Rich White Kentucky Liberals Saved: Beshear vetoes hospital merger

Rich white liberals concerned that population control programs for the poor in Louisville might be cut as a result of University of Louisville Hospital merger with two Catholic hospitals will be popping their champagne corks and dancing all night after Gov. Steve Beshear announced today that he has pulled the plug on the plan.

UofL Hospital and Louisville's Jewish Hospital were slated to come under the control of a Catholic Health Care management group through a merger with Lexington's St. Joseph Hospital and St. Mary's Healthcare, a move that critics worried could mean the end of programs aimed at reducing pregnancies among poor women.

The threatened services to restrict the reproduction of the poor are called "reproductive services."

The opposition to UofL's merger with Catholic hospitals was led by State Reps. Tom Burch and Mary Lou Marzian, both of whom are Catholics. These two Catholics who oppose Catholic teaching on reproduction services that restrict reproduction were undoubtedly delighted by the Governor's action.

Now the critics can munch their caviar in the knowledge that they won't have to look out their limousine windows and see so many poor people running around.

Scientism? What Scientism? We haven't seen any scientism...

The New Atheists are currently in the throes of denial that their beliefs about religion and philosophy smack of "scientism." And if you can't answer a charge, what better thing to do than to confuse the issue?

The term "scientism" has been around since the late 19th century, but was known as a concept even in ancient times, and it has been applied frequently to the reductive mode of thought that sees all problems as reducible to strictly scientific problems. It's the "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem many atheists have who are blind to their own scientifically unverifiable assumptions as well as the whole range of legitimate beliefs that are immune to scientific testability.

The two main responses of New Atheists like Jerry Coyne and Jason Rosenhouse, two scientific bulls who frequently wander into the philosophical china shop, are that a) their beliefs do not meet the criteria of scientism, and b) there are no such things as criteria for scientism anyway. It's kind of hard to hold both these mutually exclusive positions simultaneously, but it is a feat Jerry and Jason attempt in almost every post they write on the subject.

The fact that you can't just take the methodologies and conventions of one body of knowledge and indiscriminately apply them in other intellectual disciplines was understood as early as the 4th century B.C. In Book I, ch. 3 of his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle asserts that it is the "mark of an educated man" that not every discipline admits of the same level of precision and that "precision ought not to be sought in the same way in all kinds of discourse."

In other words, you can't verify that, say, Caesar crossed the Rubicon with the same level of precision as you can determine the paternity of a child (at least today)--and you can't use the same methods to determine the former as the latter--and vice-versa.

To use a technical term: Duh.

It's a simple concept, really, but Coyne and Rosenhouse just doesn't seem to get it. So, first, they feign ignorance. Says Rosenhouse:

But I've never entirely understood what scientism actually is. The usual definition is that scientism is the blinkered belief that science is the only reliable “way of knowing,” but this is vague until we have sharp definitions of “science” and “way of knowing.”

And then there are those pesky terms "the" and "only". What do they mean? Are New Atheist scientists really so philosophically challenged that they can't understand a term that has been around in fairly common discourse in the scholarly community for at least 60 years?

Just pulling down a few random books from my office library shelves, I find very quickly this definition given by John Wellmuth, S.J., in the 1944 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University. "The Nature and Origin of Scientism":

The word "scientism," as used in this lecture, is to be understood as meaning the belief that science, in the modern sense of that term, and the scientific method as described by modern scientists, afford the only reliable natural means of acquiring such knowledge as may be available about whatever is real. (pp. 1-2)

He not only defines it, he describes it and lists its three chief characteristics:

1. "the fields of the various sciences ... are taken to be coextensive, at least in principle, with the entire field of available knowledge"
2. "the scientific method ... is the only reliable method of widening and deepening our knowledge and of making that knowledge more accurate"
3. "either that philosophy should be made scientific by conforming to the methods and ideas of some particular science, or that the function of philosophy is to correlate and if possible unify the findings of the other sciences by means of generalizing on a basis of these findings, after ridding itself of outworn metaphysical notions."

I find basically the same definition in F. A. Hayek's The Counter-Revolution of Science, where he describes it as:

the mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed ... a very prejudiced approach which, before it has considered its subject, claims to know what it he most appropriate way of investigating it. (p. 24)

"Such an attitude," Hayek quotes physicist P. W. Bridgman as saying, "bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy, which might be expected to have exhausted their pragmatic justification at a lower plane of mental activity." (The Logic of Modern Physics, 1928, p. 46).

Then I grab for a third book: Life is a Miracle, by Wendell Berry, who discusses how "this legitimate faith in scientific methodology seems to veer off into a kind of religious faith in the power of science to know all things and solve all problems, whereupon the scientist may become an evangelist and go forth to save the world." (p. 19)

There you have it: a philosopher, an economics, a scientist, and a novelist, poet, and essayist, over a 60 year period, all of whom have no trouble negotiating the term "scientism." But Jerry Coyne and Jason Rosenhouse just don't get it.

Maybe it's that narrow scientific training they got. Doesn't seem to transfer over too well into all those other disciplines that are supposed to bend the knee to science, does it?

If there is a problem with this definition, then what is it? There are four basic criteria for a good definition:

1. that it have both a generic and differentiating element
2. that the definition and the thing defined be coextensive
3. that the definition be clearer than what is defined
4. that the definition be universal (and not individual: you can't define 'Obama', but you can define 'president')

You can find these in ch. 10 of my Material Logic. Wellmuth's definition (and the others) meet all four criteria. So what's the problem? The problem is that the question of what the limits of science are is not a scientific question, but you are arguing with people who think every question is a scientific question, including the question "What is a scientific question?"

The definition of "scientism" is essentially a philosophical endeavor, a kind of question in which Coyne and Rosenhouse have no formal expertise, much less any demonstrated informal facility, and what makes it worse is that they don't seem have a clue that they're insufficient to the task. It's somewhat analogous to a literature professor trying his hand at physics and wondering what all this stuff about time and space really means after all.

To Coyne and Rosenhouse it's all just a religionist plot concocted to cover their own intellectual illegitimacy: "The relevant distinction between scientific knowledge claims and religious knowledge claims is that the former are based on reliable methods while the latter are not." Reliable meaning "scientific." By definition, of course.

The answer? "We should reject totally," says Rosenhouse, "the idea that there are two kinds of knowledge, scientific on the one hand and religious on the other." I would pass this off as merely an attempt by someone trained only in the use of a hammer to redefine everything as a nail, but it is even more strange than that.

Instead of erasing the line between science and religion such that science engulfs religion, instead Coyne and Rosenhouse, in erasing the line between the two, end up only with ... religion. Their religion. It is the religion of science--or, as we said before, scientism. It is, said Berry, "the religification ... of science." The scientist is no longer the dull gray figure putzing around the lab. No. He must be seen in a more heroic role. The scientist now, says Berry, occupies the "place once occupied by the prophets and priests of religion."

But the argument that Coyne and Rosenhouse think is the most telling argument proving that they are not, in fact, guilty of scientism is the very clever procedure of engaging in it in the very process of denying it.

After arguing that this whole "scientism" thing is just a religionist plot (he would say "creationist" plot except the BioLogos people have been using the term), Rosenhouse waxes scientistic in the very process of denying the existence of scientism:

So I don't think it is unreasonable, in the context of these sorts of discussions, to define science very broadly. It just seems silly to me to say that scientific knowledge is one kind of thing, historical knowledge is something else, philosophical knowledge is a third and mathematical knowledge is a fourth. Mathematicians primarily use deductive reasoning in their work, but deductive reasoning is not some special, mathematical approach to knowledge that is separate from what scientists do. The primary tool of philosophy is dialectical argumentation, but this, too, is not something that is foreign to scientific practice.

In other words, how can there be such a thing as scientism (which is the belief that science is the only legitimate mode of intellectual inquiry) when, in fact, we know that science is the only legitimate mode of intellectual inquiry?

We know that everything is, in fact, a nail because, as you can plainly see, all we've got here hammer. QEP (Quod est procusum. Rough translation: "That which was to be proven hammered").

It's nonsense like this that contributes to people like Massimo Pigliucci, an atheist scientist who is at least capable of making a competent rational case for his beliefs, charging people like Coyne with "hero worship and a selective dearth of critical thinking."

Hey Baby, He'll Stand His Ground: Cardinal George standing up to the Tolerance Police

Cardinal Francis George of Chicago isn't standing down from his criticism of the intolerance of gay right groups, which are engaged in their usual attempts to intimidate people who don't agree with their political agenda, an agenda which includes the institutionalized intimidation of people who don't agree with their political agenda.

Part of the trick is to misportray what Cardinal George said, which the media (including the Lexington Herald-Leader in the headline of the story which was origianal from the Chicago Tribune) have portrayed as "Cardinal defends his comparison of gay rights movement to KKK."

What he actually said was that it would not be good if they did become like the KKK, which they promptly proceeded to act like they were becoming after the Cardinal posed the question.

The question involved here is whether gay rights groups themselves, which are constantly accusing groups they disagree with with being hate groups are themselves turning into hate groups, accusing anyone who disagrees with them with being "bigots,"--a devil word in the modern world--simply because they disagree with them.

It's good there is someone who refuses to back down from the intimidation.

Gambling industry already spending big bucks on lobbyists

I am quoted in the following story today from WDRB-TV in Lousville on the casino gambling industry-funded poll on casino gambling:

Chicago Cardinal under fire for defending pastor against gay rights groups

The Brown Shorts are at it again. The Chicago Tribune (via the Lexington Herald-Leader) reports that Cardinal Francis George of Chicago is "under fire" for "comparing gay movement with KKK."

The first question is "under fire" by whom? To which the answer is: gay rights groups. So why didn't the paper report that gay rights groups were under fire by the Church? To which the answer is: because the paper--like all newspapers anymore, doesn't even try to be non-partisan in its coverage of issues concerning gay rights. Any criticism of the gay rights movement, which holds itself out as the vanguard of tolerance, is not to be tolerated, a prohibition that is quickly acquiring the force of law.

This incident is only the most recent example of the growing intolerance of the gay rights movement. What the Cardinal actually said was this: "You don't want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism."

And he said it in defense of a pastor who complained that a gay rights march was going to cause his churches to have to cancel its mass.

"Cardinal George's offensive comments are further evidence of just how insensitive and out of touch the hierarchy is," said a spokesman for "Equally Blessed," an allegedly Catholic group that aggitates for "LGBT rights." (It's a strange thing about gay rights groups: the more Catholic they claim to be, the more anti-Catholic they become). The Cardinal's remarks, they said were "crude" and "demagogic."

He wasn't "comparing the gay movement to the KKK," he was saying it would not be good if the gay rights movement took on the anti-Catholic character of groups like the KKK.

According to the Tribune:

Truth Wins Out has launched a Change.org petition that calls for the cardinal's resignation. "It is outrageous that Cardinal George would place law-abiding, peaceful citizens in the same category as a notoriously violent hate group," Truth Wins Out Executive Director Wayne Besen said to Change.org. "George's resignation is his only road to redemption, and if he has a shred of dignity and a sliver of class, he will immediately step down."

Historically, the KKK engaged in systematic misrepresentation of those it disagreed with. It also engaged in political intimidation of its detractors. So responses like this to Cardinal George are about as comforting as if they were to don pink hoods--or burn the double spear and shield on church lawns.

If gay rights groups really want to discourage any comparison to hate groups, then they should stop acting like them.

The gambling industry's push poll

For Immediate Release
December 27, 2011
Contact: Martin Cothran

LEXINGTON, KY—A family advocacy group, which has been opposed to expanded gambling in Kentucky, raised questions today about a new survey that purports to show majority support for a constitutional amendment to legalize casino-style gambling in Kentucky. "This survey was bankrolled by the gambling industry," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for The Family Foundation. "It showed what they wanted it to show.”

"We should place about as much credence in a poll finding support for gambling funded by the gambling industry as we would place in a study on the health risks of tobacco funded by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company."


The group also pointed out that the questions asked were ones people would answer the same way no matter what the issue was. "Any time you ask people whether they want to vote on something, they'll say 'Yes'. People always want to have their say, no matter what the issue is. But putting it this way misrepresents the constitutional amendment process in this state and misportrays it as a ballot initiative process, which it isn't. For all practical purposes, this is a push poll."


One of the questions promised increased funding for a number of popular programs if the amendment were passed, promises the group said were unrealistic. "One of the questions basically promised increased funding for education, health care, public safety, and local government, said Cothran. "These promises not only bias the survey, but they are things that will not be put in a constitutional amendment. It will be like the Lottery promises on education funding--promises that went unfilled for over ten years, but which snookered people in to voting for it anyway." Cothran wondered what the response would have been had other questions been asked. "What would the response have been had they asked questions like ‘Do you think Kentucky should write into its constitution a full or partial monopoly for casino-style gambling to horse tracks that are owned by millionaires?’"


The group called for the public release of all the questions on the survey, and the order in which they were asked, all of which are factors that bear on results.

###

Trailer for The Hobbit

New "Classical Teacher" magazine is here

On a newstand near you--or just click here.

The new Classical Teacher magazine, of which I am managing editor, is now out, which includes articles such as:

"Why Use the King James Bible?" by Martin Cothran
"The Top Ten Reasons for Studying Latin", by Cheryl Lowe
"The Noblest Monument of English Prose," by Cheryl Lowe and Martin Cothran
"A Whale of a Distinction," [on the logical difference between humans and animals], by Martin Cothran
FEATURE ARTICLE: "What the King James Bible Hath Wrought," by Martin Cothran
"Greek to You: Is classical education really dead?" An interview with Tracy Lee Simmons

For a free subscription, go here.

Literature and the Bible

One of the things that strike you when you delve into English literature is the extent of the influence of the Bible, a place great writers find hard not to go to when looking for ways to reach the soul. Here is Marilyn Robinson, writing primarily about William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and secondarily about Fyodor Dostoyevski's The Idiot--two of the great portrayals of Christ figures in literature--in the New York Times:

Each of these works reflects a profound knowledge of Scripture and tradition on the part of the writer, the kind of knowledge found only among those who take them seriously enough to probe the deepest questions in their terms. These texts are not allegories, because in each case the writer has posed a problem within a universe of thought that is fully open to his questioning once its terms are granted. Here the use of biblical allusion is not symbolism or metaphor, which are both rhetorical techniques for enriching a narrative whose primary interest does not rest with the larger resonances of the Bible. In fact these great texts resemble Socratic dialogues in that each venture presupposes that meaning can indeed be addressed within the constraints of the form and in its language, while the meaning to be discovered through this argument cannot be presupposed. Like paintings, they render meaning as beauty.

Read the rest here.

The Darwinists get it wrong again: Letter from KY superintendent continues to spawn nonsense

Matt Young at Panda's Thumb, a Darwinist blog, describes my post on the correspondence between the Kentucky superintendent and State Education Commissioner in the comments section of his post on the issue. According to Young, I defend Mr. Line and demonstrate "just enough erudition to hide the anti-scientific tenor of the post. If you haven’t enough time or patience, I suggest you scroll directly down to the comment by Scott Goodman, who really hits the nail on the head."

And this:

At any rate, the author of the blog ran a post that defends Mr. Line and demonstrates just enough erudition to hide the anti-scientific tenor of the post. If you haven’t enough time or patience, I suggest you scroll directly down to the comment by Scott Goodman, who really hits the nail on the head.

Hmmm. Apparently pointing out inaccuracies, oversimplifications, and misleading statements is unscientific in the world of scientific dogmatism. That can't do a whole lot for the reputation of the science about which Young seems so concerned.

And speaking of scientific dogmatism, which is what I was targeting in my post, Young doesn't seem to want to make the basic distinction between criticisms of such dogmatism (what I do in the post) and criticisms of actual science (which I don't do in the post), which, of course, is exactly the kind of distinction scientific dogmatists don't like to make.

And to commend for his readership a comment in the comments section of my blog which itself stretches the truth is another measure of extent to which standards of intellectual integrity are regularly dispensed with when it comes to the defense of certain scientific dogmas.

The comment inaccurately refers to me as a defender of Intelligent Design, blatantly mischaracterizes my arguments, and criticizes me for statements I did not make. Not that I expect this to make any difference to Young, since these are rhetorical tactics regularly employed at places like Panda's Thumb.

So far, neither Young nor the commenters on my blog even bothered to address the actual arguments I made in the post (with one exception, and this one got it wrong--as he usually does). I fact, no one as yet come to terms with the arguments I made in my original analysis of the Kitzmiller decision's reasoning in uncritically employing a faulty demarcation criterion between science and non-science and in a blatant inconsistency at the center of that part of the decision.

Instead, we get cheap ad hominem attacks like the comment from Young that I am "the Discovery Institute’s point man in Kentucky." Huh?

How does he know this? He heard it from "his informant." Never mind actually checking it out or verifying whether it was true. Mere random Internet rumor will suffice. One hopes he takes more care in the books he writes about evolution.

My only connection with Discovery is that they have co-posted some of my blog posts that have to do with criticisms of scientific dogmatism. I do not take a position on whether Intelligent Design is a legitimate scientific theory, as the commenter he refers to alleges. Never have. Nor have I ever done or been asked to do anything for Discovery in Kentucky.

But no misrepresentation is so far out that it cannot be justified by the fact that it is done in the defense of Darwinism.

Louisville metro government action threatens medical service to poor

This is several days old, but it hasn't gotten any less ridiculous after seven days:

Louisville Metro Government is delaying an $803,000 payment to University Hospital to fund medical care for poor people this month because of some council members’ concerns over the hospital’s proposed merger.

Hospital spokesman David McArthur said he could not say Monday night if care for the poor would be affected without the money.

The chief concern expressed about the merger is that some poor people won't get "reproductive services" (a term which, we have pointed out, means "anti-reproductive services"). So now Metro government, in order to try to ensure that some poor people are not denied services, are, by withholding their money, threatening to deny poor people services.

You gotta hand it to these people. They are creative.

KY school official's letter to superintendent only partially evolved

Just when the public education establishment thought it had stamped out all dissent in its ranks on the issue of evolution, low and behold it now finds a rogue male that has somehow separated from the herd.

Here's the Lexington Herald-Leader, reporting on this crisis:

A Western Kentucky school superintendent is arguing that a new test which Kentucky high school students will take for the first time next spring will treat evolution as fact, not theory, and will require schools to teach that way.

The letter, written by Hart County School Superintendent Ricky D. Line, has sparked an animated demonstration among the chattering classes here in the state--and has caused a number of skeptic and atheist bloggers to leave off grooming themselves long enough to cast the usual aspersions in the general direction of anybody who strays away from the tribe.

The letter prompted a response by officials on the highest branch of the education tree: State Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday and the Kentucky School Board. At first blush, the letter sounds pretty impressive. But after running it through our usual battery of observational procedures here at Vital Remnants, it becomes clear that a number of things don't add up.

The letter is signed by the Commissioner but, by his own admission, he relies on research provided by the Department of Education's "legal and curriculum staffs." Now I can't say too much bad about the lawyers at KDE: They, at least, got real actual academic degrees. But "curriculum staff"? Are these people with "education degrees"? As we have pointed out here before, you can get better academic credentials by mailing in a coupon from a cereal box.

The letter gives the superintendent a lecture on the use of the word "theory." Line had asserted that evolution was "just a theory." Holliday says that, in science, the word "theory" does not mean, as it does in common usage, "little more than a guess." Holliday takes him to task for using the term in its everyday use rather than its use among the higher species of hominids known as "scientists."

Apparently Holliday and the Board didn't notice that Line was not making a scientific statement, but speaking in common English, in which the common usage of the word was exactly as Line was using it. Line was not engaging in science when he wrote the letter: He was speaking in common everyday English to the State Commissioner of Education. But, of course, educrats have trouble with common English and strongly prefer jargon to plain speech.

"Theory" as Holliday defines it, is a scientific jargon word, with a different meaning inside the discipline, one which is surely quite useful there. But which, outside it, only offers education bureaucrats an opportunity to make pedantic points that have no real relevance to the discussion.

Lectures like this (which you hear every time you use the word "theory" in its vernacular sense in the presence of a Darwinist ideologue) are turned into an opportunity to enforce a dominance hierarchy in which those who dissent from the Approved opinions are kept in their proper place in the cultural pecking order by implying that those who disagree with the dominant paradigm are just not very smart. Either that or they just can't make a basic distinction between common vernacular speech and the technical vocabulary of an academic discipline, which, in itself is not very smart.

Secondly, in the process of giving this lecture, Holliday says:

In science, facts never become theories. Rather, theories explain facts. [emphasis in original]

That is, at best, an oversimplification. All you've got to do is to and talk to a quantum physicist, who (if he adheres to the Copenhagen interpretation, the original and still standard interpretation of the theory) will tell you that science is not in the business of explanation, but of prediction. Quantum theory, the most successful predictive paradigm in science, has, for all practical purposes, handed explanation back to the philosophers. Niels Bohr. Check it out.

Then there's this gem:

Additionally, science is not a system of belief. To ask if a scientist ‘believes’ in the theory of evolution is an improper question because the term ‘belief’ implies a position or opinion based on faith. A biologist would properly say he/she understands and acknowledges the evidence supporting the theory of evolution. Belief is an act of faith and is not necessarily concerned with the availability of supporting evidence. For this reason, beliefs are not considered to be within the realm of science.

Just go ask a real scientist if he "believes" in the theory of evolution. You know what will happen? In all likelihood, he'll say, "Yes." He won't give you some geekish lecture on the proper way to phrase the question in a scientific environment.

Fortunately the ignorance that prevails in the higher branches of the public education tree has not yet infected lexicography. Here are a few definitions of "belief" culled from standard dictionaries:

• American Heritage: "Something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons"
• Merriam-Webster: " conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence."
• Webster's New World Dictionary: "A belief is an opinion or something that a person holds to be true."

Not only does this not comport with what you will find in almost any standard dictionary, it doesn't comport with the terminology commonly used in academics disciplines like philosophy, a discipline that does things like, you know, define.

And even if it were true that the term "belief" only referred to opinions based on faith, scientists don't talk like this. They commonly talk about "believing" that the theory of evolution (or replace this with any other scientific theory). So if scientists themselves talk this way, why are we giving pedantic lectures to school superintendents?

This is all nonsense. Under the most universal use of these terms science is belief based on reason and evidence and faith is belief based on divine revelation or authority. These terms are used this way all the time by people in and outside the discipline of science.

The irony here is that most people believe in evolution on the same basis they believe in religious faith positions: on the basis of authority. They don't have the least conception of what the scientific evidence for it is; they simply believe it on the grounds that the scientists they've heard about say it's true. The further irony is that many scientists, who claim to be all about reason and evidence, not only think there is nothing wrong with all the people who believe in Darwinism on the basis of scientific authority, but think it would be unscientific not to!

Besides, science proceeds as much by scientists' faith in their own hunches and intuitions as by reason and evidence, as anyone familiar with Einstein--or for that  matter Galileo (whose heliocentrism was not supported by the evidence of the time, as the Church rightly pointed out)--would know.

Finally, Holliday tries his hand at the law, with the help, apparently, of his legal department:

Moreover, the federal courts have ruled that creation science, a religious concept or belief, is not science at all. [See Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F.Supp.2d 707, 764 (E.D.Pa. 2005); McLean v. Ark. Bd. of Educ., 529 F.Supp. 1255, 1259 (E.D.Ark.1982) (dismissing “creation science” as “simply not a science”).]

It may be true or false that creation science is not science. But to appeal to a court decision--and a problematic one at that, is slightly strange. Courts may have the power to dictate what schools can and can't teach, but to appeal to them as the final arbiters of the definition of science is highly problematic to say the least. Philosophers of science can't even agree on where to draw the line between science and non-science. So how is a judge supposed to competently do it?

In fact, the reasoning in the Kitzmiller decision, at some points, inconsistent, and, at others, simply laughable. I wrote a response to the section on the ruling in which the scientific status of ID is discussed here.

Judge John Jones first simply assumes Karl Popper's demarcation criterion--that a necessary condition for something to be science is that it be potentially falsifiable. But Popper's demarcation criterion has long been considered problematic in the philosophy of science, since it excludes activities commonly acknowledge to be science. Anyone blindly applying it as Jones does has no business making authoritative pronouncements about what makes science different from non-science.

Jones argues that Intelligent Design does not meet this criterion because it is not falsifiable. He then turns right around and argues that it is false. If it's not false, then it is falsifiable, and if it is not falsifiable, then it cannot be false. But he just goes on hoping that no one will notice the blatant contradiction in his argument.

Such is the state of the Commissioner of Education's arguments. But remember: it's superintendent Line who doesn't know what he's talking about.

Sheez.