Hattix

Here in Britain, the Government has no direct say over education. An organisation of professional teachers, educators, experts, define the national curriculum which all students are tested against. There are caveats, many I do not like, such as that government funding goes to religious schools which is a horrendous abuse of taxpayer money to merely further a non-educational aganda.

My readers in the States are not so lucky. It seems that most states have a Board of Education, elected to place based on how well they can campaign and many of them aren’t even educators by trade but career politicians using it as a stepping stone. The perfect platform from which to launch a war on education.

In Texas, Don McLeroy heads their BoE and is perhaps the least qualified person to do so. He’s devoutly anti-education, a Young-Earth Creationist and most likely a Flat-Earther. This is a man who thinks that reality is taught in The Bible, The Koran, The Torah, The Talmund… A man who wants mythology to take the place of reality in the classroom.

It should come as no surprise then, that his latest exploits managed to perk the attention of this usually UK-centric blog (I’m getting there, I promise!). In three years, a panel of experts, teachers and educators were revising the English curriculum for Texas. This work of 36 months was then totally ignored and a small insular group of ’social conservatives’ wrote a new one up right there and then, according to their own beliefs and agendas. Politicians, not educators, not teachers, invented a new curriculum with little to no educator or teacher backing overnight.

It doesn’t stop there. This trainwreck carried on through the BoE, McLeroy actually dismissed members who raised concerns that he was rushing through and denied counter-arguments to be made. 9-6, the new ’standards’ were forced past.

Now you may be wondering, what do a bunch of foreigners who decide they don’t want to teach English have to do with us? Well first off, it’s the invasion of education being led by the religious right. They want to indoctrinate children early and often; Science (oh boy, this’ll make for some fun posts) is next on the agenda.

Most importantly this tells us all what damage religion can do when allowed into education. These are people who don’t privately live their own lives according to whatever book they worship, but want to force that onto other people, onto their innocent children. Does this seem evil? Only something that distant foreigners would do? It’s happening here and now in the UK! Already the government, free to sponsor whatever schools it likes, funds Christian, Muslim, Jewish schools who have a very tenuous grasp of reality and teach their dogma as science! To make matters worse, that dogma is then forced through examinations under anti-discriminaton laws.

In the UK we taxpayers do not just pay for religions we may not agree with, but we subvert the worth of our childrens’ education. Is “Allah did it” as valid an education as a thorough understanding of Genetics and Evolution? The Government wants you to think it is and it’s made laws to make sure it is. Your child, busting his nut to learn his Science, gains the exact same grade as a student at some church school who writes “because my god said so”.

It must end. Religion has its place, but that place is not in any publically funded sector. Public funds must not be used to forward any religious agenda. Let us not continue making the mistakes that our backwards American cousins are making today. Let’s prove that we can do it better.

Are we off the hook? Has nature conspired to save us from our mistakes? No warming for over a decade? Is this great news?

The answer to all the above is “no”. It’s terrible news. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany believe that a natural cycle of cooling will offset partly or completely any warming over the next decade or so. This may initially sound great, a stay of reprieve, but it’s anything but. The findings are largely a result of increased cloud cover caused by increased storms caused by climate change superimposed onto a small existing cycle. It’s bad news because it gives politicians several terms where they have a ‘look at the last five years’ excuse not to do anything; Give a politician the choice of doing something and doing nothing and he’ll do nothing every time.

What’s worse is that change after the cycle is over will be rapid and that it does not affect high latitudes. Antarctica will still lose ice shelf after ice shelf. Arctic pack ice will still be all but gone in five years.

 When the sun dawns on 2020 and the crutch holding us up collapses, do you think we’ll be ready? Call me a pessimist, but I sure don’t.

You know what puzzles most genetic scientists? That there’s any controversy at all. After reading about a field of GM potatoes being grown nearby to myself I figured I’d do my bit to set the record straight.

There never was and never will be any health risk to humans from GM foods. It’s quite simply impossible. There is, however, quite a large health risk to humans from starvation.

The high priests of the anti-GM movement (Largely “greens”, paradoxically) have founded what approaches religion with their hate filled rhetoric which has no foundation in reason or fact.

 The basics of genetic modification are really simple. Genes control what proteins a cell manufactures and how. What we do is take a section of this control code that does something we want it to do and add it to the existing code. In the above link, the potatoes, the scientists took a gene which makes the potato roots emit a certain chemical, which nematode worms use to locate roots to eat. They then broke the gene so it doesn’t work; The roots no longer emit that chemical, the worms can’t find them, the potatoes aren’t killed.

We could do, and have done, the exact same with selective breeding. If you think your pet dog isn’t genetically modified, think again. It’s not a wolf, we genetically engineered it into the dog by thousands of years of selective breeding; This is genetic modification. Same for the cow from the auroch. The pig from the boar, the chicken, the turkey, all staples on our dinner tables, all genetically modified and not found in nature.

What science is giving us are tools to do those same modifications in years rather than in millennia. Now we can directly modify the traits and characteristics of plants and animals; A good example are fungal infections in plants. We can spray on bacteria which poison the fungus, or we can include the genetic code from the bacteria which produces that fungicide into the plant’s own genome and make plants which are immune to the fungus and we don’t need to spray on the bacteria.

So what’s the problem? Well, we make ’supercrops’ which could escape into the wild and out-compete native plants. Which, of course, we’ve been doing for millennia! Rapeseed plants (Canola over the Atlantic) are springing up all over the European countryside. Wheat grows wild, but doesn’t even exist in nature. This environmental ‘disaster’ that the high priests of anti-GM preach their sermons on isn’t just a ‘disaster’ but it’s already happened and has been since we first invented agriculture 8,000 years ago! As we can see just by looking outside (I can anyway), the original forest of Britain has been almost entirely obliterated to make room for agriculture. The prairie of the US has had its herds of bison massacred and wheat planted, roads cut across it.

We’ve already done the disaster. Let’s just make the best use of the land we’ve claimed so we don’t need more. Genetic engineering allows us to make that best use. The anti-GM high priests would rather have us slash and burn rainforests than be content with what we have already; With that objective in mind, can they ever label themselves ‘environmentalist’ with a straight face?