What's Wrong with American Education:

The list of problems is long, but one place to start is with the Texas Board of Education. Texas politicians love to pander to right-wing bigots, and the Board has tremendous influence over what appears in textbooks, not only in their state, but also around the country. Textbook publishers and educators have been attempting to fight back, but a recent vote by the Board is making things more difficult. (See today's New York Times.) The Board wants American textbooks to reflect the majority of Texans' belief in white supremacy, Christian fundamentalism, and a "free market" based on "the Chicago School of Economics" that would promote the complete deregulation of business.


Tea Party Rallies Its Support from People Terrified by Debt:

Kate Zernike reports on the Tea Party leadership and its avoidance of all things social in today's New York Times. Unlike the Texas School Board whose conservative majority focus all of their attention on a highly glossed version of history as "the white man's burden," the Tea Party leadership hopes to garner power by appealing to white fears, and ignorance, about the economy.

Political leaders of all stripes make hay out of the fact that almost no one understands how the economy functions. Consider for a moment how many schools of thought are devoted to the subject and how diverse the directions they come from are. Most can be reduced to enhancing the biased views of their proponents, regardless of the political spectrum they emanate from.


Worthy of Note:

Blaine Brownell reflects on the symbolic importance of architecture in today's New York Times. Brownell describes the world's new tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, in historic terms, remarking on the fact that unlike its predecessors, which were devoted to commerce and icons of religiosity, the building in Dubai is primarily a residentual center, and made of reinforced concrete, not steel and glass or stone. Brownell thinks, "If one society worshiped God in stone, and another venerated enterprise in steel, it must say something that we have now been able to reach so high with our most common building material: concrete."


The Conservative Movement's Triumvirate:

Newt (Nuke Getrich) Gingrich, Sarah (I only run in order to quit) Palin, Glenn (I haven't got a clue) Beck. If wooden headed Ronny Rayguns could be prez …. Okay, they may be floating for the moment, but just keep flushing.

Taking Notes Helps:

Decades ago when I was in college I learned that simply taking notes helped me remember lectures. Often I didn't even need to go over those notes, or at least didn't need to spend much time studying them afterwards, in order to recall information for a test.

Now it turns out that even just doodling can help a person recall information with an improved efficiency of up to 29 percent, according to findings published in Applied Cognitive Psychology. (You can find the story at Yahoo's "Health Day" site.) Which was my argument in English class during my junior year of high school when I had the least enthusiastic teacher in the history of public education. Quite a feat since during my sophomore year I had the second least enthusiastic teacher. (How, I always wondered, could such a good public school, nevertheless, host two such improbable performers?)

Joe, the former of these two, was an ex-Marine, combat veteran of the Korean War, with the scar tissue on his face to prove it. Apparently, he had survived being hit by shrapnel from a grenade, and he had all the demeanor of a drill sergeant and the indifference of a modern day CEO. Even though I was a starting linebacker on the varsity football team, I knew to be very careful with this man. Better not to look too closely at him.

In order to distract myself and in the hopes of not being called upon in class and publicly humiliated, a favorite form of control, I began doodling whenever Joe lectured. I also figured this might keep me awake. There was nothing worse than falling asleep in one of Joe's classes.

One day shortly after I had begun this practice and Joe had been castigating first one student and then the other, he looked over at me in the corner of the room where I had hoped his faulty peripheral vision might allow me some protection and demanded to know just what I was doing. Quite possibly he thought I was writing a note to another student or doing my math homework.

"Doodling," I responded, trying to imitate the concerned and thoughtful expression I had observed on rare occasions by my elders. "It helps me concentrate and remember."

For the first time, I discovered that Joe had at least one other expression than the various degrees of disgust his face normally displayed. He seemed very nearly astounded.

"Well," he said loudly, "see that you do."

Now I was stuck. I would have to go on doodling in his class for the rest of the year, even when I didn't feel like doodling, and my sketching abilities were extremely limited. Sure, I had won a blue ribbon at the state fair when I was six years old for a pastel I had created in first grade art class, but my drafting abilities had gone down rapidly after that.

Worse, Joe was sure to tell the other teachers, and I would have to doodle in all of their classes as well. Truly, high school is hell, but one thing seems certain. Doodling has had a profound effect on my memory. How else do you explain this story, unless I just made it all up.

More Growing Pains for TV:

First it was going to make us all better educated, then it rotted our brains, and following this it was going to bring an unbelievable wealth of choice, dramatically improving democracy, allowing us to talk back.

None of this proved quite as wonderful or terrible as the hucksters and social critics thought. Currently, the issue is over plummeting advertising dollars. Revenue is drying up. There are limits that economists seemed to have never warned anyone about. Environmentalists told us a long time ago that we live in a finite world, but economists seemed to believe that wealth could grow exponentially throughout the eons (or at least the next business quarter).

Broadcast networks are in trouble. Dramatic shows cost around $3 million per hour to create, and the ad revenue that used to pay for them is drying up. The spigots at GM and Ford have been closed. The dirty little secret of business—there are limits to the amount of advertising dollars—is out of the closet. (See Tim Arango's article in today's New York Times.)

Americans, however, seem to be adapting, even if TV executives are fumbling about with ever more "reality" TV shows to cut costs. Viewers are tuning in to cable, renting movies and TV shows, and watching TV on their computers. The consumer is driving the market even if the vehicle has no idea where it is going.

The War America Never Should Have Fought Will End:

The news has been full of the Obama time table for America's cessation of military involvement in Iraq, but the topic that will be most important is being skirted. What will happen to the country that was never a country?

As everyone should know by now, Iraq is a European concept imposed on the people of the region, maintained first by foreign intervention and then by strong-man-government. The latter model has been broken and no one wants to impose the former, except perhaps Iran.

So far, no one is talking publicly about all of that "sweet oil" that lies so close to the surface. Or about the American desire to maintain a strong military presence in the region for reasons other than toppling a petty dictatorship or fighting terrorists.

When Sex Has Less Value Than Conversation:

Sounds like a house on the city limits of Las Vegas, but according to Charles Blow, writing in today's New York Times' Op-Ed pages, today's teens are more likely to "hook up" than to date.

In today's parlance, to "hook up" means to momentarily go bump in the night. Interestingly, when I was a young man the term meant "to leave." It was introduced in the military, co opted from airborne units who "hooked up" before jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.

The evolution of the term is interesting and suggests something about the current concept. Today's teens don't "make love" or even "have sex," they simply "encounter" one another from time to time, reducing the matter to a simple bodily function, as it were.

In other news, there are now more female college students in America than male ones; and China is currently America's absentee landlord. I'm not sure any relationship exists between these facts, but the times are full of change, to coin a phrase.

On the sixty-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the Dude had this to say: "Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die." — George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Dec. 7, 2006. (Now that just proves he would be fun to have a beer with, provided you weren't one of the dead people he talks to.)

Yes, America, Friday the 13th did fall on Saturday this month. (Thank you, Pogo.)

World's Biggest Ponzi scheme collapses:

In the shadow of the Blagojevich scandal comes the news that Bernard Madoff has confessed to having stolen as much as $50 billion with a fake hedge fund, which he admitted to his sons was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme (an investment swindle in which high profits are promised from fictitious sources and early investors are paid off with funds raised from later ones [after Charles Ponzi (1882?-1949), Italian-born speculator who organized such a scheme (1919-1920)]).

The question now is how many more hedge funds are nothing more than Ponzi schemes. (See The Washington Post story.)