You can be a fool

Remember when you were a kid and your overly supportive parents said you could be anything you wanted to be? Then you struggled through high school and college, and now you're not working at your dream job.

You haven't won a Pulitzer prize, an Oscar or the Nobel. You haven't discovered a cure for cancer, started the next mega Silicon Valley business or married the person of your dreams. Discouraged?

Don't be. You can still become a fool. It's easy, and it will make you popular. Here's a couple easy steps.

First, have lots of opinions and shout them out with conviction at every opportunity. You don't have to do the careful research necessary to determine if your opinions have any basis in fact. That takes valuable time away from forming opinions and using them to make friends. Better to get your opinions from vocal opinion makers. Just choose opinions that have a strong emotional appeal and repeat them, changing the wording slightly to personalize them. People will either agree with you and be your friends, or they will disagree with you and you can have an argument. Either way, people are talking to you and acknowledging you.

Then make sure you think in black and white. Gray areas confuse people, and you will be left with only those insufferable intellectuals to talk with, and we all know how they are regarded by the public.

Once you mastered "basic fool," there are higher levels you can work on.

Ha ve a merry, secular Xmas

It’s that time of year again, the time I write a short piece to justify my enjoyment of Christmas, or my preferred “Xmas.” People assume that since I’m an atheist, I would shun this religious holiday.

On the contrary on two counts. First I welcome it, rather than shun it. Second, I’m convinced Christmas is really a secular holiday, despite what the church-goers say.

Historically, Christmas has most often been an excuse for wildness, drunkenness, and rowdy behavior of all sorts. In fact there was a period in the 1600s when the celebration of Christmas was outlawed in England, mostly because of the excesses of the party animals. It was even outlawed for a time in parts of New England, for much the same reason.

Once we shook off the Middle Ages, Christmas became a time to cut loose, with only a tip of the hat, at best, to the birth of Jesus. Times and work were hard, and in mid winter not much work could be done, so people had time to celebrate the way people always tend to, with excess.

Religion started creeping back into the holiday in the 19^th century, but at the same time a different tradition was starting. Charles Dickens was one of the first and best at promoting this new attitude toward an old holiday. With the writing of A Christmas Carol, he got people thinking about the idea that Christmas was a time of unselfish acts toward others, generosity of wallet and spirit. Note that Jesus wasn’t mentioned in his delightful little book.

People now not only give over-priced gifts to family, friends and co workers, they also donate to charity, bring sacks of food to can food drives, drop money in the little pots the bell shakers have in front of stores, and generally act nicely toward people in the street.

Strangers pass me on the Boulevard and we wish each other a Merry Christmas. It makes us both feel good, and it doesn’t require a debate or conversation about the existence of God.

At the same time as A Christmas Carol, the idea of using the holiday to get together with family and rekindle ties became popular. The Christmas feast became tradition.

We send cards to friends in distant places, rekindling friendships that might otherwise fade. Some of us decorate our homes to stave off the darkness of mid winter. We have house parties, where we give our friends and families food and drink, and we don’t ask them to contribute or to reciprocate.

I have a great time doing things most of us enjoy: giving and receiving gifts, eating good food, drinking good wine and talking with good friends, and none of this comes with the requirement to talk about an itinerant Jewish preacher who was born two thousand years ago.

Educational Reform Starts with Tenure Reform

There seems to be a growing consensus about education reform in this country, at least a consensus about how we have a serious problem. Unfortunately, education is a complex affair, made up of many components. Many of the diverse small problems that make up the large one require leadership skills, buy-in from a diverse group of stakeholders and revised curriculums. There is, however, one area that isn't complex and would go a long way toward true reform, even though it would be hard to implement.

Tenure is a relic from long ago, perhaps a good idea 100 years ago, but a disaster now. Eliminate tenure and start improving education immediately.

What is gained with tenure. Excellent teachers aren't going to lose their jobs, and hiring new teachers to replace higher paid older teachers wouldn't even be an issue if teachers were paid for how well they teach, not for how many years they sat in a chair in front of a class.

In California we decided that we wouldn't even give our elected representatives a chance at tenure when we passed term limits. Do we really believe a group of people who sit around in eternal political gridlock are more deserving to be replace for poor performance than the people who make the difference between our children growing up to be successes or failures? And that is the issue, our children's futures.

Does anyone really believe that teachers are interchangeable, like those fast food workers that one day wait the counter, the next day work the fries? Do teachers who pass out work sheets deserve the same pay as someone who is actively teaching and continually checking for understanding? What about the teachers who opt for fun activities and cultural enrichment rather than teaching students to read and compute?

I have substituted in a number of classes over the years, and I can see a difference. In some classes, the teacher has provided a rich set of learning activities for the students, and the class understands the expectations. In classes like that, I've worked for my pay. I've babysat in other classes, with 1 hour, 45 minute blocks, where the assignment was a one page worksheet, something I could do in 20 minutes, the better students in 30 and the slackers in well under an hour. The rest of the interminably long block is spent chatting, texting, playing games on their phones or actually napping. These kids are bored, and it's no wonder many drop out, opting for a minimum wage job that at least give them a small monetary feedback.

The teachers who will yell the loudest about this suggestion aren't the ones who would be retained and earn a higher wage. Rather it will be the people who, without tenure to protect them, would be out on the street, looking for another job.

Eliminate poorly performing teachers, pay the good ones more money, hire support staff to do the non teaching, routine paper and phone work, and we will start turning out graduates ready to take on the demanding work of the 21st century. The alternative is stagnation.

Naturally there are other measures that must be taken, such as redesigning the make up of school boards, and having checks and balances between certificated, classified and administrative employees in order to keep one group from abusing the rights of anot

Productive and fun time

So far Dec. has been both fun and productive. I just got another article published in California Kayaker
See pages 18-20
Also took a wonderful paddle in the Watsonville slough system and filmed it.
Hope my readers enjoy these, and I'm always anxious to hear from you.

Book Review

Sam Harris' new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, provides a clear and insightful challenge to those who have conceded the moral argument to the moral relativists. He has made, sometime redundantly, the point that moral good can be derived from whatever creates human well-being, thus being a subject that can be studied scientifically, allowing us to make objective claims, at least in principle, about moral right and wrong.

Harris doesn't shy away from the label, "moral realist," and in fact he defends this position admirably. He makes excellent points about some of the cultural practices that create misery for large numbers of a population, under the moral umbrella of religious practice, and how many of our intellectuals are reluctant to condemn these practices as morally offensive and just plain mistaken.

I think this should be a must read for any open-minded intellectual who seems to think that moral issues can't be objectified and that we shouldn't impose our values on other societies. He believes, rightly so, that our political correct, multiculturalism has gone too far, and now refuses to recognize any standards of human behavior.

Harris did, in my opinion, miss some opportunities to make a good point. He quotes philosopher and neuroscientist, Joshua Greene, and then argues against Greene's points.
However, when Greene states: "And like may of our common sense abilities, our ability to make moral judgments feels to us like a perceptual ability, an ability, in this case, to discern immediately and reliably mind-independent moral facts. As a result we are naturally inclined toward a mistaken belief in moral realism."

I believe that Harris should have jumped upon this implication that because something isn't mind-independent, it can't be a real fact and subject to the idea of realism. There are many objective facts that are mind-dependent and also collective mind-dependent. One great example, used by philosopher John Searle, is that of money. There is no physical, mind-independent fact about those little green pieces of paper, and lately, those little ones and zeros in bank computers that makes them intrinsically money. They are money because we accept them as money, believe they are money and treat them as money. Money is mind-dependent, actually also collectively mind-dependent, and yet it has an objective reality. It can provide food and shelter for people, cause the building of cities, allow governments--an other mind-dependent fact--to function and finance bombs that can level cities.

Values and morals are no less objectively real than money, justice, elected leaders or other facts of society. We can't relegate mental and social process to some ambiguous concepts where objective evaluation can't proceed.

While I can look at Harris' work, one that really needed to be written and read, and in the process find some points that weren't made strongly enough for my taste, as well as some that I felt might have been overstated, that in no way takes anything away from this book. He has said something that, at this moment in history, really needed to be said.

In short, if you ever think about these issues, you need to read this book.