Do you even know what you are talking about

I want to preface this post by saying I am slightly inebriated after that tough loss by VT in the quarterfinals of the NIT earlier tonight, I have a feeling I might regret this in the morning. Since I came across this earlier today I figured I would post on it.

Today's article comes from the Florida State University paper and is entitled Texas steers 'right'. Now the joke of the headline is the first line of the actual article but it also seems to be that the author is saying that Texas was right in the way in which they changed the history books recently.

Of course, denial of America as an exceptional country is a hallmark of modern liberalism. The left feels guilty that, despite its imperfections, the United States stands light-years above other nations in terms of freedom and opportunity for self-advancement. They degrade our Founding Fathers as little more than land-owning slave masters, while saying little, if anything, about the slavery that still exists in parts of Africa and the Middle East

I don't know of any liberals that do not view the US as an exceptional country they just view the US as a country that has flaws like every country that ever has or ever will. The US absolutely stands above other countries in terms of freedom but we do not stand up there as perfect, gays and lesbians do not have the same rights as most people among other flaws that we must all overcome.

Our Founding Fathers were clearly noble men but they were just men. They were flawed and lived in their time as we live in ours. People will look back on us now and will realize that we are not perfect. This is important to point out in history class, US history in particular, because it instills in all of us that we can be great people. By knowing they owned slaves and that they were not perfect we can see their flaws and learn from them so we don't make the same. You know why slavery in parts of Africa and the Middle East is not mentioned in the same class as the fact that our founding fathers owned slaves? Because that is world current events this class on the founding fathers would be U.S. History.

He goes on to say that the books not saying that Reagan was the only one who ended the cold war is wrong. I will admit that Reagan helped but it was much more complicated than that. He ends with this:

American students’ performance in math and science has plummeted relative to other countries over the years, probably in part due to other countries’ teachers not being fixated on leftist indoctrination strategies and actually doing their jobs.

This decision in Texas is cause for an optimistic appraisal of the state of affairs in American education. In a time in which the left is making one shamble after another in Washington, and people are becoming ever more discontented with them, it seems a les-than-prudent [sic] time for aging hippies to continue using the public schools as a venue to spew their long-discredited baloney.

Math and science performance has plummeted because we are afraid of offending someone. Evolution is a theory yes but in science that means it has been 99% proven but we don't talk about it to the extent that it deserves, and I could go on. The fact is that I came out of high school an ultra conservative so no our public education system is not "fixated on leftist indoctrination[...]".

The decision in Texas is a cause for sorrow. Thomas Jefferson and many other important Americans have been stricken from Texas history books, see my post for yesterday (here). Have you ever thought Mr. Berkowitz that maybe what you were being taught in high school about our history being flawed was true. Remember if we assume that we are always right and that everything that is going wrong is someone elses fault we end up in a position we don't want to be in.

Stop Politicising our class rooms

AronRa makes some great videos on YouTube and I highly recommend him for any of your evolution needs (if you will). He has also been a strong advocate against the current Texas Board of Education and their politicising of every topic (see here). Well he recently came out with a new video and since I was busy last week only just got to see it today. It is really well done and pretty much points out how much the current board is a failure:



Sign the petition (here)! and remind me not to ever let any kids I might eventually have go to school in Texas.

Really Mr. Long, Really?

So I have been sitting at 99 posts for a long time but I feel so proud I have somehow managed to put together 100 posts, counting this one. Yay! go me.

Ok now on to the real reason for this post. So one of the opinion writers, Roy Long, for the Texas Tech University paper, the Daily Toreador, has published some things before that I have disagreed with majorly (see here and trust me there are more that I didn't blog about), well he did it again. While the majority of the article (found here) I have no problem with it is about being able to change our views as new evidence comes forth, heck this is what science is all about. In fact early on he says this:

If I could travel in time and re-write those articles, I would change a few of them.

I would be more careful about wording because certain phrases I have used in columns have offended others and caused them to not pay attention to the message of the column.

Yes this is very true many times does the point of his article get lost in amongst some small piece of evidence he uses to "support" his view that is outright wrong. I will openly admit that I have had to relook over some of his articles because of this. But in the end doesn't this come down to the writer of the article?

Well this doesn't seem bad so far I was actually enjoying the article and he was making a valid point then he says this:

However, our society does not act this way. One glaring example is “Climategate.” The scientific community has been afraid to even accept data that might possibly argue the so-called climate change theory is wrong. They intentionally changed data so there would be no opposition to their theories. This is the ultimate appeal to dishonest consistency.

I literally put the paper on my desk at this point. I thought alright well climate change is still a developing science so maybe he was just confused or maybe he just hasn't read the full e-mails (see here, here, and here for starters). So I picked the paper back up and read this:

The response to the “intelligent design” theory has also been very similar. Instead of addressing the issues that have arose from Behe’s ideas, the scientific community at large has simply dismissed him because he dares question the god of evolution. Science, which was once progressive because it dared to contradict the wrong but established theories of men, has fallen to dogmatism.

I know rushed through the rest of his article and went out in the hall looking for someone to talk to, seeing no one I relaxed and read the rest of his article again. Why did this paragraph draw such a reaction out of me? Because Behe is wrong and intelligent design is not science and therefore should be dismissed by the scientific community (see Kitzmiller vs. Dover). I could cite the hundreds of people who have refuted ID as an invalid theory but in science it only takes one so may I recommend Only a Theory by Dr. Kenneth Miller (see my post here).

So why are these your two examples in the entire paper when both of them are the exact opposite of what you are trying to prove? Both ID and global climate change denialists (doesn't have the same ring as global warming denialists) are doing what you are claiming you are against. They are trying the keep the status quo the same they are not admitting they are wrong and moving on. With global climate change the e-mails were quote mined to get just a couple of quotes that sound like global climate change isn't happening or at least isn't man made. At least IDers see that there is some evidence for evolution but they still want God in there. Guess what that is still a very unprogressive statement.

So somewhere along the lines I really lost what Mr. Long was trying to argue so congrats Mr. Long you have successfully written another article that does the complete opposite of what you were trying to achieve.

Gender roles effect Valentine's Day

So I came across this article today and was confused. The article itself is a mix of feminism while at the same time claiming that feminism is wrong. Don't believe me read this:

But for good or for bad, it presents a new challenge to the enduring American way of romance -- the one that no matter how evolved we think we've become, keeps turning up in song and story.

(Really, can it get any harder for those breadwinning women -- working long hours to help support their stay-at-home or less-moneymaking men -- to find the energy for a candlelit dinner, a quick change to a lacy negligee and an evening of unbridled romance?)

Yes that's right she claims in two paragraphs that the feminist movement has done great things for women while insisting that women must retain the classic role in relationships. She continues on later saying this:

If you caught any of this year's Super Bowl commercials, you saw a surprising representation of how conflicted men are (at least TV-commercial men) between feeling like traditional car-loving, pants-wearing tough guys and emasculated, moisturizing purse holders for their ladies.

Um, I don't know where she has been but for as long as I can remember Super Bowl commercials, and men all over the US, have been making similar jokes. When I first started dating my now fiance my friends gave me crap for not spending as much time with them as I used to. Would they do the same thing if they were in my position, sure, but that isn't going to keep them from giving me a hard time about it.

I love my fiance but she is very much her own woman and I would have no problem with her being the money maker in the family. I think that Miss Spencer is trying to force us into gender roles that are no longer a necessity. What is wrong with a woman treating her man to a fancy dinner? How about while the woman is at work all day the man is at home preparing dinner for the family so it is on the table when she gets home. Romance goes both ways and most of today's relationships were built on the idea that both parties are equal and bring different things to the table in the relationship.

No Miss Spencer romance is not dead or dying, as you seem to be implying, in fact it is still going strong. All that has happened is that the roles in the relationship are not the same that they were in the '60s and '70s and may in fact be stronger!

NASA and the future of Science

So I should have blogged about this about a week and a half ago when President Obama first unveiled his budget. Anything dealing with the President and the budget will be perceived as political so I am going to have to flirt a fine line here I know.

So when the President unveiled his budget for this upcoming year one of the major programs taking a hit was NASA's attempt to return to the moon and then their eventual plan to go to Mars. Now while I understand that this is a trying economic time, I am a grad student after all, these programs risk doing damage to the number of young kids who we are drawing to science.

Let me explain my reasoning. In the 1960s the US had one enemy who was in one place, the USSR for those of you who don't know/remember/really should go take another history class. Well in the early '60s President Kennedy challenged the American people to get safely to the moon and return to the Earth. This challenge was not taken lightly by the American people and the scientists of the US and in 1969 we DID land on the moon, no matter what some people might have you believe. This inspired many of the people growing up at that time, my parent's generation, to have an interest in science and while not always a complete understanding they were at least interested and respected it.

In the '70s NASA's budget was cut we had accomplished our mission why do we need to keep funding this mission. This continued until the 1986 Challenger disaster in which more money was briefly increased in order to increase the safety of the shuttle missions. Finally through the '90s and 2000s anytime that it seemed that some budget needed to be cut it came from NASA and in many ways this is one of the causes of the Columbia disaster in 2003, wow has it really been 7 years.

I mention this because the current leads in science were brought up during the prime of NASA's space exploration. This most likely led to them going into and being interested in science. While many of these scientists are still young enough to do research there has been a fall off in the number of students being interested in science and this will be visible in the number of researches in mine and future generations.

So why did I mention the new NASA budget cuts? Simple these return trips to the moon and eventually to Mars would draw people into science that may not have been interested in science the same way the original trips to the moon brought people into science in the '60s.

Do I understand why the President did what he did? Yes, we need to keep ourselves safe etc. Do I have actual solutions? Make space feel more open to private companies. Privatization will make the technology cheaper to get into space which then NASA and universities etc can use to get themselves into space to open it up to scientific exploration. Cutting the funding to these programs however is not the way to do that and will probably set NASA back more than the year that the actual budget will financially effect. As with the space shuttle disasters cutting money now will cost us more money later! I welcome every one's comments tell me how wrong I am or how right I am or whatever you have to say.

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!