OK, count me in! Count me one of the "Draft Fred Thompson" supporters!
How could you not want a President with guts enough to say this:
... the Iranians have filed a flurry of complaints with the United Nations, claiming "300" is "cultural and psychological warfare."Who are these guys who are getting all flushed over our cultural insensitivity?
People who want to blow Jews off the face of the earth. The regime that stormed our embassy in 1979 and kept Americans captive for 444 days. Iran's Hezbollah puppets have killed more Americans, than any other terrorist group except Al Qaeda. Explosive devices from Iran are being used right now against our soldiers in Iraq. They're clearly more skittish about cultural warfare than the sort that actually kills people--like the one against Israel that Iran financed just a few months ago.
I must say that I'm impressed that Hollywood took on a politically incorrect villain. Must have run out of neo-Nazis. So now these sensitive souls in Iran think that Hollywood is part of a U.S. government conspiracy to humiliate them into submission. I can only wish we were that effective.
Sure beats the heck out of another chorus of: "We're in a global war against terra', against evildoers...We've got 'em on the run...It's hard...We've gotta get 'em over there or we'll be fightin' 'em over here...But Islam is a religion of peeeeeeeace..."
AAAAACK!
In yet another chapter from the Animal Farm that is the United Nations, we have this:
The U.N.'s lead agency responsible for the promotion and protection of women's rights the world over, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), ended its 51 session on March 9, 2007, by criticizing only one state--Israel.
Chris Matthews has risked being tried as a heretic by his usual audience for daring to question the correctness and rationality of blaming Bush for "snookering" the American people into the war in Iraq.
I'd be speechless, but news this newsworthy simply has to get out--especially to those of us who never watch his show (because, in part, we'd never expect to hear anything remotely as rational coming out of his mouth).
You simply must watch the video, if only to see NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman's deer-in-headlights look as he struggles to process the words he's just heard (never mind come up with a remotely coherent response to them).
If you were as nauseated as I was watching the Academy Awards this year, you'll just LOVE this!Turns out those "carbon credits" Al Gore and his fancy Hollywood friends use are just as bogus as I thought they were. Worse, they are actually HARMFUL.
So next time some liberal pal of yours berates you about the way you leave the lights on or flush the toilet every time you take a pee, ask them what the balance is on their carbon credit card?
This is a slight variation on a theme I started a while back in which I suggested we "talk" to Iran about "helping" us in Iraq as a means of getting out of there.
But as good as I thought my idea was, this one is way better because it could actually WORK:
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend." So goes an old Arab proverb. What could be more satisfying than knowing that one of our enemies is killing another of our enemies without our incurring any risk at all. And that this may be happening thousands of times a day.The first step is to publicly acknowledge the de facto civil war and that the United States cannot fulfill any of its obligations until the different factions agree to peace so that rebuilding Iraq can continue. After such an acknowledgement we have to declare publicly that we stand as a neutral power and will undertake only humanitarian activities--medical supplies, food, and transport of refugees to distant camps that provide safety for either sect.
Under cover of these humanitarian activities performed by a force of twenty or twenty-five thousand non-combatant troops, a well-organized military intelligence program can be created that would include recruitment of spies from all factions, acquisition of human intelligence about our enemies and their operations, and the identification of targets of opportunity.INSTEAD OF CUTTING AND RUNNING, OR SURGING, HOW ABOUT REDEPLOYMENT
"...but I tell you, my lord, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safely...."
In addition to exploiting the opportunities of the civil war there is one more important strategic aim that must be accomplished. Contrary to cutting and running we must carry out a plan of redeployment. A large component of our present force should be redeployed to a new and permanent base to be built in Northern Iraq-non-Arabic Kurdistan. There we will be welcomed by the cooperative, pro-American Kurds, and out of the way of harassment by IEDs, RPGs, and light artillery from hostile Arabs. Kurdistan is already a mostly autonomous country and desires to become completely independent of central and southern Iraq.
We need a long term base there much like the ones we have had in Korea and Germany for more than fifty years. What are the advantages of such an arrangement? For the Kurds it will bring dollars and employment. It will also bring political stability and reassurance—about their hostile neighbors, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
In fact, an American base will tend to stabilize the Middle East as well as put pressure on America's Middle-Eastern enemies, Syria, Iran, and Saudi extremists.The strategic purpose of such a base should be as a center for the acquisition of and recruitment of human and signal intelligence and agents. And for the location of a large Special Operations cadre to do covert operations in and around the Middle East against our enemies and those who support our enemies
Such a permanent base in the region will put constant pressure on antagonistic governments. After all, we have demonstrated that an Arab country--a country in which political factions love death more than victory--is highly vulnerable to America’s newest weapon--political ineptitude. We have demonstrated unequivocally that we can reduce a country to impotence and chaos without dropping a single nuclear bomb.
Oh, and when you're done, send it along to your Congressman. It's pretty obvious they're at a TOTAL loss for new ideas, maybe this one will catch on.
Is that what Joe Wilson said when he arrived in Niger to inquire about yellow cake (I always though it was "I'm parched, I'll take some of that mint tea if you've got any"?)?
If you watched Valerie "I'm so covert even I don't know what my status is" Plame testify on the Hill today, that's what you'd imagine he said!
The sad thing is, even if you believe her account of the story--IF your'e intellectually honest and remotely interested in what Plame claims to be interested in (separating politics from intelligence-gathering)--you simply have to wonder why neither Waxman, nor anyone else on the panel asked Ms. Plame the obvious question: "OK, if it wasn't you, if it was just some guy who walked past your desk, WHY HIM? WHY JOE WILSON?"
Not only do I want the answer to that question, I--and every other American taxpayer--am OWED the answer to that question.
And if Valerie Plame Wilson gave a fiddler's fart about national security, she'd not only be willing to tell us, she'd be EAGER to do so.
Pop quiz: Who said this?
As our intelligence agencies go through reorganizations and experience the painful aspects of change and our country faces profound challenges, injecting partisanship or ideology into the equation makes effective and accurate intelligence that much more difficult to develop.Politics and ideology must be stripped completely from our intelligence services or the consequences will be even more severe than they have been and our country placed in even greater danger.
It is imperative for any president to be able to make decisions based on intelligence that is unbiased.
Still stumped about who said it?
Wouldja believe it was none other than Valerie Plame Wilson, aka "Shameless Hussy," aka "Publicity Whore," aka "Partisan Hack."
Yes folks, this little charade is happening on our time, our dime. Don't you feel safer with people like her watching our backs?
With a title like this, I could make this entire post about Bush and what appears to be his genuine belief that allowing countless numbers of Mexican (and *OTM*) "migrants" (um, sir, it's a FEDERAL law that deems them "ILLEGAL ALIENS" perhaps you misplaced that memo along with the one that says "Pardon Libby NOW asshat!") into our country--legally or illegally--is a GOOD thing.
But I won't bother. Bush has been clueless on this issue from the words "So help me God" at his swearing in (both times).
No, this post is about the bizarre inconsistency of believing tht humans are 100% to blame for Global Warming, but not for our current economic ills, or the grim prognosis for the economy of the US tomorrow!
How is it that the same people who rail against corporate greed and human selfishness when it comes to energy consumption can so easily turn a blind eye (or refuse to believe) that we are in peril when the corporations in question run sweat shops, huge construction companies and agri-businesses, and the humans doing a lot of the consuming have brown skin? Ever see an illegal alien gang member driving a Prius? What about drug smugglers, are they not polluting the enviroment too, causing the erosion of topsoil by continuing to support the trade of a crop that literally rapes the Earth?
I'm baffled...When poor non-white people want to "find a better life," no one on the left questions what a "better life" looks like! They don't stop to think that for most, it means having enough money to CONSUME energy (as well as stuff) and often, their vision of a "better life" doesn't stop to consider things like eco-consciousness, never mind LAWFULNESS.
The same people who want the government to babysit us and protect us from our own excesses--prohibiting us from eating trans fats in restaurants, not wearing helmets or seatbelts or smoking (and anyone who knows me knows I take a very dim view of people who would do these things of their own volition)--are more than happy to let us KILL OURSELVES (literally and figuratively) to help illegal aliens "find a better life."
The left seems incapable of understanding the effect of these "migrants" on some of our most basic resources. Let's take healthcare for example...How many hospitals in the Southwest have had to close because they can no longer afford to care for the people who would be able to pay for their services (because so many have demanded care who can't)? How many towns have fallen prey to high crime, gangs, drugs and rampant pollution because their tax base simply can't support their population? Enviromentalists wouldn't tolerate this kind of overuse of resources if we were talking about chopping down trees in the rainforest, or pumping oil out of ANWAR, but when it's people who will make nice compliant needy little VOTERS for their side's politicians? Well then, somehow the resources they consume are renewable through the "hard work" of the potential voter himself! How convenient!
There's just one fly in that ointment: It's bullshit. If these workers were here LEGALLY, and were paying more than SALES TAXES, and weren't clogging up our already overcrowded schools, hospitals and jails--at rates that statistically far outpace their "contribution" to our bottom line, then maybe the Gorebots of this world would sound less hypocritical.
Perhaps if our wages weren't depreciated in value to the point where they are barely enough to cover the higher costs we bear to PAY FOR the "better life" for these parasites, we would be a little more motivated to "give back" to the planet.
Just a thought.
Dr. J.,
I've been feeling really bad about my N.O. post ever since you commented on it. I tried to say that I did feel sympathy for individuals affected by the storm, but now that I re-read it, it's kind of the same thing as saying "I'm against the war, but support the troops."
If I'm not sympathetic to the lawsuit, then how can I claim to care about the people?
Having said that though, I do want to clarify my position because I still think the blame is being disproportionately placed on the Army Corps. of Engineers.
Were the levees in terrible disrepair? Yes. Were they federal levees? Yes. Was FEMA hopelessly inept? Yes, all true! I think what galls me though is the way the Governor and Mayor have continued to perpetuate the myth that these were the *only* problems facing the city when Katrina hit, that they didn't play a huge role in the tragic loss of life that followed.
Given the condition of the levees, there was no way to avoid the loss to property, no way no how, but the loss of life? I'm sorry, I lay at least half the blame on the local politicians.
Also, while the levees are federal, they are located in Lousiana, which means that funds appropriated for renovating them goes through local filters as well. You are right, I grossly overstated the amount of money squandered--it wasn't in the billions, but it was in the tens of millions. To my way of thinking, this needs to be taken into account by the jury hearing the lawsuit as well. Why was the work to rebuild the levees stalled? Who stalled it? Where did the money go???
But the bottom line is, saying that the MS coast was destroyed by a natural disaster and N.O. was destroyed by flooding doesn't prove that the blame is 100% the fault of the Army or Federal gov't. There are plenty of engineers who have said that the levees--had they been renovated to the standards set forth by the "experts"--still may have given way to the tremendous force of the storm, there just isn't any way to prove otherwise.
I was reacting emotionally to Ray Nagin's arrogant assertions that he was piling it on to see what he could get. This is a man who has shown zero remorse for his role in this tragedy, a man who was reelected with so many of the storm's victims not even present to vote for or against him, a man who has everything to gain by making it seem that the buck stops somewhere else when it comes to what went wrong.
Yes, there is plenty of blame to be laid at the feet of the Federal authorities, but the fault is not uniquely theirs, and this lawsuit and Nagin's entire attitude are clearly trying to suggest otherwise.
As for judging New Orleans, I'm sorry, but I do a little. What kind of place KNOWINGLY allows its poorest citizens to live in such danger for so many years? What kind of place tolerates the level of corruption and crime we saw *before* Katrina (never mind afterwards)? I can't help it if I feel that the city is a cesspool to a large degree. Does that mean there aren't wonderful hard-working honest people who live there? Of course not! No more than calling Las Vegas "Sin City" is an indictment on every man woman and child who lives there. But having grown up in New York City, a place hard-hit several times by blackouts, blizzards, terrorist attacks, crime waves, I can say that for all her troubles, New York is a city that picks itself up and stands on its own two feet. Sure, they asked people to come and visit, spend money, etc...after 9/11, but local authorities--for the most part--really took care of business, and people took care of each other in a way I just didn't see in New Orleans in the wake of this terrible storm.
Places do have their own "character," for lack of a better word, and if you want to be offended by the fact that I'm unimpressed with the overall "character" of New Orleans, that's your right. But please don't see it as a sign of my "hatred" for you or anyone else who lives there. It's my opinion about the totality of the place, not all the people who live there.
This isn't news, (login required--full text readable in expanded version of this post), but not because it was written a month ago.
Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment--you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. [Emphasis mine]
Or perhaps I was just waiting for a story like this to break.
WATAUGA, Texas (CNN) -- Police in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, said a videotape found in a search for stolen goods appears to show two teenagers persuading a 2-year-old boy and his 5-year-old brother to smoke marijuana.
They were stupid for smoking pot to be sure, even stupider for sharing pot with toddlers, but does anyone doubt that the real proof of a stupidity so profound it has to reflect a very low IQ is that they allowed the entire incident to be captured on tape?!
Some people will still say this is an isolated incident, and to them I say which part? The part where young kids videotape themselves breaking the law, or the part where they push drugs on younger kids? Because no one can make the case that either of these is rare, never mind "isolated." YouTube is chock full of videos of kids behaving stupidly--they've given us whole libraries of proof without ever taking an IQ test--and I think we've known for decades that the way teenagers get hooked on drugs is that they are pushed to try them as children by those older than they!
There is NOTHING NEW here. All I'm doing is juxtaposing a very gutsy man's words against just one of the many pieces of proof that he is 100% right--plenty of our kids are just too DUMB to do well in school, and any discussion of how our schools are "failing" must consider this vital fact.
Intelligence in the Classroom By CHARLES MURRAY January 16, 2007; Page A21Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment -- you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.
One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.
Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.
Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.
Now take the girl sitting across the aisle who is getting an F. She is at the 20th percentile of intelligence, which means she has an IQ of 88. If the grading is honest, it may not be possible to do more than give her an E for effort. Even if she is taught to read every bit as well as her intelligence permits, she still will be able to comprehend only simple written material. It is a good thing that she becomes functionally literate, and it will have an effect on the range of jobs she can hold. But still she will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. She is just not smart enough to do more than that.
How about raising intelligence? It would be nice if we knew how, but we do not. It has been shown that some intensive interventions temporarily raise IQ scores by amounts ranging up to seven or eight points. Investigated psychometrically, these increases are a mix of test effects and increases in the underlying general factor of intellectual ability -- "g." In any case, the increases fade to insignificance within a few years after the intervention. Richard Herrnstein and I reviewed the technical literature on this topic in "The Bell Curve" (1994), and studies since then have told the same story.
There is no reason to believe that raising intelligence significantly and permanently is a current policy option, no matter how much money we are willing to spend. Nor can we look for much help from the Flynn Effect, the rise in IQ scores that has been observed internationally for several decades. Only a portion of that rise represents an increase in g, and recent studies indicate that the rise has stopped in advanced nations.
Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.
What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.
The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder -- the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement. A detailed review of this evidence, never challenged with data, was also part of "The Bell Curve."
This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.
* * *
To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence. It's no use to cite the differences in test scores between public schools and private ones -- for students in the bottom half of the distribution, the differences are real but modest. It's no use to say that IQ scores can be wrong. I am not talking about scores on specific tests, but about a student's underlying intellectual ability, g, whether or not it has been measured with a test. And it's no use to say that there's no such thing as g.While concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.
That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
I'm officially DONE feeling sorry for the city of New Orleans. I've had it, really had it. Talk about a "can't-do" town! As bad as their troubles were and are, what have they really done to take responsibility for their own role in them? So far, all I hear is blame, and even Mayor Nagin admits to "piling it on" as much as possible, just to "see what happens."
You read correctly. They who squandered BILLIONS upon billions over the years, money they were supposed to be using to rebuild the levvies, are now seeking over $70BIL from the Army Corps of Engineers to compensate them for such esoteric and subjective things as "damage to the city's IMAGE."
Never mind that their image was of a modern-day Gomorrah, a dirty, crime-ridden ass-backwards city only worth visiting if you like Jazz, Creole food and getting publicly drunk and baring your breasts in front of thousands of total strangers (have I missed anything?). So how far can you fall from bottom anyway?
If anything, what has tarnished the city's "image" is their constant whining about how their plight is everyone else's problem! As IF they contribute to the nation's GDP (or culture) to such a significant degree that any of us would have noticed if they had been flooded permanently off the map!
This is not to say that I don't care about individuals who lost everything, I do. What I have no use for are the politicians who--instead of taking responsibility for what happened, and what needs to happen moving forward to raise a decent city from the muck and the mud--they (once again) are looking to blame everyone else, and use our collective guilt to shake us down for way more than they deserve--as if no other city in America has problems of its own to solve, problems that also require money to fix!
What about the Katrina victims in MS? Don't see them suing for billions, yet FEMA didn't hurry in there any faster than into New Orleans. Sure, theirs wasn't an issue of levvies breaking, but was their damage any less severe? So just because most of those affected were WHITE they should rebuild on their own, often without even their insurance coverage to help them, but those who didn't even OWN their property, who were already living on government largesse, they should be made whole? Whole to what exactly? As the song says, "nothing from nothing leaves nothing," right?
Sorry, I may be coming off really cold, but this is how I feel. After 9/11, I wanted to go to NYC and spend money to help people who'd lost so much. But with New Orleans? Not only am I hoping they LOSE their lawsuit, I'm hoping they rot in their own filth and I for sure have no intention of making a trip there--as a tourist especially! What would I tell my kids? "Girls, we're going to visit a city populated entirely by parasites who only know how to mooch off the labor of others, people who expect to be rewarded simply for breathing!