June 10, 2008
You’ve got to love C-SPAN. Commercial television networks spend billions purchasing rights to be the sole broadcaster of sporting events, the Superbowl, the World Series, the NBA championships, the NCAA basketball championships, the Olympics.
What’s a money poor, creativity- and content-rich public affairs cable channel to do? Well, gee, there’s the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth coming up in February 2009 . . .:
Meet C-SPAN, “the network of the Lincoln Bicentennial.”
Note the site, set your video recorders (digital or not — just capture the stuff). C-SPAN plans monthly broadcasts on Lincoln and the times, plus special broadcasts on certain events — November 19, the 145th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, for example.
Of particular value to students and teachers, C-SPAN offers a long menu of links to sites about Lincoln, and to original speeches and documents (DBQ material anyone?).
War with Mexico
House Divided
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
·1st Debate: Transcript | Video
·2nd Debate: Transcript | Video
·3rd Debate: Transcript | Video
·4th Debate: Transcript | Video
·5th Debate: Transcript | Video
·6th Debate: Transcript | Video
·7th Debate: Transcript | Video
Cooper Union Speech
Farewell Address
First Inaugural
Second Inaugural
Gettysburg Address
Last Address
Good on ’em. C-SPAN leads the way again.
Teachers, bookmark that site. Are you out for the summer? U.S. history teachers have a couple of months to mine those resources, watch the broadcasts, and watch and capture the archived videos, to prepare for bell-ringers, warm-ups, and lesson plans.
What will your classes do for the Lincoln Bicentennial? Will that collide with your plans for the Darwin bicentennial?
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1861-1865, Abraham Lincoln, Biography, Civil War, Education, Freedom - Political, History, History audio sources, History images, History video sources, Lesson plans, On-line education, On-line learning, Patriotism, Politics, Presidents, Slavery, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Television | Tagged: Abraham Lincoln, Education, Entertainment, History, Lincoln Bicentennial, Media, Teaching | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
June 9, 2008
Don’t breathe the air, don’t eat the eggs. Life next door to a DDT plant in India.
In case you were wondering where nations that want to use DDT might find some, now that it’s not being made in the U.S.
Read the rest of this entry »
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1 Comment | DDT, Environmental justice, Environmental protection, Health care, History, Politics, Public health, Science | Tagged: DDT, Environmental protection, health, India, Politics, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
June 8, 2008
A Quantum Diaries Survivor detours from physics to bring us news that in a small Italian town church authorities denied the rites of marriage to a paralyzed man, on the grounds that he can’t make babies.
Remember this case the next time some nut starts ranting about how marriage between two people of the same gender somehow endangers marriage. There’s no way to protect the “sanctity of marriage” when clowns with clerical titles work so determinedly to mock the institution of marriage, and the concepts of compassion, charity and family, from within the church.
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Leave a Comment » | Family, Politics, Rampant stupidity, Religion | Tagged: Family, marriage, Politics, Rampant stupidity, Religion, Unwarranted discrimination | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
June 8, 2008
Some nations do not wish to use DDT to poison mosquitoes because they have other poison problems, and they’d almost rather have malaria than more poison.
For example, see this description of clean water problems in India. From A Wide Angle View of India. Be sure to follow the links to stories in the New York Times and on BBC’s website.
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Leave a Comment » | DDT, Environmental protection, Health care, History, Politics, Public health, Science | Tagged: Clean Water, DDT, Environmental protection, India, Pesticides, Politics, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
June 6, 2008
What if we gave students a paycheck just to attend school? Some people are serious about it. Some authorities are actually doing it. High-level, if theoretical, discussion at the Becker-Posner Blog.
(That’s Nobel-winning economist Gary Becker, and law professor and federal Judge Richard Posner.)
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7 Comments | Economics, Education, Education reform, Education spending, Politics, Public education | Tagged: Economics, Education, Education reform, Pay for School, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
June 6, 2008
In a review of a couple of books on climate change, at the New York Review of Books, physicist Freeman Dyson concludes with these observations:
Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.
Too bad Dyson wasn’t in charge of organizing the skeptics. Dyson sounds so reasonable. Surely he would not have opened a discussion about global warming with attacks on the scientists, censoring of the science findings, and a crass political campaign maligning science and environmental protection, and especially the people who stand for conservation, as the campaign against action for global warming action actually unfolded.
My experience may be odd, but generally I find those who claim to be skeptics of global warming, and those opposed to action to clean our air, also are not much concerned with “problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.” If they were not running a Swift Boat Veterans-style campaign of calumny against Al Gore and anyone who calls for action, they’d be running similar campaigns against people who advocate control and non-proliferation of nuclear weaponry, or they’d be campaigning against people calling for clean water, or they’d be arguing that the poor, sick, aged, imprisoned or unemployed deserve the trouble they get.
Perhaps we should be grateful to the issue of global climate change for having attracted and occupied so many nuts who would be messing up affairs on other issues, if they weren’t already engaged in creating a massive, planetary cluster screw up to stop action against global warming.
Cynical Fridays.
An energetic shaking of a the wet scrub brush to RWDB.
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2 Comments | Books, Climate change, Global warming, Politics, Science | Tagged: Books, Climate change, Freeman Dyson, Politics, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
June 4, 2008
Not only is ICR appealing their case on granting creationism degrees for science teachers (see preceding post), the State Board of Education is gearing up for another battle in Commissar Don McLeroy’s War on Education and War on Science (two wars for the price of one! He’ll campaign as a budget cutter next time . . .).
See the New York Times today, “Opponents of Evolution Adopting a New Strategy.”
Oy.
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1 Comment | Creationism, Education, Politics, Religion, Science, Texas, War on Education, War on Science | Tagged: Creationism, Evolution, Politics, Religion, Science, Texas, Textbooks | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
June 3, 2008
DDT advocates continue to smear Rachel Carson and “environmental groups” with a campaign of made up calumny. To the frustration of scientists, health officials and the gods of fairness, these people continue to get credence from people who should know better, like the contributors at the Volokh Conspiracy (Quiggin and Lambert are the good guys, if you’re not following closely).
Reality is a different story. Business interests appear to have started a false rumor that someone stole a massive quantity of DDT from Uganda’s mosquito control program in an attempt to make the mosquito control guys look incompetent and dangerous. From The Monitor in Kampala, via allAfrica.com:
21 May 2008
Posted to the web 21 May 2008
Safina Nambafu
Kampala
The Ministry of Health has denied reports that some people were last week arrested in possession of stolen DDT drugs in Oyam District.
The head of the Malaria Control Programme, Dr Rwakimari, said it was the detractors of the campaign that are inciting the public to spread falsified information.
He was addressing the press at the ministry headquarters on Monday.
Dr Rwakimari said some local leaders are trying to fail the DDT campaign yet over 94% of the district had successfully been sprayed as of last Monday. Last week, civil society organisations led by the National Association of Professional Environmentalists [Nape] held a half day sensitization meeting with stakeholders in Kampala where they collectively condemned the government for carrying out the exercise.
They claimed that many of the crew members had reported strange illnesses, which they fear could have been caused by exposure to DDT. Dr Rwakimari said the government would not just look on as individuals de-campaign the exercise, adding that DDT was being sprayed in eight district in an effort to fight malaria.
Erute North MP Charles Angiro Gutomoi told Daily Monitor that he was bitter that government had had sprayed DDT, saying the exercise threatens the food market.
“National Association of Professional Environmentalists” — in Uganda. Don’t you love it? The group’s website, lacking much information, looks like the site of an astroturf organization to me. The organization exists, though, but DDT doesn’t appear to be a major concern of the group (it earns no mention in their April 2008 report).
There is real opposition to the use of DDT in Uganda, and there is a lawsuit to stop use of DDT. The suit was filed on behalf of nine different agricultural businesses. Farmers claim the spraying is not following the strict guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO), and they fear their crops will be contaminated and unsaleable.
Effective malaria fighting uses only small quantities of DDT, in a few places, on a few occasions. The fight also requires use of screens and nets to protect people at night, when the mosquitoes are active in feeding. The New York Times featured a story on the successful Nothing But Nets program today — not a government-run program, not a program favored by the Rachel Carson critics, but a useful and necessary program.
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Leave a Comment » | Africa, DDT, Environmental protection, Health care, Malaria, Politics, Science | Tagged: Africa, DDT, Environmental protection, health, Malaria, Politics, Rachel Carson, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
June 2, 2008
Ranked by number of people put to death under their regime, at ReasonableCitizen.
Accurate? What do you think?
Oh, no, of course Rachel Carson is nowhere on the list. This guy is looking for real evil, not imagined evil.
Other resources:
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Posted by Ed Darrell
June 1, 2008
I’m often struck at how creationists, including advocates of intelligent design, cannot maintain an argument in favor of their perverse beliefs against science for more than about five minutes without descending into erroneous descriptions of science, or outright lies.
Joe Carter pens the very well-read Evangelical Outpost. He attends church regularly, I gather, considers himself a good Christian, and for all I know studies the Bible regularly and tithes. But he’s also an advocate of intelligent design. In 2007 he provoked a bit of a storm claiming that scientists were making the case for ID by advocating evolution (no, it doesn’t make much more sense in the longer argument). (See “The moral imperative against intelligent design,” and “. . . in which I defend the judiciary against barbaric assault.“)
I missed it earlier, but he followed up in April of this year with a repeat performance upon the release of Ben Stein’s mockumentary movie “Expelled!” — another three part epic. Carter cast away his virtue in the third paragraph of the first post:
Had the critics remained silent over the past decade, ID might possibly have moldered in obscurity. If they had given the theory the respect accorded to supernatural explanations like the “multiverse theory” it might even have faded from lack of support.
But instead the theory’s critics launched a irrational counter-offensive, forcing people into choosing sides. The problem with this approach is that the more the public learn about modern evolutionary theory, the more skeptical they become about it being an adequately robust explanation for the diversity of life on earth. For instance in Expelled, Michael Ruse and Richard Dawkins provide two explanations for how life probably began. Ruse says that we moved from the inorganic world to the world of the cell on the backs of crystals while Dawkins says that life on earth was most likely seeded by aliens from outer space.
When even Dawkins admits that intelligent agency is involved in creation of life on earth it isn’t difficult to see why other people think it is plausible.
Is there a claim in there that is not completely false? Is there one claim that is not demonstrably in error — or an outright lie?
What virus causes this rabid departure from truth-telling among creationists? For if it’s not a virus, it’s a moral failing of the faith, isn’t it? And knowing that, wouldn’t advocates of Christianity’s growth, like Joe Carter, take steps to hide their prevarications?
If you have an idea what the cause is, comments are open.
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2 Comments | Biology, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Darwin, Education, Ethics, Evolution, History, Intelligent Design, Junk science, Politics, Rampant stupidity, Religion, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science, War on Education, War on Science | Tagged: Ben Stein, Biology, Creationism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Politics, Religion, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
May 31, 2008
Struck in Traffic works to lay claim to the title of King of the Economics Carnival with his bi-weekly American Economics Blog Carnival. Two editions since I last posted on it (though I confess, I visited a couple of other occasions thinking I would post).
For those correspondents who argue with me that the U.S. faces a crisis of turning to socialism, I invite you to find either posts advocating socialist policies (5-years plans, anyone?), or from obviously Marxist or socialist economists. Tell us what you find in comments, please, I dare you.
And I wonder: Do students learn the meaning of the word “sepulchre” anymore? Would they get the reference to a “white sepulchre?”
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Leave a Comment » | Business, Business Ethics, Capitalism, Economics, Education, History, Politics, Weblogs | Tagged: blog carnivals, Business, Capitalism, Economics, Housing Bubble, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
May 29, 2008
Nice post, too, with history of the doughnut: “Doughnuts: The Third Rail of American Politics.”
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Leave a Comment » | Politics, Rampant stupidity, Weblogs | Tagged: Doughnuts, Media, Michelle Malkin, Politics, Rachael Ray | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
May 28, 2008
George W. Bush was famously untravelled as a candidate for the U.S. Presidency. He had spent more time hanging out in bars just over the border in Juarez than hanging with diplomats anywhere. In 2000, conservatives found this lack of care about foreign nations, U.S. interventions, and foreign people to be “charming,” sort of a poke-in-the-eye to the Rhodes scholar-rich Democratic Party who worried about things like peace in Palestine and getting the North Koreans to agree to stop building nuclear devices (who could be afraid of a bad-hair guy like Kim Jong-Il anyway?).
That was then. Now they desperately have to find something about Barack Obama to complain about. Never mind that Obama has spent more time overseas and in Iraq than George W. Bush, still. While John McCain can get his information in a one-day, flack-jacketed, armored personnel-carrier tour of Iraq, Obama’s two days isn’t enough to please Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit nor Jim Geraghty at National Review Online.
Observation: Conservatives are really, really desperate to find mud on a nice guy; Reynolds and others really are losing badly on issues, to make so much of so little. Also, William F. Buckley has been dead for just over three months, and NR has already gone to hell, deteriorating to a barking-dog cutout of its former intellectual heft.
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Leave a Comment » | Campaigns, Elections, History, Iraq, Politics, Presidents, Travel, Uncomposted Organic Fertilizer, War on Terrorism, Weblogs, World history | Tagged: Desperation among Conservatives, Iraq, Obama, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
May 27, 2008
Will Texas ever stack up to California? Do the math, at TexasEd.
Will Texas ever stack up to India? China?
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Leave a Comment » | Education, Education spending, Globalization, Higher education, Politics, Texas Lege | Tagged: education funding, Higher education, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
May 27, 2008
If a guy beats someone to death, it’s murder, right? And so the nation’s labor laws hold an employer liable for the death of a worker when unsafe working conditions caused the death.
But what if the worker doesn’t die? What if the worker only loses his arms, or legs, or arms and legs?
No death, no crime, U.S. law says.
What if the employer poisons the worker with cyanide that eats away the worker’s brain?
No death, no crime, U.S. law says.
My colleagues and I were shocked to learn that an employer who breaks the nation’s worker-safety laws can be charged with a crime only if a worker dies. Even then, the crime is a lowly Class B misdemeanor, with a maximum sentence of six months in prison. (About 6,000 workers are killed on the job each year, many in cases where the deaths could have been prevented if their employers followed the law.) Employers who maim their workers face, at worst, a maximum civil penalty of $70,000 for each violation.
Read a plea to change the law, in the New York Times, from David H. Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan.
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1 Comment | Business, Business Ethics, Capitalism, Civil Rights, Economics, Environmental justice, Environmental protection, Free market economics, Freedom - Economic, Government, Gross Injustice, Health care, Human Rights, Labor and unions, OSHA, Politics, Public health | Tagged: Business, Business Ethics, Civil Rights, Environmental, Gross Injustice, Labor Law, Occupational Safety, OSHA, Worker Rights | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 