| Thursday,
July 14, 2005
Subject: More Testing, More Testing
Soon teachers will have no time to teach for the tests
because all they will be doing is administering these evaluations. Let's
guarantee that Every Child Will Be Left Behind in some manner.
Sue
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-1/1121316842302120.xml&coll=1
Feds force state to test 3 more grades next
year Funding for extra exams must be found Thursday, July 14, 2005 BY JOHN
MOONEY Star-Ledger Staff
The number of public school students taking
state exams will nearly double next year, although it is uncertain where the
money will come from to pay for the extra tests.
As required by the federal No Child Left Behind
Act, testing in language arts and math will expand to the fifth, sixth and
seventh grades, ensuring that students will be tested every year from grades
3 to 8. The tests are now administered in Grades 3, 4, 8 and 11.
But during last month's budget talks in
Trenton, the Legislature, with the approval of the Codey administration, cut
$7 million from the state Department of Education that was earmarked for the
new testing.
State officials said this week that the money
will be found once a contract for the new tests is awarded, but they could
not say where that money would come from. Making the situation more
difficult is the fact that some legislators have expressed little support
for the additional testing, especially if the federal government won't pay
for it.
The uncertainty comes as the state is reviewing
proposals from private testing firms to develop and administer the new
exams.
Given over the course of a week each spring,
the standardized tests of multiple-choice and open-ended questions are big
events in many schools and are used to gauge both student and school
progress.
===============
No Child Left Behind == No Child Gets
Ahead
I cannot recommend the public school
system as a general proposition. There may be exceptions, but as a general
rule, don't put your children into the maw of that monster.
==========
A
very disturbing Intellectual Property question:
Subject: Archiving Lawsuit
How can people expect to post on the web and
eventually make the posting disappear???
Sue
http://www.nj.com/business/ledger/index.ssf?/base/business-0/1121146261286360.xml&coll=1
Philadelphia health care advocacy firm sues
search-engine operators Lawsuit against company that locates old Web
postings is the first legal challenge to Internet archiving, experts say
Tuesday, July 12, 2005 BY KEVIN COUGHLIN Star-Ledger Staff
The Wayback Machine is a search engine for
finding old stuff on the Internet.
But some people don't want Web postings to last
forever.
A Philadelphia health-care advocacy company is
suing operators of the Wayback Machine in a case experts described as one of
the first legal challenges to Internet archiving. Healthcare Advocates
contends the Internet Archive, a San Francisco nonprofit that runs the
Wayback Machine, botched Healthcare's request to block access to archived
materials from its Web site during a trade secrets dispute in 2003.
A Philadelphia-area law firm obtained the old
Web postings by hacking its way past the Internet Archive's blocking
technology, the suit charges.
That violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans tampering with
technologies meant to protect copyrighted digital materials, alleges the
suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia.
Healthcare Advocates also says its Web postings
were copyrighted, so the Philadelphia lawyers could be fined $30,000 under
federal copyright law for each of 92 alleged infringements -- nearly $3
million.
"Presumably, they knew better than anyone else
that this is not the proper way to do things," said Scott Christie of
McCarter & English, the Newark law firm representing Healthcare Advocates.
"This lawsuit is baseless," said John Earley
III of Harding, Earley, Follmer & Frailey of Valley Forge, Pa. Earley said
his firm legally obtained Healthcare Advocates' Web information through
routine searches using the Wayback Machine.
"We did what anybody can do," said Earley, who
is vice president of the Philadelphia Intellectual Property Association.
I need not point out the disturbing elements
of this. On the one hand it is contended that the material should never have
been posted. Example: someone posts a pirate copy of a novel. The author
goes through hoops to get it taken down.
On the other it is contended that this is
legitimate history. It was up on the web, therefore it must always be on the
web.
This needs thinking through.
==============
Subject: An American Hiroshima
Jerry:
From searchs initiated after hearing the intro to "The
Savage Nation" today (www.michaelsavage.com; no references to article yet on
web site but considerable other information regarding Islamic terrorism).
Mr. Savage noted that he does not have any independent
information regarding this scenario and cannot judge the veracity, but there
are a number of web sites which come up when searching on the phrase
"American Hiroshima."
Thiis appears to be the original cite on
www.worldnetdaily.com (consider the source)
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45203
WASHINGTON – As London recovers from the latest
deadly al-Qaida attack that killed at least 50, top U.S. government
officials are contemplating what they consider to be an inevitable and much
bigger assault on America – one likely to kill millions, destroy the economy
and fundamentally alter the course of history, reports Joseph Farah's G2
Bulletin.
According to captured al-Qaida leaders and
documents, the plan is called the "American Hiroshima" and involves the
multiple detonation of nuclear weapons already smuggled into the U.S. over
the Mexican border with the help of the MS-13 street gang and other
organized crime groups.
Al-Qaida has obtained at least 40 nuclear
weapons from the former Soviet Union – including suitcase nukes, nuclear
mines, artillery shells and even some missile warheads. <snip>
But the most disturbing news is that high level
U.S. officials now believe at least some of those weapons have been smuggled
into the U.S. for use in the near future in major cities as part of this
"American Hiroshima" plan, according to an upcoming book, "The Al Qaeda
Connection: International Terrorism, Organized Crime and the Coming
Apocalypse," by Paul L. Williams, a former FBI consultant.
According to Williams, former CIA Director
George Tenet informed President Bush one month after the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks that at least two suitcase nukes had reached al-Qaida operatives in
the U.S. <snip>
According to Williams' sources, thousands of
al-Qaida sleeper agents have now been forward deployed into the U.S. to
carry out their individual roles in the coming "American Hiroshima" plan.
Bin Laden's goal, according to the book, is to
kill at least 4 million Americans, 2 million of whom must be children. Only
then, bin Laden has said, would the crimes committed by America on the Arab
and Muslim world be avenged. <snip>
This is the most recent article in the stack of
follow-up:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45246
WASHINGTON – Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., a
staunch critic of the federal government's lax immigration and border
enforcement policies, said yesterday he would request a briefing from the
Justice Department on information it has on plans revealed by WND this week
for a nuclear attack on the U.S. by al-Qaida terrorists.
Tancredo said he was greatly alarmed by the
report and would seek whatever information he could get from the nation's
law enforcement authorities – either in classified or unclassified reports.
Al-Qaida's plans, known as "America's
Hiroshima" according to captured terrorists and terrorist documents, calls
for the multiple detonation of nuclear weapons, already in the possession of
Osama bin Laden's operatives currently inside the U.S. <snip>
It is certainly a matter of concern. There's
only one way to top the 911 attacks. But of course we are not really in a
war with Islamic jehadists. And it has been longer since we declared war on
terror than we participated in World War II. Of course we haven't precisely
mobilized for this war. And see the
Gerecht article about Gitmo.
====================
Subject: An American Hiroshima
I don't know about anyone else, but my first thought
was that this is unlikely. Given that the newest of these former Soviet
warheads is now about 15 years old, and that none of them has been stored
properly, I'd guess the chances that any of them will actually detonate is
probably very small. (I've read estimates that even when the Soviets were
actively maintaining and remanufacturing their warheads they had an expected
fizzle rate of >50%. What must it be now?) Of course, even a fizzle results
in a mess of plutonium all over the place, but that can be dealt with.
-- Robert Bruce Thompson
I think the Russian data indicate that the
Secondary (fusion) part of their devices had about 50% failure rate. I am
not aware of the numbers regarding the primary, nor is my expertise
sufficient to form an actual estimate. I know that we assigned a pretty high
number to the probability that our weapons would detonate once they reached
the target when I did war analysis models. I had no way to evaluate that
number, but I sure made it clear that I needed the real numbers, not
something to make Sandia look good.
Nor do I know much about the shelf life of
fission (as opposed to fusion) weapons. A fission weapon would be enough to
ruin your whole day: see Hiroshima as an example.
I also know that the Company used to buy
fissionables, no questions asked, at pretty high rates, but I have no idea
if (1) that program has continued, or (2) if they have raised their bids
now. It used to be you could sell enough fissionables to make a fission
weapon for $4 million cash on the barrelhead, no questions asked, no
identification required. But that was a while ago.
==============
Subject: "It
always helps if you actually read what your enemies say"
Al Qaeda said from the beginning that their major
concern was US troops in Saudi Arabia.
We put troops in Saudi Arabia because the 1991
Coalition members were unwilling to take out Saddam Hussein completely; we
stopped the war after chasing Iraq out of Kuwait.
One more instance where winning the war, rather than
failing to lose it, would have paid off big dividends. American troops
occupying Iraq in 1991 would have had a much easier time than 2001 (we
hadn't yet betrayed the Kurds and Shiites). The signt of Americans in
Baghdad would not have been as strong an image for murderous recruiters as
the sight of Americans on the Arabian peninsula, within hailing distance of
the holy places.
Foreseeable? Some of it certainly was. A lesson
re-learned? I hope so.
Steve Setzer
There is no substitute for victory.
==============
Subject: SpaceCom 'High Frontier' (ironic, that) on
seizing the LaGrange Points.
http://www.peterson.af.mil/hqafspc/news/images/JournalWinter05Web.pdf
-- Roland Dobbins
=================
Subject: 60 years and counting . . .
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/513045/
-- Roland Dobbins
===============
Subject: Combat Deaths in Iraq - misleading comparison
Why would someone compare murders in Washington, DC
with combat deaths in Iraq? Or traffic accidents? Presumably you are trying
to put combat deaths in “perspective” and show how insignificant they are
compared to daily life in the US. Doesn’t Washington, DC have one of the
highest crime rates in the US? How about comparing the rate with Baker City,
OR where some of the 116ACR comes from, or some of the other small towns in
the US where NG units call home?
How many casualties have we had? How many people are
maimed for life, rather than killed? I think it’s a much higher percentage
now because fewer of those people are dieing, and being wounded in combat is
totally unlike being hurt in a traffic accident. How much does it change a
person when you spend 12 months driving back and forth on roads where people
plant bombs trying to blow you up? How many of those people are going to
come back and be unable to return to normal family life?
I don’t think comparing combat deaths in Iraq with
traffic accidents or murders in Washington, DC is relevant to the cost of
this war at all.
Steve Crandell
I am not sure I take your point. Certainly
everything you say is true enough; but does that mean that the statement by
an NG commander should not ever be noticed?
As to Washington DC crime rate, I would
presume most people know this; and think about it when Washington begins to
tell the rest of us how to run our police departments and judicial system...
===========
The LA papers today
are full of a study showing that the LA Black Community has not done well,
with many statistics on where it all lags behind. There was also a story on
how the staff at King/Drew hospital (which failed its recent accreditation)
is paid higher than any other county officials with the exception of the
Sheriff and a couple of others.
I then got this email from someone who
doesn't want to be identified. It consists of a pointer to a Norman
Porhoretz essay and an excerpt:
http://www.reportingcivilrights.org/perspectives/podhoretz.jsp
The almost complete abdication of black
responsibility and the commensurately total dependence on government
engendered by so obsessive and exclusive a fixation on white racism has been
calamitous. It has undermined the very qualities that are essential to the
achievement of independence and self-respect, and it has spawned policies
that have had the perverse effect of further discouraging the growth of such
qualities. It has thereby contributed mightily to the metastasis of the
black underclass—a development which, in addition to destroying countless
black lives, has subjected more and more whites to experiences like the ones
I described going through as a child in "My Negro Problem."
In 1963 those descriptions were very shocking
to most white liberals. In their eyes Negroes were all long-suffering and
noble victims of the kind who had become familiar through the struggles of
the civil rights movement in the South—the "heroic period" of the movement,
as one if its most heroic leaders, Bayard Rustin, called it. While none of
my white critics went so far as to deny the truthfulness of the stories I
told, they themselves could hardly imagine being afraid of Negroes (how
could they when the only Negroes most of them knew personally were maids and
cleaning women?). In any case they very much disliked the emphasis I placed
on black thuggery and aggression.
Today, when black-on-white violence is much
more common than it was then, many white readers could easily top those
stories with worse. And yet even today few of them would be willing to speak
truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence
and black crime. Telling the truth about blacks remains dangerous to one's
reputation: to use that now famous phrase I once appropriated from D.H.
Lawrence in talking about ambition, the fear of blacks has become the dirty
little secret of our political culture.
All of which reminds me of conversations I
have had with my sometimes collaborator Steve Barnes. It is not a topic one
can talk about very much.
And while we are discussing forbidden
topics, here is another that is of a piece with it:
This is fascinating on several levels--the Muslim
sense of sexual honor which as resulted in several suicides, ostracisms, and
a price on Servaty's head; the fact that Servaty was ultimately fired for
criticizing the Muslim religion ("in contemporary Europe making rude remarks
about a group of people is a crime while willfully and malignantly wrecking
the lives of individuals is not if these individuals have been so stupid as
to trust sweet words and empty promises"), and finally, Belien's comment
that "I have come to the conclusion that it has to do with the nature of
Belgium, which is an artificial state combining Dutch-speaking Flanders and
French-speaking Wallonia. Belgium is not a genuine nation; it is nothing but
a political construction. Political power corrupts. To keep the country
together the regime has to buy the adherence of a significant part of the
population. Corrupt voters do not care about corrupt politicians and corrupt
politicians do not care about organised crime. Brussels is marked by an
absence of morality. There is a lesson here for everyone. If Europe ever “belgianises,”
i. e. becomes a state without a real nation, it will end up as the same
moral cesspit that Belgium is today."
K
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/66
Avenging Muslims Seek to Kill Belgian
Journalist
From the desk of Paul <http://www.brusselsjournal.com/user/2>
Belien on Wed, 2005-07-13 19:03 philippe-servaty.jpg <http://www.brusselsjournal.com/files/philippe-servaty.jpg>
Philippe Servaty For decades Tintin has been the world’s most famous Belgian
reporter. But now it looks like he may have a competitor. Philippe Servaty
is the 42-year old chief economics correspondent of Le Soir, Brussels’ most
influential newspaper. This modern Tintin’s adventures took him to Morocco
several times over the past years. There dozens of women ended up in his bed
and naked in front of his camera lens.
One of them is 42-year old Samira, a teacher in
Agadir. Servaty told her that he loved her and asked her to pose nude for a
souvenir picture. He had her stand on all fours with a leash around her neck
while he took her doggy-style. “These sluts are so naive. If you promise to
marry them and take them along with you to Brussels they do whatever you
ask,” Servaty wrote on a website where he posted Samira’s picture. Another
woman, 23-year old Amina, was photographed while Servaty urinated on her. He
had promised her that he was going to help her flee the husband of her
arranged marriage and use his media connections to make her a movie star.
Once Servaty had gone home, however, the women
never again heard of their Brussels “Manneken Pis.” Neither did they know
that he made them stars on the internet. Samira eventually abandoned her
dreams of a new life in the heart of Europe as the wife of one of its major
journalists and got engaged to a local Agadir man whom she was to marry
later this year. On 22 April, however, her fiancé recognised her on a cd-rom
that had been made of the modern Tintin’s Moroccan adventures and was for
sale in the souks of Agadir. He beat her up and threw her out. Servaty’s
photo collection contained over 80 Moroccan women aged between 17 and 45,
some tall, some fat, some beautiful, some ugly, some single, some married,
and all but one depicted in the most degrading poses.
servaty-pictures.jpg <http://www.brusselsjournal.com/files/servaty-pictures.jpg>
servaty-pictures-2.jpg <http://www.brusselsjournal.com/files/servaty-pictures-2.jpg>
Servaty's pictures, as published by Moroccan newspapers
Samira went to the police to lodge a complaint
against Servaty. This was only the beginning of her ordeal. To pose for
pornographic pictures is a crime in Morocco and she was immediately
arrested. A judge sentenced her to a heavy fine and a prison sentence of one
year. Her school fired her, her family cast her out, all her friends
abandoned her, while the police began a search for Servaty’s other models.
So far, 13 have been convicted to prison sentences, the husband of one of
them went insane, two attempted to commit suicide in gaol and some, whom the
police cannot find, are thought to have killed themselves or to have been
murdered by their disgraced family. Even 30-year old Hafida, the only woman
in the pictures who had not taken her clothes off, has become a social
outcast. The neighbours call her a whore and the local shops refuse to let
her enter.
When the Moroccan police authorities asked
their Belgian colleagues to arrest the new Tintin, they were told by Thomson
and Thompson in Brussels that this was impossible. I would say even more,
according to Belgian law Servaty had done nothing wrong: the women had
freely consented to having him take the pictures.
Le Soir, however, forced Servaty to resign in
early June when it became known that Servaty had added “anti-Islamic
remarks” to some of the pictures, like “there is no better drug than to
ejaculate on the veiled face of a woman” or “I met her walking down the
street in her djellaba. A few minutes later the f***ing bitch did everything
I wanted. Miracles do happen, even in a muslim country!” Abusing the
credulity of women to get them to engage in obscenities is one thing,
“insulting” Islam is another. Last year Le Soir, the voice of the Brussels
francophone establishment and a pillar of the Belgian regime, had loudly
applauded the suppression of Belgium’s biggest party, the Flemish-separatist
Vlaams Blok, as a criminal organisation because some individual VB members,
including a Turkish-born woman who criticised the treatment of women in
fundamentalist muslim societies, had made remarks which according to the
Belgian judiciary “contributed to a campaign of racial hatred.” Since one of
its senior writers has been proved a “racist,” Le Soir even claims to be
“one of Servaty’s victims” along with the poor Moroccan women. <snip>
Note what is happening here: Belgium is an
artificial nation created largely along a confessional fissure in the
breakup of the Spanish Netherlands, then in the various wars of the 1700 -
1800 period. The question raised is, can there be a true free state without
it becoming a nation? The US experiment was to create a nation -- from
many one -- through the melting pot process. Origins didn't matter, but
immigrants were expected to become American in culture and loyalty and
largely in religion.
The new model is "diversity" which rejects
the melting pot and in essence say from one, many. This is an experiment
whose outcome has some real consequences for America. Is it working well?
And more on the suicide of the West:
Why do these mass-murdering commies get such a
good press?
By Boris Johnson (Filed: June 30, 2005)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.
jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/06/30/do3001.xml
It is not given to us to know whither the
Almighty has dispatched the soul of Melita Norwood, who died quietly last
week in Bexleyheath at 93. Whether she is reading her obits from above or
below, I reckon she will be pretty pleased. There she is, sniffing a rose,
or smiling with hair-clipped innocence, like some author of wholesome books
for children. Her deeds are reported in the affectionate tones that
obituarists reserve for the practitioners of some romantic but moribund
faith. She might be the last speaker of old Cornish, or the last person to
have consecrated her life to proving that Stonehenge was built by spacemen
as an observatory for the study of worms.
As it happens, she was "the most important
British female spy ever recruited by the KGB". From the 1930s she used her
position as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research
Association to pass ever more vital atom secrets to Stalin's Soviet Union.
In other words, she was a tool for one of the most murderous regimes ever
seen, and continued blissfully betraying this country throughout the Cold
War, and, as she later admitted, in full knowledge of Stalin's slaughter.
File after file she shovelled to her KGB handlers, to the point where she is
credited by some with accelerating Russia's acquisition of nuclear weapons
by two years. She was only unmasked in 1999, thanks to the testimony of a
Soviet defector; and after a brief hubbub it was decided by the then home
secretary, Jack Straw (himself a former Trot), that at 87 she was too old to
prosecute. I do not quarrel with that decision, but there is something in
the eirenic tone of her valedictions that reminds me of the amazing
indulgence we show - now that communism is meant to be dead - to commies,
socialists and Lefty tyrants of all kinds.
Cycling through London, I check out the words
on people's T-shirts, and I was amused the other day to see the letters CCCP
on someone's chest. Yup, folks, that's what the fashion-conscious British
youth is wearing, a celebration of the great doomed Soviet experiment of
1917-90.
Remind me: who was the greater mass murderer,
Stalin or Hitler? Well, Stalin is thought to have been responsible for about
50 million deaths, and Hitler for a mere 25 million. What Hitler did in his
concentration camps was equalled if not exceeded in foulness by the Soviet
gulags, forced starvation and pogroms. What makes the achievements of
communist Russia so special and different, that you can simper around in a
CCCP T-shirt, while anyone demented enough to wear anything commemorating
the Third Reich would be speedily banged away under the 1986 Public Order
Act? <snip>
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