It's funny that the Republicans with a super majority in the House (101-49 members) accomplished so little. They could have passsed every bill they wanted without a single Democratic vote with the 2/3 majority.
Sure, they're going to require every woman to have a sonogram before having an abortion, they passed Voter ID to grandstand about a problem that doesn't exist (voter fraud isn't at the polling location, it's in mail-in ballots and voter rolls), they passed "loser pays" tort reform to prevent the little guy from having a voice in the courtroom and ensure only those with deep pockets can win "justice," and they passed more of Gov. Perry's "emergency" legislation regarding eminent domain but Democrats aren't actually opposed to that.
I suppose they'll pass some of this stuff in the couple of special sessions we may have and then claim Victory.
They couldn't pass any of their illegal immigration bills, most notably the sanctuary cities bill (Arizona-light), they couldn't even muster a Congressional redistricting bill, and couldn't pass any of their public school finance proposals to lay off 10's of 1,000's of teachers. That's always good for the economy to lay a bunch of people off when we have billions of dollars in our savings account, the Rainy Day Fund (or more precisely the Economic Stabilization Fund created to address budgetary needs during economic difficulties).
So, we'll have more unemployed people applying for benefits. More people not being able to pay their bills. More house foreclosures. More people with no cash income to buy things in a state that is primarily funded by consumer purchases since Texas relies almost exclusively on the sales tax for revenue. More costs and unfunded mandates passed down to local governments to attempt to recoup the revenue to maintain services through higher property taxes. That's just absolute Genius. I wonder who thought of that?
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Monday, October 05, 2009
How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect
Just couldn't resist passing this New York Times article along. After all, this is the Speaker of Nonsense aka Raphael Hythloday.
Mind
How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect
By BENEDICT CAREY
In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.
An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”
At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.
Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.
“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”
Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.
In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.
When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.
“There’s more research to be done on the theory,” said Michael Inzlicht, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, because it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance. But he added that the new theory was “plausible, and it certainly affirms my own meaning system; I think they’re onto something.”
In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.
After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others.
The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.
But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.
“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”
Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct errors in the real world, a recent study suggests. “The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-author, “is very much worth investigating.”
Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/health/06mind.html?_r=1&8dpc
October 6, 2009Mind
How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect
By BENEDICT CAREY
In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.
An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”
At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.
Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.
“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”
Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.
In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.
When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.
“There’s more research to be done on the theory,” said Michael Inzlicht, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, because it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance. But he added that the new theory was “plausible, and it certainly affirms my own meaning system; I think they’re onto something.”
In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.
After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others.
The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.
But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.
“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”
Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct errors in the real world, a recent study suggests. “The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-author, “is very much worth investigating.”
Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Thursday, August 13, 2009
God makes valedictorian tremble
I can't do much more than pass this along. During this woman's prayer at about the 3:00 minute mark she begins to tremble, who knows why. The other people who are probably school officials lay her down behind the podium, ask someone to call for an ambulance, and begin to march the graduates out of the auditorium. I hated that I chuckled at her but if she wanted to have a religious experience the church might be a better place.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Police say: Becoming angry is a crime
That's Sgt. James Crowley in the picture by Steven Senne/Associated Press from the New York Times article Officer Defends Arrest of Harvard Professor by Liz Robbins.First, it doesn't matter whether this incident was racially motivated or not. It's just bad police procedure in any case. He claims to have followed procedures but if his actions follow procedures then maybe they ought to be changed.
Answer this question: Do you think this officer's reasons for arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. are valid?
"Sergeant Crowley said that he arrested Professor Gates because the professor got angry after being asked for identification and proof of his address, and continued his “tirade after being warned multiple times.” The sergeant said that the professor had berated him, and was adamant that he was following police procedures in making the arrest. "
I have some problems with this statement.
So, by that logic a police officer can arrest someone for becoming angry, continuing a tirade, and berating a police officer. Isn't that what every police officer should expect when confronting someone? It should be standard operating procedure. The police should be above worrying about insults. It's their job to ignore the insults and act with respectful restraint until a crime is committed. That's why we pay them.
"Next, the sergeant said, he warned Professor Gates to calm down and lower his voice, and to step outside to his front porch. Sergeant Crowley said he gave the professor two warnings, the second while holding a set of handcuffs, but that the professor continued berating him. “The professor at any point in time could have resolved the issue by quieting down and/or by going back in the house,” he said in the radio interview."
So, the answer is "submit to authority or be arrested." Nice choice officer, but what if you're wrong about the situation? One of the last resorts should be to arrest someone. Police officers should be trained better to handle conflict resolution with more than handcuffs and warning threats of arrest. Of course, the professor allegedly continued to berate the police officer but because Mr. Gates didn't settle down and submit to police authority he was subject to arrest.
Yes, I know the police call it disorderly conduct and things like not following a lawful directive. Trump the incidents up as the police may but they can make those claims almost any time they interact with the public.
Naturally: "Charges of disorderly conduct against Professor Gates, a leading African-American scholar, were dropped on Tuesday, and the police and Mr. Gates issued a joint statement calling the incident “regrettable and unfortunate.”
There are more problems here. This man was in his own home. There is some dispute over the identification that the professor offered, whether it was just a Harvard ID as the police officer claims or both a Harvard ID and a driver's license with address as Mr. Gates claims.
Frankly, the Harvard ID should have been sufficient to establish identity and residency. The police officer surely had access to a radio. Don't the police always say that the radio is faster than the criminal? Of course they do. The police officer should have taken the time to call in and verify the name and address of whoever lived at that house. It's not like the professor was going anywhere. He was claiming to be at home! The officer had all the time in the world.
So, if the officer took the time to check out the address what would have or could have happened? I doubt the perpetrator would have continued to ransack the house or even run. If he had run, this 58 year old man almost certainly would have been caught shortly. Where is he going to go? Home? The hideout for geriatric house-breaking criminals?
Another thing that is odd about this story is that a neighbor called the cops because there were two black men at the front door of a nearby house seeming to break in. Didn't this neighbor know that there were black people who lived near him? And, since there was also a cab driver helping to pry the door didn't this neighbor stop to think, "hmm, who breaks into a house while having a taxi sitting in the driveway or at the curb?" I wouldn't call the cops for the Taxi House Burglars, necessarily.
I may provide a cite later but I saw an interview on the morning news channels (CNN, HLN, FOX, MSNBC, et al.) today that gave audio/video of a neighbor saying that the professor was out of control and possibly belligerent -- but get this -- he admitted to not being able to distinguish a single word that either party said.
Lastly, and most pathetically, the officer said in response to Professor Gates's request for an apology, "“As I said yesterday, that apology will never come,” Sergeant Crowley said on Thursday. “It won’t come from me as Jim Crowley, it won’t come from me as a sergeant in the Cambridge police department.”"
That officer messed up badly. Arrest should have been a last recourse. He had many other options other than that. It's called using your brain.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Creation myths in school = YES; Folktales, myths, and legends = NO
So, we can teach Christian creation myths in school but not Aesop's Fables, Paul Bunyan, or Pecos Bill? The passage below is from p. 10 of the 2009 TEKS Review by David Barton, a conservative expert reviewer of the social studies curriculum.“Folktales, Myths, and Legends”
Interestingly, this particular genre of information is presented to students only in their first four years of school [K-3, (a)(2], and it is specifically listed as one of the primary sources of information to be presented to them. Why are non-factual sources of history such as myths, legends, and folklore presented to the youngest students who lack the age and maturity to clearly distinguish between that which is historical fact and fantasy? Young children tend to take things literally and believe their teacher without reservation; why teach them myths and legends as original sources of information? It is true that many lessons may be seen in Aesop’s Fables or Hans Christian Anderson’s tales, but they should be introduced to students only after they can safely and regularly distinguish between fact and fantasy.
The preferable approach for young children utilized through the first three centuries of American education was to teach factual history from the beginning; and then as maturity grew, introduce myths, legends, and folklore. Therefore, in the early grades, adopt the proven practice of using biographical history – of telling the interesting and adventuresome stories from the lives of George Washington, Abigail Adams, Wentworth Cheswill, Benjamin Banneker, John Paul Jones, Sybil Luddington, Lewis & Clark, Jedidiah Smith, the Wright Brothers, etc. Later, introduce stories such as Aesop’s Fables when students can understand that these are examples utilized to help teach moral truths or to provide entertainment (such as Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan). The early and repeated emphasis on “Folklore, Myths, and Legends” should be delayed until a solid foundation of factual history has been embedded in the student.
Reading through Mr. Barton's review, he makes some sound recommendations for improving the social studies curriculum in schools. I wouldn't mind that he wants to imbue the curriculum with an acknowledgement of Christian contributions but I don't see much indication that it would be done in a historically accurate and non-proselytizing fashion. The American religious tradition has been quite influential, just teach it in a constitutional way.
However, he is one of the socially conservative members of the Texas State Board of Education and apparently doesn't see an inconsistency in teaching creationism in the classroom while delaying the teaching of folktales, myths, and legends to "the youngest students who lack the age and maturity to clearly distinguish between that which is historical fact and fantasy." Not only that, "young children tend to take things literally and believe their teacher without reservation." Hmm, somewhat like adults who take the Bible literally and want to introduce intelligent design into the classroom.
Oh wait, I forgot. Intelligent design is for the science classroom while the harm that could be done by exposing children to folktales, myths, and legends is for the social studies classroom. Of course, we could apply Mr. Barton's thoughts on non-factual sources of history in the social studies classroom to similar non-factual sources of science in the science classroom "until a solid foundation of factual (science) has been embedded in the student." Do you think Mr. Barton will delay the teaching of creationism until the basics of science have been learned?
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Gov. Perry: $2 M on border cameras = 11 arrests
Money well spent Mr. Perry. This $2 million snared 1% of the number of arrests as projected. Now Mr. Perry wants another $2 million for the project. Great, once we spend $200 million we might come close to eradicating the immigration and drug problem.The funny thing is that the governor's office is now saying that estimates should have been revised after it became apparent that the program would not meet its goals. So, that's what they did. They revised their report to show that the results were close to and even exceeded goals. Nice. It's like 1984 all over again. Your chocolate ration has been increased from 1 gram to half a gram. Who needs a memory? They said the word "increased" so it must be true.
The other cool thing is that 125,000 people around the country and the world signed up online to be virtual Texas deputies. A total of about 40 million people visited the web page including people from Switzerland, Australia, and of course Mexico too. I suppose that's not an exhaustive list. It's possible that people from every far flung place on the planet have seen it too so that they could make comments like this (from the Austin American Statesman article):
One report simply read, "armadillo by the water," while another offered some advice. "Just a word of warning: A moment ago I saw a spider crawl across the top of the camera," the report read. "You might want to try and prevent any webs from being spun across the lens area by treating with repellent or take other measures."
Fortunately, one of our border senators understands what has happened now that Gov. Perry has put our border out to the eyes of the world through the internet despite Perry spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger said, "The bad guys know there are an extra pair eyes on the border."
"Instead of making Texas safer, it has made Texas the source of international ridicule," said Democratic state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh of El Paso.
Legislator voter fraud, ho hum
For some reason this video blurb is making the rounds again about how Texas legislators vote for their colleagues, are absent from the House floor, are not abiding by the rules they ask everyone to follow, and don't therefore have the integrity or any standing to impose voting restrictions on us.
If the votes were fraudulent in that members were casting contrary votes for each other, then I would care. If that kind of activity occurred, you bet the practice would stop immediately. You see, there is no vote fraud here. All you’re doing by asking the legislators to push their own button is for them to be in their seat like little kids when the teacher says “vote now.” The legislators have so much more to do than to be required to be sitting in their seat for multitudinous votes.
It’s common practice for legislators to call staffers and have them call Legislator Blank’s office and ask that staff to have their boss vote for them. The legislator is detained while meeting with Acme MegaCorporation or Mother Mary and the Sisters of the Poor and to ask them to be at their desks on the floor constantly is no more than a silly attendance requirement and hinders their ability to discuss creating appropriate policy with interested parties.
This issue is a nonstarter for me.
If the votes were fraudulent in that members were casting contrary votes for each other, then I would care. If that kind of activity occurred, you bet the practice would stop immediately. You see, there is no vote fraud here. All you’re doing by asking the legislators to push their own button is for them to be in their seat like little kids when the teacher says “vote now.” The legislators have so much more to do than to be required to be sitting in their seat for multitudinous votes.
It’s common practice for legislators to call staffers and have them call Legislator Blank’s office and ask that staff to have their boss vote for them. The legislator is detained while meeting with Acme MegaCorporation or Mother Mary and the Sisters of the Poor and to ask them to be at their desks on the floor constantly is no more than a silly attendance requirement and hinders their ability to discuss creating appropriate policy with interested parties.
This issue is a nonstarter for me.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Grand Canyon is older than the Earth says AZ state senator
Ok, Arizona state senator Sylvia Allen (R) didn't actually say that but she did say that the Earth was 6,000 years old in a rather casual way as if she were simply saying the sky is blue. Apparently, the Retirement and Rural Development Committee is debating whether certain lands should be off limits to mining uranium and are considering the environmental and economic impact. Watch the 43 second video here:
This woman lives in Arizona. Has she never been to the 6 million year old Grand Canyon? What's worse is that her argument consists of stating that there were no environmental laws 6,000 years ago and the Earth has survived just fine so why bother with them now.
It's a good thing that she's in the state legislature rather than on the school board where she could really do some damage. If this mindset weren't so common in the US, I would be flabbergasted by the sheer ignorance of the woman. Instead, I am further saddened for the future of our country.
This woman lives in Arizona. Has she never been to the 6 million year old Grand Canyon? What's worse is that her argument consists of stating that there were no environmental laws 6,000 years ago and the Earth has survived just fine so why bother with them now.
It's a good thing that she's in the state legislature rather than on the school board where she could really do some damage. If this mindset weren't so common in the US, I would be flabbergasted by the sheer ignorance of the woman. Instead, I am further saddened for the future of our country.
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