The University, Jobs, and Darwin Day v. Scott Walker

Update: Spring 2015 Evolution Seminar Series schedule at UW-Madison

Updated - An item in buried in the Wisconsin State Journal (p. 12) today shows Dane County leads the state in creating jobs between 2003 and 2013, accounting for a full 76 percent in the increase in average monthly employment, directly related to an educated populace.

Most of this increase was in the private sector (Pinkovitz, UW Extension via WORK.net (bill.pinkovitz@uwex.edu)).

That this information is buried in the Wisconsin State Journal [cannot locate online] and the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development data site [cannot locate online] is a consequence of ideology.

This quantity of jobs coming out of one Wisconsin county is pretty big news, but Republicans try to halt the dissemination of good news out of progressive Dane County.

Scott Walker has taken his war against high-tech, highly educated Dane County to absurd lengths since he began his first term, infamously rejecting $800 million dollars in federal aid for a labor-intensive rail project, (Cieslewicz, Isthmus) and slashing state aid to local school districts.

And now Scott Walker targets the University of Wisconsin System and its flagship University of Wisconsin-Madison world-class complex with another proposed $300 million dollar cut in a destructive, immolating policy move that Walker refused to campaign on because of popular opposition.

These moves by Walker come while Wisconsin still lags behind the rest of the nation in the recovery from the Bush-Cheney economic global crisis. "Over the course of the recovery, Wisconsin lagged behind the national job growth rate (4.0 v. 6.1 percent). That means every time national growth should have given Wisconsin three jobs, the state added just two. Wisconsin would have 58,000 more jobs today if state jobs had grown at the national rate" (Center for Wisconsin Strategy, COWS).

Evolution

Walker began his second term as governor, embarrassing himself and Wisconsin overseas by refusing to acknowledge the reality of biological evolution in London in response to a direct question. [See Walker goes for bland, ends up moronic, (Daily Beast) and Scott Walker dodges questions on evolution, foreign policy (Bauer, AP).]

Walker's bizarre and disingenuous response that evolution is a "a question a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or the other" is another demonstration of Scott Walker's anti-intellectualism.

Walker should be availing himself today of the work of the seminar J. F. Crow Institute for the Study of Evolution of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to understand not just the reality of evolution but also evolution's relevancy to myriad realms of human society and life. Today is Darwin Day.

More than a thriving Dane County, an educated citizenry is a political threat to Scott Walker.

Walker's move against the Wisconsin Idea is not just deplorable politics.

The statutory foundation of the Wisconsin Idea is a threat to the anti-intellectual, statist, religionist world that Walker wishes to engineer, a world bordering on outright fascism led by plutocrats and their corrupt sock puppets, should Walker achieve his societal vision that he claims to have been communicated from god.

The more knowledgeable the citizens and the more the citizenry thinks, the less chance that politicians of Walker's limited abilities can win the one-fourth of the electorate necessary to obtain office.

In London, playing a coy presidential candidate, Scott Walker may wish to consider the words of the great British thinker, Bertrand Russell on the objectives of a liberal education: "... to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community, and through the combination of citizenship with liberty in individual creativeness to enable men [and all genders] to give to human life that splendor which some few have shown that it can achieve" (Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1938) p.305. Cited in Chomsky, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, The Russell Lectures (New York: Pantheon Books, Random House) Introduction).

Scott Walker is a corrupt lightweight who has no business anywhere near public office.

TNR Piece on White St. Louis Co Racists—A Model of Hate and Ignorance

St. Louis, Missouri is the seventh most segregated urban area in America, as segregation remains a common feature of American cities, made more destructive in Ferguson, Missouri by the persistence of the racist police force and in a phrase: Stupid, white people living in St. Louis County.

Traveling to the mostly white Olivette, Missouri (15 minutes from Ferguson) Julia Ioffe of The New Republic caught up with some stupid, white people eager to speak, revealing attitudes that animate the police homicide of a Michael Brown in Ferguson (located some 42 miles northwest of St. Louis).

Writes Ioffe of her visit to a strip mall in Olivette populated by all-white patrons:

It was a stark contrast to Ferguson, which is two-thirds black. Olivette is almost the exact opposite, at over 60 percent white. St. Louis, and the little hamlets that ring it, is one of the most segregated cities in America, and it shows.

Here in Olivette, the people I spoke to showed little sympathy for Michael Brown, or the protesters.

"It's bullshit," said one woman, who declined to give her name. When I asked her to clarify what, specifically, was bullshit, she said, "All of it. I don't even know what they're fighting for."

"It's just a lot of misplaced anger," said one teenage boy, echoing his parents. He wasn't sure where the anger should be, just that there should be no anger at all, and definitely no stealing.

"Our opinion," said the talkative one in a group of six women in their sixties sitting outside the Starbucks, "is the media should just stay out of it because they're riling themselves up even more."
"The protesters like seeing themselves on TV," her friend added.

"It's just a small group of people making trouble," said another. ...
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And on and on.

In Olivette, segregation is not a problem, it's a solution. The taking of a life by the police: So what, plenty more black people where Michael Brown used to live.

Ignorance Lives

Bigotry has no supporting arguments.

Bigotry is the lack of argument and rational thinking. It's ignorance directed by hate.

The sense of entitlement that a bigot possesses to impose his hate onto society is an infantile characteristic, a projection of hate often accompanied by seeking a society-wide entitlement for their self loathing.

Civil rights workers are typically concerned about the rights of blacks and gays, women and Arabs, Jews and defendants.

Bigots are more unpredictable, though often they are big supporters of guns and violence.

Frank Rich discusses the gay civil rights movement 40 years after Stonewall.

Vatican Issues Instruction on Bioethics

Well, the Vatican has issued instruction on bioethics.

From ELISABETTA POVOLEDO and LAURIE GOODSTEIN in the Times:

The Vatican issued the most authoritative and sweeping document on bioethical issues in 20 years on Friday, taking into account recent developments in biomedical technology and reinforcing the church’s opposition to in vitro fertilization, human cloning, genetic testing on embryos before implantation and embryonic stem cell research.

I realize the Vatican's feeling towards sodomy, but in the face of what science can offer the world, the Vatican's profound ignorance and foolishness offends me.

So here are other instructions: Stick your suggestions up your collective ass.

Your child molester-protecting outfit is out of its league when talk of ethics arises. How about the Vatican issues a disclaimer on the bottom of every official document for the next 50 years apologising for its collective sin?

Harvey Korman and Barack Obama

Two events merged this week.

The last-chance (though not seriously employed) folly of shooting down the Democratic nomination of Barack Obama, and the death of actor, Harvey Korman (1927-2008).

Harvey Korman, among his numerous amusements, portrayed the Hedley Lamarr character in Blazing Saddles (1974, Mel Brooks).

Brooks and Lamarr mocked bigotry, hatred and ignorance so mercilessly that 30-plus years later one almost feels sorry for the bastards manipulating and manifesting these imbecilites today—diseased pursuits of the American mind that have played a great role in American history and that soon will dismay loudly John McCain and his ilk as this truism of American bigotry is discovered to have been uttered by anybody at anytime in anyway associated with Barack Obama’s campaign.

Nothing makes a non-bigot laugh so much as watching Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Slim Pickens, Harvey Korman, Madeline Kahn, Mel Brooks, and company ridicule bigotry into nothingness in Blazing Saddles.

One scene in Saddles (and you can pick among many) is set among the villains, including Korman’s Hedley Lamarr, scheming to drive out the residents of the town of Rock Ridge.

As the villains brainstorm specific methods of shock and awe to scare the residents out of their homes so that the villains can build a railroad through the town and profit to their huge financial advantage, one not-so-bright villain, Taggart, stumbles upon an apparent solution.

Taggart: I got it.

Hedley Lamarr: What?

Taggart: Let's kill every first born male child in Rock Ridge.

Hedley Lamarr: Nah, too Jewish.

The villains decide upon murder, rape, and pillage as the non-controversial solution.

Pure comedic, political, and cinematic brilliance.

So, hearing of Korman’s death, one hopes for a voice from Obama that holds up bigotry, hatred, and ignorance with the same grace and clarity as Brooks and Korman, and that bunch, displaying the disease with such good humor and illuminatingly cool ridicule that McCain and his forces of stupidity will be left by the wayside of segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism—old hatreds and idiocies good for a great political laugh today, if only a presidential candidate can perform as a Mel Brooks or a Harvey Korman.

Bush's Hijacking of Supreme Court

Via ThinkProgress, We know that Fifteen percent is the number of Americans who can name the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, compared with 66 percent of Americans who can name “at least one of the judges on the Fox television show American Idol.”

That's the kind of thing that scares me. So, Bush can appoint a guy like John Roberts, call him a strict constructionist who upholds the Constitution, and most people will not have a clue as to the lie Bush is telling. [Not that Bush has a clue either; he just recites the lines.]

Roberts is a strict constructionist, alright: A judge who wishes to make abortion illegal, sees no great defined liberty rights in the Constitution, is a lousy scholar of Constitutional thought, and will overturn any judicial precedent if it fits with the right wing political network.

Hell, these strict constructionist guys like Roberts would even halt an election and appoint a man like George W. Bush to the presidency if they ever had the chance. I kid you not.

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The One True Church

Now it’s clear.

Less than one week after the Roman Catholic Church issued its degree that the Catholic Church is the “one true Church of Christ", the one, true Church agreed to a $660 million settlement in the clergy molestation/rape case in Los Angeles, the largest settlement yet for Catholic Church rape/molestation cases.

The one-true-church declaration was issued to clear up the "confusion and doubt" piling up on the church's relationships among other faiths, with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI.

If all those child molestations that the church covered up seem inconsistent with its self-declared “one, true church” pronouncement; just know that none other than the supreme authority on pacifism and tolerance, our own President Bush, said of Pope Benedict XVI: “He's a man of great wisdom and knowledge.”

The Pope earlier this month had also approved the Vatican's inclusion of a prayer for the conversion of Jews in its Latin Mass, which drew the ire of the ADL.

"We are extremely disappointed and deeply offended that nearly 40 years after the Vatican rightly removed insulting anti-Jewish language from the Good Friday liturgy, that it would now permit Catholics to utter such hurtful and insulting words by praying for Jews to be converted ... ," Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, said in a statement.

Excuse me, but Pope Benedict XVI: You stink.

Update:

From The Forward:

Pope’s Statements Raise Concerns About Interfaith Relations

Marc Perelman | Wed. Jul 18, 2007
Two separate documents issued by the Vatican last week are raising concern among liberal Catholics, Protestants and Jews that Pope Benedict XVI is turning back the clock on four decades of ecumenism.

On July 10, the Holy See reiterated a controversial statement from 2000 that the Protestant and Christian Orthodox denominations are not “true” Christianity. Four days earlier, the pope authorized the wider use of a Latin mass that may allow for the inclusion of a previously disavowed prayer calling for the conversion of Jews.

The pair of pronouncements has caused substantial consternation among the more liberal streams of Catholicism, who see the German pope steering the church in a more traditional direction. While some Jewish communal officials have urged Jews to stay out of what they perceive to be primarily an intra-Catholic debate, others are continuing to sound a warning about the statements’ effect on interfaith relations.

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