Saturday, June 30, 2007

We Shall Not See Their Like Again

Another of those has passed who struggled in the giant conflagration of World War II, in which I was born too young to remember, but which has marked us all. Charles Lindberg, a Marine who was part of the group to raise the original flag on Mt. Suribachi, died June 24th in a hospital near Minneapolis.
Since it seems like a good time to thank the Marines for all they've done for this country, and it may be better to be specific, I'll use the closest Marine to me. Thanks, Dad:

1st Lt. John Avelis (1918-1979), USMCR, pilot, Marine bomber squadron VMB-413. Flew 44 missions against Rabaul and Munda in the Solomons, 1943-44. Awarded Air Medal w/six clusters and Distinguished Flying Cross.

Friday, June 29, 2007

My Choice

People love to write about the end of the world and its causes: fire, ice, bangs, whimpers.....and it looks like we have another contender.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Anybody You Know?

Here's this week's "Neanderthal Dad at Little League Game." You've probably never seen this....unless you've had any kids go through the array of kiddie sports, and then it's got to happen some time. Ours went through Tee-Ball, which is OK, too early to bring out the cave dweller, but Little League'll do it, every time. Makes a fellow proud to be swimming in the same gene pool. Wait! Maybe not....you've had enough time to look at him. Closest relative? I'll go with Jabba the Hutt.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

A Show of Hands.......

.....to indicate how many people are really surprised by this: only 24% of those Americans polled indicated any interest in public or alternative transportation if gas prices continue to rise. Also, half of all drivers are driving vehicles that get less than 20 mpg. Ditto, and so much for fuel efficiency.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Hughes the prophet

Here's another contemporary example of how Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaint has become institutionalized, to the point where we accept the constant background whining over trivia as the obbligato to our faltering society. Can anyone give a reason why the U.S. Supreme Court should be ruling on high school sports recruiting? I didnt' think so; res ipse loquitur.

Friday, June 22, 2007

Wooo....I'm shakin!

Harry Fuller says media is in an uproar, as "tectonic shifts" (his phrase) are eclipsing the media establishment. Well, to use another phrase from his article, "Yeah, so what's new?"
Furthermore, if what I encounter as examples of the newspaper art, and what I view on TV are indicative of media quality, mightn't an earthquake or two be a good thing?

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Making The Point...

I didn't call Reid Bryson "The Father of Scientific Climatology," folks, other people did. And, as the article says, it's not that global warming isn't occurring, it's just that he thinks that the theory that humans are causing it is a bunch of crap.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Wi-Fi Record

I am duly chastened. I thought I was doing pretty well pushing our wireless connection 8 miles with 300 mw of power using a 24db-gain dish. This South American link pretty much busts all that, though. Nearly 400 miles on the technology is pretty impressive....but if you don't already understand Wi-Fi, pay little attention to the explanatory stuff in the article. It's pretty bad.

Insensitivity = Semtex

Didn't much care for the little Salman Rushdie I did read, but he's back in the news, with a knighthood, or O.B.E., or whatever. And at least he serves to remind people that we (that is "we," the entire West) are under constant threat of death if anyone in the Muslim world has their feelings hurt. Because that's all it is.
The majority of the world, after all, isn't Muslim, and doesn't acknowledge Muslim beliefs or confer any particular status on Mohammed. I refuse to even give him the title of "Prophet," because the next step, of course, is to insist that if I refer to him, I must include what are essentially statements of religious reverence, such as "peace be upon him." I should actually not phrase that in future tense, because insistence upon this honorific has already been made in the U.K. These things I refuse to do, or acknowledge that my rejection of them, and beliefs specific to Islam, constitute blasphemy.

Just because someone East of Suez gets ticked off about a knighthood in the U.K. can have no connection in any rational world to threats of suicide bombing, which is essentially what some Pakistani minister has threatened. All of which shows that we have not been dealing with anything rational in this war, nor have we ever. Therefore this will not end in diplomacy or treaties, but in the sword. Fight it now, or fight it later.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

At Least Once More

I have written precious little about the "progress" in public schools since my retirement from that particular arena five years ago. This should not be inferred as insouciance, rather that I've seen little point in writing about the same ills -again- when it's obvious that the forces in our society that are transforming the schools must run their course.

Nevertheless.

After reading a rather well-crafted column in the local paper on the subject, I am moved to blog about it again, and so ask, and perhaps for the last time, why?
The schools have always been where a great many Americans, perhaps a large majority, take their hopes for the future, when children enter the classroom to acquire some of the tools needed to deal with the world. Perhaps, after acquiring some schooling, some students will apply that learning to addressing society's problems. This is certainly reasonable; historically, a number of such students have done this, and will continue to do.
But through what side door crept in the wholly irrational expectation that schools themselves can be mandated to solve a multitude, if not all of society's ills? It is irrational -looked at in the broadest sense it is impossible- since schools are not structured to do it and should not be restructured to attempt it.
And yet this litany goes on, gets longer, and is pursued with increasing pressure. Racial, medical, dietary and a myriad behavioral problems (not to mention some that we've not thought of yet- this is covered by the catch-all phrase in the DSM-IV-TR) are all deemed to have an educational solution, and those who attempt to manage the schools are far past the point where they can fold their hands and admit their incompetence to deal with these issues. Instead, they nod, and smile broadly, and assure the public that they can solve the problem (just fill in your own blank), if only they "-have the resources."
Those with adequate mental acuity who work in the schools know perfectly well they can't correct these issues. The children bear these problems to the schoolhouse door, and they are a matter of congentical defect, deficiency, or a home life that makes fantasies like the Jukes and the Kallikaks look like the Brady Bunch. The more time the teacher must devote to being a therapist or warden, the less they can teach.
The single biggest force in our present culture that militates against success in school is the prevalent belief that everything ought to be pleasant and not upsetting or rigorous. Oh, there's plenty of talk of "challenging" kids in school, but the teacher who attempts it is just as apt to find him or herself in hot water for doing so. Nothing of the sort is generally permissible in an educational atmosphere that insists that teachers embrace detailed curriculum guides and not deviate. And the curricula themselves are increasingly aimed at the lowest common denominator, as relentlessly "dumbing down" is the only practical way to ensure that "no child is left behind."
As far as any support from the home, that most perceptive of contemporary social philosophers said:

Parents can no longer control the atmosphere at
home and have even lost the will to do so. With
great subtlety and energy, television enters not only
the room, but also the tastes of old and young alike,
appealing to the immediately pleasant and subverting
whatever does not conform to it.

-- Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind; 1985

........and there is nothing immediately pleasant or gratifying about learning the parts of speech, Julius Cæsar, the Constitution, or fractions- they're all just necessary hills to be climbed on the road to becoming educated. This is the increasingly impossible task our teachers must attempt, and one of the reasons I'm frankly glad to be retired.

But none of this addresses the why of it all- what's behind it? Have we lost so much confidence in our society, are we that suspicious and fearful of our neighbors that we insist that all the things we see that incite our fears be rectified by some magical, impossible diktat? I suppose if I knew, I'd be rich & famous....the main and hopelessly banal goal that -apparently- is the presumptive end of contemporary education.
I suppose that none of this will be rectified unless and until we finally allow schools to pursue a true education: educat = to draw out, to bring forth those things in each individual and develop them as much as teaching can. And, as important as it is, teaching is always a limited activity, always ending where the free will of the individual begins. And free will is an uneasy concept as the 21st Century opens, as is anything that is not subject to statute, regulation, or some other form of social control. The more our society attempts to reduce education to a formula, the more it becomes obvious that it is a glorious variable, helping to produce individuals in all their unpredictability and diversity.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Once More, Justice

Nifong gets his; it's been a while coming, but it's been worth the wait. What is still irritating to me is that the linked NYT story uses the word "fiasco" to apply to Nifong's charges against three Duke lacrosse players. I don't see how the definition of "fiasco" applies to knowingly and falsely accusing the three young men to further his own political career. In a world of complete justice, now that he has been disbarred, he would serve a prison term.

Friday, June 15, 2007

Goodbye, Seattle!

This has got to be the end of civilization as we know it- the Microwave Popcorn Crisis threatens orderly government in Seattle. Next up: Rome falls, film at eleven.

Modern Art

Well, given my views on the daubings and splatterings, twisted coathangers, and random lumps resembling the aftermath of a pre-school Play-Doh™ fest that passes for contemporary art by humans, I'll take the efforts of the Hubble Space Telescope at 17.....

Thursday, June 14, 2007

None Dare Call It....

I have now read several rather long articles about the crisis at Los Angeles' Martin Luther King Jr. - Harbor Hospital, and, to quote that famous philosopher Mr. Lewis Black, "I am confeeewzed."
We are regaled with the apparent ineptitude and even outright malpractice of the hospital staff, but no media report I have read even hints at a cause- not one. And yet the articles state that the hospital primarily serves the minority areas of Watts & Willowbrook, and we're supposed to just draw the implied conclusion, the one the media doesn't dare discuss, that this hospital is almost certainly so chaotic, such a snakepit that attracting good staff must be a near impossibility.
And since the causes can't be mentioned, it becomes impossible to discuss solutions, so all we read is that the L.A. County Board of Supervisors is considering closing the hospital. And this will help.....what?
At least if the reasons for this meltdown in health care delivery were discussed frankly, it might be possible to do something about it. In the long run, I don't know what the answer is, but in the short run, I suspect that if hefty premiums were paid to get better people working there (as long as such competence could be assessed ) and those who couldn't demonstrate competence had their pay cut until they could meet standards, with the clear understanding that they were on probation, and would soon be on the street if they didn't shape up.
It's not a cure, but it's a start, and when people are dying on the ER floor, a start is clearly what's needed.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Monday, June 11, 2007

Rendezvous With Destiny....

The argument over global warming seems to have been derailed time and again, and curiously in much the same way as the constant skirmishing over evolution. Evolution and global warming are facts; what are at issue -what must always be at issue in Science as presently conceived- are the theories applied to explain the facts.
A theory of the cause of global warming, which has gained much momentum, states that it is demonstrable that the activities of the human race has produced the rise in global temperatures for the past several hundred years. Given a bit more of a push, a cup or two of religious fervor and maybe a dash of paranoia, and we will see putative remedies being applied willy-nilly, in hopes that the effects of centuries can be reversed in a few years.
Don't get me wrong: some of the things that will be done have been pending for three decades or more, need to move forward, but have nothing specifically to do with global warming. The most salient example that comes to mind is the move to alternative energy sources. What I am referring to is a rush to address global warming that amounts to a massive over-reaction to a situation, the remedies for which may not be well understood, with disastrous consequences on a world-wide scale.
When it comes to some things, like flirting with Geo-engineering, it's playing Russian roulette with a big, big gun. If we're right about the causes, it may succeed. If not, we may spend trillions of dollars and, if we're lucky, accomplish nothing. If we're not, we may achieve at a stroke what forty years of the Cold War couldn't- a very acceptable substitute for Nuclear Winter.....except we could just refer to it as the end of the Fourth Post-glacial Period in the Pleistocene. If that occurs, we may hope that genetic engineering has progressed far enough to resurrect the Woolly Mammoth, because we're gonna need to hunt them (again) for food.
There was much doomsaying during the Cold War, which dominated the first 50 years of my life, bemoaning the fact that mankind had finally achieved the ability to destroy himself. This was made doubly bad because it was going to happen in a Nuclear Holocaust. The irony is that we may accomplish the same thing, and with the best of intentions. There have been five Great Extinctions in geologic time since the Precambrian, and those who point to a sixth -the increase in the rate of extinction in the past 10,000 years due to the activities of man- may be right about the extinction, but wrong about the species. Such people worry about our powers threatening other species, and ignore the fact that a relatively small miscalculation -a mistake in some gene-splicing lab, for example- could eliminate the human race far more efficiently than all the nuclear bombs ever made.

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Shared Illusion...

The issue of vaccines administered to young children used to be a favorite hobby-horse of Don Imus before he was jerked from the air. Despite the definitive findings to the contrary of the Institute of Medicine, some parents and their advocates insist that the mercuric preservative thimerosal is the causative agent in autism. As with other types of scientific findings, the action of collective human belief, particularly where it relieves fear or uncertainty, appears to carry at least equal weight with some.
As Paul A. Offit writes in The Boston Globe,

"Now, vaccine makers are again threatened. Lawyers will argue that either the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine or a mercury-containing preservative (thimerosal) in vaccines or the combination of the two can cause autism. This theory has been advanced on television shows such as 60 Minutes, in popular magazines like Time and Newsweek, and on national radio programs such as Imus in the Morning. Most prominently, the mercury-causes-autism theory has been advanced by a parents advocacy group called Safe Minds -- a group now at the center of the litigation."

Thus, simple media exposure creates belief, and belief in the hands of any group of people -people backed by tort lawyers- is enough to counterbalance definitive scientific proof, if only twelve people on a jury can be convinced.

Then, there is evidence that while mercury is certainly capable of causing debilitating conditions or even death, there is no evidence that autism is one of them:

"Certainly there is plenty of evidence to refute the notion that vaccines cause autism. Fourteen epidemiological studies have shown that the risk of autism is the same whether children received the MMR vaccine or not, and five have shown that thimerosal-containing vaccines also do not cause autism. Further, although large quantities of mercury are clearly toxic to the brain, autism isn't a consequence of mercury poisoning; large, single-source mercury exposures in Minamata Bay and Iraq have caused seizures, mental retardation, and speech delay, but not autism."

Finally, anyone with a sixth-grade education ought to be able to understand the argument that if mercury is withdrawn from a vaccine, yet the incidence of autism is not only unaffected, but increases, then there is NO connection!

"Finally, vaccine makers removed thimerosal from vaccines routinely given to young infants about six years ago; if thimerosal were a cause, the incidence of autism should have declined. Instead, the numbers have continued to increase. All of this evidence should have caused a quick dismissal of these cases. But it didn't, and now the court has turned into a circus. The federal and civil litigation will likely take years to sort out."

The track record of vaccines is clear, particularly in young children. The use of vaccines has a track record that is clear, going back to Edward Jenner's inoculations against smallpox in the eighteenth century. I can sympathize with any parent having to deal with a condition as serious as autism, but that does not, and should not preclude the access to vaccines, which our current system of litigation threatens to do. Risk is a part of life, and the risks of being vaccinated are without doubt enormously less than not being vaccinated.


And yet, curiously, we are threatened with the possibility -and out of pure belief- that vaccines might become a thing of the past, or manufactured completely under government ægis in order to block litigation that can place drug companies in receivership. The demand of the vast majority, supported by evidence that vaccines are safe is curiously sidelined by a group of about 5,000 people supported by their attorneys. My demand that my children and my grandchildren have vaccines available is therefore validated only if I sue in their behalf- evidently.

If anyone believes that contemporary mankind is necessarily more clear-headed and rational than our predecessors, this sorry business should quell that argument. We ARE the same ancestors who believe that "bad air" caused malaria, and that necklaces of flowers could protect against the Black Death, and who burned old ladies at the stake when epidemics occurred. Or, put more succinctly:

"I reject your reality and substitute my own."

- Adam Savage

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Rocket Mail

June 8, 1959. I'm for it. Where is cool stuff like this today?

Friday, June 8, 2007

Tom Swift, Where Are You?

Noticed this excerpt today at Green Car Congress, in an article entitled IATA Director General Calls for a Zero Emissions Future for Aviation. An excerpt is instructive:

Technology: The aerospace industry must build a zero-emissions aircraft in the next 50 years.

I challenge the US, Europe, Canada, China, Brazil, Russia and Japan to coordinate basic research on a zero-emissions aircraft and then compete to develop products based on this research. Clean fuel is also critical. Governments have cut alternative fuel funding while oil companies are busy counting the US$15 billion in increased refinery margins that the airline industry is now paying. The first target is to replace 10% of fuel with low-carbon alternatives in the next ten years. And the second is to begin developing a carbon-free fuel from renewable energy sources. It’s time for governments and the oil industry to make some serious investments.


Hmmmm. "-make some serious investments." That's one way to put it. Another way would be "Come up with a completely new set of scientific principles." Wait, that's right, all we have to do is contact Star Fleet Command and they'll give us all the technology we need.

Zero emissions aircraft? First think "completely new physics & chemistry textbooks." At our level of knowledge, might as well wish for levitation, oh, hell, make that teleportation and have done with it.
We are faced here with what we can only hope is a fading attitude that science is bound to come up with ways to preserve our way of life, if only we make the proper investments and invoke the proper phrases at the Scientific Temple of Cant. No one is even willing to fantasize yet about Living With Less. But they will.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

How Far from Moonbat?

There was the guy who wrote the letter to the editor in the paper tonight, stating that Congress simply must lower fuel prices, citing a giant conspiracy of oil companies and whoever to stage the Iraq imbroglio to (somehow) provide a pretext for higher fuel prices. At least this guy is obviously qualified for a tinfoil hat and a set of those special night-vision binoculars for spotting black helicopters. No problem; he's a loony, he's been quite honest in laying that out for us, and as far as I'm concerned he's got a right to his opinion....and his rubber room.
But how far removed from him are Big Automotive's 3 CEOs, who together with the UAW make special pleas to further postpone increases in the CAFE standards for motor vehicles? Take away the blatantly crazy rationales of the guy in the previous paragraph......not so much. Who really believes this kind of stalling can help, as the inevitable looms ever closer? Evidently they can, but who can believe that it's anything but their bottom line talking?

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

That's Synergy!

In a new entertainment sensation, "Dance Dance Immolation" (and, nooo, I am not making this up) evidently combines all the best features of modern technology with an auto-da-fe to combine a fun night on the town without the mess and inconvenience of body waxing or other depilatory regimens beforehand, bring your own onions and mustard.

I don't know why I can't think of these cool innovations first.....

Monday, June 4, 2007

Paris Goes to the Pokey

It's a beautiful day in East Central Illinois, made just that teeniest bit nicer by the fact that Paris Hilton actually did have to go inside, if only for 23 days, which is what she'll supposedly get for good behavior. I was wrong, I admit it, and I'm glad!

Friday, June 1, 2007

Upheld....

Ill. ex-Gov. Ryan loses pension appeal

© 2007 The Associated Press

CHICAGO — A judge upheld a state board's decision to strip former Gov. George Ryan of his entire $197,000-a-year pension because of his conviction last year on federal racketeering charges.

I'd like to think this'll stick, but I liked the idea of Paris Hilton going to jail when it was first announced....and you saw what happened there. It's easy to be cynical about these things, but is the progression: Perception of differential justice -> acceptance of such treatment -> social classes?