US Students Rank Number One in Math and Science Resistance

In these preapocalyptic days, it's always nice to hear some good news. And we got some great news today courtesy of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Fourth- and eighth-grade students in the United States were far outranked in math and science by their peers in Europe and Asia, demonstrating that American students remain the best in the civilized world at resisting mathematico-scientific indoctrination.

But!

This is not a time for complacency. According to the results of the study - and putting aside for a moment the inherent fallibility of numbers - United Statesian students are still scoring above average. Worse, the average 8th grade science score has been steadily rising since 1995.

This means that the forces of mathematical and scientific proselytization have been hard at work like busy beavers over the past few decades, and show no signs of stopping in the near future. Assuming they survive the coming worldwide destruction of the world, they will continue to push the unproven religion of math and scientific inquiry on our innocent youth.

Still, I remain confident in our ability to overcome the forces of factism. The bells of academic freedom will soon ring all across this great nation, and lo, they will toll for me and the rest of the skeptics of math among us.

Assuming we survive the next two weeks, of course.

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Undisputable Proof of the Climatist-Numerist Conspiracy

A shocking exposé of climate science by James Lawrence Powell, executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium, has uncovered what I have been saying about Global Warming since the 1970s. It is nothing less than a gigantic conspiracy coordinated by thousands of scientists over more than 40 years.

Powell, author of The Inquisition of Climate Science, studied nearly fourteen thousand journal articles published between 1991 and 2012 about "global warming" or "climate change." Of these, a grand total of 24 rejected the theory of global warming.

The author justfied his findings thusly:

Anyone can repeat this search and post their findings. Another reviewer would likely have slightly different standards than mine and get a different number of rejecting articles. But no one will be able to reach a different conclusion, for only one conclusion is possible: Within science, global warming denial has virtually no influence. Its influence is instead on a misguided media, politicians all-too-willing to deny science for their own gain, and a gullible public.

Of course, we skeptics know that this is merely a cover story for a far more nefarious collusion between the climate scientists and their number-controlled masters to enslave humanity via arithmetic. The fact that so few scientists are publishing anti-climate articles proves this. After all - as we all know - absence of evidence is evidence of a conspiracy.

Not that it matters, of course, as there are less than four weeks left before the world ends. But I salute Mr. Powell for his courageous undercover reporting, exposing this conspiracy in the little time we have left.

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Babies Teaching Babies?! What Is This World Coming To!

If you've ever had any doubts about the depths to which the numbers have invaded and pervaded our culture and society, look no further than this shocking article I am writing at this very moment.

Our schools have become so entranced by arithmetofascism that they have now begun using students to indoctrinate their fellow students with mathematical propaganda. Under the innocent-sounding guise of "peer education," school systems are obeying their numerist masters by proxy, turning innocent older children into math missionaries spreading the gospel of arithmetic to even innocenter younger children.

This insidous outrage was recently exposed by some investigative reporting by a local news station in Butler County, Missouri. KFVS-12 News gathered this shocking story - I can only assume - by enrolling one of their undercover reporters into an elementary school in Poplar Bluff, Missouri disguised as a first grader. What this courageous - and I presume short-statured - reporter uncovered during the investigation was nothing less than shocking:

Earlier this school year, Eugene Field Elementary School fourth grader Maraleigh Buss entered Kelli Spitze's first grade classroom and asked the teacher whether her students did their math homework.
...
Maraleigh is among over a dozen fourth grade teaching assistants who have volunteered to give up their special class periods—art, gym, library and music—to tutor first and second grade math students who may require some extra attention, according to school officials.
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"She gets kids engaged right from the get-go," said Spitze, who began utilizing teaching assistants in her classroom last school year. "Sometimes children learn from their older peers much quicker. They are just more ready to be open-minded in that setting."

Using children to recruit other children using propaganda and indoctrination. Hmmm. Where have I heard that before?

An extreme comparison? Perhaps - but only if you consider the slippery slope to be a logical fallacy. As far as I'm concerned, children tutoring each other in math is just one sloping slip away from uniformed young thugs recruiting other kids to serve in the Math-ler Youth.

It's times like this that I'm almost glad the world is going to end in four weeks. Because a world in which babies are indoctrinating babies with arithmetical propaganda is not one I wish to continue.

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Freshwater Saga Continues: Additional Hearings Denied

The sad and tragic case of embattered Ohio middle school teacher John Freshwater took yet another turn for the worse yesterday as the Knox County Small Pleas Court denied his request for further hearings in his case to reinstate his employment after he was wrongfully and rudely disinstated from his employment in the Mount Vernon School District.

This is just the latest in a series of setbacks for the innocent and mild-mannered alternative science teacher, beginning with the completely ludicrous accusations in 2008 that he was "wrongfully" teaching Creationism and Intelligent Design in his classroom, and somehow "harming" the "well-being" of his "students" by branding crucifixes on their arms with a Van de Graaff generator.

Yes, the accusations were true, but I have and continue to maintain that the actions were not wrong. Dr. Freshwater was merely exercising his Constitutional right of academic freedom by teaching alternative science in his classroom.

The activist judges may have won this small battle, but if I know John Freshwater, he will continue fighting. He will take his case to the Appeals Courts, the President of Ohio, or even the United States Supreme Court if he has to. And even if he loses, he still wins - at being a martyr for alternative science.

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"Sesame Street" To Further Indoctrinate Kids With Numerism

I've always said that the Children's Television Workshop is deep in the pocket of Big Digit. It should be pretty obvious, what with every single "Sesame Street" episode being sponsored by a number, and their casting of a blatant arithmomaniac in a recurring role.

But now, this "educational" "television" "show" is going well beyond filling our childrens' heads with numbers, colors, and fly-in-soup anecdotes. They are going to add math, science, and engineering indoctrination to their televisual brainwashing curriculum.

What this is, as any fool can plainly see, is yet another attempt by the answerists and science-pushers to force their one-right-answer hegemony on innocent children before they're even old enough to spell "a-c-a-d-e-m-i-c f-r-e-e-d-o-m."

(Which, in a truly free school system, they could spell "a-k-y-d-u-p-i-c f-9-r-;-*-*-o-m" and be correct, but I digress!)

Well I, for one, will stop watching. This is my protest, and I urge my fellow Math Skeptics to do the same. If this doesn't work, we'll have to target their sponsors. I'm sure the Letter B would drop their sponsorship pretty quickly if we threatened a boycott. Or, I should say, an _oycott!

FREEDOM!

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Massachusetts Schools Stand Up To Arithmetical Hegemony!

The Bay State is giving us reason to celebrate tonight!

This spring, students from Provincetown to Pittsfield participated in the annual rite of Answerist cruelty known as the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). And the results clearly show that these brave students are proverbially sticking it to the proverbial man.

Some 82% of Massachusettian schools and a whopping 91% of Massachussetois school districts missed the state's performance targets, set by the commonwealth under the No Child Left Behind act. As one might expect, the Massachusettic educational, governmental, and punditial officials quickly played the Blame Game, citing the No Child Left Behind law, underfunded schools, poorly-designed educational standards, and anyone else they could think of.

Of course, none of them dared acknowledge the truth: that the Commonwealth's combined student body was simply exercising their academic freedom as they took their MCAS exams, refusing to be assimilated by the government-sanctioned knowledge-opoly that is a standardized curriculum.

I, for one, salute these brave students in their courageous act of defiance. We Math Skeptics salute you!

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SAT Takers Rallying Against Answerist Agenda

In a bit of very-welcome good news released by the noted educationalists at The College Board, average math SAT scores have dropped one point this year. For us in the Math Skeptic community, this should be good news.

However, it may not be so simple.

This drop has been attributed to an overall increase in the number of students taking the SAT, a total of 1.65 million last year. This attribution has been consequently disputed by noted attribution-disputationists at Fair Test, who argue that the test-and-punish strategy of the No Child Left Behind act is to blame.

None of these organizations and policy wonkers seem to notice the elephant on the table, which is the fact that the SAT is nothing more than a divisive tool of the Answerist hegemony, designed to rank students by their degree of assimilatability into the one-right-answer educationalist paradigm.

Which is why these results are mixed. The declining scores mean that more students are rallying against this agenda of rampant answerism, exercising their right of free expression in the the face of standardized testing. However, the increase in test takers means that more students have been socialized into the answerist paradigm in the first place.

The results show that we in the Math Skepticism community must redouble our efforts to oppose answerism in all its forms. One day, I hope, we shall be victorious!

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New Bonfire Fodder: The "Evidences" for "Evolution"

I have to hand it to the National Center for Science Indoctrination. They provide me with a never-ending supply of fresh kindling, in the form of some extremely-burnable books.

Alan Rogers' The Evidence for Evolution is no exception. This bonfire-ready tome is thick with invented "evidence" for the unproven "theory" of "evolution," which will appeal to all the brainwashed evolutionists with their faith-based belief in verifiability and natural "explanations" for the unexplainable, despite the overwhelming evidence that the explainable is unexplainable.

Rogers makes his anti-miracle stance painstakingly obvious in this passage:

On the other hand, we need not appeal to miracles even if evolution does cross valleys. ... In small populations, gene frequences are buffeted by a variety of random forces, and these can push populations across valleys. We understand the mechanisms involved, and we have seen them operate in the laboratory. Evolutionists may argue about how often they happen in nature, but one thing is clear: there is no plausible basis for the argument that adaptive evolution requires miracles.

This is, of course, circular logic at its finest. "There are no miracles, thus you cannot claim miraculosity in order to expain miracles." It is also, as any fool can plainly see, a shining example of the answerist hegemony that has pervaded our higher education system.

If you have any regard for the sanctity of the human mind, you'll do the sensible thing. Buy this book and barbecue it. It's the only way to be sure.

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National Science Board Caves In To The Answerist Lobby

Bad news to report today, Math Skeptics.

After last year's successful campaign to convince the National Science Board to remove the blatant answerist bigotry of poll questions on evolution and the Big Bang from the 2010 edition of Science and Engineering Indicators, we in the academic freedom community were feeling quite victorious. No longer would this valuable data resource be tainted by the answerist stain it had carried since 1985, when the publication first started treating public opinion on unproven hypotheses like evolution and the Big Bang as indicators of scientific literacy.

Our victory, I'm sorry to say, was short-lived. An all-out lobbying campaign by the scientifico-mathematical hegemony has succeeded in overturning the National Science Board's 2010 decision.

This is unadulterated answerism. Pure and simple. It is discrimination against those with differing factual viewpoints. People with alternate understandings of any controversial topic - from cosmic origins to speciation to multiplication - are being treated as second-class citizens at academic institutions from grade school to grad school.

However, there is a silver lining to this answerist cumulonimbus cloud, in that the NSB will be fudging the data a bit. According to the National Center for Science Indoctrination:

the 2012 Indicators will compare "knowledge indices measured with and without the evolution and big bang questions," and the survey for the 2014 Indicators will test versions of the questions prefaced with "According to evolutionary theory" and "According to astronomers."

So I suppose we can celebrate a partial victory.

But I'm still outraged. And so are you.

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Answerism Alive and Well in Atlanta

A growing "scandal" over alleged "corruption" in the "Atlanta" public school system, in which teachers and school administrators allegedly helped students "cheat" on standardized "tests," is a chilling reminder of the most insidious form of discrimination afflecting our education system today.

I am talking about the endemic scourge of Answerism.

Like its evil cousin -isms -- Racism, Sexism, Fascism, and Teaism -- Answerism discriminates and divides, segregating students into arbitrary classes of "rights" and "wrongs." Inflicted through an insidious system of standardized, one-correct-answer tests, is nothing less than blatant discrimination against the "wrongs" while granting privileged grade status to the "rights."

What these brave students, teachers, and administrators did in "cheating" on these tests was not "immoral" or "deceitful" or "borderline criminal." It was an act of civil disobedience against an unjust and discriminatory system that violates the very principles of free speech we hold dear.

How fitting it is that in Atlanta, the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the crusader for civil rights who fought against endemic Racism in American society, these teachers and administrators are standing up for student rights and fighting endemic Answerism in American scholarity.

I salute you, unjustly accused teachers and administrators of Atlanta! Let academic freedom ring!

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Students Defeat Numbers on Standardized Test

In the ongoing war between humans and numbers, it seems as though we are hopelessly outmatched. After all - there are only four billion of us versus an infinite number of numbers.

Every now and then, however, we humans triumph.

Now is one of those thens. Three students taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or S.A.T., have uncovered a numerist conspiracy to throw all of secondary and collegiate education into utter disarray by rendering this standard collegiate admissions exam thoroughly unreliable, putting millions of university diplomas at risk.

The plot was discovered when the students, attempting to answer a geometric problem on the S.A.T., realized that the correct answer was none of the above.

Of course, the numero-conspiracists at the College Board were quick to cover up for their arithmetical masters, literally falling on their own swords by claiming responsibility for the mistake.

"It was a human error," said Barrie Kelly, the College Board's executive director of communication.

Right, Mr. Kelly. "Human error." As if the inherent fallibility of numbers had nothing what-so-ever to do with it.

Shame on the College Board for siding with the numbers in their ongoing battle against humanity, and praise for the courageous students who uncovered this nefarious scheme!

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