Cooling down the hotbeds

"Every word is a prejudice,"

said Nietzsche. That's why one man's pillar of probity is another man's "hotbed" of heresy.

"you know these colleges are hotbeds of Liberalism!"

said the man across the table.

"These kids just aren't old enough to be able to tell what they're being taught from the truth. They're not teaching both sides."

He's got an interesting point. High levels of education in our country do seem to be associated with high levels of free thinking and pragmatism and therefore must be caused by it as proved by the cum hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy -- and whereas that's obviously bad and according to the divine doctrine of judging truth by what the less educated are comfortable with, it's therefore quite obvious that opposing viewpoints in other fields this Republican might be ignorant of disagree with are not being given equal or preferred classroom time or assigned reading: the voice of the people isn't being heard at Harvard.

Disciplines like mathematics, physics, biology, engineering and medicine? they only teach one side and that's elitist. Everything has two equal and opposite sides, the right side being, by definition -- right. You know all those things are best left to folksy opinion, anonymous blog commenters and to websites run and funded by Republicans who hold forth from country club and yacht club dinner tables all over America.

In history classes, we can be sure courses are not being taught about the secret liberal cabal ruining the world from its headquarters in Kenya, about the danger of subjecting corporations to the law rather than letting them write it, or that those poor women in Salem really were agents of Satan and why universal suffrage doomed the country to Divine wrath. Why, even Pythagoras and Newton and Einstein are treated as relatively established authorities and one hardly hears of the four elements or phlogiston or the aether or divine creation as acceptable differences of opinion at those hotbeds any more. And what of alternative cosmologies and opposing views in the sciences and history and literary criticism? Well, in fact they are being talked about and constantly tested, but we do have the other conservative doctrines of "if I don't know, nobody knows" and the inapplicability of past experience to the present time -- and that, dear reader, is that. It's a hotbed.

No, what they should be doing at Columbia or The London School of Economics and Political Science and other centers of Liberal propaganda and academic honesty, is reciting the catechism which includes such credos as: tax cuts pay for themselves and never, ever cause recessions; that massive concentrations of wealth and political power in the hands of a tenth of one percent of the population make for opportunity and "freedom" and that like a driverless car, the markets will always stay on the road -- and so government should stay out of business practices and move into the pulpit; as God and the Founding Fathers intended.

Face it; universities, public and private are hotbeds and that's cold comfort. Hell, why don't we do as that great Capitalist prophet, Mao Zedong did and simply close them down? The people know best!

Mail order science

One might think that I would be on the side of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in opposing Texas House Bill 2800. It's effect would be to exempt any private non-profit institution from the need to be accredited by and receive a certificate of authority from the state. The entire idea is of course to establish "universities" that give science degrees without any requirement to study science. Normally attempts to Push the Christianist agenda by equating legend with science earn my contemptuous wrath and of course so does this one to a degree, but wait, there's more.

If, as would happen should this act of insanity be passed, one could simply dream up any curriculum and award degrees of any sort, the value of any Texas institution's degree program not funded by the State would be suspect. Of course the Libertarian in me might be inclined to ask why Acme Bible College shouldn't be able to confer a Doctor of Divinity on anyone they please according to their organized delusions, but not Bachelor, or Master or Doctor of Science. Thinking back to the mid 19th century however, when one could attend Acme Medical College with an unregulated, unexamined course of study and emerge with black bag and scalpel to treat the unsuspecting populace, I have to take pause.

What would the result really be if any charlatan could establish a school and anoint its graduates with advanced degrees in science with no other education but a literal interpretation of Bible Stories for Children? An extra headache for those institutions and companies hiring physicists, geologists and such perhaps. An opportunity for me.

Fogg University of Christian Knowledge. It has a certain acronymical appeal, you have to admit, although Fogg U would be shorter and easier to remember for the kind of students it might attract. Prerequisites? What are you, some kind of Commieliberal intrusive government type?

Let market forces determine the value of unaccredited education, but for you, if you call in the next ten minutes, you can call yourself a Master of Science for $49.95 plus shipping, handling and framing charges. But wait, there's more -- the first 50 callers get a free Sham-Wow with the logo of our sham university on it. You getting this, camera guy?

Proactively efforting to impact the thought showers.

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

-George Orwell-

Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to take this opportunity to award the Human Voices Doctor Syntax award to Simon Milton.

"Why do we have to have 'coterminous, stakeholder engagement' when we could just 'talk to people' instead?"

said the Chairman of The Local Government Association, an organization that represents local government officials in England and Wales. I love this guy.

Pretentious and impenetrable babble has metastasized into every English speaking part of the world like verbal melanoma; from business schools, PR firms, popular science TV shows and journalistic covens, and it's a rare writer or speaker who doesn't effort try to include as many copies of "empowerment, " "proactive" and "Impactful" in every sentence he excretes.

Why does anyone need a clumsy, worn out metaphor like "negatively impacted on" when hurt or harmed will do so much better? Of course our institutionalized horror of appearing illiberal by using direct language is responsible for much of it. Careers have been made by those who marshal groups to speak for non-existent "communities" so as to ban words that aren't really offensive to anyone other than graduate students eager to cooperate with professors who need to publish.

Brainstorming, itself a crapulous and unfunny metaphor for talking amongst a group, seemed, or so we were given input told, to be offensive to epileptics even though there is no evidence of it negatively impacting on annoying anyone. Let's call it "thought showering" said one British City Council. Let's not. Let's just call it pretentious babble posing as enlightened vocabulary.

Let us please have a round of applause for Mr. Milton!

we don't need no education

We dont need no education.
We dont need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Teachers, leave those kids alone.

-Pink Floyd-

It's not always necessary to apply Reductio ad absurdum to a situation. Sometimes things start out at the level of absurdity. You may have read that Michael Sheridan, an eighth-grade honors student in New Haven Connecticut was suspended from school, barred from attending an honors dinner and summarily removed as class vice president. Dope? Weapons? peeking into the girls' locker room? No, he was hungry and bought some skittles from a classmate.

That's right, the school has a no-tolerance "wellness" policy; wellness being a euphemism for health which seems, well, so unhealthy and "no-tolerance" means for the most part, brainless. Who wants to introduce cogitation into the school system? that's just too liberal for America. The comfortable binary form of artificial intelligence that passes for thought in conservative utopias has brought us many examples of kids having had their educational prospects damaged because of aspirin or a nail clipper or items even more trivial. Of course some like to call this sort of thing "politically correct" in their politically correct fashion, or even "liberal" in their self contradictory manner, but I just call it bone headed conservatism. A restriction of rights is not liberal and a judgment as to whether something is allowed under one's political views is ipso facto, politically correct. That's why I avoid falling into the tar pit of those terms whenever I can.

Of course the news got out on CNN last night and the sheepish sheep in New Haven had to give the kid a reprieve, the excuse being ignorance of the commandment "thou shalt eat only what, when and where we tell you to." Lets not talk about no tolerance for ignorance please - my head hurts already.

Michael's "permanent record" will not reflect his sucrose abuse or his illicit candy deals and he will be free to go and not transgress the rules of "wellness" any further. As long as he keeps his boots shiny, pledges to worship god and the flag and avoid high fructose corn syrup, the ridiculous right wing school board of New Haven, Connecticut will allow him some portion of his civil rights and the people who truly love the idea of a country where we all obey the president and think no thoughts against the party and trust in a particular deity will be relieved and will continue to giggle about "liberals."

Baptist Balls

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

-Bob Dylan-

Who says Florida is backward? Our State may rank near the bottom by many methods of academic assessment but at least now, at last, you can use the word "Evolution" in our schools - even if your kids still have to pledge that God is sovereign and not the people.

New academic standards that squeaked through by one vote Tuesday, now state that evolution is

"the fundamental concept underlying all of biology and is supported by multiple forms of scientific evidence."

No shit! So with one stroke and by one vote, Florida puts it's toe tentatively into the 19th century, trembling with fear and holy trepidation.

The executive director of the Florida Baptist Convention has objected to calling evolution the only fundamental concept underlying biology in an e-mail to the Florida Education Commissioner. John Sullivan the Baptist asserted that the Baptists firmly believe there's evidence of a "Creator-initiated origin of life." He didn't explain how he knew that Baptists believed this; whether they believed it because they were Baptists or Baptists because they believed it, nor did he tell us how many of these people doubted the evidence for gravity. The "evidence" for creationism consists entirely of the will to believe what someone once said in a book written before soap was invented and a carefully guarded ignorance of Geology, Genetics, Physics, Mathematics, Logic, Chemistry and Paleontology. Too bad I didn't have the Baptist Cojones as a student to try to dismiss the Calculus of multiple independent variables as a "mere theory" whose weaknesses were that Jesus didn't know how either and that I didn't do my homework.

"The weaknesses of science should be taught as well as its strengths"

says Sullivan and never mind the weaknesses of belief or of "God's Word" as concerns the Jerusalem centered, 6000 year old universe, a flat earth that floats on an endless sea and a fixed firmament studded with little lights that can be reached by building a mud brick tower above which a male God complete with navel and genitals, lives in endless and vindictive glory.

Just some thoughts

Nothing is really the new anything.

Every day the universe is unimaginably bigger than it was yesterday.

Nothing you buy or do or don't do is going to "save the planet."

No one has ever succeeded in bringing back the way it used to be.

Nobody gives a damn about your diet.

There are no synonyms.

Some day there will be no Republicans.

Mr. Murdoch's neighborhood

You'd think Fox News with all its sanctimonious high sentence and pious pretensions would like the late Fred Rogers; he was an ordained minister after all and he tried to tell kids to be nice and friendly and gentle and not to hate anyone including yourself. But Rogers of course was a Presbyterian and not the snarling kind of Talibanic terrorist for whom anything not related to blood, sweat and endless toil endured to expiate inescapable guilt, shame and self loathing is neither Christian nor worthy of a Christian.

Don Chance, Professor of Finance at Louisiana State University started this Fox feeding frenzy by making some references to his anecdotal evidence that students are now "narcissistic" because Fred Rogers' attempt to make kids feel good about themselves didn't include Neo-Calvinist lectures about work - and more work. Normally this wouldn't be news, but by normally I mean in a world without Fox News and its crusade for an every man for himself, law of the claw, dog eat dog, ant hill Utopia.

If Americans are in fact work obsessed, as indicated by the abnormally long hours we work and abnormally short vacations we take, it's because of our Calvanist heritage with its confusion about whether we work to live or live to convince God not to damn us when we die. We even speak of work in ethical terms. It's called an ethic of course because it benefits employers, on earth and in heaven and our being gleefully exploitable benefits those who teach us about ethics and exploit us. Perhaps it's natural that a professor of Finance would see life and ethics and perhaps all other things in terms of a balance sheet. Perhaps he's more likely than others to reward hours punched on the time clock than actual mastery of the subject he's there to teach, but Fox, the voice of the Employer, is certainly likely to pounce on any anecdote no matter how much they have to stretch it, that allows them to promote, in the name of free enterprise, a meaner, more work oriented society of a kind dear to the heart of Stalin.

It's easier to pick on poor dead Fred, who made kids feel welcome and safe and protected and never once mentioned hell, sin, damnation and endless toil, than to blame a trillion dollar industry that broadcasts self contempt and dissatisfaction in order to sell diet food, exercise machines, makeup, plastic surgery, snake oil and acne cream by teaching you to hate everything about yourself, your house, your car and your freedom. It's not so easy to show that some guy from Louisiana who somehow prefers to be a professor of finance rather than a financier and has no background in the social sciences, knows that his students have a sense of entitlement that grew up in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, but that doesn't matter to Fox. It's even harder to expand that to "case closed" status as concerns an entire continent and its culture, but that doesn't matter to Fox either. They feel entitled to promote the interests of the entitled and that entitles them to denounce your entitlement to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That's what they get paid the big bucks for, after all.

Of course We went through this same transcendental idiocy with Doctor Spock who, to a previous generation of crypto-Calvinist Conservatives, single handedly engendered the social and civil rights revolution of the 1960's because not only did he suggest that it was a good thing to express affection for your children rather than to let them feel fear and rejection just for the economic efficiency of it, he didn't implore parents to teach their children self-loathing - the kind that leads to "discipline" which means work. That these were people who were able to dismiss the struggle against institutionalized injustice by telling those involved in it to get a job, is telling.

The Great Depression was depicted by the same "work ethic" peddlers as the result of the laziness of the American worker and the narcissistic self indulgence of those who spend rather than save. You have to admire them for being able to segue into promoting spending and borrowing, yet still blaming the younger generation for being lazy, undisciplined and too concerned with subversive Liberal nonsense like social justice, equal protection under the law and democracy, or sometimes in Louisiana, expecting teachers to be teachers rather than accountants and gatekeepers and makers of lists.

I don't know much about the scapegoats of 19th century America, but children's books were more often than not all about grasshoppers and ants by way of saying work, work, work, you lazy, good for nothing dreamers, lest ye feel the cruel lash of the Lord. The first half of that century produced arguments for slavery based on the native laziness of the enslaved race as compared with the julep sipping slave owners. The same old lies and only the liars are new.

In the grand opera of America, Fox News is only the latest fat man on stage, singing the same leitmotif in the same booming baritone we've been listening to all along. All that is new is that this one has a microphone.

Another roadside attraction

He got a chauffeur that's a genuwine dinosawr
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)
And he can knuckle your head before you count to four
(Alley-Oop, oop, oop, oop-oop)

-The Hollywood Argyles-

Rudolph Wurlitzer wrote a novel titled Nog back in the day; about a young man who purchased a trailer containing a tank with an eponymous rubber octopus and took it on a picaresque and somewhat lysergic tour. It's become a minor cult classic. Nog was the first thing I thought about when I first heard of the Museum of Creationism.

Now that Kentucky's museum of an invented past is open, I can see from the pictures that it seems really rather more pathetic and tawdry than I expected and more in line with the cheap carnies and roadside zoos and shops selling dried alligators and jackalopes that used to line the highways in earlier days of automobile travel. It's a freak show where the customers are the freaks as well as marks.

Prepare to Believe, says the home page which displays images of featherless raptors already outmoded by recent data. Perhaps Abandon All Honesty would have been more suitable, but of course the entire concept of giving legitimacy to a legend by making fiberglass and rubber images in anachronistic settings is pathetic in itself and as pure entertainment, it's hopeless to compete with the real Creators of the genre, Ripley's, Madame Toussaud and Walt Disney. In fact I'm wondering how they can reconcile the attempt to make seeing into believing when believing in the unseen is the bedrock of religion. Perhaps they're just as confused as I am by the whole thing.

Unless it becomes an attraction for the cynical, willing to pay $19.95 a head for something to laugh at, I have the sense that it cannot succeed in meeting its expenses, even with the "Museum Shop" that contains books "exposing" competing religions. Reruns of The Flintstones are free after all and don't require or engender a belief addiction.

Nihil novi sub soli

There's nothing new under the sun? Well everything old is new again to the empty head but short distance power transfer using alternating or fluctuating magnetic fields is about 200 years old. Run an AC current through one coil of wire and you induce a current in another coil of wire. Michael Faraday figured that out in the early 19th century and the wireless transmission of power using magnetic or electromagnetic fields has been a popular subject in science magazines ever since people started to distribute electricity. That was a long time ago. Still, we live in the days of i-Ignorance and the popular press is running wild with stories about an amazing way to charge your i-Pod and other instruments of i-Idiocy using Faraday's wonderful discovery.

I have to laugh. I've been interested in and a collector of early communications technology for 50 years and I have books showing detailed plans for a short distance, magnetically coupled wireless telephone dated about a hundred years ago, using this same "breakthrough." It works. Of course people in those days were a lot less hip and they just called it what it was: electromagnetism. Nobody had the audacity to invent a term like WiTricity and probably would have been tossed down a well if they had.

The cruel joke has it that the benefit of Alzheimer's is that you meet new people every day. The same goes for being a young, with-it, "into electronics" consumodroid too. Everything old is new.

Immigrants need not apply

I'm sure few people other than a handful of historians remember the Immigration Restriction League. I'd never heard of it before turning up a letter now housed at Harvard University's Houghton Library while doing some genealogical research. Dated 1910, the letter offers support for the League's anti-immigration stance which when compared with the foam flecked, hydrophobic hysteria of today's anti-immigration rhetoric, seems rational and restrained. In the 1890's when that organization was formed, the US was experiencing a large influx of immigration and Americans, being the kind of people they are, were nervous about losing low paying jobs, about disease, about foreign languages and about the "changing complexion" of America.

The letter talks about a $10 head tax and about denying entry to illiterates; something that President Cleveland had vetoed 13 years earlier, calling it "illiberal, narrow, and un-American." Open immigration, said the letter, was acceptable when the nation was sparsely settled, but not now in 1910 with just over 90 million citizens. Only 10 years earlier, the US population was slightly over 74 million, an increase of 16 million -- well over a 20% increase. That's enormous.

Although Congress eventually managed to institute literacy tests by 1921 and only after several presidential vetoes, had they been successful back in 1894, one half of my family would have remained in Europe as my maternal grandfather's mother never did learn to read. Her many many descendants however have acquired some skill with letters over the years and have done as much as anyone to build this country. New York in her day, was a stewpot of languages, something that made nativists very nervous. It still is and it still does, to the point where soulless mediocrities like Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, want to close the golden door altogether.

The IRL's fears never came true. Even with another decade of influx of the huddled and not too literate masses arriving in America, English remained a viable means of communication and the children of these very immigrants made the USA into the greatest industrial powerhouse the world had ever seen, finally broke the back of Jim Crow and became known as the greatest generation our country has had. When people insist that today's immigrants are different, they mean that today's immigrants have better tans. They may, in a generation be more American and indeed better Americans than the rednecks and Republicans who fear them, but that's not what it's about. It's about race. It's about color.

As with the Know Nothing Party, an anti immigration predecessor of the IRL, a good portion of the anti-immigrant sentiment is based on not knowing much and by believing this gives us some sort of prescience and insight, we continue that tradition of being the worst that we can be.

Death, how high is thy center of gravity.

Death, it's a good thing. Without it we wouldn't exist and without it, all the evil bastards from time immemorial would still be here, polluting the world. As sad as it is that we have to leave and face oblivion, it's comforting that Jerry Fallwell didn't fare any better for all his pious pretensions.

I have long tried never to gloat over the demise of anyone but being human I feel worse about some than others, like the 19 year old girl who died yesterday near here when she took a corner too fast in her SUV. Doubtless her parents thought they were doing the right thing. I don't know whose corpse it was that I saw on Mother's day, being loaded into an ambulance parked next to the wreckage of another SUV rollover on Florida's turnpike. Evidently it was an overly aggressive lane change.

The local paper says nobody knows why another SUV rolled over the following day on Route 95. No other cars were involved and the driver, being in a coma, can't help us. At least now we don't have to listen to Jerry tell us it was God's wrath against the tolerant and merciful. We only have the advertising industry, pop culture and the gullibility of the motoring public to blame.

Things that go bump in the night.

No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey teacher leave them kids alone

-Pink Floyd: Another brick in the wall -

What's scarier than a madman with a gun running into a school? The reaction of the American public. Beyond the knee-jerk reaction from the paranoids, the idiots that think banning things make them go away, the mourning and healing addicts and the Police State advocates, there is no end of well-intentioned but horrible acts.

Take the Morons of Murphreesboro, for instance. With the misguided self confidence of someone with a degree in education and little else, the staff at a Tennessee elementary school decided that the kids had to be more prepared for an invasion and staged a fake incident during a field trip. The kids were told they were under attack and cowered under tables in the dark, begging for mercy while an accomplice wearing a hood shook and rattled the door, trying to get in.

Ghost stories around a campfire are one thing; this is another. Parents were understandably outraged and perhaps something will be done with these State appointed guardians of our youth. I would suggest a raid on the teacher's lounge by heavily armed parents during which the perpetrators would be blindfolded and put up against a wall to see how many would soil themselves before being told it was all a game.