What the cat dragged in

One thing I try to keep in mind when I'm reading something controversial is the fact that all humans have biases, including me.  And sometimes these biases are so powerful that they become blind spots -- something we believe so strongly that we flatly refuse even to consider any evidence to the contrary.

And when you tie in powerful emotions to these blind spots, people become so immovable in their convictions that trying to change their minds is damn near impossible.

One rather unexpected case of such a blind spot surfaces periodically on a listserv I belong to.  As some of you may know, I'm a rather rabid birder, and have been known to stand in the freezing cold for hours or trek through a leech-infested steam bath of a southeast Asian jungle just in order to see birds I've never seen before.  So I belong to a listserv called "BirdChat," so I can connect with other similarly-obsessed and dubiously-sane people around the world.  And every once in a while, someone will bring up the topic of...

... cats.

When you bring up cats -- more specifically, outdoor cats -- you immediately sort the birding world into two groups.  The first has a mortal hatred of outdoor cats, and considers their toll on bird populations to be ridiculously high.  The second, which consists almost entirely of people who own cats that are allowed outdoors, dismisses those contentions as nonsense.

[image courtesy of Mark Marek Photography and the Wikimedia Commons]

And the battle escalates quickly.  Usually someone brings up the Stephen's Island Wren, a little flightless bird that lived only on one island near New Zealand, and which was exterminated by the islanders' pet cats.  Someone else will counter that we're not talking about small islands, here, that allowing Mr. Fluffums to catch a sparrow or two every once in a while is just allowing him to express his natural hunting instincts, and isn't hurting anything.  Some hothead will then propose turning loose coyotes near Mr. Fluffums' stomping grounds, and seeing how his owners will feel about "natural hunting instincts" then.  Tempers rise, unsourced facts and statistics are thrown around, and no one gives an inch.  Usually a moderator will have to step in and say, "You people need to stop this right now," and everyone will return, grumbling, to their respective corners, until the next time the subject comes up.

So at the risk of setting off a firestorm here, how 'bout we look at an actual peer-reviewed study regarding the subject?  Can it be true that outdoor cats are a problem, or are we looking at people who take bird conservation way, way too seriously?

Scott Loss, Tom Will, and Peter Marra wrote an article for Nature about two years ago that settles the issue, fact-wise, once and for all.  Called "The Impact of Free-Ranging Cats on Wildlife in the United States," it describes a "systematic review and [quantitative] estimate [of] mortality caused by cats," and came up with the following staggering statistics:

We estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals annually... Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals.

That's "billion" with a "b," folks.  And focus especially on the last sentence; cats are the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for American birds.  More than legal and illegal hunting; more than pesticides; more than collisions with automobiles, wind turbines, and airplanes.

In fact, more than all of those put together.

About the study, Dr. George Fenwick, president of the American Bird Conservancy, said:

The very high credibility of this study should finally put to rest the misguided notions that outdoor cats represent some harmless, new component to the natural environment.  The carnage that outdoor cats inflict is staggering and can no longer be ignored or dismissed.  This is a wake-up call for cat owners and communities to get serious about this problem before even more ecological damage occurs.

Pretty unequivocal, you'd think.  But the response from cat owners has largely been: silence.

The reason I bring all of this up is a conversation I had a couple of days ago with someone who was troubled because she has a bird feeder, and also an outdoor cat.  So she is, in effect, luring in birds so the cat can kill them.  Is there anything, she asked, that she can do to keep the cat from killing the birds in her yard?

I said, "Keep the cat indoors."

She looked dubious.  "But... I don't want to do that."

I gave her an incredulous look.  "Then you shouldn't have a bird feeder."

"I don't want to do that, either.  I like the birds."

"Then keep the damn cat indoors."

Having seen the firestorms that have erupted on the BirdChat listserv, I let the topic drop.  Because when you tie in biases and preconceived notions with the emotions -- especially about something as emotionally-laden as pet ownership -- things can escalate really quickly.

The data is out there.  Let me reiterate: outdoor cats are the single worst cause of bird mortality in the United States (and, I believe, in Great Britain as well).  So if you care about wildlife, the only responsible thing to do is to keep your cats inside.

But I have to wonder how many minds this will change.  On topics like this, it's far easier to frown, say, "Oh, but this can't really be about my cat," and go on doing what you've done before.  I hope I'm wrong, mind you, because this is one topic on which the jury has weighed in, and the verdict is unarguable.

But as we've seen all too many times before, changing people's minds when they've already decided what they believe is often a losing battle.  Sometimes the attitude is "evidence be damned, I'll do what I like."

Fluid morality

I try not to let my skepticism slide over into cynicism.  The latter, a disbelieve-everything-they-say approach, seems to me to be as fundamentally lazy as gullibility.  Being a skeptic is harder, but ultimately more likely to land you near the truth; keep your mind open, wait for hard evidence, and then follow that wherever it leads.

But there are some realms in which I am reminded of Lily Tomlin's line, "No matter how cynical I get, it's just not enough to keep up."  And one of those is the way fracking is being presented by the powers-that-be.

Consider the highly publicized publicity stunt by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who in 2013 drank a glass of fracking fluid to show how safe it was.

"You can drink it," Hickenlooper told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.  "We did drink it around the table, almost rituallike, in a funny way.  It was a demonstration… they’ve invested millions of dollars in what is a benign fluid in every sense."

[image courtesy of photographer Joe Sullivan and the Wikimedia Commons]

The gas companies have stated outright that the ingredients are "sourced from the food industry," but still refuse to give a complete formulation for how it's made, saying such information is "proprietary."  Hickenlooper agrees, and said, "If we were overzealous in forcing them to disclose what they had created, they wouldn’t bring it into our state."

Under pressure from environmental groups, the gas industry has released a list of "the chemicals used most often" in fracking fluid, along with their purpose.  They state that "there are dozens to hundreds that could be used as additives" above and beyond these, although this is downplayed.

They look like they're doing everything they can to be completely transparent, up to the point where it starts to jeopardize their trade secrets.  "Here, we'll show you what we're doing!" they seem to be saying.  "You want the water supply protected, and safety to be paramount?  Well, so do we!"

Then you have to wonder why the industry has not rushed into the breach when people have been injured by the chemicals in their "benign" fracking fluid.  Makes you almost think they're... covering something up.

In 2008, a gas driller, Clifton Marshall, came into the emergency room in Durango Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango, Colorado, after he had spilled fracking fluid on his clothes and boots.  Marshall was in a bad way, but it didn't end there; Cathy Behr, an emergency room nurse, spent ten minutes working on Marshall without using adequate protective equipment.  By this time, the emergency room had to be cleared because the smell of the chemicals was strong enough to make people gag.  But Behr, who had come into direct contact with the contaminated clothing, was to experience worse.  Two days later, the nurse found herself back in the emergency room, but this time because she was sick; she had jaundice, and was vomiting and feverish.  The doctors found that Behr was in multiple organ failure from "poisoning by an unknown chemical."

Pressed by the hospital to tell them what was in the fracking fluid that sickened Behr and Marshall, the gas company -- Halliburton Industries -- refused, saying it was a trade secret.  If anyone released what was in the fluid, they said, they would sue -- and then pull their multi-million-dollar drilling operation from the state.

Hospital officials backed down.  To this day, no one knows what was in the fluid.

In a rural community in Pennsylvania -- no one knows exactly where, for reasons you'll see in a moment -- the owners of a 300-acre dairy farm signed a land-use agreement with a gas company, allowing fracking on their land.  The disturbance would be minimal, the gas company said, and the risk slight.  After the drilling began, though, the family who owned the farm, the "Rogers" family (not their real name), began to question the effects that the operation was having on their drinking and agricultural water, and agreed to participate in a study by an independent agency to monitor what was happening.

But they couldn't do that, they found out quickly.  Here's how TruthOut reported the story:

The Rogers did not realize they had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the gas company making the entire deal invalid if members of the family discussed the terms of the agreement, water or land disturbances resulting from fracking and other information with anyone other than the gas company and other signatories... 

Mrs. Rogers initially agreed to participate in a study Perry [the scientist coordinating the study] was conducting on rural families living near fracking operations. She later called Perry in tears, explaining that her family could no longer participate in the study because of the nondisclosure clause in the surface-use agreement. She told Perry she felt stupid for signing the agreement and has realized she had a good life without the money the fracking company paid them to use their land.

There are also dozens of cases where gas companies have been sued because their operations have permanently contaminated drinking water supplies, and have settled in the litigants' favor -- but only on the condition that the litigants sign a statement mandating that they never disclose what the gas companies did.  This is an easy out for the gas companies; people will usually settle for an amount of cash that the gas industry considers a pittance as compared to the bad press they'd receive if such information became public.  "At this point they feel they can get out of this litigation relatively cheaply," Marc Bern, an attorney with Napoli Bern Ripka Sholnik LLP in New York, who has negotiated on behalf of homeowners, said in an interview.  "Virtually on all of our settlements where they paid money they have requested and demanded that there be confidentiality."

There are also multiple cases where doctors have appealed to gas companies to release what is in fracking fluid, to allow the doctors to treat patients poisoned by exposure to it, and the industry has complied -- but only if the doctors themselves agree to a lifelong nondisclosure statement.

And state governments are caving in from the pressure by the industry.  Just last year, North Carolina passed a bill that made it a crime for anyone to disclose the constituents of fracking fluid.  The name of the bill?  The "Energy Modernization Act."

Still think that the gas companies are all about safety and transparency?  Then consider one more story, again from southwestern Pennsylvania, only two years ago.

Chris and Stephanie Hallowich lived with their two children, then 7 and 10, in a house in rural Washington County, when they started experiencing health issues from water that had been fouled by a fracking operation nearby.  They were desperate to get out of their house, and sued the gas company, Range Resources, for enough money to cut their losses and move.  Range Resources agreed to a $750,000 settlement, but required (guess what?) a nondisclosure agreement.  The Hallowichs could not speak to anyone about fracking, or the Marcellus Shale, or Range Resources, or their symptoms, or the contamination to their water supply, ever.

And that lifelong gag order also applied to their children.

The Hallowichs' attorney, Peter Villari, said directly to Washington County Common Pleas Court Judge Paul Polonsky, who heard the case, "I, frankly, your Honor, as an attorney, to be honest with you, I don’t know if that’s possible that you can give up the First Amendment rights of a child."  Pozonsky didn't have an answer to that except that this is what the Hallowichs had to agree to if they wanted to settle.

"That someone would insist on confidentiality of a minor child," Villari said, "or that it would be discussed within the context of a proposed settlement was unusual.  I have not encountered it before and I have yet to encounter it again."

"Unusual" isn't the word I'd use.  I think "unconstitutional" comes closer to the mark.

The frightening part of this is that because the gas industry is wealthy and powerful, they are pulling the strings here -- and everyone else is dancing to their tune.  They have no reason to bend.  They've been getting their own way at every turn, from politicians and courts that conveniently ignore the dangers to ordinary citizens because (frankly) money talks.

Where this skein of lies comes full circle, though, is in asking why the gas companies are this protective of the ingredients in the fracking fluid.  I simply don't believe that this is a trade secret that is worth keeping simply from a proprietary-protection argument alone.  Surely each of these companies can't have discovered a formula that they think is so wonderful, so much better than their rivals', that they'd engage in all of these dubiously-legal shenanigans to protect it?

Isn't it just slightly more likely that there's something in this fluid that is not exactly "benign?"  Something that might, in fact, be toxic enough that to make it public would alert the public to how much danger they're actually in?

But surely the Toxic Substances Control Act would protect the public from this kind of thing.  That's why it was passed.  Right?

Wrong.  TSCA has an exemption for reporting "Tier 2" exposure to chemicals -- i.e., exposure that happens after the chemicals leave the site of manufacture -- for "petroleum process streams."  If you're exposed to fracking chemicals, you have no federal leverage to force the industry to give you information, much less to force them to stop what they're doing.

So the only way all of this will halt is if enough people know about it, and refuse to sign the fracking leases.  Already we're seeing cases of eminent domain being invoked in laying in pipelines to carry the gas; the only way to halt the industry is to cut off its source.

Which is why it's so critical that people find out about these things.  Because as we've seen, once the damage is done, the industry has been more interested in hushing it up than cleaning it up (or, heaven forfend, changing their ways).  And if that doesn't justify some level of cynicism about their commitment to decency, safety, and public health, I don't know what would.

FBI versus Facebook

For the latest reason to freak out, consider the claim over at America's Freedom Fighters that some of your Facebook friends are actually FBI agents conducting surveillance on your activities.

Now, there's good reason to be careful of what you post, and it has nothing to do with some undercover cop posing as your old college drinking buddy.  Doing anything online leaves a digital footprint so big it can be seen from space, and potential employers and college admissions officers now do routine checks to make sure that the person they're considering hasn't done anything too sketchy.  

Or stupid.  There are hundreds of stories of people who have been reprimanded, fired, or expelled for posting inappropriate stuff on social media, and most of them make you wonder how the people in question manage to tie their own shoelaces.  Examples include:

• The bank teller who told his boss he had to be away for a family emergency, and then the same day posted photos of himself at a Halloween party dressed as Tinkerbell.
• An Ohio school bus driver who was fired after posting photographs of herself drinking beer -- while seated behind the wheel of the school bus.
• A woman who called her boss a "total pervvy [sic] wanker" who made her "do shit stuff just to piss her off" on Facebook, evidently forgetting that she had recently friended him on Facebook.

And so on.  So yes, it is possible to get yourself into hot water from what you post.  It's why I'm pretty careful; I'm a teacher, a public figure in our little community, and I try to be fairly guarded about what I say and do online.  (Not, mind you, that my life is rife with drunken debauchery, or anything.  I'm such an introvert that I consider drinking a beer and watching an episode of Lost in Space a wild night.)

But still, there's such a thing as taking paranoia too far.  And the article "How Many of Your Facebook Friends are Undercover Feds?" takes the concept of being cautious about one's digital footprint, and runs right off the cliff with it.  The writer contends:

U.S. law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that offers a tantalizing glimpse of issues related to privacy and crime-fighting.

Which applies to me how, exactly?  They can check me out all they like.  Oh noes!  The Justice Department is going to see my vacation photographs!  Horrors!

The best part, though, is the article's signoff:

We urge you to very careful about who you ‘friend’- They could be a part of the government or the Left’s attack on Conservatives… GOD BLESS AMERICA!

And of course, they never tell you how you might tell your true friends from the Undercover Leftist FBI Covert Operatives.  You're left suspicious of everyone, which I have no doubt is the intent.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What I find funny about this is two things.

First: you seriously think that you're that important?  Unless the person reading this blog is some kind of master criminal or terrorist or spy, the FBI clearly has better things to do with their time and resources than to go through photographs of what you had to eat at the Chinese restaurant last night.

Second: do you really think that if the FBI were interested in you, they wouldn't be able to find out about you unless they friended you on Facebook first?  That's so naïve, it's kind of adorable.  I mean, can't you just hear the conversation?

Agent #1:  "We've got to crack this case, and it all depends on finding out what Steve Hickenlooper had for dinner last night!  But dammit, he won't accept my friend request!" 

Agent #2:  "He's a wily one, Steve is."  *snaps his fingers*  "Hey, I've got it!  Maybe if you sent him a friend request posing as his high school girlfriend, LouEllen Finkwhistle!  He'd fall for that!" 

Agent #1:  "Isn't LouEllen the one who got fired for calling her boss a 'pervvy wanker'?" 

Agent #2:  "Yup.  She deleted her Facebook account after that happened.  So if you pretended to be her, Steve would never know it wasn't actually her." 

Agent #1:  *rubs his hands together*  "EX-cellent."

So anyway.  My advice is continue to have fun on social media, but do be careful what you put out there.  The rule of "once you put it online, it's online forever" is a pretty good one to follow.  But as far as thinking that your online contacts are all undercover agents spying on you -- relax.  No offense, but you're honestly not that interesting.

Of course, that's what I would say, isn't it?  So thanks for clicking on this post, and all.

*reaches for little black book to write down your name and email address*

EX-cellent.

America über alles

A recurring question in ethics is how good (or at least average) people could have participated in the Nazi atrocities.  Didn't they recognize that what they were doing was wrong?  Because it is clear that many of the people who were caught up in the Nazi fervor were from quite commonplace origins.  They were not, by nature, violent monsters who were out looking for evil things to do.

But they did swallow the horrific ideology.  They accepted the rhetoric that the Jews were inherently inferior, the myth of German exceptionalism, the fear-message that if the enemies of the Thousand-Year Reich weren't stopped, Germany would be overrun by people bent on its annihilation.

And it worked.  A few people recognized what was happening as it was happening, but far more capitulated, either standing by silent while the horrors were occurring or else actively helping the Nazi leaders.

Key to Hitler's ideology was the creation of the "Hitler Youth."  The idea -- and it was as perceptive as it was evil -- was to catch young people early, drill them with the message that Germany was (1) superior and (2) threatened.  Teach them that their first duty was to the Fatherland, that this came before anything, and that anyone criticizing Germany was wrong, trying to subvert the cause for his or her own wicked ends.

[image courtesy of the German Federal Archives and the Wikimedia Commons]

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote:

Everybody who has the right kind of feeling for his country is solemnly bound, each within his own denomination, to see to it that he is not constantly talking about the Will of God merely from the lips but that in actual fact he fulfils the Will of God and does not allow God’s handiwork to be debased... Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest image of God among His creatures [i.e. Germans] would sin against the bountiful Creator of this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise. 

Which brings me directly to what is happening right now in Oklahoma.

You may not have heard about this; certainly the people responsible are not eager to have it become public knowledge.  But a committee in the Oklahoma legislature, led by Representative Dan Fisher, is looking toward eliminating AP (Advanced Placement) classes from Oklahoma high schools, saying that it is a violation of the state constitution to have a "mandated national curriculum."

But this is, at least in part, a smokescreen, because what is at the heart of this is not States' Rights issues.  It becomes obvious what the motivation is when you look at the first AP class that the committee has in its sights: AP US History.  And the argument for getting rid of AP US History is that it "eliminates the idea of American exceptionalism," focusing instead on "what is bad about America."

This demand that history courses whitewash our flaws comes from a retired history teacher and current activist and writer named Larry Krieger.  Krieger is incensed that the AP US History curriculum focuses on issues like slavery and the Japanese internment camps, instead of on areas where Americans have risen to higher ideals.  "Consider for a moment, from the beginning to President Obama’s recent declaration of why we had to wipe out ISIS, why do we send American boys and women into harm’s way to pay any price, bear any burden?" Krieger said in an interview.  "We do that because they are the defenders of liberty and freedom -- in short, our core values.  And so to scrub that out of the American narrative is a real egregious injustice.  People who call themselves liberals haven't really understood what... American exceptionalism means, and why it is so extremely important that it be taught to our kids.  Because what unites us as a people — we're not united by ethnic differences, religious differences, we're united by our core values."

Sound familiar?  It should.

Also unsurprising is the fact that it succeeded.  Yesterday the Oklahoma House Common Education Committee voted 11-4 to eliminate the teaching of AP US History in the state, "unless the College Board changes the curriculum."

Who wants to place bets on which AP course is next?  Hmmm, I wonder.  Could it be... biology?  Where students learn that humans evolved just like all other life forms on Earth, that human biological exceptionalism is a counterfactual myth?

Catch them while they're young.  Teach them that (1) they're superior, and (2) their way of life is threatened.  After that, you can accomplish whatever you want.

It's funny.  Every time I think I can't become more appalled at the direction that the oversight of public education is going, the powers-that-be outdo themselves.  They're becoming more overt about it, though; let's turn children into little factoid-spewing machines, meeting the benchmarks and rubrics and skill sets, and (above all) toeing the party line.  For heaven's sake, don't give them autonomy, values clarification, critical thinking skills.  Teach them not only what they're supposed to know, but what they're supposed to believe.  Label any push to educate students in how to perform critical analysis (even of their own country's leaders) as an "egregious injustice" designed to undermine our "core values."

Can't have people thinking America has flaws, after all.

Don't get me wrong.  When I look at the alternatives, I'm damn glad to be an American.  I would fight hard to protect what we have here.  But there's a difference between being proud of our country and thinking our country can do no wrong, believing that anyone who takes a good hard look at our past (and present) failings is trying to destroy our way of life.  What happened to the concept that clear-headed, rational analysis of history prevents us from making the same mistakes over and over again?

Better, apparently, to paint our ancestors as blameless, to spin the myth of American exceptionalism, so that any blow to the edifice, however justified, is looked upon as a dire threat.

It puts me in mind of a quote by Voltaire that I have above the whiteboard in my classroom:  "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Time's wasting, Mr. President!

What is it about President Obama that has brought out the conspiracy wingnuts in droves?

Maybe it's just that I wasn't as aware of such things back then,  but I don't remember crazy conspiracy theories erupting around George W. Bush.  There were lots of people who suspected that he had that IQ of a baked ham, but you didn't hear the sort of loony claims that we're seeing with Obama.

Yes, I know he's African American, but can it really be that simple?  It's not like other African Americans are the targets of this sort of thing.  No one is saying, for example, that Kanye West is in league with the devil, except possibly Beck.  But being in league with the devil is only the beginning of what you hear, where Obama's concerned.  Being in league with the devil is mild.

Here's a sampler of some Obama conspiracy theories I found -- all from the last couple of days:

From a letter to the editor in the Davidson County (Tennessee) Dispatch:

God states that seven kings must come before the rise of the Antichrist. Revelations 17:10 says the seventh king will reign for a short amount of time. Is Barack Obama the seventh king? 

Obama's lifted sanctions off Iran with promises that a peace treaty will be made but does nothing to inspect Iran as they continue to make nuclear weapons. Does Obama already know Iran's actions and is helping Iran? God says Israel must be attacked by Iran to start a war between all nations before the Antichrist can rise to create a peace treaty between these nations. Everything God said is happening. The Lord can return for God's children at anytime.

From an article in The Daily Coin:

The ever encroaching police state, the fact that all financial markets, over the entire global, are rigged. Since when does the President come out and tell Congress that he needs omnipotent powers to continue to expand the wars of aggression? What next, maybe world war; cast a dragnet across the internet to begin scooping up owners of alternative news websites? Perhaps begin systemically killing the bankers in the back office with the codes and programs that run the derivatives markets and rig the equities markets?

From Family Research Council's commentator Craig James, in response to a caller who claimed that Obama was planning to stay in office for a third term, and using that term to convert all Americans to Islam:

Obama trying to stay in power for an illegal third term is a concern of mine.  I plan to pass a note along to [FRC President] Tony Perkins on how we could escape that. 

[A third term] would be horrible.  It’s not like we’d have Ronald Reagan staying in office for another year or so while we’re in a state of emergency.  It’s not like we’d have someone who really cares about you and me.  We’re talking about someone who is there in that office as the leader of the free world, the United States of America, who doesn’t get it.  That’s the concern.  It fires me up, the thought that the guy can stick around in that office beyond a year and three-quarters.  He’s got to be gone.  We will follow up on that.

From conservative talk show host Michael Savage, who claims that Obama caused the measles outbreak:

I was asked about the origins of the measles outbreak in America and it’s pretty clear to me that it came in with the illegals.  We know that Obama committed a crime against humanity by dumping many, many, many, many ill people, mothers and children primarily, on us this summer unscreened, many of them brought in a killer virus, measles, tuberculosis and other illnesses. 

And all of these are just from the past couple of days.

What gets me about all of this is how these claims keep sprouting, like crabgrass in a garden, even though they never come true.  We've been hearing for years now about how Obama was the Antichrist (or some other wicked dude from the Book of Revelation), and that this means the End Times are imminent.  And lo, here the world still is, un-Ended.  We've heard over and over about how Obama wants to herd us all into FEMA camps and cut our heads off with guillotines, and we're all still running around with our heads firmly attached.  We've heard that Obama wants to silence people who dislike him by any means necessary up to and including assassination, and yet Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Alex Jones and Ann Coulter are still alive and kicking and spewing their rhetoric on a daily basis.

So if Obama is an evil mastermind, he's kind of an incompetent one, you know?  He's like one of those guys on Scooby Doo who has everyone convinced that there is a scary ghost haunting the carnival, and no one can figure it out except for a bunch of goofy teenagers, who unmask the ghost and it turns out to be the carnival owner, who would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for Those Meddling Fox News Commentators And Their Stupid Dog.

I'm kind of sick of waiting, frankly.  I mean, at this point I've been warned so many times that I'm ready for something to happen, and now's as good a time as any.  We're all snowbound, here in the Arctic tundra (a.k.a. upstate New York), and I'm feeling a little stir-crazy with the cabin fever.  Let's stir things up, okay, Mr. President?  Get together with your wicked Illuminati friends, and cast your spells to summon up Satan or whatever, and let 'er rip.  Because so far, you've kind of sucked at establishing a New World Order (or converting us all to Islam or bringing forth the Beast With Seven Heads, or whatever people think he's doing over there in the White House).  So far, you look pretty much like a typical politician, doing what politicians do.

And life can't be that prosaic, right?

Of course right.

The dinosaur deniers

So now apparently it's a thing amongst the devoutly religious not only to believe that evolution is false, but that dinosaurs never existed.

I'm not making this up.  According to Chris Matyszczyk over at CNet, there's a whole movement within Christian fundamentalism to "disprove the existence of dinosaurs," and, especially, to stop children from being exposed to information about them.

There's a group, apparently, called Christians Against Dinosaurs, and Matyszczyk investigated them, initially thinking that they had to be some sort of The Onion-esque satire group.  Sadly, Matyszczyk found that they're real.  And serious.

"I'm getting sick and tired of dinosaurs being forced on our children," said one member of Christians Against Dinosaurs in an online video you can watch on the above link if you can stand faceplanting multiple times.  "I for one do not want my children being taught lies. Did you know that nobody had even heard of dinosaurs before the 1800s, when they were invented by curio-hungry Victorians?...  Dinosaurs are a very bad example for children.  At my children's school, several children were left in tears after one of their classmates (who had evidently been exposed to dinosaurs), became bestially-minded and ran around the classroom roaring and pretending to be a dinosaur.  Then he bit three children on the face."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The invention of dinosaur fossils by "curio-hungry Victorians" would have come as a great shock to 3rd century Chinese historian Chang Qu, who describes the discovery of what he called "dragon bones" at a site that would later prove to be a rich paleontological site of Jurassic-era fossils.  Equally shocked would have been 17th-century British naturalist Robert Plot, who described the fossilized femur of a Megalosaurus in his book The Natural History of Oxfordshire.

Sadly, though, Christians Against Dinosaurs is not some kind of isolated wacko splinter group.  There's a whole movement afoot to discredit all fossils.  Consider the post over at Clues Forum entitled "The (Non-religious) Dinosaur Hoax Question," wherein we find out that because fossils are "rock in rock," the paleontologists are simply taking blocks of rock and carving them into whatever shape they want, and then saying, "Look!  A fossil!"  Here's a sample:

Fossils, then, are basically bones that have turned into a sort of rock. They are rocks that mimic the form of a bone that is now long gone. Many of the dino bones on display in museums are bone-shaped rocks essentially. The problem I have with this is that, according to many cable TV “science” shows I have watched over the years, these dinosaur fossils are often found embedded in rock. So, we're talking about digging out rocks imbedded in rock and we must trust that those who prepared these fossils for display have correctly carved away the non-bone rock from the real bone rock. But, in our hoax-filled world of fake science, doesn't this rock-in-rock situation make it rather easy for creative interpretations of what the animal really looked like? And, once a particular animal is “approved” by the gods of the scientific community, wouldn't all subsequent representations of that same animal have to conform with that standard?

I think what bothers me most about this is the phrase "our hoax-filled world of fake science."  Does this guy really think that scientists are getting grants to sit around making shit up?  And because all of the other scientists are in on it, no one blows the whistle?

Oh, and then the guy does this whole thing about how the discovery of fossilized Velociraptor claws are suspect because they look "just like bear claws."  Can I just ask one question?

Wouldn't you expect bear claws and Velociraptor claws to be similarly-shaped, because otherwise they wouldn't be called "claws"?

The most mind-blowing thing about this is how simple it would be to destroy the whole "argument," if this guy was really interested in finding out answers.  All he'd have to do is two things: (1) volunteer to go on a paleontological dig, and (2) talk to any scientist about how peer review is done.  But no, that's apparently too much to ask.

Much easier to sit at home talking out of your ass about "non-bone rock and real bone rock."

And then, then, the guy has the audacity to refer to himself as "skeptical."  This use of the word (as in "climate change skeptic") just makes me want to punch a wall.  "Skeptical" does not mean "someone who disbelieves in random stuff."  It means "keeping your mind open until sufficient evidence is obtained."

And don't even get me started about how the author calls his disbelief-o-thon a "theory."

But back to Christians Against Dinosaurs.  The group has a Facebook page, wherein we are told, "We all know God never created dinosaurs, and its great to have a place we can all celebrate this... I only hope that it serves as an outlet for others too afraid to speak out about their doubts in the field of paleontology.  It is healthy to question the world around us and not just take the word of science as gospel."

The last sentence of which should win some kind of Unintentional Irony Award.

Oh, yeah, and on the Facebook page we also find out that "The Museum Industry Complex are [sic] ruthless."  The rest of us, apparently, are simply shills for the Paleontological Mafia.  Jack Horner, then, would be the Don Corleone of the dinosaur world, and if we try to interfere with his research, we stand a good chance of waking up with the severed head of a T. rex in our bed.

So anyway.  The latest in the world of reality denial; don't argue that extinct species died in the Great Flood, argue that they never existed in the first place.  I wonder what's next?  Maybe deciding that all of us science-types don't exist, either.  The whole world is populated by a few thousand holy people, and everything else is imaginary, placed there by Satan to trip up the true believers.

If you're going to deny reality, hell, why not go all the way?

Blocking the paradigm shift

Yesterday, something rather unusual happened; I left an educational staff development day without feeling like I needed to kick a small innocent furry woodland animal out of sheer frustration.

Usually, calling these things "a waste of time" is a tremendous understatement, but in yesterday's installment we were given a talk by Dr. Willard Daggett, the CEO of the International Center for Leadership in Education, and I left with a great many things to think about.

Daggett himself has not been immune from controversy, something about which you can form your own opinions after an easy Google search.  But that's not what I want to look at here.  His talk yesterday centered around moving from what he calls the "Urgent Issues" -- things like the Common Core Standards, APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review, the "teacher grading" system), state-mandated standardized tests, and budget cuts -- to looking at what most of us think of as the second-tier "Important Issues."

Those "Important Issues," Daggett says, are the ones that should be moved to the front of the line.  They include: the increasing gap between what schools do and what colleges and business leaders want; the rate at which colleges report students underperforming, needing remediation, and dropping out before graduating; and competition in the global marketplace with college graduates in technical fields who are better educated than the ones that the United States is producing.

In dealing with all of these, Daggett says, educators have been more reactive than proactive.  We keep doing things the same old way, even if the "same old way" isn't working so well.  We have ignored the research about how children learn, about what makes the content rigorous and relevant, about how to increase literacy and mathematical ability.

But the most important thing he said, in my mind, was when he started talking about how we teach our content areas as a disconnected series of facts.  I'm guilty of this myself; I've heard that in an introductory biology class, students learn more new vocabulary than they do in the first year of a foreign language.  We're shy on application and problem solving, and focus instead on teaching (and testing students on) a fact salad that has little connection to the real world.

It's time, he told us, to look at other ways of doing what we do.

I found myself unable to argue with much of what he said.  And this is despite the reputation I have for being something of an opinionated gadfly.  He showed a slide that he said represented how people feel who propose making major changes to schools:

The cat, of course, is the one who is proposing the changes, and the line of German Shepherds the school staff.  He used his laser pointer to point out the dog in the middle who looks like he's about to run out and eat the cat for dinner, and said, "And I'm sure that everyone in this room knows which faculty member's face should be on that dog."  At which point more than one of my colleagues looked in my direction.

So as I said, it's a minor wonder that I didn't get angry.  Because much of what he was saying is a stinging indictment of what I've spent the last 28 years doing, and Dr. Daggett had facts and statistics to bolster his contentions.

But here's the problem, something that I mentioned to him during a break, and for which he didn't have a very good answer.

How can teachers, administrators, and school boards institute a major paradigm shift when (1) students and teachers are still being evaluated on the same old metric of regurgitation-based standardized tests, and (2) legislators are still tying the funding of schools to students' scores on those tests?

Most of us recognized the problem before yesterday; the reason that Dr. Daggett's speech didn't raise more hackles is that the majority of the people in the room already know the scope of the problem (even if they may not have known the specifics he brought up).  But we're caught between knowing that the world is changing, and that we're not meeting student needs very well, and a leadership that demands that we assess student achievement the same way we've been doing for the past fifty years.

It's not the teachers who are blocking the paradigm shift.  It's the people in the State Department of Education who are designing all of the assessments, and the state legislature that is holding the purse strings.

But it was one of the last things he said that made me sit up and frown a little.  He told a personal anecdote about a family member who had had emergency surgery for a life-threatening injury, and compared the way surgeons are treated in hospitals with the way teachers are treated in schools.  "Teachers," he concluded, "are the equivalent of the front-line surgeons in hospitals.  We should treat teachers like surgeons."

All well and good to say.  We have a governor here in New York State who trusts teachers so little that we're not even allowed to grade our own final exams, because of worry that we'll cheat.  We have to fight tooth and nail for every pay increase we get, while the state aid that pays our salaries is cut every year, and the governor has mandated a property tax cap so that school boards couldn't even raise the tax levy if they wanted to.  We're at the whim of a Board of Regents that is so out of touch with what is happening in schools that they have publicly stated that standardized test scores should comprise 50% of a teacher's final "grade," and that if the teacher doesn't meet the benchmark on that 50%, the other 50% -- evaluation by administrators, classroom visits, and so on -- doesn't matter.

Hell, they don't even trust the administrators.  The latest proposal is to have classroom observations done by outside evaluators, to keep the principals from cheating.

Treat us like surgeons?  We're so far from that level of respect and (dare I mention it) salary that the comparison almost made me laugh out loud.  The distrust and disrespect current government leaders have for the teaching profession, and the resultant stress on teachers, is one major reason why we're hemorrhaging talent -- the best and brightest are finding other careers.  Consider, for example, the loss of Stacie Starr, winner of a 2014 Teacher of the Year award in Ohio, who in her resignation speech said, "I can’t do it anymore, not in this ‘drill ‘em and kill ‘em’ atmosphere.  I don’t think anyone understands that in this environment if your child cannot quickly grasp material, study like a robot and pass all of these tests, they will not survive."

So while I thought Dr. Daggett had some good ideas, we were left with no real direction for solutions.  The situation won't change until the leadership does, and I don't see that happening any time soon.  Until then, we're doing just what the State Departments of Education are mandating that the children do; focusing on disconnected details, and avoiding any application of what we know to the real world.