Chomsky review

Noam Chomsky’s half-truths and distortions are still loved by the British Left

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/909/noam_chomsky_s_half_truths_and_distortions_are_still_loved_by_the_british_left/page/2

The Guardian has given one of its great heroes a platform to spout forth on the decline of American power and the manifold sins of its past, but it’s all subterfuge

Shine a light on Chomsky's arguments and they're likely to look a little different

Robin Shepherd, Owner / Publisher

On 17 February 2012 17:28

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But, coming to the second noteworthy item, look how he presents a veneer of “evidence” to gloss over the absurdity of the comparison. Who says Suharto is like Hitler, Stalin and Mao? Why, none other than the CIA!

Usually, the CIA is presented as a propaganda machine. But when it suits his purpose – to promote Western self-loathing – it has suddenly become a reliable source. And yet, even that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Assuming Chomsky didn’t just make it up, who in the CIA said this and under what circumstances? A low level desk officer with left-leaning sympathies? A lone, but more senior staffer, making the comparison for shock value? Chomsky never tells us, rendering the evidential value of an already false proposition useless.

Education, what is the curriculum of learning

http://www.city-journal.org/2013/eon1206ss.html

SOL STERN

The Redemption of E. D. Hirsch

I do not know what is exactly wrong with education, but the number of young people I have meet certainly have views on things that are programmed into them, but just do not seem to have the facts or the basics to really learn.

Also unfortunately for kids from lower socio-economic  families are not being educated with the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic and becomes evidencal   when they ask me for help and guidance or when working with them and I am explaining and  a common retort is "why doesn't the teachers teach this". 

How my kids’ progressive school helped teach me the value of a content-rich curriculum

6 December 2013

E. D. Hirsch is the most important education reformer of the past half-century. I came to this conclusion after writing about schools, teachers, and education policy for almost two decades. But the truth is, I first turned to Hirsch’s writing for practical and personal reasons. I was baffled by the educational practices I witnessed at PS 87, the famous New York City public school my sons attended from 1987 to 1997.

Also known as the William Tecumseh Sherman School, PS 87 is located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. My wife and I were delighted when our older son was admitted to the school. It had just been ranked by Parents magazine as one of the country’s ten best elementary schools—public or private—and the New York Timesprofiled it as one of the few city schools that middle-class parents still clamored to get their kids into. PS 87 had a reputation for adhering to the “progressive education” philosophy, but this didn’t concern me. I had little understanding of what progressivism would mean for my children in the classroom, other than that PS 87 seemed committed to providing a nurturing and minimally restrictive environment for its students. For example, I noticed that instead of sitting in rows facing the teacher, as I did when I attended the New York City public schools, the children in the early grades sat in circles on a rug and often worked together in groups. I was told that this was the “open classroom” reform, introduced in the 1970s. The new seating arrangement seemed harmless enough. Indeed, I thought it was quite charming.

I soon received a crash course in educational progressivism. Many of the school’s teachers were trained at such citadels of progressive education as Columbia University’s Teachers College and the Bank Street College of Education, where they learned to repeat pleasant-sounding slogans like “teach the child, not the text” and were told that all children are “natural learners.” PS 87 had no coherent, grade-by-grade curriculum. Thus, my son’s third-grade teacher decided on his own to devote months of classroom time to a project on Japanese culture, which included building a Japanese garden. Each day, when my son came home from school, I asked him what he had learned in math. Each day, he happily said the same thing: “We are building the Japanese garden.” My wife and I expressed our concern to the teacher about the lack of direct instruction of mathematical procedures, but he reassured us that constructing the Japanese garden required “real-life” math skills and that there was nothing to worry about. But I worried a lot, and even more so when my son moved up to fourth grade. His new teacher assigned even more “real-life” math problems, including one that asked students to calculate how many Arawaks were killed by Christopher Columbus in 1492 during his conquest of Hispaniola.

Early Questions to Nelson Mandela

Additional Titles

THE NERVE OF  NELSON MANDELA


Emanuel McLittle
September 19, 2002
NewsWithViews.com

All men are not created equal. There is but one single explanation for the 6,000 years of strife, the spilling of an ocean of blood, the sacrifice of light years of progress, and the basis for the current global power struggle. All of this is the result of at least two unalterably opposing types of souls, one vicious and animal like, the other enlightened and human, fighting. Both are wrapped in an immortal struggle to dominate one planet.

The goal of any confidence game is to create a sense of doubt about the obvious. Sociopaths, the leaders of more than three billion of the earth's people, operate through the veins of nations, its political structure. But the swindling of retirees out of their savings, or the smooth tongue needed to motivate others to commit immoral or illegal acts is child's play compared to the international drama currently being acted out on the world stage. Let there be no doubt, the draw stings that open and close the intermission curtain, the lighting to control perception (the media), the actors whose lies boggle the mind, all hang from a ventriloquist's string. They want to fool us all.

Even when the plot is hidden, the international players reveal enough for us to figure out the motive, as well as who is pulling their strings. This said, let us focus on Nelson Mandela, who recently emerged from retirement, at 85-years-old, to play a pivotal role in yet another scrimmage between the two great sides. Today the stage is set in the Middle East. The names are only coincidental. In every age there was an American viewpoint and an Iraqi viewpoint, with every man and woman in the world on one side or the other.

Mandela's job is to use his reputation as a persecuted black man, freed from a dungeon in the dessert, in 1990. His very presence impugns a conviction. White people, all white people, locked him away for 26 years of his life. He was branded a hero for all the dark people of the world for opposing white domination.

International brokers, his soul brothers in "high places," took control of Africa's wealthiest nation, placed a living martyr on its throne to reign over an idea far beyond the borders of South Africa. People of color, in this case, the Iraqis, are said to be the perpetual victims, Mandela implies, of nation-thieves, white, western Christians out to rule the world, a desire of their own hearts.

Mandela was strategic. South Africa was merely the staging ground for the false guilt used all around the world, for various scrimmages. Mandela's impact on the rest of the world is psychological and works like a silent weapon. When Mandela speaks, as he did recently, when he accused, "America of introducing chaos in international affairs," it is a strategic chess move. With little to no experience in politics, except the killing of whites and rival Zulu tribesmen, Mandela has no legitimate claim to greatness. There are no intelligent papers penned by Mandela. Others wrote all the speeches he delivered. His thoughts belong to others. He solved none of South Africa's internal problems. He is of average intelligence and has no money other then what was given to him for his role in South Africa's fall. So, how did he become a hero?

Mandela is called one of the world's "tallest" statesmen even before he emerged from his prison cell. Fellow Marxists around the world who created Mandela now want him to use his racial capital

Educational Changes

How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

BY JOSHUA DAVIS10.15.136:30 AM

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/

You can read a version of this story in Spanish here. Pueden leer una versión de esta historia en español aquí.

These students in Matamoros, Mexico, didn’t have reliable Internet access, steady electricity, or much hope—until a radical new teaching method unlocked their potential.  Peter Yang

José Urbina López Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point in the war on drugs. There are regular shoot-outs, and it’s not uncommon for locals to find bodies scattered in the street in the morning. To get to the school, students walk along a white dirt road that parallels a fetid canal. On a recent morning there was a 1940s-era tractor, a decaying boat in a ditch, and a herd of goats nibbling gray strands of grass. A cinder-block barrier separates the school from a wasteland—the far end of which is a mound of trash that grew so big, it was finally closed down. On most days, a rotten smell drifts through the cement-walled classrooms. Some people here call the school un lugar de castigo—“a place of punishment.”

For 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno, it was a bright spot. More than 25 years ago, her family moved to the border from central Mexico in search of a better life. Instead, they got stuck living beside the dump. Her father spent all day scavenging for scrap, digging for pieces of aluminum, glass, and plastic in the muck. Recently, he had developed nosebleeds, but he didn’t want Paloma to worry. She was his little angel—the youngest of eight children.

After school, Paloma would come home and sit with her father in the main room of their cement-and-wood home. Her father was a weather-beaten, gaunt man who always wore a cowboy hat. Paloma would recite the day’s lessons for him in her crisp uniform—gray polo, blue-and-white skirt—and try to cheer him up. She had long black hair, a high forehead, and a thoughtful, measured way of talking. School had never been challenging for her. She sat in rows with the other students while teachers told the kids what they needed to know. It wasn’t hard to repeat it back, and she got good grades without thinking too much.

self feeding victimization

Because Lying and Resenting is What Angels Do

http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2013/12/because-lying-and-resenting-is-what-angels-do.html#more

Many moons ago, in a post on classroom radicalism and the grooming of students, I wrote, 

The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of leftist academics Grover Furr and Rhonda Garelick, has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism - and in order to justify funding, influence and status - great leaps of imagination or paranoia may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t. As mainstream society becomes less fixated by race, gender, sexuality, etc., so peddlers of grievance and victimhood must search out - or invent - something to oppose. Overstatement and escalation are all but inevitable.

This last point was illustrated with the ‘scholarship’ of Barbara Barnett, a graduate of Duke’s infamous humanities department, who claimed that college campuses have a rate of rape and violent sexual assault almost 1000 times higher than any credible calculation. Other, equally bizarre examples of activist ‘scholarship’ can be found in the archives, starting with this gem. You can imagine my dismay on discovering that my thoughts were not at all original, as Jeff Goldstein had demonstrated three years earlier: 

An obvious problem with the grievance aspect of identity politics is that the grievance needs to be perpetually maintained in order to justify the identity aspect of the politics. And in an era of academic specialisation wherein just about every individual identity group has its own set of researchers and theoretical champions - as well as a widely accepted generic narrative of grievance - the observation that continued relevance (which translates into political power) is contingent upon the nursing and care of the grievance is something that too often goes unexamined by a society that, at base, really does wish to understand and fix the problems and frustrations expressed by individual identity groups.

That nursing of grievance – from hoax hate crimes to hallucinated racism - is a subject that’s cropped up here many times since. It’s a trend that’s becoming increasingly surreal. As, for instance, when Kerri Dunn, a psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College, slashed her own tyres and defaced her own car with abusive and racist messages, before walking over to puzzled onlookers and asking if they’d seen who was responsible. Despite being witnessed vandalising her own vehicle, Dunn protested her victimhood to faculty and police, citing a “crisis of hate” on campus, while students held rallies for “tolerance and diversity.”

With an eye to the latest such fabrication, involving an imaginative lesbian waitress named Dayna Morales, Daniel Greenfield takes it from there: 

An identity defined in terms of victimhood needs fresh injections of oppression to sustain its existence. Those African-Americans who define “blackness” not in terms of positive values but in terms of negative values, need white racism, the real thing or the fake one, to remind them of who they are. And the same holds true for other minorities who define themselves not by their culture or values, but by their resentments…  

The left’s need for victimisation means that increasing levels of tolerance actually lead to escalating confrontations with these manufacturers of intolerance. The assertion that all white people are innately racist because of their privilege is one such response to increasing tolerance. By claiming that whiteness itself is racist, the left gets back to political identity, rather than actual discrimination, as the source of conflict, and redefines even the most tolerant university multicultural spaces as racist.

The manufacturers of intolerance, whether they’re tenured academics like Ward Churchill, professional politicians like Barack Obama or angry waitresses like Dayna Morales, respond to tolerance with provocations. Their goal is to elicit evidence of intolerance to sustain their political identity. The more tolerance they encounter, the more they escalate their provocations. Their goal is not a tolerant society. It’s not a multiracial society or a post-racial society. It is a society perpetually at war over identity politics. That conflict is what gives them power.

We’ve seen the kinds of personalities to whom that endless psychodrama, and browbeating and attention, typically appeals. And for whompassive-aggression is both a lifestyle and matter of expertise. Habitual unrealism and opportunist dishonesty are apparently a small price to pay for being professionally aggrieved and therefore interesting, if only as a cartoon, a parody of a person. And even if the basis for that grievance is absurdly exaggerated or didn’t actually occur.

It’s no coincidence that these dramas usually originate in and around the clown quarter of academia, where the left holds court, and where pretentious victimhood is encouraged as a credential. Given the scrupulously PC environment of the typical campus, this creates a big problem for enthusiasts of identity politics and grievance leverage. There won’t be nearly enough actual racism or misogyny or homophobia to justify the inflated rhetoric and pre-booked outrage, on which so many egos and careers depend. And so what’s a warrior for “social justice” to do? The inflated rhetoric isn’t going away – for many it’s now the standard rhetoric, and its users can get quite upset if you dare to question them. And so liberties have to be taken – whether by denouncing grammatical correction as a racist “micro-aggression” or slashing your own tyres and blaming someone in your class. It’s a lot to ask, I know. But for heroes – for warriors – it’s the path to utopia. A world in which everyone is tolerant. And WrongThought™ has been scolded out of existence. 

Via the invaluable Protein Wisdom. 

What are Man's abilities?

Righteous rant seen on a trades forum-;-

“I’m so tired of complacent witlings who smirk about their inability to un-stop a drain, flip a breaker, or change oil in a car I could puke. Like their incompetence makes them superior somehow.

Restore American ingenuity.

I got the slogan: “Yes we can” but it refers to a commitment to greater understanding and capability of every America.

Ever read “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long” by Robert A Heinlein? Here’s one I’ve always liked: 

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

Another quote  “Never confuse wishful thinking with hard fact. Facts you don’t like are still facts. Facts you do like may not be facts at all.”

Anglosphere laws and thinking

By 

DANIEL HANNAN

Nov. 15, 2013 6:17 p.m. ET

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303289904579195922823363280

Asked, early in his presidency, whether he believed in American exceptionalism, Barack Obama gave a telling reply. "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

The first part of that answer is fascinating (we'll come back to the Greeks in a bit). Most Brits do indeed believe in British exceptionalism. But here's the thing: They define it in almost exactly the same way that Americans do. British exceptionalism, like its American cousin, has traditionally been held to reside in a series of values and institutions: personal liberty, free contract, jury trials, uncensored newspapers, regular elections, habeas corpus, open competition, secure property, religious pluralism.

The conceit of our era is to assume that these ideals are somehow the natural condition of an advanced society—that all nations will get around to them once they become rich enough and educated enough. In fact, these ideals were developed overwhelmingly in the language in which you are reading these words. You don't have to go back very far to find a time when freedom under the law was more or less confined to the Anglosphere: the community of English-speaking democracies.

Enlarge Image

Judges leave a service to mark the beginning of the legal year in England and Wales at Westminster Abbey in London on Oct. 1. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

In August 1941, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met on the deck of HMS Prince of Wales off Newfoundland, no one believed that there was anything inevitable about the triumph of what the Nazis and Communists both called "decadent Anglo-Saxon capitalism." They called it "decadent" for a reason. Across the Eurasian landmass, freedom and democracy had retreated before authoritarianism, then thought to be the coming force. Though a small number of European countries had had their parliamentary systems overthrown by invaders, many more had turned to autocracy on their own, without needing to be occupied: Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain.

Churchill, of all people, knew that the affinity between the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world rested on more...   right through to an interesting point of which way India may go politically 

Crime Measures

1. David Garrett (4,494) Says:
   November 25th, 2013 at 3:30 pm
   Weihana: I will write very slowly … just for you…Doing it in point form may make it even easier to follow:
   1. In the 1980′s the US was a very violent country, especially some of the larger cities.
   2. At that time many states – including California – were still experimenting with different regimes which met the “criminogenic needs” (I am not making that phrase up) of – say – hispanic and black offenders. They werent working, just as Kim Workman’s famous He Ara Hou programme wasn’t working here.
   3. In the early 90′s the American population got pissed off with ever increasing violence, and did a 180 degree U turn on penal policy. Most states adopted some kind of “sentence enhancement” policies, of which “three strikes” is a variant. New York hit the problem at both ends, with more comprehensive policing and “sentence enhancement” for repeat offenders. New York State got the biggest reductions of all.
   4. Crime generally, and violent crime in particular, dropped like a stone. Homicides went from 2500 odd annually in New York City to about 650. Violent crime in California dropped by 60% from 1994 to 2000.
   5. Left wing academics across the US – and around the world – adopted what the late Dennis Dutton described as “a feverish search for the ‘real reason’ crime had dropped so fast and so much. Any reason would do, so long as it wasnt something as simple as more punitive policies”. Because if you are a pointy head criminologist, it could not possibly be that.
   6. So now, you can take your pick from a whole heap of theories including more readily available abortions from 1972, and removing lead from petrol (I am not making that up). Or you can accept that removing the 20% who do 80% of the crime from society for 25 years or more has made American society very much safer than it was.
   There you go…I hope you can follow that.
2. Alan (689) Says: 
   November 25th, 2013 at 3:20 pm
   
   I suspect that much of the drop in the murder rate can be attributed to vastly improved A&E departments and better provisioned and crewed ambulances. People that would have been murdered in the past are not dying.
3. David Garrett (4,494) Says: 
   November 25th, 2013 at 3:35 pm
   
   Alan: You are quite right. The “trauma medicine factor” is responsible according to some pundits for a 30% or more drop in homicides. Put simply, if you get stabbed and lose a lot of blood, you are much less likely to die now that you were 20 years ago – so long as you get medical help quickly.

Teaching What to Who ? ?

Sex education may confuse 5-year-olds

JANE BOWRON

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/9436954/Sex-education-may-confuse-5-year-olds

OPINION: Why a child of such a very young age has to become acquainted with a condom beats me.

I remember clearly the day JFK was shot because I was the first in the family to hear of it, having overheard the shocking news on a radio news bulletin.

Full of the kind of self-importance that comes when a small child knows something that others don't, I proudly announced the tragic news to my parents who looked at each other and rolled their eyes before admonishing me for making things up.

Shortly afterwards when my brother confirmed that indeed the American president had been assassinated, I was deeply miffed that a sibling's word would be taken over mine and waited in vain for a parental apology.

I was remembering this while wondering what year 1 and year 2 children would make of being told the cold or hot hard facts of life.

Five North Island schools are now bravely rolling out a sex education policy apparently tailor-made to be absorbed by ankle-biters as young as 5 years old.

In a TV news item, teacher and sexuality educator Kathryn Heape beamingly told a reporter about the policy and how they: "Talk about how the baby grows in the uterus, and talk about how it's the penis' job to deliver the sperm to the egg through the vagina".

Good grief, if that isn't hard enough to comprehend for a 5-year-old, the notion that the penis actually has a job to perform, to, as it were, put on a suit and tie and march off to work to impregnate an eagerly awaiting egg, is both grand and comic.

The children are also shown what a condom looks like, which infers the nippers are also told that the penis' job of impregnating an egg is completely redundant most of the time, that the penis is for most of its life a work-shy ergophobe who goes to extraordinary lengths to shirk the job description of a sperm egg collision while still enjoying the fringe benefits of horsing around in the happy hunting grounds of the vagina.

Why a child of such a very young age has to become acquainted with a condom beats me. I tend to agree with the sobbing mother also interviewed in the same TV item who, along with other parents at her children's school, successfully campaigned against the policy's introduction. The notion of protection with a capital P seems to have been hijacked by earnest sex educators trying to prevent worst-case scenarios at the cost of a childhood, which by its definition should be allowed a period of grace before signs of biology kick in.

I strongly suspect the story of reproduction and explanation of sexual activity would go way over most small children's heads.

They would be like the judge in a trial who once told the famous orator F E Smith: "I have listened to you for over an hour and I'm none the wiser".

To which Smith condescendingly replied: "None the wiser, perhaps my Lord, but certainly better informed."

- © Fairfax NZ News

Looking after your friends ??

www.foxnews.com/world/2013/11/22/hero-pakistani-doc-who-helped-get-bin-laden-hit-with-dubious-murder-charge/#comments

I think the USA now does this deliberately so that others will not help them, as there seems to be a real death split by the upper elite that are on another wavelength altogether.
Another one deliberately thrown under the bus to their death ! ! by Leon Panetta.
Just who will be next and is so easily expendable.

Shakil Afridi, the hero Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA pinpoint Usama bin Laden's compound ahead of the Navy SEAL raid that killed the Al Qaeda leader, has been charged with murder -- for trying to save a little boy stricken with appendicitis six years ago, according to his attorney.

The bizarre charge comes as international pressure mounts on Pakistan to free Afridi, who was sentenced last year to 33 years in prison for "conspiring against the state," a sanction western observers believe was a pretext to punish him for helping the U.S. Afridi executed a vaccination ruse that helped establish bin Laden's presence in an Abbottabad compound, a development seen as embarrassing for Pakistan, which claimed not to know the world's most wanted man was living openly a stone's throw away from a military complex. 

Attorney Samiullah Afridi said Friday that Shakil Afridi was charged with murder in the case of the unnamed boy, who after the doctor operated on him n 2007 in Pakistan's Khyber tribal area. The boy's mother filed a complaint against the doctor, saying he was not authorized to carry out the surgery because he was a physician, not a surgeon, according to The Associated Press.

The lawyer said the case had no merit because too much time had passed. But supporters believe that the murder charge could keep Afridi imprisoned even if a retrial ordered in August of his conspiracy charge results in an acquittal.

Afridi is fighting the conspiracy charge from prison, but has repeatedly been denied the right to see his lawyer or even attend court proceedings. His sentence was overturned in August and a retrial ordered.

Afridi, who professed his love for America in an exclusive interview with FoxNews.com last year, was nabbed in the days following the dramatic Navy SEAL raid in 2011. A government-commissioned report, supposedly independent from the Pakistani leadership and likened to the U.S.'s own 9/11 Commission Report, blamed the U.S. for Afridi's capture and imprisonment.

The report, ordered to get to the bottom of how bin Laden had lived freely in the country for so long and how the U.S. could conduct a raid on its sovereign territory, blamed former Secretary of Defense and ex-CIA Director Leon Panetta for publicly acknowledging Afridi's role in the ruse. By going public with his participation, the report claimed, any chance that Pakistani authorities could help him get out of the country vanished.