Otto on a fundraising mailer

Our dog Otto continues his celebrity career by being featured on the front of a "save the date" postcard for a fundraiser for Altered Tails, a local charity that provides low-cost spaying and neutering for dogs and cats. The image is a painting done by local artist Susan Barken.

Who started the "War on Christmas"

I had previously been aware of Fox News "The Big Story" anchor John Gibson's book, The War on Christmas, as well as former National Review author John O'Sullivan's 2001 article on the subject, and of course Bill O'Reilly's repeated misrepresentations on the subject. But until I read Max Blumenthal's article, "Who Started the War on Christmas?," I wasn't aware of VDare founder Peter Brimelow's role. Turns out he blames it on the Jews.

(Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.)

Drunk driver kills someone, yet gets only a speeding ticket

Mario Chavez was driving drunk when he hit another car, killing its driver, 20-year-old University of Maryland student Brian Gray. Gray's mother was traveling behind him in another vehicle, and watched her son die. When police arrived at the scene, they did not bother to give Chavez a test for his blood alcohol level. Chavez lied to investigators about what he was doing prior to the crash, claiming he was sleeping even though his cell phone records show that he was talking on the phone. He didn't lose his job and he has only received a speeding ticket. Brian Gray, however, had blood taken from his dead body to see if he had been drinking, but he had not.

It seems the rules are different when the guilty party is a police officer. Mario Chavez is a Prince George's County, Maryland police officer who was driving his patrol car at the time of the accident. For some reason the black box recording device for his police cruiser has not been checked for evidence due to "software problems." A page of nurse's notes about Chavez after his admission to Prince George's Hospital after the crash has also disappeared.

(Via The Agitator.)

Quarterbacks, teachers, and financial advisors

I'm generally quite averse to watching sports, let alone reading about them. But I did read Michael Lewis's Moneyball at one sitting and just read Malcolm Gladwell's "Most Likely to Succeed" in the December 15 issue of The New Yorker.

Gladwell's article looks at examples of jobs where there are few, if any, available measurements of performance available before hiring that correlate with success in the position. The performance of college quarterbacks doesn't track their success in the NFL (apparently due to factors such as the sizes of players and the types of offensive formations used), and none of the items on a resumé seem to predict the success of teachers or financial advisors.

Yet quality of teaching is a huge factor in student educational success (as I've previously noted on this blog with regard to an Economist article about a McKinsey & Co. study that compared education across OECD nations). As The Economist article I referenced noted, "Studies in Tennessee and Dallas have shown that, if you take pupils of average ability and give them to teachers deemed in the top fifth of the profession, they end up in the top 10% of student performers; if you give them to teachers from the bottom fifth, they end up at the bottom. The quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything else."

Gladwell suggests that we should find a way to hire more teachers, have them apprentice with demonstrably successful teachers, and weed out the bad ones. But the most successful nations do not follow Gladwell's suggestion of increasing the number of new teachers, instead doing nearly the opposite. Again quoting The Economist:

Nor do they try to encourage a big pool of trainees and select the most successful. Almost the opposite. Singapore screens candidates with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand. In both countries, teaching is a high-status profession (because it is fiercely competitive) and there are generous funds for each trainee teacher (because there are few of them).

South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results. Its primary-school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies. In contrast, secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of 350 colleges, with laxer selection criteria. This has produced an enormous glut of newly qualified secondary-school teachers—11 for each job at last count. As a result, secondary-school teaching is the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a primary-school teacher. The lesson seems to be that teacher training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.

Gladwell's suggestion of apprenticeship, however, fits with the McKinsey & Co. study suggestion of improving teacher training and encouraging good teachers to share information and lesson plans with each other, as well as having top teachers provide oversight to teacher training.

Wal-Mart pricing on Jesus shirts

(Via FailBlog.)

A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant

Tempe's Stray Cat Theatre is performing "A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant," December 5-20.

The East Valley Tribune has described the show, and more details may be found at the Stray Cat Theatre's website.

UPDATE (December 19, 2008): A few of us went to see the show last night, which I've described in a separate post.

Roger Ebert reviews Expelled

In what may be the most entertaining review of "Expelled" yet, Roger Ebert gives Ben Stein what for in the Chicago Sun Times:

This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.

And there is worse, much worse. Toward the end of the film, we find that Stein actually did want to title it "From Darwin to Hitler." He finds a Creationist who informs him, "Darwinism inspired and advanced Nazism." He refers to advocates of eugenics as liberal. I would not call Hitler liberal. Arbitrary forced sterilization in our country has been promoted mostly by racists, who curiously found many times more blacks than whites suitable for such treatment.

Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one "result" of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. "As a Jew," he says, "I wanted to see for myself." We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. "It's difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place," he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.

Pastor who got "under God" added to pledge dies

Lest there was any remaining doubt that the 1954 insertion of "under God" into the pledge of allegiance was explicitly religious, the news has covered the death of the Rev. George M. Docherty, a Presbyterian minister from Scotland, noting that it was his sermon heard by President Dwight D. Eisenhower that prompted the change:

"I didn't know that the Pledge of Allegiance was, and he recited it, 'one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,'" he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2004. "I came from Scotland, where we said 'God save our gracious queen,' 'God save our gracious king.' Here was the Pledge of Allegiance, and God wasn't in it at all."

He delivered his sermon calling for "under God" to be added to the pledge first in 1952 with little effect, but delivered it again on February 7, 1954, while Eisenhower was in attendance at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C., near the White House. Eisenhower immediately let Congress know he wanted it to happen, and Rep. Charles G. Oakman (R-MI) introduced a bill the very next day to make that addition, which Eisenhower signed into law on Flag Day.

Michael Newdow currently has a second lawsuit working its way through the courts to remove "under God" from the pledge on the grounds that Congress's action was a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. His first lawsuit went to the Supreme Court, where the justices declined to rule on the merits of the argument, and instead reasoned that he lacked standing to bring the suit because he was involved in a custody dispute over his daughter, who was the plaintiff because she was required to recite the pledge in school. That ruling, like Eisenhower's signing of the original unconstitutional bill, was delivered on Flag Day (in 2004).

Phoenix-area foreclosures

Yesterday the Arizona Republic had an interactive foreclosure map and document of data (PDF) which includes the monthly foreclosure statistics for the last eighteen months:

April 2007: 553
May 2007: 475
June 2007: 579
July 2007: 676
August 2007: 806
September 2007: 1,093
October 2007: 936
November 2007: 1,344
December 2007: 1,617
January 2008: 2,052
February 2008: 2,249
March 2008: 2,365
April 2008: 2,969
May 2008: 3,402
June 2008: 3,717
July 2008: 4,104
August 2008: 4,013
September 2008: 4,378
October 2008: 4,587

Total foreclosures per year:
2004: 4,444
2005: 1,370
2006: 1,070
2007: 9,920
2008: 33,836 through October

This is not good news for a state where construction and real estate provide a large share of the employment opportunities. It is good news for those who do not own homes and have been waiting to buy at lower prices--it looks like next year will offer significantly better prices than this year, but there are still a lot of delusional sellers out there asking way too much. (There's a two-bedroom, two-bathroom house on a half acre in a quiet neighborhood near us that looks very nice, but is probably worth about half of the $429,000 asking price, based on comparable sales and the current downward trend. Zillow says it's worth $277,000.)

See their summary article, which has links to the map and other documents.

Disorder breeds disorder

When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City, he had a zero-tolerance policy on graffiti, litter, and broken windows, on the assumption that small crimes like vandalism create an environment conducive to more serious crimes.

Now, a study in the Netherlands published in Science provides support for this theory. In an alley used to park bicycles, the experimenters set up two conditions, one in which the walls of the alley were freshly painted and one in which they were tagged with graffiti. Flyers advertising a bicycle shop were attached to the handlebars of all parked bicycles. In the graffiti condition, 69% of bicyclists dumped the flyer on the ground as litter; in the clean condition, 33% littered. They performed several other similar experiments, and in each case the test subjects were more likely to engage in anti-social acts such as littering, trespassing, and stealing in the condition of disorder as opposed to in the condition of order.

(Via The Economist, where you can read more details of the experiments.)