The State of the President
Oh dear — I haven't been paying attention to the rules. According to Susie Bright
When you publish a blog, you are obligated to write a scathing opinion the day after the President makes a State of Union speech. You have to prove you stayed awake— although it's hardly likely.
I didn't even watch it. In fact, I've watched none of the current president's state-of-the-union addresses, mostly because he sounds like such a blithering idiot to me that it tends to color my reaction to the substance of his speech.
Not that there's all that much substance, of course. I was hearing headlines today suggesting a bit of hooplah about his commitment to improving math and science education in the US (something that I'm conerned enough about to start a company: see the link to Ars Hermeneutica). Well, I looked thoroughly through the text of the speech and found very little to warm my cold, cold cynical heart.
It's all embodied in the American Competitiveness Initiative (yes, we're told to call it the "ACI"). There were three main points that I picked up:
- Science and math education will be improved through testing, that brilliant idea that has made the No-Child-Left-Behind thingie such a success. It's sort of a market-forces approach to education although, ironically, it does rather presume that children will evolve into better test takers.
- Enormous amounts of money are proposed to spend on R&D, but much of it is actually to be in the form of corporate tax credits for companies that "invest" in R&D; to me, it sounds like another way to spell "loophole".
- Such is the president's commitment that he wants to increase spending on science at federal laboratories by incredible amounts over 10 years. This "over 10 years" gambit has become one of my favorites: it lets them talk about huge numbers, which look good, without our noticing perhaps that only 3 of those 10 years — at best — will have the current incumbant in the White House. I'm impressed.
So, since I didn't even watch, maybe I'll skip the scathing post-speech analysis. I do, however, rather agree with Ms. Bright's remarks about the call to end human-animal cloning: did we miss a breakthrough someplace? Ms. Bright wants a big, fluffy tail; and she should know better than anyone what the guys would ask for, given a chance.