ConservativeINC

Fine, America’s fourth graders aren’t actually “illiterate” but we are falling behind other countries according to a story from AP. The last time this test was given was in 2001 and since then our scores have stayed flat while others have increased. Now we’re ranked twelfth in the world behind countries like Russia and Hungary. What’s to blame for our lack of improvement?

The story gives a hint: No Child Left Behind. Bush’s brainchild educational reform emphasizes reading more but scores are still just treading water. Personally I think that NCLB is a decent idea but it doesn’t really address the problem head on. If we want to dramatically increase scores then we’re going to have to overhaul the education system with free market reforms. Kids get stuck in failing schools and many teachers don’t care about improving themselves because there is no financial incentive for doing so. A move to vouchers would increase our scores.

Or our scores could be treading water because there has been a massive influx of non-English speaking immigrants. That could be it.

Venezuela has made an intriguing move of their own by all but severing ties with their neighbor, Columbia. After getting the boot from Columbian President Alvaro Uribe from a mediation role between the Columbian government and leftists rebels (FARC), Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez recalled his ambassador to Columbia and said many harsh words about his conservative neighbor.

One question: Why would the Columbians call on Hugo Chavez, the resurgent communist, to help negotiate with leftist rebels in the first place? I understand that Chavez is close to the rebels but shouldn’t that have been more a warning sign then anything else? Columbia is contending that Chavez had unilateral talks with the head of Columbia’s Army, which is a big time no no. Could he have been planning a leftist coup in Columbia? Probably not but the end result is that there is no doubt that he is untrustworthy.

6,000 Sunnis join the fight in Iraq. They’ve joined with the side of democracy because al Qaeda has killed too many of their brethren to be seen as anything but murderous thugs. The Sunnis will provide help with a couple hundred checkpoints and will hopefully stem off the movement of insurgents and terrorists into the oil rich regions of North Iraq. Oh, and the last paragraph of the story mentioned how a bunch of refugees were getting bused into Iraq from Syria. Good news.

Is there good news for our beleaguered markets? No one can be sure and anyone who puts credence into the day-to-day fluctuations of the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a fool. The recent bump in the market is directly attributable to the Fed’s hinting at future rate cuts. But think about it, has the value of Coca Cola increased a couple of percentage points since last weak just because of possible rate cuts? How about any of the other companies? The market is fickle and reading too much into a good day or a bad day is folly.

Bill Clinton on Iraq in 2004:

That’s why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for. So I thought the President had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, “Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process.” You couldn’t responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks. I never really thought he’d [use them]. What I was far more worried about was that he’d sell this stuff or give it away. Same thing I’ve always been worried about North Korea’s nuclear and missile capacity. I don’t expect North Korea to bomb South Korea, because they know it would be the end of their country. But if you can’t feed yourself, the temptation to sell this stuff is overwhelming. So that’s why I thought Bush did the right thing to go back. When you’re the President, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for.

Now he says that he has been against the Iraq War “from the beginning.” To be fair to the former president he was not explicitly for the Iraq War. But he was not against it either. He wasn’t for or against the war and yet here he comes saying he was always against the thing. I don’t see how this helps Hillary at all but I do see how it helps her husband.

He’s in the news again. Everyone thinks he’s such a brilliant speaker and he has a blanket immunity from the media to say whatever he wants and to get away with it. This is just Bill being Bill and he’s going to make sure that his legacy is intact no matter what.

Remember how I said you shouldn’t put too much into the daily fluctuations of the market? You shouldn’t put too much into the yearly fluctuations of the weather either. 2007 is going to be the seventh warmest year on record (reliable records start around 1860) meaning that the world is slightly cooling yet still warm. My question: What’s going to happen when there is significant cooling one year? How about for five years in a row so that there’s a trend?

This story talks about how Bulgarian bears are already hibernating, which is right on track based on historical data. If you want to thank anyone for making sure that the bears got to bed on time then you should probably be thanking America because we were able to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5% last year. Yeah for us!

And finally, a Dutch lawmaker with a death wish has said he’s going to make a ten-minute long movie showing how the Quran has passages in it that are used “by bad people to do bad things.” Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this whole thing was this:

The interior and justice ministers said they were concerned, but believed they had no authority to prevent the lawmaker, Geert Wilders, from screening his film.

When I first read this passage I thought they must have been talking about protecting Mr Wilders but I’m not so sure after reading the whole article a couple of times. I’m now pretty sure now that they are just talking about shutting this guy up because it might offend some people. This is just one of many battles that are being waged, mostly in Europe, between the West and Islam.

These battles mostly do not involve bombs and guns but legalese and sensitivity codes. I like to believe that the vast majority of Muslims want to live in peace in their adopted homelands but I’m not so naive as to think they wouldn’t rather be living under Islamic law with Islamic leaders. Using hate speech codes and bending over backwards to not offend minorities is the surest way to lose all Western identity and this is what is happening in the Netherlands right now.

BigT’s Linkapalooza:
British teacher charged with offending Islam in the Sudan.
Militants march against the teacher.
The bear wasn’t even named after the prophet, but after the kid who suggested the name (who’s doubtlessly named after the prophet himself).
40 lashes.
Was Annapolis a false start?
Musharraf has been honorably discharged.
BigT

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What hath the feminist revolution brought?

In Kenya it has brought wrinkled white women looking for a good time with a young man.

Bethan, 56, lives in southern England on the same street as best friend Allie, 64.

They are on their first holiday to Kenya, a country they say is “just full of big young boys who like us older girls.”

Hard figures are difficult to come by, but local people on the coast estimate that as many as one in five single women visiting from rich countries are in search of sex.

Allie and Bethan — who both declined to give their full names — said they planned to spend a whole month touring Kenya’s palm-fringed beaches. They would do well to avoid the country’s tourism officials.

“It’s not evil,” said Jake Grieves-Cook, chairman of the Kenya Tourist Board, when asked about the practice of older rich women traveling for sex with young Kenyan men.

“But it’s certainly something we frown upon.”

Also, the health risks are stark in a country with an AIDS prevalence of 6.9 percent. Although condom use can only be guessed at, Julia Davidson, an academic at Nottingham University who writes on sex tourism, said that in the course of her research she had met women who shunned condoms — finding them too “businesslike” for their exotic fantasies.

The white beaches of the Indian Ocean coast stretched before the friends as they both walked arm-in-arm with young African men, Allie resting her white haired-head on the shoulder of her companion, a six-foot-four 23-year-old from the Maasai tribe.

He wore new sunglasses he said were a gift from her.

“We both get something we want — where’s the negative?” Allie asked in a bar later, nursing a strong, golden cocktail.

She was still wearing her bikini top, having just pulled on a pair of jeans and a necklace of traditional African beads.

Thank God she’s still wearing that bikini top! I know that these are just words but the mental image… jeez, I’ll just stop there.

First thought, is this really something that is good? For years I’ve seen horrible story after horrible story of wrinkled white guys using poor foreigners just for sex. Heck, even in one of my businesses classes we talked about this (when you take away the sweatshop labor you leave the women with prostitution as the only viable career choice that pays about the same). This type of behavior has always been frowned upon because it is a disgusting reminder of our hated paternalistic past. Yet here come the grandmas doing what they condemned just a couple decades ago.

The story points out that the women observe a little bit of decorum by not sleeping with youngsters but how long does anyone think that will last? Eventually the current crop of public school teachers will get old and wrinkled and no longer be appealing to Western schoolboys. Doubtlessly they’re going to go to post-colonial Africa for some more one-on-one tutoring.

My last thought about this is that it is extremely disturbing and disgusting. Women are suppose to be different then men! I’ve always been told that women are not as sexually base as men are. Women aren’t out hunting for their next naked wrestling partner because of some biochemical reason - well that turns out to be total BS. I also have to blame popular media for this and, quite frankly, male chivalry.

Popular media, outside of movies like the Graduate (which doesn’t warrant all the hype in my opinion), portrays women as anything but predators. Men are always the ones that are cast as the deviants while women protect virtue. But that has slowly changed as something else has changed.

Male chivalry has changed. Thanks to the successes of feminism women are now viewed as fair game in an argumentative sense. If they’ve done something uncouth it’s now OK to rat them out and to put them down. As I now reflect on what has turned out to be faulty information, that women aren’t as sexually animalistic as men, I would have to guess that women have been doing things like this forever. Bedding cheap natives, bedding young pupils, bedding pool boys, bedding everything that can be bedded!

I’m now, if you haven’t noticed, officially jaded about womanhood.

One last thing about horny gram grams. I don’t for a second think this makes them happy. Really, who can be happy knowing that you’re virtue is worth a $5.00 Nike t-shirt? And what happens when they go back to England?

Ewww. I’m done with this topic. Old people everywhere, if you need to get freaky then please don’t call up Reuters. BigT

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Three stories out today about the Arab Peace process:

BigT’s abstract: Palestine’s Abbas doesn’t have a leg to stand on because Hamas has Gaza. Israel’s Olmert doesn’t have a leg to stand on because the Israeli people are deeply divided. The Arab states are going there because Bush said “or else” and Annapolis is pretty this time of the year. A two state solution to Israel v Palestine may happen someday but that “someday” won’t be today, tomorrow, or the next day.

But all of this talk about peace has got me to thinking of ways Hamas could help the peace process out. Seriously.

Abbas and those that support him really don’t like Hamas. The Israelis really don’t like Hamas either. So here’s what Hamas could do to help bring about peace in the Middle East.

Heighten all attacks. That’s right, blow up everything and everyone you can. Blow up Jew and those Muslims who are not devout enough for you. Go into the West Bank and take out that traitorous Abbas’ supporters. Show them who’s boss!

In fact, why not make a really big statement and hit Annapolis where all your traitorous brethren are? Because, after all, you know that the people are with you; the problem has always been the leaders. They use you like pawns to keep their own people happy.

Hamas knows how it works, princes in Saudi Arabia give them money to launch attacks against Israel so that the princes look like big men at home. But the princes really don’t care, they don’t want Palestine to be returned to what it once was.

If Hamas hit the peace conference in Annapolis it would be making a big statement for all Muslims who are subjugated around the world. They will no longer stand for being second class citizens in a world that is rightly theirs!

My point is that if Hamas decided that they have had enough and start attacking everyone who doesn’t fully support them, like al Qaeda in Iraq, things will start to change for the better in the region in the long run. Israel might even get the go ahead to take out Hamas if it guarantees Abbas’ government control over Gaza after their done.

Then, while most certainly a long road still ahead, there would at least be a good chance peace could be reached then. The Arab funders of Hamas would have realized their folly, Abbas’ government would have the power to make a deal, and Israel would have to worry less about terrorists from within Palestine.

Things are going to have to get worse before they get better between Israel and Palestine. I just don’t see Hamas disappearing anytime soon and they’re the biggest obstacle to a lasting peace. With them out of the picture the peace process could move forward. But that isn’t going to happen until many more get behind getting rid of the terrorist organization. Unless Hamas goes hog wild and starts attacking Muslims that sort of support it but not enough for Hamas’ liking I don’t see them disappearing anytime soon.

Peace in the Middle East is not something that many want because they derive their power from strife. BigT

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