Again I ask, what makes this news worth following, Associated Press? What makes this news?

Her parents say a New Jersey elementary school teacher told a third-grader the Bible was inappropriate reading material for quiet time.

Michelle Jordat tells MyFoxNY.com her daughter, Mariah, cried when the teacher told her to put the Bible away.

The principal at Madison Park Elementary School in Old Bridge apologized and said the teacher made a mistake. The principal says school policy allows children to read the Bible or any other religious book during quiet time.

The school board addressed the issue for concerned parents on Tuesday night.

So, discipline the teacher, give the upset kid a pat on the head and a special bible bookmark she can use next time and call it end of story. What makes this something that needs to make headlines in a newspaper? What makes this news?

I do not understand why parents take stories like this to the press. This is not religious persecution. This is a teacher who was unaware of a school policy who has now been alerted and corrected. What made this an issue for “concerned parents” and the school board, too?

Christ in a cracker. Talk about retarded.

The following post requires a warning label (but not about its length):

A student was suspended from school recently on account of an art project. The student happens to be eight years old.

A Taunton father is outraged after his 8-year-old son was sent home from school and required to undergo a psychological evaluation after drawing a stick-figure picture of Jesus Christ on the cross.

The father said he got a call earlier this month from Maxham Elementary School informing him that his son, a second-grade student, had created a violent drawing. The image in question depicted a crucified Jesus with Xs covering his eyes to signify that he had died on the cross. The boy wrote his name above the cross.

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re violating his religion,” the incredulous father said.

He requested that his name and his son’s name be withheld from publication to protect the boy.

But it’d be easier to protect the boy if this didn’t make world-accessible headlines, and anyone in his class has already spread the word around about how he got in trouble. And, I don’t think his suspension qualifies as a violation against a religion. I think it’s a teacher’s screw up and a ridiculous reason to give a kid the boot, and a ridiculous thing to drag into the media – except for people who want to try and claim somebody’s being persecuted and suppressed on account of a religion. But it gets weirder.

The student drew the picture shortly after taking a family trip to see the Christmas display at the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette, a Christian retreat site in Attleboro. He made the drawing in class after his teacher asked the children to sketch something that reminded them of Christmas, the father said.

Why would the kid draw Christ on a cross at Christmastime? Anyone else his age would be into reindeer and Santa and elves, or even the nativity scene stuff, albeit badly rendered. If the kid thinks of a cross, it’s evidence of how his folks have trained him to think.

“I think what happened is that because he put Xs in the eyes of Jesus, the teacher was alarmed and they told the parents they thought it was violent,” said Toni Saunders, an educational consultant with the Associated Advocacy Center.

Saunders is working with the boy’s parents after a mutual acquaintance referred them to her.

“When I got that call, I was so appalled that I had to do something,” Saunders said.

“They weren’t looking at the fact that this is an 8-year-old child with special needs,” she added. “They made him leave school, and they recommended that a psychiatrist do an evaluation.”

Interesting. What kind of special needs? Or would that make it too obvious to know which family this is? Here it seems the special need is 24 hours of religious pampering a day or the folks have a conniption (see the real reason below).

The school, in fact, required the evaluation before the boy could return, the father said.

Maxham School principal Rebecca Couet referred all questions on the matter to the superintendent’s office.

Superintendent Julie Hackett said district policy prevents her from discussing a “confidential matter regarding a student.”

“Generally speaking, we have safety protocols in place,” Hackett said. “If a situation warrants it, we ask for outside safety evaluations if we have particular concerns about a child’s safety. We followed all the protocols in our system.”

Is the child’s safety at risk? Somebody went off the deep end over an art project and the parents have gone so far as to contact the media and keep it newsworthy, as if a suspension wouldn’t be traumatic enough for a kid his age. Why would any school suspend an eight year old over an art assignment!?

Hackett refused to specifically discuss the student’s drawing or the school’s reaction to it.

The father was flabbergasted when he learned his son had to undergo an evaluation.

“When she told me he needed to be psychologically evaluated, I thought she was playing,” he said.

The man said his son, who gets specialized reading and speech instruction at school, has never shown any tendency toward violence.

“He’s never been suspended,” he said. “He’s 8 years old. They overreacted.”

No shit, Sherlock.

The boy made the drawing and was sent home from school on Dec. 2. He went for the psychological evaluation — at his parents’ expense — the next day and was cleared to return to school the following Monday after the psychological evaluation found nothing to indicate that he posed a threat to himself or others.

The boy, however, was traumatized by the incident, which made going back to school very difficult, the father said. School administrators have approved the father’s request to have the boy transferred to another elementary school in the district.

I like that they’ve decided to switch schools. Obviously his teacher was moronically clueless. And not a comic reader. Everyone knows X’s over eyes is the way to illustrate cartoony death:

(See other Off The Mark comics)

A City Councilman in North Carolina has turned out to be either atheist or agnostic. His opponents are crapping their tightiewhities:

Asheville City Councilman Cecil Bothwell believes in ending the death penalty, conserving water and reforming government — but he doesn’t believe in God. His opponents say that’s a sin that makes him unworthy of serving in office, and they have the North Carolina Constitution on their side.

Bothwell’s detractors are threatening to take the city to court for swearing him in, even though the state’s requirement that officeholders believe in God is unenforceable because it violates the U.S. Constitution. Arkansas, Maryland, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas have similar provisions.

“The question of whether or not God exists is not particularly interesting to me and it’s certainly not relevant to public office,” said Bothwell, 59.

Well done, Councilman. I wish more people who thought like you would run and get elected. Why is god such a big part of these state constitutions anyway? Someone who is American can come on by and explain this to one very bemused Canadian, please.

Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist lists all the portions of constitutions with these bizarre holy edicts written in and, according to The Freethinker, the NC one was modified in 1868 to include this particular passage. Is it safe to guess all the rest were altered at some point as well?

When Bothwell took office last week, he used an oath that doesn’t require swearing on a Bible or reference God. That has riled conservative activists, who cite a quirk in the state constitution that disqualifies officeholders “who shall deny the being of Almighty God.”

Although Bothwell said a legal challenge would be “fun,” he believes his foes’ efforts are politically based.

Rather than let him do his job and see how capable he is to be working for the city at a political level, they’d rather try and get him canned now because they don’t approve of his lack of belief? How dare a non-believer have a presence? How dare he run! How dare he win! Whaaaaaaa!! Stomp stomp stomp those big boy Christian feet until you get your way. Very mature.

I wonder if people who voted for him knew he wasn’t religious ahead of time, or if that’s just popped into public awareness now.

It’s sad if he had to hide it in order to run.
It’s even more sad that it’s considered a scandal.

Should be forced to listen Twisted Sister’s Christmas album a few times:

What other bands or singers put Christmas music out for the world to cringe over? I have to admit to liking Spinal Tap’s Christmas With the Devil though. I heard both of these songs on last.fm today.

I first heard of the idea via Moscow but now I see China’s attempts to alter weather patterns resulted in clouds dumping a shitload of snow on Beijing.

In The People’s Republic of China, it’s no secret that the Party controls just about everything. But as Beijing suffers through its second major snowstorm this season, residents are growing weary of their leadership’s control-freak tendencies. After all, while the storm came as a surprise to residents, the government knew about it all along. In fact, the government caused it.

China has long tinkered with Mother Nature’s waterworks, even establishing a state organ — the Beijing Weather Modification Office — whose sole purpose is to meddle with the weather. The purpose behind weather modification is less megalomaniacal than it sounds at first pass; a large swath of northeast China, including Beijing, has been mired in a drought for nearly a decade, and the party leadership would like to reverse that trend for both practical reasons and to show the Chinese people exactly who is in charge.

To do so, they’ve turned to cloud seeding, a controversial practice that involves launching (or dropping) chemicals into the atmosphere — silver iodide in China, though dry ice and liquid propane also work — that cause water vapor in the air to crystallize at temperatures it otherwise would not. Its effectiveness is dubious; while it’s generally accepted that it works to some degree, it can only increase precipitation by 20 percent. Sometimes.

It’s already been suggested that cities generate enough reflected heat to alter weather patterns anyway, at least in terms of thunderstorms. Tall buildings might even affect wind patterns, and the quality of air plays a role in weather, too. That certainly explains the infamous London fogs of the coal burning days.

I knew cloud seeding had been done in the past, and was still being done for certain things but I had no idea the lengths people were going to try and control the weather. I’m pretty sure it’s a lost cause anyway. The weather does what it wants regardless of what we might want. Instead of forcing Mother Nature to bow to us, we should be learning a lesson here.

It’s tactless, but funny in a way, too. I mean, you have to wonder what was going through the math teacher’s head when he looked at this picture and said, that’s perfect for my pre-algebra students. A surprised black man missing teeth. What a great idea…

I’m assuming the mother of the only black kid in this class is the one who took her complaint to the newspaper, because what her son really needs is more recognition. Anyone in that school will have heard about this anyway and if they hadn’t, the paper fills in the details.

School district spokeswoman Karen Smith said the math teacher, Matthew Curran, frequently uses photos and other illustrations on his work sheets to engage the students.

Curran reported, through Smith, that he found the image by doing a Google Images search for the phrase “multiply and divide.”

“I chose it because it said ‘no way,’ which is a comment my students make when I require them to show each calculation,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I had no idea that I might offend anyone. I am very sorry for any distress that this has caused my students and the community.”

The boy’s mother said she spent much of the weekend angry and in tears.

“It’s very stressful to be an African-American in the community and you want to fit in and you want to embrace all of the things Central Bucks offers you,” she said. “Who’s protecting us here?”

Why didn’t the teacher take a few minutes with some other photo of a shocked looking cat or something and do the same?

(via AP in a roundabout way) I’ll admit that took more than a few minutes. But still. Cute or what?

Monday night, after meeting with the boy’s family, NAACP Bucks County President John Jordan issued a written statement denouncing the events.

“It brings into question whether all of our children are being provided a safe and fair environment in which to learn. What happened here is unacceptable, and we will take steps to make sure it never happens again.”

NAACP Bucks County Executive Committee members plan to meet with the principal and the teacher involved in the incident at Lenape Middle School “in hopes of amicably resolving the issue,” the statement went on to say.

When the assignment was handed out to the class, several students expressed their disapproval of the picture, according to the NAACP. But the teacher told them to do the work anyway, according to the boy’s mother.

So what, putting a white hillbilly missing a few teeth of his own would have been better? Stereotypes are stereotypes and a teacher should know well enough to avoid them, including the stereotype that math is problematic..er, too hard for people to understand.

So, I’ll end with a quote that teacher could have considered instead of that crazy ass picture:

The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple. — S. Gudder

Yesterday’s post was grimmer than I like doing so I’m not going to mock Rapture 2009 today like I’d intended. You can giggle at their salvation prayer page on your own time. I’ll just point out that Hebrew is read reverse of English and vowel sounds exist as dots that alter the look of a symbol that people may have started adding in later. To see a dot or three in a symbol means the symbol gets pronounced a different way. In Hewbrew spelling of YHWH, there are no vowel dots which is likely why the Greek/English spelling has none. Speaking G-d’s name (in vain or otherwise) was a no no anyway, driven by a fear they’d say it wrong and would therefore commit an unforgivable, grievous sin.

How can people who probably can’t read Hebrew and probably haven’t bothered finding out some history of the original books trust a computer construct that churns out twenty god related yet random words onto a page of Hebrew symbols and think they’ve gotten a message about the end times?

I remember being amused when those Bible code books came out. The Skeptic’s Dictionary has a nice article about this. I’ll just quote this bit about the author of one such tome from 1997, Michael Drosnin, and a critic named Brendan McKay.

Drosnin once said, “When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby-Dick, I’ll believe them.” McKay promptly produced an ELS analysis of Moby-Dick predicting not only Indira Ghandi’s assassination, but the assassinations of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and Yitzhak Rabin, as well as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Mathematician David Thomas did an ELS on Genesis and found the words “code” and “bogus” close together not once but 60 times. What are the odds of that happening? Thomas also did an ELS analysis on Drosnin’s Bible Code II: The Countdown (2002) and found the message “The Bible Code is a silly, dumb, fake, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake-oil hoax.”* Does this mean that God put in a code to reveal that there is no code?

Moral of the story, people like to find what they’re looking for. This isn’t real science. It’s hokum dressed up as a science. I’d bet a cookie that Drosnin’s method would find all kinds of word patterns that could be manipulated. They wouldn’t all be about death and politics. But whatever doesn’t support his supposed “hypothesis” gets ignored. Any book large enough to give you enough lines to work with could net similar results as Moby Dick. Stephen King’s books would have bundles. Does it really mean God put the pattern there, or do our eyes just look for patterns because human beings like patterns?

I’ll swap you two Cs for an A…

Not quite. Apparently it was a fund-raising scheme that backfired.

A $20 donation to Rosewood Middle School would have gotten a student 20 test points – 10 extra points on two tests of the student’s choosing. That could raise a B to an A, or a failing grade to a D.

Susie Shepherd, the principal, said a parent advisory council came up with the idea, and she endorsed it. She said the council was looking for a new way to raise money.

“Last year they did chocolates, and it didn’t generate anything,” Shepherd said.

Shepherd rejected the suggestion that the school is selling grades. Extra points on two tests won’t make a difference in a student’s final grade, she said.

But it does sell the idea that fake intelligence can be bought by people rich enough to afford it. Cripes, I’m glad this idea fell through. Kids are dumb enough as it is without parents paying schools to add bonus points to test results. Like that changes the fact that your kid has no idea where the Mississippi river is, or who was the first President or whatever fact got missed on the test in the first place. Good grief.

Carmen Zepp, a Raleigh parent, said there should be policies against offering students test credit for anything other than what they’ve learned.

Zepp objected this year when her daughter’s social studies teacher at Knightdale High School had students bring to school tissues and hand sanitizer. The supplies counted for 25 percent of a “supply check” grade.

“It’s awful,” Zepp said. “It’s indicative of the fact that our schools don’t have enough money. They can’t get tissues or hand sanitizer or whatever without bribery. And that’s pretty sad.”

Shepherd, the Rosewood principal, said her school needs more technology. She said any money raised would help buy digital cameras for the school’s computer lab and a high-tech blackboard.

What happened to low tech whiteboards, overhead projectors and handwriting skills? Surely most kids can get the tech at home anyway. Interesting note about tissues and sanitizer though. I recall in school we had tissue on our list of things to buy but we didn’t get graded on whether or not we actually brought the stuff to school. What a weird arrangement.

So, if money isn’t going into schools for supplies and necessary technical advancements (can’t say everything they want falls under “necessary”), where is it going?

It’s been just over a month since I wrote about the attack of the clever raven, but now via Brother Richard I discover a bird may have caused a malfunction in the Hadron Collider recently.

While it’s humbling enough for most researchers to remember that one little bird can threaten millions of dollars worth of equipment, others are not so sure it’s a random accident. Time Magazine reports that a bird’s dropped dinner overheated some of the mechanisms, but rather than blame gravity, a couple physicists are actually claiming the bird may have been sent back in time for a mission it may or may not have completed.

Seriously.

two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.

Never mind the paradox problems inherent in that…yeesh.

If the entertainment world was a billiards table and every pop culture reference were a stripe or solid sitting on it, I’d be the cue ball that careens around the table yet drops into the dark corner pocket of cluelessness without ever knowing what I missed.

That’s not an entirely accurate analogy, but it’s close enough. I see movies (eventually), I watch some television (albeit a season or seven behind everyone else), and I have the internet. I’m never totally unaware of what’s popular in any given moment, but it might require a very annoying internet meme to be passed around the interwebs like a plague before I find out why.

What I do notice is that notoriety has become more interesting to our culture than behaviour that would actually be deserving of praise. On the rare occasion when I flip through a gossip mag or check a site, they’re all reporting on who’s doing drugs, who’s the babydaddy, and who flashed the camera flash again. She looks fat, he looks homeless. She’s still trying to “collect the whole set” of World Children, and he slept with someone who’s only reknown by proxy. So how come we still have to get news about him and a reality TV “star” who fell from grace? Who really gives a damn about any of them?

Although Andy Warhol is credited with saying “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” I’ve discovered he later refined the concept. He’s referring to Studio 54 (the actual club, not the movie based on it) here:

It’s the place where my prediction from the sixties finally came true: “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, “In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.”

(source)

But will we be famous for any worthwhile reason? Will it be our choice, or random unexpected happenstance? What is the Star Wars kid doing these days? Did Ghyslain Raza’s parents have to sue the parents of the kids responsible for his unwanted infamy? Maybe, maybe not. But those asshole students did not ask Gaza’s permission to take something he made for fun at school nor did he know they’d post it online so the whole world could mock his high nerd factor. Those kids didn’t even know who Gaza was. Newsweek has a great article about Gaza’s experience (among others) and how the internet is proving Warhol right.

For people who use blogs and social-networking sites like diaries, putting their personal information out there for the world to see, this presents a serious risk. “I think young people are seduced by the citizen-media notion of the Internet: that everyone can have their minutes of fame,” says Barry Schuler, the former CEO of AOL who is now the coproducer of a new movie, “Look,” about public video surveillance. “But they’re also putting themselves out there—forever.”

Shaming victims, meanwhile, have little legal recourse. Identifying posters often means having to subpoena an anonymous IP address. But that could lead nowhere. Many people share IP addresses on college networks or Wi-Fi hotspots, and many Web sites hide individual addresses. Even if a victim identifies the defamer, bloggers aren’t usually rich enough to pay big damage awards. Legal action may only increase publicity—the last thing a shaming victim wants. “The law can only do so much,” warns Solove.

We are long past the point where people will forget what we’ve done. We may sink into blessed oblivion for a little while, but everyone, everywhere, may be only one click away from the world’s attention.

How do you want to be remembered?