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Comments by YACCS

 

Those who can't, get teaching credentials.

A horrifying story from California, where education bureaucrats are trying to eliminate home-schooling. Parents must have teaching credentials, according to the state's Department of Education, in order to home-school their own children.

''A child who is not properly exempt is truant, and the parent is subject to an infraction by the district attorney,'' state Department of Education Deputy General Counsel Roger Wolfertz said. ''Buying instructional materials and doing a good job of teaching is not the issue with us.''

Well, duh. Anybody who has attended public school knows that doing a good job of teaching isn't the issue. (via Joanne Jacobs).
posted by David Nieporent at 8/23/2002 09:40:00 PM |

 

And Al Qaeda discriminates, too

On Tuesday, the New York Times, in an otherwise sensible (if banal) editorial about necessary reforms in the management structure and processes of the New York Fire Department, couldn't resist pandering to their baser liberal instincts:

This turnover in the ranks will also allow the department to take on a critical problem not emphasized in the report: diversity. White men still make up a staggering 93 percent of the Fire Department's 11,112-member force, according to figures released last year. As long as a reform effort is under way, the city should do its utmost to ensure that the Fire Department not only protects, but reflects, the people of New York.

You'll note that there's no claim that the Fire Department actually discriminates in any way; the Times is merely upset that the department doesn't "reflect" the people of New York.

That might have been an aberration, slipped in as space filler, except that the Times decided to print this letter to the editor in response, from an expert on fire safety:

To the editor:

"Fixing the Fire Department" (editorial, Aug. 20) raises an important point about diversity. The New York Fire Department record on women is particularly troubling when compared with other urban fire departments.

Women make up 16 percent of the firefighters in Minneapolis, 15 percent in San Francisco and 13 percent in Miami. In New York, that figure is an abysmal 0.2 percent.

Facing a staggering number of retirements, the Fire Department needs to recruit from as wide a pool as possible to find the best candidates. The early indicators are profoundly disappointing: since Sept. 11, more than 1,000 people have been hired, yet only one was female.

There are thousands of women who want to join New York's bravest and can do the work. It's past time for the department to overcome its history of exclusion.  
KATHY RODGERS
President, NOW Legal Defense
and Education Fund

Again, note that there's no actual claim of discrimination. No argument that qualified female applicants were being turned away. Just the idea that every institution must be run by quotas. I wonder if NOW is upset that not enough women firefighters were killed on 9/11.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/23/2002 02:47:00 AM |

 

Everyone, plus or minus 50%

Headline in the Washington Post: Poll: Most Oppose School Vouchers. That's bad news for those of us who support the concept. Or is it?

Most Americans oppose the use of public funds to help parents send their children to private or church-sponsored schools, a study released yesterday shows.

The 34th annual poll of 1,000 adults, conducted by the Gallup Organization for the educational group Phi Delta Kappa, found that 52 percent of those surveyed opposed the use of state vouchers to expand access to private education.

Still, 46 percent support the voucher program, up from 34 percent a year ago.

The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Technically, I suppose that 52% would be "most," but it's hardly what most people think of when they hear the word -- and given the poll's margin of error, the headline is just a tad bit misleading. And given that support for vouchers jumped significantly (and this was before the Supreme Court ruled them constitutional), it's an awfully odd story choice.

Moreover, note that the actual poll asked voucher questions in more than one way; phrasing it as "A proposal has been made that would allow parents to send their school-age children to any public, private, or church-related school they choose. For those parents choosing nonpublic schools, the government would pay all or part of the tuition. Would you favor or oppose this proposal in your state?" gave different results. To that question, 52% said they favored vouchers, and 46% said they did not. (Moreover, 63% of minority respondents favored vouchers.)

The real lesson? Reporters write what they want to write, regardless of what the whole story is. (I don't know who's to blame, here. It's a Reuters story in the Washington Post.)
posted by David Nieporent at 8/22/2002 01:48:00 PM |

 

Beyond a reasonable doubt

The only member of the New York Times' editorial board not on Saddam Hussein's payroll reiterates his contention that Saddam is a supporter of terrorism, describing intelligence gathered from captured Iraqi agents:

However, the terrorist mission to set up facilities to weaponize poisons in Iraqi Kurdistan's mountainous equivalent of Afghanistan's Tora Bora has been more successful. One produces a form of cyanide cream that kills on contact. A shipment of this rudimentary panic-spreader, produced by what interrogators say is a Qaeda-Saddam joint venture, was recently intercepted in Turkey on its way to terror cells in the West. The chemicals are not weapons of mass destruction, but for individuals who touch it — 'tis enough, 'twill do.

Such verification of data obtained from the captured terrorists awakened C.I.A. bureaucrats who for nearly a year waved reporters away from evidence of Qaeda-Iraqi links lest it justify U.S. action. Belatedly, a C.I.A. team interrogated some of the terrorists held in northern Iraq — comparing what they found with information gleaned from Al Qaeda prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere.

Even religiously motivated terrorists crack in dismay at how much the interrogator already knows. When added to prisoners' family details provided by Kurdish sources, the scope of our knowledge led captives in Kurdistan to talk about poison production and Iraqi links because they figured there was little left to hide.

The new information has changed much intelligence analysis. The C.I.A. has even stopped discrediting reports from Czech intelligence about a different point of Qaeda-Saddam contact: the meeting between the Sept. 11 hijackers' leader, Mohamed Atta, and a top Saddam spymaster in Prague.

And that's without even mentioning the organized, systematic payments made by Hussein to the families of Palestinian homicide-bombers.

The idea that ousting Saddam Hussein could "hurt the war on terror," as some have argued, is insane. Ousting Saddam Hussein is the single most important step the U.S. can take in the war on terror.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/22/2002 05:44:00 AM |

 

Woohoo!

Georgia held primaries on Tuesday. And Cynthia McKinney lost. Big Time. 58 percent to 42 percent, with almost all of the ballots counted. McKinney most recently disgraced herself by accusing George Bush of being behind the 9/11 attacks, but the real reason I'm happy:

On Monday, state Rep. Billy McKinney (D-Atlanta) dismissed Majette's candidacy and spelled out the reason for his daughter's tough fight: "J-E-W-S," he said on television.

Thereby proving his point, I guess. Whatever. She's out, and that's what's important.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/21/2002 05:00:00 AM |

 

AIDS has been cured!

You may not have heard about this amazing medical breakthrough -- I certainly missed the announcement. But it must be true, because our nation's doctors have plenty of free time. The American Medical Association issued a press release criticizing the Princeton Review for ranking "party schools."

The college admissions and test-preparation company "should be ashamed to publish something for students and parents that fuels the false notion that alcohol is central to the college experience," said Richard Yoast, director of the AMA's Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse.

...

Yoast said it amounts to a careless exercise that legitimizes student drinking.

"Students who are looking for little more than a good time may be influenced by this ranking, and the 'party school' designation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," Yoast said.

Get a life.

Our nation's nannies are getting more and more ridiculous. If college students getting drunk is the biggest problem they have to deal with, they really need to find new jobs. Some humorist once defined being a puritan as the fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun. These people make the puritans look like party animals. If there's a danger of a toe getting stubbed, these people are there to campaign against it.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/20/2002 06:55:00 PM |

 

Government is your friend. Republicans are your enemies.

A newspaper columnist is free to write whatever he wants, and you expect him to have a bias. And you expect him to have a favorite topic. But it gets awfully tiresome when he writes the same column every week. One wonders if Paul Krugman even shows up to work anymore at the New York Times, or if he just cuts-and-pastes from old columns. Today's column: Bush is bad. Tax cuts are bad. Bush is bad. Rich people -- except those who get money from Enron without disclosing it -- are bad. Government is good. Bush is bad.

Mr. Bush is a master of photo-op populism; his handlers seek out opportunities to show him mingling with blue-collar workers. But the reality is that this administration loves 'em while the TV crews are around, then leaves 'em when it comes to actual policy. And that reality is becoming ever harder to conceal.

The federal budget is now deep in deficit, and everyone except the administration thinks it will remain there — not because of runaway spending, but because most of last year's tax cut has yet to take effect. And as my colleague Frank Rich points out, to offset the revenue losses from his tax cut, Mr. Bush would have to veto a $5 billion spending proposal every working day for the next year. Mr. Bush can no longer pretend, as he did during the 2000 campaign, that there is enough money for everything. Now, to justify that tax cut, he must hack steadily away at programs that matter to ordinary people.

....

Yet conservatives enthusiastically rely on populism — fake populism, based on staged shmoozing with ordinary Americans and attacks on the imagined cultural elitism of the liberal media. Why shouldn't liberals, who actually have the facts on their side, try engaging in the real thing?

In short, to Krugman, real populism = wealth redistribution. Bush is a fake populist, because he doesn't want to take from the rich and give to the poor.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/20/2002 03:05:00 PM |

 

Sounds right to me

The president of Montenegro is arguing that the European Union is trying to sabotage democracy in his region:

A destabilizing, anti-reform coalition supported by certain bureaucracies of the European Union is threatening to set back the progress of democracy in Montenegro.

Since the signing in March of the Belgrade agreement on a new Serb-Montenegrin union, a combination of forces within Yugoslavia has tried to hijack the negotiation process and force Montenegro into a tighter Serbian orbit. Among these forces are loyalists of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, militants supporting the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, Radovan Karadzic, Liberal Party leaders and various members of Yugoslav security services.

Now this anti-democratic axis has managed to gain the ear of some political circles in Brussels and in some Western European countries. These policymakers naively believe that pushing out the current pro-Western government in Montenegro will ensure stability by preventing Montenegro from gaining self-determination and national independence -- an option that the two republics can, under the Belgrade agreement, exercise after three years.

For several months the EU bureaucracy in Brussels has in effect tried to rewrite the agreement. Its ostensible goal is to establish uniformity within the Serb-Montenegrin union, but in practice this has meant pushing for Montenegro's economic subordination to Belgrade, even though the aspiring state has a much more liberal economy than Serbia, is increasingly well prepared for free trade with the outside world and has adopted the euro as its currency.

I don't know the facts of the case, but the charges certainly seem plausible. After all, hasn't that been the EU's position with regard to Yugoslavia all along? And isn't that the EU's position with regard to Iraq? And with regard to the PLO? And, hell, with regard to France?

The EU is terrified of actually doing anything -- besides, perhaps, regulating ketchup. They're good at such things. As long as there's "stability," the most they'll ever have to do is write a check. So who cares if a bunch of Israelis get blown up, or Kurds get gassed, or Bosnians get shot? As long as there's a big foreign bureaucracy for the Brussels crowd to deal with, they're happy. As I've pointed out before, the EU itself is fundamentally anti-democratic, with the real power lying with unelected bureaucrats who want to centrally plan everything. So why should we be surprised if these charges turn out to be true?
posted by David Nieporent at 8/20/2002 02:22:00 PM |

 

Never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity

Israel and the PLO reached agreement on Sunday to begin an Israeli pullout of troops from Gaza and Bethlehem. Unfortunately, someone forgot to consult with Hamas first:

But Palestinian militant groups including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said they rejected even a limited cessation of their 22-month-old uprising against Israeli occupation and would continue to mount attacks.

"The resistance will find ways to pursue the fight without clashing with the Palestinian Authority," senior Hamas official Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi told Reuters. "Our rifles will remain directed against the Zionist enemy and only against the Zionist enemy."

As part of the agreement, though, the PLO is supposed to "take responsibility to calm the security situation and reduce violence and terror." So either the PLO fails to live up to its obligations, or it actually takes steps to put down Hamas. If you're a betting man, here's a hint: past performance is a guarantee of future performance.

And speaking of past performance, doesn't this virtually guarantee that there will be homicide bombings in Israel? One bombing would serve to kill two birds with one stone for Hamas -- or, rather, several Israelis and Yasser Arafat's "credibility." (And yes, I find it hard to say that without laughing out loud.) Haven't we seen this exactly pattern before? The PLO pledges to crack down on militants. Israel exchanges land for those promises. And then those promises are ignored. And then the world blames Israel for making unreasonable demands, claiming that poor little ol' Arafat is doing the best he can.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/19/2002 06:13:00 AM |

 

Al Qaeda's Greatest Hits

CNN has obtained a cache of Al Qaeda's training tapes, which appears to show members how to make and use explosives and other terrorist weapons. But the scariest part is that the tapes apparently demonstrate Al Qaeda's readiness and ability to use chemical weapons:

In one tape's early frames, a white Laborador-like dog, wearing a green ribbon, is sleeping in a small room. A man wearing typical Afghan clothing, and without protective gear, drops something on the concrete floor and leaves quickly.

As a white liquid oozes across the floor and a vapor fills the lower part of the room, the dog sits up, alert, apparently sensing danger. In the next frames, the dog begins licking its mouth, salivates and sneezes.

The dog then tries standing; its head shakes violently, and its breathing quickens. Its hind legs appear to collapse. Seconds later, the dog falls and struggles to stand. Unable to control its front legs, it wimpers and moans. Then the dog appears to vomit. Its moan becomes a piercing wail.

The dog then seems to have trouble breathing. Its tail is all that moves as the screen goes blank.

A second later, the video replayed the first scene, of the dog's exposure to the gas, then jumped ahead, documenting the subsiding of its cries.

Finally, one of the dog's hind legs shoots up in the air, as its head goes down. It then lies motionless.

David A. Kay, senior vice president of the Science Applications International Corporation, a company that works for the government and commercial clients, said the tape of the dog gassing demonstrates that Al Qaeda succeeded in obtaining crude weapons of mass destruction.

Hmm. Testing poison gas on dogs. Has PETA heard about this?

And score another point for the private sector:

Asked why the C.I.A. failed to obtain the archive before CNN, Bill Harlow, the agency's spokesman, replied, "There are more of them in Afghanistan than there are of us, and they are paid better."

Not that the danger is entirely over, but I wonder what would have happened if the U.S. had listened to the Give Diplomacy A Chance crowd instead of acting decisively to oust the Taliban from power.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/19/2002 06:00:00 AM |

 

Talkin' baseball

This must be why they hate us. Apparently mean ol' Americans -- the ones accused of being only interested in oil, and killing foreigners -- are teaching Afghan kids to play baseball. It's a touchy-feely, heartwarming story, and it's great:

"Baseball is here to show them the American way, to show them that we're not here for any other reason than to help out," says Sgt. Jay Smith, of the US special forces. "We're not against [Afghans], we're not against Islam. We can be here together, Afghans and Americans."

...

For lack of a chest protector, the catcher wears a bulletproof vest. The pitcher's mound is a sandbag. A spent antitank shell strapped to a wheeled machinegun carriage has been used to lay down chalk boundary lines.

"That's our version of beating swords into plowshares," says Sergeant Smith, who solicited donations of sporting goods from friends and church groups in the United States for the country's first-ever Little League.

And as for certain nitwits who claim that Afghans were better off under the Taliban, they could read this:

However, Monty admits that the Americans are guilty of at least a degree of cultural imperialism.

"If we have a load of humanitarian aid, and they don't have a school for girls, we'll say, 'You won't get anything until you get the girls in school.' " Monty says.

Hatira, 7 years old, is conspicuous as the only girl on the ballfield. She has a mitt that was given to her by Smith, whose sister wanted to make sure that at least one donated glove went to a girl. According to Adam Khan Massoudi, the district minister of education, there are plans to form a girls' league in Orgun-e.

"Everyone likes baseball," says Mr. Massoudi, swathed in a white turban. "It's a gift from the United States."

There are still some bugs to be worked out, like the fact that kids are having a hard time learning the mechanics of the game:

Enthusiasm doesn't make for a perfect swing though. Afghanistan's fledgling Little Leaguers, most of them between the ages of 10 and 16, tend to confound the mechanics of baseball with cricket, which is popular in neighboring Pakistan. Batters in Orgun-e tend to take underhanded golf swings at pitches, and often bring the bat with them as they round the bases, itself far from a straightforward affair.

"Initially, they wanted to run to the pitcher's mound after a hit," says Smith. "Some would round the bases to home plate, then turn around and race in the wrong direction all the way back to first."

That's okay; the Tampa Bay Devil Rays aren't any good at these skills, either.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/18/2002 07:19:00 PM |

 

My father can beat up your father...

...but he'd better not, because if he does, your grandkids will probably try to collect money from my grandkids. Or maybe, as the reparations movement would have it, your grandkids' cousins' friends will try to collect from a stranger whose astrological sign is close to that of my grandkids. The reparations movement had a rally in Washington yesterday, the so-called Millions for Reparations march. The New York Times conveniently omits the detail of how many people showed up, which means you can be certain it wasn't "millions." (If they're going to make up numbers anyway, why not just call it Zillions For Reparations?) The Washington Post reports that "thousands" of people attended -- which, given the size of the black population of the D.C. area, should probably be seen as an overwhelming rejection of the movement.

But that doesn't stop both papers (though the Post is more skeptical) of giving the rally a respectful hearing, including ludicrous comments from supporters:

With the U.S. Capitol as his backdrop, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), who has introduced legislation in Congress for 13 years to create a commission to study reparations, urged people to contact their congressional representatives as soon as they arrived home.

"We will get [reparations] by contacting every single member of the House of Representatives, every single member of the Senate," he said, adding that blacks have been dealt a "historical injustice that can only be corrected" in Congress.

So the role of Congress is to correct "historical injustices?" And only Congress can do this? And this can only be done by taking money from people who never owned slaves, and giving it to people who never were slaves?

Manotti Jenkins of Chicago heard about the march on the Internet and flew to Washington with his wife and two daughters, ages 6 years and 6 months.

"Regardless of how much money I make as a corporate attorney, the impact of slavery is still here," he said. "We don't have the dignity and the respect we deserve as humans."

The impact of slavery? He wasn't a slave. Slavery ended 140 years ago. And I'm pretty sure the movement is about cash, not "dignity and respect." It's not called "Millions for psychotherapy," after all. Though, come to think of it, that would be an acceptable compromise, from my point of view: Congress will resolve the reparations issue by offering to send all its supporters to therapy. And in exchange, those people will stop assuming that their ancestors are the only people in history who ever suffered.
posted by David Nieporent at 8/18/2002 04:25:00 PM |

 

All the fiction that's fit to print

I'm not the only one to wonder what on earth the New York Times thinks its doing in shaping its coverage of the upcoming war against Iraq. Now Charles Krauthammer points out that the Times has abandoned any pretense of objectivity in reporting on this issue:

Not since William Randolph Hearst famously cabled his correspondent in Cuba, "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war," has a newspaper so blatantly devoted its front pages to editorializing about a coming American war as has Howell Raines's New York Times. Hearst was for the Spanish-American War. Raines (for those who have been incommunicado for the last year) opposes war with Iraq.

Krauthammer goes on to note, as I did the other day, that the Times simply lied about what Henry Kissinger said last week.

If the New York Times were a blog, they might be shamed into posting an entry which explained or corrected their disinformation, for fear of losing their credibility. But the Times is above criticism -- or so they think -- and no matter how often their asses get fact-checked, they're back the next day with more propaganda in the guise of reporting. Is it just a coincidence that the Times' rate of shoddy reporting has shot up drastically since SmarterTimes went into limbo?
posted by David Nieporent at 8/18/2002 06:20:00 AM |