Sane members of the Texas State Board of Education hold a slim majority over scripture-at-any-cost-in-science-books creationists.
Creationists are hammering away to defeat at least two incumbent board members to tip the balance, in classic stealth campaigns where they hide their intentions and spend oodles of money hoping to do evil by catching most voters asleep. The creationists are campaigning to beat conservative, religious Baptists, because the Baptists are “too liberal” on evolution.
District 11 includes most of Tarrant County (Fort Worth), and Parker, Ellis and Johnson counties.
Social studies is also at risk here: The stealth candidate, Barney Maddox, is making false claims against Texas social studies teachers and Texas social studies books, especially history books. The guy looks like an ill-informed nutcase, and he has a good chance of winning.
For example, the campaign flier says: “Barney Maddox believes social studies textbooks should devote more space to American presidents than Marilyn Monroe and that the vicious attack of 9-11 should be portrayed as an aggressive act by terrorists, not an American conspiracy.”
Marilyn Monroe makes no appearance in some books; presidents get 100 times more space in any book you choose. No book portrays 9-11 as an American conspiracy. The man campaigns like your standard, wild-eyed nutcase.
Call, write and e-mail everyone you know in Texas to warn them to vote against Barney Maddox, and for Pat Hardy, in the District 11 State School Board race. Your friends may not live in that district, but they should know. There are other racess with similar problems.
Early voting in this primary ends tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, March 4, is election day.
That might have been the comment I deleted. I didn’t read the whole thing. The guy must have changed his email address, because my filter usually blocks him. He was the first guy I ever had to block for repeated inane arguments and personal attacks. I gave him a lot of chances but in the end he was just not worth the time to discuss anything with.
Didn’t read the thing? Heh. Figures. The comment reveals the depths of moral difficulty of the anti-Rachel Carson position — the position Simpson takes in the blog. Simpson can’t answer any of the criticisms. No, I didn’t change my e-mail address — Simpson’s blog was just more loving of correcting dissent than Simpson.
Personal attacks? Bullbleep. Simpson thinks any correction is “a personal attack.” If one is chronically in error about the facts, and chronically belligerent about dealing with data, one gets a lot of corrections.
Here’s a challenge to Simpson: This blog is open. I’ll edit out only your profanities if you use them. But I’ll wager you can’t defend your position. I won’t go Joe Stalin on you the way you did on me.
Neil, you’re in error about Carson’s book. You’re wrong. You have a Christian duty to fix the errors. Bet you won’t.
Marshall Art, if you’re interested, you can read the remarks Simpson won’t read, here. Now you know why, in my opinion, he’s afraid to read them. The comment isn’t even snarky, though heaven knows there’d be a right.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Photo: New York Times photo by James Estrin; Joseph Romito at a press conference announcing the recovery of the Calhoun letter, with a photo of the letter at left.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Dog and cat breeders, pigeon fanciers, racehorse breeders, and others whose livelihoods depend on their trying to do better than nature at the Darwinian game often offer anecdotes about breeding failures. They thought they might get a faster horse, but they got a skittish one instead; they thought they were getting a good bird dog, but the dog would panic at the shot of a gun.
Breeders know genetics carry a lot of traits, and trying to select for one is difficult. One may amplify a bad trait in addition to the desired trait.
In one classic paper that more critics of Darwin should read, researchers discovered that instead of getting better egg production, they got mean chickens that damaged production of the entire flock.
One of my favorite papers in evolutionary biology, which I have mentioned here before, is this:
Muir, W.M., and D.L. Liggett, 1995a. Group selection for adaptation to multiple-hen cages: selection program and responses. Poultry Sci. 74: s1:101
It outlines the group selection effects observed when trying to breed chickens for increased egg production in multiple-hen cage environments. In short, selecting individual chickens for increased productivity in a group environment didn’t select for increased productivity. Instead, it selected for mean chickens. The result was an overall reduction in productivity. Only by selecting at the group level was productivity increased.
The topic is a worthy one for discussion in economics courses, especially with regard to incentives for certain behaviors.
There is this caution: Adam notes that Enron annually fired the “bottom 10%” as a matter of policy, trying to encourage everyone else to work harder, trying to reward productive people, trying to prune deadwood from the corporate vine. At one point, some divisions of GE Corp. would purge the bottom 25%. That’s even more intensive selective pressures, for evil as well as good.
And when legislators try to purge education of bad teachers? Can they possibly hope to get anything but mean chickens? Economists indict our reliance on standardized tests of students.
Often I ponder that there are few, if any, worthy models of bosses in popular media, especially in television. This realization struck me several years ago when a friend and I were working on a book on leadership (never published). Models of action are very powerful things. When people see other people doing things, people copy the behaviors, even unconsciously — ask any parent whose kid suddenly informed the in-laws or PTA of the parent’s ability to cuss in a fashion that would embarrass most sailors.
So, the models of what we see as bosses probably affect what we actually get in the workplace. This should trouble you: There are not a lot of good models of good bosses in any medium.
In the comic strips, for example, we have Dagwood Bumstead and his boss Mr. Dithers, who wars with his wife, who seems to be an authoritarian despot who physically abuses his workers. Or in more modern strips, we have Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss, who is an incompetent at all human functions, and most management functions as well. Don’t get me going on Beetle Bailey with incompetents all the way up the line from Sgt. Snorkle.
On television we’ve had incompetents and yellers for years. Phil Silvers played Sgt. Bilko. In every incarnation of Lucille Ball’s programs, a boob boss was required — from Ricky Ricardo’s Cuban temper flareups through Gale McGee’s bosses whose manifold, manifest foibles made them great comic foils. Homer Simpson’s ultimate boss, Mr. Burns, anyone?
Generally, even where someone plays a pretty good boss — Crockett’s and Tubbs’ boss on the old Miami Vice, or the lab heads in any of the current CSI series — there is another boss above them who has some massive failing, or a vendetta against the good team.
Exceptions are rare. Some of the Star Treks did better than others. Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: Next Generation, was ideal as boss in many ways. It was particularly interesting to watch him give his “No. 1,” Riker, first choice in missions on foreign planets. The character Picard had a particular way of showing confidence in subordinates, in subtly demanding the best from them. He’d ask for opinions or ideas on what to do next; when someone came up with a workable idea, or even only the best idea of an apparently unworkable lot, Picard would look them in the eye and delegate to the team the authority to make it happen: “Make it so,” he’d say.
If only we could make it so.
Then there was The West Wing. I think it premiered when I was teaching at night. For whatever reason, I didn’t see a single episode until reruns shortly before the second season. I caught new episodes almost never. Read the rest of this entry »
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
I tell students to go to the source; if they read the original documents, that puts them ahead of 99% of the people who claim to know what they are doing, especially in history.
Cartoon by Steve Benson of the Arizona Republic, 2004; via Panda’s Thumb
It’s scary to think people can be granted a degree in lying to innocent children, and that it would be counted as a factor in favor of their teaching, instead of as a problem to be overcome like a bad background report.
But ICR was granting degrees in California. They hope to expand their sales in Texas, closer to the Bible Belt’s buckle.
How will the state’s serious higher education institutions respond? What should Texas education officials do? It’s a difficult question, really. Generally states allow any institution that gets accreditation to grant degrees. ICR was denied accreditation in California, but set up a separate accrediting company for Bible colleges and religiously affiliated schools. When the U.S. Department of Education authorized that accrediting association as acceptable for Pell Grant and Stafford Grant purposes, California’s ability to stop the madness was limited. Texas allows degrees for colleges that teach chiropractic medicine, and there are probably several other degree granting programs that would raise eyebrows of rational people, were they better known.
“It just seems odd to license an organization to offer a degree in science when they’re not teaching science,” Mr. [Dan] Quinn [of the Texas Freedom Network] said.
“What we’re seeing here is another example of how Texas is becoming the central state in efforts by creationists to undermine science education, especially the teaching of evolution.”
A group of educators and officials from the state Coordinating Board visited the campus in November and met with faculty members. The group found that the institute offered a standard science education curriculum that would prepare them to take state licensure exams, said Glenda Barron, an associate commissioner of the board.
Dr. Barron said the program was held to the same standards that any other college would have to meet.
“The master’s in science education, we see those frequently,” she said. “What’s different – and what’s got everybody’s attention – is the name of the institution.”
No, it’s not the name of the institution that worries us — it’s their history of defending buncombe, hoaxes and falsehoods as science, detracting from the education of science in a major way.
Science education in the U.S. is under assault. ICR is asking Texas to surrender the nation’s future and accept the ICR’s white flag of ignorance as the state’s own. It is unclear to me whether the state may refuse to do that, though it would be the moral thing to do to refuse.
The site offers a lot. E-mail updates on issues, cheap DVDs of the movie ($10.00 each for the first 10, $9.00 each for the next 10 . . . you may want to get a copy for each social studies classroom), background stories to the movie, story of Annie Leonard, background sheets, lists of organizations working on the issues and reading lists and more. I found no lesson plans, but you can surely cobble one together for an hour class, with 20 minutes taken up by the film. Plus you can download the movie, for free.
Go noodle around the site: There are lots of possibilities for student projects, student discussions, in-class exercises, homework, and fun.
This movie details, quickly and with good humor, the economics of recycling, the economics of waste disposal, and the economics of production. This provides a great gateway to talk about civics and government, and how to make things happen like garbage collection and recycling; a gateway to talk about economics, especially the various flows of money and goods; a gateway to talk about geography and how we have used our land and rivers to bury and carry waste; and how we use natural resources generally.
This would also be a good video for Boy Scout merit badge classes for the Citizenship in the Community and Citizenship in the Nation badges.
Contrasted with most of the industrial grade video I’ve seen for economics classes, this is fantastic. It’s better than any of the sometimes ambitious, but ultimately dull productions from the Federal Reserve Banks (are you listening, Richard Fisher? Hire Will Brehm’s group). (No offense, Osgood — yours is the best of that lot.)
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., probably has political objections to the movie, claiming it leans left, which indicates it’s in the mainstream. If you’re using any other supplemental material in your classes, this just balances it out.
Screen capture from the film, “Story of Stuff”
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
The venerable missionary group known as the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) moved its headquarters from California to Dallas a few months ago. Anyone who follows science education in America is familiar with this group, who deny that the Earth can be more than a few thousands of years old, who argue that geology, astronomy, chemistry and biology are all based on faulty premises.
Dallas is a good location for a missionary agency that flies to churches around the U.S. to make pitches for money and preach the gospel of their cult. DFW Airport provides same-day flights to most of the U.S. Airlines are glad to have their business.
Years ago ICR tried to get approval from the State of California to grant graduate degrees in science, because their brand of creationism is not taught in any research university, or any other institution with an ethics code that strives for good information and well-educated graduates. ICR got permission only after setting up their own accrediting organization which winks, blinks and turns a blind eye to what actually goes on in science courses taught there. It is unclear if anyone has kept count, but there appear to be a few people with advanced degrees in science from this group, perhaps teaching in the public schools, or in charter schools, or in odd parochial settings.
With a new home in Texas, ICR needs permission of Texas authorities to grant graduate degrees. Texas Observer reported that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board put off consideration of the issue until their meeting of January 24 (no action was planned for this meeting, so failure to grant this authority to ICR should not be taken as any sign that the board is opposed to granting it).
Enrolling and graduating hundreds of thousands more students is a step in the right direction. But getting a degree in a poor quality program will not give people the competitive edge they need in today’s world economy. Academic rigor and excellence are essential – both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We also need to attract and support more research in the state for the academic and economic benefits it provides.
Check out the Texas Observer‘s longer post on the issue, and since comments are not enabled there, how about stating here your views on the issue? Comment away.
Over 100 million boys in the U.S. have repeated the Scout Law, “Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, Reverent.”
“Everybody looked at it, started giggling and asked why I wasn’t already in Switzerland,” he said.
He admits to being tempted to deposit the money and draw a bit interest before the state asked for its return.
“That money would have gone a long way,” he said.
When a company comptroller complained to me once that the $4 million in refunds to our company would mess up his quarterly bookkeeping because he expected the money in the next quarter, I volunteered to park the money in an account for him. He quickly came to his senses. At low, passbook interest rates, the $4 million would have paid $141/hour, 24 hours a day — more than $3,300 a day. A few weeks of that and you’re talkin’ big money.
Because the check was state-issued, cashing it would probably have been easy, despite the large amount, Giani said.
“It was a valid check,” said Rick Beckstead, the state accounting operation manager whose signature is stamped on the check.
How honest are you, Dear Reader? How much of a temptation would it have been to cash that check? (I’ll wager this man is a former Boy Scout; how much does that account for his actions?)
Larry Lessig, speaking at TED, makes the case for kids who use stuff borrowed from others in their classroom presentations.
First, this speech should open your eyes to the danger of our only preaching against plagiarism to kids who borrow copyrighted stuff off the internet (see especially the last two minutes of his almost-19 minute presentation). What’s the alternative, you ask? See what Prof. Lessig says. What are the alternatives?
Second, Lessig shows how to use slides in a live presentation, to significantly increase the content delivered and the effectiveness of the delivery.
Put your coffee down. If you’re not ready to be outraged, don’t read any farther. Go on to the next post.
To demonstrate the barbarity and brutality of communist systems, or totalitarian governments, people often point to execution practices used in Stalinist Russia or, currently, in the People’s Republic of China. When a person is executed, usually with a bullet to the head, the family of the executed person is billed for the bullet.
Insult to injury, injury on injury, it’s heartless, the critics rightly say — and evidence of the inhumanity, the complete lack of human emotion in the government.
That’s not what this post is about. Can there be something worse?
One of them is Jordan Fox, a young soldier from the South Hills.
He finds solace in the hundreds of boxes he loads onto a truck in Carnegie. In each box is a care package that will be sent to a man or woman serving in Iraq. It was in his name Operation Pittsburgh Pride was started.
Fox was seriously injured when a roadside bomb blew up his vehicle. He was knocked unconscious. His back was injured and lost all vision in his right eye.
A few months later Fox was sent home. His injuries prohibited him from fulfilling three months of his commitment. A few days ago, he received a letter from the military demanding nearly $3,000 of his signing bonus back.
“I tried to do my best and serve my country. I was unfortunately hurt in the process. Now they’re telling me they want their money back,” he explained.
It’s a slap for Fox’s mother, Susan Wardezak, who met with President Bush in Pittsburgh last May. He thanked her for starting Operation Pittsburgh Pride which has sent approximately 4,000 care packages.
He then sent her a letter expressing his concern over her son’s injuries, so she cannot understand the U.S. Government’s apparent lack of concern over injuries to countless U.S. Soldiers and demands that they return their bonuses.
So the official answer is that not as many soldiers were billed as Griffin claimed, and the Pentagon says they excuse the debts if the soldier complains.
What if the soldier doesn’t complain, but just pays?
How could any system do this in the first place?
Can we believe an administration that has lied to get out of accountability for so many other scrapes in this war?
Keep checking for followups.
Also, if you have received one of these letters, or if you know someone who has, please tell us.
Claire [Markwardt] made it within forty feet of the finish line when her leg broke. She tried to get up, but it broke again.
“I knew I really couldn’t stay there and I didn’t wanna let my team down and I had gone that far, so there wasn’t really a point in laying there.” she said.
Amazingly, with a leg broken in several places, Claire crawled the rest of the way across the finish line. “It was my last race of my senior year and I didn’t know how my team was doing in the race, but I wanted us to be as high as we could.” she said.
When I was in my 20’s I was reading the print copy of SI, it was the only copy back then, when I read about a female high school track runner who broke her leg 100 yards from the finish of her race. She was the anchor for the 4×400 relay in a state meet and was leading by a lot when she broke her leg. Not wanting to let her teammates down she crawled to the finish line.
That high school girl inspired me to do a lot of things. She showed me what loyalty, courage and guts were all about. I never thought I would see anything like it again in my lifetime, but I see it everyday in the news.
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to see the boss in those situations, too, so you know whether to take the job? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to see your principal or department head in these conditions, so you’d know more about what to expect?
We’re generally more careful about long-term romantic relationships than we are about jobs. That may be why marriages — even the bad ones — often last longer than jobs.
It may explain why some jobs last longer than marriages, too. I remember sitting down with people from Southwest Airlines’ People Department once, and hearing them describe Herb Kelleher’s vision of the company: Kids grow up, siblings move away, spouses come and go, but Southwest Airlines will be there for you always.
Even when you’re sick?
Something to think about.
* Yeah, I noticed it’s from a blog called “Suddenly Christian.” He talks about a two-week trip, in a car, cross-country, with a potential mate. The author has at least one foot on the ground.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
A decision by the Supreme Court of the State of Washington last month had wags and pundits claiming that it is okay for politicians to lie, at least in the state of Washington.
On October 4 the Washington Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a law that banned publication of “a false statement of material fact about a candidate for public office” in advertisements or other campaign materials, if the statement was made with “actual malice,” or with “reckless disregard to its truth or falsity,” according to a report in the New York Times.
“The notion that the government, rather than the people, may be the final arbiter fo truth in political debate is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment,” Justice James M. Johnson wrote for four the justices in the majority.A dissenting justice, Barbara A. Madsen, wrote that “the majority’s decision is an invitation to lie with impunity.”
Justice Madsen added that the decision would help turn “political campaigns into contests of the best stratagems of lies and deceit, to the end that honest discourse and honest candidates are lost in the maelstrom.”
Utah’s voters now are engaged in a great debate that tests those views.Can voters discern the truth from a fog of claims and counterclaims about school vouchers?
Polls show vouchers losing. What does that mean?
Ironically, perhaps, in the Washington case, the candidate who got the claim wrong, according to the court’s decision, also lost the race:
Mr. Sheldon said Ms. Rickert had violated a state law that made it unlawful to publish “a false statement of material fact about a candidate for public office” in advertisements and campaign materials if the statement was made with “actual malice,” meaning in the knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard to its truth or falsity.
The commission ruled against Ms. Rickert and fined her $1,000. It found that Mr. Sheldon had not voted to close the facility and that it was, in any event, a juvenile detention center rather than one for the developmentally challenged.
Justice Johnson said the law under which the commission had acted was “a censorship scheme.”
“It naïvely assumes,” Justice Johnson wrote, “that the government is capable of correctly and consistently negotiating the thin line between fact and opinion in political speech.”
Mr. Sheldon had other ways to combat the brochure, Justice Johnson added. Mr. Sheldon and his supporters could have “responded to Ms. Rickert’s false statements with the truth.” And Mr. Sheldon remained free to file a libel suit, though he would have to prove not only falsity and actual malice but also that the statement had harmed his reputation.
In a brief concurring opinion, Chief Justice Gerry L. Alexander said the flaw in the law was that it penalized false “nondefamatory speech,” meaning statements that do not injure reputation. But he said the government should be free to “penalize defamatory political speech.”
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Is Joseph Romito a Boy Scout? Can we give him a medal?
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Hey, wasn’t there some environmentalist’s post here earlier? Someone defending Carson’s position? What happened?
That might have been the comment I deleted. I didn’t read the whole thing. The guy must have changed his email address, because my filter usually blocks him. He was the first guy I ever had to block for repeated inane arguments and personal attacks. I gave him a lot of chances but in the end he was just not worth the time to discuss anything with.