Neocon extraordinaire Norman Podhoretz, who currently works as Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy advisor, is engaging in some wild speculation today regarding the new National Intelligence Estimate report on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Writing at Commentary Magazine, he suggests that the US intelligence community may be gaming its analysis on Iran to undercut Bush’s march to war. But I entertain an even
Read moreAs noted yesterday, a new national intelligence report has caught the Bush White House in yet another round of warmongering lies. No real surprise there. The revelation elicited a range of replies from a variety of predictably interested parties. John Edwards opted for flat honesty: The new National Intelligence Estimate shows that George Bush and Dick Cheney’s rush to war
Read moreHi. I’m Sam Smith, and I’m running for president. Contrary to what some “reformers” seem to believe, the laws of economics apply to teaching. An extremely talented teaching candidate who’s bright enough to earn $80,000 in another field isn’t likely to settle for $25,000 to teach, especially when current policies have turned the job into a thankless slog. There are
Read moreA new US intelligence report sheds significant light on the Bush administration’s duplicity regarding Iran’s alleged nuclear threat. Iran Halted Nuclear Bomb Program in 2003, U.S. Spy Agencies Say By Jeff Bliss and Ken Fireman Dec. 3 (Bloomberg) — Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and probably hadn’t restarted it as of mid-2007, according to a new report
Read moreSo, Planet of the Apes wasn’t so far-fetched, after all? Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in two tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won. That challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that “humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions,” said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University. (Story.) Mercifully, Matsuzawa wasn’t
Read moreAt present we have a public education model built on a lot of obsolete 19th Century assumptions about organization and pedagogy. In a sense, we’re trying to pound the square peg of student needs into the round hole of bureaucratic entitlement and the agrarian and industrial impulses that shaped it. This stops the day I take office. Instead, we will
Read moreSun rises in east. Dog bites man. Mike Tyson gets arrested. Bowl Championship Series fucked again. Any other stunning, never-saw-that-coming headlines I need to include here? Once again the BS BCS, the NCAA’s laughable insult to the very concepts of competition and moral decency, has failed, and this time they’ve simply outdone themselves. They finally managed to get LSU, a
Read moreWelcome back my friends, to the show that never ends. Or maybe it just seems that way. Today’s episode of SVR owes entirely to the mad genius of our friend Mike Smith (he of Fiction 8 infamy), who has way too much spare time on his hands. Said spare time is apparently spent scouring the frontiers of YouTube for videos
Read moreEvel Knievel is dead. CLEARWATER, Fla. — Evel Knievel, the hard-living motorcycle daredevil whose jumps over Greyhound buses, live sharks and Idaho’s Snake River Canyon made him an international icon in the 1970s, died Friday. He was 69. (Story.) He was the Elvis of stuntmen, and for those of you too young to remember, he was the real deal.
Read moreFirst off, let’s not shed any tears for Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher sentenced to 15 days in a Sudanese prison for naming a teddy bear “Mohammed.” Any woman who chooses to go live in a nation with Sharia Law, where you can be jailed for allowing yourself to be raped, deserves no sympathy. More interesting to me are the
Read morePut simply, education is the single most critical issue we face. Every dollar (wisely) spent today on teaching and learning is an investment in our future. While there’s no magic remedy for all our ills, education comes closest to being a panacea, because when you educate, you’re crafting the minds that will solve all other challenges. For example: a dollar
Read moreYay! Read Cliff Schecter’s take here.
Read moreHi. I’m Sam Smith, and I’d like your vote. In January I launched Dr. Slammy in 2008, my doomed campaign for president. Then a few months later, forgetting that there are only 24 hours in a day, I got myself embroiled in this Scholars & Rogues project. Something had to give, and as a result I let the DS08 initiative
Read moreLet’s play a little game, just for fun. You have a time machine, a magic wand, a genie or a fairy godmother. And you can go back to any one moment in history to experience an event or perhaps meet a famous (or not so famous) person. Whatever. It has to be selfish – it can’t be about changing history
Read moreFirst Oprah endorses Obama. Now Barbra is jumping the Hillary train. Great. Just feckin’ great. If we can get Britney on the stump for Edwards my life will be complete.
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