Beam me up

After spending the last few days looking at such topics as the current US presidential race, the ethics of publishing teacher evaluations publicly, and the separation of church and state, let's get back to the issue that should be occupying the mind of every serious, concerned human being: lights appearing over Mayan pyramids.

It's kind of funny how lately, just mentioning the Mayans is enough to get you noticed.  This is becoming increasingly annoying to the Mayans themselves -- there are groups of Mexicans of Mayan descent, living primarily in the states of Campeche, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo, and with the exception of the few who are happy to have the money from woo-woo tourism, most of them just seem to be rolling their eyes.  In fact, one of them, Apolinario Chile Pixtun, spoke to reporters about the phenomenon, and was quoted as saying, "I came back from England last year, and man, they had me fed up with this stuff."

Well, Mr. Pixtun may be fed up, but let me tell you, the woo-woos are still starved for it.  Witness the following photograph, taken by Hector Siliezar, which was taken in 2009 but just hit the internet last week:

The photograph, which was taken while Siliezar and his family were on vacation, is of one of the pyramids at Chichen Itza.  A thunderstorm was coming, and Siliezar thought the pyramid with the dark clouds behind it would make a dramatic photograph, so he snapped several shots with his iPhone.  It was, he said, only after he looked at them afterwards that he saw what appeared to be a beam of light coming from the top of the pyramid.

It's unclear why he didn't make the photograph public until now, but be that as it may, he decided to release it a couple of weeks ago to what he calls "occult investigators."  And from there to every woo-woo in the world having multiple orgasms was only a short step.  For example, check out this article, which not only contains an interview with Siliezar and his wife,  but ends with the following hyperbolic quote from Schele and Freidel's A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya:  "...As the Maya exploited the patterns of power in time and space, they used ritual to control the dangerous and powerful energies their [pyramids and structures] released.  There were rituals which contained the accumulated power of objects, people, and places when they were no longer in active use."

So, basically, they're implying that the beam is some kind of gigantic psychic carpet shock -- that all of the rituals and whatnot built up energy in the pyramid, and eventually it just discharged, and Siliezar was lucky enough to get it on film.

Predictably, I'm not buying it.  But that still leaves the question of what the beam actually is.  For that, let's turn not to an "occult researcher," but to a real scientist -- Jonathon Hill, research technician for the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University.  Hill, who specializes in image analysis, says that the beam is nothing more than a digital camera glitch.

What happened, explains Hill, is that Siliezar snapped the photo just as a lightning flash occurred, and the intensity of the flash "...caused the camera's CCD sensor to behave in an unusual way, either causing an entire column of pixels to offset their values or causing an internal reflection [off the] camera lens that was recorded by the sensor."  This created the appearance of a bright column on the image.  But how can he be sure of this?

Well, it turns out if you examine an enlarged copy of the image on Photoshop, you find that the beam is perfectly vertical on the image - not one pixel's variation.  I don't know about you, but that strikes me as pretty hard to explain if you think it's a photograph of a real beam of light.  It certainly struck Hill, who figured all this out, that way.  "That's a little suspicious since it's very unlikely that the gentleman who took this picture would have his handheld iPhone camera positioned exactly parallel to the 'light beam' down to the pixel level," Hill told reporters.

So, there you have it, not that it will convince the woo-woos.  In an interesting but clearly non-meaningful coincidence, I was just chatting with a student yesterday about what all the woo-woos are going to do when December 22, 2012 rolls around, and Quetzalcoatl hasn't reappeared, and our general take on it was that they'll just come up with some kind of bullshit recalculation of the date, and a few months later we'll have to go through it all again.  Because that is, after all, what it's all about -- being a woo-woo means never having to say you're sorry.

Grading the teachers

Educators across New York state were shocked and alarmed by last week's decision by the New York City School District to release the scores earned by 18,000 teachers.

The reduction of a teacher's entire year's performance to a single numerical score is the result of the New York State Education Department's effort to comply with President Obama's "Race To The Top" initiative, which demands greater accountability from educators and administrators.  The scores are calculated by a complex "value-added" formula, that supposedly takes into account student performance, student growth, and a variety of other factors.

And of course, the reaction by teachers to this public release of individual data has made the anti-education crowd howl with triumph.  The teachers don't want the data released, they say, because it finally points a finger at underperforming educators, who should either fix what they're doing or else find a new career.  The unions are complicit in this desire for secrecy, because they don't want to reform tenure law to make it easier to get rid of bad teachers.  Why, they ask, shouldn't taxpayers get a chance to see the job evaluations of the people whose salary and benefits they are directly subsidizing?

Well, I've talked to a great many of my colleagues about this, and let me correct a few misapprehensions.  First of all, no teacher I've ever met has ever stated a desire to retain teachers who aren't doing their job.  In fact, more than one have expressed resentment against "rubber rooms" and other mechanisms sometimes employed to keep bad teachers on the payrolls.  It gives, they say, a bad name to the whole profession.

Most teachers are afraid to have the data published for an entirely different reason.  It is that they do not trust NYSED to score them fairly.

Here is an agency that spent, last year, 13.7 million dollars to develop, print, and distribute the Regents examinations statewide, and still can't write a test that meets any kind of reasonable minimum standard for reliability.  As an example, a few years ago, there was a pair of questions on the "Living Environment" (Biology) Regents exam that went something like the following (I cannot find the specific questions, so am having to rely on my memory - but you'll get the gist):

31.  Asexual reproduction produces offspring that
a)  are exact copies of the parent.
b) contain a mixture of genes from both parents.
c) have many dominant genes.
d) are better adapted than the parent was.

32.  Based upon your answer to #31, the organism that has the slowest rate of evolution is
a) humans.
b) bacteria.
c) oak trees.
d) mice.

Well, almost everyone got #31 correct; we make a major point of the fact that sexually reproducing species have varied offspring, and asexual species produce clones.  But what, then, is the answer to #32?

The answer that keyed as correct is (b) bacteria.  I remember checking the key more than once, thinking I'd misread it.  Surely they can't be implying that solely because they reproduce asexually, bacteria aren't evolving -- that the method of reproduction is the only thing that controls the rate of evolution?

Yes, in fact, that is exactly what they were implying.  Despite abundant evidence that bacteria evolve rapidly (witness the appearance in recent years of antibiotic-resistant strains of everything from staphylococcus to TB), this test claims that humans are evolving faster because we reproduce sexually.  So I emailed the science specialist at NYSED, and asked if there was some mistake.  Within hours, I got back a highly snarky response, that they had "consulted their experts" and the answer stood.  I had to mark students wrong who correctly identified humans as evolving more slowly than bacteria.

In fact, the tests are so poorly constructed, and the questions (and therefore the allowable answers) so open to interpretation, that NYSED is no longer allowing teachers to grade their own students' Regents exams.  Even more telling -- there is now a recommendation by NYSED that Regents exam scores not be used in a student's final grade calculation.  How's that for a vote of confidence in the reliability of their own exams?

So I think New York state educators are to be excused if we lack confidence in NYSED's ability to design a fair assessment.  I'll go even further; I believe that the scores that they are assigning to teachers are completely meaningless.  Teachers have no control over what students they teach; no control over the poverty level, home life, and other outside stressors their students experience; and little to no control over what kinds, and how many, subjects they are assigned to teach each year.  The idea that given that number of variables,  you could find a single measure that could equally reliably represent the performance of a teacher of AP Calculus in a wealthy school in Westchester County and a 6th grade special education teacher in a poor school in the Bronx is ludicrous.

But that, unfortunately, is exactly what the micromanaging b-b stackers at NYSED have done, and that is what is being released to the public.  Imagine if we did the same to our students -- gave them no feedback of any kind for most of the year, nor informed them how their grade was to be calculated -- just waited until the end of the year, and then assigned, on a seemingly random basis, grades between 0 and 100 for everyone.

That is, in effect, what NYSED is doing.  And you wonder why teachers don't want this made public.  If your own job evaluation was done in this fashion, and by people with this kind of track record for reliability, would you want it published in the newspaper?

Faith, the "secular left," and hypocrisy

In what appears to be nothing more than a coincidence, the top four stories in the "Most Popular" column on the Yahoo! News this morning form a fascinating quartet.

Santorum Says He Doesn't Believe In Separation Of Church And State
Gingrich Warns Of Role Of "Secular Left"
Penn Judge: Muslims Allowed To Attack People For Insulting Mohammed
Santorum: No Apology Needed For Quran Burning

In the first two, GOP candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich make statements that all of us -- not just the "secular left" of Newt's warning -- should be concerned about.  Let's hear first from Gingrich, who bemoans the eroding of the American principles our Founding Fathers intended to establish:

"The forces of the secular left believe passionately and deeply, and with frankly a religious fervor, in their world view and they will regard what I am saying as a horrifying assault on what they think is the truth," Gingrich said.  "Because their version of the truth is to have a totally neutral government that has no meaning."

Santorum went even further, stating that the separation of church and state should not be "absolute," and he pronounced himself sickened when he thinks of John F. Kennedy's assurance to a group of Baptist ministers in 1960 that he would not attempt to press his Catholic views upon the nation's policy.

JFK's removal of faith from the public square, Santorum said, "... makes me want to throw up."

The problem is, of course, that people like Gingrich and Santorum are never really talking about faith in its general sense.  What they'd like is to have their own faith drive policy.  It's why you have the Catholic bishops up in arms about having to include birth control in insurance coverage for their employees, and fundamentalists trying to get creationism and/or intelligent design implanted in high school biology curricula -- but rarely the reverse.  The complaints about the inroads made by secularism never seem to focus on anything more than the particular religious beliefs of the person making the complaint.

This is what makes the third and fourth stories so interesting.  In the third, a state judge in Pennsylvania, Mark Martin, threw out an assault case in which an atheist, Ernie Perce, was attacked by a devout Muslim, Talaag Elbayomy.  Perce, it seems, was in a Halloween parade -- dressed up as "zombie Mohammed."  Elbayomy, outraged, attacked Perce, and was arrested.  And in an astonishingly bizarre interpretation of the law, Martin threw out the case, stating that the First Amendment does not give one license to "provoke others," and pronounced Perce a "doofus."

In the fourth story, we're back to Rick Santorum -- who is upset with President Obama for apologizing to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and to the Afghan people, for the inadvertent burning of some copies of the Quran in a trash pit, an act which caused riots and loss of life.  Santorum said that Karzai should be the one apologizing to us on the behalf of the "Afghan people for attacking and killing our men and women in uniform and overreacting to this inadvertent mistake."

Easy to say, isn't it?  Funny how on the one hand, the secularization of America makes Santorum want to "throw up," and yet when you look at the one place in the world where faith most strongly drives policy -- the Middle East -- any admission that their faith is worthy of respect is some sort of sign of weakness.  And as far as Mark Martin, the Pennsylvania judge who believes that religious opinion should trump secular law -- isn't this exactly the kind of thing that Santorum and Gingrich want?  Oh, wait -- that's the wrong kind of faith.  Now I get it.

It's why secularism in the public square -- and that includes public schools -- is imperative.  You should be allowed to believe what you choose, and let those beliefs guide your actions in your own home and in whatever house of worship you choose (or none at all).  However, when it comes to any imposition of those beliefs on another person, secular law has to win.  Are you outraged by zombie Mohammad, Mr. Elbayomy?  Tough.  Deal with it.  Rail about it to your children, your spouse, your imam.  But assaulting someone?  Sorry, that's not allowed.  Do the fundamentalists hate the teaching of evolution in public schools?  Oh, well.  That's why we call it "science class."  You are free, in your home and in your church, to claim that the biology teacher is a big fat liar, or failing that, to put your child in a private religious school.  Do the Catholics object to the fact that health insurance covers contraception?   Too bad.  Contraception is legal in the United States.  No one is mandating that your followers use it -- simply that it is available.

It's why Santorum's bemoaning the separation of church and state, and Gingrich's fear of the "secular left," are blatant hypocrisy.  When Santorum supports Mark Martin's dismissal of the "zombie Mohammad" assault case, and Gingrich pushes to see Hindu creation stories mandated in high school science classes, I'll believe that they really are supporters of faith in its broad sense.  Until then, they are just trying to accomplish here what the ayatollahs and imams already do in their own countries -- imposing, from the top down, their own religious views upon the rest of the citizenry.

Everything in this blog is true

Regular readers of this blog may remember that about a year ago, a student of mine attempted to kill me by sending me a video clip of an apparently pathologically stupid woman attempting to defend the practice of homeopathy.  This student, who by all appearances is a moral and upstanding young man, nevertheless induced me to watch something which he knew might well have the effect of making me choke on my own outrage and die in horrible agony.

Needless to say, I survived the first murder attempt.  Not satisfied with failure, however, this same student has tried again, this time sending me a link to a website called “Truthism.com.”

I must say that as murder attempts go, this one was pretty inspired.  The homeopathy clip was only about eight minutes long, while this website took a half-hour to read thoroughly – thirty minutes of my life that I will never again get back, and a half-hour during which I made many muffled snorting noises, rather like a bulldog with a sinus blockage.  In case you’re understandably reluctant to waste that amount of time, or possibly risk dying of Exploding Brain Syndrome, I present below a summary of the gist of the Truthism website.

1) Everything on this website is true.

2) If you doubt anything on this website, you are at best asleep, and at worst a mindless sheep who is being led about by evil government disinformation specialists.

3) Many things which turned out to be true were disbelieved, even laughed at, at first. Therefore if you disbelieve and laugh at this website, it must be true.

4) You do not have access to government Top Secret facilities and records. Therefore, anything this website claims is in those facilities and records must be true, because you can’t disprove it.

5) Science is just another means for the ruling elite to control the populace.

6) The ruling elite also invented religion and morality as a way to control the populace. The fact that science and religion are often in conflict is an indication that they are both wrong.

7) The current ruling elite are the same individuals who created the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, Stonehenge, and the Nazca lines.

8) These individuals, for good measure, also created humanity itself.

9) Because the ruling elite aren’t actually people, but are super-intelligent reptiles from another planet.

10) Called “Annunaki.”

11) Did I mention that everything in this website is true?

12) The fact that many ancient cultures depicted snakes in their art is proof that the earth is being ruled by reptiles from outer space.

13) The caduceus, the symbol of medical science, is a pair of snakes coiled together. It looks a little like a DNA molecule, which is the repository of all the genetic information in the cell.

14) There you are, then.

15) If that doesn’t prove it to you, then consider the following chain of logic: Crop Circles, Area 51, Ancient Astronauts, the Face on Mars, Freemasons, the Hollow Earth Theory!

16) Ha. That sure showed YOU.

17) And as a last piece of evidence; everything on this website is true.

I have to point out, at this juncture, how much it cost me to write all this out for you.  I can hear the pathetic little death screams of the neurons in my frontal cortex as I’m writing this.  But being the selfless reporter that I am, on the front lines of investigation, I’m willing to undergo significant risks to my own health, safety, and IQ in order to bring this story to your doorstep.

And you know, it’s not as if I can’t see the attractiveness of this as a theory.  Think how positing the existence of evil, super-powerful cold-blooded reptilian alien propaganda specialists would explain, for example, Ann Coulter.  But alas, it’s not enough simply to like a theory, it has to fit with the data, and at the moment, the lion’s share of the evidence is in the “against” column.  So, sad to say, we must conclude that despite the website’s repeated claims of being true, its domain name should probably be changed to “EgregiousBullshitism.com.”

And with that said, I think I should go lie down for a while and recover from this latest assassination attempt. If this keeps happening, I may have to hire a bodyguard.

End of the week wrap-up

Well, it's Friday, and "TGIF" is the slogan of the day here at Worldwide Wacko Watch.  But before we kick back for the weekend, there are a few stories we need to put to bed, all contributions by regular readers of this blog.

The first one, which comes from Hebei Province, China, is a tawdry story of bigamy -- a girl playing fast and loose with the hearts of two young swains.  Worse still, the parents of all three were aware, even complicit in, the affair.  (Source)

Worst of all, all three of the participants were dead at the time.

Apparently in this region of China, it's considered adding insult to injury if you die single.  Presumably being dead is bad enough, but being dead and not getting any is just intolerable.  So if a single family member dies, it's considered the only reasonable thing to do to find a nearby eligible person (eligible in the sense of being approximately the same age, unmarried, and also dead), and marry them to each other post-mortem.  The dowry, paid to the young woman's family, can run over 30,000 yuan ($4,700).

In this case, however, another young man's family wanted the same for him, so they hired grave robbers to dig up the woman's body, and married her off to their young bachelor, again at a cost of 30,000 yuan.

You have to wonder how the spirit world will handle all of these three-way goings-on.  Bigamy is illegal in China, so presumably the best thing to do would be to find a dead lawyer who is willing to write up divorce papers.  On the other hand, maybe the rules are different in the afterlife, so perhaps we should leave well enough alone if the happy, um, trio is okay with it.


Speaking of leaving well enough alone, we now travel to the town of Totnes (Devon), England, where a war is being fought over some gnome statues that were placed, by the approval of town officials, in a local roundabout.  (Source)

Well, to be more accurate, they're not your typical, quaint garden gnomes.  What they are is statues of the Seven Dwarfs, spray-painted bright blue.  The overall effect is that they look like the love children of Dopey and Smurfette.

Many Totnesians are not amused.

"Please assure me I haven't been imbibing an illegal hallucinogenic substance and that the shiny blue monstrosities on the roundabout in Totnes are not a figment of my fevered mind," said Hazel Fuller, of Dartington.

Another Totnes resident, Chris Keleher, said, "The offending gnomes may be appropriate in Las Vegas or in Disneyland but to claim that they enhance the image of Totnes in any way is to insult the values of what Totnes is supposed to stand for."

Apparently, a few folks have even called for the resignation of the mayor, Judy Westacott, for "a breach of public trust and humiliation."

Others have defended the gnomes (and the mayor).  In what may be one of the oddest non sequiturs I've ever heard, Ann Rutherford, of Totnes in Bloom (the organization that sponsored the gnomes in the first place), said, "Real Totnesians have fallen about with laughter at the blue gnomes.  They are great fun.  It is only uptight, humorless incomers who object.  Do we constantly have to go round in hair shirts eating organically grown food?"

So there you have it, Totnes: your choices are (1) fall about with laughter at the spray-painted Disney dwarfs, or (2) wear hair shirts and eat organically-grown food.  The choice, I think, is clear.


Speaking of choices, our last story brings us back to the US, where all of the furor over the 2012 presidential election is about to be resolved in a singularly spectacular fashion.

Some of you probably have heard about UFO Phil, and in fact I did a post on him last October (here) describing his plans to build a UFO refueling station on Alcatraz Island.  Now, he's back in the spotlight, for a different reason -- he says that by the power invested in the aliens from another galaxy who he's been talking to, he's going to assume the US presidency in November regardless of who wins the popular vote or the ballots cast in the electoral college.  (Source)

Now, before you say that this is impossible, remember that this is essentially what George W. Bush did in 2000, if you replace "aliens from another galaxy" with "his brother Jeb and other cronies from the state of Florida."

In any case, UFO Phil is content to let the debates and all continue for the time being.  "I'm going to become your new president," he said, brimming with his usual ebullient confidence.  "Don't worry, Obama, Mitt Romney and whoever else can still have their little election.  That's not going to affect me."

As far as what his platform is, he says that the first thing he'll do as president is to establish a "Senate for Terrestrial Relations," whose purpose would be to prepare for the arrival of "our brothers from space."  He would then decommission the military, and replace all of the airplanes and so on with spaceships.  Last, he would take down the Statue of Liberty, and replace it with a monument to Zaxon, the leader of the friendly aliens.

"He has very nice skin and will look phenomenal as a statue," UFO Phil told reporters.

Me, I'm okay with it.  It can't be much worse than what some of our other government leaders are currently doing.  So UFO Phil would have my vote, as long as he promises not to sing at his inauguration, because I've heard some of his songs (you can find plenty on YouTube), and I have to say that if I had a choice between listening to UFO Phil sing and removing both ears with a belt sander, it would be a tough call.


Anyhow, that's our news for Friday here at Worldwide Wacko Watch.  Chinese dead bigamists, blue dwarf statues in England, and UFO Phil destined for the presidency.  So thanks to all who submitted links, and a happy TGIF to all of you.

Spinning away the rough edges

Is it too much to ask to have an honest political debate?

I'm not referring to any particular candidate having lied; I'm more referring to the entire spectacle.  All the candidates are coached to a faretheewell, told by their strategists and tacticians what to say, when to smile, when to get angry, and where to look.  As a result, what we see has little to do with the reality of any of the candidates' personalities or approaches to leadership, and more to do with what their handlers think would be expedient apropos of getting elected.

Really, did we -- or more to the point, could we -- learn anything about the Republican candidates from last night's GOP debate in Arizona?  Santorum and Romney both spent most of their time jockeying for the position of Least Liberal Man On Stage; Gingrich seemed mostly to smile paternally, and when asked for a one-word description of himself, said, "Cheerful," as if that were a qualification for public office; and Paul continued to sound his "small government" mantra.  We didn't learn a single new thing about any of them, and given the way debates are run (and analyzed afterwards), I doubt we could have.

I think the last time that I saw any real authenticity in a debate was during the Bentsen/Quayle vice presidential debate, when Quayle compared himself to JFK and Bentsen shot back with the now-famous quip, "Senator, I knew Jack Kennedy. And senator, you are no Jack Kennedy."  Pow!  Zing!  Can you think of any moment in a more recent debate when a candidate has actually responded, in an unscripted and honest fashion, to anything?

Oh, for the times when there was a real exchange, when you could actually learn something about a politician's personality, views, articulateness, and quickness of mind from watching him or her speak.  It's not that it was always (or even often) polite; more than once, such debates drew blood (figuratively, if not literally).  Possibly the most brilliant retort ever recorded was the exchange on the floor of the British Parliament between the Earl of Sandwich and the redoubtable John Wilkes.  Sandwich was so infuriated by something Wilkes had said that he blurted out, "Wilkes, I predict that you will either die on the gallows or else of some loathsome disease!"  Wilkes coolly responded, "Which it will be, my dear sir, will depend entirely on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

Zing!

Can you honestly imagine anything of the kind occurring in one of today's "debates?"

Winston Churchill has a well-deserved reputation for thinking on his feet, and few could best him in an intellectual argument.  There's the famous exchange between him and Lady Astor ("Sir Winston, if you were my husband, I'd poison your coffee!"  "Lady Astor, if you were my wife, I'd drink it.")  But there were others.  Churchill was doing a public speech, in front of hundreds, and a man came up to one of Churchill's aides and handed him a sealed envelope.  Thinking it was a crucial message, the aide went up to Churchill (still on the stage) and handed him the envelope.  Churchill paused in his speech, and opened the letter, only to find a sheet of paper with the word "IDIOT" scrawled on it in huge, black letters.

Totally unflustered, Churchill showed the paper to the audience and said, "I've often received letters where the sender forgot to sign his name, but this is the first time I've received one where the sender signed his name but forgot to write the letter."

Pow!

It's not just in public speaking events that politicians used to feel freer to express their views; knowing that every time a public figure speaks, his or her words could be recorded, excerpted, and broadcast on the internet, leaders today have to be constantly on their guard.  It didn't used to be that way.  Even the taciturn Calvin Coolidge knew how to use his tongue, when he chose to.  After watching a particularly dreadful opera performance, President Coolidge was cornered by a reporter while leaving the theater.  "What do you think of the singer's execution?" the reporter asked.

Coolidge responded, "I'm all for it."

Zap!

It's not that people like Wilkes, Churchill, and Coolidge didn't prepare, didn't write scripts, didn't have advisers.  It's just that in those days, before the terms "spin" and "sound bite" had been coined, speakers were not hesitant about letting their personalities (rough edges and all) show.  Even Ronald Reagan, much as I hate to admit it, was more authentic than any of today's candidates are; although I usually disagreed with what he said, I had no doubt that what we were seeing was the real Reagan.

Today, I wonder.  And I also wonder how far today's Wilkeses and Churchills could get in the political arena without being tamed, muzzled, or simply swept aside by the media and the party machinery.

It's also why I tend to pay attention to the candidates' pasts.  What they said when they were less watched, less guarded, is often more telling than what they're saying now, where an unfortunate word choice can lead to a drop in the all-important polls.  It's why, for example, I think it's critical that we think carefully about declarations like the ones Santorum made in his 2008 "America is under attack by Satan" speech.  When the media resuscitated this speech, made at Ave Maria University, Santorum at first defended himself by saying that he simply "believes in good and evil," but finally added with some annoyance that the comments he'd made were from an "old speech" and so were "not relevant."  On the contrary; they're extremely relevant, mostly because there's no way in hell he'd admit to any such thing in what currently passes for presidential debate.  Old stump speeches, made to people whose views the candidate shares, are the best way to get a window into what the candidate's views actually are.  It may, unfortunately, be the only way.

Evidently, glib but unimaginative scripted responses, rather than speaking from the heart, are now the currency of debate.  How sad for American politics; how sad for us all that we cannot be allowed to see who we are actually voting for.

A democracy of ideas

Lately I've been doing something I probably shouldn't do, to wit: reading the reader responses to articles in the Yahoo! News.

I realize that this is a skewed sample -- but I will say, and I know it sounds harsh, that the average IQ of the responders seems to be in the range more commonly associated with shoe sizes.  And they seem to have no particular problem with trumpeting their stupidity in an international public forum.  I know that there are many, many topics about which I am ignorant, but I try my best not to make moronic pronouncements about them.  There's that well-known quote, variously attributed to Confucius, Mark Twain, and others -- "Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it."

Well, that lesson has yet to sink in for many.  Take, as an example, the article that appeared today, regarding the fact that this is (thus far) one of the warmest winters on record, worldwide, despite some regional lows (such as the viciously cold winter eastern Europe has had).  Here are a sampling of responses, which I'm paraphrasing from memory, because if I have to go back and re-read the actual responses, I'll scream and wake up my sleeping family:

"Warmest winter my ass.  I looked up the record high temperature in my city, and it hasn't been broken since 1960.  If it's not happening to me, it isn't global!"

"It's all a lie made up by Obozo and company to get you to lie down and let them walk over you with their stormtrooper boots."

"So what if it is global warming.  The Arctic Ocean will be free of ice and we can use it for shipping.  It'll inconvenience the polar bears and penguins and the rest of us won't give a damn.  Bring it on."


And so on, for pages and pages. I could go on, but I won't; I think I lost several dozen brain cells just typing those three out.  However, I have to man up and write out one other one, which stood out for an interesting reason:

"Will you people wake up.  Global warming IS A LIE made up by the liberal tree-huggers to get you to buy into their agenda.  Wise up, or I hope you'll be happy walking everywhere you go, with no electricity for your house and the American economy destroyed."

I find this one interesting because I think it's illustrative of a tendency I see in a lot of areas; "I don't like this idea" = "this idea isn't true."  Clearly, this individual thinks that the result of a drastic decrease in fossil fuel use would be bad -- no gasoline for cars, no coal for electrical plants, and the hit on the economy from the collapse of the petrochemical industry.  From this, (s)he has inferred that global warming isn't happening.

I have no particular issue with someone questioning, from a scientific standpoint, the evidence for global warming (although I really wish people could get into their heads the difference between "climate" and "weather" in these discussions).  I also have no problems with debating whether the cure (reduction in petrochemical use) might be worse than the disease.  However, I didn't think it took a particularly advanced brain to recognize that the two aren't connected, except insofar as the disproof of global climate change would obviate the need to do something about it.  The point is, just because you don't like the solution doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.  If you engage in that sort of thinking, you're just doing the adult version of "la la la la la, not listening."

In any case, I don't intend to get into the evidence for climate change here.  I really meant this more as a commentary on the way people think, and their tendency to feel that it's their god-given right to bloviate about topics regardless of whether they actually know anything about them.  Maybe that's the problem; people have the misapprehension that the word "democracy" extends to ideas.  Democracy is all well and good in politics; everyone has a say, and it tends to blend out the voices of the extremes.  However, "your vote is equal to mine" and "your rights are equal to mine" does not imply that "your ideas are equal to mine."  Your ideas might be better than mine, if you're an expert and I'm not.  If I jumped up and said to Stephen Hawking, "You need to listen to what I have to say about quantum mechanics!" I wouldn't be exercising my rights as a citizen of a democratic country, I would be a moron.

To quote Richard Dawkins: "If there are two opposing ideas, it is not always true that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  It is possible that one person is simply wrong."