Texas Science Textbook Review

The right-wing majority on the Texas State Board of Education wants to revise the state's standards for science textbooks to require the addition of religious pseudoscience when teaching subjects like biology. And this isn't just bad news for Texas schoolchildren, because the Texas standards will impact the textbooks used by millions of students nationwide.
The Texas State Board of Education recently invited a small group of people to review the biology textbooks that will be used for the next eight years, starting in 2014. But more than half of the reviewers are right-wing religious ideologues,¹ some of whom are even skeptics of Darwin's theory of evolution — considered one of the most reliably established facts in science, and a central tenet of biology.²
The ultimate goal of these sham textbook reviews — and Texas Board of Education curriculum reform — is to enshrine right-wing ideology into Texas textbooks. What's worse, because of the scale of production of these textbooks, the dictates of the Texas State Board of Education will be included in textbooks used by millions of students in other states.
We can't let them get away with replacing long-accepted scientific principles with religious pseudoscience and propaganda.³
Tell textbook publishers to stand up to the Texas State Board of Education and only publish books that are based on sound, peer-reviewed science scholarship. Click here to sign the petition automatically.
The most recent review of biology textbooks was a particularly egregious process considering the people who were invited to participate. Here are just a few of the reviewers who are listed in the Creation Science Hall of Fame as “Darwin Skeptics”⁴:

• Raymond Bohlin, a research fellow for an organization whose purpose is the promotion of “intelligent design” — a religious idea which seeks to cast doubt on evolution while circumventing the Supreme Court ruling that bars the teaching of “creation science” in public schools.⁵
• Walter Bradley, who helped launch the "intelligent design” movement with a book he coauthored, titled The Mystery of Life's Origin.
• Ide Trotter, a wealthy funder of anti-science organizations who has repeatedly participated in science textbook reviews advocating for the inclusion of scientifically discredited theories about the weaknesses of evolution.

Tell textbook publishers to stand up to the Texas State Board of Education and only publish books that are based on sound, peer-reviewed science scholarship. Click here to sign the petition automatically.
Textbook publishers can refuse to make suggested changes, or pull out of the state's business altogether, just as publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston did in 1994, when Texas requested over 400 revisions in five health textbooks — including the removal of toll-free phone numbers for teenage suicide prevention groups.⁶
We're not going to change the minds of some of the theocrats elected to the Texas State Board of Education. But we can pressure publishers not to compromise their science textbooks by caving to the board's unreasonable demands.
The final review of these textbooks won't happen until November, and these textbooks could be in classrooms for a decade. Now's the time to put pressure on textbook publishers to stop accepting this scientifically debunked information.
Tell textbook publishers to stand up to the Texas State Board of Education and only publish books that are based on sound, peer-reviewed science scholarship. Click the link below to sign the petition automatically:
http://act.credoaction.com/go/1587?t=8&akid=8727.5084505.bx5l8X
Thank you for standing up for science.
Jordan Krueger, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets

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Learn more about this campaign

1. Dan, "Alarm Bells Are Ringing: Creationists Get Influential Positions in Texas Science Textbook Review." Texas Freedom Network, July 30, 2013.
2. National Research Council. "Science, Evolution, and Creationism." Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2008.
3. Gail Collins, "How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us." The New York Review of Books, June 21, 2012.
4. Jenny Bergman, "Darwin Skeptics." Creation Science Hall of Fame.
5. [PDF] Barbara Forrest, "Understanding the Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals." The Center for Inquiry, May, 2007.
6. Gail Collins, "How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us." The New York Review of Books, June 21, 2012.

our son of a bitch

"Yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch".

This line goes way back to WWII. It has been attributed to:

• Franklin Roosevelt on US General George S. Patton.
• Winston Churchill on the man Patton loved to dislike (and vice versa), British General Bernard "Monty" Montgomery.
• Either or both of them on Charles De Gaulle. Take your pick.

Variations go back further than that. It is claimed that Acheson said this about Tito; And that Dulles said it about Somoza, the son of the son of a bitch of Roosevelt.

Speaking of brutal Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, Harry Truman is supposed to have said "He's a bastard, but he's our bastard." This quote is attributed to Truman, FDR, and Nixon. This is a broad chronological range. There were actuall three Somozas: Anastasio Somoza Garcia, who fathered Luis Somoza Debayle and Anastasio Somoza Debayle, and the Somoza dynasty that ruled Nicaragua from the mid 1930s through the late 1970s.

The Marines invaded Nicaragua in 1912 and stayed until 1933, fighting but never defeating the revolutionary Augusto Sandino. They created the Nicaraguan National Guard and installed Anastasio Somoza Garcia in power. Then Sandino, who had signed a truce and put down his arms, was assassinated by Somoza. In 1935, General Smedley Butler, who led the Marines into Nicaragua, said: "[I was] a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the banks. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism - I helped purify Nicaragua for [an] international banking house." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it another way. "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

Corruption, torture, and wholesale murder of dissidents continued for 45 years under two generations of Somozas, for after Somoza Garcia was gunned down in the streets in 1956, his son Anastasio Somoza Debayle took control. The Somozas plundered Nicaragua and became millionaires. The younger Somoza, "the vampire dictator," made $12 million a year buying the blood of his people and selling it abroad at a 300% mark-up, but his biggest single rip-off occurred in 1972 after an earthquake killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans: Somoza had his National Guard seize $30 million in international relief supplies and sold them to the highest bidder. Near the end of his reign, he aerially bombed his own capital to stay in power, but he was overthrown in 1979 by a rebel group who called themselves the Sandinistas, after the revolutionary hero his father had slain.

Time Magazine printed the following in its 15 November 1948 issue:

In 1939 [Anastasio Somoza] got himself elected for eight more years. And he went to Washington. To prime President Roosevelt for the visit, Sumner Welles sent him a long solemn memorandum about Somoza and Nicaragua. According to a story told around Washington, Roosevelt read the memo right through, wisecracked: "As a Nicaraguan might say, he's a sonofabitch but he's ours."

The basic "punchline" had been floating around Washington since well before 1939. For example, after the Chicago Convention, Gen. Hugh Johnson, who had worked hard with Barney Baruch to stop Roosevelt, was asked what he thought of his nomination. Johnson replied by recalling a story of a county convention of Democrats in which the wrong man had been chosen. Driving home from the meeting, two politicians were comparing notes. Both had opposed the successful candidate. One said to the other, "Damn it all! We should never have let them put Blank over. He's a So and So!" The other man sighed and said nothing for a long time. Then he cheered up. "After all," he observed. "Blank isn't so bad. He's our So and So."

A short piece written on the death of Senator James Watson [Indiana], the "last Republican majority leader in the Senate before the Roosevelt era," includes this telling:

Senator Watson used to tell a story of Uncle Joe which shall be our contribution to the stock of reminiscences about Jim Watson. One day in the House the Speaker spoke about a party man as a deserving appointee for some vacant post. "But you couldn't recommend him," said young Watson. "He's a so-and-so." "Yes, he may be," said Uncle Joe, "but, my boy, he's *our*
so-and so, isn't he?"

"he's a so-and-so, but he's our so-and-so" bears some resemblance to a popular anecdote said to have involved U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (Pennsylvania; 1792-1868) and cited well into the 20th century:

Speaking of the probable contests for seats in the next Congress, the Boston Herald says: "The republicans are not over scrupulous, when in power, as to the management of contested cases. In fact, their morality was well illustrated by the characteristic remark of Thad. Stevens, when it was said that both claimants of a disputed seat were 'd-----d rascals,' 'I don't
doubt it,' said the grim old 'whip,' 'but what I want to know is, which is our d-----d rascal?'

"He's a damned rascal," said Thad. Stevens bluntly on a similar occasion,
"but as he's *our* damned rascal we must put him in."

An anecdote involving "[he may be a _____,] but he's our _____" (and similar) was already pretty familiar to office-holders, political pundits, and Washington wags by the time FDR started his first term. That it had been brought out again in 1934 and applied to FDR's nomination in 1932 (consequently making FDR "our son of a bitch") must have gotten some additional notice in Washington and at the White House.

It's a little hard to know whether FDR ever really used the line in the late '30s or whether someone else just recycled the anecdote, attributing the line to the President in reference to some Latin American dictator. There is a common knowledge legend that the then director of the CIA had said of the dictator Marcos before the 1986 revolution "He may be a son of a bitch but at least he's our son of a bitch." There is a whole lot of other dictators about whom the same quote had been attributed! Batista, Pinochet, Fujimori,Mobutu, the Shah of Iran, Savimbi, Suharto, Trujillo and even Botha have been lumped into this expression.

human rights accompaniers in Honduras

Take action to pressure the U.S. Embassy in Honduras and U.S. State Department to take steps to recognize the importance of, and support the role of human rights accompaniers in Honduras, including Witness for Peace (WFP).

On July 25th, 2013, French citizen Orlane Vidal and Swiss citizen Daniel Langmeier, both international human rights accompaniers with the Honduran International Accompaniment Project (PROAH), were kidnapped and threatened for two and a half hours by armed guards of the mining operations of Minerales Victoria, in the community of Nueva Esperanza, Atlántida Department, Honduras. Vidal and Langmeier had met the previous day with members of Nueva Esperanza to discuss protection issues and international accompaniment for the community, which has been protesting Minerales Victoria's operations in the community. Armed men had been present in Nueva Esperanza for nearly two months prior to this kidnapping, terrorizing the community for resisting the mining activities. There has been no response from Honduran authorities and U.S. diplomatic officials, and armed men continue to be present in the community.

Next week, a 30th anniversary WFP delegation will travel to Honduras to accompany human rights defenders in various areas of the country. Delegates will document threats and violence against human rights defenders by U.S.-funded state security forces. Accompaniment of human rights defenders is a major part of WFP's work in Honduras. Tell the U.S. Embassy in Honduras and the State Department that they must be vocal in support of human rights accompaniers in Honduras, and take steps to ensure that the work of accompaniers is not undermined. If the U.S. government consistently and substantively expresses support for human rights, accompaniment has a better chance of being effective.

Thank you for standing up for human rights accompaniment in Honduras!

In solidarity,

The Witness for Peace Honduras/Nicaragua Team and Walker Grooms, National Grassroots Organizer

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Estimad@ Arnulfo,

the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees

the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.