Call for signatures

The man Think Progress refers to as the first democratically elected leader of a 100% Muslim country, President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, has been deposed at gunpoint in a military coup, according to the Guardian, by supporters of the longtime dictator Maumoon Gayoom. Nasheed, in addition to his importance for the development of democracy in the Indian Ocean region, is also remarkable for his seriousness and effectiveness in alerting the world to the dangers of global warning; one of the lighter moments in that career is when he held an underwater cabinet meeting, above, in 2009 to call attention to where his country is going to be if we cannot do something about the carbon-caused changes in the world climate (the Maldives is at its highest only a couple of meters above sea level).

ThinkProgress notes that

Global climate grassroots organization 350.org has established an urgent petition to ask the international community to help ensure Nasheed’s safety.

so I am passing that on. Please have a look. 

Left behind—but not quite as far as it was

I've been spending a lot of time on obnoxious or wicked Israelis, and it's only fair to note that there is more going on than that, including one of the great socialist organizations of history, the Histadrut labor federation, roaring back today with a general strike against the government habit of hiring low-wage contract workers from the Israeli equivalent of temp agencies instead of union members. Interestingly enough, the government is more right-wing than the private employers' organization, the Coordinating Bureau of Economic Organizations,  which has already done a deal with the federation.

Fourth meeting of the Hapoel Hatzair movement, about 1909. David Ben Gurion is possibly in this photo, first at the left in the second row from the bottom. From Labor Zionism at MidEastWeb.org.

This follows up on the federation's decision, after days of agonizing back and forth, to join last summer's vibrant protests against housing conditions— [jump]

Oh, one other thing—money really does help!

We've just been talking about it, right?

According to a report issued Friday by the Bruce Baker for the Albert Shanker Institute, "Revisiting The Age-Old Question: Does Money Matter In Education?" (h/t Huffington Post)

Does money matter? Yes. On average, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved or higher student outcomes. In some studies, the size of this effect is larger than in others and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than others. Clearly, there are other factors that may moderate the influence of funding on student outcomes, such as how that money is spent – in other words, money must be spent wisely to yield benefits. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters.

Do schooling resources that cost money matter? Yes. Schooling resources which cost money, including class size reduction or higher teacher salaries, are positively associated with student outcomes. Again, in some cases, those effects are larger than others and there is also variation by student population and other contextual variables. On the whole, however, the things that cost money benefit students, and there is scarce evidence that there are more cost-effective alternatives.

Do state school finance reforms matter? Yes. Sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes. While money alone may not be the answer, more equitable and adequate allocation of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving the equity and adequacy of outcomes. The available evidence suggests that appropriate combinations of more adequate funding with more accountability for its use may be most promising.

Read up on the evidence yourself, and pass it on.

Crazy kind of loving there...

Segregation Map of Kansas City, Missouri, Census Year 2000, by the photographer Eric Fischer; each dot represents 25 people, color-coded by race: pink is White, blue is Black, orange is Hispanic and Latino, and green is Asian.

Somebody at Kos posted a discussion of a Very Disturbing Report on Education today, produced by the Cato Institute and proving or purporting to prove that increased school funding doesn't help to improve educational outcomes. Oh, dear, I thought, and took a look at the report itself—Money and School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment by one Paul Ciotti—to see if I could find some holes in its methodology.

Well, I didn't need to worry myself about that in particular, since it turns out that the thing was published in 1998, that's 14 years ago, and actual scholars have had time to identify all the holes already. And have done so, too.

Ciotti's report is the story of the lawsuit filed in 1977 by the Kansas City Board [jump]

Don't know whether she's Komen or going

Cocktail Cow, by Alan Hayball

Updated 2/7/2012

Just in case you've been wondering about whether the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation lost that kerfuffle or not, it seems they are now advertising for a Director of Public Policy. But don't they—you ask—already have a Vice President for Public Policy, and is that person not the remarkable Karen Handel, erstwhile losing Tea Party candidate for the governorship of Georgia, and last heard of as a key figure in turning the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation into the Ill-Matched Losers in a Recklessly Chosen Battle against Planned Parenthood Foundation (IMLRCBPPF)?

Well, Jezebel (h/t TBogg) thinks that the Director will be needed because the Vice President is going to be going away for a long while, hoping to spend time no doubt with her (unplanned) family, or, to put it in perhaps more familiar language, she is getting the sack (plus, as TBogg notes, severance package and non-disclosure agreement).

I said way back on Friday (over at Kos, not here) that SGK was slow-walking in an effort—doomed to failure—to suggest that they had not in fact lost anything at all, but was anybody listening?

The fact, I'm convinced, is that a tide is really turning, that people are beginning to recognize rightism as an infection that can be treated, not just an aspect of the way things are, and

Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on Mount Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to their husbands, "Bring something to drink."

The Lord God has sworn by his holiness: The time is surely coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks. (Amos 4:1-2)

Update
Yup, she's gone. But declines a severance package! Some have suggested it was the possibility of  non-disclosure agreement she was worried about. Suppose she's already got a book deal from Regnery? 

Modern cows of Bashan (Golan Heights), not yet taken away. Photo from Quackenblog.

A fetal blow

Soonergrunt at Balloon Juice points out an organization that gets upwards of $3 billion a year from the US government, even though it directly pays for upwards of 20,000 abortions a year: the State of Israel (through their way-more-socialist-than-Obama health care system).

So why is it Republicans never complain about that appropriation? They don't care about murdering blastocycsts if the blastocysts are Jewish?

By the way, in Iran, working with a Sharia tradition according to which the "ensoulment" of the fetus takes place around weeks 16 to 18 of pregnancy, abortion beginning with the 19th week is considered as the killing of a live human being and therefore a "great sin and crime"; before that point, it is legal to perform an abortion if a panel of three specialist physicians certifies that the mother's life depends on it. This is a considerable liberalization, under the Islamic Republic, of the law as it existed under the Shah, when abortion was simply illegal in all cases; and it was further liberalized in 2005 when certain fetal abnormalities were added to the list of conditions under which early-term abortion can be allowed.

Way too liberal for some Americans, though I suppose it would work pretty well in many Midwestern states, as long as you kept the Sharia part quiet.

Die Frau ohne Schatten, from act 1, scene 1, the Empress and the Nurse; the Falcon, uncredited by this YouTubist, is Rachel Frenkel.

More Rough Beast

Photograph by Elisa Rojas C. From LuxLikeVitriol, a collection of poems by Bogdan Ciochinaru.

Yesterday's reports on General Dempsey's warning to the Israeli government on any preemptive attack on Iran may have an echo in the IDF senior officer cohort, according to a new report from the UK Independent:

Almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel's military and security establishment [jump]

Observers' paradox

Schrödinger's Cat. By Draguunthor at DeviantArt.

The tempest over the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation massacre as it unfolded Thursday and Friday put me in mind of a problem on a blogospheric scale that I have meant to address for some time, the Heisenbergian way the Internet has of dealing with uncertainty—you can perceive the velocity of a story as it travels through the Tubes or its position, but not both at the same time, and the aspect you choose has an effect on what the story actually is.

The news that SGK had reversed its decision to withdraw funding for breast examinations [jump]

Occupy Sanity

Occupy Sanity, by Davidhg, on Flickr.

From The Troubador at Daily Kos, who adds:

Words fail.

However, organizations like Occupy Our Homes aren't failing. Every day people in the Occupy movement are fighting big banks to keep families in this country from being foreclosed upon. Fighting to keep another person from being homeless, and from another housing unit becoming vacant. Fighting to change the narrative, to make this national blight more visible, more known.

And that's what spreading the above image can do. Make this injustice more known or understood in a way the mind-numbing statistics cannot, perhaps inspiring others to get up and do something with this newly-understood knowledge.

What Rough Beast watch

From F.A. MacKenzie, "The War in the Caucasus"

Last time we ran across General Martin Dempsey of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was emerging from talks with Israeli leaders in unusually uncommunicative mood, with no communiqués and no chitchat with the hungry waiting press, last 20 January.

Even more remarkable, no leak about what he said to the Israelis has appeared in either U.S. or Israeli news media, indicating that both sides have regarded what Dempsey said as extremely sensitive. 

[jump]

What are they afraid of, exactly?

Found art from Blogger of the Bride.

 The New Jersey state legislature is certainly more courageous than their truculent governor Christopher Christie, in bringing forward a marriage equality bill favored by only 52% of the population (Christie wants to submit it to popular referendum, apparently so nobody can say he had anything to do with it),  but why do they have to call it the "Marriage Equality and Religious Exemption Act"? Because the exemption, apparently, is as important to our civil rights as the bill itself:

The bill includes a religious exemption stating that no member of the clergy of any religion authorized to solemnize marriage and no religious society, institution or organization in this state shall be required to solemnize any marriage in violation of the free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

It also includes another religious exemption stating that no religious society, institution or organization in this state serving a particular faith or denomination shall be compelled to provide space, services, advantages, goods or privileges related to the solemnization, celebration or promotion of marriage if such solemnization, celebration or promotion of marriage is in violation of the beliefs of such religious society, institution or organization.

Can't you just see the horror of life without these protections? Leather-clad Chad and Todd grabbing some helpless Baptist minister by the elbows, grinning sadistically, while a police officer mutters, eyes downcast, "Sorry Reverend, you have to do it—it's the law."

Race for the cure? Race for the exit!

The rule announced by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation requiring them to cut off funding to any organization that is under investigation, which applies to, out of the 2000 organizations they support, exactly one (Planned Parenthood) made me think of Alice:

At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his note-book, cackled out 'Silence!' and read out from his book, 'Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.'
Everybody looked at Alice.
'I'm not a mile high,' said Alice.
'You are,' said the King.
'Nearly two miles high,' added the Queen.
'Well, I shan't go, at any rate,' said Alice: 'besides, that's not a regular rule: you invented it just now.'
'It's the oldest rule in the book,' said the King.
'Then it ought to be Number One,' said Alice.
The King turned pale, and shut his note-book hastily.

That's all I wanted to say, except for the admonition that you should not truck with the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation (I always thought that was a stupidly formulated name, however worthy a person Susan G. Komen herself may have been) until they have displayed sincere contrition.

Shining Eyes and White Wrists. (Above) (1887-1893) Wu Youru. Ink on Paper. Collection of the Shanghai History Museum. From Baartquake. Most Shanghai ladies of the late 19th century were not so liberated.

Airborne elephant watch forward

And this one from Turkey, where as you know the dread Islamists have been in power for ten years now, in the form of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or AKP),  created out of the remnants of the Virtue Party and the Motherland Party. That is, they don't call themselves Islamist (unlike the Virtue element as it was before), but other people are glad to call them

"'Islamic,' 'Islamist,' 'mildly Islamist,' 'Islamic-oriented,' 'Islamic-leaning,' 'Islamic-based' or 'with an Islamic agenda,' and similar language is being used. These characterizations do not reflect the truth, and they sadden us,"

as former education minister Hüseyin Çelik remarked.

So how do they display their dread Islamic credentials? Are they banning alcohol?* Forcing women into purdah?

I'm not saying they're not oppressed, but they're not exactly veiled...

Chopping some of those thieves' hands off? Not exactly. Apparently [jump]

*Are you kidding? Turkey exported $68.4 million in beer alone in 2010—40% of it to Islam-ridden Iraq!

Airborne elephant watch

Google fetched this from someplace unsafe-looking called wn.com. Apologies for not crediting anybody. Forellenhof is the name of any number of hotels where Deutsch wird gesprochen and I suppose you can order trout—Forelle—from the Gasthof menu.

Yes, it's time to think once again about one of those news stories Thomas Friedman would not be able to imagine even in his most fevered vegetably-induced trance state: another prankish pachyderm sighted among the clouds, this time back in Tunisia, where they say elephant-gliding first got its start.

You can ignore the Times's Friedmanesque headline—"Tunisia Faces a Balancing Act of Democracy and Religion", like Religion, weighing in at 500 pounds, in this corner, and in the other, fresh from a championship bout in little Myanmar, you get the picture—and go straight to the story.

It turns out that the democracy and the religion are mostly struggling "ach! in einer Brust", in the same breast, and not really struggling, either, because they're actually fairly comfortable with it, that is a majority of Tunisians so far think of themselves as both little-d democrats and big-M Muslims at the same time and fail (of course they're not smoking whatever Tom is) to see any contradiction. Almost like Baptists, or somebody.

Not that everybody is entirely on board. There are your liberals, as usual, the ones who won the revolution but lost the election; and there are your Salafis, the ones who think that elections are not from God; and they tease each other a lot. The liberals are not listening to me, which is not that much of a surprise, and they're more worried about movie censorship than about breakfast for people who don't know where they're finding lunch, and if they want to start winning elections, they need to think about those priorities; and the Salafis are in my humble etc. kind of creepy. And somebody is really going to get hurt, I'm afraid. But most people won't, and things in general are going to keep chugging along. Try to enjoy it!

 

Abusive language

Wouldn't want these young Memphisites to get the wrong idea about George Washington, would you? From the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

 1. Tennessee Tea Partiers are concerned about the way slavery is presented in local history textbooks:

what's in your kid's textbook may be giving them [sic] a negative opinion about our nation's founding history....  "My biggest concern is that important information is being omitted, which creates a negative light on our Founding Fathers," said Tea Party activist Brian Rieck. (WYCB Television, Bristol, VA; h/t Great Lakes Liberal at Kos)

So they'd like the state legislature to do some editorial work on the texts, just [jump]

Immaculate contraception (addendum)

Just in case it wasn't clear:

If anyone's religious freedom is affected by the rule requiring employers—except for a very narrowly defined class of religious organizations—to include coverage for family planning in their employees' health insurance, it is not America's Catholics, but a much smaller class of people, the CEOs of Catholic hospitals, colleges, and charitable foundations.

I think of them, rightly or wrongly, as America's Catholic bishops; that is, as a relatively small number of elderly and largely virginal men who have never had and will never have a reason to ask their doctors for birth control pills themselves and have extremely little experience of those who have (let alone of a girlfriend missing a period). It is their tender consciences that revolt at the thought of paying for insurance that pays for family planning for others, including Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and nonbelieving employees, not to mention those Catholic employees who defy the papal edict, which is virtually all of those who are or ever have been sexually active women (yesterday I said 99%; today's Times says 98%).

A pompier Temptation of Saint Hilarion, by Dominique Louis Fléréol Papety (1815-1849) from Ze Last Chance Garage du 78.

In New York State since the effective date of the Women's Health and Wellness Act in 2003, every health care plan that covers any prescription drugs must also cover family planning, by law. Catholic Charities sued against the provision and lost every round of appeals, up to the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. Thus it is settled law that such provisions do not offend religious freedom.

Worrying about those tender consciences is 1% thinking; these people are not exactly martyring themselves for a cause. They haven't shut down Catholic Charities yet, or Fordham University, on account of the New York State Women's Health and Wellness Act. Do you know why? Because they don't really care that much. So forget about it.

Immaculate contraception

Speaking of Times columnists, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, the Right Rev. Ross Douthat, is having a terrible time dealing with the horrors dealt out by the Obama administration; this time, the awful prospect of the rules announced last week by HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius for the Affordable Care Act, requiring employers to provide health insurance covering family planning services with no co-pays, including the dreaded "morning-after pill", which some of those Jesuits regard as an extra-sneaky way of getting an abortion. There's an exemption, but oh, my, [jump]

Really, Tom Friedman...

...whose blog, as you know, presents the Times columnist's electrifying insights in all their unspeakably raw grandeur, as they arrive to him before the Times copy editors bleach them out and turn them into something they are intellectually and emotionally equipped to deal with, is celebrating at the Davos conference and one of the aspects of his celebration is a brand new Twitter feed.

Also, don't miss his insider take on Davos, taken while he was "a guest of King Bhumibol’s at the week-long Davos para-party which one gets to by transporter beams."

I'm a non-Tweeter myself (he tweets not, neither does he spin; and yet Solomon in his glory...), and his website is distinctly unfriendly to comments (a clear sign, if you're a doubter, that this is the authentic Tom), so I have been unable to make any contact with him and engage in some of that feisty ferment of idea exchange on subjects such as the flatness vs. fatness of the world, the Airborne Elephant Watch, and so on. And I'm probably his biggest public fan—possibly the only one. And yet he still hasn't blogrolled me! Any of you Twitterholics care to take a stab at finding out why?

Mustache ring. From Paper Airplane Design.

Just a shande

Updated 7/13/2014

So they say whenever Netanyahu gets a divorce, he gets together with the wife and the lawyers and says, "Listen, let's talk without preconditions; I'm the most ethical man in Israel, I'm prepared to make incredible concessions if you negotiate in good faith."

"Okay," says the wife, "no preconditions. So what's your position?"

"Well, I get to keep all the money, and all the houses, and all the stuff."

"What? are you crazy?"

"In the first place, it's my money; and then I have to have all the houses, so I have somewhere to keep the stuff."

"And how come you have to have the stuff?"

"It's a principle of mine."

"And that's not a precondition?"

"Of course not, it's not the same thing at all. You know me, I'm a man of principle and I would never impose preconditions."

"But seriously, if you get everything, what are these incredible concessions you're prepared to make?"

"Are you kidding? We get a divorce, I was going to let you move out and fuck other men!"

I really meant to try to drop the thugs of Likud as a subject for a while, but then I caught this from yesterday's Times: [jump]

It's the principal of the thing

The New York education world is buzzing with the news of a study ostensibly showing that small high schools are better than big ones, carried out by Gordon Berlin and Howard Bloom of a nonprofit firm called MDRC, funded by the Gates Foundation, and "proving" the correctness of the path followed by the Bloomberg administration over the past ten years, of shutting down those awful old failure mills and then filling the buildings with these little boutique schools, the School of Armenian Studies, the Renaissance School for Future Hipsters, the Cupcake Academy, where all the math and science classes are keyed to understanding the life cycle of the cupcake,  and so on.

And does it, actually? There's no telling in any proper sense, [jump]