The Weekend Wonk: Educating for Ignorance – It’s “School Choice” Week!
The video above contains some pieces from my video documenting the 2012 Heartland Institute Climate Conference in Chicago – including some clips that did not make the original cut. I wanted originally to spotlight Heartland’s focus on destroying the American Public School system, as you can see.
For the last 40 years, the ‘conservative” movement has attempted to further it’s ends by manipulating the most virulent, ignorant, and fanatical elements of the fundamentalist Christian right. We can see in today’s Republican party how well that strategy has worked out. The same people think they can use the fanatical Christian right as a trojan horse – to move Anti science, Climate denial disinformation into the school system under the shadow of the “Teach the Controversy” Creationism movement.
It’s School Choice Week – celebrating the right of your children to be taught that the earth might be 5 billion, or 5000 years old, and to make up their own minds about the science. They will also have the right to be taught that maybe the last 150 years of physics is wrong, heat seeking missiles don’t really seek heat, CO2 lasers don’t really lase, and heat trapping gases can’t really trap heat – that they should “think for themselves”, and, well, listen to Rush Limbaugh instead of the National Academy.
The celebration is supported by a rogues gallery of the usual suspect right wing think tanks, like the Heartland Institute, Cato, Freedomworks, Americans for Prosperity, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Why would a group of far right wing, mostly libertarian, Ayn Randian types be in bed with the tongue talkers and snake handlers of the creationist movement?
All across the country—most recently, in the state of Texas—local battles over the teaching of evolution are taking on a new complexion. More and more, it isn’t just evolution under attack, it’s also the teaching of climate science. The National Center for Science Education, the leading group defending the teaching of evolution across the country, has even broadened its portfolio: Now it protects climate education too.
How did these issues get wrapped up together?
There is the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” theory. In other words, anti-evolutionists and climate deniers were both getting dumped on so much by the scientific community that they sort of naturally joined forces. And that makes sense: We know that in general, people gather their issue stances in bunches, because those stances travel together in a group (often under the aegis of a political party)
But there’s also the “declining trust in science” theory, according to which political conservatives have, in general, become distrustful of the scientific community (we have data showing this is the case), and this has infected how they think about several different politicized scientific issues. And who knows: Perhaps the distrust started with the evolution issue. It is easy to imagine how a Christian conservative who thinks liberal scientists are full of it on evolution would naturally distrust said scientists on other issues as well.
United States History – Heritage of Freedom In Christian Perspective, Third Edition; A Beka Book, copyright 2009, Pensacola Christian College.
When public-school students enrolled in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.
The more than 17,000 students in the Responsive Education Solutions charter system will learn in their history classes that some residents of the Philippines were “pagans in various levels of civilization.” They’ll read in a history textbook that feminism forced women to turn to the government as a “surrogate husband.”
Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state.
Infiltrating and subverting the charter-school movement has allowed Responsive Ed to carry out its religious agenda—and it is succeeding. Operating more than 65 campuses in Texas, Arkansas, and Indiana, Responsive Ed receives more than $82 million in taxpayer money annually, and it is expanding, with 20 more Texas campuses opening in 2014.
Charter schools may be run independently, but they are still public schools, and through an open records request, I was able to obtain a set of Responsive Ed’s biology “Knowledge Units,” workbooks that Responsive Ed students must complete to pass biology. These workbooks both overtly and underhandedly discredit evidence-based science and allow creationism into public-school classrooms.
A favorite creationist claim is that there is “uncertainty” in the fossil record, and Responsive Ed does not disappoint. The workbook cites the “lack of a single source for all the rock layers as an argument against evolution.”
As the video above demonstrates, the fossil interests that seek to delay responses to climate change are perfectly willing to piggyback on top of the fundamentalist movement to introduce creationism into science curriculums.
In the past five years since 2008, among the hottest years in U.S. history, ALEC has introduced its “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” in 11 states, or over one-fifth of the statehouses nationwide. The bill has passed in four states, an undeniable form of “big government” this “free market” organization decries in its own literature.
ALEC’s “model bills” are written by and for corporate lobbyists alongside conservative legislators at its annual meetings. ALEC raises much of its corporate funding from the fossil fuel industry, which in turn utilizes ALEC as a key — though far from the only — vehicle to ram through its legislative agenda through in the states.
A DeSmogBlog investigation last year found that the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act’s origins date back to 2000.
The Act’s creation is directly connected to the ongoing efforts of another corporate-funded group, the Heartland Institute (of “Heartland Institute Exposed” fame), a group well plugged into the climate change denial machine.
As the map below illustrates, creationism in schools isn’t restricted to schoolhouses in remote villages where the separation of church and state is considered less sacred. If you live in any of these states, there’s a good chance your tax money is helping to convince some hapless students that evolution (the basis of all modern biological science, supported by everything we know about geology, genetics, paleontology, and other fields) is some sort of highly contested scientific hypothesis as credible as “God did it.”
Science 5, Third Edition, copyright 2011, BJU Press, Greenville, South CarolinaUnited States History – Heritage of Freedom In Christian Perspective, Third Edition; A Beka Book, copyright 2009, Pensacola Christian College.
History and economics texts are also infused with fundamentalist theology and an unabashedly conservative viewpoint. The Great Depression, one says, was exaggerated to move the country toward socialism, and it described “The Grapes of Wrath” as propaganda.
Frances Paterson, a professor at Valdosta State University in Georgia who has studied the books, said they “frequently resemble partisan, political literature more than they do the traditional textbooks used in public schools.”
Mr. Arnold, the headmaster of the Covenant Christian Academy in Cumming, Ga., confirmed that his school used those texts but said they were part of a larger curriculum.
“You have to keep in mind that the curriculum goes beyond the textbook,” Mr. Arnold said. “Not only do we teach the students that creation is the way the world was created and that God is in control and he made all things, we also teach them what the false theories of the world are, such as the Big Bang theory and Darwinism. We teach those as fallacies.”
Congress invoking the Bible for public policy. Doesn’t that interfere with the Establishment Clause of the Constitution? Any Libertarians out there? Taking a little red herring break, funny story on Schmidt. Gene Cernan told me years ago that the last true words left on the moon were “Jack, let’s get this mother outta here”. Schmidt might be a great geologist, but wrt Artic (sic) ice area, he don’t know Jack Schmidt.
He may not know Jack Schmidt about arctic sea ice, but he is certainly channeling what his relatives think about it. I speak of Holie Schmidt, DontGiva Schmidt, Fulla Schmidt, and Bull Schmidt. Those last two are very highly regarded by AGW deniers, to the extent that many adopt them for middle names.
Wait. There’s just too much raw raw bs here. This is a sewage processing plant worth of the stuff. The Jesus coloring book riding a dinosaur with coloring hint, omnipotent yellow? Brainwash for breakfast anyone? Is this real?
Unfortunately, it is all too real. At the Creationism Museum in Kentucky, they have a number of dinosaur replicas with saddles on them and you are invited to have your picture taken while riding them. Don’t know if they have “Jesus garb” that you can don for the picture, but I feel sure that they wouldn’t mind if you brought your own to wear.
Google “Creationism Museum” and look at any of the first ten hits for a mindblowing experience. They spent $27 million to build the place and they are DEAD serious—-and “the faithful” are apparently showing up in droves, so it looks like it will survive.
Welcome to the world of Chris Mooney’s making that attempts to offer respect and accommodation for faith-based beliefs – beliefs contrary to evidence-based beliefs – and assumes there must be a compatible middle ground because that sounds so very tolerant and post modern. And to dare disagree then makes one some kind of militant, bigoted, intolerant {blank}-aphobic if one dares to stand on principle of respecting reality’s arbitration of a claim about it. The nerve.
Perhaps too many of us didn’t watch enough Sesame Street, apparently. and have forgotten the purpose of the song was to teach us why “One of these doesn’t belong”.
I watch a number of right-leaning blogs, and the scuttlebutt on the higher-brow ones is that the K Street lobbyists and their funders (aka “Conservatism, Inc.”) have taken control of a great deal of the narrative through their massive presence in the media and the advertisers who have the power of life and death over nominally independent talk-radio personalities.
Conservatism has a very simple answer to climate change: nuclear power. But there are huge fortunes in coal and oil and shipping that would be destroyed by a move to uranium, so the fossil interests keep the propaganda aimed against the science on the right, while financing the anti-nuclear “environmental” groups on the left. The result is stalemate, which means the status quo continues and their profits keep rolling in. The Greens have made an excellent foil for the expansion of the “skepticism” to climate science; it’s hard to argue that they don’t want to take your pickup truck and NASCAR away when they really DO want to take your pickup truck and NASCAR away!
Maybe some outreach can bridge this gap. Something like a PV-covered carport with a 3/4 ton plug-in hybrid hauler underneath might do the trick. But the positions on both sides are pretty hard.
Could you point out some of the “higher-brow right-leaning blogs”? I haven’t found any that qualify for “higher-brow”, except perhaps in their use of the language—-certainly not in the quality of their thinking.
And how about some more details regarding the “environmentalist” groups “on the left” who are being financed by the fossil fuel interests? Who are the groups, who is financing them? Who exactly are the environmentalist groups on the left who are primarily “anti-nuclear” in their activities?
I had asked “And how about some more details regarding the “environmentalist” groups “on the left” who are being financed by the fossil fuel interests? […]”
And got a (very) small start on an answer. I was a member of FOE for years back in the early days but left as they became more international and less “American” and changed focus. I now belong to and support EDF, UCS, NRDC, Greenpeace, and a host of others, including the Sierra Club that Brower et al split from to form FOE—there were some hard feelings indeed back then.
You overreach greatly when you try to paint a couple of hundred thousand bucks from Robert Anderson way back in 1969 as meaningful, especially when you baldly assert that FOE is “financed by fossil fuel interests” because of that ancient history. Anderson was a very rich man and a philanthropist better known as a patron of the arts. For all we know, he was Brower’s neighbor, and answering a “can I borrow a cup of sugar?” plea (or Brower was standing at a stop light with a bucket and Anderson threw a bundle of cash in “for a good cause”). The “nuclear power religionists” are laughable when they use Anderson the way the right uses Al Gore. Get serious and tell us about LATELY?—Like within the last 40 years? (And what makes FOE “left”?)
The other part of my question was totally ignored. I asked, “Could you point out some of the “higher-brow right-leaning blogs”? Still waiting for enlightenment there, as are others, I’m sure—“higher-brow right leaning blog” sounds like a bit of an oxymoron to me.
There are blogs I enjoy reading, and I wouldn’t blight them with your presence.
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“There are blogs I enjoy reading, and I wouldn’t blight them with your presence”, says E-Pot, once again demonstrating for us his arrogance, narcissism, lack of self-awareness, and general cluelessness. Well done, E-Pot!
So well done that I really need not point out the self-evident truth that one who has NO facts and NO arguments to present will often resort to the ad hominem attack that E-Pot has done so weakly here. All those question marks in my comments, and E-Pot has no answers. Put up or shut up, E-Pot! For a guy who always wants to see sources, you seem strangely reluctant here.
I am just a bit insulted that he didn’t try a bit harder to say something more clever, but perhaps he is sitting up on his horse of imagined superiority again and sniffing his perfumed sleeve hanky, and in that exalted state he perhaps thinks that his display of “restrained disdain” is somehow “superior”.
I harbor no such inhibitions, so I will restrain myself only from blatant vulgarity when I say to the world that E-Pot is an “anal orifice from which are emanating gases in a state of combustion”, and express my sympathies for the fact that he had an unhappy childhood because he was always getting slapped around by the “real kids”.
In the adult world, E-Pot is just an amusing walking demonstration of the term “All Hat, No Cattle”, so he need not fear physical harm here. I WOULD suggest that he might want to think about NOT attending any future Crock conventions, though. (And before he starts to whine about being threatened with physical violence, let me say that I am only offering E-Pot some good advice here. I am a caring person who cares about others, no matter how sad and sorry they may be, and wants to help them avoid potential difficulties).
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Oh the injustice. That was so painful to read. What is the point of filling young minds with junk and ruining the rest of their lives (and others)?
Perhaps it’s a conspiracy to train an army of trolls and trollettes to unquestioningly obey their fossil fuel paymasters as AGW denial becomes increasingly untenable.
I’m not suggesting that this is actually true, but it’s a bit more believable than most of the other wacko conspiracies doing the rounds.
There are folks out there on the internet that are more than happy to counter the religious fundamentalists efforts, for they do believe these guys are a real threat to society. Here’s a Dawkins disciple going to work against these guys:
Andrew – I discovered “why people laugh at creationists a ways back”. Its a hoot and I recommend the whole series. I found Potholer54 along the same lines. Peter and many others have found links between creationists and GW deniers. There is a mixed group of you tubers who have been variously banned at times due to a concerted effort by thick headed rubes. Peter started his youtube career being banned by WUWT and Coleman. Thunderfoot collided with a crazy religious nut kid who has later yanked. A group of them got together to thwart attempts at lobbing negatives and false claims to get them removed from youtube. One of my other favorites is zomgitscriss.
Yeah the Potholer54 vids were a wake up call as to how bad the media is when reporting science. His last video said he got a new job, so he’s going to chill out on the YT vids for some time.
I’ve actually noticed on a few Thunderf00t videos (somehow my spell check recognizes the name), that he shows a screen shot of a ‘collective’ of rational Youtubers, which included Potholer and Greenman. I like most of his videos, though i recently tried to engage him in a debate about the health hazards of the junk they spilled in the WV American Water water supply, as i felt he was downplaying the situation on a Young Turks video comments section just by casually examining its chemistry (without considering the products of hydrolysis or incidences/rates of hypersensitivity to exogenous compounds in society); he ignored me, whilst he kept replying to some young kid who had no science background that was making poorly thought out comments.
That one kid that made a video threatening to inflict violence on him because he was criticizing the Koran or Muslim fundamentalists was a little spooky. That kid figured out his name and where he worked and forwarded it to a group of Muslims hoping at least one from the group would lay down some ‘jihad’ or something.
This is just plain scary. It’s all so easy to just laugh at these nutjobs – but think about it. These people may actually succeed. I find myself slack-jawed at the thought that those who would propose such teaching can even get to the point of writing it down and proposing it to school boards with little fear of being laughed right out of whatever office they’ve crawled into. Have they no shame, no sense of reality whatsoever? That such teaching can even be seriously proposed, says how far our culture has degenerated. I grew up in a time when science was still respected by the general public. I worry that we just won’t make it.
The very idea that there could be some sort of debate among the school boards about such issues, is to say the good and wise have already lost.
indy222. Your incredulity surprises me. I was for twenty years an instructor in English at a regional campus of Ohio State. We had on faculty a geographer who shopped global warming denialism on our campus for over a decade, did so with a megaphone. There was no outrage whatsoever among the faculty. These highly educated people were fully willing to give this guy the benefit of the doubt that there was sound science behind what he was teaching. My attempts to educated on this issue, — to make people aware of the consensus view and to expose denialism as mere anti-science – were universally condemned as a malicious assault on an esteemed colleague. I was fired for my pains. The denialist retired with full honors — is still revered as one of the greatest teachers ever to grace the halls of the institution. So no, I’m hardly surprised that school boards across the country are taken in by these snake-oil salesmen. If the most educated among us, people with PhDs, can be duped, why not your typical school board member?
WHOA! A sad tale from Ohio, but of course Ohio has given us Boner and other right wing idiots, so there is perhaps reason to question the collective intelligence of Buckeyes. You were fired after TWENTY years? Is there no such thing as tenure in Ohio? Or were you actually in some alternate universe that just looked like Ohio? At any rate, you should consider it a badge of honor to be fired from a place like that.
I’m glad to say I worked in schools in the east that were far more enlightened and in which people were far less tolerant of fools and far more in support of those who spoke “truth”. One of my most memorable moments was when some ignorant fool was going on about something at a large meeting and an “emeritus” type aroused himself from his nap and merely said “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say on this campus”. After a short stunned silence, the fool sat down, the “emeritus” type went back to sleep, everyone else breathed a sigh of relief, and the discussion got back on track. You would have enjoyed working there.
There is no excuse for your educated colleagues, and you are right about school board members. Back in my day, they were far more concerned about “doing the right thing” and those who sought election or appointment were good folks, and often highly educated—they were a joy to work with. The people who seek these positions now tend to be ignorant and far more motivated by politics and ideology rather than true “education”, to the frustration and shame of anyone who has ever called themselves an educator.
The ironic thing is that the main campus of OSU is host institution of the Byrd Polar Research Center, which has on faculty some very distinguished climate scientists (for example Lonnie and Ellen Mosely Thompson) who have been leaders in the study of anthropogenic global warming. The denialist on our campus, who had no expertise in climate science whatsoever (was an urban land use specialist), would never have gotten away with selling his snake oil on main. An ugly combination of a culture of cronyism in the local administration (“He’s a good old boy!”) and apathy on the part of the faculty (“Global warming? What’s that got to do with my paycheck?”) ended with my goose getting well and truly cooked. Sigh.
Sigh, indeed. In academia, a “proper” campus community energetically polices itself and weeds out “trolls” of any variety. Where I worked, folks like your denialist were taken on by many in public and privately counseled by admin to “get their stuff together” under pain of separation—and we DID fire some—it took two or three years to “line them up and shoot them down”, but it did happen. Very satisfying.
The other side of that coin is an academic community where cronyism, apathy, and indifference rule. A very tough nut to crack. Again, I extend my sympathies to you for having found yourself in such a place.
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All questions of science, creationism, evolution, and climate change aside, the nose of the free marketers is well under the tent of public education in this country, largely due to the efforts of our old friends ALEC and a number of profit-seeking “virtual education” companies, a prominent one being K-12, a company based in VA that takes in nearly a billion dollars a year (all from the taxpayer’s pocket), and has gotten “feet on the ground” in a number of states. Read the Sourcewatch piece—-it reads like a movie script with all the usual actors from many bad old movies coming together again (remember William Bennett?). The Waltons are into it also—see the schoolmatters article.
The fundamentalists have embraced the “educating for ignorance” virtual education movement that goes a step beyond charter schools because it allows them to do a bigger end run around state laws and more easily set up home schooling with on-line resources spouting the kind of crap in this Crock post. It dovetails with the fight against science of the right wing politicians who want the fundamentalist vote,as well as the SOB’s who want to get rich without concern for right or wrong, and fossil fuel is behind it with $$$.
An example of how cleverly these SOB’s suck money out of the public coffers while polluting education can be found in VA. (I’m rounding off and making up numbers for simplicity, but you’ll get the point). They set up an online “virtual school ” and enroll students from Fairfax County (one of the richest in the state) and students from one of the poorest in the state in the SW coal country. Fairfax, being well-off, gets perhaps $500 in state aid per student, while the poor county gets perhaps 3500 per student. So, you sign up 5 kids from the poor county, 150 kids from the rich county and…….wait for it……declare that your “school” is based in the poor county so you can draw state aid at the rate of $3500 for ALL 155 kids, even though 150 telecommute. It effectively bleeds off $3000 from the state funds into the SOB’s pockets for providing a substandard education to all. Another of ALEC’s blessings.
So it did. Don’t know why, because the page DOES exist.
Google “Walmart’s Walton Foundation Doubling Efforts to Privatize K-12” and you’ll get it. Click the link to the full Washington Post article and read about the Alliance for School Choice and the tie-ins to the Repugnants.
As I said, a script for a bad movie with all the same old actors hiding in the shadows
From the very right reverend John Coleman.
Congress invoking the Bible for public policy. Doesn’t that interfere with the Establishment Clause of the Constitution? Any Libertarians out there? Taking a little red herring break, funny story on Schmidt. Gene Cernan told me years ago that the last true words left on the moon were “Jack, let’s get this mother outta here”. Schmidt might be a great geologist, but wrt Artic (sic) ice area, he don’t know Jack Schmidt.
He may not know Jack Schmidt about arctic sea ice, but he is certainly channeling what his relatives think about it. I speak of Holie Schmidt, DontGiva Schmidt, Fulla Schmidt, and Bull Schmidt. Those last two are very highly regarded by AGW deniers, to the extent that many adopt them for middle names.
Wait. There’s just too much raw raw bs here. This is a sewage processing plant worth of the stuff. The Jesus coloring book riding a dinosaur with coloring hint, omnipotent yellow? Brainwash for breakfast anyone? Is this real?
Unfortunately, it is all too real. At the Creationism Museum in Kentucky, they have a number of dinosaur replicas with saddles on them and you are invited to have your picture taken while riding them. Don’t know if they have “Jesus garb” that you can don for the picture, but I feel sure that they wouldn’t mind if you brought your own to wear.
Google “Creationism Museum” and look at any of the first ten hits for a mindblowing experience. They spent $27 million to build the place and they are DEAD serious—-and “the faithful” are apparently showing up in droves, so it looks like it will survive.
Welcome to the world of Chris Mooney’s making that attempts to offer respect and accommodation for faith-based beliefs – beliefs contrary to evidence-based beliefs – and assumes there must be a compatible middle ground because that sounds so very tolerant and post modern. And to dare disagree then makes one some kind of militant, bigoted, intolerant {blank}-aphobic if one dares to stand on principle of respecting reality’s arbitration of a claim about it. The nerve.
Perhaps too many of us didn’t watch enough Sesame Street, apparently. and have forgotten the purpose of the song was to teach us why “One of these doesn’t belong”.
I watch a number of right-leaning blogs, and the scuttlebutt on the higher-brow ones is that the K Street lobbyists and their funders (aka “Conservatism, Inc.”) have taken control of a great deal of the narrative through their massive presence in the media and the advertisers who have the power of life and death over nominally independent talk-radio personalities.
Conservatism has a very simple answer to climate change: nuclear power. But there are huge fortunes in coal and oil and shipping that would be destroyed by a move to uranium, so the fossil interests keep the propaganda aimed against the science on the right, while financing the anti-nuclear “environmental” groups on the left. The result is stalemate, which means the status quo continues and their profits keep rolling in. The Greens have made an excellent foil for the expansion of the “skepticism” to climate science; it’s hard to argue that they don’t want to take your pickup truck and NASCAR away when they really DO want to take your pickup truck and NASCAR away!
Maybe some outreach can bridge this gap. Something like a PV-covered carport with a 3/4 ton plug-in hybrid hauler underneath might do the trick. But the positions on both sides are pretty hard.
Could you point out some of the “higher-brow right-leaning blogs”? I haven’t found any that qualify for “higher-brow”, except perhaps in their use of the language—-certainly not in the quality of their thinking.
And how about some more details regarding the “environmentalist” groups “on the left” who are being financed by the fossil fuel interests? Who are the groups, who is financing them? Who exactly are the environmentalist groups on the left who are primarily “anti-nuclear” in their activities?
Friends of the Earth, founded by anti-nuclear activists dissatisfied with the Sierra Club’s stance, was financed by Texas oilman Robert O. Anderson.
I had asked “And how about some more details regarding the “environmentalist” groups “on the left” who are being financed by the fossil fuel interests? […]”
And got a (very) small start on an answer. I was a member of FOE for years back in the early days but left as they became more international and less “American” and changed focus. I now belong to and support EDF, UCS, NRDC, Greenpeace, and a host of others, including the Sierra Club that Brower et al split from to form FOE—there were some hard feelings indeed back then.
You overreach greatly when you try to paint a couple of hundred thousand bucks from Robert Anderson way back in 1969 as meaningful, especially when you baldly assert that FOE is “financed by fossil fuel interests” because of that ancient history. Anderson was a very rich man and a philanthropist better known as a patron of the arts. For all we know, he was Brower’s neighbor, and answering a “can I borrow a cup of sugar?” plea (or Brower was standing at a stop light with a bucket and Anderson threw a bundle of cash in “for a good cause”). The “nuclear power religionists” are laughable when they use Anderson the way the right uses Al Gore. Get serious and tell us about LATELY?—Like within the last 40 years? (And what makes FOE “left”?)
The other part of my question was totally ignored. I asked, “Could you point out some of the “higher-brow right-leaning blogs”? Still waiting for enlightenment there, as are others, I’m sure—“higher-brow right leaning blog” sounds like a bit of an oxymoron to me.
There are blogs I enjoy reading, and I wouldn’t blight them with your presence.
“There are blogs I enjoy reading, and I wouldn’t blight them with your presence”, says E-Pot, once again demonstrating for us his arrogance, narcissism, lack of self-awareness, and general cluelessness. Well done, E-Pot!
So well done that I really need not point out the self-evident truth that one who has NO facts and NO arguments to present will often resort to the ad hominem attack that E-Pot has done so weakly here. All those question marks in my comments, and E-Pot has no answers. Put up or shut up, E-Pot! For a guy who always wants to see sources, you seem strangely reluctant here.
I am just a bit insulted that he didn’t try a bit harder to say something more clever, but perhaps he is sitting up on his horse of imagined superiority again and sniffing his perfumed sleeve hanky, and in that exalted state he perhaps thinks that his display of “restrained disdain” is somehow “superior”.
I harbor no such inhibitions, so I will restrain myself only from blatant vulgarity when I say to the world that E-Pot is an “anal orifice from which are emanating gases in a state of combustion”, and express my sympathies for the fact that he had an unhappy childhood because he was always getting slapped around by the “real kids”.
In the adult world, E-Pot is just an amusing walking demonstration of the term “All Hat, No Cattle”, so he need not fear physical harm here. I WOULD suggest that he might want to think about NOT attending any future Crock conventions, though. (And before he starts to whine about being threatened with physical violence, let me say that I am only offering E-Pot some good advice here. I am a caring person who cares about others, no matter how sad and sorry they may be, and wants to help them avoid potential difficulties).
Oh the injustice. That was so painful to read. What is the point of filling young minds with junk and ruining the rest of their lives (and others)?
Perhaps it’s a conspiracy to train an army of trolls and trollettes to unquestioningly obey their fossil fuel paymasters as AGW denial becomes increasingly untenable.
I’m not suggesting that this is actually true, but it’s a bit more believable than most of the other wacko conspiracies doing the rounds.
There are folks out there on the internet that are more than happy to counter the religious fundamentalists efforts, for they do believe these guys are a real threat to society. Here’s a Dawkins disciple going to work against these guys:
http://youtu.be/K2Rx4cW6E6Y
He also does a good series on ‘Why People Laugh at Creationists’, and has some cool science entertainment videos.
Andrew – I discovered “why people laugh at creationists a ways back”. Its a hoot and I recommend the whole series. I found Potholer54 along the same lines. Peter and many others have found links between creationists and GW deniers. There is a mixed group of you tubers who have been variously banned at times due to a concerted effort by thick headed rubes. Peter started his youtube career being banned by WUWT and Coleman. Thunderfoot collided with a crazy religious nut kid who has later yanked. A group of them got together to thwart attempts at lobbing negatives and false claims to get them removed from youtube. One of my other favorites is zomgitscriss.
Yeah the Potholer54 vids were a wake up call as to how bad the media is when reporting science. His last video said he got a new job, so he’s going to chill out on the YT vids for some time.
I’ve actually noticed on a few Thunderf00t videos (somehow my spell check recognizes the name), that he shows a screen shot of a ‘collective’ of rational Youtubers, which included Potholer and Greenman. I like most of his videos, though i recently tried to engage him in a debate about the health hazards of the junk they spilled in the WV American Water water supply, as i felt he was downplaying the situation on a Young Turks video comments section just by casually examining its chemistry (without considering the products of hydrolysis or incidences/rates of hypersensitivity to exogenous compounds in society); he ignored me, whilst he kept replying to some young kid who had no science background that was making poorly thought out comments.
That one kid that made a video threatening to inflict violence on him because he was criticizing the Koran or Muslim fundamentalists was a little spooky. That kid figured out his name and where he worked and forwarded it to a group of Muslims hoping at least one from the group would lay down some ‘jihad’ or something.
Thanks – I hadn’t seen zomgitcriss before.
This is just plain scary. It’s all so easy to just laugh at these nutjobs – but think about it. These people may actually succeed. I find myself slack-jawed at the thought that those who would propose such teaching can even get to the point of writing it down and proposing it to school boards with little fear of being laughed right out of whatever office they’ve crawled into. Have they no shame, no sense of reality whatsoever? That such teaching can even be seriously proposed, says how far our culture has degenerated. I grew up in a time when science was still respected by the general public. I worry that we just won’t make it.
The very idea that there could be some sort of debate among the school boards about such issues, is to say the good and wise have already lost.
indy222. Your incredulity surprises me. I was for twenty years an instructor in English at a regional campus of Ohio State. We had on faculty a geographer who shopped global warming denialism on our campus for over a decade, did so with a megaphone. There was no outrage whatsoever among the faculty. These highly educated people were fully willing to give this guy the benefit of the doubt that there was sound science behind what he was teaching. My attempts to educated on this issue, — to make people aware of the consensus view and to expose denialism as mere anti-science – were universally condemned as a malicious assault on an esteemed colleague. I was fired for my pains. The denialist retired with full honors — is still revered as one of the greatest teachers ever to grace the halls of the institution. So no, I’m hardly surprised that school boards across the country are taken in by these snake-oil salesmen. If the most educated among us, people with PhDs, can be duped, why not your typical school board member?
WHOA! A sad tale from Ohio, but of course Ohio has given us Boner and other right wing idiots, so there is perhaps reason to question the collective intelligence of Buckeyes. You were fired after TWENTY years? Is there no such thing as tenure in Ohio? Or were you actually in some alternate universe that just looked like Ohio? At any rate, you should consider it a badge of honor to be fired from a place like that.
I’m glad to say I worked in schools in the east that were far more enlightened and in which people were far less tolerant of fools and far more in support of those who spoke “truth”. One of my most memorable moments was when some ignorant fool was going on about something at a large meeting and an “emeritus” type aroused himself from his nap and merely said “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say on this campus”. After a short stunned silence, the fool sat down, the “emeritus” type went back to sleep, everyone else breathed a sigh of relief, and the discussion got back on track. You would have enjoyed working there.
There is no excuse for your educated colleagues, and you are right about school board members. Back in my day, they were far more concerned about “doing the right thing” and those who sought election or appointment were good folks, and often highly educated—they were a joy to work with. The people who seek these positions now tend to be ignorant and far more motivated by politics and ideology rather than true “education”, to the frustration and shame of anyone who has ever called themselves an educator.
The ironic thing is that the main campus of OSU is host institution of the Byrd Polar Research Center, which has on faculty some very distinguished climate scientists (for example Lonnie and Ellen Mosely Thompson) who have been leaders in the study of anthropogenic global warming. The denialist on our campus, who had no expertise in climate science whatsoever (was an urban land use specialist), would never have gotten away with selling his snake oil on main. An ugly combination of a culture of cronyism in the local administration (“He’s a good old boy!”) and apathy on the part of the faculty (“Global warming? What’s that got to do with my paycheck?”) ended with my goose getting well and truly cooked. Sigh.
Sigh, indeed. In academia, a “proper” campus community energetically polices itself and weeds out “trolls” of any variety. Where I worked, folks like your denialist were taken on by many in public and privately counseled by admin to “get their stuff together” under pain of separation—and we DID fire some—it took two or three years to “line them up and shoot them down”, but it did happen. Very satisfying.
The other side of that coin is an academic community where cronyism, apathy, and indifference rule. A very tough nut to crack. Again, I extend my sympathies to you for having found yourself in such a place.
All questions of science, creationism, evolution, and climate change aside, the nose of the free marketers is well under the tent of public education in this country, largely due to the efforts of our old friends ALEC and a number of profit-seeking “virtual education” companies, a prominent one being K-12, a company based in VA that takes in nearly a billion dollars a year (all from the taxpayer’s pocket), and has gotten “feet on the ground” in a number of states. Read the Sourcewatch piece—-it reads like a movie script with all the usual actors from many bad old movies coming together again (remember William Bennett?). The Waltons are into it also—see the schoolmatters article.
The fundamentalists have embraced the “educating for ignorance” virtual education movement that goes a step beyond charter schools because it allows them to do a bigger end run around state laws and more easily set up home schooling with on-line resources spouting the kind of crap in this Crock post. It dovetails with the fight against science of the right wing politicians who want the fundamentalist vote,as well as the SOB’s who want to get rich without concern for right or wrong, and fossil fuel is behind it with $$$.
Google Sourcewatch K-12
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/K12_Inc.
Google Walmart’s Walton Foundation Doubling Efforts to Privatize K-12
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/…/12/walmarts-walton-foundation-doubling.html
An example of how cleverly these SOB’s suck money out of the public coffers while polluting education can be found in VA. (I’m rounding off and making up numbers for simplicity, but you’ll get the point). They set up an online “virtual school ” and enroll students from Fairfax County (one of the richest in the state) and students from one of the poorest in the state in the SW coal country. Fairfax, being well-off, gets perhaps $500 in state aid per student, while the poor county gets perhaps 3500 per student. So, you sign up 5 kids from the poor county, 150 kids from the rich county and…….wait for it……declare that your “school” is based in the poor county so you can draw state aid at the rate of $3500 for ALL 155 kids, even though 150 telecommute. It effectively bleeds off $3000 from the state funds into the SOB’s pockets for providing a substandard education to all. Another of ALEC’s blessings.
dumboldguy: Your link to Walmart Walton etc takes me to page that says entry does not exist.
So it did. Don’t know why, because the page DOES exist.
Google “Walmart’s Walton Foundation Doubling Efforts to Privatize K-12” and you’ll get it. Click the link to the full Washington Post article and read about the Alliance for School Choice and the tie-ins to the Repugnants.
As I said, a script for a bad movie with all the same old actors hiding in the shadows