Amnesty is critical of recent U.S. actions, with reason…
CNN.com – Amnesty slams U.S. on human rights
Amnesty slams U.S. on human rights
// May 28th, 2005
4 killed, dozens hurt as Afghan students riot
// May 11th, 2005We desecrate the Quran by flushing it down the toilet, having left it on the toilet of Guantanbamo bay cells to rattle prisoners. We entirely ignore the plight of their educational system, and take no responsibility for doing so. They riot, and we wonder why.
What’s worse, we blame them…
USATODAY.com – 4 killed, dozens hurt as Afghan students riot
GPS Device Finds Robbery Suspect
// May 8th, 2005Still, I’ll admit that this seems like a good use of the technology.
GPS Device Finds Robbery Suspect
Bill Would Provide Grants For Get-Tough Sex Offender Laws
// May 8th, 2005See, I don’t only rip on Republicans. Here’s a Democrat who is moving to restrict my freedoms.
And not because I’m a sex offender. Any logical person would see some valor in this argument. However, I see this as a first step in monitoring other subversive elements of society. Surely, once we’ve strapped monitors to sex offenders and been successful, it won’t be hard to convince the general public that we should also monitor drug offenders and other non-violent criminals.
Fuck that.
local6.com – News – Bill Would Provide Grants For Get-Tough Sex Offender Laws
U.S. Cites Signs of Korean Preparations for Nuclear Test
// May 8th, 2005What’s the difference between calling a bluff in poker and doing so in foreign affairs?
(Insert one of many possible punchlines here)
U.S. Cites Signs of Korean Preparations for Nuclear Test
FW: Too Little Too Late
// May 7th, 2005[Nick B writes...]
Here’s an encouraging article which gives me a little more faith in the American public, although Bush has called himself a man who "doesn’t govern by the polls" so this shift in pulic opinion is probably too little–too late.
Poll: Most Americans say Iraq war not worth it
Wed May 4, 8:38 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A majority of Americans do not think it was worth going to war in Iraq with support at the lowest level since the United States launched the invasion in 2003, according to a CNN/USAToday/Gallup poll released on Tuesday.
Fifty-seven percent of those polled said it was not worth going to war compared to 41 percent who thought it was. In a February poll, 48 percent said the war was worth it and half said it was not.
A poll in April 2003, shortly after the war began, found that 73 percent of Americans held the view that the war was worth fighting. The new poll results had a margin of error of plus or minus five percentage points.
Asked how things are going for the United States in Iraq, 56 percent said "badly," up from 45 percent in March. Forty-two percent said things were going "well," down from 52 percent in March. The margin of error for that question was plus or minus three percentage points.
Asked whether the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq, the respondents were nearly divided with 49 percent saying it was mistake and 48 percent saying it was not. On that question, the margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points.
The telephone poll of 1,006 adults was conducted April 29-May 1.
Neocons Lay Siege to the Ivory Towers
// May 7th, 2005May 4, 2005
COMMENTARY
Neocons Lay Siege to the Ivory Towers
By Saree Makdisi, Saree Makdisi is a professor of English literature at
UCLA.
In the months ahead, the state Senate Committee on Education will consider a
bill that pretends to strike a blow for intellectual honesty, truth and
freedom, but in reality poses a profound threat to academic freedom in the
United States.
Peddled under the benign name “An Academic Bill of Rights,” SB 5 is in fact
part of a wide assault on universities, professors and teaching across the
country. Similar bills are pending in more than a dozen state legislatures
and at the federal level, all calling for government intrusion into
pedagogical matters, such as text assignments and course syllabuses, that
neither legislators nor bureaucrats are competent to address.
The language of the California bill – which was blocked in committee last
week but will be reconsidered later in the legislative session – is
extraordinarily disingenuous, even Orwellian. Declaring that “free inquiry
and free speech are indispensable” in “the pursuit of truth,” it argues that
“intellectual independence means the protection of students from the
imposition of any orthodoxy of a political, religious or ideological
nature.” Professors should “not take unfair advantage of their position of
power over a student by indoctrinating him or her with the teacher’s own
opinions before a student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other
opinions upon the matters in question.”
To protect students from what one might (mistakenly) suppose to be an
epidemic of indoctrination, the bill mandates that students be graded on the
basis of their “reasoned answers” rather than their political beliefs.
Reading lists should “respect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all
human knowledge.” Speakers brought to campus should “promote intellectual
pluralism,” and faculty should eschew political, religious or
“anti-religious” bias.
Notwithstanding its contorted syntax, the bill may sound reasonable. But, in
fact, it has nothing to do with balance and everything to do with promoting
a neoconservative agenda. For one thing, the proposed “safeguards” to
“protect” students from faculty intimidation are already in place at all
universities, which have procedures to encourage students’ feedback and
evaluate their grievances. Despite a lot of noise from the right about
liberal bias on campus, there are simply no meaningful data to suggest that
any of these procedures have failed.
The real purpose of the bill, then, is not to provide students with “rights”
but to institute state monitoring of universities, to impose specific points
of view on instructors – in many cases, points of view that have been
intellectually discredited – and ultimately to silence dissenting voices by
punishing universities that protect them.
“Why should we, as fairly moderate to conservative legislators, continue to
support universities that turn out students who rail against the very
policies their parents voted us in for?” asks the Republican sponsor of the
Ohio version of the bill.
Backers of the Florida bill would like to empower students to sue professors
with whom they disagree on the theory of evolution.
The campaign for academic “rights” actually originated with organizations
and individuals committed to defending Israel from criticism, and whose
interest in curtailing academic freedom dovetails with those of
conservatives.
At the federal level, for example, a confluence of conservative and
pro-Israeli forces helped push HR 3077 through the House of Representatives
in 2003. That bill, which foundered in a Senate committee (but has been
resurrected in the current Congress), called for government monitoring of
international studies programs that receive federal funding. The bill was
drafted in response to the claim that the federal government was funding
programs that criticize American foreign policy. If passed, it would have
created a board (including two members from “federal agencies that have
national security responsibilities”) to ensure that academic programs
“better reflect the national needs related to homeland security.” Its
supporters included the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation
League, and the American Israel Political Action Committee, the bulwark of
Israel’s Washington lobby.
The bill was also backed by pro-Israel agitators Daniel Pipes and Martin
Kramer, who, via allies such as neoconservative firebrand David Horowitz,
are among the proponents of the “bill of rights” legislation at the state
level. All the proposed bills before state legislatures are variants of a
text written by Horowitz and backed by Students for Academic Freedom, which
maintains a website where students can complain about their instructors’
supposed bias.
The problem with all this is that the university is meant to be an insular
environment. Those within its walls are supposed to be protected from
outside political pressures so that learning can take place.
But the lesson of the recent upheavals at Columbia University – where an
individual professor became the object of a concerted campaign of
intimidation because of his criticisms of Israel – is that pressure groups
targeting an individual professor for his public views are willing to
inflict collateral damage on an entire university. What the new legislation
offers such groups is the opportunity to inflict damage preemptively on our
entire educational system.
Despite its narrow defeat in the California Senate Education Committee last
week, SB 5’s supporters clearly will not disappear quietly. If this and
similar bills pass, who gets hired and what gets taught could be decided not
according to academic and intellectual criteria but by pressure groups, many
of whose members are failed academics driven by crassly political
motivations. Society would pay the price.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-makdisi4may04,0,1186970
.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
Putin: Palestinians can’t ‘fight terrorism’ with ’slingshots’
// May 4th, 2005At face, this seems like a good thing…
World Tribune.com — Putin: Palestinians can’t ‘fight terrorism’ with ’slingshots’
There IS a difference…
// May 4th, 2005…between the machoism of playground days and stealing kids lunch money, and presiding as the US president and doing international chest-thumping. Iran doesn’t seem bothered in the least, perhaps because North Korea is making it happen and probably even has their backs.
FT.com / International economy – UN chief Kofi Annan warns of nuclear catastrophe