Funding to Moon, Mars Promised

Yet one more reason why Tom DeLay is a good man:

Funding for Moon, Mars Projects Promised

DeLay said NASA is a priority — even in a time of war and tightening budgets.

"We will provide the funding necessary to get us where we want to go," the House majority leader said. "And hopefully we can do it in an expedited manner."

Say what?

The site American Rhetoric has compiled a list of the top 100 American speeches. You can access the text to all the speeches, as well as an mp3(hello iPod) for most as well. I wish that they had one of Bush's speeches immediately after 9/11. They have Clinton's speech after the Oklahoma City bombing (I can't remember the speech itself but I'm sure it's very good). King's "I Have a Dream" speech is ranked as #1.

It seems to me that if there's one glaring flaw to this list it's that it's limited almost entirely to the last 100 years (there are a few exceptions)--nothing from the Civil War era or from the country's founders. But I suppose it would be hard to find an mp3 of those...

Thou shalt not think

"This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."

So read a sticker inside science textbooks in Georgia. However, in accordance with a federal judge's ruling, these stickers are being removed. The judge agreed with the ACLU lawyers that claimed the stickers violated the seperation of church and state. This strikes me as a bit odd given that there is nothing church related at all in the text of these stickers. Consider the sticker, line by line:

"This textbook contains material on evolution."

Clearly, nothing religious about this. It simply states the obvious. It would no different than saying "This textbook contains material on DNA."

"Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things."

I'm going to assume that this is the problematic part of the sticker. Still, the religious part escapes me. The sticker isn't affirmatively suggesting an alternative to evolution. It's promoting nothing. It's merely stating what any intellectually honest scientist would have to concede--that evolution isn't a fact. It's a theory. It's not saying it's a bad theory, a wrong theory, or a crazy theory. Just that it's a theory. To say anything else simply isn't intellectually honest. If the judge believes that something insidious is implied by the text, he must be deriving such inferences from his own political paranoia rather than from the text of the sticker itself. Either that or he has a hermeneutical philosophy that defies all rational explanation (talk about reading into a text).

"This material should be approached with an open mind, studies carefully, and critically considered."

Assuming that we don't want students to be brainwashed robots that don't know how to think and critically appraise information, ideas, and theories then how how can anyone possible object to this statement? Isn't this expressing what should be the governing philosphy of education in general--namely that the essence of learning isn't to imprint facts into one's mind but to develop the ability to think critically while reasoning through things, analyzing the data, and coming to conclusions that based on the facts seem to be the most reasonable?

I can't help but wonder if evolution's proponents actually realize that their philosophy of naturalism/evolution can't withstand the modest scrutiny encouraged by a sticker.

Democratic Blunder?

I always thought placing Howard Dean at the top of the DNC was a bad idea politically for the Dems. So far it appears I've been proved right. The Republicans raised almost $20 million more than the Dems from individual donors in Deans first 100 days as chair, and Dean has been ranting about how Tom Delay deserves jail time (before a trial and a showing of evidence--due proccess in other words--the same due process just a year and a half before he said even Bin Laden was entitled to).

Anyways, Bob Novak has some interesting things to say about Dean and the concerns about him within his own party: Howard Dean, Unmuzzled

Darth for Dems

It turns out Anakin really has turned to the Dark Side.

Tour de mort

I'm glad this didn't happen when I visited the Eiffel Tower...

Newswreck

The Mainstream Media has done it again. Only this time the screw-up really was a matter of life and death. Newsweek has retracted it's story about US interrogaters at G-bay flushing Korans down the toilet. As it turns out the only thing flushed down the toilet was yet another tier of journalistic integrity. Lives have been lost (15 of them) and the image of the US is marred even further in a region that is too quick to assume the worst about our intentions for their culture and their part of the world. The Bush administration and the Pentagon are understandably infuriated about this. The folly of this episode is so remarkable that one can't help but wonder how and why Newsweek would publish something like this. Could it be that they (like CBS) are so eager to be a hindrance to the Bush administration that thier partisan zeal blinds them from the basic principles of sound journalism? It's sad that journalism students across the country can look at the American mainstream media and learn far more about what not to do rather than what they should do.

The French Dinosaur

The most recent Newsweek takes a look at France and the trouble it's having living up to the grandiose standards of its behemoth past.

There's very little about France today, apart from history, that can pretend at transcendence. What is astounding, in fact, given its great past, is the country's current mediocrity. And pretending otherwise doesn't make it so. On the economic front, France's 2 percent growth may be double the European Union average, but that's not saying much. Remedies for this problem, from a lessening of social costs to greater flexibility in hiring and firing, have been very slow in coming. This government has never been willing or able to push through major pension reforms, and it's not likely to start now with a graying electorate fiercely attached to its security. Meanwhile unemployment among those under 25 is running at more than 23 percent.

Don't Hamanize!

You probably won't see the mainstream media make mention of this, but the former Klansman in the Senate himself, Robert Byrd--the same Robert Byrd who filibustered against the Civil Rights Act--gave the Majority Leader a Bible lesson from the book of Esther. It's really quite amusing all things considered. It seems as though the aging former Klansman from West Virginia is one of those King James only folks...

Radioblogger has the post here.

And you can download the almost 6 minutes clip here.

Movie stuff

I've been hoping for the longest time that Indiana Jones IV would get off the ground. Well, it looks like the stage might finally be set. Read about it here at TheMovieBlog.com


And in other movie news...It's looking like the new Star Wars film might actually be worthy of its namesake. Aintitcool.com has several reviews from screenings of the film. I haven't read all of them so if you're nervous about spoilers, don't click on this link.

France's long affair with anti-Semitism

David Bryce-Jones has posted an incredibly well-researched essay detailing the history and pervasiveness of France's anti-Semitism and how it relates to their attempts to shape the Arab-Jewish conflict. He notes:

France’s current president, Jacques Chirac, began his career in the governments of de Gaulle and Pompidou, becoming prime minister under Giscard as well as Mitterrand before being elected president in 1996. In the several crises engulfing the Middle East during his tenure, Chirac has imitated his predecessors by taking issue with the “Anglo-Saxons,” a Vichy-style phrase loose enough to include the United States, Britain, and anyone else perceived to stand in France’s way.

In April 1996, in a speech in Cairo, Chirac claimed that France intended to follow its traditional policies in the Middle East with renewed vigor. Visiting Jerusalem that October, and walking through the Old City, he accused Israeli security guards of closing in on him, pushing them away angrily with a gesture as symbolic as it was physical. At his next stop, in Ramallah, he declared that Arafat’s Palestinian democracy might serve as an example to all Arab states. Moving on to Amman in Jordan, he denounced the Western sanctions on Saddam Hussein, with whom he had maintained a friendly relationship dating back to the mid-1970’s. He advised Arafat not to sign at Camp David in 2000.

By means of supporting Arafat and Saddam, France was clearly hoping to lever itself into a position of mastery in areas where once Britain had been supreme and where the United States now had responsibility for keeping the peace. The end of the Oslo peace process and the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in 2000, the failure of the United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq, the wrangling over Resolution 1441 at the UN and then the invasion of Iraq in 2003—all spurred Chirac and his administration to prolonged diplomatic activity in pursuit of this grand design. The results have hardly been impressive.

He then concludes with this:

As such pinpricks suggest, France today lacks the resources and the influence either to supplant the United States or to enlist the Arab world in its camp, to create a Palestinian state, or to dismantle Israel. Moreover, its nuisance value has rebounded on itself. Its chosen instruments, Saddam Hussein and Arafat, both proved untrustworthy: support for the former was evidently related to French profiteering from the UN oil-for-food scam, which dwarfed the corruption even of the Mitterrand era, and support for the latter had roots in obscure deals, protection rackets, and emotional anti-Americanism.

In the Middle East, France has forfeited whatever leverage it might once have enjoyed. At home, meanwhile, it has had to come to terms with a growing Arab underclass, one whose resentments and tendencies to violence have been whipped up in no small part by the inflexible hostility displayed by the French state to Jewish self-determination. The pursuit of une puissance musulmane, fitting Arabs and Jews into a grand design on French terms, has evidently been an intellectual illusion all along, and highly dangerous to the interests of everyone concerned.