I missed the recanting by reified liberal columnist Molly Ivins on July 12, but perhaps that’s because it was buried beneath some blather about deregulation and power grids. [No, it's not. Be honest. You don't read her anymore.-ed. Okay, I admit it.] Anyway, here’s the recanting:
CROW EATEN HERE: This is a horror. In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong.
The only problem is figuring out by how large a factor I was wrong. I had been keeping an eye on civilian deaths in Iraq for a couple of months, waiting for the most conservative estimates to creep over 20,000, which I had fixed in my mind as the number of Iraqi civilians Saddam had killed.
The high-end estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths in this war is 100,000, according to a Johns Hopkins University study published in the British medical journal The Lancet last October, but I was sticking to the low-end, most conservative estimates because I didn’t want to be accused of exaggeration.
Ha! I could hardly have been more wrong, no matter how you count Saddam’s killing of civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, Hussein killed several hundred thousand of his fellow citizens.
I don’t like to use profanity on here, but my only response to that is – No shit, Sherlock! Where were you? Anyone with the slightest interest in the facts would have known this… in fact knew this… for years. So why not Ivins? I assume she has an IQ in triple digits, so the only explanation is willful ignorance – the kind that comes from ideological bias of the most extreme sort. I imagine Ivins would be appalled by the comparison, but this is exactly the kind of blindness that allowed people in the 1930s and 40s to excuse Stalin up to and even after the Hitler Pact. It is also almost precisely what has driven people like me and many readers of this blog away from conventional liberalism. The battle is now… as it was then… against fascism in its various guises. I invite people like Ivins to wake up and join. (ht: Catherine Johnson)
I could not agree more and your mild profanity was perfectly appropriate. I read her stuff more for entertainment than anything although it still shocks me how she just keeps beating her drum of misinformation with wild abandon. It would certainly be a baby step in the right direction if she made this self correction a habit but I know that’s expecting too much. This blooper was just too big for even her to ignore after it was brought to public attention.
Ivins. Ivins. Rings a bell. She had some sort of newspaper column, I think.
It was a long time ago.
…I assume she has an IQ in triple digits…
Erm… no comment.
“I assume she has an IQ in triple digits” You have misoverestimated her.
Thanks for the info, Roger.
This link will be useful to rebut the “killed more Iraquis than Saddam” meme going around on many comment-open sites on the right side of the spectrum like this one, Captain Ed, Beldar, Tom McGuire, Hugh, etc., etc.
The comment “even Molly Ivins doesn’t believe this BS” or words to that effect will be fun to use.
Words fail me . . .
Still, it’s commendable that a person would so forthrightly and at such length apologize and correct something like this. Sure, she should have known this information, but so what? She’s tuned in now, and rather than getting bashed for it, she should be appreciated for being willing to do something that most people in today’s testy political climate can’t: correct themselves publicly, at length, and vociferously. I’m not a fan of her work either, but I am a fan of writers like her working from facts, so this is a good step. It’s not as though her correction was one dashed-off line at the end of the column. It’s the whole second half of the column, and it’s not one of these pseudo-apologies or ‘yes, but’ apologies. It’s a good old fashioned “I screwed up and it was a horrible thing to do” apology. Give her some credit.
Gotta love her account of how she’d been “keeping an eye” on the civilian body count, circling like a vulture, waiting to swoop in and start feasting. Disgusting. And if she cares so much about the plight of the Iraqi people, why the hell *didn’t* she know the number of Iraqi citizens who have been murdered by Saddam Hussein?
You are right, of course, Jim. Which is why I think it is such an effective rebuttal to the mindless incantations of those like Jane Fonda who are spouting the talking points of the other side.
Gotta love her account of how she’d been “keeping an eye” on the civilian body count, circling like a vulture, waiting to swoop in and start feasting
That’s what upsets me (and I agree with others here that her apology is dead-on, with no ifs ands or buts. Good for her.)
It’s the circling like a vulture, waiting to for the number to ‘hit’ 24,000.
She was looking forward to it.
Jim, you’re absolutely right that as apologies go, this was a great one. No weasel words (“I’m sorry if I”), no hedging (“under the circumstances”), just about every public figure could learn a thing or two from Ivins about how to apologize properly.
But the fact remains, the mistake itself was stupifying; the kind of mistake that tells you a lot about the person making it.
I was shocked, trying to track down figures on how many people Saddam killed, that there’s no obvious counterpart to the Iraqbodycounts web site (at least none that pops up quickly on Google, or gets cited in zillions of newspaper articles).
Just the name, ‘Iraq Body Counts’—-what can that possibly mean?
That a dead body isn’t a dead body if the person was slaughtered before March 2003?
If you’re going to run an Iraq Body Count, shouldn’t you count all the bodies?
(I’ve only looked at the guy’s front page, so I probably shouldn’t talk. Maybe he’s got a Saddam Body Count somewhere else. But again, if he does it sure doesn’t get equal billing.)
Can someone check my math?
Saddam was in power for 23 years, which is 276 months.
If you average civilians killed by month you find 1449.
Nearly 1500 civilians killed under Saddam a month, on average.
There have been 25000 civilian deaths (including civilians killed by insurgents & by criminals) from March 2003 to July 2005, 28 months.
That’s an average of 893. Right?
All of this is assuming Saddam’s killing rate over 23 years of rule wasn’t going to change appreciably.
So you have 500 more people alive each month over 28 months: 15,000 people are alive now who would be expected not to be alive if Saddam had stayed in power.
Of course, this is foolish; we can’t know what the future would have been. Saddam might have gone through a lull and just killed a couple hundred people a month, or a couple dozen.
That’s why you don’t see people who support the war sitting around waiting breathlessly to hit the magic number.
If I’ve got my math horribly wrong, somebody tell me quick!
Iraqbodycount.net is an interesting animal. They count victims of terrorist bombings as deaths attributable to the coalition, on the basis that the coalition has a responsibility to prevent them.
That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it would be nice to see the numbers broken out. Unfortunately, their database doesn’t contain that information – it has to be inferred from the “target”.
Still, it’s quite clear that it isn’t the coalition killing civilians:
link: http://www.iraqbodycount.net/database/
I also wonder how they determine who is civilian and who is not in (e.g.) Fallujah.
Please. Ivins knew that inflated figure was bogus. Just like Amy Goodman, who repeats that figure constantly on her Democracy Now program. These people put their trust in the power of the Big Lie. Ivins did her mea culpa bit only because she was found out and held accountable by people like Roger.
There’s a great piece in the current City Journal on Pete Seeger, another good old down-home peace lover. Seems he didn’t wake up to the realities of life in Stalin’s Russia until the 1950s.
I don’t know if Roger has linked to these two articles, but these are the ones to see:
Fun with Numbers by John Leo
Leo uses info from Iraqbodycounts.com & from Oxford Research Group
The Oxford Research Group is the one to look at.
(Oh–I see I misstated my own figures: the 25,000 covers the first 2 years of the war, not the first 28 months…..I’m going to maintain sympathy for Ivins on that front, seeing as how I have a lot of trouble remembering numbers, and can make huge, nonsensical mistakes in that respect, and with no rhyme or reason, either. I have a terrific memory for many statistics, and then I’ll wildly misremember others…)
It’s COMPLETELY reasonable that an American journalist would mix up 24,000 with 400,000–and not just an American journalist, either.
We Americans don’t have the most advanced number sense on the planet, that’s for sure. The Brits are even worse.
(I covered the new British report on math education in England at Kitchen Table Math, if you’re interested. That’s why I know….)
It concerns me that killings by crime have shown a steady rise, since I believe I’ve seen statistics showing that the prison population is back up to what it was before Saddam let the prisoners out. (I could be wrong…)
It’s also flat wrong to put these figures out with no attempt made whatsoever to work out a point of comparison, something the LANCET report at least purported to do.
It’s fair to say that no one would have been killed by ‘insurgents’ if we hadn’t invaded, but it’s not fair to say that no one would have been killed by Baathist thugs.
Some of these folks–insurgents & Baathist thugs–are the same people.
By the same token, it’s fair to say that the huge disruption to the country harms policing; therefore increased crime is our responsibility.
But there, too, we need to know what the murder level was prior to March 2003.
These figures, sitting there on a nice, white web page, give the stark impression that we invaded a peaceable kingdom and then all hell broke loose.
Please, she just got caught in the ridiculousness of it all. She was so off on her numbers she must have (finally) gotten nailed by somebody and she had no choice but to listen.
She’s been writing this way for quite a while. Usually she cherry-picks some little aspect of a larger fact, then she makes fun of all involved with lots of clever witticisms and ad hominems that have really nothing to do with anything, and finally she just speculates up a storm about how it’s all going to turn out if things keep going the way they are. It’d be laughable if it wasn’t so boring and predictible.
The Chicago Trib, which runs Molly Ivin’s articles, actually had a blurb about her apology by the public editor, Don Wyclyff, in which he praised her to the hilt for her “honesty” and forthrightness, calling her a true “journalist.” Then immediately he went after Andrew McArthy over at NRO and called him a “propagandist.”
Now we have to put up with Derrick Jackson blowing a gasket over the horrible atrocities in Darfur and how Bush is to blame somehow. Will somebody tell him we’re going into year 3 with that story? Where the hell was he?
Roger;
The true test for Ivins will be when she is on a chat fest and she hears the Lancet and other Iraq death myths being repeated by her leftist buddies. Will she give them the facts and tell them to quit spreading falsehoods? Or will she allow the myth to continue by saying nothing. It will be interesting to see.
kevin Peters
Roger — Absolutely no justification for dismissing concern about PUCHA repeal and complete electricity deregulation as “blather” I would think everyone in California who is not an Ayn Rand disciple would more or less agree.
Ivins is one of the fairest and most decent liberals around. Conservatives who saw her on C-SPAN a couple of years ago, dressing down Al Franken at some book fair after he took some cheap shot at O’Reilly, might agree.
It is extremely rare and admirable for someone to unequivocally admit “I was wrong, I’m sorry.”
Certainly haven’t heard Hitchens say these words, and I doubt I will even when the new Iraqi constitution officially enshrines female subservience. She also explains why: “Saddam’s regime left 271 mass graves, with more still being discovered. That figure alone was the source for my original mistaken estimate of 20,000.”
And she puts the blame on Saadam for any sanctions deaths, and gives the UN its due, another admirable, non-lefty thing to do:
“There are wildly varying estimates of the number of civilians, especially babies and young children, who died as a result of the sanctions that followed the Gulf War. While it is true that the ill-advised sanctions were put in place by the United Nations, I do not see that that lessens Hussein’s moral culpability, whatever blame attaches to the sanctions themselves — particularly since Saddam promptly corrupted the Oil for Food Program put in place to mitigate the effects of the sanctions, and used the proceeds to build more palaces, etc.”
Catherine,
Is there a particular reason why you do not include the 1-2 million casualties of the Iraq-Iran war in your count? The UN laid the responsibility for the war on Iraq and Saddam was the Iraqi responsible. It seems a bit unfair not to give full credit for his entire butchers bill.
Of course, the MSM won’t use that count because it reveals a reality that does not fit well with their propaganda effort but why should Saddam escape from the same type of accounting used for Hitler or Stalin or Mao?
A lower range 1 million plus the 400,000 that you give him credit for will give you a completely different result for your comparative equation.
Glad she apologized but very little slack should be cut to her for it. She has been writing about the war a lot over the last couple of years. How could she not know this basic piece of infomation? She’s not off by a little bit. Does this now change her views about the war? No of course not. She only pretended to have an empirical case to make.
Then when the numbes turn out to be completely in the other direction, she maintains the exact same position. OK, then why try to make the case to begin with? Because she was dying to say that George Bush is more evil than Saddam Hussein. When a person holds that kind of position, no wonder she lowballed the dead Iraqis in mass graves.
Aw, c’mon guys! Nobody died in Iraq under Saddam; it was all kite-flying and dogs chasing sticks.
The Seeger article was interesting if a little error-filled. For example, the Almanac Singers did not remain anti-war throughout the 1940s, but became pro-war like most communists after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. This initially served them well, as they appeared on a 1942 radio show called “This is War” which was broadcast on all four national networks. Unfortunately, their past pacifism was soon discovered. And the notion that “Goodnight Irene” had mild commercial success is ridiculous; it was a smash hit, selling 2 million copies and staying atop the charts for an amazing 13 weeks.
Roger, when the story about Ivins first came out my reaction was exactly what your’s was–Incredulity that nayone living in this day and age, and especially through the build-up to the Iraq war, could possibly not have known what an inhuman butcher Saddam was. I’m glad to see someone else holding her feet ro the fire for this.
I wanted to address something esle you said; “…It is also almost precisely what has driven people like me and many readers of this blog away from conventional liberalism.”. This seems to be a common concern today for former people from the left, for those who have been having second thoughts. I think the cost appropriate term for you and those like you IS the term conservative. American conservatism, unlike is not trying to conserve an oligarchy or a nobility or some kind of aristocracy, it is trying to preserve the traditions of the American Revolution. Freedom and justice are the clarion calls for American conservatives (mind you, this broad definition would include many people who would usually be considered “liberals”) In this case, Roger L. Simon, conservative, could disagree with the majority of other conservatives on gay marriage or stem-cell research (like I, as a conservative, do) but still be well within his rights to call himself a conservative.
Sorry for the long post
Colin
Is there a particular reason why you do not include the 1-2 million casualties of the Iraq-Iran war in your count? The UN laid the responsibility for the war on Iraq and Saddam was the Iraqi responsible. It seems a bit unfair not to give full credit for his entire butchers bill.
Believe me, you’re preaching to the choir…..
I left out the million-man-Iraq-Iran war (actually, I have the numbers: 500,000 Iraqis dead & 300,000 Iranians…) because…uh…this whole thing started after a little Iraq War body count flare-up with my husband.
If I drag in the Iraq-Iran War he’s going to tell me I’m crazy.
Of course, he’s going to tell me I’m crazy anyway, so I might just drop that into the mix.
OK, the real answer is apples to apples: the body counts are about civilian deaths and technically speaking the 800,000 Iraq-Iran War dead were soldiers.
There seem to have been 5000 Iranian civilians gassed by Saddam, but that’s all I’ve seen so far in terms of civilian deaths from that war.
I have some data on civilian deaths in Kuwait, too–there’s a huge amount of stuff out there (which is why it got stranger & stranger to me that no one appears to have done a Saddambodycount web site).
I stuck with the 400,000 figure because he’ll be more or less forced to believe it.
Despite the fact that she may have remained somewhat-willfully ignorant of those numbers, it still seems like a generosity of spirit is called for when someone changes their stance in the course of a debate, particularly in the completely stand-up way she did.
One other thing that I believe deserves to be factored into these calculations in a big way (but never is) is the manner in which the deaths were caused.
If ending an innocent life is morally reprehensible, what about torturing them in unimaginable ways prior to ending it? In my view, can’t be compared.
I think I’d rather die multiple or even many immediate deaths rather than die only once after suffering through the kind of extended hell that many of Saddam’s victims experienced. Am I crazy, or wouldn’t 99% of the non-masochictic world agree with me on that?
Like Hitler and the other diabolical tyrants before him, the psychic damage and pain that Saddam caused will not soon be gone from this world and will have all sorts of manifestations.
those were the days
This is interesting.
It’s a long presentation on Saddam by Clinton’s Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues.
Address of Ambassador Scheffer on Justice in Iraq
There’s no doubt in his mind the figure’s a tad higher than 24,000.
Definitely look at the speech. It’s astonishing, it really is. Here is a Clinton official compiling a massive moral and legal case against Saddam.
That’s gone now. There is virtually no one on the left thinking about, or even remembering, the monster that was Saddam.
Here’s the Burns piece from 2003:
How Many People Has Saddam Killed? by John Burns (2003)
The fact is, liberal commentators all read this article.
It’s just gone out of their heads. It’s hard to remember facts the flatly contradict other ‘facts.’
I’m with Bruce.
This is a guy who fed people into plastic shredders, a guy who cut off women’s heads in front of their families and put the heads on posts in front of their homes for the neighbors to contemplate.
I’ll take a car bomb any day of the week over that.
It is utterly bizarre to me that this element has simply vanished from all public conversation.
I just found this reader comment underneath the Ivins column:
Catherine,
The problem with allowing the other side to set all the terms of the debate is that you will tend to lose quite often. I would be interested in hearing someone who believes that our battle with Iraq was unjust on the basis of deaths incurred versus deaths avoided explain how the the deaths caused by the war with Iran – which the UN determined to be unjust – should not be a part of the calculation. The focus on civilian deaths is a debating trick – and not a very good one. How is the death of a teenage conscript forced to clear a minefield by running through it different than the death of a cab driver blown up while driving past a building that took a cruise missile? To me, there is more moral opprobrium attached to the teenage mine clearing device than to the unfortunate cabbie.
Good luck with your debate.
As a reporter for a pretty big newspaper, I have certainly made some mistakes and always offer to clarify or correct as needed. And, yes, it hurts like a son of a bitch, especially since I do a fair amount of investigative work where I encounter people who dont want me to write a thing. But you do it, because to not, well, that speaks to your credibility and honesty.
So on one level, I respect such a bald admission on her part.
But on the other hand…she sucks. Her willful inability to ponder even another side of a complex issue makes her less than a hack–NB: if you ever want to piss a reporter or writer off, call them a hack–it makes her a crude lazy,shill.
She is,quite nakedly, one of the premier Duranty’s of her generation. She has many, many colleagues in this designation, but she rises to the fore. Again, she recanted. But to even be in such a spot…..i am breathless. AT some level, the editors who lay her copy down, even though its off a syndicate, have a responsibility in this matter.
I’m not impressed, either. She was either stupid beyond our ability to imagine, or a knave. Apparently, the latter.
Re: Seeger. Lots of commies didn’t know what was up in the Soviet Union until the mid-fifties. It turns out that the ex-Trotskyites and ADA liberals were right, and the Progressive Party was wrong, and Stalin and Communism truly were grievous threats to Europe and the Third World. The problem was that the anti-communists were crawling with their own enemies to freedom and progress, right here in the USA, and they were so IN YOUR FACE about it: Nixon slandering Gahagan Douglas in ’48, followed by full-blown McCarthyism and blacklisting in the early fifties. It was easy to think, 1949-1954, that McCarthyism, along with states rights doctrines and the filibuster that allowed racist Southern institutions to flourish, were greater threats to America, and to liberal American values, than Stalin was.
We have no idea what it was like. Imagine a situation in which Sean Penn or Jane Fonda or Michael Moore are not allowed to make movies, even though an audience still exists for their work. Or where a tenured faculty member like Chomsky or Juan Cole could be fired solely for their “anti-American” views. Where only a narrow range of views on questions of national security are tolerated. You wouldn’t want that would you?
Alpo time.
Rod,
Scheer, Dowd, Ivins and &c. perform a very valuable function. They give hope to all who have realized that they are incapable of original thought and suffer despair as to the possibility of ever finding gainful employment. Surely we shouldn’t castigaste too sharply those of moribund intellect who have been employed to stimulate the lesser lights who comprise the readership of niche publications. They know their readers and provide precisely the product necessary to satisfy and fulfill all the curiosity of which those readers are capable.
markus,
…and they were so IN YOUR FACE about it
unlike those nice low key communists who had secret cells and operated as spies and organizers. And those in-your-face anti-fascists, boy, were they a disgrace.
Imagine a situation in which Sean Penn or Jane Fonda or Michael Moore are not allowed to make movies, even though an audience still exists for their work.
Why yes, I don’t have to imagine that. Cuba, China, Vietnam and other progressive states come to mind. Some universities also seem to be in the running. I must admit that I can understand the appeal of your imaginative exercise, however…
Roger;
The attempt to find the precise numbers is important but it avoids one important fact. Once any dictatorship has killed enough of it’s own citizens and created a climate of fear the actual the need to kill vast numbers of people lessens. Everyone in the country knows that their life could be snuffed out at any moment. That is why the insane thought that Saddam was going to be thrown out without outside military intervention makes no sense. saddam had killed and tortured so many Iraqi’s that he had snuffed out any sense that a revolt would even be attempted.
Here is a more important number. The terrorist who had plans to blow up LAX received his sentence today. Only 22 years, with the time of his detention taken off the total. Does this judge want us to be killed? Foreign citizens caught attempting to blow up anything should be executed.OBL will read about this sentence and laugh at our naivete and stupidity.
Kevin Peters
The problem with allowing the other side to set all the terms of the debate is that you will tend to lose quite often.
You know, that is an extremely good point, and it’s one I subliminally understand, but then forget in the heat of losing an argument.
I actually won one just the other day (or at least left the Other Party speechless, which is just as good) by changing the terms.
I’m trying to remember how it went…..
Somehow the 7/7 bombings led to Guantanamo (almost certainly my doing) and I said something about how if the people at Guantanamo were given Prisoner of War status it wouldn’t be legal to question them….I can’t remember what else…I probably Defended the Honor of Our Troops….
From the look on the Other Party’s face, he thought I’d given him a clean shot.
‘That is to apologize for abusive treatment of prisoners….etc.’ He was in full-blown op-ed mode.
And then suddenly it hit me: I wasn’t apologizing.
At all.
I said, ‘I would never under any circumstances apologize for our troops. I would be happy to see every terrorist at Guantanamo killed tonight.’
I said it like I meant it, too.
Of course, I didn’t. My preference is we stick with our present policy. Feed them well, subject them to expert interrogation, and respond to the occasional Quran mishap with an Investigation followed by a Report.
But suddenly swapping-out the terms of debate was incredibly effective.
He sure didn’t see it coming!
rod
Wow!
When someone has lied and distorted for as long and gleefully as Ivins, a single correction–no matter how clear–is merely a data point. That’s all. I don’t care whether she apologizes or not. When we get better behavior from her, then I’ll rethink my low opinion. Frankly, I see this particular column as a tactical retreat on her part.
ìWe have no idea what it was like.î
Some of us have more than an idea. Experience, it is called. When (to give a some very mild examples) your father is threatened with loss of employment because his father decided to stay in the West after the WWII, call me. When you have to register a typewriter with the government (a possible tool of dissemination of anti-government propaganda), call me. When you are obliged to vote for the Party candidate and making any changes (read choices) on your ballot will get you entered in a secret police file, call me. When you have to lie all your life just to stay out of trouble and always wonder whether you can talk openly on front of your friends and family, call me.
Life under socialist tyrannies is dreadful not only because dissent could get you killed/maimed/jailed. It is dreadful because of all those daily indignities and absurdities arbitrarily inflicted on the hapless subjects of the state. It is shattering the sense of self, destroying human innate honesty, self-worth, and the very human soul. For detailed analysis I could recommend Czeslaw Miloszís ìThe Captive Mindî (Noble Prize in Literature) but why bother. Nothing can compare to the horrors of living in America under a Republican administration.
Catherine,
I wonder if your involvement in the math project is rewiring your logical perceptions? In the early ’80′s I learned the basic concepts of Boolean algebra in order to work with some dbase programs and found myself better able to perform logical sequential tasks as a result. The only other transformative learning experience that I’ve encountered as an adult was working with attorneys as an expert witness and preparing for deposition or testimony. Lots of logical strings involved in that work too.
Perhaps you will be winning many more debates in the near future – not that you probably lose many now. If all else fails I would recommend the use of a light omelette skillet, the cast iron type can shatter.
ìI would be happy to see every terrorist at Guantanamo killed tonight.’
I said it like I meant it, too.
Of course, I didn’t.î
You’re a better (wo)man than I am, Gunga Din!
Count me among the unimpressed. Molly Ivins. Feh.
As Kevin said, we have more important consideratons: Today at the millenium bomber’s sentencing, Judge John Coughenour delivered a lecture not to Ahmed Ressam but to us:
Read the whole sorry thing at Hugh Hewitt
Katherine,
It is dreadful because of all those daily indignities and absurdities arbitrarily inflicted on the hapless subjects of the state. It is shattering the sense of self, destroying human innate honesty, self-worth, and the very human soul.
A young woman from Kazachstan educated me: “you just can’t understand unless you’ve experienced it.” I believe her.
Where has she been? In a cave in Manhattan or Beverly Hills?
I was reading reports of Saddam’s human rights abuses years ago. Long before Bush came out of the land of Mordor.
In fact I think we need shrinkwrapped for this, or maybe Jamie Irons. What is the psychological term…memory falsification syndrome? In other words the real memory is not the one we like anymore so we replace it with another one…like say kite flying children in Baghdad.
There was alot of secrecy surrounding the deaths of Iraqis at the hands of their government. After all Saddam paid good money ofr those journalists and got what he paid for. They ignored, lied, and changed the subject.
But I have heard that the National Geographic put the deaths as high as two million back in the good old days and I have also heard that many people just vanished. Some reports have numbers as high as 50,000 in Baghdad alone. I doubt they were abducted by aliens.
Sorry, no link for that it is something I read some time ago and can’t remember who did the survey.
I have also heard that people are buried all over the damn country. This is something I have even heard soldiers say. Go out to do some bulldozer work and the next thing you know you are finding bones.
The Lancet numbers were stupid on their face. Think about it, for those numbers to have been accurate the US would had to have killed 180 people a day, every day for more than a year. If there is a car bomb in that country that kills 40 people the whole world hears about it, 5000 people a month is absurd. All I can say is if Ivins could not figure that out and had remained oblivious to Saddam’s murderous regime [or forgot either one] she is a disgrace to her profession.
Apology or not.
I’m not sure Molly has an IQ in triple digits. She could well be the single stupidest op-ed columnist in the world.
That said, regardless of number of digits in her IQ she’s apparently sentient enough to compose sentences and paragraphs incoherent as those may be. Therefore willful ignorance is the only explanation.
Kyda:
I hate to sound crude or anything but screw that judge.
Besides there are hundreds of those guys at Gitmo. Considering how our courts work if they actually tried all those people in civilian courts they would die of old age before their trials were scheduled.
So much for fair and speedy. And Military Tribunals allow for the defendant to have an attorney represent him. Military justice is not without some semblance of civilization.
I suggest the judge leave this to the military. And if the Congress does not like that they can change it, not the courts.
Knucklehead:
I would say the competition for single stupidest oped writer is pretty stiff, but I bet MoDo at the NYT could give her a run for her money.
Katherine
LOL!
Well….I was just reading a couple of passages from Richard Nisbett’s GEOGRAPHY OF THOUGHT today, about Asian versus Western thought….and I have to say that on the subject of our guests at Guantanamo I have a distinctly Asian point of view.
Which is to say that I’m not especially troubled by the Logic of Noncontradiction.
OT btw….I’m not sure of the manners here…but if you want to read a fun passage from Nisbett’s
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why
I’ve posted it at Kitchen Table Math: geography of thought, along with an online test the U. of Michigan posted about some of his research.
Actually, if you want to take the test you should go here, because the press release will spoil it for you.
back on topic – for Rick B The Nisbett press release has an interesting observation about argument:
I’d say that’s a pretty fair description of the move from ‘The prisoners at Guantanamo should not be granted POW status’ to ‘The prisoners at Guantanamo should be slaughtered like sheep.’
Assuming Nisbett is right, I wonder if it means the internet will violently increase polarization?
Remember the study showing that people who read the internet expose themselves to more conflicting opinion than people who don’t?
Well….maybe that’s a bad thing.
I wonder if your involvement in the math project is rewiring your logical perceptions?
I REALLY hope so.
I’m keeping notes; I’m trying to do a kind of Piaget for 50 year olds….
In the early ’80′s I learned the basic concepts of Boolean algebra in order to work with some dbase programs and found myself better able to perform logical sequential tasks as a result. The only other transformative learning experience that I’ve encountered as an adult was working with attorneys as an expert witness and preparing for deposition or testimony. Lots of logical strings involved in that work too
Cool!
That would be very interesting to see.
I’m violently pro-logic….I feel personally affronted when I spot instances of non-logic, WHICH, unfortunately, I seem to do frequently on the subject of THE IRAQ WAR.
Nisbet has a funny thing about the Greeks throwing some guy overboard because he discovered irrational numbers. Irrational numbers weren’t logical, so they killed the guy. That’s kind of the way I feel.
So it would be interesting to see whether I became more logical.
At the moment I’m trying to become ‘spatial,’ which is a huge challenge.
Also I’m trying to figure out what the eff is going on with effing reciprocals.
WichitaBoy told me once math would keep me humble.
He was right.
If all else fails I would recommend the use of a light omelette skillet, the cast iron type can shatter.
Don’t say that!
Ed just took Christopher out in a rainstorm and a huge tree branch crashed halfway through the windshield.
sheesh
It’s always something around here. I was all set to march forth with my plan to defeat cheap debating tricks, or, failing that, bean the guy with an omelette pan….so I guess that will have to wait.
(They’re both fine, thank God, but the car’s a mess.)
Judge John Coughenour
There’s a guy who needs an omelette pan to the head.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Thanks, markus – I needed a good laugh.
Logic is only as good as one’s assumptions. Or, as they used to say, garbage in, garbage out.
What fascinates me is the differing assumptions the two sides make, leading to starkly different world views. Many on the other side really believe that there is nothing worse than living under a Republican administration and that Nixon’s shabby treatment of his opponents really was the equivalent of Stalin’s infinite sea of murder.
In the case of Red Molly, she’s so blinded by her hatred of rich people, rich people from Texas in particular, that she has lost all perspective. Nothing else matters for her; that’s the cardinal assumption from which all else flows.
Often, in these arguments, one notices that the assumptions being displayed overtly are not the real beliefs. That’s why the argument often shifts, and why when one false assumption or erroneous fact is knocked down ten more immediately spring up like dragon’s teeth to take its place: these are not the true assumptions being debated, merely the manifestations of a deeper belief whose name may not be uttered.
Catherine
So great to see you here! (I ordered four more copies of Animals in Translation for friends!)
Nisbet has a funny thing about the Greeks throwing some guy overboard because he discovered irrational numbers. Irrational numbers weren’t logical, so they killed the guy. That’s kind of the way I feel…
You have not got the story quite right.
The Pythagoreans discovered the existence of irrationals. (Actually, they discovered that the hypotenuse of an isoceles right triangle cannot be expressed as a rational number, and saw that all was lost!).
They swore their members to secrecy about this stunning and profoundly disturbing discovery; this finding was never to be made public.
Some poor fool did so, and was tossed overboard.
But the proof of the existence of irrationals is so simple, and can be done in so many ways, it’s not like it would not have been discovered elsewhere soon enough!
Jamie Irons
Wichita Boy:
It is like mass hysteria. Now I understand how such a thing as the Salem Witch Trials could come about.
I remember when I had the war argument with my brother and he started in about Halliburton I asked him if Blair and Howard owned stok in the compay because they supported the damn war after all.
Stunned him. He had never even thought it out that far.
His real conversation [as you say] was about something else.
Actually, when I first saw the title to this thread
IVINS EATS CROW
I thought Roger was referring to Cheryl Crow, Lance Armstrong’s wife, and I was quite upset.
Reading the actual story kind of settled me down.
For a similar frisson, and perhaps the funniest parody of a Glenn-Reynolds-like post ever put into cyberspace, I refer everyone to:
JENNIFER LOPEZ HAS BEEN SHOT!
Jamie Irons
“I assume she has an IQ in triple digits” … yes, but it depends which side of the decimal point they’re on…
And her retraction is meaningless. It will not change one single other thing she writes, thinks or says. Having made her token apology, it will simply be erased from her life, leaving no cause to re-examine any other beliefs, positions, memes, tropes or shibboleths…
WB,
Do you believe that Ivins could put together a logical string that would trace the derivation of her thought process? If I gave it a bit of time I suppose that I could come up with a base set of assumptions (I would prefer principles but assumptions do underlie principles) that I can logically trace back either to a Judeo-Christian ethos or to Aurelian Stoicism depending on the audience and the intent of the apologia.
I’ve rarely seen any logical process involved in the regurgitations of the columnists that I’ve grown to despise over lo these many years. I have real doubts that many or perhaps any of them can trace what they are writing back to a generative root provided by Rousseau, Condorcet or Comte. Perhaps a little Locke or Mills with a Benthamite utilitarian slant but nothing that would indicate a grasp of the underlying philosophy. Effective sophistry requires at least a basic grasp of essentials and I just don’t see it exhibited by the vast majority of these reified columnists.
Rick,
Could I have a glass of that Condorcet?
Jamie Irons
Jamie,
If you do, you’ll wind up wanting to run a perfect election.
Jamie Irons:
“You have not got the story quite right.”
Catherine’s drowning the messenger account comes from a story about Pythagoras from a source hostile to the Pythagoreans. One of Pythagoras’s students, Hippasus of Metapontum, supposedly proved that 2 had an irrational square root and Pythagoras had him drowned to keep the discovery secret. But another account says that Pythagoras himself discovered the irrationality, and swore his students to secrecy. If so, it didn’t work. There’s a discussion in Plato’s Theaetetus, in which Pythagoras’s student Theodorus of Cyrene and Theodorus’s student Theaetetus, are characters, about then current thought on irrational square roots. It was all, I think, sorted out by the time of Euclid.
Rick,
…reified columnists.
OK, now you’ve done it. I’m going to nitpick!
re∑i∑fy
tr.v. re∑i∑fied, re∑i∑fy∑ing, re∑i∑fies
To regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence.
chuck,
You would have me believe that Ivins is real? Certainly, she appears to exist, but does mere existence constitute reality?
“It was all, I think, sorted out by the time of Euclid.”
Weeeellll, sort of. As I recall, Euclid was ready to deal with square roots (wasn’t there a nifty demonstration in Plato’s Meno?), but other irrational numbers like cube roots were problematic. Wasn’t there an outstanding problem to double the volume of a cubic altar? I believe it can’t be solved by Euclidean construction, and I have the vaguest recollection that theorem (that it cannot be done) remained unproven until the nineteenth (twentieth?) century, when people were able to rephrase the problem in terms of number fields and algebraic extensions.
“The Lancet numbers were stupid on their face.”
True, but not for the obvious reason. Whenever one of these publications with an axe to grind (aka MSM) does one of these articles, they get very creative in how they count things.
You remember all the deaths attributed to sanctions against Iraq? A great many of them were estimates and projections based on kids that did not get their medicine. The tiny distinction that medicine was still coming in but Saddam intercepted it was simply ignored. Which is why Rick is entirely correct. Their logic goes something like this:
Fact: Sanctions are in place.
Fact: Iraqi children are not getting vacinated.
Ergo: USA is killing Iraqi children.
I read another stellar example of this, if OT, just last night. Hunting for Harry Potter info after finishing the book, I made the mistake of reading a Time mag article. The author of that interview was so stupid that he/she concluded that C.S. Lewis would have been a “death eater”.
Practice in math really would help these people, but they don’t have to study Boolean logic for improvement. Basic math common sense would work. If you multiply 325 x 176 and get 421, you ought to be able to just glance at that and see that you did something wrong. That glance will not give you the correct answer, but it will tell you to keep looking. I thought that everyone was supposed to learn this skill while making change?
You’ll note that the education lobby is really not interested in Americans learning such skills. They want to produce people who, if not entirely convinced by Lancet nonsense, will at least not laugh at it.
“wasn’t there a nifty demonstration in Plato’s Meno?”
Yes, but it wasn’t a demonstration of the math itself, though it is an interesting side effect. The math was already accepted by both Socrates and Meno. A slave ignorant of math is brought forward and guided through the math to get the correct answer.
Well into the ’60s, when he didn’t have the excuses cited above, Pete Seeger was playing the Soviet military hymn “Meadowlands”, as an instrumental, in concert. I reckon this was his way of telling all his long-time Communist fans, many of whom now identified themselves as “non-aligned Marxists”, where he stood.
Rick,
I certainly wasn’t trying to imply that Red Molly has special gifts in the logic department; I suppose it is her passion rather than her intelligence which one finds fetching. Instead, I was referring to certain others of those people who, while indubitably possessing logical skills, seem unable to bring themselves to come to reasonable conclusions regarding who our enemies are.
Timmah,
I have the vaguest recollection that theorem (that it cannot be done) remained unproven until the nineteenth (twentieth?) century, when people were able to rephrase the problem in terms of number fields and algebraic extensions.
I think Gauss dealt with these in Disquisitiones Arithmetica, 1801. The basic idea is that starting with a unit line and ruler and compass, the unit interval can be divided into equal parts and laid end to end. This leads to the rational numbers (the base field). Then square roots can be taken, the hypotenuse thingee, and this leads to a space of two dimensions over the rationals because, well, there are two square roots of a number. Further square roots double each of the proceeding dimensions, so the upshot is that the number of dimensions is a power of two. A cube root would introduce a factor of three, so no go. Gauss extended this to discover which roots of -1 could be taken with ruler and compass, the roots of the cyclotomic polynomials, leading to his construction of a 17 sided polygon. Trisecting an angle also leads to cube roots in the general case, so that can’t be done either.
Sorry for the long winded explanation
I stand (à la puissance n) corrected.
Jamie Irons
893 / 1449. We’re still 36% better than Hussein’s regime! Woohoo!
WB,
I think I drew an inference that lacked implication on your part. Ivins cannot be material to any discussion regarding logical permutation given that she exhibits no evidence of logic having had any bearing upon her output. I would still challenge you regarding the “certain others”. I would assert that they are operating on a strictly emotional level without regard to logical foundation. They stand for nothing but mindless opposition to the simple fact that they are denied power. Had they power to effect change, they would be in favor of whatever change was being effected.
That Clinton’s strategy of regime change as embodied by the legislature in an act of Congress passed in ’98 is treated as non-existent is superlative evidence of this fact. Bush executes what Clinton proposed and is judged evil in some quarters for doing so. This is idiocy that cannot come close to claiming the mantle of sophistry. Reason, according to my understanding of the word, is simply irrelevant to the opposition. Their concern is solely foused on who holds the reins without any consideration to the direction being taken.
Or another way to look at it: 4 years, $300 billion dollars, 1785 coalition deaths, no Bin Laden, terror attacks up globally, 3000 dead Americans unavenged, American soldier divorce rates skyrocketing, 51% of Americans believing their commander in chief lied to them, and another Islamic regime about to be created out of the ashes of a criminal dictatorship. American military unable to deal with North Korea, Iran, and China. Americans and our military humiliated by torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. With two terror strikes in trains in Madrid and London, our Homeland Security Chief declares urban transportation the cities’ problems. America and the world unsafer as a whole.
With all of that and our democracy in place (and failing), deaths in Iraq are down 37% over a criminal, horrible, beastly dictatorship.
I wish I had been married to you folks, you really have low expectations for success.
Moses–
Your nickname isn’t funny and your analysis is sophomoric. Take a hike.
Or another way to look at it: 4 years, $300 billion dollars, 1785 coalition deaths,
That you are able to write that as a criticism of the war shows how intellectually bankrupt you are. How many casualties were predicted prior to the invasion of Afghanistan? Iraq? How many casualties did the US suffer in the years of WWII?
terror attacks up globally
Or is that locally, i.e. Iraq? It seems to me that the US hasn’t suffered a terrorist attack on the country or its interests outside the war zones since the start of the WoT.
American military unable to deal with North Korea, Iran, and China.
MW, you and I both know this is sophistry: you don’t want to see the military deal with any of those countries. So why bother?
Beyond the fact that nobody believes you now, there’s a better reason to be careful what you pretend to wish for: you gut your credibility to oppose the thing later. At some point, the country may be seriously debating a military response to one of those countries, given either ongoing support of terrorists and development of nuclear weapons (NK, Iran), or imperialist designs on the region (China). Mock support for unspecified military action now may come back to haunt you later.
WichitaBoy
That’s why the argument often shifts, and why when one false assumption or erroneous fact is knocked down ten more immediately spring up like dragon’s teeth to take its place
Well, that’s the thing…..and it’s why plunging into the Math Wars has been good for my marriage. There’s just no point in even discussing Iraq with Ed. But we agree about math, constructivism, standardized tests, NCLB, etc.
Actually, the fact that we agree on all the ed. stuff is evidence for your point.
His initial impulse was to think NCLB was a Republican plot that was NOT FUNDED, so it was a farce, etc.
We had some heated exchanges, and now he’s pro.
He’s pro because his logic was wrong. (Either his logic or assumptions.)
I’m also more ‘con-’ than I was, because my assumptions about standardized testing were wrong. I was assuming you can trust state-administered tests, and Ed had already had ample experience in CA writing tests that were thrown out due to politics. He had real-world experience I lacked, and he was right. (Meanwhile he’s gotten more pro-testing.)
So….with NCLB we started from different places, different politics, different philosophies, different ideologies.
But our stated assumptions were direct expressions of our unstated beliefs, so logical argument plus real-life experience changed our positions in ways they needed to be changed. We ended up shifting our positions, and agreeing.
I also, years ago, before I realized I wasn’t a Democrat, changed his views on vouchers for poor kids. I was relentless on that one. Urban schools are so destructive (there are kids in urban schools so traumatized by being assaulted and, in the case of the girls, raped, on school grounds that their folks can’t even get them out the door in the morning) that any liberal arguing in favor of protecting ‘the system’ over protecting the children needs to be bashed mercilessly, which naturally I felt compelled to do. (It’s fun being married to me!)
But the fact is, I could have done all the bashing I wanted and it wouldn’t have done any good if he’d had a deep emotional belief in … keeping little black & Hispanic kids locked up in sh***y urban schools. (What exactly is the deep belief that compels ‘liberals’ to protect ‘the system’?)
So I think you’re right….on contentious subjects where our stated assumptions match our unstated beliefs, logic takes us a long, long way. And it’s great having a smart husband to debate with & learn from.
Iraq is different.
“Gauss dealt with these in Disquisitiones Arithmetica, 1801″
I should have known–doh! Thanks to your “long-winded” explanation, I just ordered D.A., only 13 years after I first resolved to get a copy. Translated, oddly enough, by one Arthur C. Clarke.
I should add that many, many liberals do not believe in keeping black & Hispanic kids locked up inside sh***y urban schools.
eduwonk, Kaus, the PPI–zillions of them. I read them every day.
But inside the party they’re outgunned.
Jamie Irons (& Terrye!)
hi!
THANK YOU!!!
The man overboard story is HILARIOUS!
I love it!
Just the intensely emotional reaction to a breach of rationality–whoa nelly.
I know how they felt.
Other People’s Illogic makes me crazy!
My only saving grace is I’m not too keen on my own illogic, either.
Terrye
The Lancet numbers were stupid on their face. Think about it, for those numbers to have been accurate the US would had to have killed 180 people a day, every day for more than a year. If there is a car bomb in that country that kills 40 people the whole world hears about it, 5000 people a month is absurd.
This is the kind of illogic that just drives me wild.
Where is the common sense?
Practice in math really would help these people, but they don’t have to study Boolean logic for improvement. Basic math common sense would work.
That’s an interesting question.
I’m not so sure…..
It is true, though, that my neighbor, who is a statistician and works in research, didn’t remotely go down the Saddam-had-no-WMD road.
For her, WMD or its precursors can’t simply cease to exist, because matter can’t cease to exist. (Is that called ‘conservation of matter’?)
Her entire response to the missing WMDs was to want to know what happened to them, and where they were.
Were they destroyed?
If so, where are the remains?
That’s a problem I’ve noticed in people with no science background at all. They assume, without thinking about it, that ‘destroyed’ means, essentially, ‘vanished without a trace.’
They don’t have the perception that ‘destroyed’ means ‘still around in a useless form.’
Where is the common sense?
Post modernism was to have destroyed it but the task has proven more difficult than originally envisioned. If people could only be forced to stop relying on their own damned lying eyes it might yet come to pass. Give the NEA another twenty years.
Give the NEA another twenty years.
You know, the NEA is a huge problem, but I don’t think they’re responsible for constructivism.
The education world and its history are murky to me (I’m working my way only slowly thru LEFT BEHIND)….but it looks like the ed schools are the problem.
Ed just read a history of the origins of ‘social studies’ in the schools that he thought was good:
From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future: The Discipline of History and History Education
A lot of the original impulse behind organizations like the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) was specifically to keep teachers out of power–to prevent teachers from having any influence whatsoever over content.
Diane Ravitch supports teachers unions, and it’s possible I will, too, if I ever sort out the history.
In any case, the ed. schools have been running things for a hundred years now, in partnership with organizations like NCTM & the Human Resources branch of the NSF.
I think it’s fair to say that these institutions are opposed to notions of truth and even fact.
They are certainly opposed to the teacher as an authority whose responsibility it is to pass on the knowledge of her generation to the new generation.
Teachers are no longer to be the ‘sage on the stage.’
They are to be the ‘guide on the side.’
The public hears about math tests where kids get points for doing the work correctly even though the answer is wrong.
It’s much, much worse than that.
Constructivist texts basically try to get rid of right answers altogether.
They have various ways of doing this.
For one, there is, now, in math curricula, a HUGE emphasis on estimation.
Everyone makes an estimate, and while in the real world some estimates are better than others (see, e.g., estimates of casulaties in the run-up to Afghanistan & Iraq) in ed. world estimates turn into opinions and ‘everyone has an opinion.’
There are good reasons to teach children about estimation; kids must be taught to ask themselves, ‘Is my answer reasonable?’ and to be able to answer the question.
But when you sit down and read through a constructivist math book …. that’s not the feeling you get about the constant emphasis on estimation.
The feeling you get is that estimation is a way of turning an answer into an opinion.
For instance, you see huge time devoted to children using ‘strategies’ to ‘determine’ what a ‘math fact’ like 9 x 8 is.
In and of itself, 9 x 8 can’t be altered by constructivists. 9 x 8 is 72 and that’s it. It’s not 73, and it’s not 71.
But when you turn 9 x 8 into a problem to be solved via strategies, and then you require every child to come up with 3 different strategies, and then you have a class of 20 kids presenting 3 different strategies apiece…..you’ve now turned 9 x 8 into Sixty Different Things, each one with equal standing.
The whole subject of math dissolves into strategies and points of view.
Catherine, I agree that 71 and 73 are lousy answers to 8×9. You would like to think that people would learn the times tables. But a person that thinks that 8×9=12 has bigger problems than not knowing the times tables. That is akin to Ivins’ problem.
I say the focus on estimation is just another symptom of the dumbing down of education, instead of an alternative teaching mechanism. Confronted by a class of 4th+ graders that though 8×9=12, I might resort to some estimation emphasis. (The difference between me and the current system is that I’d make it explicit. If the problem was to get an estimate, a decent estimate with good reasoning would be “correct”. But if actually testing the knowledge of the times tables, I’d only accept the mathematically correct answer. Perhaps this is because I’m a math fan that often tutored it, but majored in English. There is a time to focus on grammar and a time to focus on more subjective things. And unlike the current system, I wouldn’t give up on the times tables merely because my students needed remedial education first.)
As for constructivists, I’m not that familiar with the movement. Are they supposed to be replacing what the deconstructionists destroyed–only with their views instead of reality? Anyway, I blame the NEA because they are the political arm of what ails education. Since the NEA is full of people that will forever believe that 8×9=12, I’m not interested in convincing them out of their theoretical underpinnings. I merely want to convince other people that the NEA is about as trustworthy and useful as the UN. Then it will not matter what the constructivists think. But I’ll grant that with something as in need of a beating as current American education, we should not neglect any stick.
Well, I’m certainly glad that no one ever asked me to come up with three different strategies for solving the mysteries of 8×9. If we’re abandoning the tried and true times table, I can come up with but one: you take eight objects (apples, oranges, paperclips, whatever) and lay them in a row, repeat nine times, count. My hat’s off to the class that comes up with “Sixty Different Things”. But then, the world of mathematics left me behind with the advent of “New Math” and, apparently, it’s been going downhill ever since.
Catherine,
I would certainly never fault the NEA as a union. It has fulfilled the primary purposes of unions, the accretion of benefits, diminution of measurable responsibility and protection of jobs for its members, as well as any union that has ever existed. It has extraordinary clout with one party in government and has successfully avoided the imposition of standards of competence throughout its history. Truly a great union – like the UAW in ’69 in Detroit.
I wonder when the estimation concept will be embodied in IRS regulations.
Roger:
The education problem is complicated and can’t be explained totally in simple answers. But California, which went from one of the best school systems to one of the worst in a brief time has some glaring errors that are obvious.
Local funding control to largely state funding control. I don’t remember the year but in response to the problems in the urban schools California passed a law that all school districts had to have the identical amount of money spent per student. This shifted budget controll from local control to Sacramento. The goal was to increase the spending and quality in the poor area’s. But like many grand idea’s it failed.
Communities used to take great pride in their school districts. Because they had control of the budgets and the curriculumn there was more involvement by the locals in their schools because they could mold it and see first hand the problems. They were more likely to vote for more school funding. Schools that were not performing were recognozed earlier and principles had more authority. If a district wanted to experiment they could, and if the new way failed they didn’t have to lobby Sacramento to get things changed.
The primary reason that state control was instituted, the poor urban schools, did not get better. Because the tax payers had no control they were reluctant to raise taxes. We spend more money per pupil in California, considering inflation, then we did in 1960. But the results are far worse. And the urban schools have gotten worse, not better.
And the people in districts that want to spend more money to improve their schools have figured out a way to go around the state funding issues. they have formed non-profit corporations and they have local volunteers raise money to fund the programs that have been cut on a state level.
This is a simple explanation and doesn’t take into consideration all of the social programs that the federal and state governments have dumped on the schools to perform. Feeding programs, special ed, etc. The increase of spanish speaking students who don’t speak english has also placed a burden on the schools.
What should we do? Give controll back to the local governments and school districts. The economic benifits of making sure that the schools are good will force the cities to handle problems and they will have a better idea of what they need then Sacramento does. Go into the blighted urban area’s and spend a ton of money building schools and buying textbooks. They need it. but by making it mandatory that every district spends the exact amount per pupil it precludes the billions that will be needed to help the blighted areas. Give more authority to principles. Most teachers are great people. But for the under performing teachers it is almost impossible to fire them unless they commit a crime.Let local districts pick their curriculum and textbooks. Textbooks has become a political racket. If a liberal city wants Howard Zinn they should be able to have his book. If another district doesn’t, they shouldn’t be forced to.
Citizens that think they have the ability to shape their districts will put more money and effort into doing so. If they think they are powerless they won’t.
Catherine,
(What exactly is the deep belief that compels ‘liberals’ to protect ‘the system’?)
I wish I had been married to you folks, you really have low expectations for success.
And Mose sWine (oops — did I spell that wrong?), given his apparent preference for the pre-war policies toward Iraq, obviously has very high requirements before he calls anything a “failure.”
I would go into more detail about the fallacies of his reasoning, but anyone who thinks that cutting the kill rate of terrorists and their nation-state allies by 500 lives a month constitutes a failure just isn’t worth the effort.
Molly Ivins is to Iraq as Lyssenko was to science.
In a March 12, 2002 column entitled “Dr. Srangelove” by The Free Press, Molly “The Plagiarist” Ivins tried to pass off lines from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” as her own prose.
…and who sold Saddam the weapons and propped up his government…oh yeah Reagan and Bush.
Southpaw, no France and Russia and others. The USA was 12th on the list of arms sellers, accounting for about 1% of the arms. That’s why Iraq was using, you know, Soviet tanks.
But if you really cared about that, you’d have bothered to look that up from a reputable source–AKA not the MSM.
Those who are counting corpses may be interested in this, if you haven’t seen it before:
http://austinbay.net/blog/?p=456
And for the “America armed Saddam” crowd, there’s
http://www.thedissidentfrogman.com/bureau/000113.html
with sources given. A bit old, but the data’s still good.
Molly Ivins didn’t eat any crow. She picked a bit up on her fork, aimed it toward her mouth, then launched into a diatribe. While the rest were shaking their heads, trying to follow her leaps of illogic, she dumped the whole thing on the floor and gave it to the dog. Which died.
Regards,
Ric