You can’t make this up.

Today at lunch we had a rather vigorous discussion of terrorism, war, etc. I may be a little too sensitive (and thus ill-suited for military leadership) but I find any talk of violent conflict to be highly disturbing. I often find myself wishing that people would just “be cool” rather than reacting to evil in the world with more evil. For example, it seems that Israel has gone of the cliff and the two sides of the conflict will never be reconciled because they have lost any sense of the humanity of their opponents. When we reach a point (as many here have with the muslim world) that we think the only solution is violence how do you turn back?

One important lesson: democrats may nominate mediocre judges. But republicans want to nominate lunatics that think that the supreme court has been going down hill since the thirties.

Glenn Greenwald lays out the saga of the right wing and Plamegate.

I think this is a great example of how propaganda works. The smart propagandist knows that you don’t need to convince the people that a lie is the truth. You only need to sew enough doubt that people stop believing the actual truth. If you ask many people that came of age in china after Tienemen square what they think happened, even those who have lived overseas and heard the actual story of what happened tend to view it as a wash: people say many things, who knows what is true. When people doubt reality happened it might as well not have.

Evolution opponents exploit this, even though they don’t realize they aren’t telling the truth. They throw long lists of untrue or discredited criticisms of evolution. To refute them is long and tedious so evolution goes from reality to “disputed”.

Compare:
A) Democrats Drop Troop Pullout Dates From Iraq Bill

B) Chart of Enemy Attacks in Iraq, which shows that the civil war has progressively intensified since 2003 and that the “surge” hasn’t helped much.

Questions: Why the fuck are American troops still there? Why do Bush and the Republican drones ignore the evidence that the troop presence is not helping, but only allowing the deaths of more Iraqis and US soldiers? Why are the Democrats being cowards? Or rather, are the Democrats playing politics here, i.e., what is their strategy?

At least 27 colleges have challenged the US News college rankings reports by refusing to fill out their surveys. I know that Reed had done this awhile ago, and maybe a few others had, but now it seems like a movement is underway. According to an InsideHigherEd article, two weeks ago, 12 college presidents called for their colleagues to stop filling out the institutional reputation part of the survey. Then a few days ago, 15 more colleges, particularly some historically black colleges, decided to do the same, arguing that the rankings have been inherently unfair to them. Read the rest of this entry »

White House Says It Will Move Quickly to Replace Wolfowitz

Intense.

Riffing off Eli’s post, the “education problem” is really complex. But Eli is right about the equality issue. In California schools are effectively segregated. My wife teaches in East Oakland. She teaches in a segregated school. Which is to say, there are no white students. Zero. Around 90% of her students receive free and reduced lunch.

Her classroom is a portable in poor repair. The door fell off a closet in the room a month ago and it hasn’t been fixed. Many of the lights are burned out (when she arrived in the room all of the lights were burned out and the heater didn’t work, she had to fight to get those). The school has no internet access. The computer lab is locked because there is no technology teacher. The computers in the lab are all first generation iMacs…around 9 years old. Their are bars on the windows, the doors have metal bars in addition to locks and there is graffiti on the walls.

Her students had no teacher at all for the first semester, just a revolving set of substitutes, which was lucky, because when teachers are sick there are so few subs in the district they usually don’t get one so they just spread the kids out into other classrooms.

The kids are going on their first field trip of the year tomorrow. The district has no money for buses, so the kids will be bringing money to take the city bus to the Chabot Science Center.

There is no PE teacher or facility. For PE, my wife takes her class out to the playground and has them run around or play games. There are only a few balls, a few worn out jump ropes and one cone. Read the rest of this entry »

See ya later, Wolfie.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Embattled World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz will resign at the end of June, his leadership undermined by the generous compensation he arranged for his girlfriend.

His departure was announced late Thursday by the World Bank board.

Wolfowitz’s departure ends a two-year run at the development bank that was marked by controversy from the start, given his previous role as a major architect of the Iraq war when he served as the No. 2 official at the Pentagon. read more.

And again, here’s Juan Cole’s critique of how Wolfowitz’s cronyism which cost him his job at the World Bank was also what caused the Iraq debacle.