I think I'm a little jaded

The assignment: Introduce yourself, what you plan on getting out of your degree program, and this class in particular.

What I turned in:

Name: His Royal Imperial Highness of Space and Time, but you may call me John Hummel

Current goals: Honestly just getting through my master's degree. I decided it's a lofty goal and why not.

How will it help my current profession: Honestly, it won't. Let's face it: your current job doesn't reward you for getting a degree because they'd prefer to hire outside the company. What it will do is make it that much easier when applying for another job, or threatening to leave my current employer unless they pay me more.

What do I want out of the course: The ability to dominate databases! To drive them into submission so they obey my every whim! To crush their electronic dreams BWAHAHAHAHA. Or, just make it easier to create efficient resources of information in a database system.

Minimum Standards and States Rights

Last Wednesday, there was a vote in the House to establish that schools across American could not tie down, use solitary confinement, and other medieval techniques of discipline that should never be applied to children.

Nearly every single Republican voted against it, on the idea of "states rights."

I have to say - what exactly is wrong with a minimum set of standards? We set up minimum standards for air quality on the federal level, for automobiles, even federal standards for what should be taught in classes.

There are some 22 states without provisions against treating children as if they were criminals, which this law seeks to address by establishing minimum standards to let all teachers know "No, you may not tie down Jimmy when he's bad. No, you can't put Susie in solitary confinement - you run a school, not a prison."

Evidently, the vast majority of Republicans thought that setting up these standards and spending $22 million a year to enforce them is too much. So remember, trillions for war, billions for tax cuts - but torturing kids? Well, they, we can't go spending money on that.

Finding the balance between separation of church and state

Friday morning I went to a Dad's event at my childrens' elementary school. The idea was for the various father's to learn how to do things like encourage your children to do well by validating them, or tracking their grades, or things like that.

I'll be honest - it was not terribly well planned out (as in, dad's showed up, and the promised food wasn't there), the video we were invited to watch didn't have sound at first (seems they forgot to check if the computers showing the movie had sound), and it felt like the teacher kind of put it together 10 minutes before the event.

But there was one event that threw me, and I'm not sure how to react. At one point, the teacher pulled out a proverb about instructing our children. I was tempted to quote Proverb 23:13-14 "Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell", and ask if we should start beating out children - since the Bible says that too.

I refrained.

I'm very very much a supporter of separation of church and state. I'm all right with teaching The Bible as literature, say in a mythology class alongside Greek and Norse legends. But the moment you start using it as a tool of morality and instruction in schools, there's a world of bad that can result as people start picking what parts of the Bible to follow. The "love your neighbor" stuff is fine, but the "take up your sword" or "kill the men, kill the women who aren't virgins then take the virgins as wives" doesn't exactly sound like good behavior.

That said, I'll keep a close eye on this for the next meeting. Once is fine. If it becomes a habit, I might ask if he can find more than one source of pithy sayings to choose from - before we start being asked into a prayer circle.

$0.02 on Expelled

There are plenty of people out there observing that the Intelligent Design supporting "documentary" "Expelled" is full of crap.

I won't do that. But I will talk about the commercial.

In the commercial, we see a wizened old scientist up in the front of a classroom, talking about evolution. When Bill Stein, in high water pants (I'm guessing he's suppose to be dressed like he's at a private school?) asks "Hey, Mr. Scientist - what caused the origin of life?"

Stein is then "sent to the Principal's office" for having made a movie. Hahaha.

One issue:

The Theory of Evolution, based and refined off of Darwin's theories of natural selection, does not explain the origin of life. Never has. Has no intention to do so. The Theory of Evolution based on Natural Selection seeks to describe how species have evolved over time. That's it. It takes as a premise that evolution exists (something we all know happens, or else we wouldn't have to get flu vaccines every year), and states *why* evolution happens and what the mechanism is for the creation and adaptation of new species into their environment. Hence why Darwin's book was "On the Origin of Species", not "On the Origin of Life".

The actual *origin* of life? No idea. There are guesses and hypothesis that they're working out in labs and chalkboards, but no science claims to have a good working theory on that one yet. They *do*, however, have a very useful and tested and working theory on how species evolve over time.

So sorry, Stein, but when you get a 30 second commercial wrong on the basic science - you fail.