The inner voice

Like most of us, I have a constant narrator in my head.

My narrator isn't nearly as sensible and coherent as the one Will Ferrell's character heard in the wonderful movie Stranger than Fiction; he heard someone describing his actions, in detail, as he performed them.  (I won't give away any more of the plot than that; you really should watch the movie, which is brilliant, and has killer performances not only by Ferrell, but by Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, and Queen Latifah.)

My internal monologue sounds more like a three-year-old with serious ADHD and the vocabulary of a sailor.  Here's a small sample of my brain chatter from this morning:  "I'm hungry... I've got to write my Skepto post first... wow!  Full moon! Cool!  Let the dogs out first...  I'm still tired... Fuck, now the dogs want back in!... Better get writing...  I'm hungry..."  And so on, and so forth, every waking hour of the day.

No wonder I'm an insomniac, with that nitwit babbling in my skull nonstop.

I've wondered at times if there was a way to get the internal voice to quiet down.  Or at least slow down.  In my several relatively unsuccessful attempts to learn to meditate, I found that if anything, my mental monologue gets louder and more insistent the quieter my surroundings are.  A Buddhist friend who is an advanced student of meditation has said to me, "When you have thoughts, let them flow through your brain and out, without judging.  Just watch them go by."

The problem is, there's always one more frenetic utterance following, and then another, and another.  This flow isn't a murmuring brook, it's Niagara Falls.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So it was with some astonishment that I read that our internal monologues might be part of how our brains shape our sense of self.  Recent research seems to indicate that without it, we are completely severed from our personhood, left unmoored, without a way to anchor our consciousness to our surroundings.

The whole thing is the subject of a 2015 film by Guillermo F. Flórez called Speechless, which investigates the lives of three stroke victims who have developed some form of aphasia, a loss of the ability to speak coherently.  One of them, Tinna Phillips, was fluent in six languages -- but suffered a stroke in her 30s that left her with Broca's aphasia, the inability to string words together into sensible sentences.    Even now, almost twenty years later, she still has trouble expressing herself.  "I cried inside, because I cannot communicate," Phillips said.  "My mom, others, Chinese!  I don’t know.  Is not communicate, nothing.  I, six languages, gone!"

What is even more remarkable about Phillips's case, however, is that the stroke completely stopped her internal monologue.  Where once she had the random thought patterns we all have, now she has... silence.  And that silence has in a deep fashion divided her from the context in which she lives her life.

We talk to ourselves, American philosopher Jerry Fodor says, to create an internal representation of our world, and without that, it's difficult to function.  "There is a gap between the mind and the world, " he writes, "and (as far as anybody knows) you need to posit internal representations if you are to have a hope of getting across it.  Mind the gap.  You’ll regret it if you don't."

Psychologist Alain Morin goes even further.  He writes, [I]nner speech is the main cognitive process leading to self-awareness.  That is, self-talk allows us to verbally identify and process information about our current mental experiences (e.g., emotions, thoughts, attitudes, goals, motives, sensations) and other personal characteristics such as personality traits, behavior, and appearance.  At an even higher level, I suggest that our internal dialogue is also what makes us aware of our own existence: 'I’m alive and well; I’m a unique person with an identity; I have goals, aspirations, and values.'"

As far as what its ultimate purpose is, Morin speculates that it has something to do with recognizing our own personhood and continually evaluating and reevaluating our own place in the social milieu.  Inner speech makes it possible to communicate and develop a relationship with ourselves.  "We can talk to ourselves as if we were speaking to someone else," he writes.  "In this process we can reproduce for ourselves appraisals we get from others.  For example, we can say to ourselves 'You’re very strong,'emotional, lazy,' etc., 'Why did you do this?  Because…', 'You take yourself way too seriously!', 'I feel anxious', and so on.  Talking to ourselves that way most certainly makes us self-aware and helps us identify self-information."

Which is fascinating.  I wonder how animals without spoken language see the world, and their place within it.  Do dogs have a sense of self?  Do dolphins?  How can you encode your world without language?  Our understanding of ourselves and our context is so tightly tied up in language, both internal and external, that it's hard to imagine even having thoughts without their being embedded in words.

So as annoying as my inner voice is, I suppose it's better to have it than not.  I just hope that my monologue's neurotic nature isn't equally evident in my external personality, although that would explain why I so seldom get invited to parties.

And now I need to go eat something, because I'm tired of hearing "I'm hungry" over and over.

The Children's Guide to Nonsense

Two weeks ago I wrote a post suggesting that people who have any concern for the promotion of quality information about how the world works should boycott The History Channel until it stops claiming that shows like MonsterQuest have the least thing to do with reality.

This post prompted a number of emails and comments, which can be distilled down to (1) there's nothing wrong with entertainment, (2) THC is not trying to convince anyone who isn't already convinced, and (3) lighten the hell up.  The number of responses I got along those lines made me wonder for a while if maybe I was taking the whole thing a little too seriously.

Until I read a post a couple of days ago on Jason Colavito's wonderful blog, entitled "History Channel Official 'Ancient Aliens' Guide for Children, Teaches Kids Aliens Are Behind Everything."

I don't want to steal Colavito's thunder, and all of you should check out his post, which is spot-on.  But the gist is that THC has released a book called The Young Investigator’s Guide to Ancient Aliens: Based on the Hit Television Series.  The Amazon page for the book describes it thusly:

As a tie-in to the wildly successful History Channel show, perfect for young readers, here's a book filled with fascinating tales, ancient folklore, and compelling evidence of the role extraterrestrials may have played in human history. 

What really happened to the dinosaurs? Who actually built the ancient pyramids in Egypt? Are airplanes really as modern as we think they are? This book takes a close look at landmark events throughout history and asks the question: What if aliens were involved? 

Spanning history, from the earliest of human civilizations to the modern period, this book exposes evidence of the presence of extraterrestrials in some of our most triumphant and devastating moments.

Entertainment, my ass.  This is a calculated effort to catch children while they're young and naïve, and convince them that a zero-evidence pile of horse waste actually has legitimate standing in the world of science.

I was heartened, however, to see that The Young Investigator's Guide has thus far received five reviews, all one-star.  Here's a sampling of the comments from the reviews:

Keep this toxic claptrap away from children. 

The War On Science is fought on several fronts, from the schools of red state America to our television screens.  'The History Channel' is contributing to this as it debases the meaning of the word 'History' into anything it thinks will sell no matter what the consequences. 

This has to be considered an extension of the mind-numbing influence of ratings-driven TV.  Ratings-driven TV exists as a money sucking virus seeking viewers at all cost.  It doesn't exist to educate or enlighten, to make things better or to warn us about shams and fiction posing as fact.  It exists only to promote an uncritical passive hoard of watchers who predictably consume what is offered in the commercials.  It dumbs us down to serve corporate agendas. 

Will we soon be selling electronic editions of "The Little Holocaust Deniers' Guide to the Early 1940s"?

To which I can only add: Huzzah.

Lest you feel too optimistic, however, Colavito points out that the Toronto Public Library System purchased 31 copies of the book, to make sure that several of the 23 libraries in the system had more than one copy.  Not to mention the fact that it's shelved under "nonfiction."

The whole problem here, of course, is that this sort of thing is like a gateway drug to woo-woo.  You hear the "what's the harm?" argument come up, over and over again, with respect to ideas like Ancient Aliens, Astrology, the Tarot, and so on.  And the direct harm is certainly to nothing more than your pocketbook.  But there's a more subtle reason to fight pseudoscience; accepting an idea on anything other than the standards of scientific evidence establishes a habit of uncritical thinking.  If you're willing to buy into nonsense like this based on an I Want To Believe attitude and very little else, what's to stop you from accepting other unscientific ideas that do cause direct harm -- homeopathy, anti-vaxx, climate change denial, and so on?

In any case, check out Colavito's take on the whole thing, which is well worth reading.  And to the "it's just entertainment" crowd; maybe you should give some second thoughts to how insidious a non-scientific approach to the world can be.

Tinfoil hat upgrade

Are you concerned about being abducted by aliens, especially considering the inevitable result of being strapped down naked to an examining table and probed in ways you'd prefer not to think about?

You, apparently, are not alone.  And a fellow named Michael Menkin has done something about it.

He has invented a hat that stops the aliens from being able to get in touch with your brain.

So what we have here is a higher-tech version of taking a couple of sheets of Reynolds Wrap and smooshing it over your head.  It's a tight-fitting cap made of Velostat, which I had never heard of before, but which Wikipedia explained was "a packaging material made of a polymeric foil (polyolefines) impregnated with carbon black to make it electrically conductive."  The stuff looks, from the photographs, a little like Naugahyde.

Which means that the photographs of people wearing the things look like they're wearing a beanie made from a 1970s loveseat.  (I'd include some photographs here, except for the fact that there's a big "COPYRIGHTED ALL RIGHTS RESERVED" caption attached to them.  However, don't miss out -- you must go to the website and look at the pictures, but I'll warn you not to attempt to drink anything while doing so.  I will not be held responsible for damage to your computer that occurs if you do not follow this advice.)

Laugh all you want, Menkin tells us, there are more important things to worry about than looking silly:

The "thought screen helmet" is our only defense in a "telepathic war."  I call this device a "thought screen helmet" because it prevents aliens from performing any kind of mental control over us.  It blocks out all alien thought so humans can no longer be manipulated or controlled, and it prevents aliens from completing mental communication with us so people cannot be abducted.

So let me get this straight.  Aliens come across the galaxy, in faster-than-light spacecrafts powered by unimaginably complicated technology, intent on kidnapping a few humans, and they're defeated by... a hat?

And apparently hats aren't the only things the aliens can't figure out:

Aliens have taken ten helmets from abductees and several Velostat lined baseball caps.  If you are not wearing a hat they will go through your entire house looking for them. They will not, however, go into a locked cabinet.  Before you make a helmet have some kind of cabinet or trunk that you can lock. That way they won’t take it. 

All thought is open and controlled in a telepathic society therefore locks are unnecessary.   Aliens are unfamiliar with locks and the concept of a lock.

So, let's see... aliens can be defeated by hats, locks, and... string:

Almost any kind of tape or string wrapped around the helmet several times will prevent aliens from removing the helmet if they manage to get close to you.

And if the hats, locks, and string aren't enough, you'll have to resort to harsher measures -- like Axe Body Spray:

Several abductees report that aliens do not like perfume.  One abductee claims that they stopped an abduction by exposing strong cheap perfume to aliens.

I dunno.  These are beginning to sound like some pretty inept aliens.  These sound like somehow the cast of Gilligan's Island learned how to drive a spaceship, and are now bumbling around like buffoons, running into each other and dropping coconuts on the Skipper's toes.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I went through this website for nearly an hour, looking for any sign that these people are joking.  Tragically, it appears that they're are completely serious.  There's even a testimonials page, wherein we hear glowing reviews like the following:

“I am happy to report that the Thought Screen Helmet has been performing beautifully!   It’s been over six months now and NOT ONE INCIDENT! Aside from some of the naive neighborhood kids and their taunting it’s been a blissful period.”

"The hat and helmet work very well and I have experience much relief wearing them.  I am however, surprised that the aliens have not found a way to thwart this simple but effective technology.  At any rate I am very happy with mine and thank you again for your work." 

“Still nothing new to report here...so it must work!”

Yup!  The only possible explanation for nothing happening is that the hat you're wearing is blocking alien telepathic signals.

Anyhow.  I might make myself a hat at some point, because the website gives step-by-step instructions, and supposedly the whole thing costs less than $45.  On the other hand, I doubt that the hat will block sarcastic comments from my wife, which is honestly much more of a concern to me than being abducted by aliens.  So maybe I'm just as well off going back to tinfoil.

Doomed to repeat

This weekend, I inadvertently started an online argument about the Syrian refugees.

I rarely get involved in political discussions online (or anywhere else) because of this very thing.  It's the most fruitless of pursuits, really; it usually accomplishes nothing but eliciting shouts of acclamation from the people who already agree with you, and snorts of derision from the people who don't.

In other words, nothing.

I got the ball rolling by comparing the plight of the refugees, and the reluctance of the United States government to give them asylum, to the attitudes of the majority of English policymakers during the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-19th century, and the blocking of Jews before World War II trying to flee Germany into the Netherlands (and from the Netherlands and elsewhere into the United States).  Some of you may not know that Anne Frank and her family applied for, and were denied, passage into the United States in 1940 -- a move that would have saved their lives.

Well, that was apparently pasting a bullseye on my chest.  How dare I compare the Syrian refugees to the Jews?  The situation is completely different.  Plus, you know, those people want to kill us.  They are uniformly hostile to the United States and everything we stand for, so we're right to deny them entry.

So I thought it was time to set aside my reluctance to discuss political matters, and offer a little history lesson.  I have pulled some quotes, all from primary sources, that refer either to the Irish during the Potato Famine, the Jews prior to World War II, or the Syrian refugees now.  See if you can tell them apart.  (The only editing I did was to remove obvious giveaway references.)

1. The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach [them] a lesson, and that calamity must not be too much mitigated. … The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil... but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of those people.
2. [They are] more like squalid apes than human beings... Only efficient military despotism [can succeed in this situation], because [they] understand only force.
3. It is probably unwise to say this loudly... but [this situation] is and has been since its beginning guided and controlled by [people] of the greasiest type, who have... absorbed every one of the worst phases of our civilization without having the least understanding of what we really mean by liberty.
4. Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity.  Every problem that has arisen can be traced back to our departure from God’s Law and the disenfranchisement of White men.  And our current actions serve no purpose but to depart even further from those.
5. [They] can go [back home] and stew in their own juice.  The rest had better stop being what they are, and start being human beings.
6. It looks like to me if shooting these immigrating feral hogs works, maybe we have found a [solution] to our... problem.
7. I see no solution to the... problem short of expelling all followers of the religion from the United States.
8. [They] could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of.  As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence.
9. A policy that will not kill more than one million [of them]... will scarcely be enough to do any good.
10. [They] are a cancer that must be cut out of our society, whose goal is the destruction of civilization from within.
11. [They] hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion.  This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with [our] character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry.  Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.
12. When neighborhoods are occupied by [these people], they establish their own laws and don't respect our own. 

Ready for the answers?

1. The Irish.  Charles Trevelyan, head of the English Administration for Famine Relief, 1845.
2. The Irish.  James Anthony Froude, professor of history, Oxford University, 1860.
3. The Jews.  General Montgomery Schuyler, 1919.
4. Syrian refugees.  Representative Don Davis of North Carolina.
5. The Jews.  George Bernard Shaw, 1932.
6. Syrian refugees.  Representative Virgil Peck of Kansas.
7. Syrian refugees.  Representative Charlie Fuqua of Arkansas.
8. The Jews.  H. L. Mencken, 1930.
9. The Irish.  Nassau Senior, chief economist to Queen Victoria.
10. Syrian refugees.  Representative John Bennett of Oklahoma.
11. The Irish.  Benjamin Disraeli, 1878.
12. Syrian refugees.  Representative Carl Gatto of Alaska.

If you're curious, the sources of the quotes can be found here for the Irish Potato Famine, here for the pre-war antisemitism, and here for the rhetoric against Muslim immigration.

Only the details change.  The hate speech, the fear and loathing of the "other," the wild claims that those people are trying to destroy our society, all stay the same.

It doesn't even seem to do any good to point out how many of the refugees are children or the elderly.  It doesn't help if you tell people that none of the Paris attackers were Syrian -- every last one of them was a citizen of the E.U.  Nor were any of the 9/11 bombers Syrian.

None of that matters.  They may look like starving, homeless refugees, but they're still implacably hostile to us.  You know how They are.

It's just that every generation has a different They.

I will end with a quote from the great Elie Wiesel.  As a survivor of the concentration camps during World War II, he has as good a reason as any to give in to hate, fear, and intolerance.  Instead, here are his words on the subject.

Opening the door to the Chinese Room

The idea of artificial intelligence terrifies a lot of people.

The reasons for this fear vary.  Some are repelled by the thought that our mental processes could be emulated in a machine. Others worry that if we do develop AI, it will rise up and overthrow us, à la The Matrix.  Still others are convinced that humans have something that is inherently unrepresentable -- a heart, a soul, perhaps even simply consciousness -- so any machine that appeared to be intelligent and human-like would only be a clever replica.

The people who believe that human intelligence will never be emulated in a machine usually fall back on something like the John Searle's "Chinese Room Analogy" as an argument.  Searle, an American philosopher, has said that computers are simply string-conversion devices; they take an input string, manipulate it in some completely predictable way, and then create an output string which they then give you.  What they do is analogous to someone sitting in a locked room with a Chinese-English dictionary who is given a string of Chinese text, and uses the dictionary to convert it to English.  There is no true understanding; it's mere symbol manipulation.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There are two significant problems with Searle's Chinese Room.  One is the question of whether our brains themselves aren't simply string-conversion devices.  Vastly more sophisticated ones, of course; but given our brain chemistry and wiring at a given moment, it's far from a settled question whether our neural networks aren't reacting in a completely deterministic fashion.

The second, of course, is the problem that even though the woman in the Chinese Room starts out being a simple string-converter, if she keeps doing it long enough, eventually she will learn Chinese.  At that point there will be understanding going on.

Yes, says Searle, but that's because she has a human brain, which can do more than a computer can.  A machine could never abstract a language, or anything of the sort, without having explicit programming -- lists of vocabulary, syntax rules, morphological structure -- to go by.  Humans learn language starting with a highly receptive tabula rasa that is unlike anything that could be emulated in a computer.

Which was true, until this month.

A team of researchers at the University of Sassari (Italy) and the University of Plymouth (UK) have devised a network of two million interconnected artificial neurons that is capable of learning language "organically" -- starting with nothing, and using only communication with a human interlocutor as input.  Called ANNABELL (Artificial Neural Network with Adaptive Behavior Exploited for Language Learning), this network is capable of doing what AI people call "bootstrapping" or "recursive self-improvement" -- it begins with only a capacity for plasticity and improves its understanding as it goes, a feature that up till now has been considered by some to be impossible to achieve.

Bruno Golosio, head of the team that created ANNABELL, writes:

ANNABELL does not have pre-coded language knowledge; it learns only through communication with a human interlocutor, thanks to two fundamental mechanisms, which are also present in the biological brain: synaptic plasticity and neural gating.  Synaptic plasticity is the ability of the connection between two neurons to increase its efficiency when the two neurons are often active simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously.  This mechanism is essential for learning and for long-term memory.  Neural gating mechanisms are based on the properties of certain neurons (called bistable neurons) to behave as switches that can be turned "on" or "off" by a control signal coming from other neurons.  When turned on, the bistable neurons transmit the signal from a part of the brain to another, otherwise they block it.  The model is able to learn, due to synaptic plasticity, to control the signals that open and close the neural gates, so as to control the flow of information among different areas.

Which in my mind blows a neat hole in the contention that the human mind has some je ne sais quoi that will never be copied in a mechanical device.  This simple model (and compared to an actual brain, it is rudimentary, however impressive Golosio's team's achievement is) is doing precisely what an infant's brain does when it learns language -- taking in input, abstracting rules, and adjusting as it goes so that it improves over time.

Myself, I think this is awesome.  I'm not particularly concerned about machines taking over the world -- for one thing, a typical human brain has about 100 billion neurons, so to have something that really could emulate anything a human could do would take scaling up ANNABELL by a factor of 50,000.  (That's assuming that an intelligent mind couldn't operate out of a brain that was more compact and efficient, which is certainly a possibility.)  I also don't think it's demeaning to humans that we may be "nothing more than meat machines," as one biologist put it.  This doesn't diminish our own personal capacity for experience, it just means that we're built from the same stuff as the rest of the universe.

Which is sort of cool.

Anyhow, what Golosio et al. have done is only the beginning of what appears to be a quantum leap in AI research.  As I've said many times, and about many things; I can't imagine what wonders await in the future.

Food fight

There's a logical fallacy I've seen a lot lately.  It's called argumentum ad Monsantum (also known as argumentum ad Hitlerum).  The idea is that you can immediately cast doubt on the motives of a person or organization if you compare them to, or (worse) claim they got their ideas from, a stand-in for The Boogeyman.  Monsanto, Hitler, communists, Muslims, whatever one seems apt at the time.

Of course, this boils down to lazy thinking, which most of the fallacies do.

What's rather maddening about this is that the opposite can happen, too.  Give something an association with a name that's considered positive, and you automatically reap the benefits of a reflected glow of goodness, whether or not it's deserved.

You could call this the Compare-Yourelf-To-Mother-Teresa-And-Declare-Victory ploy.

The argumentum ad Monsantum strategy has been much used in the fight against GMOs, since Monsanto has been heavily involved in developing genetically modified crops for years.  How anyone who has even a smidgen of a background in science can fall for this is beyond me; comparing RoundUp-Ready Wheat with late blight-resistant potatoes makes no sense from any standpoint, from effects on human health to ecological impact.  (Consider that the former results in an increase in the use of chemical pesticides, and the latter decreases it.)

Saying that all GMOs are bad is, in fact, precisely equivalent to claiming that all genes do the same thing.

[image courtesy of photographer Elina Mark and the Wikimedia Commons]

What's wryly amusing about this is that the opposite side of the same coin -- the word organic -- is maybe not as squeaky-clean as it's been billed.  The reputation of organic produce for containing less in the way of Nasty Chemicals is apparently ill-deserved, considering a story by David Zaruk over at The Risk-Monger that revealed a startling fact -- that organic farmers in the United States are certified to use three thousand substances that are designated as toxic, and that are considered acceptable purely because they're "natural."

Copper sulfate, used as a fungicide, is highly toxic to fish, and is completely non-biodegradable.  Pyrethrin and azadirachtin (neem oil), insecticides that come from plants and therefore are somehow thought to be better than synthetics, are lethal to honeybees and carcinogenic in humans.  Rotenone, from the leafy parts of the jicama plant, kills damn near everything you put it on.

Also on the list is nicotine.  Made, presumably, from all-natural, organic, health-supporting tobacco plants.

Worse still, once produce is certified organic, it bypasses any kind of requirement for pesticide residue testing.  Because organic produce isn't supposed to have any pesticides on it, right?

Of course right.

Monsanto = bad.  GMO = bad.  Organic = good.  All a way to give yourself a nice warm feeling of being socially and environmentally responsible, not to mention healthy, and then to stop thinking.  Myself, I would rather the responsible use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, which comes along with mountains of information on hazards and requirements for residue testing, than giving free rein to people who believe that Natural Must Mean Good For You.

Now, don't get me wrong; I think that a lot of the organic food movement is driven by the right motives.  Creating our food with as little negative environmental impact as possible, and producing food that is healthy and nutritious, are certainly goals to be lauded.  What is unclear is whether the rules governing organic food production as they now exist are meeting those goals.

But the beat goes on, which is why there was an apparently serious article over at The Organic Authority wherein we learn that artist and practitioner of magic Steven Leyba is mounting a one-man campaign against Monsanto, spurred by his own personal health experiences:

In 2010 I had been overweight and decided to get healthy.  I started eating large amounts of fruits and vegetables from my local grocery store.  I got sick and that was the time I found out about GMOs.  I was appalled.  I couldn’t understand why I would get so sick by eating what I thought was so healthy.  When I switched to organic food I got healthy again.

And since anecdote with a sample size of one is apparently data, Leyba decided to take matters into his own hands, and is launching a magic spell against Monsanto:

Death curses work like any manifestation of will like Gestalt psychology; you visualize and act in accordance and at some point what you can conceive and believe you can achieve.  Medicine men practice this and even medical doctors to some extent practice this.  They plant suggestions in people’s minds for healing and those people start to do things that promote their own healing.  For me I see a great need to identify the cancer (Monsanto and Nestlé) and attack with full force and mirror back this so-called Black Magic they are doing to all of us.

So he made a book full of disturbing imagery that includes demented portraits of executives who work for Monsanto, and also Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who worked as an attorney for Monsanto in the 1970s.  

"I encourage everyone to Death Curse Monsanto and Nestlé," Leyba says.  "Justifiable Death Curses are effective on many levels, fun, cathartic... and completely legal."

Article author Jill Ettinger, far from casting a wry eye at Leyba's Eye Of Newt approach to taking down Monsanto, seems to think it's a great idea.  And given the recent push in the United States for mandatory labeling of GMOs, "it may just be working," she says.

No harm, I suppose, if it amuses him.  But wouldn't it be better to learn some actual science, rather than giving in to fear talk and ignorance?  Not to mention (literal) magical thinking?

The world is complex, and when the motives of people and corporations get involved, it becomes even worse.  It'd be nice if categorical thinking really worked.  The difficult truth is, if you want to give yourself the best shot at making smart choices for yourself, both with respect to your personal health and the environmental impact, there's no substitute for bypassing the hype on both sides and understanding the reality beneath it all.

A war over textbooks

Yesterday a cousin of mine sent me a link wherein I learned that this week the Texas State Board of Education voted down a resolution that would allow academics to fact-check public school textbooks.

Yes, you read that right.  (1) It was a debate in the first place, and (2) they voted it down.  The vote was 8-7, I'll admit; but why it wasn't passed 15-0, with a corollary of "Duh" added to it, is absolutely mind boggling.

Board member Thomas Ratliff was one of the ones who voted for it.  "I know people are concerned about pointy-headed liberals in the ivory tower making our process different or worse," Ratliff said.  "But I hold our institutions of higher education in fairly high regard."

Whoo!  That's some serious high praise for academics, right there, and that was from a guy who supported the resolution.  "Them goddamn pointy-headed ivory-tower liberals in them thar colleges, they's maybe not so bad.  I s'pose."

This throws textbook review back on "citizen review panels" made up of teachers, parents, and business leaders to fact-check the books that are being used to educate our children.  The same system, allow me to point out, that approved a history text that called African slaves "workers," as if recruiters had gone over to West Africa in the 1700s with fliers that said, "Great job opportunities in the New World!  Get in on the ground floor of a booming agricultural industry!  Awesome fringe benefits!  Flexible hours!"

As a nod to getting people on the panels that actually know what the fuck they're talking about, the Board unanimously approved a measure to make sure that "at least a majority of the members have sufficient content expertise and experience."

Like that is an innovative approach.

Board member Marty Rowley said, "I think we're making it stronger and better and more expert than in the past."

This is the same Board of Education who made education "more expert" last year by including a statement in the standard for American history that required students to "identify the individuals whose principles of laws and government institutions informed the American founding documents, including those of Moses," and mandated that they learn "the role of Biblical law in the writing of the Constitution."

No wonder they don't want any academics in there messin' with the textbooks.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Roy White, chairman of a group called "Truth in Texas Textbooks," was delighted with the outcome of the vote.  The review panels don't need a bunch of university professors stepping in and taking over, and the issue with the African "workers" was an honest oversight.  "You got humans involved, there are going to be some errors," White said.

I'm sorry, that's not an error.  This is not a misspelled word.  Whoever wrote that passage knew precisely what (s)he was doing.  This was a deliberate attempt to introduce political spin into public school history textbooks, and more specifically to de-emphasize the role that white slave owners in the pre-Civil War South had in one of the biggest, most systematic state-sponsored human rights abuses the world has ever seen.

Nope.  Can't have that ol' Confederate flag get any bad press, even if it means weaving an implicit lie into the books used in history classrooms.

Kathy Miller, of the watchdog group Texas Freedom Network, was less sanguine.  "With all the controversies that have made textbook adoptions in Texas look like a clown show, it's mindboggling and downright embarrassing that the board voted this down," Miller said.  She also pointed out that of the hundred people who were appointed to review history texts in Texas last year, only three were actual historians -- and one was a retired used car salesman who was running for political office.

The scariest thing is that because of Texas's large population and policy of state-wide textbook adoption, their standards for textbook content tend to drive the nation.  Publishers understandably don't want to have to print up a Texas edition of a book and an Everybody Else in the US edition, so the Texas edition often ends up being the one that is available nationwide.  The "workers" issue, and flak over science textbooks that gave short shrift to climate change and evolution (and gave students the incorrect impression that there's any significant questioning among scientists over either one), has put pressure on the publishing companies -- who are therefore caught right in the middle of the controversy.

The whole thing is, bottom to top, appalling.  The idea that a majority of the board that oversees education for an entire state thinks that a "citizen review panel" is going to be better at fact-checking biology textbooks than someone with a Ph.D. in biology.  The generalized distrust these people evidently have for anyone who actually knows what they're talking about.  The patently obvious ideological motivation for the whole thing, which is to push a conservative, nationalist, Christian agenda into public schools.

And with this week's vote, they're apparently going to get away with it.