Friday, March 18, 2011

Egyptian Children's TV Show: We Must Liberate Jerusalem from 'the Disgusting Jews'

From:MEMRI

Following are excerpts from the "Ammo Alaa" children's TV show, which aired on Nour Al-Khaleejiyah TV on December 29, 2010.

To view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/2821.htm.

TV host: "Let's see how we should answer the disgusting Jews, who say that Jerusalem belongs to them. What proof do we have that Jerusalem is Islamic? We tell our friends that... Am I making you fall asleep, Mr. Sa'd, or what? Wake up Sa'd... Have a carrot... First of all, we tell the Jews that the Arabs lived in the blessed city of Jerusalem, more than 2,000 years before the first Jew settled in there.

"2,000 is a very big number. Not one year, not two, not ten, not a hundred – 2,000 years. That's the first thing. We tell them that the Arabs lived in Jerusalem 2,000 years before the first Jew set foot in it. Okay? Okay! [..]

"The disgusting Jews are getting ready, and they let their little children do many disgusting things, so that they will hate Islam, and kill all our Muslim brothers there.

"My advice to you is to place Jerusalem inside our hearts, learn and be smart. When we take exams, we must kill ourselves memorizing. We must do well and be very good Muslims, so we can use our knowledge to liberate Jerusalem. [...]

"Scientists know how to make weapons and things that serve Islam. They can make the Muslims have a strong state, and make a nuclear bomb and an atom bomb, and all those things that make [the Jews] stronger than us."

Thursday, March 17, 2011

We Won Wisconsin - But The Fight Goes On

Althouse: Union thuggery against Althouse and Meade: "We wil...

From: Althouse: Union thuggery against Althouse and Meade: "We wil...: "'We will picket on public property as close to your house as we can every day. We will harrass the ever loving shit out of you all the time...."

UN Security Council authorizes no-fly zone over Libya

From: Jerusalem Post

Resolution authorizes UN members to take "all necessary measures" to protect civilians and civilian centers; Gaddafi tells rebels that armed forces plan on taking over Benghazi; regime vows retaliation for intervention.

TRIPOLI/UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations authorized military action to curb Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on Thursday, hours after he threatened to storm the rebel bastion of Benghazi overnight, showing "no mercy, no pity".

"We will come, zenga, zenga. House by house, room by room," he said in a radio address to the eastern city.

Al Jazeera television showed thousands of Benghazi residents in a central square celebrating the UN vote, waving anti-Gaddafi tricolor flags and chanting defiance of the man who has ruled for four decades. Fireworks burst over the city.

Gaddafi had warned that only those who lay down their arms would be spared vengeance to be exacted on 'rats and dogs'.

"It's over. The issue has been decided," Gaddafi said. "We are coming tonight...We will find you in your closets. "We will have no mercy and no pity."

The UN Security Council passed a resolution endorsing a no-fly zone to halt government troops now around 100 km (60 miles) from Benghazi. It also authorized "all necessary measures" -- code for military action -- to protect civilians against Gaddafi's forces.

UNSC Resolution 1973 was adopted with 10 countries voting in favor, none opposing it and with five abstentions.

But time was clearly running short for the city that has been the heart of Libya's revolution. Residents said the Libyan air force unleashed three air raids on the city of 670,000 on Thursday and there has been fierce fighting along the Mediterranean coastal road as Gaddafi moves to crush the month-old insurrection.

French diplomatic sources said military action could come within hours, and could include France, Britain and possibly the United States and one or more Arab states; but a US military official said no immediate US action was expected following the vote.

Ten of the Council's 15 member states voted in favor of the resolution, with Russia, China and Germany among the five that abstained. There were no votes against the resolution, which was co-sponsored by France, Britain, Lebanon and the United States.

Rebel National Council head Mustafa Abdel Jalil told Al Jazeera television air strikes were essential to stop Gaddafi.

"We stand on firm ground. We will not be intimidated by these lies and claims... We will not settle for anything but liberation from this regime."

It was unclear if Gaddafi's threat to seize the city in the night was anything more than bluster. But at the very least it increased the sense that a decisive moment had come in an uprising that only months ago had seemed inconceivable.

Some in the Arab world sense a Gaddafi victory could turn the tide in the region, weakening pro-democracy movements that have unseated autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt and raised mass protests in Bahrain, Yemen and elsewhere.

Libya vows retaliation

By late evening, telephone lines to Benghazi and internet connections appeared to be cut.

Gaddafi's Defense Ministry warned of swift retaliation, even beyond Libyan frontiers, if the UN voted for military action against the oil-exporting nation.

"Any foreign military act against Libya will expose all air and maritime traffic in the Mediterranean Sea to danger and civilian and military [facilities] will become targets of Libya's counter-attack," the ministry said in a statement.

China, Turkey, and a Waiting World: Armed and Active

From: Commentary

Americans need less of a reminder today than we did a year ago that the world waiting beyond U.S. power and international consensus is not a gentle, stable one. But the reminders are accelerating. Two cropped up this week on opposite ends of Asia.

In Taiwan, Tsai Der-Sheng, the director of the National Security Bureau, briefed a legislative committee on China’s deployment across the strait of what he characterized as an entirely new type of ballistic missile. According to Tsai, the new missile’s destructive capacity is beyond anything previously deployed with the Chinese forces. The range of the missile, which he called the “Dongfeng-16,” would allow China to target U.S. facilities in Guam and Okinawa as well as Taiwan.

One Western analyst suggests that the new missile may be an upgraded version of the Dongfeng-15 (or DF-15), a tactical ballistic missile in service for some time with the Chinese army. That may be clarified in the coming days; what is more significant about this situation is that there has been no notice from foreign intelligence agencies that China was developing either a wholly new DF-16 or an upgrade like this one to the DF-15. The implication of that is that China’s missile-development cycle has been — at least in this case — considerably shorter than in the past, when Chinese development efforts were recognized and tracked for years before weapons were fielded with the operating forces.

At the other end of Asia, Greece has lodged a complaint with Turkey for sending a warship to interfere with an Italian cable-tending ship operating in an international strait in the Aegean Sea. The Italian ship has Greece’s approval for its activities, which involve entering Greek waters. The delineation of territorial waters is a particularly sticky problem in the Aegean; it is not self-evident which competing interpretation — Turkey’s or Greece’s — is “correct.” But the ascendancy of NATO and U.S. maritime power has held this and other such disputes in check for decades.

Not surprisingly, the cable-laying operation in question is related to an agreement between Italy and Israel to install an undersea communications cable linking the two countries. Industry analysts suggest that the cable will position Israel as the region’s most attractive high-speed communications hub. It’s becoming a pattern for a weapon system to pop up where economic activity is expected to benefit Israel — but the broader perspective on this trend is equally worrisome.

In the past 40 years, the Mediterranean has been almost entirely free of the kind of maritime intimidation regularly attempted by China against its neighbors. A Turkish warship harassing one of Italy’s civilian cable ships, as it operates under contract to Alcatel-Lucent, is the kind of threat China has used against third parties’ marine assets in its economic disputes with Vietnam. No particular armed vigilance has been required to discourage such power moves in the Mediterranean — as long as the U.S. and other NATO leaders were perceived to have the will to counter them. Small incidents like this one in the Aegean are early indicators that that perception has changed.

Teacher pay bill passes In Florida

From: Fox 13 Tampa

Evaluations based on FCAT and principal's input

TALLAHASSEE - Florida public school teachers would lose job security but could make more money if their students do well on standardized tests under a trailblazing bill that went to Gov. Rick Scott on Wednesday after a party-line vote in the Republican-controlled state House.

The legislation will establish a statewide teacher evaluation and merit pay system in 2014 and do away with tenure for new teachers hired after July 1 this year. It also chips away at teachers' due process and collective bargaining rights.

Scott has made the bill a priority and it's the first legislation sent to the Republican governor since he took office in January.

It's similar to legislation his predecessor, Republican-turned independent Charlie Crist, vetoed last year after statewide protests by teachers and their supporters.

Teacher's success determined by student testing
The measure is the latest in a series of steps Florida has taken to instill accountability into its education system by relying heavily on student testing to measure success and failure.

That includes a grading system to reward top schools and sanction those that fall short. Those changes were instigated by former Gov. Jeb Bush.

"All of us know that measurement works," Scott said at a news conference with GOP legislative leaders shortly after final passage. "We measure students. We know that works."

The bill passed the House 80-39. It cleared the Senate in a largely partisan 26-12 roll call, last week.
Democrats acknowledged the bill is less objectionable than last year's version but said it still has problems, including the lack of funding source for the merit pay.

They predicted that would lead either to tax increases or layoffs and reductions in the base pay.

Evaluation system to rely on FCAT, principals
Determinations of which teachers will get merit pay and which will face termination will be made according to an evaluation system. Half of each teacher's evaluation will depend on how much progress their students have made on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) or other exams over a three-year period.
The other half would rely on principals' assessments and other factors, including advanced degrees—but only if they are in the teacher's subject area.

"It is a very objective way of evaluating teachers," said Rep. Ana Logan, a Miami Republican who's been a teacher, administrator and school board member. "There are many teachers who can put on a dog and pony show, a very good dog and pony show, but are not very good teachers."

Florida teachers already face pay, benefit reductions
Florida teachers already rank near the bottom nationally and are facing pay and benefit reductions in the next budget year as part of spending cuts designed to avoid a potential $3.6 billion shortfall.

"It's amazing to me that the members in this chamber see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the plumbing care of their toilets," said Rep. Scott Randolph, D-Orlando. "Until we pay teachers a livable wage, there's no need to talk about this bill."

Republicans argued that merit pay is a way to attract and retain top teachers while other provisions in the bill will make it easier to get rid of bad ones.

"This is pro-teacher," said Rep. Richard Corcoran, R-New Port Richey. ""They want to be measured. They want to be recognized for their excellence."

Democratic Rep. Elaine Schwartz, though, said merit pay "is just a euphemism for killing unions" and part of a national movement to diminish public employees' collective bargaining rights.

"This process is a way of making unions useless in the school environment," said the Hollywood lawmaker.

Proponents say this bill is better than previous versions
Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, the statewide teachers union, said the legislation is fatally flawed.

"We've looked closely at plenty of scientifically sound, peer-reviewed research out there that shows this is the wrong approach to take to implement performance pay and to revamp evaluations," Ford said in a statement.
New teachers who cannot get tenure will face the prospect of being terminated without cause at the end of each school year even if they get top ratings.. School officials will not even be required to let them know why they are being let go.

The bill in many respects mirrors Florida's plan for using a $700 million federal Race to the Top grant. Crist created a diverse panel that included state and local school officials and teachers union representatives to develop that plan after he vetoed last year's bill.

Rep. Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, acknowledged that some criticism of that legislation was deserved.

"Last year, they said that we rushed the bill through and we probably did. Last year they said that we didn't listen to teachers enough and we probably didn't," Weatherford said. "We have listened, we have learned and we have made this a better

Three Jewish Children

From: Caroline Glick







Fogel_children.jpg
Ruth Fogel was in the bathroom when the Palestinian terrorists pounced on her husband Udi and their three-month-old daughter Hadas, slitting their throats as they lay in bed on Friday night in their home in Itamar.

The terrorists stabbed Ruth to death as she came out of the bathroom. With both parents and the newborn dead, they moved on to the other children, going into a bedroom where Ruth and Udi's sons Yoav (11) and Elad (4) were sleeping. They stabbed them through their hearts and slit their throats.

The murderers apparently missed another bedroom where the Fogels' other sons, eight-year-old Ro'i and two-year-old Yishai were asleep because they left them alive. The boys were found by their big sister, 12-year-old Tamar, when she returned home from a friend's house two hours after her family was massacred.

Tamar found Yishai standing over his parents' bodies screaming for them to wake up.

In his eulogy at the family's funeral on Sunday, former chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau told Tamar that her job from now on is to be her surviving brothers' mommy.

In a rare move, the Prime Minister's Office released photos of the Fogel family's blood-drenched corpses.

They are shown as they were found by security forces.

There was Hadas, dead on her parents' bed, next to her dead father Udi.

There was Elad, lying on a small throw rug wearing socks. His little hands were clenched into fists. What was a four-year-old to do against two grown men with knives? He clenched his fists. So did his big brother.

Maybe the Prime Minister's Office thought the pictures would shock the world. Maybe Binyamin Netanyahu thought the massacre of three little children would move someone to rethink their hatred of Israel.

That was the theme of his address to the nation Saturday night.

Netanyahu directed most of his words to the hostile world. He spoke to the leaders who rush to condemn Israel at the UN Security Council every time we assert our right to this land by permitting Jews to build homes. He demanded that they condemn the murder of Jewish children with the same enthusiasm and speed.

He shouldn't have bothered.

The government released the photos on Saturday night. Within hours, the social activism website My Israel posted a short video of the photographs on YouTube along with the names and ages of the victims.

Within two hours YouTube removed the video.

What was Netanyahu thinking? Didn't he get the memo that photos of murdered Jewish children are unacceptable? If they're published, someone might start thinking about the nature of Palestinian society.

Someone might consider the fact that in the Palestinian Authority, anti-Jewish propaganda is so ubiquitous and so murderous that killing the Fogel babies was an act of heroism. The baby killers knew that by murdering Udi, Ruth, Hadas, Yoav and Elad they would enter the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. They can expect to have a sports stadium or school in Ramallah or Hebron built for them by the Palestinian Authority and underwritten by American or European taxpayers.

And indeed, the murder of the Fogel children and their parents was greeted with jubilation in Gaza.

Carnivals were held in the streets as Hamas members handed out sweets.

Obviously YouTube managers are not interested in being held responsible for someone noticing that genocidal Jew hatred defines Palestinian society - and the Arab world as a whole. But they really have no reason to be concerned. Even if they had allowed the video to be posted for more than an hour, it wouldn't have made a difference.

The enlightened peoples of Europe, and growing numbers of Americans, have no interest in hearing or seeing anything that depicts Jews as good people, or even just as regular people. It is not that the cultured, intellectual A-listers in Europe and America share the Palestinians' genocidal hatred of the Jewish people.

The powerful newspaper editors, television commentators, playwrights, fashion designers, filmmakers and professors don't spend time thinking about how to prepare the next slaughter. They don't teach their children from the time they are Hadas and Elad Fogel's ages that they should strive to become mass murderers. They would never dream of doing these things.

They know there is a division of labor in contemporary anti-Semitism.

The job of the intellectual luminaries in Western high society today is to hate Jews the old-fashioned way, the way their greatgrandparents hated Jews back in the days of the early 20th century before that villain Adolf Hitler gave Jew hating a bad name.

Much has been made of the confluence of anti-Semitic bile pouring out of the chattering classes. From Mel Gibson to Julian Assange to Helen Thomas to Charlie Sheen to John Galliano, it seems like a day doesn't go by without some new celebrity exposing himself as a Jew hater.

It isn't that the beautiful people and their followers suddenly decided that Jews are not their cup of tea (or rail of cocaine). It's just that we have reached the point where people no longer feel embarrassed to parade their negative feelings towards Jews in public.

A DECADE ago, the revelation that French ambassador to Britain Daniel Bernard referred to Israel as "that shi**y little country," was shocking. Now it is standard fare. Everyone who is anyone will compare Israel to Nazi Germany without even realizing this is nothing but Holocaust denial.

The post-Holocaust dam reining in anti-Semitism burst in 2002. As Jewish children and parents like the Fogels were being murdered in their beds, on the streets, in discotheques, cafés and supermarkets throughout Israel, fashionable anti-Semites rejoiced at the opportunity to hate Jews in public again.

The collective Jew, Israel was accused of everything from genocide to infanticide to just plain nastiness.

Israel's leaders were caricatured as Fagin, Shylock, Pontius Pilate and Hitler on the front pages of newspapers throughout Europe. IDF soldiers were portrayed as Nazis, and Israeli families were dehumanized.

No longer civilians with an inherent right to live, in universities throughout the US and Europe, Israeli innocents were castigated as "extremist-Zionists" or "settlers" who basically deserved to be killed.

Professors whose "academic" achievements involved publishing sanitized postmodern versions of anti-Jewish Palestinian propaganda were granted tenure and rewarded with lucrative book contracts.

Today, when properly modulated, Jew hatred is a career maker. Take playwright Caryl Churchill's 1,300- word anti-Semitic monologue "Seven Jewish Children."

The script accuses the entire population of Israel of mass murders which were never committed.

For her efforts, Churchill became an international celebrity. The Royal Court Theater produced her anti- Jewish agitprop. The Guardian featured it on its home page. When Jewish groups demanded that The Guardian remove the blood libel from its website, the paper refused. Instead, it left the anti-Semitic propaganda on its homepage, but in a gesture of openmindedness, hosted a debate about whether or not "Seven Jewish Children" is anti-Semitic.

From London, "Seven Jewish Children" went on tour in Europe and the US. In a bid to show how tolerant of dissent they are, Jewish communities in America hosted showings of the play, which portrays Jewish parents as monsters who train their children to become mass murderers.

"Seven Jewish Children's" success was repeated by the Turkish anti-Semitic action film "Valley of the Wolves- Palestine," which premiered on January 28 - International Holocaust Memorial Day. The hero of that film is a Turkish James Bond character who comes to Israel to avenge his brothers, who were killed by IDF forces on the Turkish-Hamas terror ship Mavi Marmara last May.

No doubt owing to the success of "Seven Jewish Children" and "Valley of the Wolves-Palestine" and other such initiatives, anti-Semitic art and entertainment is a growth sector in Europe.

Last month Britain struck again. Channel 4 produced a new piece of anti-Semitic bile - a four-part prime-time miniseries called "The Promise." It presents itself as an historical drama about Israel and the Palestinians, but its relationship with actual history begins and ends with the wardrobes.

In what has become the meme of all European and international left-liberal salons, the only good Jews in the mini-series are the ones who died in the Holocaust. From the show's perspective, every Jew who took up arms to liberate Israel from the British and defend it from the Arabs is a Nazi.

WHAT ALL this shows is that Netanyahu was wasting his time calling on world leaders to condemn the murder of the Fogel family. What does a condemnation mean? France and Britain condemned the massacre, along with the US. Does that exculpate the French and British for their embrace of anti-Semitism? Does it make them friends of the Jewish state?

And say a British playwright sees the YouTube censored photographs. No self-respecting British playwright will write a play called "Three Jewish Children" telling the story of how Palestinian parents do in fact teach their children to become mass murderers of Jews.

And if a playwright were to write such a play, The Royal Court Theater wouldn't produce it. The Guardian wouldn't post it on its website. Liberal Jewish community centers in America wouldn't show it, nor would university student organizations in Europe or America.

No, if someone wanted to use the photographs of Yoav's and Elad's mangled corpses and clenched little fists as inspiration to write a play or feature film about the fact that the Palestinians have no national identity outside their quest to annihilate the Jewish state, he would find no mass market.

The headlines describing the attack make all this clear.

From the BBC to CNN the Fogels were not described as Israelis. They were a "settler family." Their murderers were "alleged terrorists."

As far as the opinion makers of Europe and much of America are concerned, the Yoavs and Hadases and Elads of Israel have no right to live if they live in "a settlement."

So too, they believe that Palestinians have a right to murder Israelis who serve in the IDF and who believe that Jews should be able to live freely wherever we want because this land belongs to us.

Until these genteel Jew haters learn to think otherwise, Israel should neither seek nor care if they condemn this or any other act of Palestinian genocide. We shouldn't care about them at all.

A Great Liberal Expose' on the Fallacy of the "Obesity Epidemic"

From: The Daily Beast

The first lady would be horrified by the idea that her Let’s Move campaign, which is dedicated to creating an America without any fat kids, is a particularly invidious form of bullying. But that’s exactly what it is, says Paul Campos.

Michelle Obama spoke movingly last week at a press conference about how parents agonize over the pain bullies inflict on children. Maybe she should talk to Casey Heynes about that. Heynes is a 16-year-old Australian fat kid who according to his father has been bullied for years by classmates about his weight. A few days ago, some of them decided to record their latest attack on a camera phone.

The First lady would, no doubt, be horrified by the suggestion that her Let’s Move campaign, which is dedicated to trying to create an America without any fat kids, is itself a particularly invidious form of bullying. But practically speaking, that’s exactly what it is. The campaign is in effect arguing that the way to stop the bullying of fat kids is to get rid of fat kids.

The whole Let’s Move campaign is like a Tea Partier’s fever dream of wrongheaded government activism. Now, as a liberal, I believe that government activism is often justified. For more than a generation, this idea has been attacked relentlessly by conservatives, and now the Tea Party movement is subjecting it to fresh assaults. Given our political climate, it’s more important than ever for liberals not to assume that a particular government initiative to stop something from happening is a good idea. Rather, we need to be reasonably certain that a) the something in question is actually happening; b) we know why it’s happening; c) we know how to stop it from happening; and d) the benefits of stopping it from happening are worth the costs.

Any time liberals support an ambitious government program that fails to meet this test, we are empowering the successors of Ronald Reagan, who famously declared that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

The Let’s Move campaign fails this test spectacularly. It has had one notable success, however: According to a Pew Foundation poll, nearly three in five Americans now believe that the government should have “a significant role in reducing childhood obesity.”

Predictably, the prevalence of this belief tends to split along partisan lines: 80 percent of liberal Democrats compared to only 37 percent of conservative Republicans and 33 percent of self-described Tea Partiers.

Fat kids have enough problems without government-approved pseudo-scientific garbage about how they could be thin if they just ate their vegetables and played outside more often.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow sees the poll results as evidence that conservatives will oppose anything proposed by Mrs. Obama or her husband, “no matter how innocuous or admirable.” But there’s nothing innocuous or admirable about this crusade. The “childhood obesity epidemic,” to the extent that concept ever made any sense, may well be over. As Australian scholar Michael Gard points out in his new book, The End of the Obesity Epidemic, over the last decade obesity rates among both adults and children have leveled off or declined all over the world, including in the United States. Contrary to alarmist predictions from just a few years ago that by the middle of this century all Americans would be overweight or obese, the “obesity epidemic” has, for the time being at least, stopped. Americans weigh no more than they did a decade ago.

The fact that Americans did not gain weight in the 2000s merely highlights that we don’t know why body mass levels increased in the 1980s and 1990s, or indeed why they remained basically stable in the 1960s and 1970s. We don’t know if adults or children consume more calories today than they did forty years ago: Even weakly reliable statistics regarding this question don’t exist. Similarly, we don’t know if people today are less active than they were a generation ago. Nor do we know if caloric intake and activity levels have changed over the past 10 years, when the “obesity epidemic” apparently ended.

In the face of all this, public health authorities invoke what people always invoke when they don’t have any good data: “common sense.” They argue that it’s just common sense that Americans got fatter in the 1980s and 1990s because they ate more, or were less active, or both. But these are far from the only explanations for weight gain in populations. For instance dieters tend to gain more weight over time than non-dieters, non-smokers gain more weight than smokers, and people generally gain weight as they age. Since the 1960s, smoking rates have plummeted, the median age of the population has gone up by nearly 10 years, and dieting has become much more common. In addition, even if we assume that weight gain in the 1980s and 1990s was caused exclusively by changes in caloric consumption and/or activity levels, it’s crucial, from a public policy perspective, to have a good idea what the relative contribution of these factors was. If Americans aren’t eating more than they were a generation ago, attempts to get them to eat less are especially likely to fail. But we simply don’t know whether this is the case.

Remarkably, debates about whether the government ought to have a role in making American children thinner almost never acknowledge that we have no idea how to do this. Consider the first lady’s major policy goals: She wants children to eat a healthy balance of nutritious food, both in their homes and at school, and she advocates various reforms that will make it easier for kids to be physically active. These are laudable goals in themselves, but there is no evidence that achieving them would result in a thinner population. Indeed ambitious, resource-intensive versions of Mrs. Obama’s initiatives have been implemented on a smaller scale, for example by the Johns Hopkins University Pathways program, which attempted to improve the diets and increase the activity levels of Native American children in three states, while educating their families about health and nutrition. The program had some success in all these areas, but it produced no weight loss among the children as a group. The same basic results, improved health habits but no weight loss, were obtained in the Child and Adolescent Trial for Cardiovascular Health, a similar program involving thousands of ethnically diverse children in four states. Pursuing comparable initiatives at a national level might be worthwhile-these programs did, after all, result in improved health habits among the children who participated-but there is no reason to think the kinds of reforms Mrs. Obama is advocating will make American children thinner. The perverse result could be that an initiative that might have been judged a success had its primary focus been on producing healthier children will instead end up being used as another example of a failed Big Government program, simply because it did not produce thinner ones.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume there’s actually an ongoing childhood obesity epidemic, that we understand what is causing it, and that we know how to stop it. Even assuming all this, does it make sense to try to make American children thinner, as opposed to merely healthier? Why, after all, is such a goal so important in an age of increasingly scarce public health resources? At this point, we need to consider how the concept of “childhood obesity” got defined in the first place. The Centers for Disease Control website offers these definitions of “overweight” and “obesity” in children:

Overweight is defined as a BMI at or above the 85th percentile and lower than the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex. · Obesity is defined as a BMI at or above the 95th percentile for children of the same age and sex.

These definitions raise a couple of obvious questions in a nation that has been bombarded with claims that childhood obesity is skyrocketing. After all, by this standard, aren’t exactly 10 percent of children always overweight by definition, while another 5 percent are obese? And what’s the justification for these statistical cut-points, anyway?

The definitions were created by an expert committee chaired by William Dietz, a CDC bureaucrat who has made a career out of fomenting fat panic. The committee decided that the cut-points for defining “overweight” and “obesity” in children would be determined by height-weight growth chart statistics drawn from the 1960s and 1970s, when children were smaller and childhood malnutrition was more common. The upshot was that the 95th percentile on those charts a generation ago is about the 80th percentile today-hence, the “childhood obesity epidemic.”

These definitions are completely arbitrary. The committee members chose them not on the basis of any demonstrated correlation between the statistical cut-points and increased health risk, but rather because there was no standard definition of overweight and obesity in children, and so they invented one. In other words, the “childhood obesity epidemic” was conjured up by bureaucratic fiat.

The committee did this despite Americans being healthier, by every objective measure, than they’ve ever been: Life expectancy is at an all-time high, and demographers predict it will continue to climb steadily. This isn’t surprising given that mortality rates from the nation’s two biggest killers, heart disease and cancer, are at historical lows and keep declining, while infectious diseases are under better control than ever. There’s no reason to think that today’s children won’t be healthier as adults than their parents, just as today their parents are healthier than their own parents were at the same age, continuing a pattern that has prevailed since public health records began to be kept in the 19th century. (Tellingly, 50 years ago government officials were issuing dire warnings that a post-World War II explosion of fatness among both American adults and children was going to cause a public health calamity).

And none of this even touches on a subtler and more invidious cost to the Let’s Move campaign: the profound shaming and stigmatization of fat children that is an inevitable product of the campaign’s absurd premise that the bodies of heavier than average children are by definition defective, and that this “defect” can be cured through lifestyle changes. As Casey Heynes’ desperate act of self-defense illustrates, fat kids have enough problems without the additional burden of being subjected to government-approved pseudo-scientific garbage about how they could be thin if they just ate their vegetables and played outside more often.

Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity is exactly the sort of crusade that liberals who don’t want to give ammunition to conservative critiques of government activism should oppose. It is a deeply misguided attempt to solve an imaginary health crisis by employing unnecessary cures that in any case don’t work. As such, it is almost a parody of activist government at its most clueless. Politically speaking, it deserves the same treatment Heynes gave his tormentors.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Wisconsin Police and Fire Threaten Walker Supporters

The Wisconsin debacle is getting even worse. Police and Firefighter Unions are now strong arming financial supporters of Governor Walker to publicly oppose him or they will boycott their services and products. In my mind there is an implied unwillingness to provide crucial police and fire support as well should the recipients of the letter below not acede to their demands. This is a letter that is making the rounds of the blogosphere.

Letter From Police and Fire

Absolutely Amazing

NASA Hack James Hansen in 1986: 2°-4° warmer in 2010. The Reality: No Change!

From: The Blog Prof

Don Surber made this great catch today:
Don writes:
From the Miami News on June 11, 1986: Dr. James “Hansen said the global temperatures would rise by 2 to 4 degrees in the following decade,” meaning 2001-2010.

...Steven Goddard mocked James Hansen.
This is what has happened with global temperatures over the last decade:


...How can a man who has been consistently wrong for 35 years be considered a scientist, let alone an expert?
A good question. Another one: what does Hansen have to do to be discredited in his own field of study? Since the 90s, every single IPCC 'model' (they aren't really models - they're scenarios) have been proven to be no better than what comes out of your butt after spicy food that you're not used to. See here:

In science, every theory is supposed to be judged by it's predictive capability versus actual reality. Not in the case of global warming where instead of proving the model is right or wrong, the experimental reality is being fudged. For the alarmist, anything that seems out of the norm (whatever that means) is due to global warming. If it doesn't snow enough, it's obviously global warming. If it snows too much? Well, that's global warming too. Never mind that no IPCC model predicts any such thing.

Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School

From: Slate.com


Preschoolers in school. Click image to expand.
Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.

They pressure teachers to make kindergartens and nurseries more like schools. So does the law—the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act explicitly urged more direct instruction in federally funded preschools.
There are skeptics, of course, including some parents, many preschool teachers, and even a few policy-makers. Shouldn't very young children be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover, they ask? Perhaps direct instruction can help children learn specific facts and skills, but what about curiosity and creativity—abilities that are even more important for learning in the long run? Two forthcoming studies in the journal Cognitionone from a lab at MIT and one from my lab at UC-Berkeley—suggest that the doubters are on to something. While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.

What do we already know about how teaching affects learning? Not as much as we would like, unfortunately, because it is a very difficult thing to study. You might try to compare different kinds of schools. But the children and the teachers at a Marin County preschool that encourages exploration will be very different from the children and teachers in a direct instruction program in South Side Chicago. And almost any new program with enthusiastic teachers will have good effects, at least to begin with, regardless of content. So comparisons are difficult. Besides, how do you measure learning, anyway? Almost by definition, directed teaching will make children do better on standardized tests, which the government uses to evaluate school performance. Curiosity and creativity are harder to measure.

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments. We might start by saying: Suppose we gave a group of 4-year-olds exactly the same problems and only varied on whether we taught them directly or encouraged them to figure it out for themselves? Would they learn different things and develop different solutions? The two new studies in Cognition are the first to systematically show that they would.

In the first study, MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on. For one group of children, the experimenter said: "I just found this toy!" As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised ("Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!") and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time. With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, "I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!" and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy.

All of the children pulled the first tube to make it squeak. The question was whether they would also learn about the other things the toy could do. The children from the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its "hidden" features than those in the second group. In other words, direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information.

Does direct teaching also make children less likely to draw new conclusions—or, put another way, does it make them less creative? To answer this question, Daphna Buchsbaum and I gave another group of 4-year-old children a new toy. This time, though, we demonstrated sequences of three actions on the toy, some of which caused the toy to play music, some of which did not. For example, Daphna might start by squishing the toy, then pressing a pad on its top, then pulling a ring on its side, at which point the toy would play music. Then she might try a different series of three actions, and it would play music again. Not every sequence she demonstrated worked, however: Only the ones that ended with the same two actions made the music play. After showing the children five successful sequences interspersed with four unsuccessful ones, she gave them the toy and told them to "make it go."

Daphna ran through the same nine sequences with all the children, but with one group, she acted as if she were clueless about the toy. ("Wow, look at this toy. I wonder how it works? Let's try this," she said.) With the other group, she acted like a teacher. ("Here's how my toy works.") When she acted clueless, many of the children figured out the most intelligent way of getting the toy to play music (performing just the two key actions, something Daphna had not demonstrated). But when Daphna acted like a teacher, the children imitated her exactly, rather than discovering the more intelligent and more novel two-action solution.

As so often happens in science, two studies from different labs, using different techniques, have simultaneously produced strikingly similar results. They provide scientific support for the intuitions many teachers have had all along: Direct instruction really can limit young children's learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

Why might children behave this way? Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. It's this kind of learning, in fact, that allows kids to learn from teachers in the first place. Patrick Shafto, a machine-learning specialist at the University of Louisville and a co-author of both these studies; Noah Goodman at Stanford; and their colleagues have explored how we could design computers that learn about the world as effectively as young children do. It's this work that inspired these experiments.

These experts in machine learning argue that learning from teachers first requires you to learn about teachers. For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative. When the teacher in the tube-toy experiment doesn't go looking for hidden features inside the tubes, the learner unconsciously thinks: "She's a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me." These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. Indeed, these studies show that 4-year-olds understand how teaching works and can learn from teachers. But there is an intrinsic trade-off between that kind of learning and the more wide-ranging learning that is so natural for young children. Knowing this, it's more important than ever to give children's remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies.

France: Islam: If Muslims ask for Europe’s "empty" churches...

From: Spero News

Rome - A Muslim group has asked to use the empty churches in France for Muslims to pray in, solving (at the expense of Christians) the traffic problems caused by Muslims who pray in the streets. Fr. Khalial Samir Samir, an expert scholar of Islam, reflects on the embarrassing proposal, calling for Islam in Europe to become more "European" and less "Arab". 

In a press release published Friday, March 11, 2011, the "Banlieuses Respect " Collective asked authorities in charge of organization of the Church of France, to place at Muslims’ disposal "empty churches for Friday prayers". Hassan M. Ben Barek, a spokesman for the Collective, said the measure would "prevent Muslims from having to pray on the streets" and being "politicians’ hostages”.

In fact, for several years now, every Friday, alongside dozens of mosques in France, Muslims have blocked the surrounding streets for an hour or two, spreading mats on the roads to pray. In many cases, local authorities close their eyes to this offense, and in some cases the police are there to ensure the safety of those who block the streets. This situation is on the rise in France (for example, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier. Montreuil, Nice, Paris, Puteaux, Strasbourg, Torcy ...). A situation that is found all over the world (Athens, Brussels, Birmingham, Cordova, Moscow, New York ...) and also in Italy (Albenga, Canicattì, Como, Gallarate, Milan, Modena, Moncalieri, Naples, Rome ...). In the Muslim world this phenomenon is present, especially in Egypt. On 10 December, in Lyon, Marine Le Pen (National Front) denounced the  Muslims "street prayers", which led to negative reactions towards the Muslim community in France. 

Three points:
1.       first on the reason for this request, namely the lack of space in the mosques;
2.       second on the consequences of this lack of space, namely congested streets near mosques;
3.       third on the proposed solution to solve this problem, namely "the provision of churches empty for Friday prayers."

Lack of space in the mosques
There are some 75 Muslim places of worship in Paris, of which you can find the details in each of the 20 arrondissements (http://mosquee.free.fr/Adresses/Ile_de_France/75_Paris/75_Paris.html). Moahmmed Moussaoui, President of the Conseil francais du culte Muslims (CFCM), since June 2008, professor of mathematics at the University of Avignon, in a very subdued and reflective interview on December 15, 2009 on Europe 1 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyyPIfuvo-o&feature=player_embedded) states that if one calculates the number of Muslims in France at five million (some say four million) and assuming that 17% of them go to the mosque on Friday, that number would be about 850 thousand people . Assuming that each person requires one by two metres, the required capacity of Muslim places of worship would be 850 thousand square meters. Currently there are around 250 thousand. Three times more space in the mosques is needed. The figures are obviously fluctuating. It is almost impossible to estimate the number of Muslims in France since French documents do not indicate religion. Moreover the proportion of those who practise their religion is even more difficult to assess. On the other hand, it is unusual for Muslim women go to the mosque to pray, those who want to pray do so more readily at home, which reduces the area required for places of worship. 

A year later in another interview dated December 22, 2010, by the same Mossaoui, we read: "A study on the space for Muslim worship says that 300 thousand square meters are currently available in France. Double that is needed, according to the CFCM. Today, 150 construction projects are underway throughout the country". Which is "an irrefutable recovery" for Massaoui. (http://www.liberation.fr/societe/01012309460-prieres-de-rue-les-fideles-dans-l-impasse). 

Even if it takes twice as much space, it is up to the Muslim community to solve the problem. The State or the Church has nothing to do with it. The same Mossaoui said as much, in a television interview dated to December 2009, that the French state should not have to fund mosques, rather Muslims themselves with the help of funding from abroad. On the other hand, to avoid feeding negative reactions towards the Muslim community, then the rather generalized practise of Mayors in granting long leases of land (most often for one euro per year) for the construction of mosques needs to be reconsidered. The Ordinance of 21 April 2006 allowed for these concessions "for allocation to an association of worship for a religious building open to the public." In many cases, the administrative court has estimated that these practices are “similar to a disguised subsidy”, which is contrary to the 1905 law.  

Blocking streets near the mosques to pray
As we said, this is a common practice in Muslim countries. In fact, population growth, as well as a renewed religious fervour, have meant that the existing mosques and places of worship are not enough to contain all the faithful on Friday at noon. Given that this is the case in Muslim countries where the separation between state and religion is virtually nonexistent, the faithful have been in the habit of occupying sidewalks and streets near the mosques, and of diverting traffic. 

For over a decade, this practise has also developed in Europe, although it is perfectly illegal, since the street belongs to all pedestrians as well as motorists. This situation is recognized as totally unacceptable by all reasonable people, regardless of the principle of secularism. It becomes even more so, if one takes into account that these exceptions are no longer exceptional, since it takes place every Friday. And since this exception is applied to a specific religion, Islam, the impression of many is of an "invasion" of land, a kind of "conquest" of the national territory by the "Muslims" . There are no justifications for this occupation of public territory. 

On the contrary, should a group of citizens (Muslims, Christians or other religions) make an official request for an exceptional use of a public road for a limited time, for a party or ceremony, this would not pose a problem. It seems to me that the current situation does no more than reinforce and justify Islamophobic reactions. And this, in my opinion, is a fundamental point. It has become commonplace to speak, rightly and wrongly, of "Islamophobia." Of course this may motivated by more or less racist reasons, which is totally unacceptable, even if it happens everywhere. However if people, in the name of the particular group to which they belong, behave in a manner contrary to the laws and rules of the land, or even to the traditions and customs, then, these people are responsible for the resulting negative responses. In this case, Muslims are partly to blame for the Islamophobia which is expanding throughout Europe. It is up to Muslims themselves to protest against those who cause these reactions and educate their co-religionists. 

Moreover, the fact that the phenomenon of praying on the street was born and largely remains in Muslim countries, it means that it is not just the West’s problem, but of Islam. Let me explain: many justify this objectionable behaviour (the occupation of a public place by a certain group) with the fact that there is no space for this group. This tends to insinuate that the group (in this case Muslims) are mistreated or discriminated against. Not so, because in Muslim countries the situation is exactly the same, and even more widespread. The explanation is that the "system of Muslim prayer" has not been redesigned for the modern city. If you were to apply this system to Christians, for example, the roads would be completely blocked. If all Christians were required to meet Sunday at noon, be sure that no church could contain them. This was formerly a problem, and still is for the Coptic Church. There is only one church for the celebration of Mass on Sundays, which gathers the whole community. 

Hence the need to construct two overlapping places of worship (in the Coptic Church) or accept having  numerous Masses per church. Moreover, during the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church authorized the anticipation of Sunday Mass to Saturday evening, contrary to the whole Tradition, to allow as many faithful as possible to participate in the Eucharist. It is an internal matter for the community, which, if alive, must find ways to adapt to the world, and not ask the world to adapt to it!

Finally, in the dozens of videos that show Muslims at prayer in the street, which can be seen on Youtube, for example, I have never seen women in prayer. One of two things: either it is because it is not convenient, and then it is equally improper for a man; or, because Friday prayers in the mosque is not an obligation, and if so, then this applies to everyone. Unless it is because the public prayer is "a matter for men," probably because, in this case, it takes on a "political" aspect.

Provision of empty churches for Friday prayer
The March 11 proposal of the Collective, calling on the Church of France, to "provide Muslims empty churches for Friday prayers", is astounding. These "empty churches" are consecrated places and it would never occur to a Christian to use them for anything other than the liturgical ceremonies, or sacred music - an exception that is always possible. It would be unthinkable to use them to celebrate a non-Christian cult. 

On the other hand, a church that served as a mosque would have to be re-equipped for the needs of Muslim prayer. Many typically Christian elements would have to be removed and typically Muslim ones added. And above all these "empty churches" are not destined to remain empty, but on the contrary to be occupied as soon as possible by a Christian community or a monastic community, which is happening more and more throughout Europe. Now it seems unlikely that such a place, more or less once converted into a mosque, could be "repossessed" and turned back to church. It would be a great loss for the Muslim community and could lead to much bitterness and religious conflicts. The Christians would then be accused of being Islamophobic, revanchists, disrespectful of Muslim sensitivities, unbrotherly towards them, and so on.
Finally, imagine for a moment the opposite. If in a Muslim country (Egypt or Algeria, for example) the indigenous Christians (in Egypt) or immigrant Christians (in Algeria) asked Muslims to give them a mosque, since they have many, or to lend them one for Sunday, or only for important celebrations: Christmas, Epiphany, the beginning of Lent, Easter, Pentecost and the Assumption, what would the reaction of Muslims be? 

Conclusion
In conclusion, it seems important that a new relationship between the Muslim community and the European population be established in France and Europe, a relationship based on cooperation, friendship and mutual esteem. There are extremist fringes on both sides, which we should help each other to de-fanaticise. French Muslims represent less than 10% of the population elsewhere in Europe the proportion is lower. Islam in Europe poses a problem, since it is not seen simply as a religion, but also as a culture that penetrates all areas of daily life. Consequently, there may be a conflict of cultures. Europe has worked for centuries to separate religion and society, and everything is marked by a secularized Christian culture. 

I think the Muslim community must make a serious attempt to accept that the religious phenomenon remains, as far as possible, a private affair. The more Islam moves in this direction, the less opposition it will find. This does not mean being less Muslim, far from it, it means being Muslim in a different, more inner, way.

Asking the Church to provide currently unused churches at the disposition of Muslims is a major embarrassment at the very moment when the effort of believers is focused on re-evangelizing those who have strayed from Christian practice. Asking the State for public subsidies in the form of a lease, embarrasses the State and the public who will perceive it as a subterfuge. It is a far better thing to rely on one’s own strengths and the solidarity of Muslims (avoiding, however, that this foreign aid is not subject to certain conditions). 

According to the president of the CFCM there are currently about 150 places of worship under construction. We must insist that the municipalities do not pose ideological obstacles to the construction of mosques, if they adhere to zoning regulations. In my opinion, in order for Muslims and Islam not to be seen as a foreign body, great effort have to be made in the formation of imams in France, imams who are perfectly integrated into French culture and mentality, (or the wider European Union context). 

As long as Islam is culturally "Arab" as long as Muslims believe that to be a true Muslim they must be closer to the original Arab culture, there will be uneasiness. This is, to me, the vocation of the Muslims of Europe: the creation of a Western interpretation (French, European ...) of Islam, which harmonises the Muslim faith and spirituality with Western modernity, namely, secularism and human rights . I am convinced that this is possible - and is already under way - but this requires an effort by all to reach its destination, and above all the desire for an Islam thus conceived. 

Finally, as suggested in point 3, greater reflection is needed on how to maintain the principle of "community of prayer” (salât al-jumu’ah), however,  rethinking its modalities to account for cultural and practical realities. In other words, if there is a conflict of interest, first we must look for the desired goal in the letter of the Law (maqâsid al-shari'ah) rather than the letter of the Shari'ah.

Fed instructs teachers to Facebook creep students

From: The Daily Caller

Education Department officials are threatening school principals with lawsuits if they fail to monitor and curb students’ lunchtime chat and evening Facebook time for expressing ideas and words that are deemed by Washington special-interest groups to be harassment of some students.

There has only been muted opposition to this far-reaching policy among the professionals and advocates in the education sector, most of whom are heavily reliant on funding and support from top-level education officials. The normally government-averse tech-sector is also playing along, and on Mar. 11, Facebook declared that it was “thrilled” to work with White House officials to foster government oversight of teens’ online activities.

The only formal opposition has come from the National School Board Association, which declined to be interviewed by The DC.

The agency’s threats, which are delivered in a so-called “Dear Colleague” letter,” have the support of White House officials, including President Barack Obama, who held a Mar. 10 White House meeting to promote the initiative as a federal “anti-bullying” policy.

The letter says federal officials have reinterpreted the civil-rights laws that require school principals to curb physical bullying, as well as racist and sexist speech, that take place within school boundaries. Under the new interpretation, principals and their schools are legally liable if they fail to curb “harassment” of students, even if it takes place outside the school, on Facebook or in private conversation among a few youths.

“Harassing conduct may take many forms, including verbal acts and name-calling; graphic and written statements, which may include use of cell phones or the Internet… it does not have to include intent to harm, be directed at a specific target, or involve repeated incidents [but] creates a hostile environment … [which can] limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or opportunities offered by a school,” according to the far-reaching letter, which was completed Oct. 26 by Russlynn Ali, who heads the agency’s civil rights office.

School officials will face lawsuits even when they are ignorant about students’ statements, if a court later decides they “reasonably should have known” about their students’ conduct, said the statement.

Following the discovery of “harassment,” officials may have to require mandatory training of students and their families, according to the Ali letter. “The school may need to provide training or other interventions not only for the perpetrators, but also for the larger school community, to ensure that all students, their families, and school staff can recognize harassment if it recurs and know how to respond… [and] provide additional services to the student who was harassed in order to address the effects of the harassment,” said the letter.

Facebook is developing new features that will make it harder for principals to miss episodes of online “harassment,” and so will increase the likelihood of government action against the teenage users of Facebook and other social-media. “We’re adding a unique feature, developed with safety experts, that lets people also report content to someone in their support system (like a parent or teacher) who may be able to address the issue more directly,’ Facebook declared Mar. 11. “It is our hope that features like this will help not only remove the offensive content but also help people get to the root of the problem,” the company statement declared.

The department’s re-interpretation expands legal risks for schools beyond those set by the Supreme Court in a 1999 decision, said a Dec. 7 NSBA statement. The court decision, which interprets several federal laws, says schools are liable for harassment that school officials know about and that “effectively bars” a student’s access to an educational benefit.

The remedies being pushed by administration officials will also violate students’ and families’ privacy rights, disregard student’s constitutional free-speech rights, spur expensive lawsuits against cash-strapped schools, and constrict school official’ ability to flexibly use their own anti-bullying policies to manage routine and unique issues, said the NSBA letter. The government has not responded to the NSBA letter.

The leading advocate for the expanded rules is Kevin Jennings, who heads the Education Department’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Jennings founded the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network advocacy group, and raised at least $100,000 for the Obama campaign in 2008, according to Public Citizen, a left-of-center advocacy group. In an September 2010 interview on the government’s StopBullying.gov website, Jennings said that “in a truly safe school … students feel like they belong, they are valued, they feel physically and emotionally safe.”

Ken Trump, a Cleveland-based school-safety consultant, says the administration is so determined to focus on gay and lesbian teens that it is asking Congress for $365 million to conduct bullying-related school surveys in 2012. In 2011, the administration ended a program that gave roughly $300 million per year to states to counter physical violence and drug-abuse in schools.

The primary purpose behind the administration’s initiative is to “create a social and political climate where it is impossible to express conservative moral beliefs” about sexuality, even when research data shows those beliefs help many people live prosperous and happy lives, said Laurie Higgins, the school-advocacy chief of three-person Illinois Family Institute, in Carol Stream, Ill. Everyday experience and careful research show that children are most likely to prosper when they’re raised by their parents, not by school officials and D.C.-based special-interests, she said.

Children do not have any right to bully other kids, gay or straight, to hurt them, taunt or tease them, but they do have a right to speak their minds, and champion their beliefs, said Higgins. Kids learn to treat each other with respect, especially when they and their peers have the ability to hold each other responsible for good, bad or trivial actions, she said.

One of the better things about Facebook, said Higgins, is that it promotes responsible behavior by requiring teens to identify themselves with their real names and pictures. But the kids’ ability to mature into adults will be stymied if the federal government, special-interests and school officials intervene in kids’ conversations about girls and boys, sports and fashion, studies and music, whenever they offer judgements or facts that are disliked by influential political advocates, such as Jennings’ GLSEN, Higgins said. “Kids will be inhibited if they fear their moral reasoning will be seen by others as criminal,” she said.

GLSEN’s advocates strongly support the federal initiative. The Department’s October “guidelines are thorough, comprehensive and list examples in current law to support each provision…. When it comes to bias-based bullying in particular, we have to be willing to name the problem if we want to protect all of our students,” said a Dec. 21 GLSEN statement. Almost 90 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students “experienced harassment in the past year because of their sexual orientation,” according to a 2009 GLSEN survey of more than 7,000 students, said the statement.

Advocates for gays and lesbians say teens who identify as gay or lesbian are four times as likely as normal kids to kill themselves, and they cite multiple examples of teen-suicides following anti-gay statements or physical violence.

The anti-harassment legislation is frequently supported by the ACLU and its state affiliates, partly because ACLU officials also support the goal of government-supported diversity. In contrast, the libertarian Foundation for Individual Rights In Education, or FIRE, opposes anti-harassment bills as threats to free-speech. On Feb. 15, its website presented arguments against a pending bullying-related bill in Congress, dubbed the Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act. The draft act “is redundant, it replaces the clear definition of harassment with a vague, speech-restrictive definition that conflicts with Supreme Court precedent, and it treats adult college students like children who need special laws,” said FIRE’s statement.

This month, Higgins’ side won an expensive free-speech victory when a federal appeals court in Chicago upheld a token award of $25 dollars each to two students who were punished by school officials in Naperville, Ill., for wearing unapproved t-shirts following a school event that was intended to promote acceptance of homosexuality. The “Day of Silence” event at the school was organized by GLSEN. The two students’ shirts carried the message “Be Happy, Not Gay,” and were worn on a day declared to be a “Day of Truth,” which was organized by a national conservative group that opposes GLSEN’s goals.

“[A] school that permits advocacy of the rights of homosexual students cannot be allowed to stifle criticism of homosexuality,” said the appeal court’s decision, authored by Judge Richard Posner. “The school argued (and still argues) that banning ‘Be Happy, Not Gay’ was just a matter of protecting the ‘rights’ of the students against whom derogatory comments are directed. But people in our society do not have a legal right to prevent criticism of their beliefs or even their way of life,” said the ruling.


Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The Climate of Climate Change

From: The New Atlantis

C
limate change is inescapable. Whatever is actually happening in the atmosphere, the hubbub of politics and media ensures that the topic is always in the air — and the past few years have seen the winds of climate-change talk swirl into a tempest and then blow away. In June 2008, Barack Obama, upon effectively securing his party’s nomination for the presidency, predicted that Americans would look back and see that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Both he and John McCain, his Republican opponent, favored some form of carbon-reducing legislation, and momentum seemed to be building toward an international treaty.

Since then, things have changed, to put it mildly. Fishy e-mails were leaked from one of the world’s leading centers of climate research at an English university. The much-anticipated 2009 Copenhagen climate summit failed to produce any substantial achievement. President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress were unable to pass large-scale climate legislation. And green movement hero Al Gore has done his cause no favors with his recent marital and legal woes.

A Rasmussen tracking poll found that in May 2008, 48 percent of American voters believed that recent global warming was primarily caused by human activity while 34 percent cited planetary trends unrelated to mankind. By April 2010, those numbers had flipped, with 48 percent pointing to natural trends and only 33 percent of the respondents believing that we are the primary culprit. Still, politics and polls aside, the first decade of the 2000s was, according to researchers, the warmest since the advent of modern thermometer-based record keeping.

Four recent books explore the dynamics of the climate debate. British scientist Mike Hulme explores the history and the current state of the debate from a scholarly perspective in Why We Disagree About Climate Change. Stanford’s Stephen Schneider offers an intensely personal reflection on his four decades researching climate in Science as a Contact Sport. TV-weatherman-turned-talk-radio-host Brian Sussman rails against an eco-Marxist conspiracy in Climategate. And Texas Tech geosciences professor Katharine Hayhoe joins her pastor husband Andrew Farley in calling upon fellow believers to focus on the science and then act in A Climate for Change.

All of these works affirm that, in one way or another, climate change is a profoundly human phenomenon. By that I do not simply mean that these authors accept (as all but Sussman do) the anthropogenic theory asserting that humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions are largely to blame. No, climate change is best described as a human phenomenon because it cuts across (and sometimes into) deeply held understandings of culture, including our capacities for knowledge, progress, and purpose; our relationship to the natural world and each other; and our relationship to the divine. Disagreements may sometimes masquerade as scientific disputes, but often this is just a proxy war while the real interests driving the fight remain behind the scenes.

Mike Hulme did the bulk of his writing before the recent shift in American sentiment about global warming, but Why We Disagree About Climate Change remains very useful for understanding the current debate. Hulme, who was the tenth-most-cited scientist in the climate-change field for the period of 1999 to 2009, is a professor at the University of East Anglia, the center of the e-mail leak. Although Hulme was not involved in the controversial e-mails, he has proven more prescient than most in the science world when gauging the scandal’s impact. Even though nothing in the “Climategate” e-mails directly supports the claim that the anthropogenic theory is a vast hoax, more people believe that now than did before. As Hulme argues in his book, public perceptions of truth can be more consequential than the truth itself.

In Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Hulme says hardly a word pro or con about the potential merits of alternative explanations, like volcanoes and sun cycles, seemingly central to the minority scientific view. Instead, he pulls up the underlying cultural, psychological, and sociological roots of our climate disagreements — the factors that he believes give rise to much of the passion associated with this topic — and lays them on the table in a calm and workmanlike fashion.

While openly acknowledging his own predispositions — as a Prius-driving professor, an orthodox Anglican Christian, and a member of the Labour Party, to name a few — Hulme works to maintain the stance of a neutral and nonjudgmental observer. In this he largely succeeds. Indeed, at times he may succeed too effectively, as the book occasionally drags for lack of either a clear villain or a prescriptive thesis — although his cool, methodical approach is a plus in a genre too often beset by activist hyperbole on all sides.

Hulme opens with a brisk tour of the history of climate as a concept, highlighting the shift from the integration of climate and daily life in pre-modern societies (think of the lessons communicated through Old Testament droughts) to modernity’s cleaving of culture from nature. Climate has also been tied to theories of cultural superiority and historical determinism, from the ancient Greeks (who gave us the word klimata to distinguish their productive zone on earth from the perils to the frigid north and torrid south) to Immanuel Kant (who saw the benefits of a temperate climate as the key to explaining why certain “peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons”) to Jared Diamond (whose recent book Collapse chronicles the fall of civilizations that apparently overstrained their ecosystems).

Hulme’s second chapter follows the “discovery of climate change,” highlighting the work of and scientific culture surrounding such scientists as John Tyndall, who formulated the theory of greenhouse gases in the 1860s, and Svante Arrhenius, who in 1896 first calculated by hand, with impressive accuracy, the climate sensitivity associated with a doubling of carbon dioxide. Though several of these early pioneers saw the modification of the atmosphere as a positive potential insurance against the return of an Ice Age, that view shifted over time. By the 1980s, Wallace S. Broecker of Columbia University was advancing the idea of very negative physical “tipping points” that now dominates much of the academic and popular thinking. Hulme emphasizes that each era’s scientists operated in a culture with its own paradigms, its own “ways of seeing the world; ways of believing.”

The meat of the book is in seven chapters, each dedicated to one of our own era’s belief structures — the fears, cultural factors, and value judgments that drive our responses to theories of climate change and possible remedies: first, we disagree about the role of scientific knowledge and the role of scientists in policy discussions; second, we disagree about the ways we value things (our economics); third, our religious and ethical outlooks differ, or as the author puts it, “our duty to others, to Nature, and to our deities”; fourth, we have disparate personal and corporate approaches to risk; fifth, we respond differently to mixed messages communicated about those risks; sixth, we have differing views of “development” for the global poor; and seventh, we disagree about how issues of global importance should be governed. There is, of course, much overlap between these categories — our views about science will influence our understanding of risk, for example, and our religious and economic convictions can influence our opinions about development for the poor and the proper role of government. Hulme acknowledges these overlaps even as he works to illuminate each category on its own; the effect, however, is a repetition that leaves the reader wondering whether the book could have been considerably shorter.

The central issue Hulme raises is that we fundamentally disagree about what we, knowingly or unknowingly, hold most dear, and that our disagreement can produce a host of secondary conflicts. If we differ on first principles we will usually differ on much that comes after.

Though Hulme ably covers topics as diverse as international treaties, the social cost of carbon, and environmental theology, he is at his best when dealing with the role of science in society. He argues that the scientific norms of skepticism, universalism, communalism, and disinterestedness are difficult to apply to public problems where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent” — what Silvio Funtowicz and Jerry Ravetz have termed “post-normal science.” Hulme notes this not to disparage the traditional norms but to help scientists and the public see the situation more clearly. He calls for humility and transparency, and recognition of the important but limited role for science when facing difficult ethical decisions. All sides of the climate policy debate — both those who argue that the science is currently settled (and assume that the need for vigorous government intervention is unquestionable) and those who argue that the policy status quo must not change unless and until all doubt is removed — would be wise to remember that, as Hulme puts it well, “Certainty is the anomalous condition for humanity, not uncertainty.”

While Hulme’s treatise attempts to illuminate the human element of the debate, the late Stephen Schneider’s memoir illustrates it personally. As a child, Schneider was fascinated with hurricanes, and he grew up with a desire to make a difference in the world. During a long career in atmospheric modeling where he was a central figure in battles over global cooling, nuclear winter, ozone-layer depletion, and global warming, Schneider found himself dueling with a pre-Penthouse Bob Guccione in the New York Times, receiving smuggled documents from the Soviet Union, going off-script on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, fishing for trout with Dan Rather, verbally sparring with congressmen on Capitol Hill, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize along with other climate scientists and Al Gore, and talking global warming with rapper Snoop Dogg and the (aptly named?) band Widespread Panic at a summer music festival.

Undoubtedly, it was an interesting ride — and it makes for a surprisingly good read, a bit like sitting on the porch and listening to a cantankerous but lovable old uncle recount his war stories. There are backs to be patted, scores to be settled, apologies to be made, lessons learned, and perhaps an embellishment or two. It may not be history exactly as it was, but it is certainly one man’s personal sense of history as it was felt.

Schneider rose to fame due to some solid scientific chops, a lot of being in the right place at the right time, and a knack for producing a great quote. In 1973, when mute uncertainty reigned over whether competing anthropogenic effects might produce a net cooling or warming, he quipped, “Mark Twain had it backwards. Nowadays everybody is doing something about the weather, but nobody is talking about it.” Nice line — and the New York Times’s science writer agreed.

But he who lives by the sword sometimes suffers self-inflicted wounds. Schneider’s most famous quote, one that still regularly pops up in books and columns and online today, comes from a 1989 interview with Discover magazine: “[Scientists] have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

Schneider spends several pages expressing his frustration at having his views misrepresented and only partially quoted. To be fair, let us here provide the full quotation:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

Though still rightly disturbing for those of us who would prefer the whole truth all the time, this is quite a bit more nuanced than the we make up what we need caricature of Schneider’s comments that one often sees.

It is also noteworthy that Schneider stood up for scientific truth even when the facts ran counter to his personal policy preferences and friendships. The most notable example in the book is his disagreement with the über-activist-scientist Carl Sagan in the early 1980s over nuclear winter — the theory that a large nuclear war would plunge the planet into a period of extreme cold. With Schneider’s access to more advanced atmospheric modeling systems, he could see that Sagan’s doomsday predictions of a nuclear winter that could wipe out humanity were vastly overblown. Sagan had earlier been a friend (he had helped get Schneider on the Tonight Show), but Schneider felt compelled to advocate against Sagan’s winter scenario with what he (ever quotable) dubbed a “nuclear fall” theory — a far milder and more temporary scenario. He describes his falling out with Sagan as “one of the most unpleasant chapters in my life.” They did not reconcile until years later, when the climate-policy fight eventually brought them together again.

One of Schneider’s aims is to set the record straight on what he and his allies said and did, but it must be noted that he sometimes distorts the record of those with whom he disagrees. He blithely labels President George W. Bush and most Republicans as global-warming deniers. Clearly President Bush, who refused to support the Kyoto Protocol or major domestic climate-change legislation, did not take policy positions that Schneider would have preferred. But in 2001, President Bush affirmed his belief in the reality of global warming and favorably noted the National Academy of Sciences conclusion that the increase was due in large part to human activity. Toward the end of Bush’s presidency, his administration took pains to highlight its achievements on the issue, including the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, an initiative intended to be much more practicable than Kyoto. Contrasting Schneider’s nonchalant criticism of conservatives with the angst he felt in disagreeing with Sagan reminds us that, in science as in life, we usually want to take it easier on our friends.

Schneider, who unexpectedly passed away in July 2010 on an airplane returning from a scientific conference, operated in the center of what Hulme calls the “co-production” model of public policy formation, wherein scientists and policymakers engage in a complicated dance. His book reveals to us the late-night negotiations and P.R. brinksmanship that occur when science and politics are forced together in the creation of consensus documents, such as those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Schneider was truly a man on a mission, as the subtitle of his book, Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate, makes clear. At times, his arrogance and hubris are jarring. Nevertheless, one also sees a sympathetic figure who clearly loved his wife and faced his own mortality in fighting lymphoma. Those who either deify or demonize activist-scientists like Schneider may benefit from this glimpse of the complex, gifted, but imperfect man he was.

Squarely on the other side of the climate debate from Schneider is Brian Sussman, who now spends his mornings on conservative talk radio in the liberal bastion of San Francisco. His prior claim to fame was being the backup weatherman for the CBS Early Show. His new book Climategate actually has little to say (just some four pages) about the e-mail scandal whence its title comes. During an event at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. in June 2010, Sussman acknowledged that the title was changed at the publisher’s suggestion for marketing purposes. At the same event, he pronounced his book “bulletproof.”

Bullets and revolutions are apparently on Sussman’s mind as he smells a grand Marxist conspiracy at work. Indeed, the book opens with these words: “Global warming’s story begins with a diabolical bastard named Karl Marx.” It seems that almost every page thereafter contains some reference to the bearded one, or Lenin, or Hitler, or “Marxist scientists,” or “eco-Marxists,” or the like. Brazen statements like “the earth’s entire temperature record is rigged” and not-so-subtle suggestions that “Barack Hussein Obama” is a handmaiden of the U.N. “oneworlders” and was never properly sworn in as president (because there was no Bible at the swearing-in do-over after Chief Justice John Roberts publicly flubbed the oath) are commonplace as well.

The primary value of Climategate comes in having all of the major arguments of the “it’s a hoax” crowd together in one volume. Some of the anecdotes are indeed concerning. It certainly does not inspire confidence in our temperature record to see an official weather station five feet from an old trash-burning barrel. Yet it is difficult to know how much to extrapolate from the things that Sussman highlights because, upon even a cursory investigation, this “bulletproof” book is full of holes.

For example, Sussman’s list of the “Twenty Hottest Years” includes data only from the contiguous United States, not the world, which one might expect from a book on global warming. The author does not clue the reader in to this distinction, but it becomes readily apparent if one follows the cryptic footnote to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. This is important particularly because in the lower 48, extremely hot years from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s appear frequently on the list, with the year 1934 coming in at the top. But that regional heat wave was not a worldwide event.

Nevertheless, the author is silent about that crucial distinction, even as he castigates Al Gore for his words about the recent clustering of the world’s ten hottest years. Sussman checks Gore’s quote against his U.S.-only graph and taunts, “I honestly don’t know where Gore obtains his data.” Actually, the Goddard Institute graph labeled “Global Land-Ocean Temperature” seems to match Gore pretty well. Even M.I.T.’s Richard Lindzen (a favorite of the skeptics) agrees with Gore’s assessment of the top ten warmest years, reluctantly observing at another Heritage Foundation event that “there’s no way out of that.”

Sussman’s fun with words and numbers continues as he describes the year 2008 as “the coldest of the new millennium.” Never mind that it was still one of the ten hottest in the modern era of recordkeeping and quite consistent with the long-term warming trend predicted by the majority scientific view.

One could go easily go on and on, but a final example will suffice. Climategate highlights a British court case dealing with teaching materials used in the classroom. In its decision, the court identified several discrepancies between Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and the reports of the IPCC. Sussman attributes the words “political brainwashing” to the court, but the judge never uses those terms or anything similar — a fact easily checked by simply reading the decision. Climategate also neglects to inform readers that the judge noted that he had “no doubt” that “Al Gore’s presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate.” In the end, An Inconvenient Truth was approved for classroom use.

In a final bit of unintended irony, Climategate closes with a spy-movie-style scene in which a Silicon Valley venture capitalist helps Sussman to follow the money — Gore’s money. Legitimate questions can and should be asked about the former vice president’s green technology ties. Certainly at one level, though, it makes sense that Gore would put his money where his mouth is. Sussman’s mole instead tells us that Gore, despite his years of government work on the issue, does not believe the earth has a fever, he just “believes in money.”

The book concludes with Sussman and his rich friend bemoaning the fate of their country. They vow never to give up the fight to save this nation, and in Climategate’s penultimate sentence the mole says, “That’s why I want this book to be a huge seller.”

Money and patriotism can go hand in hand for Sussman, but apparently not for Gore, who is deplored for being a Marxist on one page and a capitalist on the next. This is emblematic of the sloppy logic in Climategate overall. Upon finishing the book, I could not help but wonder why an otherwise reputable and scholarly think tank like the Heritage Foundation would lend its stamp of approval to a book that is seemingly based on such a limited amount of rational thought.

A nice antidote to the venom of Climategate is A Climate for Change, by Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe and her husband Andrew Farley, a pastor, author, and also a professor at Texas Tech. While they share a Christian faith with Sussman, their approach to global warming could hardly be more different. The couple would likely concur with Mike Hulme that our disagreements about climate change are often grounded less on the actual science (the general knowledge of which rarely rises above sound bites and rumors) than on a host of other factors.

In addition to being a very useful primer addressing the basic science of climate change and the major counterarguments made by climate-change skeptics, A Climate for Change also highlights theological issues related to the care of God’s creation and the demonstration of love to one’s global neighbors. Hayhoe and Farley provide examples of apparent climate-change impacts from the Arctic of Alaska to the tropical island of Tuvalu, and offer concrete steps towards reducing one’s carbon footprint.

Perhaps the book tries to do a little too much, and at times the topics are covered in too cursory a manner as the authors seek to address the full gamut of frequently asked questions they have received over the years. Generally, though, their explanations are both accessible and well documented. The book is enhanced by color charts, graphs, and other figures, many of them created from raw source data by Hayhoe herself. Dealing with a topic that can engender both passionate activism and opposition, A Climate for Change provides a unique perspective at the intersection of religion and science, finding a diagnosis in the material world of science and a call to respond in the realm of faith.

Mike Hulme approaches the same intersection from a similarly spiritual perspective in “Beyond Climate Change,” the final chapter of Why We Disagree. Describing climate change with Horst Rittel’s term “wicked problem” — one in which resolving one aspect may well tear open another — Hulme recasts our current array of reactions within four biblical myths (using the term “myth” non-pejoratively to mean deeply assumed truths).

The myth of Eden laments for the loss of a pristine creation. The myth of Apocalypse channels our fear that we have unwittingly doomed the world. The myth of Babel brings forth the prideful hope that we will solve the problem with a new wave of technology and massive geoengineering. And the myth of Jubilee calls for “climate justice” on a massive scale to redress years of energy and pollution inequality.

Hulme does not argue that one particular myth holds the solution. Instead, he acknowledges that, notwithstanding the hype surrounding each new major report or hurricane or heat wave or election, with each promising to provide the turning point in the fight against global warming, no solution can emerge from today’s dominant systems of thought. He only finds hope in the possibility that the problem of climate change will spur new “modes of knowing” that will press beyond our current “science-saturated and spiritually impoverished wisdom.” Climate change may “do work for us” by waking us from a deep spiritual slumber. For Hulme, the four religious myths offer a starting point from which to explore larger questions about “how and why we live on this planet.”

Hulme’s last chapter feels like it should be the first of a different book — and, in a sense, he hopes it will become just that. By jarring humanity beyond the material worlds of science, economics, and politics, Hulme sees the possibility that climate change may help direct society away from a fate where, as he quotes playwright Tom Stoppard, “When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.” The answer, as Hulme sees it, will be something like ecologist Jesse Ausubel’s pithy summary of medieval history: “Great sins can elicit great cathedrals.” This seems a lot to ask from climate change. But Hulme’s challenging vision suggests that, in ways we can barely begin to imagine, the human phenomenon of climate change and our current disagreements about it may yet turn out to be a blessing in disguise if we can look beyond the atmosphere and see the heavens.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

FARK IT