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24. november 2005
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Donald Sensing argues that the current noise from the Democratic party demanding an early withdrawal from Iraq is mere positioning, since Pentagon were already planning to scale back troop commitments in the country from next year.
Folks, you are dreaming if you think this plan was a midnight-oil project since Murtha or his fellow attacks dogs began biting. As I have said since at least 2003, the administration's management of post-conquered Iraq can be fairly criticized. But the idea that this administration ever envisioned a permanent, or ven enduring, presence in Iraq of 150,000 or so troops in Iraq is simply hysterical. (I personally doubt that Bush & Co. ever thought there would be this many troops still there today, which is another fair point of criticism.) Its no coincidence that the Democrats have raised their voices so loudly just before the Pentagon was ready to announce these withdrawals.
Rather clever, when you think about it. If the troop level is not reduced, the dems can keep banging the anti-war drums. If the troop level is reduced, they can say 'we were right' and even 'we saved the country from another Vietnam.'
11:05:39 PM 
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The Washington Post writes about how the small Belgian town of Maaseik became a terror hub.
Over the next nine months, Belgian federal police arrested five men in Maaseik, a town of 24,000 people tucked in the northeast corner of Belgium. Each was charged with membership in a terrorist organization, the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, a fast-growing network known by its French initials, GICM.
With each arrest, investigators uncovered fresh evidence that placed small-town Maaseik at the center of a terrorist network stretching across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The town had served as a haven for suspects in the Madrid train explosions that killed 191 people in March 2004, for instance, as well as an important meeting place for the GICM's European leadership.
The troubling thing is that the suspects had no weapons, bombs or visible evidence of planned attacks. But a cell (or group of cells) can move from intention to terrorism in a very short time.
10:59:52 PM
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This must be the silly season.
All right, the Mirror is a sleazy tabloid, and an alleged leaked secret memo saying that Bush wanted to bomb al-Jazeera's Qatar headquarters was too good for it to pass over.
Let's be serious, if Bush even said such a thing, it was a joke that stupidly was written down. Much like when Ronald Reagan's joke about nuking the Soviet Union became public in 1984.
SJ Monitor has a good overview of the story, which has spread pretty much beyond sanity, as leftists everywhere desperately want it to be true. A classic case of Bush Derangement Syndrome if I ever saw one.
PS: The headline is a joke.
PS 2: Christopher Hitchens points out that stupidity is not limited to one side of the debate.
After almost three years of combat, the standard of debate ought to have risen and to have become more serious and acute. Instead, it has slipped into a state of puerility. Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, squeals about cowardice and suggests that those who differ are stabbing our boys in the back—and then tries to revise her remarks in the Congressional Record. This is to sink to exactly the same level as those who jeer that sympathizers of the intervention should "send"—as if they could—their own children, if they should happen to have any handy. Or even to the level of those who claim that anti-war criticism demoralizes "our men and women in uniform." I can't be absolutely sure of this, but the "men and women in uniform" whom I have met, and who have patrolled edgy slums and nasty borders, are unlikely to burst into tears when they hear that someone even in their home state doesn't think they can stand it. Let's try not to be silly.
He also outlines what people should be debating about the Iraq war, namely what exactly should be done to prevent Islamofascism from becoming a really, really dangerous problem.
3:02:36 AM
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The University of Kansas is going to teach intelligent design the way it is supposed to be taught:
A course being offered next semester by the university religious studies department is titled "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies."
"The KU faculty has had enough," said Paul Mirecki, department chairman.
"Creationism is mythology," Mirecki said. "Intelligent design is mythology. It's not science. They try to make it sound like science. It clearly is not."
I'm offended if they omit the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
2:48:43 AM
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Pamela Winnick points out that not only ID threatens science education in the United States.
Did you know that the equator runs through the United States?
This "fact" is among hundreds of errors in science textbooks used by students all over the United States.
Major textbook publishers care about pleasing bureaucrats in state capitals and appeasing a plethora of political groups.
But they often don't care about actual science. Year after year, they promise to correct their error-ridden books, only to release new editions with even more errors.
Scientific correctness obviously means nothing, but political correctness means a lot:
It is commendable, of course, to honor scientists who hail from all races, religions and ethnic groups. But coerced multiculturalism is quite another thing, often adding to outright error and inevitably insulting members of so-called disadvantaged groups. Florida, for example, requires that textbooks promote a "positive self-image" for members of disadvantaged groups. This mandate leads to outright absurdity in science textbooks as the number of "disadvantaged" groups grows larger and larger.
The Fordham Foundation says publishers employ reviewers not to check facts, but to make sure there are enough tall people, enough short people, enough people in wheelchairs, enough American Indians and Hispanics, enough single-parent families, and so forth. Textbook publishers, Hubisz said, "now employ more people to censor books than they do to check facts."
Bennetta points to Marie and Pierre Curie, the French couple who shared a Nobel Prize for their research on radiation. Before the advent of political correctness, textbooks pictured the husband-wife team together. Soon, however, Pierre's picture was excised. And then, some textbooks -- for example, Chemical Building Blocks, one of 15 books in Prentice Hall's Science Explorer series -- darkened the skin of the Polish-born Marie, presumably to suggest she was a woman of color. This attempt at multiculturalism at the expense of fact is insulting for members of disadvantaged groups who are subtly led to think they can't be scientists in real life -- only in the fairy-tale world of textbooks.
"How's that for multiculturalism?" Bennetta said.
This sounds so much like science textbooks here in Norway.
Link via email.
1:12:03 AM
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Obviously no idea is so stupid that no pseudo-researcher will write a book promoting it.
Could it be that the Moon is artificial? Could it even be hollow? A seeming impossibility for a natural planetary object. Extraordinary claims indeed. But keep an open mind and read the compelling arguments based on scientific evidence and irrefutable logic – arguments that will completely change the way we think of our world.
Everybody knows that the big bad wolf built the moon, to have something to howl at.
Via email.
1:02:37 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 30.11.2005; 19:07:34.
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