Here’s the Dilbert cartoon Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli should have viewed before he went fishing:
Making up stuff on the internet
May 3, 2010
3 Comments | 
Accuracy, Bogus history, Climate change, Global warming, History, Hoaxes, Junk science, Research, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: Accuracy, Bogus history, Climate change, Global warming, History, Hoaxes, Junk science, Ken Cucinelli, Michael Mann, Research, Science, Virginia, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Constitutional drama, under our noses, off the radar
May 2, 2010What about that impeachment trial, eh? Planning to watch it?
Your best bet might be C-SPAN, but I wouldn’t wager the mortgage were I you.
Impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson in the U.S. Senate, 1868; from Harper's Weekly, April 11, 1868 - public domain
Federal Judge Thomas Porteous of New Orleans got four articles of impeachment approved against him by the U.S. House of Representatives on March 10. The first article got a nearly unanimous vote — who says the House is divided? — 412 to 0. Three other articles got similar margins, 410-0, 416-0, and 423-0.
Unless you live in New Orleans or have a strange fascination for that great newspaper, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, you probably heard nothing about this great Constitutional drama. If you get the Times-Picayune, you’ve had good coverage of the issue so far.
Under its own special rules of impeachment, the Senate appointed a committee led by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, which will hold the actual trial and report results to the full Senate for action. Sen. McCaskill said she expects the trial to begin in early August, and that the report to the full Senate could come as soon as September.
While news media and bloggers chase ghosts and hoaxes, real work continues in Washington, D.C. You just don’t hear much about it.
You likely have not heard of Judge Proteous’s troubles, though they are long-standing, because the issue was a local, Louisiana and New Orleans affair. Heaven knows New Orleans has had its share of other stories to knock off the front pages the ethical lapses of a sitting federal judge who was once a promising attorney.
Should you have heard? How can we judge? Should we not be concerned when a relatively important story is not only bumped to the back pages of newspapers, but bumped completely out of them, and off the radar of people who need to be informed about how well our government works?
My alert to this story came through a back-door route. On the list-serv for AP Government, someone asked who presides at the impeachment trial of the Chief Justice — remember, the Constitution spells out that the Chief Justice is the presiding officer in the impeachment of the President or Vice President. My memory is that the Senate rules on impeachments, and there is a committee that effectively presides, and that the impeachment of a Vice President or President merits special attention because the Vice President is the official, Constitutionally-mentioned presiding officer. We can’t have the vice president presiding at the trial of himself or herself, nor of the president. Looking up impeachment procedures, I stumbled across the pending impeachment of Judge Porteous. I don’t think it has appeared in our local newspaper, The Dallas Morning News.
Other judges have been impeached. Here in Texas, within the past three years, we had a federal judge impeached, Samuel Kent. You’d think Texas media would be sensitive to such stories. (Kent resigned before the trial could begin.)
I perceive that media are ignoring several important areas of federal governing, not necessarily intentionally, but instead by being distracted by nonentity stories or stories that just don’t deserve the inflated coverage they get. Among undercovered areas are the environment, energy research, higher education, foreign aid, management of public lands and justice, including indictments, trials and convictions. A vast gray hole where should be the news of Judge Porteous’s pending impeachment is just one symptom.
Several news outlets carried stories:
- Deseret News in Salt Lake City, carried the AP story by Larry Margasak (AP also has the best, most recent photos of Porteous, but I’m not an AP subscriber)
- CNN story on House impeachment of Porteous
- Wall Street Journal law blog mentioned the impeachment vote, and linked to another WSJ article on the issue
More:
2 Comments | History, Journalism, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, News, Newspapers, U.S. Constitution, U.S. Senate | Tagged: Government, History, Impeachment, Journalism, Judge Thomas Porteous, Louisiana, New Orleans, News, Politics, U.S. Constitution, U.S. Senate | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ravitch calls the issue: Will public education survive?
May 1, 2010
Diane Ravitch in Dallas, April 28, 2010 – Copyright 2010 Ed Darrell (you may use freely, with attribution)
Bill McKenzie, editorial board member and writer for the Dallas Morning News, wrote briefly about the rekindled controversy over standards a year ago — but did he listen to Diane Ravitch on Wednesday night?
He should have.
I first met Ravitch a couple of decades ago when I worked for Checker Finn at the Office of Educational Research and Improvement. Ted Bell’s idea of a commission to look at education quality, and it’s 1983 report, saved the Reagan administration and assured Reagan’s reelection in 1984. She was one of the most prodigious and serious thinkers behind education reform efforts, then a close friend of Finn (who was Assistant Secretary of Education for Research) — a position that Ravitch herself held in the administration of George H. W. Bush.
Ravitch now criticizes the end result of all that turmoil and hard work, the No Child Left Behind Act, and the way it has distorted education to keep us in the crisis we were warned of in 1983. Then, the “rising tide of mediocrity” came in part because we didn’t have a good way to compare student achievement, state to state. Today, the mediocrity is driven by the tests that resulted from legislative efforts to solve the problem.
Conditions in education in America have changed. We still have a crisis after 27 years of education reform (how long do we have a crisis before it becomes the norm), but for the first time, Ravitch said, “There is a real question about whether public education will survive.” The past consensus on the value of public education and need for public schools, as I would put it, now is challenged by people who want to kill it.
“The new issue today: Will we have a public education system bound by law to accept all children.”
Ironic, no? The No Child Left Behind Act has instead created a system where many children could be forced to the rear.
I took an evening in the middle of a week of TAKS testing — the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. With ninth through twelfth grades, we had four days of testing which essentially requires the shutdown of the education for the week (we had Monday to review for the test). It was a week to reflect on just how far we have strayed from the good intentions of public education advocates who pushed the Excellence in Education Commission’s report in 1983.
Ravitch spoke for over an hour. I’ll have more to report as I get caught up, after a month of meetings, test prep, testing, and little sleep.
Background, more:
8 Comments | Education, Education assessment, Education quality, Education reform, History, Politics, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Teaching, Testing | Tagged: Education, Education assessment, Education reform, Politics, Public education, Teachers, Teaching, Testing | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Quote of the moment: Jonathan Weiner’s Pulitzer-winning explanation of mosquitoes developing immunity to DDT
April 30, 2010When evolutionists study these worldwide resistance movements, they see four classes of adaptations arising, because an insect under attack has four possible routes to survival.
Jonathan Weiner, author of The Beak of the Finch, a story of evolution in our time
First, it can simply dodge. Strains of malarial mosquitoes in Africa used to fly into a hut, sting someone, and then land on the hut wall to digest their meals. In the 1950s and 1960s health workers began spraying hut walls with DDT. Unfortunately in every village there were always a few mosquitoes that would fly in through the window, bite, and fly right back out. Millions of mosquitoes died, but these few survived and multiplied. Within a short time almost all of the mosquitoes in the villages were hit-and-run mosquitoes.
Second, if an insect cannot dodge, it can evolve a way to keep the poison from getting under its cuticle. Some diamondback moths, if they land on a leaf that is tainted with pyrethroids, will fly off and leave their poisoned legs behind, an adaptive trick known as “legdrop.”
Third, if the insect can’t keep the poison out, it may evolve an antidote. A mosquito species called Culex pipiens can now survive massive doses of organophosphate insecticides. The mosquitoes actually digest the poison, using a suite of enzymes known as esterases. The genes that make these esterases are known as alleles B1 and B2. Many strains of Culex pipiens now carry as many as 250 copies of the B1 allele and 60 copies of the B2.
Because these genes are virtually identical, letter by letter, from continent to continent, it seems likely that they came from a single lucky mosquito. The mutant, the founder of this particular resistance movement, is thought to have lived in the 1960s, somewhere in Africa or Asia. The genes first appeared in Californian mosquitoes in 1984, in Italian mosquitoes in 1985, and in French mosquitoes in 1986.
Finally, if the insect can’t evolve an antidote,it can sometimes find an internal dodge. The poison has a target somewhere inside the insect’s body. The insect can shrink this target, or move it, or lose it. Of the four types of adaptations, the four survival strategies, this is the hardest for evolution to bring off — but [entomologist Martin] Taylor thinks this is how Heliothis [virescens, a cotton boll-eating moth] is evolving now.
“It always seems amazing to me that evolutionists pay so little attention to this kind of thing,” says Taylor. “And that cotton growers are having to deal with these pests in the very states whose legislatures are so hostile to the theory of evolution. Because it is evolution itself they are struggling against in their fields each season. These people are trying to ban the teaching of evolution while their own cotton crops are failing because of evolution. How can you be a creationist farmer any more?”
Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch, a story of evolution in our time, Alfred A. Knopf 1994, pp. 254-255. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1995.
10 Comments | Africa, Biology, Books, DDT, Evolution, History, Malaria, Quotes, Reason, Science | Tagged: Biology, Books, DDT, Evolution, Jonathan Weiner, Malaria, mosquitoes, Resistance | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
I get political e-mail, from Bill White on Texas social studies standards
April 29, 2010Good information, oddly enough for a political note:
Dear Ed,
Watch my brief comments
and join the conversation.We need your help to keep divisive politics out of Texas’ classrooms.
From now until May 14th, the State Board of Education is accepting public comments on its proposed curriculum changes.
The SBOE has proposed removing Thomas Jefferson from a part of the curriculum. They are also planning to exclude references to Hispanics who fought Santa Anna and died at the Alamo.
Watch the YouTube video with my brief comments by clicking here.
During the primaries, Texans voted against the most extreme and hyper-political SBOE candidates, sending a clear message about their approach of injecting politics into our classrooms.
Last month, I called on Rick Perry to ask his appointed chair of the SBOE to either send changes back to expert review teams or delay the vote until new board members are seated.
Perry’s response has been to say that he’s not going to “try to outsmart” the SBOE. He declined to show leadership, refusing to ask his appointed chair of SBOE to rein in the hyper-political curriculum amendment process.
Join the conversation and spread the word about this opportunity to be heard.
Our next governor should be a leader who ensures our schools prepare young Texans for college and their careers. I am committed to improving education and working for our future.
Thank you for taking the time to weigh in.
Sincerely,
Bill WhiteP.S. If you would like to send your comments directly to the SBOE, click here.
2 Comments | Economics, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Government, History, Social Studies, State school boards, Texas, Texas history, War on Education | Tagged: Bill White, Education, Social Studies, Texas, Texas State Board of Education, War on Education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Teaching Now, new blog
April 29, 2010It’s from the folks at Education Week and Teacher magazine: Teaching Now.
You may want to see the entry a couple of days ago about a school who issued cell phones to fifth grade students, and why.
Or note this story that Broward County, Florida, is hacking away at salaries for librarians and teachers of art, music and physical education.
Leave a Comment » | Classroom technology, Education blogs, History, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Tagged: Classroom technology, Education, Education blogs, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Diane Ravitch in Dallas: NCLB isn’t working
April 28, 2010Dr. Diane Ravitch, one of the principal education theorists behind the No Child Left Behind Act, will speak twice in Dallas over the next two days — telling how NCLB is not working
Both public events, tonight at 7:00 p.m., and Thursday at the Dallas Institute of Culture and Humanities, are sponsored by the Dallas Institute.
Note that registration is required for tonight’s session:
To All Staff RE: The Dallas Institute of Culture and Humanities presents: Education Forum: What Makes a Good Education?
Two Public Events: Wednesday, April 28, at 7 p.m., and Thursday, April 29, at 7 p.m.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010, 7 p.m. Evening Forum and Book Signing at the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts Montgomery Arts Theater, 2501 Flora Street, Dallas, 75201
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Diane Ravitch, Education Historian
In this age of productivity models and minimum standards, the topic of a good education often
gets lost, but it evokes the century-long quarrel between the practical and the academic
curricula in our public discourse. Today, if we want to build a school system that will serve our
youth not only in their schooling but throughout life, we need to place what makes a good education
at the center of our discussion.Beginning this conversation during our inaugural Education Forum are two noted authorities in the teaching profession: Dr. Diane Ravitch and Dr. Louise Cowan
Dr. Diane Ravitch, one of the nations leading education historians and author of the
#1 bestselling book on education, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.In it, Dr. Ravitch explains why she is recanting many of the views she held as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. Based on the data, she claimed in a recent interview on The Diane Rehm show, the remedies are not working and will not give us the educated citizens that we all want. Dr. Ravitch will explore what makes a good education and how to fulfill our commitment to a democratic future.
Dr. Louise Cowan, a Founding Fellow of the Dallas Institute and former dean at the University of Dallas, created the Institutes nationally recognized Teachers Academy programs from her vision of what makes a good education. For 27 years, these programs have challenged area school teachers to assume their full authority and responsibility as teaching professionals.
SEATING FOR THE EVENING FORUM IS LIMITED – ADMISSION BY RESERVATION ONLY
Teachers Admission – $15 / General Admission – $25
Deadline to register is noon, Wednesday, April 28.
For more information or to register, call 214-871-2440, or go to http://www.dallasinstitute.org/programs_events_eduforum.html
Thursday, April 29, 2010, 7 p.m. Evening Book Discussion at the Dallas Institute of Culture and Humanities, 2719 Routh Street, Dallas, Texas 75201
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.
Discussion of Dr. Ravitchs new book will be led by Institute Fellows and Teachers Academy alumni.
General Admission – $10
For more information or to register, call 214-871-2440, or go to http://www.dallasinstitute.org/programs_events_eduforum.html
The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture
2719 Routh Street
Dallas, Texas 75201
www.dallasinstitute.org
2 Comments | Education, Education assessment, Education reform, History, No Child Left Behind Act | Tagged: Dallas, Diane Ravitch, Education, No Child Left Behind | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Decline and fall of the Wall Street Journal — DDT poisoning to blame?
April 27, 2010Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal provoked groans in 2007, but especially among those of us who had dealt with the news teams of the paper over the previous couple of decades.
For good reason, we now know. An opposite-editorial page article in the European edition shows why.
Richard Tren and Donald Roberts, two anti-environmentalist, anti-science lobbyists, wrote a slam at scientists, environmentalists, malaria fighters and the UN, making false claims that these people somehow botched the handling of DDT and allowed a lot of children to die. Tren, Roberts and the Wall Street Journal should be happy to know that their targeting essentially public figures, probably protects them from libel suits.
Most seriously, the article just gets the facts wrong. Facts of science and history — easily checked — are simply stated erroneously. Sometimes the statements are so greatly at odds with the facts, one might wonder if there was malignant intent to skew history and science.
This is journalistic and newspaper malpractice. Any national journal, like the WSJ, should have fact checkers to check out at least the basic claims of op-ed writers. Did Murdock fire them all? How can anyone trust any opinion expressed at the Journal when these guys get away with a yahoo-worthy, fact-challenged piece like this one?
Tren and Roberts make astounding errors of time and place, attributing to DDT magical powers to cross space and time. What are they thinking? Here are some of the errors the Journals fact checkers should have caught — did Murdoch fire all the fact checkers?
- Beating malaria is not a question of having scientific know how. Curing a disease in humans requires medical delivery systems that can diagnose and treat the disease. DDT does nothing on those scores. Beating malaria is a question of will and consistency, political will to create the human institutions to do the job. DDT can’t help there.
- DDT wasn’t the tool used to eradicate malaria from the U.S. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control — an agency set up specifically to fight diseases like malaria — says malaria was effectively eradicated from the U.S. in 1939. DDT’s pesticide capabilities were discovered in mid-1939, but DDT was not available to fight malaria, for civilians, for another seven years. DDT does not time travel.
- DDT doesn’t have a great track record beating malaria, anywhere. Among nations that have beaten malaria, including the U.S., the chief tools used were other than pesticides. Among nations where DDT is still used, malaria is endemic. DDT helped, but there is no place on Earth that beat malaria solely by spraying to kill mosquitoes. Any malaria fighter will tell you that more must be done, especially in improving medical care, and in creating barriers to keep mosquitoes from biting.
- Beating malaria in the U.S. involved draining breeding areas, screening windows to stop mosquitoes from entering homes, and boosting medical care and public health efforts. These methods are the only methods that have worked, over time, to defeat malaria. Pesticides can help in a well-managed malaria eradication campaign, but no campaign based on spraying pesticides has ever done more than provide a temporary respite against malaria.
- DDT is not a magic bullet against malaria. Nations that have used DDT continuously and constantly since 1946, like Mexico, and almost like South Africa, have the same malaria problems other nations have. Nations that have banned DDT have no malaria.
- DDT has never been banned across most of the planet. Even under the pesticide treaty that specifically targets DDT-classes of pesticides for phase out, there is a special exception for DDT. DDT was manufactured in the U.S. long after it was banned for agricultural use, and it is manufactured today in India and China. It is freely available to any government who wishes to use it.
- People in malaria-prone areas are not stupid. Tren and Roberts expect you to believe that people in malaria-prone nations are too stupid to buy cheap DDT and use it to save their children, but instead require people like Tren and Roberts to tell them what to do. That’s a pretty foul argument on its face.
- DDT is a dangerous poison, uncontrollable in the wild. Tren and Roberts suggest that DDT is relatively harmless, and that people were foolish to be concerned about it. They ignore the two federal trials that established DDT was harmful, and the court orders under which EPA (dragging its feet) compiled a record of DDT’s destructive potential thousands of pages long. They ignore the massive fishkills in Texas and Oklahoma, they ignore the astounding damage to reproduction of birds, and the bioaccumulation quality of the stuff, which means that all living things accumulate larger doses as DDT rises through the trophic levels of the food chain. Predatory birds in American estuaries got doses of DDT multiplied millions of times over what was applied to be toxic to the smallest organisms.
DDT was banned in the U.S. because it destroys entire ecosystems. The U.S. ban prohibited its use on agriculture crops, but allowed use to fight malaria or other diseases, or for other emergencies. Under these emergency rules, DDT was used to fight the tussock moth infestation in western U.S. forests in the 1970s. - Again, DDT’s ban in the U.S. was not based on a threat to human health. DDT was banned because it destroys natural ecosystems. So any claim that human health effects are not large, misses the point. However, we should not forget that DDT is a known carcinogen to mammals (humans are mammals). DDT is listed as a “probable human carcinogen” by the American Cancer Society and every other cancer-fighting agency on Earth. Why didn’t the Journal’s fact checkers bother to call their local cancer society? DDT is implicated as a threat to human health, as a poison, as a carcinogen, and as an endocrine disruptor. Continued research since 1972 has only confirmed that DDT poses unknown, but most likely significant threats to human health. No study has ever been done that found DDT to be safe to humans.
- Use of DDT — or rather, overuse of DDT — frequently has led to more malaria. DDT forces rapid evolution of mosquitoes. They evolve defenses to the stuff, so that future generations are resistant or even totally immune to DDT. Increasing DDT use often leads to an increase in malaria.
- Slandering the World Health Organization (WHO), Rachel Carson, the thousands of physicians in Africa and Asia who fight malaria, or environmentalists who have exposed the dangers of DDT, does nothing to help save anyone from malaria.
Tren and Roberts have a new book out, a history of DDT. I suspect that much of the good they have to say about DDT is true and accurate. Their distortions of history, and their refusal to look at the mountain of science evidence that warns of DDT’s dangers is all the more puzzling.
No world class journal should allow such an ill-researched piece to appear, even as an opinion. Somebody should have done some fact checking, and made those corrections before the piece hit publication.
Full text of the WSJ piece below the fold.
7 Comments | Accuracy, Africa, DDT, Disease, History, Hoaxes, Political Smear, Politics, Public health, Rachel Carson, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: Africa, DDT, Disease, History, Hoaxes, Malaria, Political Smear, Politics, Public health, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science, World Health Organization | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Colleague’s Fulbright-Hays trip to Senegal
April 26, 2010One of my colleagues — an art teacher; you know, the adventurous type — heads off to Senegal this summer on a Fulbright-Hays program.
I’m sorta jealous, of course. I need time to push our history course to championship level, though — I didn’t apply for anything this summer.
If you’re teaching world history, or art, or government, or environmental science, or geography, this might be a great blog to track.
Senegal is a very interesting place. Note on the map how it completely surrounds its neighbor nation of The Gambia.
Senegal, map courtesy of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
France held the nation as a colony once upon a time, from 1850 to independence of the Mali Federation in 1960 — one of the national languages is French, but regional languages are numerous, Wolof, Soninke, Seereer-Siin, Fula, Maninka, and Diola. The Mali Federation was short-lived, and Senegal broke off in August of 1960.
If you listen to NPR, you’ve probably heard their reporter signing off in that distinct way she does, “Tthis is Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, for NPR, in Dah-KAHHH!” (Not to be confused with Dacca, Pakistan).
According to the CIA Factbook (online version):
The French colonies of Senegal and the French Sudan were merged in 1959 and granted their independence as the Mali Federation in 1960. The union broke up after only a few months. Senegal joined with The Gambia to form the nominal confederation of Senegambia in 1982, but the envisaged integration of the two countries was never carried out, and the union was dissolved in 1989. The Movement of Democratic Forces in the Casamance (MFDC) has led a low-level separatist insurgency in southern Senegal since the 1980s, and several peace deals have failed to resolve the conflict. Nevertheless, Senegal remains one of the most stable democracies in Africa. Senegal was ruled by a Socialist Party for 40 years until current President Abdoulaye WADE was elected in 2000. He was reelected in February 2007, but has amended Senegal’s constitution over a dozen times to increase executive power and weaken the opposition, part of the President’s increasingly autocratic governing style. Senegal has a long history of participating in international peacekeeping and regional mediation.
The country is tropical, hot and humid. Geographically, it is low, rolling plains.
Dakar is about as far west as one can go on the African continent. (See the map inset — Senegal is in dark green).
Senegal has iron ores, and phosphorus (ancient bird droppings?). It’s not a rich nation, but it’s better off than many developing countries.
Adkins is in for a great adventure, no?
Africa, showing Senegal - CIA Factbook
4 Comments | Adventure, Africa, Art, Education, Environmental protection, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Government, History, Science, Teachers, Teaching, Travel | Tagged: Adventure, Africa, Education, Environmental Science, Fulbright-Hays, geography, Government, History, Senegal, Summer Travel, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Strike a blow against malaria, for World Malaria Day, April 25, 2010
April 25, 2010Today is World Malaria Day.
Not a day to celebrate malaria, but to encourage the fight against it.
What can you do? One good thing would be to give $10 to Nothing But Nets, the campaign to get bednets for every kid in an African area affected by malaria.
Bednets save lives of kids like this 4-year old - Photo by Paul Bettings/World Vision
Another thing to do would be to remember that fighting malaria does not require DDT, and in fact fighting malaria might be hampered by DDT.
Go donate. We’ll worry about the charlatans later.
5 Comments | DDT, History, Malaria | Tagged: DDT, Malaria, Nothing But Nets, World Malaria Day | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Utah report: More false “founders’ quotes” plague American discourse
April 25, 2010Utah has a movement out to slander education and the Constitution, with a pointless claim that the Constitution cannot be called a “democracy,” damn Lincoln, Hamilton, Madison, Washington, both Roosevelts, and Reagan.
Sadly, it started in my old school district, the one where I got the last nine years of public school education, Alpine District, in the north end of Utah County.
They even have a website, Utah’s Republic. (No, Utah was never an independent republic before it was a state — it’s not like the Texas Republic wackoes, except in their wacko interpretations of law and history, where they are indistinguishable.)
At the blog from that site, there is a silly discussion on how a republic is a much superior form of government to a democracy. Never mind that sheer numbers in our nation have always made democracy impossible (can’t get 150 million voters in one hall), or that distance makes it impossible to work (vote tomorrow in Washington, D.C.? Everybody call the airlines, see if you can make it.)
So, I pointed out how a republic can also suggest tyranny. And the response? A flurry of “quotes from the founders.”
Can you vouch for any of these “quotes?” Is any one of them accurate?
The Jefferson “mob rule” quote isn’t in any Jefferson data base that I can find. I find it also attributed to George Washington — but almost always without any citation, so you can’t check.
That maneuver is one of the key indicators of Bogus Quotes, the lack of any citation to make it difficult to track down. All of these quotes come without citation:
As for a moral people, Washington said there could be no morality without religion and called it the “indispensable support,” not education. Obviously Jefferson and the Founders wanted education of the constitution to take place but we are very far removed from it in our education system.
Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide. – John Adams
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. – Thomas Jefferson
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. – Thomas Jefferson
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote. – Benjamin Franklin
Democracy is the most vile form of government… democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. – James Madison
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. – Abraham Lincoln
The last one is probably accurate, but irrelevant to this discussion (nice red herring, there, Oak). Can you offer links to verify any of them?
Is this what I suspect? The “Utah Republic” drive is not only a tempest in a teapot (though perhaps caused by other more serious maladies), but also a tempest based on false readings of history?
The website for “Utah Republic” is maintained by a guy named Oak Norton, who is obviously in thrall to the voodoo histories of David Barton and Cleon Skousen (I think Barton stole a lot of his voodoo history from Skousen, but that’s another topic for another day).
Funny: Nowhere do these guys discuss one of the greatest drivers of the republic, over more egalitarian and more democratic forms of government. Remember, Hamilton preferred to have an aristocracy, an elite-by-birth group, who would rule over the peasants. He didn’t trust the peasants, the people who he saw as largely uneducated, to make critical decisions like, who should be president. Norton doesn’t trust the peasants to get it right, and so he wants to dictate to them what they are supposed to know, in Nortonland.
Just because Oak Norton slept through high school history and government is no reason to shut down Utah’s Alpine School District or any other school; he’s not offered much evidence that everyone else missed that day in class, nor evidence that it has any significant effect.
Jefferson’s advice on quotes found on the internet, backdropped by his books now held by the Library of Congress.
28 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, Democracy, Education, Fake Quotes, Government, History, James Madison, Santayana's ghost, Thomas Jefferson, U.S. Constitution, Voodoo history | Tagged: A republic madam if you can keep it, Accuracy, Adams, Bogus history, Democracy, Fake Quotes, founders, Jefferson, Madison, Misquotes, Quotes, Santayana's ghost, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
I get e-mail: PFAW on Texas social studies follies (“please help!”)
April 23, 2010
Jeff Danziger cartoon, for the New York Times Syndicate, on Texas State Board of Education “changes” to Texas social studies texts.
People for the American Way have joined the fight for good education in Texas, pushing better social studies education standards. The Texas State Board of Education will conduct final votes on social studies standards in May.
Grotesque slashes damaged social studies standards in the last round of amendments. Conservatives will probably try to keep secret their proposed changes, offering a flurry of last-minute amendments carefully designed to gut serious education and make the standards work as indoctrination for young conservatives instead.
PFAW has good reason to fear. Here’s their letter. from PFAW President Michael Keegan:
Dear People For Supporter,
Thomas Jefferson banned in Texas schools? Maybe… if the Right has its way. The fight is still on to keep absurd changes out of the Texas social studies textbook standards, with the final standards set to be adopted by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) on May 21.
Right-wing members of the SBOE are using the textbook standards in Texas to rewrite history in a way that could impact students across the U.S., tossing out facts in favor of propaganda like:
- America is a Christian country, founded on “Biblical principles.”
- Conservative icons from Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, the Moral Majority and even Sen. Joseph McCarthy are history’s “good guys,” but progressives and progressive values are at odds with what it means to be “American.”
- Words like “democracy” (sounds like “Democrat!”) have nothing to do with America — we’re a Republic — In fact, “capitalism” has sort of a negative connotation to some, so they want that word to be universally replaced with “free market.”
- Some of the major contributions of Thomas Jefferson — arguably America’s greatest thinker — are on the chopping block, as are the contributions of other important figures not favored by the zealots on the Texas State Board of Education, like Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall. (Who’s next? Martin Luther King? FDR?)
Texas is just ground zero for what is clearly a national effort. We need to make sure that whatever standards are adopted in Texas, they do not affect the social studies textbooks used by students in other states.
The Texas State Board of Education traditionally has tremendous power in determining the content of textbooks not only for Texas students but for students across the U.S. Texas reviews and adapts textbook standards for the major subjects every six years, and because of the size of the state’s market, textbook publishers often print books consistent with the Texas standards. Last year, they attracted national ridicule for trying to inject creationism into science textbooks. This year, they’re voting on social studies standards.
The right-wing majority on the State Board wants indoctrinate Texas students into this new perverse revisionist history. PFAW is supporting our allies on the ground in Texas who are working to make sure students have the chance to learn history as it occurred, not how the Far Right wish it had happened. But we need to do all we can to make sure this is not exported to other states and school districts as well. Help us take extremism out of textbook decision making and let our children learn the truth in the classroom.
Thank you for your activism and for your continued support of PFAW.
— Michael B. Keegan, President
Pass the word, will you?
1 Comment | Astrobiology, Economics, Education, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Social Studies, State school boards, TEKS, Texas | Tagged: Curriculum, Economics, Education, geography, History, People for the American Way, Politics, Social Studies, state board of education, TEKS, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Earth Day/Lenin’s Birthday hoax
April 22, 2010One surefire way to tell an Earth Day post is done by an Earth Day denialist: They’ll note that the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, was an anniversary of the birth of Lenin.
Coincidentally, yes, Lenin was born on April 22 (new style calendar; it was April 10 on the calendar when he was born — but that’s a digression for another day).
It’s a hoax. There is no meaning to the first Earth Day’s falling on Lenin’s birthday — Lenin was not prescient enough to plan his birthday to fall in the middle of Earth Week, a hundred years before Earth Week was even planned.
My guess is that only a few really wacko conservatives know that April 22 is Lenin’s birthday (was it ever celebrated in the Soviet Union?). No one else bothers to think about it, or say anything about it, nor especially, to celebrate it.
Wisconsin’s U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, usually recognized as the founder and father of Earth Day, told how and why the organizers came to pick April 22:
Senator Nelson chose the date in order to maximize participation on college campuses for what he conceived as an “environmental teach-in.” He determined the week of April 19–25 was the best bet; it did not fall during exams or spring breaks, did not conflict with religious holidays such as Easter or Passover, and was late enough in spring to have decent weather. More students were likely to be in class, and there would be less competition with other mid-week events—so he chose Wednesday, April 22.
In his own words, Nelson spoke of what he was trying to do:
After President Kennedy’s [conservation] tour, I still hoped for some idea that would thrust the environment into the political mainstream. Six years would pass before the idea that became Earth Day occurred to me while on a conservation speaking tour out West in the summer of 1969. At the time, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, called “teach-ins,” had spread to college campuses all across the nation. Suddenly, the idea occurred to me – why not organize a huge grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment?
I was satisfied that if we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda. It was a big gamble, but worth a try.
At a conference in Seattle in September 1969, I announced that in the spring of 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment and invited everyone to participate. The wire services carried the story from coast to coast. The response was electric. It took off like gangbusters. Telegrams, letters, and telephone inquiries poured in from all across the country. The American people finally had a forum to express its concern about what was happening to the land, rivers, lakes, and air – and they did so with spectacular exuberance. For the next four months, two members of my Senate staff, Linda Billings and John Heritage, managed Earth Day affairs out of my Senate office.
Five months before Earth Day, on Sunday, November 30, 1969, The New York Times carried a lengthy article by Gladwin Hill reporting on the astonishing proliferation of environmental events:
“Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation’s campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam…a national day of observance of environmental problems…is being planned for next spring…when a nationwide environmental ‘teach-in’…coordinated from the office of Senator Gaylord Nelson is planned….”
Nelson, a veteran of the U.S. armed services (Okinawa campaign), flag-waving ex-governor of Wisconsin (Sen. Joe McCarthy’s home state, but also the home of Aldo Leopold and birthplace of John Muir), was working to raise America’s consciousness and conscience about environmental issues.
Lenin on the environment? Think of the Aral Sea disaster, the horrible pollution from Soviet mines and mills, and the dreadful record of the Soviet Union on protecting any resource. Lenin believed in exploiting resources, not conservation.
So, why are all these conservative denialists claiming, against history and politics, that Lenin’s birthday has anything to do with Earth Day?
Can you say “propaganda?”
Good information:
- National Geographic Society, “Earth Day at 40 – How It Began, Where It’s Going“
- Calgary Herald
- ABC News (North America, not Australia)
- Bill McKibben in the Washington Post, notes that the environment, and Earth’s people, are losing the environmental fight
- Earth Day reading from The Baltimore Sun
- USA Today worries that Earth Day has run too far in the opposite direction from Lenin, too corporate
- Washington Post on Earth Day activities in 2010
- EPA on Earth Day
Wall of Lenin’s Birthday Propaganda Shame:
- David Zeimer, writing in The Wisconsin Law Journal (This guy is particularly nutty. He notes the successes of cleaning up the air and water in and around Milwaukee, and then claims that clean air and water are false goals. Nuts.)
- Orange County Register comments (of course)
- Inaptly named (propaganda doublespeak?) American Thinker (Sussman runs with an odd crowd; and why does his friend always shout “Lenin’s birthday!” at Sussman’s speeches? Who needs a friend like that?)
- One of the ways you know Earth Day is innocently timed is that the FBI investigated it; in 1970, the FBI investigated hippies, but not organized crime. Go figure.
- Capitalism Magazine announces they have fired all of their fact checkers
- Front Page pushes the Lenin hoax
- Careful Thought blog abandons its name
- Tarpon’s Swamp just scrambles history and current issues inexplicably
- Don Surber may be as nutty as Zeimer, above — he notes words of concern from 1970, then dismisses the progress that resulted because people worked to change things; clean air is bad, to him, I guess
- Free Republic, never concerned with clashing facts, or facts at all, gets things exactly wrong
- Lubos Motl, a man not known for getting any facts straight, joins in the hoax at the Reference Frame (and don’t pretend Motl doesn’t know it’s a hoax)
- Making the case that economics should be left to professionals, the Amateur Economist pulls out a laundry list of hoaxes
Warn people not to be sucked in by the hoax:
20 Comments | Environmental protection, History, Hoaxes, Holidays, Science | Tagged: Earth Day, Environmental protection, Gaylord Nelson, Hoaxes, Lenin, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Teaching poetry badly, denying the captains of our souls
April 20, 2010At the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet, Wanda Coleman wrote about running into a student who hated to write poems, because she’d been conditioned to think poetry is difficult and dense:
I am forever grateful for that nameless White female, who, in her clunky shoes and calf-length tweed skirts, passed out poems on mimeograph paper to her first-grade students. When talking to students myself, I often tell the story of the very prim and ebony Mrs. Covington who challenged her junior high school English class to memorize “Invictus” before telling us who had authored the poem.
Words to teach by. “Invictus?” You know it, even if you don’t think you do.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
A poem written in 1875 by William Ernest Henley. Wikipedia describes it well enough:
At the age of 12, Henley became a victim of tuberculosis of the bone. A few years later, the disease progressed to his foot, and physicians announced that the only way to save his life was to amputate directly below the knee. It was amputated at the age of 25. In 1867, he successfully passed the Oxford local examination as a senior student. In 1875, he wrote the “Invictus” poem from a hospital bed. Despite his disability, he survived with one foot intact and led an active life until his death at the age of 53.
How is your National Poetry Month going? Go read Harriet.
1 Comment | Education, History, Motivation, Poetry, Teaching | Tagged: Education, History, Invictus, Poetry, Teaching, William Ernest Henley | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Concord Hymn, read by Bill Clinton
April 19, 2010What came after Paul Revere’s ride? The Battle of Lexington, and the Battle of Concord.
Longfellow’s poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” was written in 1860, 23 years after Emerson wrote “The Concord Hymn” for the dedication of the monument to the Minutemen at Concord Bridge.
1 Comment | 1776, America's founding, American Revolution, History, literacy, Literature, Poetry, War | Tagged: American Revolution, Battle of Concord, Bill Clinton, Concord Hymn, History, Literature, Poetry, Ralph Waldo Emerson | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
