Free speech and dog bites

It looks like some people need a refresher course in the concept that going around deliberately offending people you disagree with doesn't make you a hero, it makes you an asshole.

This is my general conclusion about Pamela Geller and the American Freedom Defense Initiative, whose "Draw a Cartoon of Muhammad" event in Garland, Texas was crashed by two armed Muslims.  The event had high security -- no one was in any doubt of the risk they were taking -- so when the two men came in, brandishing assault rifles, they were immediately shot and killed by the armed guards hired to protect attendees.

The comparisons to the Charlie Hebdo massacre started to fly.  Geller, who organized the event, was vocal in her claim that the whole thing had to do with free speech.  "There is a problem in Islam, as illustrated last night, and anyone that addresses it gets attacked in this same way," Geller said.  "The Islamic jihadis are determined to suppress our freedom of speech violently."

Which is certainly true, on some level.  I don't want anyone to misunderstand me; I still think that Islam is factually wrong, and has a lot to answer for in terms of human rights offenses, suppression of women, and encouraging extremism and fanaticism.  But Geller's case began to look a little different when it was revealed that she isn't just a free speech advocate, she's a conspiracy theorist who thinks there's some kind of huge plot to institute Shari'a law in the United States, and that there are Muslims everywhere, influencing every level of government.

Hell, she even thinks that conservative activist Grover Norquist is a "dangerous Islamic infiltrator."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So the whole Draw Muhammad event starts to look like a deliberate set-up, and that Geller was hoping like crazy that something violent would happen.  What she did amounts to taking a stick and repeatedly hitting a dog with it, and when the dog turns around and bites you, saying, "See?  I told you it was vicious."

And, of course, she got her wish.  So this isn't some sort of victory for free speech; it's a fanatic on one side pissing off two fanatics on the other side, which hardly constitutes a win for either ideology.

As far as the parallels to Charlie Hebdo, there are some similarities.  In both cases, we had people who knew full well what the reaction by devout Muslims would be.  The difference, though, seems to be that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo lampooned other religions as well -- the Catholics and Jews got equal time in their magazine -- whereas Geller's event was specifically targeted at Islam.  The fact that the intent in Garland was to provoke a response is evident from the armed guards, who turned the attack into something more like suicide by cop.

So let me make this clear.  We do have the right to free speech in the United States.  Geller, and the cartoonists who participated, had the right to do what they did.  But having a right to do something doesn't mean that you have the right to expect that there be no consequences no matter what you say.  I might have the right to say that a guy I know is an illiterate, ugly ignoramus, but I don't have the right to act all surprised if he responds in kind.

And more importantly, having the right to do something doesn't make it the right thing to do.

As far as Geller's claim that she was just trying to point out how crazy the Islamic extremists are, I only have one question: didn't we already know that?  No one who has picked up a newspaper in the past ten years had any doubt on that point.

There's a difference between criticism and deliberate provocation.  By all means criticize; pointing out the flaws in an ideology is crucial in getting people unstuck from erroneous ways of thinking.  (And as I said before, there is a lot about Islam to criticize.)  But you can do that and remain respectful of people.  It doesn't mean there won't be times people will lash out at you; it doesn't mean you won't sometimes offend.

But it does leave you on a moral high ground that Geller and Charlie Hebdo have abandoned.  They want to have it both ways -- to set out to be offensive, and then to be offended themselves when their targets retaliate.

And in the end, all they proved was that being an asshole sometimes results in getting people killed.

Eppur si muove

In 1633, Galileo Galilei was put on trial by the Inquisition in Rome for his claim that the Earth went around the Sun, not the other way around.

He had a nice body of evidence in his favor.  He had observed the phases of the planet Venus, had advanced a theory of oceanic tides that supported the movement of the Earth rather than the Sun, and had actually seen the four largest moons of Jupiter (now called the "Galilean moons" in his honor) circling their host planet.  He was able to show that all of the motions of the planets, as well as the apparent motions of the stars, were far more easily and simply explained by a heliocentric model than a geocentric one.

None of that mattered.  The powers-that-be had spoken, and religious dogma and orthodoxy won the day.  Galileo was found guilty of being "gravely suspect of heresy," and was put under house arrest for the remaining nine years of his life.  He was fortunate; only thirty years earlier, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for such heretical views.

Part of what saved Galileo, of course, was that he was bullied into recanting.  He was made to swear his adherence to the scriptural account, and to "abjure, curse, and detest" his criticism of the claim that the Earth was the motionless center of the universe.  His caving to their demands probably saved his life.  But legend has it that as he left the courtroom to begin serving his sentence, he muttered, "Eppur si muove"  -- "and yet, it moves."

Cristiano Banti, Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition (1857) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And that brings me to our modern-day version of the Inquisition, by which I mean the climate change deniers currently in charge of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology, chaired by Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, and containing such shining lights of scientific knowledge as Dana Rohrbacher (who called climate change "liberal claptrap").  The general tenor of the committee can best be judged by a statement from Representative Bill Posey of Florida, who claimed we shouldn't be worried, because during the "Age of the Dinosaurs" the temperature was 30° warmer than it is now, and it didn't seem to bother them any.  But cut the guy some slack; even if he apparently doesn't know that the dinosaurs were around for 200 million years, and that there's good geological evidence of temperature swings during that time that included at least one Ice Age, he's correct that there was a temperature high -- called the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum -- that occurred when there were dinosaurs.  Okay, the average temperature during the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum was only 5° higher than it is today, so he was off by a factor of six, but that's good enough for the Science Committee, right?

Of course right.

So my point is, we've allowed science research to be put into the hands of a committee largely made up of clowns who couldn't pass a 9th grade Earth Science class.  So what did we expect would happen?

What happened was precisely what the Inquisition did to the free-thinking gadflies of its time; they squashed dissent.  Just a couple of days ago came the announcement that the committee had slashed NASA's Earth Science Research budget by $323 million -- about 20% of its total budget.  The cuts weren't even announced until six days before the vote, giving the minority of members who actually get that scientific understanding comes from data and hard evidence little time for action.  The budget passed on a party-line vote.

Chairman Smith, when asked about the budget, responded only that "The Obama administration has consistently cut funding for... human space exploration programs, while increasing funding for the Earth Science Division by more than 63 percent."

But you see, Mr. Chairman, there's a good reason for that.  The scientific consensus is that we're approaching a tipping point with respect to the climate, despite what you and your cadre, and its counterpart in the Senate -- the Committee on the Environment, chaired by none other than Senator James "Snowball" Inhofe -- would have us believe.  Some people, including biologist and environmental scientist Tim Flannery, think we might already have passed that point.  (His book The Weather Makers is one of the best, most readable summaries of the mountain of evidence in favor of anthropogenic climate change; everyone should read it, but plan to be a little depressed afterwards.)

So we've put the foxes in charge of the henhouse, and we shouldn't be surprised that they are making chicken dinners.  NASA was given the message "toe the line, or else."  They basically said, "Up yours, Lamar," and continued to push for action on climate change, giving unequivocal support to the scientists who conduct the research and actually know what's going on.  The result?  NASA's budget for climate research gets cut to the bone -- and the House passed a bill that prohibits scientists from giving advice on their own research to the Environmental Protection Agency, while allowing corporate interests unfettered access to the EPA's advisory board.

But sooner or later, the Congress will find out what the Inquisition found out: you can't legislate away reality.  If they wanted to, they could pass a bill stating that the Moon was made of Wensleydale cheese, and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to its actual composition.  So while our leaders put their hands over their eyes and say "la-la-la-la-la, not listening," outside the world continues to warm, the climate continues to oscillate wildly, storms continue to strengthen, and the seas continue to rise.

Chairman Smith and his herd of science-deniers can vote away our ability to study climate change, but they can't make the warming itself go away.  All they can do is assure that we have less information, and will be less able to cope with the effects of climate change when they happen.

Eppur si muove.

Wagging the dog

On Saturday, we looked at the wild conspiracy theories that have arisen around the military exercises called "Jade Helm 15" that are scheduled to take place in the southwestern United States this summer.  The conclusion I came to was that you had to be a major nutjob to believe what Alex Jones and his ilk were claiming -- a statement that comes pretty close to a tautology.

Unfortunately, further developments have shown that Texas Governor Greg Abbott is, by this definition, a major nutjob.

Abbott has informed Major General Gerald Betty that he is deploying the Texas State Guard to make sure that the planned military takeover of Texas doesn't happen.  Abbott wrote:

To address concerns of Texas citizens and to ensure that Texas communities remain safe, secure, and informed about military procedures occurring in their vicinity, I am directing the Texas State Guard to monitor Operation Jade Helm 15.  During the Operation's eight-week training period from July 2015 to September 2015, I expect to receive regular updates on the progress and safety of the Operation. 

During the training operation, it is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.  By monitoring the Operation on a continual basis, the State Guard will facilitate communication between my office and commanders of the Operation to ensure that adequate measures are in place to protect Texans.

To make matters worse, we find out that a man who is running for president of the United States also considers Jade Helm a serious threat.  It will probably come as no surprise, however, that the contender I'm referring to is Ted Cruz:

My office has reached out to the Pentagon to inquire about this exercise.  We are assured it is a military training exercise.  I have no reason to doubt those assurances, but I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty, because when the federal government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this administration, the natural consequence is that many citizens don’t trust what it is saying.

 Of course, this is not the first wacko idea that Cruz has fallen for.  When he found out about Agenda 21, a non-binding environmental action plan for sustainable development that was drafted in 1992 by the United Nations, Cruz wrote:

Agenda 21 attempts to abolish “unsustainable” environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads. It hopes to leave mother earth’s surface unscratched by mankind. . . . Agenda 21 subverts liberty, our property rights, and our sovereignty.

Right.  Because non-binding resolutions that no one has acted on for 24 years are all about destroying American sovereignty.

Oh, and don't you think that Ted Cruz looks exactly like a blobfish?

But I digress.

The whole Jade Helm thing, though, seems to be spiraling out of control.  Over at the dubiously-connected-with-reality website Personal Liberty, we find out that we need to panic even more because an anonymous guy found out from a friend of a friend that there are trains with shackles on them:

Let me drop a bombshell that I have not seen you address.  There are trains moving throughout Texas that have shackles inside some of the cars.  I have not personally seen them, but I know personnel that have seen this.  This indicates that these trains will be used to transport prisoners of some sort.  I know from reading your articles that your default belief will be that these are for American political prisoners and will be transported to FEMA detention camps of some sort.

What is a little scary about all of this is that when you get heavily-armed people scared over nothing, they react, and pretty soon that nothing turns into a great big something.

In other words, you have the insane tail wagging the slightly-less-insane dog.

So I'm glad that there are at least a few voices of reason, such as Republican Senator Todd Smith, who wrote a letter to Governor Abbott that began thusly:

Let me apologize in advance that your letter pandering to idiots who believe that US Navy Seals and other US military personnel are somehow a threat to be watched has left me livid.  As a 16 year member of the Texas House and a proud patriotic AMERICAN, I am terrified that I have to choose between the possibility that my Governor actually believes this stuff and the possibility that my Governor doesn’t have the backbone to standup to those who do.  I’m not sure which is worse.  As one of the remaining Republicans who believes in making decisions based on facts and evidence -- you used to be a judge?  I am appalled that you would give credence to the nonsense mouthed by those who intend to make decisions based on internet or radio shock jock driven hysteria.    Is there ANYBODY who is going to stand up to this radical nonsense that is a cancer on our State and our Party?  It is alarming that State Republican leadership is such that we must choose between DEGREES of demagoguery.

 To which I can only say: Amen.

Of course, "listening to the voice of Reason" is not something we've seen people do much lately, especially when the loonies have whipped up a frenzy.  So I can only hope that wiser minds prevail, and the nutjobs quiet down, and whatever military exercises they have planned for this summer go off peacefully and without a hitch.  It would be a terrible thing if the conspiracy theorists turned out to be right, not because they were right from the beginning, but because the fear they'd incited created the very situation they were yelping about.

Scooby Doo vs. Jade Helm

For the past seven years, we've heard over and over that President Obama is planning on taking away our guns, outlawing Christianity, rounding True Americans up into FEMA- run death camps, and establishing a fascist dictatorship.

I think if my American readers will take a moment to look around them, they can confirm for themselves that none of this has happened.

You would think that a zero-percent success rate at predicting the future would induce some of the loonies who have been spouting this nonsense to reconsider their arguments.  You would think that if, after seven years, there's been no sign of a Liberal Gestapo forming, people would say, "Wow.  I guess I was wrong about all of that.  What a goober I am."

You would be wrong.

New from the "No, really!  Listen!  This time it's real!" department, we have the contention that Jade Helm 15, a military operation in the southwestern United States, is a cover for the impending takeover of Texas.

Why Texas?  Well, insofar as you can ask any kind of logical question about this claim, apparently Texans think that it's because they're the last bastion of patriotism, and Obama wants to shut 'em down.  Or something like that.  Bastrop, Texas resident Bob Wells summarized the idea thusly:

It’s the same thing that happened in Nazi Germany: You get the people used to the troops on the street, the appearance of uniformed troops and the militarization of the police.  They’re gathering intelligence.  That’s what they’re doing.  And they’re moving logistics in place for martial law.  That’s my feeling.  Now, I could be wrong.  I hope I am wrong.  I hope I’m a 'conspiracy theorist.'

The unspoken punch line, of course, was "But I'm not."  And all of this is despite the efforts of military leaders to quell the panic.  Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria was sent in to a public meeting to clarify what was going on and answer any questions, and he was met with this sign:

[image courtesy of photographer Jay Janner and the Austin American-Statesman]

Lastoria soldiered on despite the crazy-talk.  No, there wouldn't be soldiers running around gunning down innocent civilians.  The whole thing was pre-planned to take place in remote areas, and they'd made a map available of where the operation was occurring.  Soldiers participating in the activity would be wearing orange armbands, so that anyone who saw them would know who they were and what they were doing.

The whole thing, Lastoria said, was to train soldiers in how to work in hostile areas.  They were not implying that Texas was a hostile area.

Although he may well have changed his mind on that point after the meeting.

And of course, such a claim wouldn't be complete without Alex Jones fanning the flames.  Jones, who amazingly enough is still on the air even though he (1) has been batting zero, prediction-wise, for decades, and (2) apparently has three-quarters of a pound of LaffyTaffy where most of us have a brain, opined thusly on his broadcast InfoWars:

[Some] eerie footage out of Fort Lauderdale shows troops conducting a martial law-style drill under the cover of night training to intern citizens.  The secretive drill directly dovetails with the Jade Helm military exercises, in which 1,200 special forces troops will descend on ten US states for domestic training...  I happen to have met the governor when he was attorney general years ago. I happen to know, somewhat, his chief of staff. I happen to know multiple billionaires that know the governor very well and have had dinner with him and he’s stayed at their house, and they tell me he knows exactly what’s going on...  Texas is listed as a hostile sector. Of course we are. We're here defending the republic.

And apparently this ties into a claim that they're using abandon Wal-Mart stores as operational headquarters.

Oh, and people have seen said Wal-Marts being filled with empty coffins, for when the military launches their actual plan and starts slaughtering people.

You know, I'm perfectly willing to believe that our government has sponsored some pretty shady deals, and I'm sure that we don't know 5% of what is actually going on.  Fine.  But if there really was some kind of super-secret plan to stage a military takeover of Texas as a means for establishing a dictatorship in the United States, do you really think that:

1. They'd hold question-and-answer sessions to tell everyone about it?
2. They'd publish a map telling people where the operation was taking place?
3. A certifiable wingnut like Alex Jones would correctly figure out what's happening?
4. The participants would take the amazingly covert and secretive step of wearing orange arm bands, for fuck's sake?

And you'd also think that after years of claiming that the United States was going to go down in flames, and being wrong every time, that no one would be listening to Alex Jones any more.

But the way these things work is that the people who rant about them think, afterwards, when nothing untoward happened, that it was only their bravery and selflessness in speaking up that stopped the evil government from succeeding in their evil plans.  You can almost hear the government leaders saying, "Drat!  We'd have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids and your stupid dog!"

You can't win.

Virtual immortality

I have lived through the deaths of people I was close to -- family members, friends, colleagues.  You can't spend 54 years on this Earth without having this experience.  And death can be many things -- peaceful, frightening, a release from suffering, the devastating tragedy of a life lost too young.

Fear of death is pretty much universal, and it's the unknown aspect of it that terrifies most people.  Will there be an afterlife, or just... nothing?  If there is an afterlife, what will it be like?  Despite the similarities between many near-death experiences, the cultural imaginings of the afterlife vary tremendously, from the benign to the horrifying.  And, of course, some afterlives are benign for some (the true believers) and horrifying for everyone else (nonbelievers and devotees of other religions).  So I think it's safest to say that no one has the slightest idea what, if anything, we'll experience after we die.

This explains why the search for immortality has been around for a long, long time.  There are scientific approaches -- usually involving the protection of the telomeres, end-caps on the chromosomes that shorten with the years and seem to have a role in age-related illnesses.  And, of course, there are the legends of people who supposedly achieved immortality by magical means, including the Comte de St.-Germain, Nicolas Flamel, and... Keanu Reeves.

So I suppose it's no surprise that there are people who want to cheat death using technology.  And a company called Paranormal Games claims that they are taking the first steps down this road with a virtual-reality software called Project Elysium, that supposedly can make an interactive 3-D computer model of a deceased love one.

The company hasn't released how it plans to accomplish this -- the software is an entrant in the Oculus VR Jam 2015 contest, where it is rumored to be a favorite for the grand prize.  Presumably the bereaved would provide photographs of the dearly departed, along with other personal details, perhaps even voice recordings, if such are available.  Project Elysium has provided screenshots of people being turned into virtual-reality characters, like the one below:

The company will be releasing promotional videos as early as next week.

Now, it stands to reason that any such facsimiles of real people, especially if they are created from still images, will be pretty rudimentary.  At first.  But as we've seen over and over, once something becomes technologically possible, it becomes sophisticated and streamlined fast.  (Consider how digital music storage and retrieval has changed, from the days of CDs to now, when you can have thousands of songs stored on a device smaller than a matchbox.)  Even if Project Elysium is not very authentic-looking at first, all it has to do is demonstrate that software designers can make it work on some level.

After that, it'll be off to the races.

My general sense is that this crosses some kind of ethical line.  I'm not entirely sure why, other than the "it just ain't right" arguments that devolve pretty quickly into the naturalistic fallacy.  Especially given my atheism, and my hunch that after I die there'll be nothing of my consciousness, why would I care if my wife made an interactive computer model of me to talk to?  If it gives her solace, what's the harm?

I think one consideration is that by doing so, we're not really cheating death.  The virtual-reality model inside the computer isn't me, any more than a photograph or a video clip is.  But suppose we really go off the deep end, here, and consider what it would be like if someone really could emulate the human brain in a machine -- and not just a random brain, but yours?

There's at least a theoretical possibility that you could have a computerized personality that would be completely authentic, with your thoughts, memories, sense of humor, and emotions.  But even given my opinions on the topic of religion and the existence of the soul, there's a part of me that simply rebels at this idea.  Such a creation might look and act like me, but it wouldn't be me.  It might be a convincing facsimile, but that's about it.

But what about the Turing test?  Devised by Alan Turing, the idea of the Turing test for artificial intelligence is that because we don't have direct access to what any other sentient being is experiencing -- each of us is locked inside his/her own skull -- the only way to evaluate whether something is intelligent is the way it acts.  The sensory experience of the brain is a black box.  So if scientists made a Virtual Gordon, who acted on the computer screen in a completely authentic Gordonesque manner, would it not only be intelligent and alive, but... me?

In that way, some form of you might achieve immortality, as long as there was a computer there to host you.

This is moving into some seriously sketchy territory for most of us.  It's not that I'm eager to die; I tend to agree with my dad, who when he was asked what he wanted written on his gravestone, responded, "He's not here yet."  But as hard as it is to lose someone you love, this strikes me as a cheat, a way to deny reality, closing your eyes to part of what it means to be human.

So when I die, let me go.  Give me a Viking funeral -- put me on my canoe, set it on fire, and launch it out into the ocean.  Then my friends and family need to throw a huge party in my honor, with lots of music and dancing and good red wine and drunken debauchery.  And I think I want my epitaph to be the one I created for one of my fictional characters, also a science nerd and a staunch atheist:  "Onward into the next great mystery."

For me, that will be enough.

A conspiracy of engineered failure

Robert Heinlein said, "Never attribute to conspiracy what is adequately explained by stupidity."  I think this is a pretty good rule of thumb.  It's not that conspiracies don't exist; it's more that humans aren't very good at them (e.g. Watergate), and we're much more likely to be acting from venial motives -- greed, duplicity, desire for power -- than we are to be engaging in some kind of deep and sinister plot.

That said, I'm beginning to wonder if the implementation of the Common Core isn't some kind of conspiracy.

Let's start with the fact that the Chief Operating Officer of the South Carolina Department of Education, Elizabeth Carpentier, is threatening parents who allow their children to opt out of state tests with thirty days in jail.

State Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman, asked about Carpentier's statements, declined to comment other than saying that there is "no statutory provision for parents to opt their children out of testing."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, has been making some veiled threats of his own.  "It’s just part of most kids’ education growing up,” he said, regarding the implementation of the Common Core standardized exams.  "Sometimes the adults make a big deal and that creates some trauma for the kids...  We think most states will do [meet their targets for participation].  If states don’t do that, then we have an obligation to step in."

So the implication is that everything is just hunky-dory with the Common Core curriculum and the tests, and the only parents that will opt out are overprotective mommies and daddies who can't stand to see their kids work hard.

Oh, and those mommies and daddies might have to go to jail if they allow their kids to opt out.

So we have threats coming from the powers-that-be, but there's a flipside to this.  If the curriculum and the tests were fair measures of student achievement or teacher competence, the opt-out movement might have less of a basis for their argument.  But the implementation of these exams, and their content, has been riddled with problems.  Psychologist Dr. Charlene Williams writes:

The 6th grade ELA practice performance task for the Smarter Balance was completely inappropriate for 11-12 year olds, requiring them to toggle between several screens (on small Ipad screens), and choose multiple pieces of evidence to evaluate, select, paraphrase, compare and contrast, as well as write a multiparagraph essay. Never mind that while practicing, toggling back to the articles caused the students’ written work on the essay to be erased (lost).

Williams goes on to challenge the exams' validity on every level:

1) There is no proven Construct Validity (does your test measure what you think it measures). 

2) Cut scores are determined by an unknown (arbitrary) process - labeling children as proficient or failing appears to not be based on any scientific process.  It is not scientific to arbitrarily decide what levels of your test scores actually mean in the real world.  Scientific measurement requires cross-validation with external measures that provide evidence for your claims (like grades, or independent in-depth measures of children’s educational achievement in a a smaller sample with highly experienced evaluators). 

3) Computer adaptive tests - there have been many concerns raised about how item difficulty has been decided. Children continue to progress on these tests if they continue to get a certain number the most recent answers correct. Educational measurement specialists (true academically trained professionals) and parents and children have observed that very often items following very difficult questions are significantly easier. This raises concerns that children’s scores are artificially deflated by unscientifically determined item difficulty determinations. 

4) Inter-rater reliability - No checks exist to independently determine whether the scoring administered by these testing companies has truly reliable and valid measurements of children’s answers... The assessments are not verifiable, because they are not permitted to be subject to independent scientific evaluation.

This last point is especially troubling.  Anything we get to hear about the exam content has to be "leaked," because the people who see the exams are prohibited from discussing them.  This mandate comes not from state Departments of Education, but from Pearson Education, the corporation who designs the tests.  Educator Elizabeth Phillips, in an op-ed piece for The New York Times, writes:

I’d like to tell you what was wrong with the tests my students took last week, but I can’t. Pearson’s $32 million contract with New York State to design the exams prohibits the state from making the tests public and imposes a gag order on educators who administer them.  So teachers watched hundreds of thousands of children in grades 3 to 8 sit for between 70 and 180 minutes per day for three days taking a state English Language Arts exam that does a poor job of testing reading comprehension, and yet we’re not allowed to point out what the problems were.

But some educators care more about their students than they do about threats of repercussions by a rich corporation who is pulling the strings of upper-level administration in every state in the United States... and those educators have uncovered some frightening facts.  For example, a teacher who (understandably) wants to remain anonymous performed a reading-level analysis on a passage from the 4th grade ELA assessment, and found that it had a lexile score of 1140 -- corresponding to appropriateness for the average reading ability of an 8th grader.

The skew between the difficulty level of the exam material, and the grade for which it was targeted, prompted New York educator Stephanie Santagada to write a letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo using vocabulary culled directly from the 4th, 6th, and 8th grade reading assessments:

There is a man in Albany, who I surmise, by his clamorous paroxysms, has an extreme aversion to educators.  He sees teachers as curs, or likens them to mangy dogs.  Methinks he suffers from a rare form of psychopathology in which he absconds with our dignity by enacting laws counterintuitive to the orthodoxy of educational leadership.  We have given him sufferance for far too long.  He’s currently taking a circuitous path to DC, but he will no doubt soon find himself in litigious waters.  The time has come to bowdlerize his posits, send him many furlongs away, and maroon him there, maybe Cuba?

So yeah, I'm beginning to think there's more here than simple incompetence.  The people in charge are not stupid, and one thing these people excel at is number crunching.  I flatly refuse to believe that the inclusion of a passage that is four grade levels too hard in the ELA assessment was a simple blunder.  Which leads us into into some scary territory, because that implies that the other problems may not be accidents, either.

But why would Federal and State Departments of Education, with the collusion of a lot of elected officials like our own aforementioned governor, do this?  Cuomo himself tipped their hand earlier this year, when he said that he wanted to change the teacher evaluation system -- because too many teachers were achieving high scores by the previous metric.

So the reason for all this, I believe, is that the powers-that-be are deliberately setting students up to fail, in order to show up public education itself as a failure -- in an effort to destroy the entire edifice. Replacing it, more than likely, with a network of charter schools that are run by privately-chosen (i.e. not elected) boards, and which will have a vested interest in buying in to programs, curricula, and assessments created by for-profit corporations like Pearson.

The whole thing, I think, boils down to money, and who is lining whose pockets.  So in the end, it does turn out to be venial motives -- greed and political power.

I could be wrong.  It might be that what we're looking at is the educational equivalent of the Keystone Kops, running around frantically and bonking into walls and falling over.  That's certainly what it looked like at first.  But now, with the time we've had to smooth over problems, develop exams, streamline administration, we shouldn't be seeing these kind of mistakes.  Giving so many tests might still be a mistake, of course; but the fact that the exams themselves are so deeply, fundamentally, and obviously flawed, coupled with the gag order against discussing them, has the hallmark of deliberate downward manipulation of the scores.

Which means that it is even more important for parents to defy the threats, and opt their children out, and for educators to come forward with the content and administration problems of the exams themselves.

Public education itself might be at stake.

Redemption, retribution, and justice

Yesterday, on an island in Indonesia, at midnight local time and 1 PM Eastern Standard Time, eight men were brought out into a wooded grove one at a time and were executed by a firing squad.  Each one was given the choice of whether to sit or stand, and to have a hood, a blindfold, or nothing at all.  All eight chose nothing, and to look the members of the firing squad in the eye as they died.  Three of the eight executioners had live ammo in their guns; the other five had blanks.  No one knew which guns were which.

When the prisoner was ready, the firing squad took aim at the man's heart.  The command to fire was given, and seconds later, the condemned man was dead.

The crime the eight committed was possession of drugs with the intent to distribute.  Two were members of the infamous "Bali 9" drug trafficking ring.  Each had been caught entering the country with heroin or cocaine.  Four of the men were from Nigeria, two from Australia, one from Brazil, and one from Indonesia.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Most, if not all, of the men had experienced significant personal changes during their four-year stay in prison, while their cases dragged through appeal after appeal.  One, Australian Myuran Sukumaran, spent his time painting; his final paintings were of a heart, and a haunting self-portrait with a black hole in the center of the chest.  The other Australian, Andrew Chan, and one of the Nigerians, Okwudili Ayotanze, became well known for offering solace and counsel to their fellow prisoners.  All appeared completely repentant for what they had done.

Further complicating matters, the Brazilian, Rodrigo Gularte, was a diagnosed schizophrenic, who thought animals could talk back to him and believed that electromagnetic waves were controlling his behavior.

The whole thing brings up a lot of questions about why the judicial system works as it does.  Why do we imprison, and in some cases execute, people who have broken the law?  It seems to me that there are three answers to this question -- and they lead to different answers regarding how we should treat criminal cases.

The first is that justice is retributive.  Some of the oldest known codes of law, such as the Code of Hammurabi, are retributive in nature.  If you cause someone to lose a hand, you should lose your hand.  The basic logic is payback; "you deserved everything you got."

The second is to protect society.  By this standard, two people who commit the same crime should be treated differently depending on how much of a subsequent threat each one represents.  And this is considered in sentencing, at least in the United States; someone who is likely to commit further crimes is often given a harsher sentence.

The third is to set an example.  "See what happened?" this standard says.  "You don't want this to happen to you."  It was for this reason that floggings and executions used to be conducted in public, often in the middle of the town square.  Such events were often widely attended, as peculiar as that may seem to modern sensibilities.  The last public hanging in the United States, of rapist/murderer Rainey Bethea, was attended by 20,000, and was such a media circus that the decision was made to conduct executions behind closed doors from then on.

All of which demands that we consider how to deal with cases of serious crimes.  What the eight men  did was terrible; heroin and cocaine are horrible chemicals that destroy lives.  From the standpoint of retribution, the sentence was fair.  And the publicity surrounding the case certainly should act as a deterrent; no one could fail to be moved by the photographs of the hysterical family members of the executed men, and it's hard to imagine anyone considering bringing drugs into Indonesia not being given pause.

But there are still questions.  If the idea of justice is to safeguard society, the focus should be on rehabilitation, not retribution.  From what I've read, certainly Chan and Sukumaran were rehabilitated, and not only would have been unlikely to do anything of the sort again, but might well have been powerful spokesmen against the illegal drug trade.  Apparently a change of heart is what saved Malaysian drug trafficker Yong Vui Kong from being hanged in Singapore; his sentence was changed to life in prison and fifteen strokes of the cane because he had "seen the error of his ways and had repented."

As far as rehabilitation goes, however, you have to wonder how effective that usually is even in non-capital cases.  Recidivism rates are sky-high.  A study by the National Institute of Justice of over 404,000 prisoners in the United States found that 76.6% of them were re-arrested within five years, over half of those arrests occurring within the first year after release.

Add to this the fact that the execution of drug traffickers has barely put a dent in the Southeast Asian drug trade; the region is the second biggest producer of heroin in the world (after Afghanistan).  And the people most often caught are the couriers, who are usually young, poor, and desperate.  The kingpins, the ones who are controlling the operations and getting rich from the profits, are seldom ever brought to justice.

None of that mattered.  Indonesian President Joko Widodo said from the beginning that there would be no clemency granted.  And there wasn't.

I'm not sure why this case resonated so strongly with me.  I was fairly certain what the outcome would be, so it wasn't over any particular curiosity over what would happen.  I think it may have been the personal angle -- I read articles containing interviews with Chan's girlfriend, whom he married a few months ago while he was already in prison.  I saw galleries of Sukumaran's paintings.  I read the statements by the lawyers of the eight prisoners and the pleas by leaders of their home countries to spare them.  I thought about the ethics of executing someone like Rodrigo Gularte, who had a serious mental illness.

And yesterday, while I was teaching my Critical Thinking class, eight men halfway around the world were shot through the heart.  In the final analysis, I have no real idea whether this was just or unjust, ethical or unethical.  Nor can I decide whether President Widodo should have considered any other factors in his decision to allow the executions to proceed.

All I can say is that I'm glad that I will never be in a position to make such a judgment.