Texas Textbooks are at it Again

According to this editorial at the Austin American Statesman's website, Texas has taken it upon itself to rewrite history. While this does not shock me after Texas's past reputation with education, I do wonder how much research this unnamed author has done exactly. The target audience of this editorial is obviously other liberal persons like the author. As far as the author's credibility, I personally would say it is questionable at best. Not only is the author unnamed (as far as I could see anyway) but they also included a link at the bottom of the editorial to backup their research. The link, however, was not only in a "tinyurl" format, which simple does not seem professional to me EVER but it easily could have been embedded into the text. Heck, I can do it, why can't they?


The author of this editorial argues against Texas's censored textbooks, at least as far as the subject of history. According to this author "The board ignored the experts and instead adopted a hodgepodge of wishful thinking, distortion, exaggeration and fantasy dressed up as historical fact." It is hard to discern exactly what all that means, especially with the oh-so scholarly use of the word "hodgepodge", but it sounds pretty bad, right? The hidden meaning behind all of that is that Texas is once again censoring their Text books and in this case putting certain spins on some of America's history and entirely leaving out other parts.

All in all, though I can not say I was very impressed by this editorial, I do agree with the main point and I have been annoyed by the censorship of textbooks in Texas in the past.

But all of this, as always, is just from a student's perspective.

p.s. For a little laugh read through the comments on that editorial.

Kyle's Mayor Gives Me Hope

In the article "Kyle Moves to  band synthetic marijuana" on Statesman.com, Patrick George reports on the efforts of the Kyle City Council to make the sale of a "pot substitute" illegal. This "substitute" is called K2 as well as Spice and is "an herbal product" (like marijuana?) "sprayed with chemicals". Side effects may include " vomiting, hallucinations, elevated blood pressure" and the vague "other health problems". I know of video game levels with similar side effect warnings and at least one episode of Pokemon that caused seizures. Personally I don't think any of these side effects are anything to get too worked up about.

Fortunately, Kyle City mayor Lucy Johnson agrees with me. She would prefer the council to focus on "real drugs" and I agree with her. Johnson doubts that K2 is problematic in the city and again, I agree with her. As a college student in a larger city (a group which is among the most frequent of drug users) I had never heard of either K2 or Spice which leads me to believe it is not as rampant as the Kyle City Council would have you believe.

I would suggest this article for several reasons. For one, George does an absolutely wonderful job of reporting unbiasedly, leaving the reader to decide whether the council is overacting or not and also gives good information on the drugs along with both sides of the story. Another reason I would suggest this article is because I believe it is a prime example of not only Texas politics but also US politics in the possible overreaction of the Kyle City Council. I also enjoyed this article because it gave me some hope that some politicians, such as Mayor Johnson, are still focused on what needs to be focused on, such as the "real drugs".

But that's just a student's perspective.