That wacky Don Wagner!

.....Back in September, as always, Tracy’s Board Meeting Highlights described trustee reports given during the SOCCCD board meeting. Trustee Don Wagner, it said, reported that he had “attended the Education Alliance dinner and encouraged everyone in the community to take a look the organization, of which he is a board member.”
.....Near as I can tell, EA is growing and is becoming a player in OC politics. (For a brief review of its activities since 1994, read this.)
.....Well, ever since Tracy’s report, I have regularly visited the Education Alliance website (see), keeping an eye on the organization.
.....Education Alliance’s politics are typical of the religious right. Its platform (see) lists seven “principles”:

1. Back to basics education
2. Rights of parents
3. Local control
4. No bilingual education
5. Eliminating union and other special interests control over school administration
6. Promoting positive values and discipline
7. Term limits

.....Now wait a minute! Don’s on the board of EA, and EA favors term limits.
.....According to EA, term limits “prevent constant unbroken sustained long-term re-election of any particular individual to any particular office in the government of education.” That’s a bad thing, evidently.
.....OK, but Don Wagner holds office in the government of education. He’s a trustee of a community college district.
.....Don was elected in 1998. He was reelected in 2002. And then again in 2006.
.....Just sayin’.
.....From now on, though, I'm callin' him "Ralph Waldo" Wagner.

Some district history you may have missed: Wagner debates, 1998



SEE also Video: Wagner goes after "liberal busybodies"

Fear and loathing in Costa Mesa

A Gustavo Arellano review in this afternoon’s OC Weekly: Humberto Caspa's New Book Chronicles the Fear and Loathing of Mexicans in Costa Mesa

If Orange County is the Mexican-hating capital of America, then Costa Mesa is its capitol—the crucible where anti-immigrant measures get debated, adopted, executed, and then mimicked nationwide. The past four years alone have seen the city introduce America to Minutemen mayors, migra agents in city jails, shuttering of day-labor centers and human-relations commissions, and arresting local activists. Couple that with xenophobic NIMBYers, and no wonder Humberto Caspa titled his book chronicling Costa Mesa’s Mexican madness Terror in the Latino Barrio: The Rise of the New Right in Local Government….

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: The lawn is full of breathing statues

Some poetry. It helps.

from Elizabeth Spires:

The Faces of Children

Meeting old friends after a long time, we see
with surprise how they have changed, and must imagine,
despite the mirror's lies, that change is upon us, too.

Once, in our twenties, we thought we would never die.
Now, as one thoughtlessly shuffles a deck of cards,
we have run through half our lives.


The afternoon has vanished, the evening changing
us into four shadows mildly talking on a porch.
And as we talk, we listen to the children play
the games that we played once. In joy and terror,
they cry out in surprise as the seeker finds the one in hiding,
or in fairytale tableau, each one is tapped and turned

to stone. The lawn is full of breathing statues who wait
to be changed back again, and we can do nothing but stand
to one side of our children's games, our children's lives.


We are the conjurors who take away all pain,
and we are the ones who cannot take away the pain at all.
They do not ask, as lately we have asked ourselves,

Who was I then? And what must I become?
Like newly minted coins, their faces catch
the evening's radiance. They are so sure of us,

more sure than we are of ourselves. Our children:
who gently push us toward the end of our own lives.
The future beckons brightly. They trust us to lead them there.

Demea’s no dummy

.....As we’ve often noted, Trustee Tom Fuentes is among the directors of Eagle Publishing, of which Regnery Publishing is a subsidiary.
.....Regnery publishes books that are, shall we say, south of academe. They’re often south of honest, too. Consider the execrable Unfit for Command. You remember that one.
.....Occasionally, I check out Regnery’s “featured books.” Among them these days (see) is The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, by Jonathan Wells.
.....Regnery’s description of Wells’ book makes it sound like old news: the absence of transitional fossils, the Cambrian explosion. Evidently, Wells accuses some “Darwinists” of faking the evidence. Yeah, sure. It's all a plot. We'll meet at Disneyland later this summer and distribute the loot.
.....These days, no opponent of science leaves home without the “intelligent design” argument, which, in essence, judges that, since there exist complex natural phenomena the explanation of which we have not yet found, it follows that God (i.e., a grand intelligence) must be the explanation.

.....Imagine hanging with some ancient Babylonians. Suddenly, lightning hits a tree, sets it on fire. Everybody’s impressed. Babs (the Babylonian) says, “must’ve been God.” Lonnie (the Babylonian) replies, “Maybe it’s something else—something maybe we’ll figure out some day.”
.....Babs gets hostile. “Yeah, Mr. Wizard? Like what?”
.....Lonnie doesn’t come up with anything.
.....“OK, then,” says Babs. “It’s God.”

.....According to Regnery,

Wells … turns to the theory of intelligent design (ID), the idea that some features of the natural world, such as the internal machinery of cells, are too “irreducibly complex” to have resulted from unguided natural processes alone. [Yawn.] … As Wells explains, religion does play a role in the debate over Darwin—though not in the way evolutionists claim. Wells shows how Darwin reasoned that evolution is true because divine creation “must” be false—a theological assumption oddly out of place in a scientific debate….

.....I’m not sure what that last part's about. But it is often noted—by scientists and philosophers—that science is concerned with “the natural,” i.e., with nature. It is therefore not concerned with the “supernatural”—i.e., that which is beyond the natural. Bringing supernatural entities into the explanation of natural phenomena is, therefore, a mistake, like trying to open a bottle of beer with, say, a sentence fragment, or with a pain in one’s toe.
.....It’s just stupid.

.....The other day, I mentioned to one of my classes that there is, of course, a problem with the design argument, one noted 240 years ago by David Hume, among others. In his famous Dialogues, upon hearing a description of the design argument, the character Demea, a theist, immediately objects:

I shall be so free…, said DEMEA, as to tell you that from the beginning I could not approve of your conclusion concerning the similarity of the Deity to men; still less can I approve of the mediums by which you endeavour to establish it. What! No demonstration of the Being of a God! No abstract arguments! No proofs a priori! Are these, which have hitherto been so much insisted on by philosophers, all fallacy, all sophism? Can we reach no farther in this subject than experience and probability? I will not say that this is betraying the cause of a Deity. But surely, by this affected candor, you give advantage to atheists which they never could obtain by the mere dint of argument and reasoning.

.....Demea is saying that, if theists rely on this argument, they argue for a designer who operates at our level, the lowly level of human experience. That is, if we say that we must believe in God specifically because of what we see in the world, then we are talking about a God who makes worldly things, like cells and stars and cow pies. We are not talking about a God who makes things whose limits are only our wildest imaginings.
.....Demea may be a theist, but he’s no dummy. And he’s honest, too.
.....—Unlike the boorish yahoos of Regnery Publishing, including Jonathan Wells and Tom Fuentes—a man who helps to oversee South County's community colleges.
.....Good Lord!

March 2005: the community responds to Fuentes' nixing Spanish study-abroad:

Think I'll go

Check out this very nicely done promotional video for a dance performance by the Performing Dance Ensemble at IVC's Performing Arts Center on May 15 and 16.

Hell, I think I'll go!



I noticed that some readers commented favorably on a video for the IVC reading program. I looked it up, and, sure enough, it's good: IVC Reading Program.

Tell us about program- or college-related videos that you're proud of.

Gary, Indiana - what a night!

There is just one place,
that can light my face!

(hat tip to Celeste Fremon over at Witness LA who sure knows how to cheer up a gal.)

Religion: honoring the disability

.....OK, enough about YouTube and livers. Celebrated philosopher—and Darwinian atheist—Daniel Dennett can be heard interviewed recently on BBC radio: BBC interview.
.....The conversation includes three authors, including brain expert Raymond Tallis. Dennett enters the conversation 12 and a half minutes in.

.....Even more recently, Dennett participated in a debate about religion (with Robert Winston). To hear that, go to Guardian debate. Dennett’s portion starts at 22:47.
.....Among other things, Dennett says

.....If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol or television or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges—mixed blessings, in fact—has the power to overwhelm our best judgement and cloud our critical faculties, religion doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and to make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.
.....Right now, Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, a young student, is on death row in Afghanistan, sentenced to execution for committing blasphemy. Imagine! We're living in the 21st century and in "liberated" Afghanistan blasphemy is still a capital crime. Most of the rest of the world is unwilling to tell those bent on carrying out this barbaric sentence that they are simply wrong.
.....You don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense to do massively crazy things. And—this is the worst of it—religious faith can give people a sort of hyperbolic confidence, an utter unconcern about whether they might be making a mistake, that enables acts of inhumanity that would otherwise be unthinkable.
.....Other institutions or traditions may encourage a certain amount of irrationality—think of the wild abandon that is often appreciated in sports or art—but only religion demands it as a sacred duty. This might not matter if we could treat religious allegiances the way we treat differences in taste: if you have a taste for kick-boxing or heavy metal bands, that's your business. Not so with religion. Its arena includes not just the participants but all of life on the planet.
.....The better is enemy of the best: religion may make many people better, but it is preventing them from being as good as they could be. If only we could transfer all that respect, loyalty and intense devotion from an imaginary being—God—to something real: the wonderful world of goodness we and our ancestors have made and of which we are now the stewards.

You’ll be glad to know that these conversations are thoughtful and intelligent. It ain’t Fox news.