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September 26, 2006
Catholic Doctrine Says The Pope Is Not Always Infallible
Over at the Ten O'Clock Scholar, RDS has a very informative post about the Pope and the doctrine of his infallibility. For someone like me who was raised as a Catholic, it comes as a surprise to discover that the Church does not claim the Pope to be always infallible. It is only the Pope's ex cathedra pronouncements that are considered infallible, and ex cathedra edicts must meet some stringent criteria and are thus quite rare--as RDS notes, this has only happened a handful of times in 2000 years. Very interesting stuff.
Precise definition of terms can make a difference, can't it? RDS uses his accurate knowledge of Catholic doctrine to demolish a British story that tries to denigrate the Pope's comments about the violence historically associated with Islam.
September 19, 2006
Who Are We Fighting? It Seems Romney Knows.
Mitt Romney continues to impress me. I'm probably a perfect test case because three months ago I knew next to nothing about him (Republican governor of Massachusetts, a Mormon, a strong ideological conservative), and for him to win the White House in 2008 he must educate and persuade people like me that he's a better choice than, say, Rudy Giuliani.
He's been doing a pretty good job of that lately. First he took a strong stand against former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami's visit to Harvard University.
And now it appears that he has a clear view of exactly who it is that we're fighting in the "global war on terror". That's a terrible description of what we're involved in, by the way, and Romney seems to know why. From ABC News via Romney's own site:
Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass., has sought to confront the religious element of terrorism.Exactly. It has been pointed out that calling this a "war on terror" is analogous to calling our WWII struggle against Japanese imperialism a "war on kamikazes". Terror is a tactic, not an ideology."They are terrorists, yes, but more directly they are Jihadists," the White House hopeful told ABC News. "That has broad implications."
Romney's determination to avoid referring to America's enemies solely by the tactics that they use is earning praise from some foreign policy specialists.
"I think it could change the entire center of the conversation," said Mary Habeck, a professor of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. [...]
In her new book, "Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror," Habeck argues that Jihadists are not merely angry about U.S. policies. In Habeck's view, Jihadists are at war with the United States because they view America as the biggest obstacle to the global rule of an Islamic superstate.
She told ABC News that if you refer to them as terrorists, "you have no idea what holds them together as a group or what gets them to join up as a group."
Romney's determination to go beyond the "terrorist" label has also met with approval by a Democratic member of the 9/11 Commission.
"The governor is on the right track," former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., told ABC News. "I continue to believe very strongly that a war against a military tactic is not likely to be very satisfying in the end."
I've also abandoned my brief use of the term "Islamo-fascist". Mary Habeck has persuaded me that while it's possible to draw some similarities between the jihadis and the original fascist ideologies, the term "fascism" is incompatible with the jihadis' goals.
One of the critical points of Habeck's book is that the jihadis' view of the Islamic declaration of faith, or tawhid ("there is but one God, and he has no partners...), leads directly to their conclusion that the pure Koranic shari'a law is the only legitimate law for the world, because it comes from God. Any law or government created by humans (whether it be capitalist, socialist or whatever) is forbidden and must be fought. Even if a democratic congress were to voluntarily pass a law to make shari'a the rule of the land, it would still be illegitimate because it would be decreed by human will, not God's.
Romney's words tell me that he is getting the right knowledge, analyzing it correctly and speaking plainly about his conclusions. I'm definitely staying tuned.
September 14, 2006
Ann Richards, R.I.P.
As most of you know by now, Ann Richards died Wednesday. Fellow Texan Mark Coffey at Decision '08 has some thoughts on her passing that echo my own.
I, too, certainly was not a fan, but as Mark notes a woman of her era who is successful in the cut-throat world of Texas politics deserves some respect, regardless of her political outlook.
Posted at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)September 13, 2006
VDH Makes A Sharp Point
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, Victor Davis Hanson is brilliant. As you might have read, he's now blogging over at Pajamas Media, and I like what I've seen so far: the logical style and clear reasoning is the same as found in his books and essays, but there might be a little more...spontaneity?...in his blog writing. Which is good--VDH on a rant should be fascinating.
He's got a great post up entitled "The Will of the President", in which he makes draws some historical comparisons that are very sharp indeed:
Total all the mistakes in Iraq—and they are legion— and they do not match a month’s folly in WWII (cf. the daylight B-17 missions of 1943, the early torpedo scandal of US submarines, the shortcomings of the Sherman Tank, the Kasserine Pass, the lit-up cities along the Eastern seaboard that facilitated U-boat carnage, the surprise at the Bulge, the intelligence failures about the hedgerows, and on and on) or Korea (the surprise at the Yalu, the lack of winter gear in the retreat, the surprise at the efficacy of the Mig-15, the Korean- prisoner fiasco, or the ossification at the 38th parallel when momentum was once again with us, etc.). Who made such blunders and more? Men like Arnold, Bradley, Eisenhower, Halsey, MacArthur, Marshall, and more in the pantheon of now deified generals.
Just before the 2004 presidential election, I got into an email debate with a dear liberal friend over the Iraq war. In attempting to make the point that the popularity of a course of action has nothing to do with its ethical or moral correctness, I cited Lincoln in the summer of 1864--the virulent criticism he received and lack of popular support did not dissuade him from the course he had determined. We now revere him for behaviour that what was then seen as pig-headed and desirous of tyranny. My friend saw the names Bush and Lincoln in the same sentence, blew a gasket and missed the point: the determination of history is not set in stone by current opinion polls.
At least GWB has a ways to go before he rivals Harry Truman's 25% approval rating.
September 12, 2006
Flash: "Progressives" Decree That Multiplication Tables Have Value After All
There's great news (with a hitch) from the battle for sensible and effective education. From today's Wall Street Journal comes the news that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has reversed its endorsement of "discovery" methods of teaching math:
In a report to be released today, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which represents 100,000 educators from prekindergarten through college, will give ammunition to traditionalists who believe schools should focus heavily and early on teaching such fundamentals as multiplication tables and long division.The council's advice is striking because in 1989 it touched off the so-called math wars by promoting open-ended problem solving over drilling. Back then, it recommended that students as young as those in kindergarten use calculators in class.
Those recommendations horrified many educators, especially college math professors alarmed by a rising tide of freshmen needing remediation. The council's 1989 report influenced textbooks and led to what are commonly called "reform math" programs, which are used in school systems across the country.
The new approach puzzled many parents. For example, to solve a basic division problem, 120 divided by 40, students might cross off groups of circles to "discover" that the answer was three.
Infuriated parents dubbed it "fuzzy math" and launched a countermovement. The council says its earlier views had been widely misunderstood and were never intended to excuse students from learning multiplication tables and other fundamentals.
All emphases are mine.
I'm both pleased and infuriated at this announcement--we can't return soon enough to teaching math with an emphasis on learning the proper algorithm necessary to arrive at a definite answer. But the NCTM's disingenuous protest that "we never intended to excuse students from learning ... fundamentals" is feeble bullshit. Google up the NCTM and you'll find plenty of evidence of the influence of their organization; they are in the business of writing standards for math education, and they knew very well that their ideas would have widespread influence. Ideas such as "discovering" the answer to 25 divided by 5, instead of simply memorizing the answer and moving on to more advanced topics.
Unlike many countries, the U.S. has no nationally mandated curriculum, so the math council's guidance has significant influence. In recent years, states have developed their own standards, in part because of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires that schools make progress in raising students' scores on state achievement tests. Another math group, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, created by President Bush, is preparing its own guidance for how best to teach the subject. It meets in Cambridge, Mass., this week.A recent study by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington nonprofit group, found that only two dozen states specified that students needed to know the multiplication tables. Many allowed calculators in early grades.
Whatever their stated ass-covering intentions after the fact, this is the real-world result of the NCTM's "discovery learning" adventure. The grim reality of US kids' performance versus the rest of the world may have something to do with this sea change:
Francis Fennell, the council's president, says the latest guidelines move closer to the curriculum of Asian countries such as Singapore, whose students tend to perform better on international tests. There, children focus intensely on a relative handful of topics, such as multiplication, division and algebra, then practice by solving increasingly difficult word and other problems. That contrasts sharply with the U.S. approach, which the report noted has long been described as "a mile wide and an inch deep."
So it's taken 17 years for the NCTM to find its nose hanging in front of its face. Meanwhile a whole generation of kids have been saddled with a ludicrous progressive/psychologically motivated math curriculum that satisfies the educators' misguided sense of social responsibility at the expense of their students' skills.
Life-long learning indeed. How about a life-long need to keep a calculator in your pocket. Pah!
Necessary, But Not Sufficient...
Lan astaslem. Arabic for "I will not submit. I will not surrender."
Arabic script provided by Michelle Malkin.
"I will not surrender or submit." That's a good and necessary start; but from there we must proceed to "We will triumph" and "If you persist in your attack against freedom, human rights and the rule of law with the consent of the governed, you will be destroyed."
Posted at 12:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)September 11, 2006
Bad News From Anbar, More Of The Same From The MSM
The Houston Chronicle cites a worrisome Washington Post story that describes a report by the chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq.
The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.The officials described Col. Pete Devlin's classified assessment of the dire state of Anbar as the first time a senior U.S. military officer has filed so negative a report from Iraq.
An "unusual secret report". Oh.
So here we go again: A classified report is leaked by unnamed officials, thereby prohibiting anyone else from fact-checking their qualifications to draw the conclusions that are so confidently referenced.
If the report is true we've got serious problems in Anbar province; but given the provenance of the story, I'm withholding any judgment. And as usual, the leakers need to be found and punished--what's the bloody use of classifying anything if it goes public by the next day?
September 07, 2006
The Corn Lobby And US Energy Policy
Iain Murray in The Corner highlights an interview with Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute. Murray:
... Brown realizes what’s at stake with the current fuel ethanol obsession:Cars are a new concern, the worry arising from the present drive to produce green fuels to fight global warming. A "corn rush" has erupted in the United States, using the crop to produce the biofuel, ethanol - strongly supported by subsidies from the Bush administration to divert criticism of its failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.Just a single fill of ethanol for a four-wheel drive SUV, says Brown, uses enough grain to feed one person for an entire year. This year the amount of US corn going to make the fuel will equal what it sells abroad; traditionally its exports have helped feed 100 - mostly poor - countries.
From next year, the amount used to run American cars will exceed exports, and soon it is likely to reduce what is available to help feed poor people overseas. The number of ethanol plants built or planned in the corn-belt state of Iowa will use virtually all the state's crop.
This will not only cut food supplies, but drive up the process of grain, making hungry people compete with the owners of gas-guzzlers. Already spending 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food, they simply cannot afford to do so.
A colleague of mine who has followed Brown’s utterances for many years suggests that this “may be the first time he’s ever been right about anything.” Yet he is certainly correct here. Corn ethanol is a boondoggle of gigantic proportions, foisted on the American public by an uncompetitive corn ethanol industry that sees the global warming scare as its lifeline. And this boondoggle harms the world’s poor, not just working Americans who have to pay more for gas. A responsible Congress would cut the ethanol mandate and subsidy to nothing.
Emphasis mine. Just another case of the fundamental conflict between those who champion competitive markets as the best way of making life better for everyone; and those who seek profits for themselves at the expense of the nation as a whole.
We must not allow the corn lobby to run US energy policy.
Posted at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)September 05, 2006
The Continuing Rejuvenation Of Nuclear Power
In which automobile would you feel safer on the interstate at 70 mph: a 2006 Toyota Camry or a 1950 Cadillac? There's no question that 56 years of technology has made a huge difference in the safety of automobiles (whether or not our human brains choose to take advantage of that fact is another question entirely).
The generation of electricity by nuclear power is about as old as that 1950 Cadillac. Although it's a shame that the same market forces haven't been allowed to drive nuclear power technology as the auto industry, there has been a lot of progress. From Free Republic:
A revolutionary nuclear energy technology is being designed and built in South Africa, but with suppliers and partners in many other nations, says Paul Driessen, a senior policy adviser for the Congress of Racial Equality and Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).The 165-megawatt Pebble Bed Modular Reactors (PBMR) are small and inexpensive enough to provide electrical power for emerging economies, individual cities or large industrial complexes. [...]
The fuel comes in the form of baseball-sized graphite balls, each containing sugar-grain-sized particles of uranium encapsulated in high-temperature graphite and ceramic; this makes them easier and safer to handle than conventional fuel rods, says Pretoria-based nuclear physicist Dr. Kelvin Kemm.
It also reduces waste disposal problems and the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation; conventional fuel rod assemblies are removed long before complete burn-up, to avoid damage to their housings; but PBMR fuel balls are burnt to depletion.
Because they are cooled by helium, the modules can be sited anywhere, not just near bodies of water, and reactors cannot suffer meltdowns.
Since PBMRs can be built where needed, long, expensive power lines are unnecessary; moreover, the simple design permits rapid construction (in about 24 months), and the plants don't emit carbon dioxide.
PBMR technology could soon generate millions of jobs in research, design and construction industries -- and millions in industries that will prosper from having plentiful low-cost heat and electricity. It will help save habitats that are now being chopped into firewood -- and improve health and living standards for countless families, says Driessen.
The article also notes that surplus process heat from the reactors can be used for a host of useful tasks like seawater desalinization and recovering liquid petroleum from oil shale and tar sands.
We need more of this kind of innovation, and we also need to lose our emotional prejudice against nuclear power.
