One more time

Ok so I promise I will eventually get off of this book banning topic but I came across this today and after my last two posts (here and here) I figured I would pass this along. This comes to us from Amazon.com and it is a list of the most commonly banned books. The most common reasons for books being banned, at least by my count, are:

Profanity(12)
Sexual Situations/Nudity(10)
Teenage Situations(6)
Racism(5)

I don't know if the parents/teachers who made these complaints have ever walked through the halls of the middle and high school but all of these go down every day. You think you are protecting the kids from all of these no all you are doing is covering your eyes and not seeing what they are actually doing. By the time I was in high school I knew fellow students who had been sexually active, I also knew the better part of the swear words you can imagine. Sure I may not have used them at home or even much at school, yes I was that kid, but that doesn't mean that I hadn't already been exposed to them. As for the teenage situations, which is a very broad category and often includes the sexual situations, we all went through them. At the same time it wasn't something you always felt comfortable talking about with family, friends, or teachers. Reading that people had gone through similar things and had come out alright helped me get through all of them. Racism exists (yes even though Stephen Colbert said that it had ended with President Obama's election) today but most of these books are not even modern books. They date back in time and they show you the views that were held at the time of the writing of the book. This is important not just in the historical aspect of it but in order to help us learn from our mistakes. The reading of a book should not just be handing a kid a book and telling them to read it. It should include a background of what was going on at the time of writing and why the book was written, see banning books and Fahrenheit 451.

There are a couple more common themes that get books banned and a very common one is support of communism/socialism, this is something I have already written about (here) so I really don't feel that there is much more to say on that. Also a big theme is violence and death.

All of these themes are events that we deal with in a real life. All things we need to learn about. Books provide an opportunity to do that learning in our minds. When we see it on TV or in Movies we get the visual aspect. It doesn't give us an opportunity to learn from it or to think through what we would do in real life. With reading we can put ourselves in the situation but at the same time our brains recognize it as not real, where as sometimes it is more difficult with TV and movies, so we can see how it turns out in the book and realize that those decisions were good or bad.

Ok I will step off of my soap box now, although what is a blog if not a giant soap box, and will try to get back onto more sciency issues for my next blog post but I make no promises we won't be back to this issue at some time in the future.

And so it continues

So PZ kind of mentions this article briefly in one of his posts today, and that story is crazy in itself, but I figured I would say something quickly about it especially after having blogged about this very issue a couple of days ago.

So what else is there to say about this article? Well it shows what banning books can do to you. You start with just books then you get to authors then you finally mess up ban the wrong author and you say whoops but don't do anything about it. So why did they ban this author's children books?

In its haste to sort out the state's social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children's author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."

Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bear series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

Ok so you banned him because of an misunderstanding...Whoops! But wait why should we ban books that are, "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system?" Shouldn't these be the types of books that we encourage students to read? Why shouldn't we know what communism was actually about or why not consult a first hand source to see how Hitler rose to power? I am not arguing that these are good ideas just that the best way to prevent things like them from happening again you have to be able to understand what they were trying to do. Although this does mean that you will have to think critically and we all know how you feel about that don't we David Bradley...I think it was something like, "This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook," yeah that's it. But wait it gets better:

Hardy said she was trusting the research of another board member, Terri Leo, R-Spring, when she made her motion and comments about Martin's writing. Leo had sent her an e-mail alerting her to Bill Martin Jr.'s listing on the Borders .com Web site as the author of Ethical Marxism. Leo's note also said she hadn't read the book.

"She said that that was what he wrote, and I said: ' ... It's a good enough reason for me to get rid of someone,' " said Hardy, who has complained vehemently about the volume of names being added to the curriculum standards.

Neither one has read the book how do you know what it says. Leo later in the article says that she didn't recommend there be a motion put forth it was more of a oh here is something interesting e-mail. So now the author of children's stories was placed on the banned authors list.

There is something called common sense use it. You should not be putting a book with explicit sexual reference in an elementary library. But why shouldn't a similar type of book be in a high school library? I mean by the time most children get to high school they know about safe sex etc...wait no this is Texas we teach abstinence only. The Texas Board of Education is not only making the state of Texas fall behind in education but they are dragging the rest of the country down with them. None of you are experts in any of these subjects, most of you are from the far religious right, listen to the experts they know what they are talking about and yes I know this goes against the "American way" of questioning authority but what you are doing is rejecting facts in place of your personal religious beliefs. If you are a voter in the state of Texas make sure that when you get the chance vote for people who use logic and reason, this includes the governor's race this spring and fall make sure you know how they feel on supporting science and reason.

Update: Sorry apparently I forgot to spell check when I published this earlier

Textbooks and politics

I am a Yankee through and through it makes it a little weird at times living in West Texas, to be honest I feel really out of place a lot of times. But if many of those living here in Texas had it their way they would control everything. The main people doing this are very much the religious right. What may come as a supprise to many is how much control Texas has over the textbooks that students around the country use. This is because when their standards are written the state itself chooses the books. Texas is the 2nd most populated state in U.S. and with all of the schools using the same books this is a huge number of books. This means that many publishers write their books to the Texas state standards and don't rewrite them for another state or school district. With this background information I figured I would pass along this article I came upon a couple of days ago showing the history of the far right's take over of textbook standards here in Texas that have been causing a stir amongst educators from over the entire U.S. This is an interesting read and shows why so many of those in higher education here in Texas are so vocal about going against what the board says. Things like this in particular:

There has already been plenty of screaming and wall pounding in the battles over standards for other subjects. In late 2007, the English language arts writing teams, made up mostly of teachers and curriculum planners, turned in the drafts they had been laboring over for more than two years. The ultraconservatives argued that they were too light on basics like grammar and too heavy on reading comprehension and critical thinking. “This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook,” grumbled David Bradley, an insurance salesman with no college degree, who often acts as the faction’s enforcer. At the bloc’s urging, the board threw out the teams’ work and hired an outside consultant to craft new standards from scratch, but the faction still wasn’t satisfied; when the new drafts came in, one adherent dismissed them as “unreadable” and “mangled.” In the end, they took matters into their own hands. The night before the final vote in May 2008, two members of the bloc, Gail Lowe and Barbara Cargill, met secretly and cobbled together yet another version. The documents were then slipped under their allies’ hotel-room doors, and the bloc forced through a vote the following morning before the other board members even had a chance to read them. Bradley argued that the whole ordeal was necessary because the writing teams had clung to their own ideas rather than deferring to the board. “I don’t think this will happen again, because they got spanked,” he added.

It is things like this along with the state standards for science and the potential ones for history that only show the US as being right in all of their decisions and founded as a christian country. Both of these are wrong ideas. The U.S. has made mistakes in foreign policy along with domestic policy. Showing these wrongs and teaching why they are wrong is what makes us a better country and better people in general. And there have been enough people that have pointed out why we are not a Christian country that I don't feel I even need to address the idea of seperation of church and state.

Anyway I def suggest that you check out the article it is important that we all know what we are up against both here in Texas and throughout the rest of the country.

Why argue against people who believe the earth is 6000 years old?

So people might be wondering why do I care about informing people what the science actually says. Well today I was clicking through xkcd and came across this:



Yeah the fact that anyone can become a member of our representative democracy and/or they vote is pretty much the main reason.

But it's cold...

So I have blogged about greenman3610 before (see here, and here) and I know I seem to really push every video he does, it couldn't be because he addresses concerns that anger me in a very eloquent way could it. In his latest video he addresses the common misconception that just because it is really cold outside right now that must mean that global climate change is wrong:



So while we are on the subject PZ Myers blogged about this a couple of days ago (and of course I can't seem to find his post exactly to link here) and I thought it was very interesting. PZ pointed out that the person writing this article is in fact a restaurant critic, so enjoy this article as well.

EDIT: So this is why I couldn't find the article on PZ's blog I actually found it on Rationalwiki's what's going on in the blogosphere section, by bad!

Movie Review?

I did not get nearly enough blogging done while I was at home but I really didn't have anything to blog about so that tends to happen, sorry. I am now back at school which means that you might get more blogging because I don't want to do work but I wouldn't hold out too much hope if I was you. Anyway on to what I was actually going to post.

Now I promise you that I am not going to make this a normal aspect of this blog but I wanted to say just how good I thought Avatar is, if you haven't heard of Avatar where the heck have you been and check out the trailer below.



I know I am sure you have all heard from every other blog that you follow how great a movie it is, and I quite simply wanted to add that I agree with that. So why should I waste a post saying that? Well I figured I would pass on why I enjoyed this story so much.

1) The amazing scenery and visual effects. This is something that most people seem to agree on. I went to see it in 3D and I don't think I could see it in 2D. I have never felt like I was actually living in the world up on the screen as I did when I watched Avatar

2)The story. Yes it isn't a completely original story but that is ok. The story spoke to me and pulled you in and that was mostly do to:

3) The writing. Yes the lines weren't a piece of classic literature but they nail down pretty well how people actually speak in the situations they are trying to portray, well maybe not the being on a foreign planet. I have never felt so attached to a story line. I was literally squeezing one of my hands to death with the other hand during the stressful parts of the movie.

Most of the detractors of the movie, including some people I know, don't like it because it "pushes the liberal agenda." By liberal agenda they are pretty much saying things like the green movement. Yes the movie does contain some of those overtones but the main idea I got was the idea of equal treating of fellow man, no matter what their beliefs. I know crazy right how dare we seek equal treatment of fellow man and try to keep from destroying the environment that if we continue down the path we are on will in the long run lead to our destruction.

So in closing if you haven't see, or have just not in 3D, go see it ASAP. This movie maybe the Star Wars of our generation, which as you may have guess I am a sci-fi buff and love Star Wars. There will probably be at least another movie coming out so make sure you see the one while you can.

On one final note what happened in Haiti last week was horrible and I'm not going to say much else, I feel enough has been said already, but if you can afford to I recommend giving to an organization that you know will be spending the money on the good of the people down there, which means that you should probably avoid smaller organizations. The two main organizations that I recommend are the Red Cross (you can specify where you want the money to go), and MSF/Doctor's without Borders.