Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

Dear readers,

I'm going on a short break from Skeptophilia.  Next week, I'm heading down to Fayetteville, Arkansas to meet the fine people of Oghma Creative Media.  We'll be discussing the release on April 14 of my latest novel, Kill Switch, through Oghma's Fleet Press imprint.

Kill Switch will be available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many other bookstores, and will be available both in print and for Kindle or Nook.  But what's it about, you might be asking?

Mild-mannered high school teacher Chris Franzia comes home on the last day of school to find two FBI agents waiting for him in his driveway.  They tell him that there's been a string of murders in the past month, and the only commonality is that all of the victims were in a particular graduate class at the University of Washington thirty years earlier.

And Chris is likely to be the next one in the gunsight.

After two near misses convince Chris that the FBI men were telling the truth, he flees on a cross-country race against time, trying to stay one step ahead of an invisible, implacable enemy who is tracking his every move.  The problem is... Chris has no idea why they're after him.  But figuring that out is now literally a matter of life or death.

So check it out when it hits the shelves.  It is, in the words of one reviewer, "a conspiracy theorist's wet dream."


One other bit of news:  a friend of mine has started a Secular Services Directory, a site that acts as a clearinghouse for businesses that are secularist/atheist friendly.  Here's the gist of it, from their "About" page:

This national directory is the brainchild of a couple who are both long-standing secularists.  Over the years, we’ve encountered ignorance, misunderstanding, and even prejudice in seeking out services that support our values.  We’ve often wished that there was a resource to identify businesses that operate on a basis of critical thinking and rationality.  For years we’ve joked that it seems just about every affinity group out there has its own directory, except us. 

Until one day we had the thought, “Why don’t we just build one ourselves?”  So we did.  Welcome! 

Now, there are a lot of settings where a person’s religious or spiritual beliefs (or lack thereof) don’t really come into play.  For instance, whether or not our grocer or the gas station on the corner operates along secular lines doesn’t really matter to us. 

But for more personal services where we’re most vulnerable — medical care, legal advice, mental health counseling, and so on — we want to feel secure that we don’t have to deal with proselytizing or judgment on top of the needs we’re trying to meet.
We hope you find value in what we’re creating, and welcome any support or assistance you feel moved to offer.

So I hope you'll visit their site, and if you own a business, that you'll register it with them.  At the very least, you can give their Facebook page a "like."


Thanks again to all of my loyal readers for visiting Skeptophilia and for your support and positive comments.  I'll be back on Monday, April 6 with more news from a skeptical view.

Modern-day Caligulas

Is it just me, or do a lot of high-profile members of the evangelical wing of Christianity seem to have lost their minds lately?

I mean, it's not like they haven't been saying some odd things for a while.  Pat Robertson, for example -- who at this point must be what, 148 years old? -- has been entertaining us for as long as I can remember.  But now we've got apparently insane hyper-Christians, many of whom have been elected to public office, making statements that under normal circumstances would qualify a person for medical supervision.

First we have Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, signing into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which "prohibits state or local governments from substantially burdening a person's ability to exercise their religion — unless the government can show that it has a compelling interest and that the action is the least-restrictive means of achieving it."  All of which sounds pretty innocuous until you realize that what prompted the bill was a series of cases in which Christian-owned businesses wanted government protection for their decision not to serve gays and lesbians.

Making it clear that this was what the bill was about, Eric Miler of Advance America said about the bill's passage, "It is vitally important to protect religious freedom in Indiana.  It was therefore important to pass Senate Bill 101 in 2015 in order to help protect churches, Christian businesses and individuals from those who want to punish them because of their Biblical beliefs!"

And despite this, Governor Pence swears that the RFRA has nothing to do with discriminating against LGBT people.  "This is not about discrimination," he said, in a press conference.

The state is already beginning to experience a backlash.  Supporters of non-discrimination policies have begun pulling out of Indiana, most dramatically the software company Salesforce, which operates a S&P 500 corporation headquartered in Indianapolis.  "We have been an active member of the Indiana business community and a key job creator for more than a decade," Scott McCorkle, CEO of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud division, wrote in a letter to Indiana lawmakers. "Our success is fundamentally based on our ability to attract and retain the best and most diverse pool of highly skilled employees, regardless of gender, religious affiliation, ethnicity or sexual orientation.  Without an open business environment that welcomes all residents and visitors, Salesforce will be unable to continue building on its tradition of marketing innovation in Indianapolis."

But what Pence and the Indiana state legislature has done is sane compared with what we're hearing from other right-wing Christian elected officials.  How about Senator Sylvia Allen, a member of the State Senate of Arizona, who last week proposed a way to fix the problems in the United States: mandatory church attendance.

In a debate over laws governing carrying concealed weapons, Senator Allen suddenly made the following statement, which should be an odds-on contender for the 2015 Non Sequitur Award:

I believe what's happening to our country is that there's a moral erosion of the soul of America.  It's the soul that is corrupt.  How we get back to a moral rebirth I don't know.  Since we are slowly eroding religion at every opportunity that we have.  Probably we should be debating a bill requiring every American to attend a church of their choice on Sunday to see if we can get back to having a moral rebirth.

What does that have to do with concealed-carry laws?  I have no idea.  Neither, apparently, did the rest of the senate, who just sort of sat there staring at Senator Allen with their mouths hanging open.

Then we have State Representative Gordon Klingenschmitt of Colorado, who on his television show Pray in Jesus's Name commented upon a brutal attack on a pregnant woman that occurred earlier this month, and said that the attack had happened because of the "curse of God upon America for the legalization of abortion."  Worse, still, when people reacted with outrage to Klingenschmitt's statement, he informed us that he has the right to say any damn thing he wants to, because, you know, 'Murica.

I'm against evil and I'm in favor of good. If other people are offended by the Bible, that's okay, they don't have to agree with me or come to my church or watch my TV show.  It's a free country.  If you're offended because I quote the bible in church, I ask you to forgive me but I will not apologize for quoting the Bible in church.  If the government is now going to step into my church on Sunday and say "oh, you're not allowed to do that because you are an elected official," I would ask people to take a step back and think about how the government should be protecting your freedom of worship on Sunday and maybe cut me a little slack.

Then we had a war of words between conservative Idaho State Representative Paul Shepherd and a LGBT activist named Dylan Hailey.  Shepherd had forgotten to renew his subscription to the website domain name www.paulshepherdusa.com, so Hailey bought it and converted it to a website describing the struggles of LGBT individuals in Idaho.

Well, Shepherd wasn't going to take that lying down.  In an interview with Melissa Dalvin of Idaho Reports, Shepherd made an analogy that "WTF?" doesn't even quite cover:  "Slave owners were very good Christians and good people," Shepherd said.  "They weren't terrible, rotten, horrible people.  And that's how I see gay people."

And it wasn't just the elected officials.  It appears that because of a byzantine rule regarding the way proposals for laws work in California, an attorney named Matthew McLaughlin may be in position to force lawmakers to consider a bill called the "Sodomite Suppression Act."  Here's an excerpt:

Seeing that it is better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God's just wrath against us for the folly of tolerating wickedness in our midst, the People of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.

Now, nobody thinks that this bill has a chance of passing -- it's doubtful if even people like Klingenschmitt and Shepherd would vote for something like this.  But just the very fact that it's under consideration is terrifying.

You know, the whole thing makes me think about the Roman Empire.  It worked pretty well for a while, you know?  Then all of a sudden, you had people like Caligula having his horse elected to the Senate and ordering his armies to whip the ocean because he wanted to teach the god Neptune a lesson, Nero singing songs in praise to himself while watching people being burned alive, and Elagabalus, who made up his own religion revolving around the idea that prostitution was holy, and killed anyone who refused to join it.

Actually, I hope I'm wrong, here.  Because once the Roman Empire more-or-less imploded, the whole place was overrun by barbarians, and that wasn't much better.  So let's hope we can replace our own modern-day Caligulas with people who are interested in sensible governance.

Divine message recognition module

Superstition in general leaves me a bit mystified.  As long as I can remember, I've never understood how people can believe in good luck charms and actions that will curse you to its opposite, or that some purely natural phenomenon is a sign from god... or a message from his infernal counterpart.

This is why I responded with frank bafflement at people's reaction to the photograph that went viral this week in the aftermath of the tornado that struck Moore, Oklahoma.

The photo was reposted tens of thousands of times on social media, usually with messages like, "God is with us even in difficult times!" and "Praise the Lord!  He is here!"  This elicited two main questions in my mind:  (1) Aren't telephone poles always shaped like a cross?  And (2) if the Almighty wanted to send the people of Oklahoma a sign of his presence, wouldn't it have been more considerate to do it without smashing the shit out of the town first?

This last question is especially pertinent, given that Moore has been hit by tornadoes seven times in the past twenty years, with the ones in 1999 and 2013 being particularly devastating (the tornado in 1999 cut a 38-mile-long swath of destruction, and resulted in the highest windspeed ever measured on the Earth's surface -- 301 miles per hour).  So my guess is that given the choice between receiving a cross-shaped sign from god, and not being blasted to smithereens by a tornado again, most of the citizens of Moore would choose the latter.

So I found people's responses to the photograph pretty perplexing.  Of course, I had the same reaction to the kerfuffle over the cross-shaped chunks left in the wreckage after 9/11:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Because, after all, this is what the intersection of two girders looks like.  But this one resulted in a war of words between people who wanted to clear away the debris and people who saw this as a holy message from god and wanted it left as-is.  In the end, it was installed on a pedestal at Ground Zero, and has become an object of devotion by the religious.

[image courtesy of photographer Samuel Li and the Wikimedia Commons]

Once again, I find this kind of incomprehensible.  You'd think if god wanted to send a sign to the faithful, a bunch of writing in the sky an hour earlier saying "THERE ARE CRAZIES WHO HAVE HIJACKED AIRPLANES AND ARE ON THE WAY TO DESTROY THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, GET OUT NOW!" would have been more to the point.

Note that this is a completely separate question from the question of whether an all-powerful deity exists in the first place.  My only point here is that if there is a deity, then leaving behind cross-shaped debris after something has wreaked destruction, ruin, and death is a pretty peculiar way to communicate with his followers.

On the other hand, I guess if it brings people solace after a tragedy, there's some benefit to it.  It's better than despair, after all.  But while I went through times in my life when I desperately wanted to believe in the supernatural -- during my teens and early twenties, I was pretty much constantly casting about for evidence of such phenomena -- the whole "Sign from God" thing never made sense to me.  Which is probably why it used to piss me off no end in English Lit classes when the teacher would tell us that in chapter 3, the Clouds In The Western Sky were foreshadowing the horrible events that would unfold for the Main Character And His Doomed Lover in chapter 7.  "Oh, come on," I recall thinking.  "They're clouds.  As in big blobs of condensed water droplets.  They don't give a rat's ass about the Main Character And His Doomed Lover."

Nor, I suspect, does the broken telephone pole in Moore, Oklahoma have anything to do with a divine message.  It's a striking photograph, yes, but no more than that, especially given that telephone poles are already more-or-less shaped that way.

Or maybe I'm just missing the Divine Message Recognition Module in my brain.

Hydra heads and creation museums

Apparently having one Creation Museum in the United States (in Glen Rose, Texas) wasn't sufficient.  So in 2007, a bigger and better one opened in Petersburg, Kentucky.  Then those museums started having some financial problems due to declining attendance, with projects like the infamous "Ark Encounter" being put on hold because of loss of revenue.  So clearly, there was only one possible solution.

Build yet another Creation Museum.

This is getting ridiculous.  Fighting these things is becoming a little like trying to lop off the heads of a really stupid Hydra.

This one is in Boise, Idaho, which certainly makes sense, site-wise.  Boise is the capital of Idaho, a state where over 80% of citizens are Christians, where last month a group introduced a proposal to have Idaho officially declared a "Christian state," where just two weeks ago three legislators boycotted an invocation given in the Senate because it was delivered by a Hindu.

So I have no doubt that yet another expensive boondoggle meant to celebrate a completely counterfactual and unscientific view of biological and geological science will turn out to be wildly popular.

At least, that's the hope of Douglas Bennett, who is one of the museum's founders, and who is (mystifyingly) a trained geologist.  How someone who has a degree in geology can actually subscribe to the idea that all of the Earth's sedimentary rocks were laid down by one cataclysmic flood five-thousand-odd years ago is beyond me.  You'd think that the single question, "Where did all of the water go afterwards?" would be sufficient to raise questions for anyone with scientific training, wouldn't you?

Of course, if the rain was magicked down by god, maybe it was magicked away again.  Or maybe there's a big floor drain at the bottom of the ocean.  I dunno.

Be that as it may, what perhaps sets this museum apart from the others its that for each exhibit, there will be the biblical explanation side-by-side with the explanation that comes from actual science.  "The museum is dedicated to the fact that creation science can explain the evidence we see in the world around us and that it is not just religion," Bennett said. "Because we feel we don't have anything to hide.  If we put both out there, a person that's actually seeking the truth will look and say, 'Ah, the biblical explanation fits what I see in the world around us a lot better than evolution.'"

Me, I find this troubling.  Because you can bet they didn't hire an actual evolutionary biologist or geologist (I'm discounting Bennett, here, for obvious reasons) to write the scientific explanations.  I'm pretty certain that the point/counterpoint was written by people who buy the whole creation story wholesale, which means that the scientific explanations will be misrepresented, oversimplified, or just plain wrong.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So this whole enterprise sets up the evolutionary side of the argument (i.e., reality) as one great big straw man.  I probably shouldn't let this bother me; after all, it's unlikely that the museum is going to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.  But this kind of slick, hyped-up marketing makes the anti-science crowd even more convinced of their beliefs -- that the scientists are a bunch of godless charlatans trying to bring the world to wrack and ruin.  It's also appealing to children, who are more easily convinced, especially when their parents are telling them that anyone who tries to show them evidence to the contrary is making an evil, Satan-inspired end run on their immortal souls.

And the last thing we need is yet another generation growing up with a lousy understanding of science.

Oh, yeah, and I haven't told you about the other thing the Idaho creationists are trying to do.  They're wanting to raise money for a "life-sized Ark" that will be next to the interstate somewhere between Boise and Nampa.

Because we all know how well that ended for the Kentucky "Ark Encounter" project.

So on the whole, I suppose I should be glad that the creationists are sinking their funds into these kinds of mare's nests.  The more money they put toward building monuments to silly, counterfactual worldviews, the less they'll have to put toward buying congresspeople who support their views.

The twisted moral sense of Phil Robertson

Websites that cover news about religion, atheism, and matters of belief have been buzzing in the last day or so because of a speech Phil Robertson (of Duck Dynasty fame) gave at a political "prayer breakfast" in Florida.

[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Robertson's speech centered around a gruesome story about an imaginary atheist family.  Here's a transcript (warning: it's ugly and upsetting):

I’ll make a bet with you.  Two guys break into an atheist’s home. He has a little atheist wife and two little atheist daughters. Two guys break into his home and tie him up in a chair and gag him.  And then they take his two daughters in front of him and rape both of them and then shoot them and they take his wife and then decapitate her head off in front of him.  And then they can look at him and say, "Isn’t it great that I don’t have to worry about being judged?  Isn’t it great that there’s nothing wrong with this?  There’s no right or wrong, now is it dude?" 

Then you take a sharp knife and take his manhood and hold it in front of him and say, "Wouldn’t it be something if this [sic] was something wrong with this?  But you’re the one who says there is no God, there’s no right, there’s no wrong, so we’re just having fun.  We’re sick in the head, have a nice day." 

If it happened to them, they probably would say, "something about this just ain’t right."

There are a number of things going on here worthy of commenting upon.

First, Robertson seems to enjoy talking about this way too much.  Doesn't it seem that he's saying that the only reason he isn't raping and murdering people himself is that god is watching him and judging him?  You have to wonder if it's people like me you should be afraid of... or people like him.

Second, he's implying that there's no way that Christians would do such a thing, that it must be the non-religious people who are running around committing atrocities.  Discounting studies about the religious affiliations of people incarcerated for violent crimes -- such studies rely on self-reporting, and are notoriously inaccurate -- let me just point out that there was a group of people in American history who did exactly the sort of thing he's describing.  Raping, murdering, mutilating, and then gloating over the bleeding bodies of their victims.  It was the Klansmen of the post-Civil-War South -- almost all of whom were "decent, god-fearing Christians," who, when they'd washed the blood from their hands, donned their Sunday best and went to church.

The third problem is that he's saying that if you're an atheist, you must believe that there's no right and wrong, no morality; that without some code of conduct coming in from an outside agency, we'd steal, rape, kill each other.  Funny that this doesn't happen in the natural world, then, isn't it?  There's no god of wolves sending the lupine equivalent of Moses into the pack with tablets filled with rules, and yet wolves share food, care for each other, and rarely kill (or even seriously injure) each other.  Work by Dutch behaviorist Frans de Waal and others has shown that non-human social animals do show deeply moral behavior, which is exactly what you'd expect in the evolution of species that live in large groups.  (Nota bene: Just like humans.)

But the fourth, and deepest, problem is that the twisted behavior Robertson is describing is not forbidden in the Christian bible.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  This sort of thing is commanded by god.  Consider this lovely passage:

They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul; and everyone who would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.  [2 Chronicles 15:12-13]

Killing atheist wives and children.  Sound familiar?

Oh, but maybe they weren't doing it on god's command, they were just doing it because they thought it was god's command.  Then how do you explain this?

Then the Lord thundered, "Bring on the men appointed to punish the city!  Tell them to bring their weapons with them!"  Six men soon appeared from the upper gate that faces north, each carrying a deadly weapon in his hand.  With them was a man dressed in linen, who carried a writer’s case at his side. They all went into the Temple courtyard and stood beside the bronze altar.   

Then the glory of the God of Israel rose up from between the cherubim, where it had rested, and moved to the entrance of the Temple.  And the Lord called to the man dressed in linen who was carrying the writer’s case.  He said to him, "Walk through the streets of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of all who weep and sigh because of the detestable sins being committed in their city." 

Then I heard the Lord say to the other men, "Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked.  Show no mercy; have no pity!  Kill them all—old and young, girls and women and little children.  But do not touch anyone with the mark.  Begin right here at the Temple." So they began by killing the seventy leaders. 

"Defile the Temple!" the Lord commanded.  "Fill its courtyards with corpses. Go!"  So they went and began killing throughout the city. [Ezekiel 9:1-7]

Ah, yes, the god of love, ordering his followers to fill the courtyards with corpses.

Then we find out that we're supposed to kill not only non-believing men, women, and children, but also their animals, and destroy the town, as well:

Suppose you hear in one of the towns the Lord your God is giving you that some worthless rabble among you have led their fellow citizens astray by encouraging them to worship foreign gods.  In such cases, you must examine the facts carefully.  If you find it is true and can prove that such a detestable act has occurred among you, you must attack that town and completely destroy all its inhabitants, as well as all the livestock.  Then you must pile all the plunder in the middle of the street and burn it.  Put the entire town to the torch as a burnt offering to the Lord your God.  That town must remain a ruin forever; it may never be rebuilt.  Keep none of the plunder that has been set apart for destruction.  Then the Lord will turn from his fierce anger and be merciful to you.  He will have compassion on you and make you a great nation, just as he solemnly promised your ancestors.  The Lord your God will be merciful only if you obey him and keep all the commands I am giving you today, doing what is pleasing to him.  [Deuteronomy 13:13-19]

But you know, despite all of these divine commands to kill nonbelievers (along with their spouses, children, and the whole shebang), Christians rarely ever do that.  It's almost like they're getting their sense of right and wrong from... somewhere else.

I wonder where that might be.

I think it might be fitting to end with a quote from the show True Detective, wherein Detective Rust Cohle says:  "If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of a divine reward, then brother, that person is a piece of shit."

Scandinavian Jesus and nukes over Charleston

I ran into two examples of complete batshit lunacy in the last couple of days, and they're kind of interesting in juxtaposition.

The first was linked on the r/conspiratard subreddit, a site devoted to ridiculing conspiracy theories.  It's called "Theory: Jesus 'Yashua's' Nazarene," and if you're puzzled by the title, I can say with some authority that it makes more sense than the article itself.

The author, a man who understandably wants only his first name ("Neil") to be known, tells us some pretty earthshattering stuff.  First, we're told that there's a reason that Jesus is often depicted in the United States as a white-skinned dude with blond hair and blue eyes; it's because he was actually Scandinavian.  But not to worry -- he's not being racist, "Neil" says, because he thinks everyone is Scandinavian:

We wonder today if there is a bloodline group alive today that has the same bloodline that Jesus (Yashua) was born with and I SAY YES. This bloodline is not large in number but they represent about 10% of the global populations and can be found primarily in the United State but on all continents as well.

These descendents have a rare blood factor and have prehistoric ancestors that can be tracked back to an area in the world known as the “Garden.” This original people group on earth were what we refer to today as Scandinavians. Believe it or not, the oldest mummies all over the world had blonde hair, which also tells us that our original ancestors were Scandinavians. I mean all of us. It does not matter what color your skin is today, your original ancestors on earth were Scandinavian. When Jesus (Yashua) said we were all brothers he meant it literally.

THE BLONDE BLUE-EYED SCANDINAVIAN NAZARENE TRIBES THAT JESUS (YASHUA) WAS BORN INTO, ARE NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH THE RED HAIR GREEN-EYED BLOODLINE KNOWN AS THE “TRIBE OF CAIN” that is also known as the “Tribe of DAN”, WHICH IS A HYBRID BLOODLINE.

So there you are, then.  Don't discriminate against people of other skin and hair colors, unless they're red-haired.  Then it's okay.

Then we hear about how "Neil" realized all of this when he found out that Scandinavians all have Rh-negative blood types, and so, apparently, did Jesus:

Science can track this Scandinavian Bloodline from the exact location Jesus (Yashua’s) Nazarene tribes lived in Northern Israel back in time thousands of years before Jesus (Yashua) was born. Jesus (Yashua) was not a Jew as people have falsely labeled him, he was a Nazarene and was probably born in the same Nazarene village where ran his ministry from in Northern Israel. The Bible clearly states that Jesus (Yashua) was a Nazarene.

The Nazarenes were Scandinavians who apparently had the PURE Rh Negative bloodline factor, which can be tracked back in time to the original human race that was born on this planet in a part of the world that was known as the “Garden”.

The problem with this -- okay, one of the many problems with this -- is that only about 16% of Scandinavians are Rh negative.  The two groups who have the highest incidence of Rh negative blood are the Basques of Spain and the Berbers of Morocco, both of whom have a percent incidence of the gene somewhere in the high 30s to low 40s.  And neither Spain nor Morocco are anywhere near Scandinavia.  And neither place is known for its blond, blue-eyed people.

But this guy doesn't let a little thing like "facts" stop him.  He goes on to tell us how there was a letter from "Pontius Pilot [sic]" that the Vatican is covering up, and it says that Jesus had hair "colored like a chestnut shell or walnut shell," which clearly is the same thing as blond.  He did not have red hair, "Neil" reiterates, making me wonder if he once had a bad experience in Ireland, or something, because he seems pretty vehement on the topic of the Ginger Jesus Theory.

So anyway.  On and on it goes.  My point is that when this site got posted on public media, "Neil" and his "theory" got excoriated.  "What kind of idiot would believe this?" one commenter wrote.  "I live in hope that wackos like him are few in number."  Another wrote, "This has to be a troll.  I flatly refuse to believe that there are people who are that ignorant."

Which brings us to our second story.

Last week, presidential hopeful Rick Santorum gave a speech in South Carolina.  The event was sponsored by Frank Gaffney, which should already put you on high alert -- Gaffney is known as a birther/truther nutjob who believes that America is soon to be under Sharia law.  So no wonder it attracted some peculiar people.

I mean the audience, not Santorum.

Rick Santorum [image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

So anyway, Santorum gives his spiel about how Obama is leading America into ruin, the usual blah.  But it really got interesting during the question-and-answer session, when a woman stepped up to the microphone and said this:

Mr. Santorum, thanks for being here, my name is Virginia, I'm a retired schoolteacher, a political activist and a lifelong resident of South Carolina.  I have the same question that I asked Senator Cruz.   I'll preface it by saying that I think Michele Bachmann [unintelligible] that Boehner made a deal... my question is on defending this country, and what you did for national security, and sealing these borders and protecting the United States.  I've fought that battle all my life.  I'm losing, and that's because I'm not getting help from my congress...  Why is congress rolling over and letting this communist dictator destroy my country?  Y'all know what he is, and I know what he is.  I want him out of the White House.  He's not a citizen.  He could have been removed a long time ago...  Everything he does is illegal, he's trying to destroy the United States.  Everyone knows this.  The congress knows this.  What kind of games is [sic] the congress playing with the citizens of the United States?  Y'all need to work for us, not for the lobbyists that pay your salaries.  Get on board, let's stop all this, and save America.  What's going on, Senator Santorum?  Where do we go from here?  Ted told me I got to wait till the next election.  I don't think the country'll be around for the next election.  Obama tried to blow up a nuke in Charleston a few months ago... he's trying to destroy our military, he's fired all the generals and all the admirals that said they wouldn't fire on the American people if he asked them to do so, if he wanted to take the guns away from 'em.  This man is a communist dictator, we need him out of that White House now.

So.  Obama is a communist who has gone around firing all of our military leaders, somehow without that action making national news.  And furthermore, he tried to drop a nuclear bomb on Charleston, South Carolina so that he can get the military to shoot American citizens and then take away their guns.

Kind of makes Scandinavian Jesus seem... sane, doesn't it?

But here's what's interesting.  Unlike "Neil," whose public appearance in an online forum resulted in his getting his ass handed to him, "Virginia" was treated as if what she said made perfect sense.  Santorum could have taken this as an opportunity to say, "Look.  Let's not believe counterfactual nonsense.  Yes, we do disagree with the president and the Democrats on what the right course of action is for the country; but we're not helping our cause by making ridiculous claims that obviously aren't true."  Instead, here's how he responded:

First, I object to your laying the blame on me, because I'm not a sitting member of the Senate.  I'm not responsible for any of that stuff.  [applause]  But I will tell you this.  You've hit on one point that I absolutely agree, and it's that this is a complete lack of leadership.  The bottom line is, and I can tell you, when President Obama issued that executive order, and I don't care what the executive order was about, when he issued an executive order, an executive action that said that he was not only not going to enforce the law, that he is actively going to change that law, make new law, and be able to act, enforce the agencies to act pursuant to that law, he did something that you mentioned.  The word "tyrant" comes to mind.  It is not, the president does not have the authority to do these things.  The president has done a lot of dangerous things.  This is the most dangerous thing the president has done.

Yes, you read right.  A former senator, and current candidate for the Republican nomination for president, apparently believes that President Obama tried to nuke Charleston.

And this, Dear Reader, is why I write this blog every day.  If we don't start insisting that people sift fact from fiction, if we let crazies like "Neil" and "Virginia" blather away without calling them out on their nonsense, we end up with people like Rick Santorum, who evidently has the critical thinking ability of an avocado, being a serious contender for nominee for the highest office in the land.  Maybe I'm creating a false analogy, here; but to me, it's all the same thing.  Once you decide that facts and logic don't matter, then you'll swallow anything, whether it's some crackpot theory about Jesus having blond hair and Rh-negative blood, or the president having a plan to drop a nuclear bomb on an American city so he can take away our guns.  The only difference is the details.

It all goes back to something Voltaire said, almost three hundred years ago, a saying that I have posted above the whiteboard in my classroom:  "Those who can be made to believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities."

Andrew Cuomo, education, and the lie between two truths

The episode of The X Files called "E.B.E." contained what may be the most insightful quote that the series ever generated.  Fox Mulder's informant, the man who is never known as anything but his code name of "Deep Throat," says:  "And a lie, Mr. Mulder, is most conveniently hidden between two truths."

That statement is especially accurate when the truths are stated outright and the lie is implied.  And this is a lesson that apparently was well learned by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's Director of State Operations, Jim Malatras.

In an op-ed piece in the New York Daily News, Malatras once again places the blame for New York's "failing schools" in the laps of the teachers and administrators, and lauds Cuomo's plan to hitch teacher evaluation, retention, and salaries to high-stakes standardized tests.  Malatras writes:

Public education should be the great equalizer — a system that helps every child learn in order to achieve a brighter future... (O)ur current system fails to deliver on that promise. That must change. 

And the governor has a plan to do it.  He will attract the best and brightest teachers by providing full scholarships to those who enter the profession.  He will create a fair and objective evaluation system, rewarding good teachers and providing unprecedented support and mentoring.  He will turn around failing schools and transform them into community schools.  He will continue to expand early education... 

If the Legislature enacts these reforms, we will spend an additional $1.1 billion in aid — bringing education spending to the highest level in state history.

This "fair and objective evaluation system" involves tying 50% of teachers' numerical scores to student performance on tests prepared at great cost by companies such as Pearson Education, despite a long history of inaccuracies and errors and scholarly research that showed as long ago as 1999 that standardized tests are a poor measure of both student achievement and teacher quality.  Not only would the governor's plan lead to veteran teachers facing revocation of their tenure if their students fail to hit the benchmark score, it would also tie scores to a $20,000 incentive for "highly effective teachers," and require five consecutive years of "effective" or "highly effective" ratings for a new teacher to achieve tenure.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo [image courtesy of photographer Diana Robinson and the Wikimedia Commons]

Malatras includes a couple of truths in his piece.  He states correctly that New York has the highest per-capita spending on education ($19,522 per student).  He also says that the bottom line should be the students -- their learning, their achievement, their mastery of skills.  No one, I think, would disagree with that.

But the lie is hidden there, and hidden well, because it's implicit in a true statement he makes at the end of the fifth paragraph of his piece.  Malatras writes:

But the governor is not willing to throw more money into the system as it exists today. A system where 64% of our third- through eighth-graders are not proficient in math, 69% are not proficient in English language arts and a quarter of high school students fail to graduate in four years. A system where nearly 110,000 students sit in 178 failing schools, and nine out of 10 are minority or poor.

Did you catch that?  In the failing schools, nine out of ten children are minority or poor.

The implicit lie is that the governor's plan -- hitching the careers of teachers to a flawed metric generated by high-standards exams -- is going to fix the inherent impediments faced by children who grow up in poverty and disadvantage.  So how about Governor Cuomo and Jim "Yes-Man" Malatras consider research by Regina Enwefa, Stephen Enwefa, and Robert Jennings, that found that the single metric that correlated best with students needing special education services was poverty:

Today’s youth in poverty, who need skills to match the rapidly changing directions of our society, are failing academically.  More than seventy-five percent of poor youths have below average basic skills and almost fifty percent are in the bottom fifth of basic skills because of poor reading and math skills.  Poverty alone can cause low academic achievement. Poverty along with cultural and linguistic differences, tends to lower academic achievement and result in very high drop out rates.  Though educators try to meet the academic needs and demands of children and their families with disabilities, they too face barriers.  Inadequate staffing to meet the needs of today’s increasing numbers of poor children clearly affects the child’s ability to perform.

So Governor Cuomo's opinion is that this is some kind of coincidence, and that these children's failure to achieve is the result of poor teaching?  Easier, of course, to blame the teachers and the administrators and the schools rather than addressing the actual cause of the problem.  Easier to pretend that you can use an identical "fair and objective evaluation system" to generate an assessment both for a teacher of AP students in a rich school in Westchester County and a special education teacher teaching disadvantaged children in inner-city Buffalo.  Enwefa et al. write:

Global policymakers are working relentlessly in an attempt to determine ways to restructure education with significant focus on educational services for children with disabilities.  If our government indeed wants to help poor families of children with disabilities out of poverty, and then there must be a fundamental change in policy.  Policy makers must look at poverty itself, rather than at specific problems that could result from poverty...  Budget-cutting policies in areas of housing, education, health care, and employment need to be re-examined.  It is clear that policies targeted at raising family incomes can contribute to increasing children’s cognitive development and academic accomplishments.

Of course, that's not the only problem with Jim Malatras's clever little smear piece.  You can also lie by omitting facts.  He conveniently fails to mention that despite the high per-pupil expenditure in New York, the state education budget is 5.1% lower today than it was in 2008, and the unfunded state mandates have multiplied every year.  The shortfall, of course, has had to be made up by increases in property taxes, already some of the highest in the nation -- until the governor instituted a 2% tax levy cap, and took even that source of revenue out of districts' hands.  The result: devastating staffing cuts and loss of program.

So to recap: Governor Cuomo's plan is to ignore the root cause of failing schools, and instead tie teacher retention to standardized tests that even if they measured what they're supposed to measure, unfairly penalize teachers in poor schools and teachers of students with disabilities.  At the same time, he's reduced funding, increasing the burden on taxpayers to make up the difference, and expected schools to continue functioning the same -- no, better! -- than before.

By any measure you like, Governor Cuomo is failing New York's children.  A pity, isn't it, that politicians can achieve an "ineffective" rating without any consequences?

I wonder why that is.