posted by Harry @ 8:50 PM
3 comments
It's not as though Pickens doesn't have a few crafty deals on his own ledger. Five years ago he launched a controversial scheme to buy water rights around Roberts County, Texas, the same region of the panhandle where he plans to build his wind farm—and where he owns a 68,000-acre ranch. The idea was to pump water from the Ogallala aquifer to cities downstate. Though he never found a buyer for the water, Pickens did win the right of eminent domain for his pipeline. His attorneys applied to create an entity known as a groundwater-supply district, which was gerrymandered to include only two voters: his two ranch hands. The measure passed, to no one's surprise. Though Pickens says he has abandoned the water project, his lawyers want to use the water corridor to site a private transmission line from his panhandle wind farm to power-hungry cities. "You have to admire his guts and his gall," says Thomas (Smitty) Smith, director of Public Citizen, an advocacy group that opposed Pickens's water business.Since he's been rehabilitated and now wants to bring Al Gore's vision to fruition, he can apparently do no wrong, even though he took land from other land owners for his own use by way of eminent domain, even though he used some shady (at least to me) gerrymandering to get his way and so that he can make a the huge profit that he claims he doesn't care about, and even though in order to make that profit that he really doesn't care about, he's demanding huge government subsidies. Nope, he's not evil anymore, not like those evil oil executives who dare to make "obscene" (as opposed to merely erotic) profits from the U.S. Government keeping a lid on our oil supplies.
Naturally, the Pickens Big Wind plan is proudly endorsed by Do-Nothing Pelosi’s friends at the obstructionist Sierra Club. Through another company, Mesa Power, Pickens has committed upwards of $12 billion in wind farms on the Texas panhandle. CEFC and Mesa Power are separate entities. But what benefits one piece of the Pickens puzzle benefits them all. The wind venture, as Pickens himself acknowledges, depends on permanent federal subsidies.Things are different when the Speaker of the House, the one who promised the most ethical Congress ever, is an investor in your scheme. And when you have Newsweek Magazine covering for you because you've become politically correct, the rules no longer apply to you. Then you can be as shady and dishonest as you want, because for some, the ends justify the means. And watch out for those ends. They will get us in the end.
Pickens is banking on ‘em. And Pelosi’s banking on him.
As reported on #dontgomovement.com, Speaker Pelosi bought between $50,000 and $100,000 of stock in Pickens’ CLNE Corp. in May 2007 on the day of the initial public offering:
“She, and other investors, stand to gain a substantial return on their investment if gasoline prices stay high and municipal, state and even the Federal governments start using natural gas as their primary fuel source. If gasoline prices fall? Alternative fuels and the cost to convert fleets over to them becomes less and less attractive.
Labels: Michelle Malkin, Nancy Pelosi, Newsweek, T. Boone Pickens
posted by Harry @ 8:01 PM
3 comments
Considering that there is nothing to the "Mozart effect," in which playing classical music to babies supposedly improves their "spatiotemporal reasoning," it has had amazing staying power. Along with similar cases of a gullible public's going crazy over preliminary findings that ultimately fell apart, it has created a bitter rift among scientists about whether neuroscience can explain how the brain learns and thereby guide teaching. Now some scientists are fuming about "scientifically unsupported" claims, about parents and teachers who are "misinformed" and about "myths of brain-based pedagogy."That's not the part that might upset the big cheeses.
Critics are certainly right that there's a lot of bath water that should go down the drain, starting with the Mozart Effect itself and moving on to "brain-based" toys whose benefits remain more mythical than real and "brain-based" education consultants who peddle their questionable (and expensive) services to schools. But the critics go further. In a guest editorial in the journal Science last month, two scholars called "brain-based pedagogy" a "myth." They are especially concerned that teachers, who pay $500 to attend "learning and the brain" conferences at places like MIT and Stanford, believe the research is solid enough to use in classrooms today, such as by teaching boys and girls differently. "People have been sold a bill of goods that there is enough here to make curricular decisions," says psychologist Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University, coauthor of the editorial.That's the part they wouldn't like. Our district combined their resources with two other districts to hire a "brain-based" consultant to entertain us with a half-day workshop. The speaker was very good but we are still making fun of the presentation. We may be public school teachers but we're not total idiots. The dimmest among us could see that there was very little of value there.
Petitto, for instance, led a 2007 study that settled a decades-long debate over how children learn to spell: does the brain uses the same processes for words you can sound out ("blink") as for those you can't ("yacht")? Brain imaging showed that blink-like words use the brain's soundprocessing system, while yacht-like words rely on circuits that encode memory and meaning. That suggests "a dual-route model of spelling," Petitto says. "Knowing this, there's no way I'd teach a child spelling without phonological information. This is finally evidence that the brain needs that and uses it."Yes, multisensory instruction works, but just try to get an educational "expert" to admit it, or a public school administrator to adopt a language arts method that is based on the concept.
The new journal, called Mind, Brain, and Education, is full of other fascinating hints. One study found that when children begin forming mental representations of letters, more than the visual sense comes into play. Crucially, the brain's premotor area, which plans movements, does. That suggests that having children try to write letters at the same time that they're learning to recognize them might produce what Denes Szucs and Usha Goswami of the University of Cambridge call "a multisensory representation" of letters, and "deepen learning."
Labels: brain-based education, education, Newsweek
posted by Harry @ 7:57 PM
4 comments
Luanne Laemmerman is the first to roll her eyes when she says something she considers corny about the environment:The Free Press is celebrating an environmental fascist. Yes, we should take care of our environment, but as American citizens we also are supposed to have property rights. It's one of the bases of our society. How many of these rights will Laemmeran self-righteously trample on in order to protect the sacred environment from us nasty human beings?
"If we all just did a little bit, it would make a big difference."
"I consider all of us to be on the same team."
"Our human survival depends on it ... as corny as that sounds."
But while Laemmerman tempers the hurrah comments with eye rolls and self-deprecating jokes, she also says she means every word.
"I'm an activist, plain and simple," she said.
To many Macomb County nature lovers, that's a good thing.
Laemmerman, 43, of Royal Oak moved into a new job as the county's environmental prosecutor last week. She will be responsible for enforcing federal and state wetlands regulations. The job, a rarity in county government, marries her two loves: the law and the outdoors.
It deliberately cuts from footage of the ruins and radiation victims of Hiroshima to an inappropriately raucous VE-Day celebration in Times Square, with Glenn Miller on the soundtrack. "Yup," Burns says, "we stick it in your face." He was concerned enough about this point to write, in a follow-up e-mail, "I share your sense of the obscenity of celebration after atomic obliteration. That's why we did it that way, and that's the way it was here in these United States, despite the skin-crawling nature of it."Sorry Ken, but these people had a damn good reason for their celebration. They had just gone through four years of war. Millions had been horribly killed and now the killing had come to an end. Their fathers, brothers, and sons were coming home instead of being forced to invade the Japanese mainland. Millions of American soldiers were getting their lives and families back. What is inappropriate is, just because you don't like the way the war ended (and yes, it was awful, it was a war) to continue to second guess the decision to drop the atomic bombs from the comfort of a studio sixty years after the fact.
Labels: Detroit Free Press, Ismael Ahmed, Ken Burns, Newsweek, World War II
posted by Harry @ 7:25 PM
4 comments
American DreamersRight off, one has to ask, how are they a strength? The article begins,
Muslim Americans are one of this country's greatest strengths. But they're vulnerable as never before.
Fareed Siddiq is a successful businessman and a father of two. He lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio—a 19th-century mill town built on a river and known for its scenic waterfalls and dams—in a five-bedroom house he recently paid for, in cash, with his savings. Prominent in local civic and religious organizations, including the Red Cross and the chamber of commerce, Siddiq was invited to the InterContinental Hotel in downtown Cleveland earlier this month along with about 400 other business leaders to hear President George W. Bush speak.So right off the bat, without wasting time, Lisa Miller, Newsweek's current apologist for Islam attacks us with the standard charge that Americans are alienating young Muslims. It comes with the standard warning and disclaimer that Muslim violence against us is our own fault for not reaching out and accepting every Muslim demand for special rights, thereby causing the alienation of young Muslims, thereby creating a danger to ourselves. (Don't try this at home. It only works for Muslims.) But fortunately,
He was moved to ask his president a question: "What," he asked, hauling his 6-foot-5, 245-pound frame to the microphone, "are we doing with public diplomacy to change the hearts and minds of a billion and a half Muslims around the world?" What should he tell his friends and relatives in Pakistan about why he continues to live in the United States?
"Great question," answered the president. "I'm confident your answer is, 'I love living in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, the country where you can come and ask the president a question and a country where—' Are you a Muslim?"
"Yes," answered Siddiq.
"Where you can worship your religion freely. It's a great country where you can do that."
It was a good answer, says Siddiq, but not enough for him—not when he, a financial adviser at a major investment bank, is afraid to use the bathroom on flights because he doesn't want to frighten his fellow passengers as he walks down the aisle. He thinks anti-Muslim sentiment in the country is getting worse, not better. "I'm not so much worried about myself," he adds. "It's the young people I'm concerned with. Those are the people we need to try—not only as Muslims but as Americans—to make them feel part of America. If you alienate the Muslim young people from America, that is dangerous."
America, the officials said, has so far provided relatively infertile ground for the growing and grooming of Muslim extremists. "Most Muslims in America think of themselves as Americans," says Charlie Allen, intelligence chief at the Homeland Security Department.And yet, if we look at recent news we have the Fort Dix Six
The alleged terror plots uncovered since 9/11 are a sign that this success cannot be taken for granted. Ire among Muslim Americans at U.S. policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories is at a peak, and thanks to satellite news channels like Al-Jazeera and the Internet, that dissatisfaction can spread like fire.and
The relative peace that came with invisibility disappeared after 9/11. When Muslims became objects of fear, "people who had never recognized and seen themselves as Muslims had no choice but to see themselves as Muslim," says Muzaffar Chisti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at the New York University School of Law.Again, it's our fault for wondering which ones are part of that large minority that approve of violent attacks against innocent civilians in the interest of jihad.
To combat the discrimination many were feeling, many Muslim Americans turned, in classic American fashion, to the courts. The Council on American Islamic Relations, an advocacy group, counted nearly 2,500 civil-rights complaints by Muslim Americans in 2006, a dramatic increase over the previous year. These are the kinds of stories that make news—women who sue for the right to wear the hijab in their driver's license photo—and Muslim Americans say they show how invested they are in the American system.Somehow we are supposed to think it's a good thing that Muslims are reporting every sideways glance as a hate crime, not to mention all of the alleged attacks against Muslims that have been found to be fraudulent. The right to cover one's face on a driver's license photo, wouldn't that be classified as a special right? Like the Somali cab drivers in Minnesota who are demanding to be able to discriminate on the basis of religion? At the University of Michigan's Dearborn campus, Muslims have the right to having their footbaths paid for by student funds with the full support of the ACLU and state senator, Gilda Jacobs, who as I found out minutes ago,
“Interestingly, Jacobs was only one of two senators to vote against a bill in 2004 allowing religious and divinity students to win publicly funded scholarships. Jacobs said she was opposed to ‘funding of seminaries.’Isn't that special? I thought equal rights were the order of the day in this country. Yet Lisa Miller (along with Gilda Jacobs) wants us to applaud the fact that Muslims want to replace equal rights for all with special rights that favor Muslims. That doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy. But wait, it gets worse,
The six imams who were pulled off a US Airways flight last fall after praying openly at a Minneapolis airport gate have sued the airline and the airport commission for civil-rights violations. "I believe in justice in the United States, and that's why we've taken this case to court," says Didmar Faja, one of the imams.Yes, and Muslims are suing for a special right to disrupt airline flights. For those of us who need to be reminded, they were doing quite a bit more than merely "praying." Even causes for concern are minimized.
In Muslim intellectual circles, imagining ways to accommodate these young people is topic A, but the reality is somewhat grimmer. There are so few homegrown Muslim clerics in America today—and almost no institutions for training them—that prayer in most mosques is led by a scholar fresh off the plane from Lebanon, say, or Saudi Arabia, someone with no connection to America and no affinity for its culture.Remember the Freedom House report on Saudi influence in American mosques? It was chilling, but it may be unavailable. Daniel Pipes analysis of it is here. There is a bit of bad news, but there's not much, so we shouldn't be concerned. It's tucked into the very end of the article.
[ . . . ]
More unsettling is the question of what these foreign-born imams preach. According to unofficial estimates by government investigators, at least 50 percent of American mosques may receive some funding from foreign governments or institutions, mostly Saudi Arabia. The danger is obvious: if Saudi Arabia is exporting its Wahhabi Islam to this country via imams, pamphlets, Qur'ans and buildings, how long before a warped version of this extremist ideology intersects with a vulnerable group of teenagers? So far, connections between Saudi influence and the handful of suspected terror plots hatched here since 9/11 have been tenuous, according to the public record.
The bad news, however, bears repeating: 26 percent of Muslims age 18 to 29 believe that suicide bombing can be justified. Thirty-eight percent of that group believe that Arabs did not carry out the 9/11 attacks. These data, combined with the rising religious conservatism of young Muslim Americans, have led some experts to argue that differences between Europe and America have been overblown, that affluence and education do not inoculate a society against radicalization. "This idea that all those who are middle class are exempted from extremism has always been false," says Geneive Abdo, author of "Mecca and Main Street." "The leadership of the extremist movements have always been highly educated Muslims."Isn't that what we're told to ignore under the threat of being called an "Islamophobe?" But there's more.
It's impossible to underestimate the emotional nature of anti-Israel sentiment among Arab-American youth, argues Ismael Ahmed, executive director of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services in Detroit. "I think the poll miscaptures what's being said," he says. "There is such a thing as legitimate resistance to oppression, and there is terrorism on both sides. It's wrong, but there's also the right to resist." The poll numbers, in his view, don't point to a threat of homegrown suicide bombers, but to a passionate defense of a resistance movement—the way, 30 years ago, an Irish-American teenager would have supported the IRA.You gotta love that; moral relativism, combined with blame the victim, combined with a totally inverted version of the truth. Nowhere is personal responsibility accepted. I still don't understand how that contributes to American strength, do you?
It's strange that the United States and the Muslim world so often seem to be in conflict. The more you know about America's basic ideals and those of classical Islam, the more similarities you see. For one thing, both the country and the religion were founded on the principle that individual freedom is a God-given, inalienable right. For another, they share a central belief in the strength that comes from embracing diversity.Huh? The last time I checked, diversity, especially of the religious sort, was being changed into a theocratic, dictatorial, Islamic homogeneity that is actively destroying age old communities of non-Muslims, or as we are referred to; infidels.
The resemblance dates back to their beginnings. The Muslim world grew in much the same way America would, a thousand years later. As Islam spread from its birthplace in Western Arabia, its community of followers—the umma—expanded into an increasingly diverse collection of cultures, peoples and nations. Muslim rulers made a practice of welcoming and protecting people of all faiths—a tradition begun earlier but set in stone less than 10 years after the Prophet Muhammad's death, when Caliph Umar captured Jerusalem in 638 and invited 70 Jewish families to come and live there, after centuries of repeated expulsions by non-Muslims.Of course, the Jews of Arabia were wiped out. Protection of non-Muslims involves paying a special tax, living as second class citizens, and being subjected to daily humiliations that are codified in Sharia law. There is more of the same kind of drivel you've read over the years since 9/11 all about how benign Islam is, at least according to the cherry picked quotes. Ignore the reality of 1400 years of Islamic history. Only "Islamophobes" pay attention to that.
Labels: islam, Muslims, Muslims in America, Newsweek
posted by Harry @ 7:17 PM
3 comments
Labels: Juan Cole, Martin Kramer, Newsweek
posted by Harry @ 8:48 AM
0 comments
Labels: Across the Bay, Juan Cole, Martin Kramer, Newsweek
posted by Harry @ 9:53 AM
0 comments
When the siege finally ended, the PA soldiers left the church in terrible condition:
The Palestinian gunmen holed up in the Church of the Nativity seized church stockpiles of food and "ate like greedy monsters" until the food ran out, while more than 150 civilians went hungry. They also guzzled beer, wine, and Johnnie Walker scotch that they found in priests' quarters, undeterred by the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol. The indulgence lasted for about two weeks into the 39-day siege, when the food and drink ran out, according to an account by four Greek Orthodox priests who were trapped inside for the entire ordeal....
The Orthodox priests and a number of civilians have said the gunmen created a regime of fear.
Even in the Roman Catholic areas of the complex there was evidence of disregard for religious norms. Catholic priests said that some Bibles were torn up for toilet paper, and many valuable sacramental objects were removed. "Palestinians took candelabra, icons and anything that looked like gold," said a Franciscan, the Rev. Nicholas Marquez from Mexico.
Labels: Church of the Nativity, David Raab, Little Green Footballs, Newsweek, Palestinians
posted by Harry @ 2:34 PM
0 comments
Iraq continues to bedevil Coalition forces and the new Iraqi government. University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole offers a sober perspective at juancole.com. Thinking that Newsweek wouldn't lie to a long time subscriber like me, (even though they have maliciously dumped on Daniel Pipes in the past, and heaped unwarranted praise on The Daily Kos) I sauntered over for a look.
posted by Harry @ 8:41 PM
0 comments
"No one can find a safe way out for himself if socety is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result." -- Ludwig von Mises
CHALLAH AKBAR
