There’s much anger circulating around the blogosphere about “the comments of Michael Reiss, Director of Education at the Royal Society”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/sep/11/michael.reiss.creationism about how to deal with creationism and ID in school science classes. In fact, the whole thing could stand as an example of how on some issues (of which this is one) people only want to hear an unequivocal assertion of a party line and get unreasonably annoyed (and purport not to understand what they understand perfectly well) when someone says something nuanced or pragmatic.

Here’s the question Reiss asked:

bq. What should science teachers do when faced with students who are creationists?

To which he gave the answer that simply ignoring them is wrong and counterproductive. Rather, in his view, it is better pedagogical practice to engage with their doubts about evolution. He also adds that teachers have a duty to explain the scientific position but that they should not expect the doing so will displace creationist beliefs in students. His thought there is that explaining that evolutionary theory provides the best _scientific_ explanation is not necessarily going to cut ice with people who don’t accept the scientific way of looking at the world.

All reasonable enough, or so it seems to me. But then you get headlines like “Leading scientist urges teaching of creationism in schools”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4734767.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1 Of course, strictly speaking that’s true, since he advocated that teachers be open to the discussion of creationism with their students. But it gives the impression that he wanted creationism (and its ID variant) to be given house-room in the curriculum as “valid” alternative explanations of life. And that he didn’t say.

Incidentally, the Times also devoted “a leader to the controversy”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article4735469.ece , comparing _inter alia_ Reiss to Sarah Palin:

bq. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, while not a creationist, has courted the support of those who want to teach biblical creationism alongside evolution in science classes by saying that schools should “let kids debate both sides”. Both Governor Palin’s populism and Professor Reiss’s well-meaning intervention are based on the same mistake – that it is acceptable to teach faith as if it were science.

Since Reiss’s clearly expressed view is that creationism is no part of the scientific world view, that is a gross distortion by their leader-writer who is clearly neither a careful nor a charitable reader.

Part of Alex Tabarrok’s “argument”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/09/why-libertarian.html for why libertarians should vote for Barack Obama:

The libertarian voice has not been listened to in Republican politics for a long time. The Republicans take the libertarian wing of the party for granted and with phony rhetoric and empty phrases have bought our support on the cheap. Thus – since voice has failed – it is time for exit. Remember that if a political party can count on you then you cannot count on it.

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I’m reposting this “Fiscal Conservative” cartoon with permission from Steve Greenberg, Ventura County Star, California:

Bob Herbert’s recent column summed up a lot of my sentiments:

Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal?

Or are some of us overreacting?

… But this is perhaps taking it a bit too far.

Kieran, would you mind popping down the corridor and telling Councillor Thompson that I’d like a word with him about the changes to residents’ parking at the end of my road? Thanks

(yes yes, I know he doesn’t work there any more, but that would have spoiled the joke, wouldn’t it?)

Her story will almost certainly be unfamiliar to non-Irish readers, but “it’s an important one”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2008/0911/1221039067831.html?via=mr.

The death has taken place of Wexford school teacher Eileen Flynn, who became an important figure in the history of the separation between the Catholic Church and the State. In August 1982 Ms Flynn was dismissed from her job as an English and history teacher at the Holy Faith Convent in New Ross, Co Wexford. At the time she was sacked, Ms Flynn was unmarried with a baby son and was living with the baby’s father, a separated man, Richie Roche. Two months after Ms Flynn gave birth she received a letter from the school manager informing her that following her decision not to resign from the school her position was being terminated. The letter referred to complaints from parents about her lifestyle and of her open rejection of the “norms of behaviour” and the ideals the school existed to promote. It also reminded her of the “scandal” already caused. Ms Flynn sought to be reinstated in her post but lost her unfair dismissal case at the Employment Appeals Tribunal and at the Circuit Court. She finally lost her appeal to the High Court on March 8th, 1985.

A key piece of background information here is that she was sacked from what was, effectively, a state school. The Irish state had farmed out the larger part of the education system to the Catholic Church (albeit with separate schools for the Protestant minority), so that while the state paid teachers, the parish priest was typically the local school manager. This wasn’t all bad, but stories like Eileen Flynn’s remind me why I don’t particularly like efforts by some US religious groups to push the boundaries between church and state. The ability to deprive people who don’t conform to local mores of their livelihood is likely to become a dangerous and pernicious form of social control, as it did in Ireland for most of the last century.

Calling her ‘Lying Sarah‘ is all well and good. But we need something snappier. How about Sarah Prevaricuda? You know. Sung to the tune of Heart? (I know, I know. It’s got the same problem as that Savage Dragon endorsement. Too je ne sais quoi for flyover country.)

You lying so low in the weeds
I bet you gonna ambush me
You’d have me down down down down on my knees
Now wouldn’t you, Prevaricuda?

Come to think of it, what is that song even about?

No right no wrong, selling a song-
A name, whisper game.

If the real thing don’t do the trick
You better make up something quick
You gonna burn burn burn burn it to the wick
Ooooooh, Prevaricuda

OK, that part describes standard Republican operating procedure. What Henry calls ‘the mechanisms of Nixonland’. So I get why they play that part.

But what about this?

Back over time we were all
Trying for free
You met the porpoise and me

And:

Sell me sell you the porpoise said
Dive down deep down to save my head

So if she’s the barracuda (prevaricuda), then that makes … McCain the … porpoise? (Or is Obama the porpoise?) Either way: it’s ok to call McCain (or Obama) a porpoise, but not ok to call McCain an old fish? (I think I read something about that at the Corner today.)

Or maybe it’s some sort of commentary on Rick Warren, ‘the porpoise-driven life’? Is the song saying that, after Saddleback, McCain needs Palin?

Who writes this stuff? I mean: who gets paid to think it up? Not me, clearly.

The week before last, I chaired an APSA panel on Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FNixonland-Rise-President-Fracturing-America%2Fdp%2F0743243021%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1221059642%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325, with responses from Paul Krugman, Nolan McCarty, Paul Pierson and Eric Rauchway. I can honestly say that this was the best APSA panel I’ve ever been at (and this isn’t self-promotion – my contributions were limited to the boring non-creative stuff like organizing questions from the audience); when I finish transcribing the audio of the panel and put it up on the WWW, you’ll be able to decide for yourself. Anyway, one of the key questions that panelists discussed was the extent to which it was true that Nixonland was still with us today, and if so, why? The last couple of days (and today’s nonsense from the McCain campaign about how Obama wants to give comprehensive sex education to kindergarten children, which maps almost perfectly onto similarly nonsensical political arguments that Rick documents in the 1960s) provide pretty good evidence that Nixonland is alive and well. But why?
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Hello again, crooked timber of humanity! I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long. It feels like I’m always saying that, but then, that’s what happens when you move to the once-every-Jovian-year posting schedule.

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My mother and I have a tacit agreement. It’s the same one she had with her father and that I, already, have with my elder daughter. I believe my grandfather had the same pact with his mother. It’s simply this – to alert the other to thriller and mystery writers that they may not have read.

The rule is that the writer has to be good enough for the other person to like. This does lead to some mistakes. Unlike my grandfather, who loved Ovid and Pope (in one of his many failed attempts to corrupt me — or at least loosen me up — he gave me a wonderful translation of Catullus’s dirty poems) but would read any old crap when it came to thrillers, my mother is moderately discerning. I am somewhere in between. But, of course, good mystery writers generally improve with age (examples abound, but especially striking is Julian Symons, who apparently wouldn’t allow his first effort to be republished but ended his career with several absolute blinders; the obvious counterexample being Colin Dexter, whose work is solid proof that the best TV is inspired by substandard fiction). So I was embarrassed when my mother told me about Peter Robinson, whose books I’ve been reading for years without telling her. I had a good reason – at first they just didn’t seem good enough for her (I know that she is a bit, though not much, more discerning than I am). I didn’t really notice the point at which he got good enough to mention, so didn’t do it, even though I think he is now in the top rank of mystery writers.

So it was funny when she visited the other week that she immediately asked if I had read Mark Mills’s The Savage Garden (UK). I had just ordered both that and Amagansett (UK title: The Whaleboat House — why do they do that, byt the way?) after amazon told me that he is favoured by people who read Robert Goddard (a page turner if ever there was one whose apparent lack of success in the States is baffling to me).

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Comics! That is to say, TopShelf is having their annual $3 sale! You can get some good books, man. I just loaded up. I’m especially looking forward to: Scott Morse, The Barefoot Serpent. (I really like Scott Morse’s art.) Tim Sievert, That Salty Air, and Dan James’ Mosquito (check out the preview.) I loved James’ The Octopi and the Ocean. You should pick that up, too, while you are at it. Hell, you might even buy stuff that’s not $3 but merely on sale! Like Jeffrey Brown’s Incredible Change-Bots.

In other news, the Savage Dragon has endorsed Barack Obama for President. Good for him! But maybe he’s too metrosexual for this to make a big difference.

Measured by the dollar amount involved, the nationalisation of the mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, announced today by the Bush Administration, is the largest in history. No less than $5 trillion of assets and obligations have been taken over by the US government in one hit.

Of course, that debt had long been regarded as having an implicit government guarantee and the companies involved were quangos (in the original sense of quasi-NGOs) rather than genuine private firms. Fannie was a government agency privatised in the 1960s, and Freddie was created to provide competiion for Fannie. So even though the US government will now guarantee virtually all new mortgages, this is more an admission of existing reality than a big step towards socialism.

The significance of the event is not in the marginal change in the status of Fannie and Freddie from quasi-private to quasi-public, but in the abandonment of the pretence that the normal operations of financial markets are capable of cleaning up the mess they have created, even with the liberal helpings of public money that have already been dished out.

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There’s an ongoing low-level argument in our house about Teach for America, which may reflect our own dispositions more than any actual disagreement. My spouse doesn’t like it much, because it promotes the idea that teaching is something clever people can do just because they are clever, and she doubts that the students who do it are very good in the classroom (she has some experience of non-standard routes into the classroom, having, herself, entered LAUSD as an emergency credential teacher straight out of college, the year before TfA began). I agree with all that, of course, and the students of mine who have done it give very mixed reports back to me. But taking into account the fact that the classrooms the TfAers occupy would mostly be occupied by similarly under-qualified teachers, most of whom will leave within a couple of years and some of whom within a couple of weeks, and having seen on campus the way that TfA has harnessed (and, it seems to me, contributed to) the idealism of high-performing students, I have a more positive take on it (the dispositional difference here is probably between viewing glasses as half-full or half-empty; though our dispositions are reversed when it comes to politics more generally). So when the TES asked me to profile a “thinker who has influenced education”, my wife suggested Wendy Kopp, and I thought it would be a way to work out my thoughts a bit more. It was a nice coincidence because Charles Windsor had just become the patron of Teach First, the UK organisation modeled on TfA.

Here’s what I wrote.

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“[T]he court made no distinction between what needs were reasonable, given the age of the children, and what simply amounted to a ‘fourth pony,'” wrote Parker, who was joined by Judges Rudy Coleman and Thomas Lyons.

Link.

It’s good to know that this old post has had so much influence on the legal community.

link thanks to.

Related topic for discussion: Tolstoy’s classic pious fable, “How Many Ponies Does A Man Need?”

Hilzoy has some “word by word analysis”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_09/014585.php of John McCain’s convention speech, which reminded me that I hadn’t seen anyone do any convention speech Wordles. Which doesn’t mean that no-one has done one – just that they don’t seem to be popping up in the blogosphere. So here are yer wordles for Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, in that order (I’ve used different colour schemes for the Democratic and Republican nominees to make it easier to distinguish them).

Barack Obama

John McCain

Joe Biden

Sarah Palin