…how easy it is to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale” using TATP, I’m totally shaking in my boots.
Wuh?
"Terrorists are waiting for the Democrats here to take control, let things cool off and then strike again." — Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), quoted by the Salt Lake Tribune. (Via Political Wire.)
Someone remind me…who was president on September 11, 2001?
Caption This Photo
U.S. President George W. Bush looks out from Marine One as he prepares to depart the White House in Washington August 16, 2006. REUTERS/Jim Young (UNITED STATES)
Separate but Equal
USA Today features dueling commentaries on the Department of Education’s imminent release of regulations on single-sex classes for public schools. The new regulations will eradicate the threat of discrimination lawsuits should public school systems institute single-sex classes or entire single-sex schools.
The change in regulations is the result of the much-hyped “Boy Crisis,” which is, in fact, largely overstated and most affects schoolchildren in poverty—a problem not solved by segregating sexes.
The dueling opinion pieces, though one purports to support sex segregation, both arrive at the same point (if one does so unintentionally)—that single-sex classes are a convenient excuse to ignore the real problems with the American educational system and the design of people who want to reinforce traditional gender roles. You know, like back in the Good Old Days.
From the piece against single-sex education:Advocates of sex-segregated schools offer pseudo-scientific workshops where educators learn about alleged brain differences between boys and girls. According to some advocates: When establishing authority, teachers should not smile at boys because they're biologically programmed to read this as a sign of weakness; they should only look boys in the eyes when disciplining them; girls should not have time limits on tests or be put under stress because unlike boys, girls' brains cannot function well under these conditions; and girls don't understand mathematical theory very well except for a few days a month when their estrogen is surging.
Anyone who advocates any blanket learning style based on gender is an idiot, right out of the starting blocks. My best work was always done under pressure. If I were given three months to do a paper, I wouldn’t start it until the night before; stress is my most effective motivator. And no matter how much I loved reading and writing, I always scored higher on standardized tests in math. Perhaps I’m secretly a boy. Dumping me into some lollygag class where I was coddled and my math competency ignored would have left me bored and angry, with a lot of unfulfilled potential. And I know plenty of men who buck the stereotype of being most productive under some sort of authoritarian education style, too. Generalizations are not a great basis for educational theory.
Although these ideas are hyped as "new discoveries" about brain differences, they are, in fact, only dressed up versions of old stereotypes — that boys must be bullied and girls must be coddled.
From the piece for single-sex education:Boys, in particular, suffer from a one-size-fits-all approach. And as students reach middle school, they are increasingly distracted by members of the opposite sex.
Once again, we hear that boys just can’t control themselves, so we’d better get them away from the sirens.
The thing that kills me about this tired refrain is that men are distracted by members of the opposite sex (or the same sex, depending on their sexuality, which shows you what a superb rationale this is for single-sex education) for most of their lives. Men and women are generally wired differently that way, and I’m not sure how segregating a boy, as opposed to letting him learn how to reconcile hormones with obligations from an early age, will actually make him better prepared for adulthood, when he’ll still have to choose between ogling a coworker’s legs and finishing his TPS report on time.There is some reason for caution, but experiments should be encouraged with careful limitations. Parents should be allowed to choose whether they want their kids in single-sex or mixed-gender classes. And lesson plans mustn't play into sexist stereotypes. (Joe Cook, executive director of the Louisiana ACLU, says Livingston educators were following "unfounded notions like 'boys need to practice pursuing and killing prey, while girls need to practice taking care of babies.' ")
Remember that.
Districts inept enough to see single-sex education that way deserve lawsuits.Drop by the fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms at Woodward and you'll find very different books lying around. In the girls' class there's The Great Gilly Hopkins and The Chocolate Touch. In the boys' class there's Stealing Home: The Story Of Jackie Robinson and Dragons of Deltora. Giving boys books they prefer to read gets them more excited about reading.
Might I suggest that districts inept enough to not include all those books in one classroom in the first fucking place, so that boys and girls can choose whatever reading material most appeals to them, were failing to meet their students’ needs in ways that aren’t solved by gender segregation? If a school can’t be clever enough to put all those books in one mixed-sex classroom, then the problem of students falling behind probably has very little to do with the genitals of their classmates.
And, once again, I’ve got to call bullshit on the gender assumptions. I’m going to guess that Stealing Home would not have been Paul the Spud’s first choice of reading material when he was a kid. On the other hand, since my dad was a baseball fanatic and I always enjoyed talking baseball with him, it might very well have been mine.Tessa Michaelos' all-boys kindergarten features a pile of Legos, hard hats and a balance beam used for a vocabulary contest. Michaelos' boys soar academically. Many of the all-boys classes in other grades out-perform both the girls-only and mixed-sex classes.
So, the boys are benefiting from single-sex education, but the girls aren’t. Hmm. Is it possible that it’s not the gender segregation that’s helping out the boys so much, but the revamped classroom with Legos and a balance beam? What are they giving the girls—dolls and an Easy-Bake Oven? Perhaps it’s that the toys boys get are learning toys. Without controlling for gender by providing both groups with the same materials, it’s impossible to know what’s really creating the disparity in achievement.
There are just endless problems with this whole situation, the primary issue being that all its so-called solutions are predicated on a false premise. Boys aren’t in crisis. And the more we look to gender for answers to solve an imaginary crisis, we ignore the real crisis of poverty creating unequal educational opportunities. That’s the real scandal of the American education system, and while we wring our hands over boys v. girls, we leave poor kids of both genders to wallow in shitty schools.
And, as a final aside, I am deeply resentful of gender-drawn lines in educational theory, because I have never followed the stereotypical path of girls. As I mentioned above, I work better under pressure, my competencies in math and science exceed my language abilities, and I was always a more visual than aural learner. And I know I’m not alone. When educators attempt to model programs based on gendered brain differences, they are creating a terrible dynamic for anyone who diverges from the standard gender expectations of learning processes, including the not insignificant portion of the population who are gay, bisexual, and transgendered, most of whom, like myself and many other straight men and women, deviate from the expected learning style based on their genders. Unless they are truly dedicated to identifying each child’s specific needs, it’s pointless to advocate gender segregation, and providing classes for each of those specific needs would be nutty—boys who do best in single-sex classes, girls who do best in single-sex classes, boys who do best in mixed-sex classes taught to boys’ expected learning style, girls who do best in mixed-sex classes taught to girls’ expected learning style, boys who do best in mixed-sex classes taught to girls’ expected learning style, and girls who do best in mixed-sex classes taught to girls’ expected learning style. That’s six different possibilities for every cohort, which most schools can’t accommodate. (Especially schools in poverty-stricken districts.)
And, ultimately, there’s one control factor that no one likes to talk about—the competency of the teachers. Maybe the success of Tessa Michaelos' all-boys kindergarten class is down to Tessa Michaelos being an awesome teacher. Perhaps a room filled with Legos and a balancing beam wouldn’t lead to the boys’ academic achievement if it were in the hands of a less dedicated, less skilled teacher.
My parents were both teachers, and, for years, I couldn’t go to the grocery store, or the library, or the movie theater, without someone working there telling me how my mom or dad was “their favorite teacher!” They were great teachers who inspired students because they genuinely cared about them and tried to give them what they needed, which was often a kind word, an interest in their lives, a moment to look at pictures of their cousin’s new baby, a hug. I’ve been given free drinks by a bartender who told me my mom changed his life by making him realize he was smart. “She just kept telling me until I believed it.” He went from regular English to honors’ English and was attending college, something he’d never considered. Do you think he would have benefited more had she never looked in his eyes unless disciplining him? Harrumph.
Why?
"Hollywood Wackos"
So, did you ever wonder what the 100 Most Liberal Movies of ALL TIME are? Well, we have a site that can tell you that and more. Over at CelebPolitics they will let you know just what movies to avoid so that you can:
Exercise your right to be informed! Stop going to movies starring liberal actors, so that your money stops going into their liberal pockets.
Oh yes, that's right. They call them "Hollywood Wackos" and:
Hollywood wackos drive expensive cars, live in huge mansions, and work about two months per year. And yet they believe their "real world" perspective qualifies them to tell the American public how to vote come election time. Help stop these idiots from spouting off by boycotting their movies!
Ben Stein, btw, is their #1 guy.
Here is a list of the Top Ten Evil Liberal Movies (called "toxic liberal waste", btw):
1. The American President
2. The Princess Bride
3. Meet the Fockers
4. The War of the Roses
5. Wall Street
6. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
7. Romancing the Stone
8. Tell Them Who You Are
9. The Jewel of the Nile
10. The Game
Here are the top 100. What are their Top Ten Lovable, Huggable Conservative Movies? Why:
1. It's A Wonderful Life
2. Dave
3. Dodgeball
4. Tango and Cash
5. The Greatest Story Ever Told
6. A Smile Like Yours
7. Casper
8. Casper: A Spirited Begining
9. Dennis the Menace
10. Easy Wheels
Top 100 here.
The best thing about this site though is their ratings explanation (emphasis theirs):
We do not rate movies based on content, as that would require actually seeing movies that we suggest people boycott.
Operation Iraqi Liberation
Project OIL just got a little honester care of the Honesterator:
"Leaving before we complete our mission would create a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, a country with huge oil reserves that the terrorist network would be willing to use to extract economic pain from those of us who believe in freedom," Bush said.Now, if he’d just said “from those of us who need to drive Hummers to compensate for our small penises,” we’d really be getting somewhere.
(Hat tip Konagod.)
I promise not to keep blogging about the Ramsey case…
…but I thought this was worth mentioning. Via Article of Faith, the Times mentions that the ex-wife of the guy who confessed says that “she and Mr. Karr had been together in Alabama when JonBenet was murdered.” She also says that he spent a lot of time researching the case (eww), and, apparently, the way the cops zeroed in on him was that he contacted a journalism professor who made several documentaries about the case. Karr’s dad also says the guy has never been to Colorado.
The guy’s a frigging lunatic, obviously, but it looks like there’s a possibility he’s the kind of lunatic who might also soon claim to have abducted Amelia Earhart from the cockpit of her aeroplane, if you know what I mean.
My point in mentioning this is not to try to draw any conclusions about the veracity of his confession, but just to point out that the immediate descent of the media vultures on this as if it’s definitely the end-all be-all is completely fucking ridiculous. As usual.
The Report First Ask Questions Later paradigm of the modern media is dreadful, simply dreadful. They've evidently learned nothing from their shameful complicity in taking a nation to war under the same flawed premises.
BREAKING: Unconstitutional, Bitchez!
A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.Ka-POW.
U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency's program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy.
Spreading Democracy Something
Right at the tail end of a truly depressing NY Times piece headlined Bombs Aimed at G.I.’s in Iraq Are Increasing, we get this little update on how all that democracy-spreading is going:
Bush administration officials now admit that Iraqi government’s original plan to rein in the violence in Baghdad, announced in June, has failed. The Pentagon has decided to rush more American troops into the capital, and the new military operation to restore security there is expected to begin in earnest next month.Looks like we’ve hit a stop sign on that Road Map to a Democratic Middle East.
Yet some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq’s democratically elected government might not survive.
“Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.
“Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect,” the expert said, “but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.”
What I find most distressing is that this is reported as part of an article focusing on the increasing number of soldiers being killed or injured by bombs. The Bush administration keeps telling us their sacrifice has a purpose, and that that purpose is a free and democratic Iraq, that we’ve got to stay the course or their lives will have been given in vain. Well, okay, Bullshit Brigade—what say you now? They’re dying for…an alternative to democracy? Sounds awesome.
Bliss
Depp to Star in Burton's "Sweeny Todd"
LOS ANGELES - Johnny Depp is going from woozy buccaneer to murderous barber.Somewhere, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have an amazing dream-viewing machine, used solely for picking through my subconscious brain to find out what new project they could create to bring me joy.
Depp is reuniting with director Tim Burton ("Charlie and the Chocolate Factory") to play the title role in a film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical "Sweeney Todd," about a 19th-century barber seeking bloody revenge over his wrongful imprisonment.
That's got to be the explanation... right? They're batting 100 so far...
McCain Monkeys Around
Maybe somebody should have clued in Sen. John McCain.McCain followed his joke with some screeching and chest-beating, then flung his own shit at Allen.
First, Sen. George Allen, R-Va., wound up a few dozen veterans with a "we win, they lose, there's no substitute victory" strategy for Iraq, then McCain followed with a joke about a monkey flying an airplane.
McCain, R-Ariz., was in town Wednesday night to lure some votes for his Republican colleague, Allen, who has heard enough monkey jokes lately. … Macaca is a genus of monkey.
Anyone who believes that John McCain just made a spectacular gaffe by telling that joke doesn’t know the first thing about John McCain. He can be a real nasty piece of work, and he’s extremely competitive. (“You lose battles in politics. I do get good and angry. Really angry! By God, I'm not going to let them beat me again. I don't like to lose.”) He’s got his gaze fixed on the White House, and, after losing in 2000, he’s not about to lose again—and he doesn’t have the slightest qualm about throwing his every last shred of integrity out the window to win, because he knows how the GOP rolls these days.
Allen is his most likely competition for the Republican nomination. You do the math.
McCain is a lot of things, but not clued in ain’t one of them.
(Hat tip to Brendan Nyhan.)
Bush is Crap
My only question is why anyone would be hesitant to say this kind of thing anymore. The Bush administration clearly is crap!
[Deputy British Prime Minister] John Prescott has given vent to his private feelings about the Bush presidency, summing up George Bush's administration in a single word: crap.I actually find it sort of pathetic that calling Bush a crap cowboy is controversial.
…"He was talking in the context of the 'road map' in the Middle East. He said he only gave support to the war on Iraq because they were promised the road map. But he said the Bush administration had been crap on that. We all laughed and he said to an official, 'Don't minute that'." [MP Harry Cohen] added: "We also had a laugh when he said old Bush is just a cowboy with his Stetson on. But then he said, 'I can hardly talk about that can I?'”
…And today Mr Prescott issued a statement in which he said: "This is an inaccurate report of a private conversation and it is not my view. "
Told that others at the meeting could not recall the words, Mr Cohen said: "He did. I stand by that."
Question of the Day
As the comments thread here has delved a bit into issues of attraction, specifically regarding weight, I thought this might make for an interesting QotD: Do you have a very rigid physical type to which you are attracted?
The men to whom I’ve found myself attracted are of all races, tall and short, fat and thin, able-bodied and disabled. If there’s any discernible physical attribute they all share, it’s having faces with character—wrinkles, scars, dimples, deep creases when they smile. So I guess that’s my type, although its consistency is perhaps only discernible by me.
I’m more picky about personality, but that’s a whole other QotD.
Oh My
Man arrested for murder of JonBenet Ramsey. Tune into your favorite cable news channel for 24/7 wall-to-wall coverage of this decade-old murder case. Coverage will continue indefinitely, or until Bush requests interruption to deliver a stirring address on staying the course in Iraq.
Sure, Any Deity Can Appear in a Pancake or in a Stain on the Wall...
True Supreme Beings are use a little more showmanship.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is tired of being ignored.
(Tip 'o the Energy Dome to BoingBoing.)
Caption This Photo
U.S. President George W. Bush looks up after starting the engine on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle while touring Harley Davidson Vehicle Operations in York, Pennsylvania, August 16, 2006. At right applauding Bush is Harley-Davidson President and CEO Jim Ziemer. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque (UNITED STATES)
