Have I expressed my opinion on this much, or more importantly my meta-opinion?
Evolution/creation isn't one of the ten most important issues IN EDUCATION, much less in the greater political sphere. More important education-political issues, off the top of my head and in no particular order:
1. 10-15% of public school teachers are so incompetent that they're literally ruining young lives, yet tenure prevents them from being fired.
2. By contrast about 20-25% of public school teachers are so amazing at what they do, and add so much value to society, that they deserve 3-4 times the compensation (salary or otherwise) that they actually get -- but as long as seniority is the only thing that matters, they'll never actually get what they're worth as teachers.
3. Regardless of the merits of any teaching subject matter (evolution, creation, sex-ed, phys-ed, fine arts, you name it), would it kill someone to give kids a proper math education? I'm not talking about just Why Johnny Can't Add, but why Johnny can't string two coherent thoughts together and use basic logic.
4. Writing skills are also generally abysmal, though this is a bit similar to #3 in that it involves linking coherent thoughts into sequence.
5. Testing in schools: Are the tests we give the right tests? If not, how could they be improved?
6. Charter schools: No matter where you stand here, this will make a greater magnitude of difference (one way or another) than how much ink Darwin gets in the classroom.
7. Classroom bullies: How do we handle kids who can't or won't behave, to the point that they impede others from learning?
8. Special Ed.
9. What's the most effective way to teach the scientific method in school? Yes, this is closely related to evolution/creation, but really this is the more important issue of which the Flying Spaghetti Monster kerfuffle is just a special case (if not a sideshow).
(A different special case of this general problem: What's the best way to teach Newtonian physics? We already know that it's "just a model," one that loses some accuracy under some well-known conditions, but one that continues to do a great job of reflecting reality as experienced on a human scale.)
10. What's the most appropriate length/shape of a school year.
(Honorable mention: Single-sex classrooms, home schooling, et al.)
Going into McCain's running mate pick, Sarah Palin was probably my second choice -- behind Bobby Jindal but comfortably ahead of any other candidate I could think of. (No idea who was third for me: Pawlenty? I know nothing about him other than that he governs Minnesota.)
I don't quite get the venom directed at her selection from otherwise calm, measured venues like The Volokh Conspiracy. I understand that there's now a shoes-on-opposite feet situation with regard to "experience," though I think it's much easier to defend a neophyte VP than a neophyte president: The former gets all sorts of experience while still being basically an understudy (and attending state funerals).
Anyway she's still a bit of an unknown quantity, sort of like how Barack Obama himself would have been circa October-November 2007. She's generally made great first impressions (also like Obama recently) and has a soaring popularity level. My general sense is that she's actually accomplished things (mainly anti-corruption); by contrast what would you say any of {McCain, Obama, Biden} have actually gotten done in the Senate? She has more executive branch experience than the other three combined, no? (I don't remember whether McCain was ever CEO of a particular company; from their biographies I'm pretty sure neither Obama nor Biden ever started or ran a business, unless I've forgotten something obvious.)
Getting to the point, though, this July 2007 Weekly Standard article by Fred Barnes was, I think, the first in-depth Sarah Palin profile by a national media outlet. It's generally sympathetic, given the point of his bothering to write about her then ("the one shining victory in which a Republican star was born"), and yet these were the things I learned about her in that piece:
Political analysts in Alaska refer to the "body count" of Palin's rivals. "The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah,"
That's a bit fraught, though as long as she's never called herself a "f'g steamroller" I'll ignore my trepidation about whether people with that reputation can avoid spectacular career crashes of their own.
She fired the Alaska Board of Agriculture because it wanted to let the Creamery Board shut down. Think that through: She overhauled a state agency so that she could KEEP ALIVE an anti-free-market government program.
"Though Alaskans tend to be ferociously anti-tax, she persuaded Wasilla voters to increase the local sales tax to pay for an indoor arena and convention center." ...because what on Earth would Wasilla have done without a taxpayer-funded venue?!
Her campaign for governor was bumpy. She missed enough campaign appearances to be tagged "No Show Sarah" by her opponents. She was criticized for being vague on issues. But she sold voters on the one product that mattered: herself.
That passage ends with an oddly backhanded compliment, no?
Barnes also threw in a paragraph about Palin's religious faith, with this quote from her (that I find neither good nor bad): "I believe everything happens for a purpose. In my own personal life, if I dedicated back to my Creator what I'm trying to create for the good . . . everything will turn out fine."
Somewhere else I saw a thread about Palin's opinion of evolution and/or creationism as taught in schools. Just Google her name and the quote "Teach both." I have a fervent opinion -- about the legitimacy of that as a political issue, and the kind of people who have strong opinions either way about it. But that's for another post.
Strongly rumored to be K.B. Hutchison. My first choice has been Jindal for awhile, but by the time you see this it will probably be announced one way or another.
"But the record's clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time. Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time?"
--Barack Obama's acceptance speech, as prepared
Granting that I'm an economic libertarian and a defense/foreign policy hawk, I say "90%" is a pretty darned good estimate of how frequently George W. Bush has been right. Certainly not much more than that (if any) but not much less either.
You may respectfully disagree, but to dismiss that estimate as "take a ten percent chance on change" is to be an idiot, a demagogue, or both.
More thoughts on [the prepared text of] Obama's speech after the fold; maybe he had a damn good delivery of it, but on paper, with all the hard-left economic rhetoric, he's not even trying to win over someone like me, and he's certainly not a centrist reformer.
"We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was President" -- and by golly, Obama will see to it that while he's in office the next version of the dot-com bubble happens.
"[B]usinesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road." Why did people give Obama so much undeserved crap for calling himself a citizen of the world, yet so little for pandering to native jingoism above economic sense?
"Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us." True at face value, yet I'm absolutely reminded of Ronald Reagan's line about some of the most terrifying words in the English language, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
"That's the promise of America - [...] the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper." That's almost an Orwellian about-face, like claiming that the promise of the Soviet Union was the right to pursue individual happiness.
"And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day's work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons." The sort of red tape required to enforce this as a rule of law is exactly the sort of thing no government has any business taking part in.
There's a fascinating set of posts as a result of a horribly botched code deploy on the "Knighthood" Facebook app. I'd direct you to the relevant threads but I can't remember whether the Hive7 forums want you to supply a login and password above and beyond the Facebook credentials.
(And if you don't have a Facebook account then I'm all the more certain you wouldn't be able to read the threads.)
But anyway, some people who feel wronged (and I can't blame them) are screaming their heads off for a rollback, other people are trolling them, it's a mess.
As a quasi-computer geek (moreso a process geek) I'm transfixed by the ineptness of the Hive7 response. But I'm also transfixed by the idea that some of these aggrieved people spent so much of their time on this game.
(Now in general I'm a game person, an easily obsessed person, etc., so you wouldn't think I'd be in a position to talk -- but my goodness, so much emotional investment is evident in these threads.)
"These are the many millions who live to despise every last thing about the comic strip [For Better or For Worse], and, as such, have never missed a day."
--The Washington Post (emphasis in original)
Georges Bizet - L'Arlesienne Suite #1
Earlier this afternoon:
Richard Wagner - Tannhauser: Overture
(Victor Borge has a fantastic take on Tannhauser.)
"Will some N.F.L. team make a run at Usain Bolt as a wide receiver? "
--Freakonomics Blog
"A guy like Bolt, no matter how impressive he was on that track … you’d have to take everything down to basic fundamentals. Has he even seen a football game? Can he catch a ball standing still, never mind on the run? And of course, it’s like Mike Tyson used to say: ‘Everyone has a plan until they get hit.’ What happens when he’s trying to judge ball flight on a punt and he has guys bearing down on him? Forget about trying to catch a ball on a 7 or 9 route with a safety on him. That’s when your straight-line speed tends to go out the window unless you know what you’re doing."
--ex-scout Doug Marino, quoted by Doug Ferrar at Football Outsiders. Marino concludes:
“Honestly, I’d say that Usain Bolt’s chances of playing in the NFL would be about as good as yours or mine.”
Orin Kerr inexplicably lauds this deranged rant. Where to begin?
"One of the most ludicrous aspects of American politics in the last generation is how Republican politicians in Washington—who live in perfect gilded opulence, and who devote their professional lives to servicing the rich—somehow became the party of the people. And Democrats, whose legislative agenda revolves around helping the middle-class, turned into effete elites." [whole lot of emphasis added]
Maybe someone who actually knows what he's talking about can correct me on this, but isn't the lavishness of Washington parties (the dinner kind, not the political kind) pretty non-partisan? Especially for somebody whose next paragraph refers, without any trace, to "the reality-based community," isn't the conceit that Democratic congressmen live an entirely different, relatively restrained, lifestyle just a bit naive?
For that matter, a really good way to miss the whole point of the exercise is to assume that money = status. In America, of all countries, I think we generally know better than that. I still remember when conservative radio hosts would gush over this book, and for good reason - the "millionaire next door" was a key part of their demographic!
A particular strain of liberal politician (this description may or may not fit Obama) wants to take my money away by force, all because he thinks he's better than I am at judging how to spend it. What could possibly be more elitist than that?
Suddenly, the Chicago Sun-Times has a much better sports section.
"Mariotti resigned, and then headed to the Sun-Times office to tape his Around the Horn segment, only to find that his security pass had been deactivated while the paper was deciding whether or not to accept the resignation. They finally accepted it."
"I think that it overshot the mark by far just because, what, in a Yankee game someone didn’t get a homer? Please. It’s happened thousands of times. That’s part of the game. It’s the beauty of the game. Mistakes are made."
--Detroit Tiger pitcher Kenny Rogers, who opposes instant replay
If mistakes were "the beauty of the game," then how would we know if we had the optimal level of them? Should we tweak the rules a bit to subtly introduce even more mistakes?
I found (via Marginal Revolution) this Ezra Klein post alleging that anti-Obama people are just experiencing "resentment of the meritocracy."
Coincidentally, I'd already become intensely aware of the envy going the other direction -- Joe Biden's Saturday speech brought this home.
As Ezra concludes:
"This election, in other words, is becoming a contest to decide which type of elite voters hate -- or fear, or mistrust -- more: A social elite or an economic elite?"
The salient difference here is that so much of the Obama appeal rests on the faux-messianic role he plays, while (as far as I can tell) nobody's going around claiming that McCain wealth is itself what makes him extra-qualified[1] to be president.
On the other hand, if somebody excels at leadership because the meme spreads that he's a good leader, maybe it's not a chicken-and-egg problem so much as a virtuous cycle. So hey, Obama: exceptionally gifted leader of the masses. Wonderful! Will he make the right decisions? That's another story, where a lot depends on the initial assumptions and ideological baselines you set for your own opinion of "the right decisions."
[1] But now that I mention it, Joe Biden's own absurdly low net worth (relative to how long he's had a senator's salary) suggests that, regardless of the political decisions he makes, he's really not very good at financial planning! So Biden's qualifications are a good test of how much relative weight you assign to seniority versus actual merit.
(Can you tell how distinctly unimpressed I am by him, totally aside from party affiliation or ideology? But conversely, some people I'm close to have a lot more trepidation about Obama as leader of the free world than I have. No matter what happens over the next few years I fervently believe that Obama was the best option of the three plausible Democratic candidates.)
FoodMaxx radio ads promise that their milk prices will always be the lowest that the State of California will allow. Rhetorical questions that immediately come to mind:
1. Why is it any of the State of California's business how much FoodMaxx charges for milk?
2. Even if it were the State of California's business, what's the point of a minimum price on a staple of life that, meanwhile, the government is giving people welfare to help them afford?
(You already know the answer to these, right? It involves an incredibly powerful lobby of dairy companies who pretend that they're doing anything other than naked rent-seeking.)
This is one reason why I'd much rather have a president who understands evil for what it is, rather than one whose knee-jerk reaction is to assume that everyone is culpable and that somehow the UN can work things out.
(Though I'll readily admit that the former requires common sense and rational calculation, not absurd snap judgments that result from supposedly looking into Putin's soul.)
My friend Aaron invited me to join his fantasy football league this year, drafting in 15 minutes. I had barely looked at the league until just now, where I come to find:
1. I've got the #2 pick
2. It's a Points Per Reception League
(So yeah, both of my fantasy football blog posts this month have been about the same player, assuming the #1 pick goes to LaDainian Tomlinson as it should.)