from (insert correct answer here, we don't have it yet) to form self-replicating strands of nucleic acids and the proteins for which they code, somewhat like viruses or prions. This isn't that poor of an assumption, given the low probablity of spontaneous generation of life in the first place. It had to happen somewhere, given the numbers of stars and planets, and obviously it happened here or we couldn't write and read blogs written by graduate students of no current academic importance, but proposing it occured multiple times is a bit of a mathematical stretch. If you'd like, we can concede that life was unlikely to start more than once at a time, allowing the possibility that early life began several times sequentially, and that will not affect this dicussion at all. So, given that life occured once, or once to start, then the proteins incorporated in that first organism were likely of one chirality, given the simplicity of early life-like molecules and the coding for proteins written into whichever nucleic acid (likely RNA, from current evidence) was employed. That life had to replicate, using the available amino acids, proteins, and other molecules, and would replicate using the same structure without fundamental changes in the RNA (mutations). Molecules of the wrong chirality couldn't even interact chemically with those of early life, it'd be life trying to use the mirror image of a key. (Gleiser uses the mirror analogy to describe chiral molecules first, and it's apt, so I'm stealing it. Thanks Marcelo, you'll never likely see this, but I'm giving credit anyway)
Briefly, then, what we're seeing in the exclusivity of "left-handed" proteins is a what Dawkins calls a frozen accident, the vestige of the structure of our most distant ancestors and the necessary structures for their replication and survival, all the way down to us. There's no reason to suppose that life on other planets would necessarily follow this blueprint, and actually finding samples would be a requirement for making any statements of that kind.

Gleiser states it thusly:

If one traces life’s origins from its earliest stages, it’s hard to see how life began without molecular building blocks that were “chirally pure,” consisting solely of left- or right-handed molecules. Indeed, many models show how chirally pure amino acids may link to form precursors of the first protein-like chains. But what could have selected left-handed over right-handed amino acids? My group’s research suggests that early Earth’s violent environmental upheavals caused many episodes of chiral flip-flopping. The observed left-handedness of terrestrial amino acids is probably a local fluke.

Obviously we're not far apart on most of this view, it's the "it's hard to see how" statement that vexes me... his local fluke may be much more local than he believes, as in local to the particular location on the planet where life began.

Sham Charity...

2009-10-19T19:24:00.002-04:00

http://www.orphanage-outreach.org/

An organisation called Orphan Outreach runs volunteer trips to the Dominican Republic, many of which are taken by public schools. This, at first glance, sounds like a wonderful idea. The issue I derive from this is that the founders of O.O. are not only religious (that's immaterial), but that they require the orphans to attend Pentecostal Church services nightly, according to their volunteer guide. Volunteers, of course, aren't mandated to attend, but then again they aren't the target here. On top of that, the volunteers are required to not only pay for the trip ($1600 for a week) and their own airfare, they're expected to bring a 50lb. suitcase of food to donate and give any flight coupons that might be received if they're bumped on a flight. Hmm... not that I have a problem with supporting the orphanage, but if I chose to go and volunteer, what would I have to pay $1600 for a week's worth of beans and rice and a place to sleep under a mosquito net in an open air building? What exactly does that money cover? Not to mention that fact that I would then get to pass through customs in a third world nation with 50lbs of food, and then identify myself as an American for a nice trip through an area where we're advised by the State Department not to travel alone or after dark. It sounds to me like, under the guise of a good cause, those who run this programme are financially exploiting the charitably minded and seeking to convert young children to their religion.

Pat Condell's latest...

2009-10-02T21:33:00.000-04:00

Patriotic Jackassery

2009-10-02T21:00:00.004-04:00

Someone will disagree with this, but, hell, someone disagrees with everything else I write as well. At the outset of a school pep rally today, our athletic director threw out two male Hispanic students who refused to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. They weren't disruptive or disrespectful, in fact they weren't even speaking, they simply didn't stand and say the pledge. I was told, by the athletic director, to take them to our version of in-school suspension for that "offence", which I refused to do. Rather, I let the students stand just outside the gym doors and watch until I could get the attention of an administrator who promptly took them back in to be seated. The AD is furious that I went over his head (and that I took the students' side on this).
As I explained to the AD, I also refuse to say the pledge, although not for the same reasons as the students. Unless our government sees fit to remove the blatant and unconstitutional endorsement of religion from that document, I will continue to refuse to say the pledge, and if that were to happen I would still have reservations in publicly swearing allegiance to a piece of cloth and the nation. I have no intention of betraying the nation in which I live, and there are a number of things about this country that I admire and support, not least the fact that I have the freedom/right to decide whether or not I wish to say something like the Pledge of Allegiance because of the way our government was constructed. The students actually refused because they aren't yet citizens of the U.S., although they are here legally. That two adolescents (17 and 18 respectively) chose not to swear allegiance to a nation, of which they are not citizens (and that, at times, treats those of their ethnicity rather unjustly, to say the least), does not offend me in the least as a citizen of that nation. The athletic director, on the other hand, was absolutely incensed both with their conduct and my failure to condemn it.
A little research turns up this gem: 1943 West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, in which the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the government, schools included, to compel speech in the manner of the Pledge. This at the height of World War Two, no less. Attempts since then to challenge the constitutionality of the words "under God" in the pledge, as they expressly support monotheism as a religious belief, have not resulted in Supreme Court rulings ( Newdow v. California was dismissed because the plaintiff was deemed not to have parental standing in the case). There are a number of more recent rulings that uphold the opinion that coercion of speech is not constitutional.
Basically, Wake Co. schools should be thanking me for saving them a lawsuit. Somehow I doubt I'll ever hear that thanks.

Teh Stoopid, it Burnz

2009-09-20T12:09:00.005-04:00

Warning: This will be lengthy

I received this email a few days ago, forwarded by a childhood friend of mine who is quite intelligent, and , I thought, fairly reasonable and rational. As she's not the author of the illogical piece of trash I'll quote in a moment, I'll reserve any judgement and simply consider that she probably shares the neo-con political views of her parents. Needless to say, I do not, a fact of which she is apparently not aware when forwarding this drivel.

The Truth About the Health
Care Bills - Michael Connelly, Ret. Constitutional Attorney
08.24.09

Well, I have done it! I have read
the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care
Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area
of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of
the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional.
What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.

To begin with, much of what has been said
about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats
and the media are saying. The law does provide for
rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other
classes of citizens are involved, free health care for illegal immigrants,
free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by
members of the medical profession.

The Bill will also eventually force
private insurance companies out of business, and put everyone into a
government run system. All decisions about personal health care will
ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats, and most of them will not be health
care professionals. Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and
allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled by the
government.

However, as scary as all of that is, it
just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this
legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care
choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer
of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even
been contemplated. If this law or a similar one is adopted, major
portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been
destroyed.

The first thing to go will be the
masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and
Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. The Congress will be
transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different
areas over the lives of the American people, and the businesses they own.

The irony is that the Congress doesn't
have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin
with! I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find
any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care.

This legislation also provides for
access, by the appointees of the Obama administration, of all of your personal
health care information, your personal financial information, and the
information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a
direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the
Constitution protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You
can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been
legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may
provide.

If you decide not to have
health care insurance, or if you have private insurance that is not deemed
acceptable to the Health Choices Administrator appointed by Obama, there will
be a tax imposed on you. It is called a tax instead of a fine because of
the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th
Amendment. However, that doesn't work because since there is nothing in the
law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax,
it is definitely depriving someone of property without the due
process of law.

So, there are three of those pesky
amendments that the far left hate so much, out the original ten in the Bill of
Rights, that are effectively nullified by this law. It doesn't stop
there though.

The 9th Amendment that provides: The
enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to
deny or disparage others retained by the people;

The 10th Amendment states: The powers not
delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to
the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the
people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many
areas that once were theirs to control.

I could write many more pages about this
legislation, but I think you get the idea. This is not about health
care; it is about seizing power and limiting rights. Article 6 of the
Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to "be bound by
oath or affirmation to support the Constitution." If I was a member of
Congress I would not be able to vote for this legislation or anything like it,
without feeling I was violating that sacred oath or affirmation. If I
voted for it anyway, I would hope the American people would hold me
accountable.

For those who might doubt the nature of
this threat, I suggest they consult the source, the US Constitution, and Bill
of Rights. There you can see exactly what we are about to have taken from us.

Michael Connelly

Retired attorney,

Constitutional Law Instructor

Carrollton , Texas

Well, there are some issues I can't argue here, since Mr. Connelly wasn't kind enough to actually link the bill itself. For one, I can't imagine how he could be privy to that information being a Constitutional Law instructor at where ever he may be (There are no accredited colleges or universities listed in Carrollton, TX)Since that's an argument from personal ignorance, let's give credit where none is likely due and pass over that issue altogether.
If by rationing of health care the author means that health care will be provided only to those who actually need that care, as determined by a medical professional, he's probably right, and I fail to see a problem with this. I personally don't want to pay for health care that I don't need, nor, I assume, would he. Other nations with nationalised health care actually provide services for everyone who's there, so giving care to "illegal immigrants" is a certainty if we follow working models. There's something rather inhumane about denying someone needed medical services because they talk funny, or were born elsewhere, so I invite you to consider the motives behind the author's complaint. I'd guess he doesn't like brown people much, but that's a bit hasty, we can find that out from further conversation (or could if he'd bothered to allow a way to respond personally to his diatribe). Abortion happens to be legal in this country, courtesy of Roe v. Wade, so the complaint that a new system would fund abortion is likely motivated religiously. Likewise the complaint that health care providers will be forced to provide a legal service to their constituents. "Family Planning" clinics that don't provide abortions, and even fail to refer patients to places who do, aren't all that scarce. Perhaps we can lift the misogyny long enough to correct this? I somehow doubt that Mr. Connelly has ever been in the position to require one himself, so it's not like he can add a valid viewpoint to the discussion. Alas, that complaint seems to be seated in the political and religious viewpoint that has respect for embryonic life but none for humans that can actually walk and talk.
Health care is currently regulated by insurance bureaucrats, most of whom are not health care professionals but paper-pushing clerks who are trying to maximise their profits. Comparing this to the proposed system wherein government bureaucrats would take their place, it amounts to a draw at worst. It's also possible that the government version, not driven by profits, might be just a bit less obnoxious to deal with and result in fewer medical expenses for the patient.
The author asserts that the balance of power between the branches of government will be compromised by a new health care system. He fails to supply anything resembling evidence for this assertion, so I can dismiss it with a similar lack of evidence.
For an instructor of constitutional law, this man's grasp of the constitution seems rather poor (so does his logic for a former attorney, for that matter). I'd speculate that he chased ambulances for a living, but ad homenem aside, we can simply examine his arguments as they stand.
3rd and 4th Amendments> The author maintains that the government having access to your healthcare records, in an effort to maintain that care, amounts to unreasonable search and seizure. Search and seizure of what, exactly? This bases itself on the assumption that there is something sinister involved here, rather than the exact same forces in play that your current health insurance apply. If we really want to get snarky, we can always consider that the Patriot Act did the same thing for any form of electronic communication you might have used while it applied. I'm siginicantly less concerned about the Obama administration having access to my medical records than I am (or was) about Bush and his theocrats having access to anything someone who might not agree with them said on the phone or in an email.
5th Amendment> The argument amounts to stating that paying taxes is tantamount to seizure or property without due process. While that may be a typical Libertarian view, it hasn't been applied to the rest of our tax system, and it's a function of a governed capitalist society that the government has to have money to operate. Somehow I don't see the author of that email donating to them.
The responses to the 9th and 10th Amendments are rather telling, as is the "I defy anyone to show me where it says in the Constitution that the government can regulate health care". Well, Mr. Connelly, since the medical profession in 1789 was also the same profession that was quite capable of giving you a nice shave and a haircut, whilst chopping off a limb or bleeding you because of poor "humours" in the blood, I imagine the founders didn't even consider giving that power explicitly to anyone; Nor did they implicitly give the federal government the power to regulate any other industry, say drug and food safety or worker's rights. As an instructor of Constitutional law, you must surely understand these things we call "implied powers"? We've been using them for about two centuries now.
It's entirely possible that the good lawyer is simply a genuine State's Rights man, of the sort that thinks they should still own slaves and lost a certain war over state's rights about 150 years ago. If so, he should consider encouraging his god-bot infested hellhole of a state to secede again. We wouldn't miss them, and I certainly wouldn't miss the bullshit arguments that he thinks he's provided.

Perhaps the map isn't so far off, but at least that little nation within a nation has shrunk since the map was designed.

Addendum In the interest of fairness, whomever originated the email left off the contact info, not the author. Michael Connelly can be contacted at mrobertc@hotmail.com , and his blog can be found here.

Review of The New Atheism, Victor Stenger

2009-09-18T21:40:00.004-04:00

The New Atheism fills a needed gap in the literature begun by Sam Harris in End of Faith, in that it actually addresses all the fleas, and attempts at legitimate rebuttal, that have surfaced in response to the books by Dawkins et. al.. Stenger begins with a solid summary of the works of the "Four Horseman", as well as those by himself and Dan Barker, that also incorporates census data on just how many nonbelievers exist worldwide. This portion of the book, and those dealing with suffering and morality, aren't novel, although they serve to round out the scope of the material.
The key portions of Stenger's book are the rebuttals of Haught, D'Souza, and the ilk who have made legitimate attempts to address the arguments of the New Atheists (at least tried to blow enough smoke in front of them so as to create doubt in those arguments). As I had no interest in purchasing or reading the drivel perpetuated by religious apologists, it is useful to see from whence their arguments might come, as well as to have those arguments examined in clear language. Stenger is concise to the point of almost being too brief in some parts, but manages to address a number of apologetic claims. One can almost imagine a Gish gallop of religious argument that demands rebuttal as the author replies to them. Perhaps more importantly, and more interestingly, Stenger addresses the fine-tuning arguments from physics that previous atheist authors have not touched, ably eliminating that from the viable apologetic arsenal. For clarity's sake, Stenger's refutation amounts to pointing out the the apologists' argument fails to take into account that varying one physical constant actually varies the others and leads to conditions that are still suitable for the organisation of matter and life in some form, although not necessarily life as we know it. The assertion of the theists is thus reduced to special pleading based on the anthropic principle. Furthermore, Stenger poses the multiverse theory, among others, as a manner to resolve the problem of fine tuning. He also points out that the idea of a pre-Big Bang singularity, the point where theists like to insert a deity as a first cause, has been dis-proven in physics since Hawking's Brief History of Time in 1988. William Craig Lane and Dinesh D'Souza still cling to this argument, as do many of their supporters, so Stenger's submission of quantum tunneling from yet another universe as the cause of this universe, supported by publications of both his own and Hawking's, serves as an important nail in that coffin. By simply citing a zero energy beginning to the universe, which is empirically supported, much of the fine tuning argument evaporates of its own accord.
Stenger also devotes a chapter to the mind, as he believes that may be the last real battleground where theists seek to insert god. While scientific notions of mind still have explanatory work to do, Stenger asserts that, as with the evidence of an interventionist deity, the presence of a dualistic mind, that is a mind that arises separately from the matter of the brain, absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence. The latter phrase is useful in maintaining an agnostic stance toward natural phenomena, however the author makes the valid point that the absence of evidence that should be there if a hypothesis were true disconfirms that hypothesis. This holds true both for a deity that intervenes in the universe and the existence of a (insert religious term for soul here).
The remainder of Stenger's book is devoted to explaining the nature of science, debunking Mormonism and explaining the history of religious phenomena, placing Christianity and Jesus in the proper historical context of an axial age (wherein numerous cultures at the same stage of civilisation had thinkers who professed moral codes), and, surprisingly, agreeing with Sam Harris that Eastern philosophy, once stripped of supernatural pretence, serves as a viable source of morality. In particular, the author seems to admire the eightfold path of Buddhism as a moral code, although he also supports the aspects of Hinduism and Taoism that demand a reduction of ego as a means of living a morally fulfilled life.
While not entirely novel, Stenger's work is concise and well-written, with enough newly presented notions to be worthy of a read. Thanks for the early birthday gift, Mom.

Well, Last Time it Was Sarcastic

2009-09-15T20:10:00.003-04:00

... but apparently I am a bit too harsh. A professor in the PhD programme chose tonight to discuss what she terms "professional discourse". I'll boil down her points as I understood them, and then I'll give my take on them.
1. It's not OK to directly confront wrong notions, ideas, and statements. Instead, you need to phrase a rhetorical question or frame the response in such a way that you sound as if you're only giving your view on the subject.
2. Asking for evidence to support an assertion is unreasonable because "we don't have the books in front of us."
3. You need to refrain from using big words, or if you do you should explain what they mean. Using big words make you sound like a know-it-all.
4. Don't dominate the discussion, but don't sit there silent either. By dominating the discussion you're silencing someone else who might want to talk, and sitting silently isn't contributing.

To be fair, I see nothing terribly wrong with #4 provided that other people do actually want to talk. The other three are a bit of an annoyance, and rely upon some poor reasoning.
It's perfectly acceptable to confront some one's wrong ideas with empirically supported ideas of your own. This is called debate, and in the absence of being directly handed information, it's how we might actually learn something from a course web discussion. I agree that it's a logical fallacy, and counterproductive, to attack the person themselves. However, since when does professional discourse have to include deference to absolute horseshit? (oops, I just broke #3, again). Calling the idea horseshit is a bit rude, I'll admit, but demonstrating that it's not correct is another story. We have a style over substance fallacy working here, and apparently it's the dominant culture in the course.
Evidence is how we, as rational human beings, actually support what we're saying and manage to establish some measure of veracity for our assertions. Operating under the assumption that I can just assert something and that should be good enough leads to the submission of personal experience and anecdote as proof of (insert concept here), and just doesn't work. These people are PhD students in Science Education, surely they grasp the idea of evidence? All that aside, how frackin' difficult is it to Google something?
The last sentence applies heavily to #3 as well. You don't know a word I used? Really? All right, I can accept that, now open another browser window and use OED to figure out what it means. Still don't get the concept? Wikipedia is full of entries on just about everything; Not necessarily ones that contain loads of perfectly verified information, but I'm not discussing anything particularly controversial here. Alternately, you might try something like searching the name of the person I just cited, and it's just possible that the very source I used will pop up, or something that at least summarises the ideas espoused in that source.
/rant. Perhaps I should have stuck to the actual sciences, or looked into Philosophy despite my scant background in it if I wanted to be able to have real discussions with people in my programme. Or perhaps these people need to grow a thicker skin, take Sagan's advice and not get so attached to their hypotheses, learn to look things up they don't understand, and possibly provide something to back their assertions beyond "Well, in my experience..."

I've been too harsh...

2009-08-24T09:09:00.010-04:00

Robert Wright destroys my worldview in an essay in Sunday's NYT. What else could possibly come of such a well written opinion piece that so greatly differs from the views of a "new atheist". Wright states in his gospel:

I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.

Eureka! I have underestimated the creative power of natural selection! Why, if Wright hadn't pointed it out, I might never have considered that God could have begun the universe, and then stepped back to let it all run through the process that we can detect. When I was a strident, militant, neo-Atheist, I would have simply examined the evidence for natural selection, abiogenesis, and the Big Bang , and posited that they can work without a designer of any sort. In my hasty militaristic scientism, I'd have put down the teleological appearances of evolution as nothing but that: appearances. Yet Wright, by citing that wonderful scientist William Paley, points out that the apparent design is there because life, the universe and everything must have been designed! That's right, Paley was a wonderful scientist, as Wright notes:

There are two morals to the story. One is that it is indeed legitimate, and not at all unscientific, to do what Paley did: inspect a physical system for evidence that it was given some purpose by some higher-order creative process. If scientifically minded theologians want to apply that inspection to the entire system of evolution, they’re free to do so.

What a poor scientist I am, blinded so by my strident, militant, evangelical fundamentalist Atheism as I've caught it from the likes of Dawkins and Dennett! Proof of a designer was there all the time, all I had to do was examine the evidence with the intent of finding evidence of a designer. This, of course, is science at its purest: rifling through all the available evidence to find that which supports your hypothesis and discarding that which does not. Why, any common citizen could tell me as much.

Wright does an even more thorough job with his other salvo: that of destroying my (our, to include other fundagelical militant atheists) strident pretensions that I'm subscribing to pure logic in failing to attribute a designer:

They could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism. (Darwin himself, though not a believer, said as much.) And they might even grant that natural selection’s intrinsic creative power — something they’ve been known to stress in other contexts — adds at least an iota of plausibility to this remotely creative god.

. In my slanted materialistic worldview, coloured as it is by staunch atheism and an unjust tendency to root my tenets in evidence, I've overlooked an important fact; The evidence from evolution and the natural world doesn't entirely rule out the possibility of a deistic, non-interventionist deity. How stridently narrow-minded of me (and all other neo-militant, scientific thinking atheists) to act as if there isn't a behind-the-scenes designer, who obviously could have set all this in motion and is now completely apathetic and non-interventionist towards his/her/its creation.
Wright's dismantling of the evangelical militant mantras of the New Atheists continues:

And, god-talk aside, these atheist biologists could try to appreciate something they still seem not to get: talk of “higher purpose” is not just compatible with science, but engrained [sic] in it.

Why yes, Robert, we've been far too close-minded to see the concept of "higher purpose" embedded in in biology. It's clear, when looking at parasites, predation, and how a population can be culled through simple starvation, that there is a grand design: a power greater than simple selection of the best adapted is in play. How else could such a wonderful array of life come to be on our planet? How could life come to be at all, without a designer? After all, our best and most recent lab experiments are only able to create self-replicating molecules that consist of a simple nucleic acids surrounded by proteins, nothing at all like early life might have been. We can only hope that the others who are so trapped by their narrow beliefs in neo-fundamentalist atheistic science can be freed from their intellectual chains by Wright's sparkling logic and fair open-mindedness towards the possibilities inherent in the evidence.

RESPONSE TO COMMENT 1:
Here I was about to remark that there must be some sort of law about committing grammatical errors when snarking about the errors of others, and I find that my usage matches OED. (Really, go look).

Nice reponse to the article... the (deliberate?) misunderstanding of the more common "there's no evidence so who really gives a fuck" atheist position is irritating, Wright should know better... And you're right... ruling out the possibility of deities would destroy our favourite hobby of arguing with creationists and such.

Interesting study...

2009-08-03T23:18:00.006-04:00

Richard Dawkins tweeted about this, and I found it interesting, so it's discussion time... A key to analysing this may simply be

funded by the John Templeton Foundation,

but I'll attempt to be fair and reserve judgement.

The study concludes that a) majors in social sciences and humanities become less religious, b) majors in the natural and physical sciences maintain their level of religiosity, and c) education majors tend to harbour the religious and strengthen their convictions. I haven't the data to argue with it, so let's simply examine that of the study.

Source: University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, 2009

Firstly, they've separated the measures for importance and attendance, and consider them of equal value in measuring religiosity. I'm not certain I buy into that... If one considers religion to be of less importance, it follows that one is less religious. Attending services of some form or another occurs for a number of reasons, many of them social (data to back this up might help, I know).

The education numbers frighten me a bit. Clearly, there is an upswing in religiosity, by both measures, after completion of college for those in education majors. The article also states

"Education majors are clearly safe havens for the religious," said U-M economist Miles Kimball, who co-authored the study. "Highly religious people seem to prefer education majors, tend to stay in that major, and tend to become more religious by the time they graduate."

I'd love to see the data that spawned that particular conclusion, as it isn't provided and doesn't seem evident from the methods used in the study. I don't deny the possibility that it's true, but something concrete would be helpful. Religion does tend to have a regrettable tendency to make people want to pass it on, however.

The final conclusion is the one I truly take issue with:

"Our results suggest that it is Postmodernism, not Science, that is the bête noir of religiosity. One reason may be that the key ideas of Postmodernism are newer than the key scientific ideas that challenge religion. For example, religions have had 150 years to develop resistance or tolerance for the late 19th century idea of Evolution, but much less time to develop resistance or tolerance for the key ideas of Postmodernism, which gained great strength over the course of the 20th century."

There's nothing at all to suggest that this is true, other than the numbers they demonstrate. Is it possible that courses in sociology, philosophy, and comparative religion simply tend to teach rational thinking and, more importantly, demonstrate the cross-cultural tendencies of the religious to attempt to explain/deal with certain life events? Perhaps the ideas of Postmodernism are more difficult for the religious to confront than those of science; After all, Postmodernist thinking doesn't use empiricism as a standard for doctrine either.

Original paper here.

Accomodationist Drivel

2009-07-23T16:12:00.003-04:00

The NCSE has a point... their role is to promote the teaching of evolution/natural selection in public schools in the U.S., and it is therefore detrimental to their goals to estrange theistic evolution supporters. The validity of their argument ends there, however. It is not ethical, much less feasible, to deny reality in the hopes that some theistic evolutionist will then support their attempts to keep creationism out of the classroom. Kevin Padian, of NCSE, states that

Creationists—people who deny evolution because it conflicts with their religious precepts—often tell us that whether we accept a naturalistic or a supernatural explanation of the world around us is a philosophical choice: a belief. They're not wrong. That first decision—what kind of “knowledge” is going to be privileged in your mind—is ultimately a question of belief, a leap of faith, a decision about truth, if you care to use the term at all.

Well, Kevin, you have some serious flaws in your underlying assumptions that you have neglected to examine, or even state. A naturalistic world view is not based on faith or belief, but more accurately disbelief. I, and others who adopt that world view, choose to accept the evidence of our own senses (extended by scientific instruments) rather than one that includes supernatural sources as causes for natural phenomena. This isn't a belief, it's pure rationality. There is no reason to assume a supernatural cause for anything that can be explained by natural causes. Only poor logic or underlying assumptions based on faith would cause someone to make such a leap, and neither of those constitute anything resembling evidence. Likewise, the failure of naturalistic explanations doesn't imply that supernatural explanations are valid, it means that the naturalistic explanations currently available aren't valid. It's a bit sad that someone who deals in science, a study founded purely in reality, feels the need to lend credibility to unreal concepts.

Padian continues

And that brings us to the students who never learned much about science, but were brought up with conservative religious views. Will it make sense to them to tell them that “evolution is true,” even if you give them a lot of examples of evolution at work? Will they listen in the first place, particularly if they think that your teaching is going to be hostile to their beliefs?

Well, perhaps it isn't enough to tell someone who hasn't been exposed to the science that evolution is "true" and then simply guide them through the evidence. It is quite likely, from anecdotal experience at least, that they will simply shut their mind if not their ears to the evidence as it is presented, or that they will co-opt it to fit their beliefs where appropriate. Does that mean we shouldn't present the evidence? Some people will refuse to accept evidence of a number of things, even if it is painfully obvious, if said evidence conflicts with dearly held beliefs. Yet, there are those that it may eventually reach. Are we to abandon that attempt because people choose to be willfully ignorant?
Addressing the last point, I would have to say no. There are people who will cling to their beliefs in the teeth of the prevailing evidence, and there may be no reaching them. So be it. A course in logic and reasoning might be a better way of beginning that discussion than the evidence for evolution, but fundies demonstrate a profound inability to identify their own logical fallacies whilst attempting to point out those of other people. Pretending that there is a way to reconcile (insert creation story here) with the science is doing a disservice to those people who might actually want to learn something. I'm not saying we demand that they abandon their belief systems all at once, but I don't agree with the need to coddle them: educational curricula aren't determined democratically.
Then again, what should I have expected from an article/book review that begins thus"

John is the only one of the four evangelists who recounts Jesus' (possibly apocryphal) statement to Pilate that he was in fact a king whose role was “to bear witness to the truth; and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.” Pilate is said to have replied to this, “What is truth?”

.

What is truth Kevin Padian? Something which you aren't interested in promoting...

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000077

Cybernetics? Well, not quite...

2009-07-21T22:04:00.003-04:00

... but it's still pretty cool. Cognitive Science and computer researchers at UC Berkeley have managed to teacher monkey to manipulate a computer cursor and a robotic arm. Not so smoothly at first, but smoothly and through the desired path after practice.

As also evident in Figure 2A, there was a similar monotonic decrease in the mean time to reach targets. Whereas the initial cursor trajectories meandered, they became more direct with practice (Figure 2D, comparison of representative trajectories from day 3 and day 13 for Monkey P). It is important to note that the subjects were not required to follow a straight path from the center to each target. Interestingly, the mean trajectory to each target became increasingly stereotyped over time, suggesting that a relatively stable solution emerged for the path to each target. We quantified the similarity between each set of daily mean trajectories by performing pairwise correlations (see Materials and Methods). As illustrated by the color map in Figure 2D, the correlation between the mean paths for each day initially increased and then stabilized. Similar results were obtained for Monkey R (see Figure S3)

Basically, they get better at moving the exoskeleton and/or cursor over time, they way a human does when learning a new physical skill. The possible extensions of this technology are somewhat apparent to anyone who had an interest in science fiction as a kid: once approved for human use, this same technology can be used to control artificial limbs, or to operate a computer (or other computer driven object) without having to use your hands. You can read the original article here for free.

Obligatory MJ post.

2009-07-07T23:17:00.003-04:00

Fuck Michael Jackson, and all the overblown media coverage of a the demise of a mentally-deranged pederast. Yes, his dad abused him and it caused him all sorts of troubles, I'm not downplaying that.. but enough already

Satire as only the British can do it

2009-07-07T22:54:00.001-04:00

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong

by John Crace - The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/07/karen-armstrong-case-for-god

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart make Dawkins and Hitchens burn in Hell, O Lord my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen.

Much of what we say about God these days is facile. The concept of God is meant to be hard. Too often we get lost in what Greeks called logos (reason) rather than interpreting him through mythoi - those things we know to be eternally true but can't prove. Like Santa Claus. Religion is not about belief or faith; it is a skill. Self-deceit does not always come easily, so we have to work at it.

Our ancestors, who were obviously right, would have been surprised by the crude empiricism that reduces faith to fundamentalism or atheism. I have no intention of rubbishing anyone's beliefs, so help me God, but Dawkins's critique of God is unbelievably shallow. God is transcendent, clever clogs. So we obviously can't understand him. Duh!

I'm going to spend the next 250 pages on a quick trawl of comparative religion from the pre-modern to the present day. It won't help make the case for God, but it will make me look clever and keep the publishers happy, so let's hope no one notices!
...
Continue reading and to audio
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/07/karen-armstrong-case-for-god

Taken from RDnet... Hilarious book review.

At least they figured something out...

2009-07-05T13:49:00.002-04:00

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1595404.html

WCPSS isn't going to cough up 6 grand a day for the consultant from Canada I talked about in earlier posts, although they declined to comment on why. O'Connor claims that it's due to budget constraints, which is understandable. I'm hoping it's because they realised that he's a complete and utter fraud, but we'll see about that.

Sharia Law in the Swat Valley

2009-07-02T12:29:00.003-04:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/02/taliban-pakistan-justice-women-flogging

A summary? A teenage girl/woman was seen in public with a man to whom she was not married or related, and was publicly flogged for it... "religion of peace", my ass.

Pat Condell is annoyed with burkas...and Islam, again.

2009-06-28T21:32:00.001-04:00

Well said, however:

I get email...

2009-06-27T13:44:00.003-04:00

It isn't nearly as deranged or interesting as the stuff PZ gets, but it's deluded in its own way.

Hey David, how have you been? We've missed you. We have been wondering what we have done for you to not talk with us or your dad, for so long. Could you possibly call your dad sometime soon, and fix things ?
He talks about you often and wonders what he did for you to not talk to him.
We sold the condo last year and we got your grandmothers house. We moved in June 27th. Can't believe it's a year tomorrow.
Are you teaching anywhere?
Are you dating anyone now?
What are you doing this summer, if your still a teacher?
Do you come up to NY often?
We would really love to hear from you soon
Love Dee

Wow, where to start... So this is my step-mother, who I've met perhaps 5 times. She's playing the step-motherly peacemaker role, which I can understand. What bemuses me is that she, and more so my father, fail to understand why I don't speak with him. I'll preface this next bit of vitriol with the fact that she and my step-sisters don't know me well enough to have done anything to me... therefore this is not aimed at them. Rather they're being ignored by proxy.

The man who physically and emotionally abused me doesn't grasp why it is that I won't talk to him. I find that both comical and sad... Does he honestly think I'd want to? By way of apology, he once said "Sometimes I feel like I didn't do a very good job with you." Awesome. Try for some actual remorse, and we might have somewhere to begin. In all reality, I'm not sure that a sobbing, legitimate apology would elicit anything other than disgust on my part at this point in my life. There are things for which I can forgive, but forgetting and moving into a normal father-son relationship isn't going to happen. So there lies the crux of this issue. No, Dee I can't call and fix things, that's well out of my hands, and out of the question.

The rest of this is step-motherly (faux?) concern banter. They don't miss me, as they don't know me. The search for information is awkward, as some of these questions have answers they can easily surmise: No, I don't go to NY often, I haven't since I left. Painting herself and my father as the victims is an interesting twist on a guilt trip, but doesn't make it any more likely to work.

There's something a bit ghoulish about living in the house in which you grew up after your parents have died and left it, at least to me. It's a situation I'll never face, as neither of those houses are the property of my family now, but I still find it odd that my father (or anyone) would choose to do that. He must have really wanted out of that condo.

At least they're reading the nephew I didn't know I had fairy tales, she states on her Facebook that she's "teaching him about the love of Jesus".

Proctor and Proctologist have the same root...

2009-06-10T09:37:00.003-04:00

for a damn good reason... both are expected to ignore all the shit they happen to come across in the course of their duties.

Ok, for the actual point of this post: The poor woman who proctored for an exam I had to give yesterday (a re-test for a course I don't teach, lovely) chose to expound to me on why she feels that creationism needs to be taught in science classes. Other than because she's a creationist, of course. A summary of her argument could be this:

1.) I just can't see how the Big Bang and all that knows to make me different from you, and one trees leaves different from another.
2.) Well, all creation stories have the same basis, so teaching one would at least let the kids know that there are other points of view out there.
3.) (In response to "Faith based concepts don't belong in a science class because they aren't science.") Well, there's an answer to that, I just don't remember it. I had a brain trauma, so I don't always remember or understand things.

Responses to this load of collops? 1 is an argument from personal incredulity, the reason for which I refer you to #3. Her second point is arguable on philosophical grounds, but to appease her I offered to discuss Norse creation myth in my class alongside evolution. After all, according to her it's enlightening students to the fact that there are other points of view. When this didn't mollify her, it became clear that she only wanted Xian creation taught... funny how that always seems to be a sticking point. The simplest demolition of her second point is this: the kids are aware there are other points of view. They can't walk 50 feet, drive 5 blocks, or turn on any form of media in the country for any length of time without being reminded about teh Jebus.
And the key to this entire discussion? statement #3... Lady, you had a brain trauma that you admit impairs your memory and cognitive abilities... and I'm supposed to take your opinion on something you aren't even trained in seriously?
For a bit of colour: This woman claimed repeatedly that private schools give a better education than public, because when she transferred from St. Pederast the Buggerer or Our Lady of Intolerance in the 9th grade, she took 11th and 12th grade classes, and then had nothing to take but "her major", which she claims is chemistry. Firstly, I completely fail to believe that story without seeing 3 years worth of transcript that says Chemistry, 1 credit, and nothing else. More importantly, one instance of anything does not count as evidence of the same... but she wasn't about to win any prizes for polysyllabic cogitation. There are possibly a number of private schools that offer a better education than a number of public schools in this country. Having seen the state of some of our public schools, and knowing the private schools can't remain open without tuition, I should hope so. When all else fails, refer her back to #3 above. It's not an ad hominem if it literally means you can't think for yourself anymore.

They live in Lotus Land, all right...

2009-06-07T15:02:00.003-04:00

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=self-cleaning-materials

So, Wilhelm Bartholt examines lotus leaves, because they appear to be free of dirt at nearly all times, and discovers what he calls the "lotus effect", a combination of hydrophobic waxes and bumps on the leaves that cause water to bead up rapidly and run-off, cleaning the leaves as it goes. He's applied this useful phenomenon to fabrics, and hopes to do so to other materials. None of this is in contention, and is a commercially useful application of nanotechnology.

The issue arises when people attempt to explain the evolutionary reason for the lotus effect, and continue to focus on the self-cleaning aspect of the plants. Let's have a cursory examination of the ecology of the lotus: The water lotus grows in India, China, and Southeast Asia, and as you might gather from the name, it's aquatic. It also happens to be a perennial, meaning that the tubers under the sediment at the bottom of the water regrow into full plants yearly. It is known for purity because it grows only in clear water and its leaves are always clean. Some scientists have proposed that the self-cleaning adaptation in lotus' has evolved because there is an advantage to removing dust and dirt from the leaves, ostensibly for photosynthesis. While this sounds reasonable at first, shall we consider the environment of the lotus before we make such a pronouncement? How much dust would you say the average aquatic plant contends with? This isn't something that grows in a desert oasis, it's a subtropical to tropical (Burma) plant the grows in slow pools in rivers, naturally. So why decide that the lotus is trying to be clean? Well, there are insects that use a similar effect on their wings to keep them clean, dry, and ready for flight... and this seems to be reasonable as well until we understand that those are desert insects, who have to contend with immense amounts of dust in many cases. Indeed, dry seems to be the key here: aquatic plants, especially those that live on the surface, don't need to cleanse themselves of dust, they need to get water off of their leaves as fast as possible. Light attenuates with water depth, and even liquid water increases the albedo of a surface that, in this case, is supposed to be absorbing light. On top of that, the lotus grows only in clear pools, indicating that it has a low tolerance for low light levels (it also grows in areas that may already be shaded, which decreases available light intensity. The self cleaning effect of the hydrophobic leaf surfaces is a spandrel, a structure that happened to evolve along with a selected trait. The spandrel is the commercially viable aspect of that property, but that doesn't mean that the plant is trying to remain clean, it's simply trying to keep it's leaves on the surface and free of reflective water during heavy rains to maximise photosynthetic potential. A brief study in the light intensity reaching the leaves under a) conditions where the leaves have some dust on them and b) the leaves are free of dust but subject to pooling water or submersion would likely bury this silliness for good. Or, it may actually prove me wrong, but at least there would be some evidential basis for the adaptation story, which flies in the face of photo-physics and ecology.

Random Drug Tests are Unreasonable Search/Seizure?

2009-06-05T18:48:00.003-04:00

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/education/story/1552223.html

That's what an NC Appeals court ruled when the issue of random drug testing of teachers in Graham, NC was brought before it. I'm not sure about the constitutionality here, but I do have an opinion of random drug tests in general.

Random tests are going to catch two kinds of users: people with serious chronic drug problems, and someone who occasionally uses marijuana. I'm just fine with someone catching the first, as they don't need to be responsible for the care of children while under the influence, and are likely to have difficulty regulating their drug use/abuse enough to not be high at work. However, I'm not ok with penalising someone who smokes a joint in their basement on a Saturday with Pink Floyd playing in the same manner. The issue here is the marijuana a) stays in someone's system a lot longer than more dangerous substances (a couple weeks to a month, from most sources, as compared to a matter of hours or a day.), and b) not nearly as harmful a substance physically/mentally as things that aren't going to be caught (like the teacher who decides that weekends=cocaine). Drug testing someone because they do something stupid or appear to be high at work, now that I'm fine with.

This may be a case of my pro-hippie bias coming through. From my personal experience, and most statistics I've seen, potheads aren't aggressive or harmful to other people, they're simply lazy. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want a chronic pot user teaching my kids, if I had any, because I can't picture that being an effective teacher.

Thread from Sandwalk (well..maybe)

2009-05-28T19:33:00.008-04:00

If you were part of that discussion, or have something to add, feel free to continue it here.
______________________________________________________________________

I'll have to address responses here, because there's something screwy with the comment box, at least here at work.

@ Eugene> well... here's the thing, I don't actually have to disprove that someone who was dead for 3 days happened to rise again, walk around for a while longer, and then rose bodily into the sky, because the whole idea is preposterous. From the repeated experiences of mankind, it is obvious that this simply doesn't happen, so the burden of evidence for that is on you... one might think it would be recorded more accurately and closer to the time of occurrence that the canonical gospels (or those that are apocryphal for that matter). I can however, offer evidence that throws the whole scenario into doubt apart from "well, that just doesn't happen". There are several religions from that area, that predate Christianity, that have a deity who is the son a virgin, who also happens to be resurrected and preach salvation: Mithras, Adonis, and Osiris, to claim three that predate Christianity. The myth of Hercules also predates Christianity and shares some of the elements of the story of Jesus. The Norse legends of Odin don't predate Christianity, but hail from a time prior to the introduction of the Christian religion to that part of the world. Are all of those, particularly Osiris and Mithras (whose stories are nearly identical to those of Jesus, and in the same region hundreds of years prior) also true? Or is it more likely that early Christians latched onto existing myths of the time in order to add a certain panache to their forming religion. December 25th, incidentally, was the date of the Roman Feast of the Sun, and the supposed birthday of Mithras, recorded in Roman histories BCE... The theft of ideas is rather obvious if you can look at it unbiased. So what needs to be asked of you is simply this: why is your story more likely to be true than the ones that preceded it or mimicked it?
It can also be demonstrated that there are reasonable, natural, explanations for purported miracles... Lazarus was dead and resurrected? or had goatherds in Palestine 2000 years ago perhaps never heard of a coma, if the event happened at all?

And if a hypothetical claim of super-nature intervening in the workings of nature cannot be ruled out on the basis of the generally observed regularities of the natural sciences or abstract philosophy, the only possible evaluation left is direct examination of the phenomenon to see if it is entirely explicable with reference to purely naturalistic causes.

Correct, science lies fully in the realm of the natural and the observable. Don't neglect that observing the effect of an event is still empirical observation, and can lead to knowledge of the event itself. Science and reason, which is intertwined with science if your a scientist worthy of the name, demand that unnecessary explanations be stripped away. I don't need to hypothesize a creator if I know how, or approximately how, something came about without one. Theistic evolution is exactly that: adding an unnecesssary and logically untenable element to an explanation that stands on its own.
Smijer responded quite well to the god of the gaps argument, so I'll let that lie.

As for what can be empirically disproven, the creation story/stories in Genesis can be demonstrated to be false, Ussher's claim of the age of the Earth is clearly false, and modern day "miracles" are explainable by other means that the supernatural ones, many of which have also been shown to be flat-out hoaxes.

Smijer> When something is that far out of the realm of observation, one has to use reason rather than empiricism. However, defending an idea by saying "well you can't prove it didn't happen is making your stand on some rather shaky ground. He also can't prove it did, and I can easily call into question the validity of the Bible as a historical document, by the age of the writing and the evidence that it has numerous, unrelated authors.
So you define religion, in your sense, as the social aspect? Once you strip away rituals, you're left with a social club. A college fraternity would then be a religion, by your definition, even more so because they still include ritual of some form or other.. all they lack is a professed doctrine in the supernatural.

_____________________________________________________________________
Eugene Curry

On what basis, then, can one say with any sort of confidence that "[r]eason tells us" that super-nature cannot (theoretically) impinge on the workings of nature?

Because by definition, once something has a measurable impact on the natural world, it can be empirically observed, and is now part of nature.

And given an unbiased historical examination, the resurrection of Jesus proves extraodinarily resistent to naturalistic explanations.

Yes, I agree... however, given unbiased historical examination, the evidence that Jesus even lived, much less did or said anything attributed to him, is debatable. If one chooses, for sake of this discussion, to accept that he was indeed a real person, then we're left with second and third-hand accounts of his deeds, at best. Do you happen to recall the supposed miracles at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917? We had live eyewitnesses for those, and know them to be false, or naturally explainable. Honestly, how reliable would you consider a first century source, which has been transcribed and translated multiple times before reaching you, to be on a topic that was not a matter of your faith? How about if the oldest extant copy was, most definitely, a copy, with items clearly added afterward, and dated from several hundred years after the supposed date of the original manuscript?

____________________________________________________________________

Smijer> The comment box is only wonky on my blog, it works on other people's... bizzare, and something I need to resolve. (Although I rarely have commenters to reply to, so it doesn't usually matter).
I understand, and can respect, the idea of using church for a social gathering if that is your only source. That is indeed the reason why many people don't completely leave religion, per se, and the UU churches I've seen are the most tolerable for me by far. I attend a couple of meet-up groups in this area that fill that role, and have previously used my rugby team for that sort of outlet (not a whole lot of thought going on there, to be sure). I'm not one to claim that every aspect of every religion is bad... I do claim that a number of heinous things are done in the name of some deity or other, and the the spurious supernatural claims of religion are exactly that. I'd love a place to sit down with people, play some chess (or air-hockey, or another game of your preference), have a nice intellectual discussion, and possibly drink a few Guiness's... Providing a setting that matches the similar needs of others apart from church involvement is something that will have to come with the growing numbers of non-believers in the country.

____________________________________________________________________

Eugene> At the risk of making this incredibly long...

1) extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. 'nuff said. You presume that I wouldn't accept such evidence if it were presented because of my wording, I can assure you (who's opinion on the matter I frankly don't value) that I would. I know my own mind best... Flew's opinion isn't worth a whole lot to me because he's an addlepated, waffling twit; Ehrman's is generally sound and he accepts that there was a historical Jesus (yes, I did more research).
Also, something of which you are likely aware and not considering: just because it's written down doesn't mean it's true.

2) Paul was most certainly evangelising for Christianity, which, incidentally, he stood to gain a great deal from spreading. That doesn't mean that he's outright lying, but it does shed reasonable doubt on his motives. Six of the 13 Epistles aren't accepted as being authored by Paul in the first place, although Corinthians, which you quoted, isn't one of these.

3) Your analogy is off here... It is reasonable to assume that at some point a black man could be president of the US. It is an element of mythology to assume parthenogenesis in primates, because it doesn't happen in nature, but it is a common thread in a number of myths/religions throughout human culture both before and after Jesus. If we're going to discuss ideological biases, is it possible for you, as a Baptist preacher, to view Christianity objectively? Can you really evaluate its claims as if it were, say, Hinduism?

4) Can you prove the resurrection using unbiased sources? Moreover, I'd say the base of your religion is the existence of a deity at all. Thusly, please demonstrate the following:

a)The Universe was created

b)The creation was performed by a deity

c)The deity is interventionist and keeps interfering in the universe

d)The deity happens to be that of an iron-age Semitic people from one region of a small planet circling a star in a galaxy of some 100 billion others, the galaxy being one of some 150 billion others

e)All of this is documented in the "holy book" of that particular set of people

It might also be helpful to your case to demonstrate these auxiliaries:

f)The deity is omni-maximal, i.e. omniscient, omnipotent and omni-benevolent

g)All other creation myths, gods, demi-urges and supernatural beings are false

You agreed that the burden of proof lies with you, I eagerly await your explanations.

5). You're conflating evolution with abiogenesis, and further conflating it with the Big Bang and cosmic development. If I can demonstrate that abiogenesis is possible, which some current experiments are rather close to doing, is your god then reduced to starting the universe and stepping back? Otherwise, it has been conclusively demonstrated that no outside interference is necessary for evolution to occur, so positing a designer is indeed superfluous.

6). I think I mistakenly dealt with this in 1. I don't have serious doubts the man existed, I do have serious doubts that most of what is attributed to him isn't fabricated to make him sound better. My personal view of the historical Jesus is along the lines of Gandhi, or Siddhartha Gautama (without all the nirvana hooey). Rational skepticism of anything, especially something written from an oral history, re-written, and translated as many times as much of the Bible has been would expect numerous errors; The fact that it's also prone to exaggerations and outright mendacity only compounds this problem. You accuse me of not applying skepticism to my own ideology; On what basis should I give more credibility to your particular brand of religion/mythology than someone else's?

to simply say that the traditional super-natural explanation of the early belief in Jesus' resurrection is incorrect is not to provide a naturalistic explanation. One has to actually offer an alternative positive theory. And it is here that the difficulty lies because no positive and comprehensive naturalistic theory withstands scrutiny.

It isn't necessary to provide a plausible alternate hypothesis for something that didn't happen, or can't be demonstrated to have happened. The reason this applies to evolution and not to resurrection is that one is a naturally observed phenomena (the diversityof life on Earth), and one is claimed to have occurred once and only once, and it beyond attempts at empirical observation.

My base position is this, for the resurrection, the existence of any deity, and anything else that lacks evidence: If an entity X is postulated to exist, and no substantive evidence capable of withstanding intense critical scrutiny is present to support the postulated existence of entity X, then the default position is to regard entity X as not existing until said supporting evidence materialises.

Contrary to popular opinion, this is de facto atheism, not agnosticism, and is the stance that many/most atheists with whom I've spoken take.

Yes, please?

2009-05-28T14:10:00.002-04:00

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1534684.html

The graduation rate for NC high school students is 60%. That number would be less depressing if they mentioned that it means that 60% graduate with their original cohort, rather than at all. Unfortunately, the state means graduated, period, when it cites that statistic. The good news? NC doesn't bother to count all the students who graduate from a non-traditional high school setting. The thousands of students who earn a GED each year count against a school's dropout rate. What impact does that have? Well, in the case of my particular school and district, it means that we fight to keep students who are 2 and 3 years behind their original graduating class in school, and that we have 19 and 20 year old students taking the freshman classes they still need to graduate. Yes, that's right, 19 and 20, sitting in class in the fall next to 13 and 14 year old freshmen... hm... does that sound like a wise idea to you?
So what is NC going to do about it? Well, the state legislature is considering not counting students who leave a traditional high school for a GED programme as dropouts. This needs to happen, and soon, for the sake of the students who are leaving (or should), if nothing else. If you happen to live in NC and read this, email/call/write/harass your local rep.

Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads?

2009-05-14T19:14:00.004-04:00

http://www.buffalonews.com/260/story/671674.html

The SC legislature has voted to create a programme in grades 6-12 that would be aimed at curbing dating violence... this is certainly a good idea. However, they've specifically removed language that would include LGBT partnerships in the training. Their reasoning?

"I do not want the Department of Education or school districts teaching our children in grades six through 12 about same-sex relationships," said Rep. Greg Delleney, a Chester Republican who pushed to make the violence prevention program apply only to heterosexual relationships. "I'm sure it would develop into that."

Yeah, that's an ethical decision that doesn't reflect archaic Biblical bullshit. Well done SC.

In a better attempt at defending their decision, this is offered:

Bill sponsor Rep. Joan Brady said excluding gay relationships is fine and declared that, "Traditional domestic violence occurs in a man-woman, boy-girl situation."
"The fact is, this is a gender-specific, abusive behavior. The overwhelming predominance of dating abuse occurs in a traditional or heterosexual relationship," said Brady, R-Columbia.

Hmm.. maybe she's right.. wait, wait, there's this:

a 2004 Journal of Adolescent Health study found that youths involved in same-sex dating are just as likely to experience dating violence as those in relationships with members of the opposite sex.

So yes, fewer LGBT's are subjected to dating violence than heterosexuals. This I can completely understand, as there are fewer LGBT's than heterosexuals. Either these people are seriously misunderstanding the statistics involved (which wouldn't be surprising in the least), or their homophobia is getting the better of their decisions. Either way, SC citizens are losing out.

Backlash?

2009-05-14T19:10:00.003-04:00

The News and Observer posted an article related to my last post... WCPSS is bringing in the author of the book I discussed as a 6K a day consultant for next school year. That's great and all, but they're also laying off a number of teachers, citing economic reasons. hmm... 6K times 8 days of consulting = $48K... oh wait, that's more than I make a year! Someone's position has been sacrificed to pay for training in the latest fad in education, that's lovely.

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1525047.html

WCPSS's "Next Big Thing"

2009-05-08T11:14:00.005-04:00

O’Connor, Ken (2008).A Repair Kit for Grading.

My Comments in italics.

1. Don’t include student behaviors (effort, participation,
adherence to class rules, etc) in grades; include only
achievement.

A legitimate way to prevent teachers from grading for something other than achievement (behaviour, for example) is to allow a separate grade or rating scale for those behaviours we consider important. There’s no need to grade for behaviour in an academic grade if we have somewhere else to do it, but without that outlet (and 2 comments on a report card are not sufficient) people will still combine the two.

2. Don’t reduce marks on “work” submitted late;
provide support for the learner.

Claiming that penalties for late work distort the actual achievement level of the student represented by that mark is plausible and fair. The anecdotal evidence regarding the effects of penalties on motivation is nothing more than that, and cannot be reasonably treated as evidence of anything. The plural of anecdote is not data. Allowing students to renegotiate deadlines for turning in work is both excellent for teaching responsibility and problematic if poorly handled. Creating a separate record for these behaviours solves some of the problems, and requiring that all standards be met prior to moving to the next course solves the other (that students attempt to extend deadlines indefinitely).

3. Don’t give points for extra credit or use bonus points;
seek only evidence that more work has resulted in a
higher level of achievement.
Extra credit does indeed distort grades. This can be demonstrated by simple mathematics.

4. Don’t punish academic dishonesty with reduced grades;
apply other consequences and reassess to determine
actual level of achievement.

Punishment should be something other than a grade of 0, but also needs to be both a deterrent and something severe enough to convey the seriousness of the offense. A simple talking-to does not accomplish this for most of our students. The assessment also needs to be completed, without dishonesty, afterward in order for the student to demonstrate their actual achievement level on that standard. The sanctions imposed/recommended by MacDonald high are viable if and only if they apply to the given student (loss of extra-curricular for a student who doesn’t participate isn’t effective.). MacDonald is a private Catholic school, so loss of privilege and expulsion are much more realistic penalties to the students and parents than they might be to ours. (We have a limited 365-suspension/expulsion policy because we have a mandate to provide and education to all, not just to all that can pay the fee).

5. Don’t consider attendance in grade determination;
report absences separately.

O'Connor prescribes that attendance should not be considered in grades, yet WCPSS attendance policy is to fail students who miss more than a certain number of days without excuse. Excused absences do not imply that the student has actually made up the missed material; any more than unexcused absences imply that the student hasn’t mastered the material for which they were present or achieved missed objectives after their return. If we want to be honest with ourselves about our grading conversations, FF’s need to become INC’s until the objectives are met or not met. In addition, Gathercoal (2002) has a valid point: absent is absent, and we do no favours by excusing one form and not another.

6. Don’t include group scores in grades; use only
individual achievement evidence.

The argument against group assessment is valid. Cooperative learning products need to be used as formative assessment, if at all.

7. Don’t organize information in grading records by
assessment methods or simply summarize into a single
grade; organize and report evidence by standards/
learning goals.

Requires revision of our entire grading system, report cards and GPA included, to be worth implementing.

8. Don’t assign grades using inappropriate or unclear
performance standards; provide clear descriptions of
achievement expectations.

Marzano’s suggestions of criterion-referenced grades are no less arbitrary than using a simple % proficient, which is also more immediately communicable to parents and others. Criterion referenced grades need to be based, appropriately, on numeric marks with set levels of achievement needed to reach each one. In our case, these levels need to be predictive of performance on objective, outside examinations (CAT, EOC, Stanford 9’s, etc). Indicating both achievement and growth could be useful for everyone involved in using the grade in the future.

9. Don’t assign grades based on student’s achievement
compared to other students; compare each student’s
performance to preset standards.

Do we actually have people doing this? I’ve seen college profs grade on a Bell curve, but I’m unaware of anyone here who is… if so it certainly needs to be addressed. Achievement marks should, realistically, statistically distribute along something resembling a Bell curve in an on-level course simply because of the normal distribution of abilities. Skews towards high or low achievement are also natural if the students in the course are of skewed ability as well (i.e. a class load of true honors students being marked on the same scale as an on-level course. Or ICR graded in the same manner.)

10. Don’t rely on evidence from assessments that fail to
meet standards of quality; rely only on quality
assessments.

Right. This is not profound. The difficulty arises in determining what is actually a valid assessment prior to its use. This fix is fairly straight forward for anyone employing a semi-reflective practice. The footnoted Gardner text on time limits is apt yet we also need to convey, in some form or other, a student’s ability to read. Assessments may not need to rely solely on reading skill, nor should they ideally, but this then needs to open the door to oral or performance assessments that are still predictive of the student’s performance on an outside exam, at least until we allow for orally given EOC’s or do away with them altogether.

11. Don’t rely only on the mean; consider
other measures of central tendency and
use professional judgment.

O’Connor’s difficulty with the mean stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of statistics, and an unwillingness to simply drop the outliers. The mean is a valid, probably the most valid, measure of central tendency provided that the component marks are in a normal distribution. http://simon.cs.vt.edu/SoSci/Site/MMM/mmm.html . There may exist students for whom their mean mark does not reflect their level of understanding of a given objective, in which case something else must be done. O’Connor’s evidence for this topic is once again anecdotal at best.

12. Don’t include zeros in grade
determination when evidence is missing or
as punishment; use alternatives, such as
reassessing to determine real achievement
or use “I” for Incomplete or Insufficient
Evidence.

Giving INC’s in place of zeroes is possibly the best alternative for missing assignments I have seen proposed, provided we require the student to eventually demonstrate proficiency on the standard for which the assignment was missed. This would have to extend all the way to receiving an INC for any course in which the student did not demonstrate proficiency on a given standard (not that not demonstrating proficiency is not equal to demonstrating a lack of proficiency). The fact that they assign a numeric value to a grade that lacks a basis in reality is the only valid argument against the assigning of zeroes for missing marks. The other arguments presented are highly emotional and invalid without corroborating evidence. Adjusting to a 5 or 50 point scale brings the mean back toward centre, and towards the probable level of student achievement, but fails to account for missed assessments. For formative this may work out, but it would be an ineffective way of evaluating a student’s summative assessments because it still involves missing data.

13. Don’t use information from formative
assessments and practice to determine grades;
use only summative evidence.

Good, agreed. That’s what formative assessments are for.

14. Don’t summarize evidence accumulated
over time when learning is developmental and
will grow with time and repeated opportunities;
in those instances, emphasize more recent
achievement.

If the opportunity to use grade replacement (EOC score, or a section of a final summative assessment as applied to a topic which earned a lower mark earlier) were to be legitimately available, it would perhaps be the most accurate way of indicating exactly what a student achieved in a course. EOC data isn’t available rapidly enough for this to work (We’d need a goal by goal item analysis for each student to grade in this manner).

15. Don’t leave students out of the grading
process. Involve students; they can - and should
- play key roles in assessment and grading that
promote achievement.

Involving students in the grading process, at least as far as creating an understanding of that process so that they can monitor their own progress, could potentially provide motivation for those students (if they’re making progress). As with any other use of grades as an extrinsic motivator, it can work either way in the student’s mind. Students and parents, however, should not be left in the dark as to how their (child’s) grade has been determined.

O’Connor’s current work is a re-write of his two earlier works, none of which are based on empirical evidence obtained by O’Connor himself. A limited amount of his suggestions are based on someone else’s empirical evidence, and most are based on anecdotes at best. Some of them are still logically defensible if the initial premise is accepted as valid. The ideas presented are in many cases worth trying if the opportunity is to be fully and realistically given, rather than treated as a half-measure and abandoned after a brief trial period. This would require an overhaul of the grading system district-wide in order to be successful. However, this is once again likely to become something that is systematised to rest the burden solely on the teachers themselves, as our other policies seem to do.
___________________________________________________________________
Anonymous> I agree that it does help to establish bad habits if we don't somehow take into account attendance and timeliness of completing assignments. O'Connor proposes establishing a 2nd mark to convey this information, which I would accept at this level, perhaps not at post-secondary. From my personal experiences at university: I failed a course that I missed 6 times (5 absences were allowed). I averaged 98% on all my coursework and scored 100% on the final. Is it truly representative of my knowledge of my material that I received an F and had to retake that? (Yes, I know, I shouldn't have missed the 6th time... I do get that.) Students who miss that much coursework typically aren't going to pass in the first place. Firm deadlines for assignments are something I'm less likely to be lenient about; If an assignment is designed properly, it's intended as practice or assessment at a given point in time, and its usefullness has passed.

Case and point?

2009-04-27T13:43:00.005-04:00

http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/editorials/story/1499820.html

So, according to the editorial, a case against conservative Christianity was its stance that environmental problems aren't worth being concerned over, what with the Rapture and such right around the corner. I take issue with their use of the word was, but yes, that's a pretty strong condemnation of any religious group: "Hey, don't worry about the planet, our imaginary friend is going to blow it all up soon (with some help from his faithful followers and nuke-yoo-ler bombs)".
In support of their use of the past tense, the N&O posts this little gem

So it's good news not only that Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest is going out of its way to conserve energy on campus, but also that it hosted (with its L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture) a Creation Care Symposium over the past weekend.

Oh, yes.. that's spectacular. They've decided they want a lower power bill, so they'll save some energy. Creation Care Symposium?! Yes, why would we ever admit that it might not have been created in our effort to pretend that we're going to help slow the denigration of the planet.

The comments betray a far more accurate view of conservative Xian views:

cackcon wrote on April, 27 7:29 AM:
Oh, and I hope y'all realize that "faith in the earth" would constitute paganism. You can keep "Mother Earth"; I'll take Father God any day!
Recommend (1) Report abuse

cackcon wrote on April, 27 7:24 AM:
So y'all are theologians now, eh?There are so many untruths tangled together in this Editorial to unpack within this comment box. But what I would like to suggest, simply, is that your tongue-in-cheek praise for a denomination of the Christian faith is rather appalling, dripping as it does with politically-motivated insincerity.If the Southern Baptists cared at all for what you Editors thought, they would have long ago succumbed to the panic attack that is environmentalism. Kudos to them for not diving off the cliff just because everyone else (and every other denomination, it seems) has done so already.

At least they'll go along with the rest of the human race when they do something abysmally stupid... It's not as if the planet needs us here.

Damned brick houses...

2009-04-27T13:28:00.004-04:00

I knew someone should've taken out that last pig.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/world/27flu.html?em

Ok, so the nursery rhyme reference was rather childish... so is the chicken little nonsense going on in the press over 20 cases of influenza. Yes, 1400 cases in Mexico could be cause for concern, maybe a little tightening of borders, some travels restrictions (or advisories), that sort of thing. Releasing 25% of our nationwide stock of emergency flu drugs for this few cases seems rather premature to me, however. Even more, as flu cases drop precipitously during the late spring and summer (there's a strong correlation between blood circulation to the nose via being chilled and rate of cold/flu infection), meaning that this particular outbreak picked the wrong time of year to get going, statistically speaking.
Is it possible that this is actually something that should create concern? Well, the only indicator I can see for that is that it originated in Mexico, meaning it may not need the typical American winter sniffles to spread. Anyone dying of a disease makes people freak out, but I don't see 103/1400 as especially virulent. Perhaps my view of that would be different with a weaker immune system or very young/old relatives... but this isn't aerosol Ebola here folks, it's the freakin' flu, and not the 1918 variety.

If it would get their religious views out of the curriculum...

2009-04-20T09:53:00.002-04:00

I'd be all for it. That's right, the NC legislature has proposed a third option for sex-ed in this state, as reported by the N&O here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/education/story/1476957.html

For a state the promotes abstinence-only sex education, this might not be a bad thing. If and only if they allow the opt-out on a curriculum that teaches the students about STD's, birth control, and responsible decision-making without all the lovely Bible Belt influence that is currently present. I'd like to make the following proposal to the NC Legislature:

1). Change the sex-ed curriculum to align with NIH guidelines. (I'd tell them to try matching that of a more progressive state, but they get a bit shirty about such things)

2.) Allow students to opt out of that curriculum at the parent's behest.

3) Educate the parents about the rates of teen sexual activity, pregnancy, and disease, including all the factors that predispose teens to each of those. (Fundies tend not to remember the birth control in their rush of guilt, and trends like saddlebacking spread STD's more rapidly. Unprotected anal sex with multiple partners isn't a good idea.)

4) If a child who has been opted out of the curriculum is later reported to have contracted an STD or becomes a parent, while still under their parents' care, charge the parent with neglect for failing to provide the information needed for the teen to make a responsible decision.

Slow posting on my part, but...

2009-04-17T23:00:00.003-04:00

this is brilliant

Tim Minchin
STORM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_htqDCP-s

Dead, but not buried

2009-04-14T21:58:00.003-04:00

I had the pleasure of catching the opening night of the Dead's latest tour on Sunday... if you're a fan, check it out. Warren Haynes did a nice job of pulling back his usual style, and fit into the overall groove of the band. He's not Jerry, but he's not bad either.

Audience recordings available here: http://www.archive.org/details/thedead2009-04-12

Soundboard recordings are on dead.net, supposedly, but I can't find them.

Set list:
Set 1
Music Never Stopped>Jack Straw>Estimated Prophet >He’s Gone >Touch of Gray>I Need a Miracle >Truckin’

Set 2
Shakedown Street>All Along The Watchtower>Caution>Jam>Drums>Space>Cosmic Charlie>New Potato Caboose>Help on the Way >Slipknot! >Franklin’s Tower

Donor Rap

Encore:
Samson and Delilah

Stress-Impaired Brain Development?

2009-04-06T13:57:00.006-04:00

taken from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/05/AR2009040501719.html

Researchers at Cornell have found a correlational link between high levels of stress during childhood, such as those caused by living in poverty, and reduced working memory in late adolescence and adulthood. This sounds interesting, but the implications are far less that the article above would like them to be.

Now, research is providing what could be crucial clues to explain how childhood poverty translates into dimmer chances of success: Chronic stress from growing up poor appears to have a direct impact on the brain, leaving children with impairment in at least one key area -- working memory.

Hey , hold on there buddy... you quoted the actual author of the study as saying:

"What this data raises is the possibility that it's also related to cognitive development."

hmm... suddenly I'm far less than impressed with the quality of the journalism.

The bottom line here is that the Post's science writer took the opportunity to heap blame for a problem with multiple probable causes on an environmental factor that happens to tie-in well with the rest of the news. That's great and all, it probably sells newspapers, but I would prefer something more objective from a good science writer... perhaps a fair analysis that accounts for the following:

1) the researcher isn't saying this is anything more than correlational data
2) there is a causal relationship here: Parents living in poverty have kids who live in poverty.
3) (2) sounds ridiculous until you consider that there's a reason the parents are living in poverty, some of that reason is indeed genetic, and these are still their children.
4) The environmental factors that shape a child's social and cognitive development most profoundly are found outside the home (see Dawkins and Pinker, among others, for that one).

It may be convenient to hand out the excuses along with the welfare, but only the 2nd need be distributed. Whether the child (or adolescent) is not-so-bright because mom and dad are also a bit dim, or because his/her mental development was stunted because his/her brain was marinating in too much cortisol is immaterial. If the kids are dumb, find them something they can do for wages instead of allowing them to collect a goverment check for free because you chose to pretend they were college bound with a room temperature IQ.

SIWOTI isn't all bad..

2009-04-03T14:59:00.002-04:00

I feel that I owe a brief thank you to the denizens of Pharyngula and RD.net... The hours of reading and contributing to the various and sundry arguments on those sites certainly helped hone my critical writing and argumentative skills.... which may have contributed to blowing the top off of the critical writing section of the GRE. So, sadly disguised attempt at bravado aside, if anyone who's participated in those happens to read this, thank you.
A second credit is probably due to the one current follower of the blog and numerous "matches on the bar". Thanks shithead, let's drink a Guinness and be elitist assholes in public again soon.

Wow, they must be DUMB

2009-04-01T12:12:00.003-04:00

This may as well be a tweet instead of a blog, but: I'm giving midterms today. 3 of my genius students, all in one class, had their study guides out underneath their tests, as if I wouldn't notice the constant shuffling of papers. Since I waited until they went to lunch to take the papers (and shred them into the recycling bin), one of them actually had the gall to insist that she had only taken the study guide out during lunch. These kids don't need lessons in Physical Science, they need lessons in lying.

Ironic quote of the day...

2009-03-25T10:06:00.005-04:00

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1449088.html

Yeah, not even getting into why a suuposedly reputable newspaper bothered to cover this story in the first place... Obviously it must have been a slow news day.

However:

Rosemary McArthur, the Colorado-based founder of the American Association of Psychics, said many of her members are reporting an increased interest in their services. But, she said, the hard times have also buoyed the popularity of psychic hot lines that don't compare in quality to the psychics who register with her group.
"People are vulnerable, and they're easily taken in by people who tell them what they want to hear," said McArthur, whose moniker is "The Celtic Lady."

Wait... wtf? She's the founder of the American Association of of Psychics, and she's warning people against being taken in? Wow... apparently she'd like to cut down on business.

For clarity's sake... psychics aren't real. They're making it up as they go along, and telling you what they think you want to hear. Give it a moment's rational thought, if you haven't: what is the difference between a vague prediction that can't be applied to anything until after the event that was predicted (and then only by stretching and interpreting the idea) and not seeing the future? Nothing.

Hmmm?

2009-03-24T14:54:00.003-04:00

It seems our illustrious tech department has decided to block Pat Condell's website on school computers, citing "hate speech" and "profanity". The second I can understand, if they're that squeamish, but calling his videos "hate speech" is a load of horseshit, or bowing to the pressures of some theist who's skin is too thin to handle a bit of criticism. I'm betting on the second... well done Wake County.

http://patcondell.net/

Natural arms race...

2009-03-24T11:11:00.005-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/science/24armo.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp?8dpc

This is a pretty cool article, although I'd like to see the actual paper.

Competition among males is often expressed in the form of elaborate weapons made of bone, horn or chitin. The weapons often start off small and then, under the pressure of competition, may evolve to attain gigantic proportions.

The underlying message being that bigger weapons are more intimidating, and therefor require less use. If, as a male, you spend less energy on defending your territory, you have more available for procreation. That, and injuries in the animal kingdom are often fatal, either directly or indirectly. It's best to avoid the fight in the first place.

Sexual selection was Darwin’s solution to a problem posed by the cumbersome weapons sported by many species, and the baroque ornaments developed by others. They seemed positive handicaps in the struggle for survival, and therefore contrary to his theory of natural selection. To account for these extravagances, Darwin proposed that both armaments and ornaments must have been shaped by competition for mates.

Darwin's concepts of sexual selection have been expanded upon, of course, but the basic idea holds true. Nothing with an energy cost fails to have a purpose... and realistically, that purpose should end up in a net energetic savings (active biological use of energy, not an entropic sense).

The article goes on to discuss the process of turning harmful weapons into display weapons, and the gradual adjustment from one to another. Many organisms (crabs are cited) have weapons that are used for both purposes. Humans, who's weapons are manufactured rather than genetically inbuilt (memetically coded weapons?)have only recently developed them for display rather than potential use. With the exception of their initial use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this is a solid explanation for the existence and lack of use of atomic arms. Humans would prefer to explain this by rationalising that "we knew what the outcome would be", which is understandable... if you fail to account for all the other horrible weapons we have developed for which we also know the outcomes (VX and Tabun Gas, anyone?). Once we're able to demonstrate that we have the ability to use such a display weapon, it is no longer necessary to put it to use... the people/organism with the best ritualised bluster wins (see Cuban Missle Crisis).

How is this harming you? Seriously.

2009-03-23T12:08:00.006-04:00

http://projects.newsobserver.com/under_the_dome/n_c_mirrors_national_poll_results

N.C. mirrors national poll results
Submitted by ryanteaguebeckwith on March 23, 2009 - 11:44am.
Tags: constitution Elon University Poll gay marriage polling Under the Dome

North Carolina mirrors national sentiment on gay marriage.

A survey by the Elon University Poll roughly matches up to the results of a December poll by Newsweek that asked about state constitutional bans.

"Suppose your state held an election where you could vote for or against an amendment to the state constitution that would ban gay marriage," that poll asked.

In that poll, 49 percent of respondents were against a ban, 45 percent in favor and six percent unsure.

A recent Elon poll with similar wording found 50 percent opposed a North Carolina ban, 43 percent supported, five percent were unsure and one percent refused.

Both polls were of all households, not just registered or likely voters.

The Newsweek poll was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from Dec. 3-4 of 1,006 adults. Its margin of error was plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

A Recent phone survey conducted by Elon University matches the nationwide results... 49% of the US population would not support a constitutional ban on gay marriages. Great... I understand those people. The 44% who would support such an amendment confuse me though. Honestly, how does the idea of two people, regardless of gender, getting married insult anyone? How is it anyone else's business what goes on behind the closed doors of someone's bedroom? (Within reason of course... no children or anything like that).

My Irony meter just broke, again...

2009-03-18T09:34:00.005-04:00

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1447447.html

Venessa Mills, the Wake County mother whose home-schooled children were ordered to attend public schools, grew alienated from her husband and parents after joining a religious group that some former members call a cult, the judge in the case said Tuesday in a written order.
That's funny, some former members of the Catholic Church call it a cult... can we extend this ruling?

"It is in the best interest of these minor children based on all of the evidence presented that Mr. Mills, a father with equal rights, should be allowed to expose the children to more than just the experiences that Venessa Mills desires," Mangum wrote.

Magnum's ruling quotes people named as former members of Sound Doctrine who describe the institution as abusive. They say Sound Doctrine practiced brainwashing and was run by fear and manipulation.

See, here's where we run into issues: the judge claims that the 'cult'
is abusive because it's run on manipulation and fear, whereas I would argue that pretty much any religion is run on those same two concepts. Fear of death, darkness, sex, and the unknown are the starting point for all religion. The ability to manipulate those fears is all that keeps the clergy in control. In terms of abuse, what inflicts more damage than fostering the fear of eternal torment by fire, and torture in children? This lasts a lifetime in many people...

Humanity has grown out of its awkward childhood, it is high time to put away the imaginary friends.

"Everyone said I was daft to build a castle in the swamp"

2009-03-16T13:58:00.006-04:00

http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20090316/ARTICLES/903161998/1155?Title=Efforts-revive-to-allow-structures-for-stopping-erosion

Mayors from Brunswick and Pender Counties are upset... because their beachfront communities are in danger from erosion. Hmm... people put millions into houses that are mere yards from the ocean, and then whine when there's a chance that the ocean will swallow their house during a storm? This seems like a logical conclusion to me. I'm sorry, but I really lack sympathy for anyone who builds on a barrier island and expects anything less than the eventual destruction of that property, because they clearly didn't investigate what barrier islands are.
For you edification, a barrier island is (oversimplifying here) a large sand bar. As sea level rises, they roll landward, over themselves, moving back into the marsh and abandoning what was once beach to the offshore system. Likewise, inlets on those islands migrate in the direction of the longshore current (North to south on east facing beaches along the US coast, generally), moving through whatever happens to be in their way. These natural processes can be slowed by hardened manmade structures, but eventually those too fall into the ocean unless replaced with larger ones. Seabright, NJ is the classic example of that happens to towns that try things like groins and seawalls: you get a beach only at low tide, with a big concrete wall on the landward side of it. Beautiful.
Conveniently, the people on the Coastal Resources Commission are pretty reasonable people, who are going to squash this nonsense without the legislature being able to override.

Shooting Fish in a Barrel

2009-03-16T11:43:00.007-04:00

Just a note, this is a repost from my myspace blog, so it isn't the most current thing on Earth. feel free to sharpen your teeth on their arguments (or my responses, if you wish).

Evolution indoctrination at OU
by The Tulsa Beacon
Reposted from: http://www.tulsabeacon.com/?p=1358

What is the difference between education and indoctrination?
Education involves allowing people to see evidence and indoctrination involves beating them about the head with an idea that most likely lacks that evidence. Which have you received?

The line between conveying information with an open mind and a mindset that parallels religion is being crossed this year at The University of Oklahoma with a 12-month celebration of the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. While devoting huge resources to a campaign to “prove” that evolution is not a theory, the scientific brain trust at OU will virtually ignore parallel theories of the origin of man - including Creation Science and Intelligent Design.
Let the fallacies begin. 1) “Evolution” is definitely a theory: an explanation of natural events that fits all the evidence and holds predictive power. It is not a theory in the pop culture sense of the word, wherein a theory is someone’s unsupported crackpot idea.
2) Creationism and ID aren’t parallel theories of anything, they are bald assertions that everything was caused by a supernatural entity. They lack explanatory power and, more importantly, evidence. The writings of misogynistic, Bronze Age goat herders aren’t sufficient evidence of anything, and that lies at the root of ID.

OU will trot out Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, to try to convince students and the public that there is no God and science has all the answers.

Good for OU! Dawkins is a wonderful speaker, who also happens to be one of the world’s premier experts on evolutionary biology. The fact that he’s an atheist has no bearing on the topic other than the fact that you’re completely biased against atheists. Science doesn’t have or claim to have all the answers, but it is a better way to get the answers than consulting a book written before people had discovered medicine.

Darwin became infamous 150 years ago when he wrote The Origin of Species. He speculated that all life evolved from lower forms and that men were derived from the apes. His unproven theories were all that the humanist movement needed to attack the Bible and any belief system that hints at the existence of a supreme being.

The word you’re looking for is famous, not infamous, other than that your historical statement isn’t too bad. Theories are by their very nature unproven, just tested a great deal. Parts of Natural Selection have been shown to be complete bunk, and discarded, yet the whole works better than anything else we have. The reasonable assertion that your Supreme Being has as much corroborating evidence for his existence as an invisible pink unicorn, and that the Bible is clearly full of self-contradictory piffle, made plenty of case for humanists to attack them in the first place. Ever heard of Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine? How about Voltaire? I rest my case.

OU has a website devoted to this worship of Darwin and evolution. It’s clear from the content of that website that organizers believe that evolution is a fact and that if other theories are mentioned; they will be discounted or ridiculed.

Projecting much? No one is worshipping Darwin, or evolution. You worship... we happen to be celebrating the anniversary of a man’s birth. You know, kind of like Christmas without all the praying? No, I can see that's not going to be a good analogy for you.

Do things change? Certainly, But species don’t evolve into other species. Dogs don’t turn into cats. Monkeys don’t turn into men.
Species do evolve into other species, there’s an entire fossil record of that happening. On the other hand, Dogs don’t turn into cats, and monkeys don’t turn into men, you’re right. Unfortunately you’re also caricaturing the entire process. Perhaps you’re not intelligent enough to grasp that, but I suspect you’re just being intellectually dishonest. Lying for Jesus, indeed.

In fact, even secular scientists are doubting [sic] the viability of evolution concerning the origin of life. The laws of thermodynamics and common sense tell us that things don’t get better - they deteriorate.

Really, Which ones? The members of the Discovery Institute not only aren’t secular, but most of them aren’t scientists. The laws of common sense tell us all kinds of things that also happen no to be true, so those are right out. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that in a closed system things run from more organized states into less organized states with a subsequent loss of energy. Not only are organisms not closed systems, but neither is the Earth. The incoming solar energy over the period of a year balances the entropic differences in all of biological evolution, ever. (Mathematical and Computer Modelling Volume 19, Issues 6-8, March-April 1994, Pages 25-48 , for starters).

The biggest case against Darwin’s evolution is the fossil record. There are no viable transition fossils when there should be millions if you buy into his theory.

What do you consider to be a viable transition fossil? A half monkey-half frog isn’t going to exist, but I can trace the ancestry of modern whales back to something that looks like a hoofed wolf. This is one of a great number of examples.

Where is the missing link? There isn’t one in the fossil record.

To what missing link are you referring? I’d suggest you actually read the research then. Your ignorance does not constitute a lack of evidence. We have an entire line of hominid evolution that can be examined if you choose to take the time. This entire line of reasoning is about as honest as Behe claiming that there was no work on the evolution of the immune system when in fact he simply hadn’t bothered to read any of what there was.

Evolution science is not really science but a religion. That is why it cannot stand honest scrutiny or tolerate other views. It takes more faith to believe that men came from monkeys or a primal soup struck by lightning than it does to believe that God created the Earth and mankind in seven days.
Oh great point, except that it’s wrong in every aspect. Proponents of evolutionary theory (read: any credible scientist) will examine the evidence available to see if it fits the current models and theories. If it doesn’t, the models and theories are chucked out. You on the other hand, acting purely on faith, would throw the evidence out instead. Besides, you really think that being made out of mud by an invisible man in the sky is plausible? Again, you’re projecting, either because it makes the position easier to attack or because you simply can’t fathom that someone doesn’t think in the same manner as you do.

Both are religious beliefs. Oklahoma students should be exposed to both theories (including Intelligent Design). Instead, the public school system in Oklahoma has bowed to the pressure of secular humanists and insisted that there is only one theory to explain the origin of man - evolution.
OK has bowed to the pressure of reality and decided to teach science, rather than teach religious twaddle. Bravo for them. Religious beliefs should be kept out of the science classroom, period. Therefore if you can establish that evolution is a religion rather than science, it should be removed from class, not supplemented with more religion. Incidentally, does including Creationism in the classroom have to be limited to Christian creation? If you allow it, then we should also teach Muslim creation, Hindu creation, the story of Odin making the world out of his dead father, and the rest.

Incidentally, the origin of life cannot be proven by the scientific method, which requires observation and testing. No one was around when life began and no scientist - no matter how many degrees he or she has - has been able to recreate life in the laboratory.

Firstly, evolutionary theory and abiogenesis are two different things. Secondly, no, scientists aren’t able to produce viable life in a laboratory, but they can make self-replicating proteins, proto-cells, and nucleic acids among other things. Awfully close. However, I suspect that if scientists are ever able to create life in a lab, you’ll gleefully exclaim that it’s because life requires and intelligent creator to come into existence.

Here’s the worst aspect of this story. State tax dollars are going to support the celebration of a mad scientist who infected the world with a new religion that teaches that God cannot exist.

This is such dishonest nonsense that it doesn’t even merit a response. See above for refutations of everything you’ve said here, excepting the attack on Darwin’s character, which is completely irrelevant.

OU has stacked the deck for humanism and against other religions. Creationism and Intelligent Design should get equal time in this huge “celebration” of Charles Darwin.

No, they shouldn’t, the reason being that Charles Darwin didn’t invent either of them. If you’d like to celebrate Creationism, have a Moses day, since (if he was real) he wrote the Pentateuch from whence comes your creation story; Perhaps a William Paley day, in order to celebrate the ever so silly Blind Watchmaker fallacy.

There is a God and that belief is held by the vast majority of Oklahoma taxpayers. Withholding that truth from our students does them a disservice and damages our society.

Now you’ve made a strong assertion which you cannot back. Prove the existence of said God, without the use of your holy book. The vast majority of people believe all sorts of things, that doesn’t make any of them necessarily true. Science, and information in general, is not a democratic process. Your students are exposed to what you consider the truth every Sunday, of their own free will. There is simply no need to insert it into a science classroom, or the celebration of the life of a man who had nothing to do with it.

When we tell our college students that they are nothing more than animals, why do we act surprised when they act like animals?

Ah, the slippery slope argument. You tell them that they are more than animals, and they still act like animals, because they are. I’m assuming you aren’t referring to any of the favorable behaviors of animals that we frequently observe, so it might be better termed that they act like barbarians. Humans are by far the worst behaved of the species on Earth. Since you are most likely referring to drinking, partying, and sexual debauchery, you should consider the alternative. Teens and students who are raised in fundamentalist Christian households, where your “truth” is presumably taught, are far more likely to become pregnant outside marriage or contract STD’s than those raised in secular homes and exposed to a comprehensive sex education programme. What’s more, is that many of the teens who take virginity pledges are more promiscuous orally and anally, usually unprotected, than the teens that do not. This also lends to the spread of STD’s. (Saddlebacking, anyone?) So much for animals, eh?
That, and your premise fails because people are capable of reason and don’t have to behave in any given way simply because they’ve been told something. Just because you’re a brain-washed sheep doesn’t mean everyone is.

The Tulsa Beacon does not appear to have an email address for letters to the editor, but surely they would love to hear your opinion. You can contact them at:
Phone: (918) 523-4425
Fax: (918) 523-4408
The Tulsa Beacon
PO BOX 35099
Tulsa, OK 74153

Comment Rules...

2009-03-15T13:08:00.004-04:00

Not that anyone is following , and therefore commenting, but I'd like to post my guidelines for posting comments in anticipation of that happy event.

1. Agree, or disagree, with me at your own behest.

2. Please refrain from spamming, god-botting (posting verses from your own particular holy book as evidence of anything, I don't care, I don't believe it. Period), and continually derailing comment threads to suit your own agenda.

3. Feel free to use whatever language you wish... I'm not looking to censor based upon vulgarity or offensiveness. That being said, postings that are intended to incite violence against any group may be removed at my whim. If I judge you to be jesting, I'll leave it up.

Accountability?

2009-03-06T09:24:00.003-05:00

We have numerous meetings about a concept called PLC, or Professional Learning Communities, which sound like a great idea until you examine the outcomes. PLC's are supposedly a way to improve student performance by teaming, collecting and analysing student data, and adjusting teaching methods to those that are best suited to your students based on that analysis. So far, so good... except for the fact there is no conclusive data demonstrating its efficacy. ( Go on, look at the site the DuFours put together... see any trends in their data, with statistical significance? Nor did I).
This isn't all of what irritates me about the PLC system. Being forced to use something that doesn't definitively work is part of being in K-12 education... we do this for every new fad in education. The main issue is where the responsibility for student success lies. Teachers are required to teach, assess student learning, and correct errors; This is the core of our job description. However, under the PLC concept, our job description also includes calling home for every absence (attendance office anyone?), devising methods to motivate students who simply don't care, and bending over backwards to accept work late. This has nothing to do with learning, this deals solely with accountability. When my 20 yr old gangbanger sophomore doesn't come to school for a week, the administration's first question to me should not be "What are you doing to get him in class?". Quite frankly, it isn't my problem if he doesn't come to class, it's his mother's and his own. Deciding that I'm responsible for making a student complete the work necessary to learn removes the responsibility from the student... and therein lies the problem. While my students may not (read: will not) use much of the information learned from my course throughout their lives, unless they have a specific job requiring it, they will use the life lessons they glean from school at every opportunity. We're setting up our students to absolve themselves of responsiblity for their own actions, teaching them that a lack of effort will be rewarded with someone else bailing them out.
Speaking of effort: the majority of students who do try assume that because they did what they were asked, they deserve an 'A'. (source: informal survey of 100 HS students, all of them in my classes). It's too bad that life doesn't care how hard you worked if you didn't manage to successfully complete what you needed to do, because this is what they expect. Again, the education system, coupled with parent enablers, is to blame here. These young adults are in for a rude shock when they have to deal with all of real life at once. (note: some of them deal with some aspects of real life, such as the juvenile justice system)