I'm sorry, but I've yet to meet one local people who've expressly told me that he/she would like to "erase Israel from the map".
That's how their kids are taught. Ask any of them of the history of Jews in Palestine. To this day the Palestinian Authority refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist.
Don't forget, they hate the Jews so much they were cooperating with Hitler for the Final Solution to their mutual Jewish Problem. This was even before there was a Jewish state, just some settlements. Back then, the British partition plan gave the Jews a tiny portion of what is today Israel. The Jews accepted, the Muslims refused to even recognize them.
They just want the Jews out of the Middle East. I would add "forgetting the Jews were there long before Islam existed" but that's not what is taught to their children.
Yes, in all of this I refer to the Palestinian Muslims. There isn't so much of a problem with the Christians.
Facts are facts, and the Muslims fighting to erase Israel from the map (yes, this is the stated goal of the people you are helping) DO stage propaganda photo shoots using the bodies of children and pass it off as journalism to a world willing to be fooled by it.
They DO purposely shoot rockets into Israeli civilian areas and send their children in to dismantle the missile launchers after firing so no experienced soldiers get killed in the Israeli counter-attacks. Then they take pictures of the children they sent to their deaths for their propaganda machine.
What you are documenting and experiencing is what your Palestinian handlers are allowing you to document and experience. You will go home to pass on the staged propaganda to the rest of the world. You will not be allowed to see what happens.
But that doesn't mean the photos won't remain distorted.
Reuters continually runs distorted photos from the Arab/Israeli conflicts. Sure, they were publicly shamed into ditching one photographer after two extremely public examples of image editing showed, but they continue to be caught using obviously faked, staged and misrepresented photos.
I don't mean just staged by independent photographers. I mean like Green Helmet Guy, who arranges shoots pretty much professionally, using the bodies of dead kids and such as props. Once he's set up, the photographers shoot, Reuters gobbles it up.
The photo"journalists" have basically been part of the propaganda arm of the Palestinians for years.
Israel may have military might and truth behind them, but the Muslims have a much better PR machine, and they're willing to have their own kids killed just to score those PR points. How do you fight a PR war against that?
And finally...what is wrong with spending a lot of money on education?
Nothing at all. The problem is people complaining that we don't spend enough money and that's why our schools suck. Guess what, money's not the reason. Look elsewhere for solutions before asking for more.
You are making a lot of unwarranted assumptions about union members.
Union members may care. The union doesn't. When it comes down to kids vs teachers, their extremely powerful political arm will work to harm the kids. They've even fought to stop incentives for teachers who work hard to get kids to perform well. Can't have that, it would disadvantage the under-performing teachers.
You forget, the crappy teachers are union members too, and they're the ones who most need the union to cover their asses.
So either something about our society systematically keeps black students, particularly boys, at a disadvantage
Yes, they themselves. When you have a family and culture that doesn't value education, then kids will usually perform poorly. This is modern black culture. This isn't the black culture of our grandfathers' time that fought against segregation, where family and work ethic was important. Now it's about gangstas, single moms, welfare and blaming the Man for all your troubles. It's a recipe for disaster.
Of course you'll call me racist for telling the truth. They didn't like Bill Cosby when he said it either. The mostly black audience laughed when Chris Rock joked about a guy coming back from jail being more admired than one coming back from college. Jokes like that are only funny when there's a core truth to them.
My kids' school tore down their jungle gym because the insurance wouldn't cover it due to the possibility of injury litigation. Of course that one goes back to it being the fault of the parents who sue if their kid gets an owie.
Transportation is interesting. That fits in with the issue of a general public transportation system. In Germany at least kids ride the city bus.
Wages though can be extremely good. Initial hiring wages aren't that high, but a senior teacher can be rolling in the money, not even counting the extremely generous pension. Back in the Wisconsin debates, one high school teacher at the protests teacher was making about $90,000 per year in pay and benefits. A fourth-grade teacher was making in the mid 80s.
Of course this varies by state, but IIRC the pay doesn't correspond to performance.
Bloated is when for years salaried non-teaching positions have been consistently growing much faster than actual teaching positions. PC is the feel-good stuff they do, kumbaya cultural rather than actual studies.
It would be supremely stupid for a teachers' union to publicly state such a thing. I know teachers. They are in a union. They care deeply about their students.
It would be, and it was. Teachers may care, but their collective voice as unions doesn't, at least not if it gets in the way of the union.
Albert Shanker, former AFT head, "When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren."
Bob Chanin, former NEA bigwig, said things like academic achievement and better schools are fine, but "When all is said and done NEA and its affiliates must never lose sight of the fact that they are unions and what unions do first and foremost is represent their members."
Union/teachers first, kids second, if at all.
There are socioeconomic factors that determine one's success in education. A primary one is structural racism.
The racism is in the culture to not value learning (emphasis on socio). My kids go to an about half-black school. Some of the best students come from poor black families. However, overall the blacks in the school do the worst. Boys do worse than girls. Asians do the best, and they aren't necessarily any better off financially than the blacks.
In fact, we're near the top for the amount of money we spend per pupil.
The problem is much of that is wasted: bloated administrations, feel-good PC courses that don't help core education, and teachers unions that flat-out admit they don't give a damn about students.
Add to that apathetic parents, and you have a crappy school system that won't get better no matter how much money we pump into it.
Turn a boxer inside out. Instead of having one crankshaft in the middle, have two crankshafts at the ends, instead of piston heads pointing out, they point in. Then for two piston heads that come at each other, put them in the same cylinder tube so the ignition happens between them.
Teabaggers who are running around screaming about the deficit that their fucking heroes spent the last 30 years running up
So much ignorance about the tea party, so many pathetic attempts at juvenile insults ("teabaggers"). You probably don't realize that established big-government, deficit-loving Republicans were the main targets of the Tea Party movement in the 2008 elections. In many instances, the incumbents and fat-cat party favorites did not win the primary nomination.
Those of us who support raising taxes on the wealthy (a majority of Americans, by the way)
A majority? So what you're saying is that a majority would love to use their power as the majority to forcibly take money from the minority.
Social Security (which does not add a single penny to the deficit)
Where is the social security money invested? In government bonds. What does the government do with money from selling bonds? It spends it to run the government. There's no "lock box." When SS outlays exceed income (in the next several years), SS will have to cash in those bonds. The government most likely won't have saved the money to pay of course, so it'll be added to the deficit for that year.
However, the $106K limit on FICA does seem a bit low given what $106K means now vs. then. It should be at least $250K.
In a field test you want a test group that is capable of producing a range of results that may appear in actual use. A group of DHS agents isn't exactly a snapshot of your average group of travelers -- not enough Muslim terrorist types, far too many jackboot Nazi types.
In Congress they would be testing the only "native American criminal class" so results would be highly skewed there too.
If you are indispensible, and the flagship product is about to be released, how about negotiating a chunk of the action instead of more pay? In a public company this could materialize as stock options, not sure about a small private company.
The Westboro crazies think everybody but them is going to the Christian Hell. You have to believe in their very specific definition of the Christian God to get to Heaven. I think ol' Fred even has his own addendum to the Bible that you need to follow.
An atheist is simply without belief in a god or gods. It does not necessarily have to make a statement about their actual existence. Within atheism there is a range: from simple lack of belief (which you call agnostic) to hard denial of the existence of any deities (not just yours, you're not special).
a = without gnosis = knowledge
An agnostic says we cannot know for sure whether there is a deity. It is a philosophical approach: not a statement of belief, but a statement of knowledge. This way there is such a thing as an agnostic theist, somebody who believes but does not claim to know. There is also the agnostic atheist, someone who does not believe because deity cannot be known.
Thus, atheism as a simple lack of belief is a perfectly logical position.
or the more Christian a state is, the more likely they'll support Christian supremacist groups like the BNP or White Pride.
Oh yes, we see the governments of majority Christian nations supporting those groups all the time! You posted the data as authoritative, now you denigrate it because unflattering conclusions can be drawn. You don't get to have it both ways.
The reason American Muslims reject terrorism more than Muslims in a place like Pakistan could more likely be because American Muslims have nearly 100% literacy rate while Pakistan is around 50%.
Or, logically, because they'll suffer backlash.
Rauf didn't call for an abandonment of the first amendment, he said that people shouldn't hide hate speech behind it and pretend its benign.
You don't hide "hate speech" behind the First Amendment. The First Amendment is what guarantees the right to "hate speech." Note the quotes, since that can be defined as "anything I don't like." The UN Muslim voting bloc has been trying to push a "defamation of religions" resolution through the UN for years, the goal being to criminalize criticism of Islam.
Sufism is not a sect, you can be Sunni and Sufi, it's a philosophy that's found all over the Muslim world. Arguably, Pakistan is a sufi country.
Very arguably. Sufism is still a small minority, persecuted in places. The Wahabis even want you dead. It would be good if your view dominated Muslim thought in the world, but it doesn't.
, which is why you see Jordanian Muslims planting flowers at churches or Indonesian Muslim leaders protecting churches of minorities
Funny, your Muslim leader was protecting curches against -- Muslims who had bombed a church! So would you say the number of churches saved by Muslims is greater than the number of churches burned and bombed by Muslims?
The majority of Muslims support religious freedom
Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran and the other countries at the bottom of the religious freedoms list contain the majority of Muslims.
But they do support Henry Ford religious freedom, "You can have any religion you want, as long as it's Islam."
Here's one good link about American Muslims, but you can find similar elsewhere: Pew Research polling on American Muslims
Interesting. The more Muslim a state is, the more likely its people are to support terrorism and Al Qaeda. If they're living in a state where they are a small minority, they are not willing to speak out for violence against that state. It makes sense.
get the distinct impression you're hearing about Rauf from a less-than-objective source. Rauf believes in American freedom of speech and is patriotic,
"I believe that the insulting or mocking of others' religious symbols, icons, prophets, etc. should not fall within the realm of free speech." -- Rauf
Free speech, as long as it doesn't criticize Islam. That's not how we roll in America. He can take that point of view back to Kuwait.
His congregation is sufi; very wonderful and loving people.
You do realize that Sufism is not mainline Islam, right? Not one Islamic state is Sufi. Sufis are persecuted even today in Muslim countries.
It's like the old lawyer joke, the majority make the minority look bad.
Feel free to write when a church is in Mecca, or even when it's legal for infidel tourists to travel there. Or I'll just be happy to hear when religious freedom is protected in most Muslim states.
BTW, don't take any of this as an endorsement of Palin or Bachmann. I can't stand either of them and wouldn't want to vote for them. However, that doesn't I can't recognize the unfair, absolutely biased treatment they've received at the hands of the press.
Palin's out of the running now -- yippie. I hope she's missed her chance forever. But Bachmann's still in. If she gets too high poll numbers I may have to finally register with a party, Republican, in order to vote against her in the primary (and also maybe to vote for Cain). I don't want the choice between her likely incompetence and the proven incompetence of the current office holder, between a religious nutjob and a leftist nutjob.
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That's how their kids are taught. Ask any of them of the history of Jews in Palestine. To this day the Palestinian Authority refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist.
Don't forget, they hate the Jews so much they were cooperating with Hitler for the Final Solution to their mutual Jewish Problem. This was even before there was a Jewish state, just some settlements. Back then, the British partition plan gave the Jews a tiny portion of what is today Israel. The Jews accepted, the Muslims refused to even recognize them.
They just want the Jews out of the Middle East. I would add "forgetting the Jews were there long before Islam existed" but that's not what is taught to their children.
Yes, in all of this I refer to the Palestinian Muslims. There isn't so much of a problem with the Christians.
It doesn't care about your feelings.
Facts are facts, and the Muslims fighting to erase Israel from the map (yes, this is the stated goal of the people you are helping) DO stage propaganda photo shoots using the bodies of children and pass it off as journalism to a world willing to be fooled by it.
They DO purposely shoot rockets into Israeli civilian areas and send their children in to dismantle the missile launchers after firing so no experienced soldiers get killed in the Israeli counter-attacks. Then they take pictures of the children they sent to their deaths for their propaganda machine.
What you are documenting and experiencing is what your Palestinian handlers are allowing you to document and experience. You will go home to pass on the staged propaganda to the rest of the world. You will not be allowed to see what happens.
But Reuters is in the photo business, and Reuters has a solid history of defending and/or ignoring flat-out propaganda disguised as photojournalism.
But that doesn't mean the photos won't remain distorted.
Reuters continually runs distorted photos from the Arab/Israeli conflicts. Sure, they were publicly shamed into ditching one photographer after two extremely public examples of image editing showed, but they continue to be caught using obviously faked, staged and misrepresented photos.
I don't mean just staged by independent photographers. I mean like Green Helmet Guy, who arranges shoots pretty much professionally, using the bodies of dead kids and such as props. Once he's set up, the photographers shoot, Reuters gobbles it up.
It uses the gyroscope to feed data to the camera's image stabilization program.
The photo"journalists" have basically been part of the propaganda arm of the Palestinians for years.
Israel may have military might and truth behind them, but the Muslims have a much better PR machine, and they're willing to have their own kids killed just to score those PR points. How do you fight a PR war against that?
Nothing at all. The problem is people complaining that we don't spend enough money and that's why our schools suck. Guess what, money's not the reason. Look elsewhere for solutions before asking for more.
Union members may care. The union doesn't. When it comes down to kids vs teachers, their extremely powerful political arm will work to harm the kids. They've even fought to stop incentives for teachers who work hard to get kids to perform well. Can't have that, it would disadvantage the under-performing teachers.
You forget, the crappy teachers are union members too, and they're the ones who most need the union to cover their asses.
Yes, they themselves. When you have a family and culture that doesn't value education, then kids will usually perform poorly. This is modern black culture. This isn't the black culture of our grandfathers' time that fought against segregation, where family and work ethic was important. Now it's about gangstas, single moms, welfare and blaming the Man for all your troubles. It's a recipe for disaster.
Of course you'll call me racist for telling the truth. They didn't like Bill Cosby when he said it either. The mostly black audience laughed when Chris Rock joked about a guy coming back from jail being more admired than one coming back from college. Jokes like that are only funny when there's a core truth to them.
It was in the news not long ago. But then it's a fairly common occurrence.
Budget shortfalls hitting teacher staffing, school improvements, etc.
But the growing administration overhead warranted a multi-million dollar new administration building.
My kids' school tore down their jungle gym because the insurance wouldn't cover it due to the possibility of injury litigation. Of course that one goes back to it being the fault of the parents who sue if their kid gets an owie.
Transportation is interesting. That fits in with the issue of a general public transportation system. In Germany at least kids ride the city bus.
Wages though can be extremely good. Initial hiring wages aren't that high, but a senior teacher can be rolling in the money, not even counting the extremely generous pension. Back in the Wisconsin debates, one high school teacher at the protests teacher was making about $90,000 per year in pay and benefits. A fourth-grade teacher was making in the mid 80s.
Of course this varies by state, but IIRC the pay doesn't correspond to performance.
Looks like we're number four.
Bloated is when for years salaried non-teaching positions have been consistently growing much faster than actual teaching positions. PC is the feel-good stuff they do, kumbaya cultural rather than actual studies.
It would be, and it was. Teachers may care, but their collective voice as unions doesn't, at least not if it gets in the way of the union.
Albert Shanker, former AFT head, "When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren."
Bob Chanin, former NEA bigwig, said things like academic achievement and better schools are fine, but "When all is said and done NEA and its affiliates must never lose sight of the fact that they are unions and what unions do first and foremost is represent their members."
Union/teachers first, kids second, if at all.
The racism is in the culture to not value learning (emphasis on socio). My kids go to an about half-black school. Some of the best students come from poor black families. However, overall the blacks in the school do the worst. Boys do worse than girls. Asians do the best, and they aren't necessarily any better off financially than the blacks.
In fact, we're near the top for the amount of money we spend per pupil.
The problem is much of that is wasted: bloated administrations, feel-good PC courses that don't help core education, and teachers unions that flat-out admit they don't give a damn about students.
Add to that apathetic parents, and you have a crappy school system that won't get better no matter how much money we pump into it.
Turn a boxer inside out. Instead of having one crankshaft in the middle, have two crankshafts at the ends, instead of piston heads pointing out, they point in. Then for two piston heads that come at each other, put them in the same cylinder tube so the ignition happens between them.
So much ignorance about the tea party, so many pathetic attempts at juvenile insults ("teabaggers"). You probably don't realize that established big-government, deficit-loving Republicans were the main targets of the Tea Party movement in the 2008 elections. In many instances, the incumbents and fat-cat party favorites did not win the primary nomination.
A majority? So what you're saying is that a majority would love to use their power as the majority to forcibly take money from the minority.
Where is the social security money invested? In government bonds. What does the government do with money from selling bonds? It spends it to run the government. There's no "lock box." When SS outlays exceed income (in the next several years), SS will have to cash in those bonds. The government most likely won't have saved the money to pay of course, so it'll be added to the deficit for that year.
However, the $106K limit on FICA does seem a bit low given what $106K means now vs. then. It should be at least $250K.
In a field test you want a test group that is capable of producing a range of results that may appear in actual use. A group of DHS agents isn't exactly a snapshot of your average group of travelers -- not enough Muslim terrorist types, far too many jackboot Nazi types.
In Congress they would be testing the only "native American criminal class" so results would be highly skewed there too.
If you are indispensible, and the flagship product is about to be released, how about negotiating a chunk of the action instead of more pay? In a public company this could materialize as stock options, not sure about a small private company.
http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/tech-fun/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/pirateddvd1.png
If that's not incentive to pirate, I don't know what is.
Aside from format shifting, it's the main reason I never watch a DVD I buy. Instead I rip it and watch the rip.
The Westboro crazies think everybody but them is going to the Christian Hell. You have to believe in their very specific definition of the Christian God to get to Heaven. I think ol' Fred even has his own addendum to the Bible that you need to follow.
a = without
theos = god
An atheist is simply without belief in a god or gods. It does not necessarily have to make a statement about their actual existence. Within atheism there is a range: from simple lack of belief (which you call agnostic) to hard denial of the existence of any deities (not just yours, you're not special).
a = without
gnosis = knowledge
An agnostic says we cannot know for sure whether there is a deity. It is a philosophical approach: not a statement of belief, but a statement of knowledge. This way there is such a thing as an agnostic theist, somebody who believes but does not claim to know. There is also the agnostic atheist, someone who does not believe because deity cannot be known.
Thus, atheism as a simple lack of belief is a perfectly logical position.
A while back someone slashed the tires on their bus, and not one auto shop or towing service in town was willing to help them.
Otherwise I'd have to mod you down simply because.
Real irony: If this post gets modded up.
Oh yes, we see the governments of majority Christian nations supporting those groups all the time! You posted the data as authoritative, now you denigrate it because unflattering conclusions can be drawn. You don't get to have it both ways.
Or, logically, because they'll suffer backlash.
You don't hide "hate speech" behind the First Amendment. The First Amendment is what guarantees the right to "hate speech." Note the quotes, since that can be defined as "anything I don't like." The UN Muslim voting bloc has been trying to push a "defamation of religions" resolution through the UN for years, the goal being to criminalize criticism of Islam.
Very arguably. Sufism is still a small minority, persecuted in places. The Wahabis even want you dead. It would be good if your view dominated Muslim thought in the world, but it doesn't.
Funny, your Muslim leader was protecting curches against -- Muslims who had bombed a church! So would you say the number of churches saved by Muslims is greater than the number of churches burned and bombed by Muslims?
Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran and the other countries at the bottom of the religious freedoms list contain the majority of Muslims.
But they do support Henry Ford religious freedom, "You can have any religion you want, as long as it's Islam."
Although Jobs had help from Archangel Jony.
Interesting. The more Muslim a state is, the more likely its people are to support terrorism and Al Qaeda. If they're living in a state where they are a small minority, they are not willing to speak out for violence against that state. It makes sense.
"I believe that the insulting or mocking of others' religious symbols, icons, prophets, etc. should not fall within the realm of free speech." -- Rauf
Free speech, as long as it doesn't criticize Islam. That's not how we roll in America. He can take that point of view back to Kuwait.
You do realize that Sufism is not mainline Islam, right? Not one Islamic state is Sufi. Sufis are persecuted even today in Muslim countries.
It's like the old lawyer joke, the majority make the minority look bad.
Feel free to write when a church is in Mecca, or even when it's legal for infidel tourists to travel there. Or I'll just be happy to hear when religious freedom is protected in most Muslim states.
Governors, not presidents. Typing too fast.
BTW, don't take any of this as an endorsement of Palin or Bachmann. I can't stand either of them and wouldn't want to vote for them. However, that doesn't I can't recognize the unfair, absolutely biased treatment they've received at the hands of the press.
Palin's out of the running now -- yippie. I hope she's missed her chance forever. But Bachmann's still in. If she gets too high poll numbers I may have to finally register with a party, Republican, in order to vote against her in the primary (and also maybe to vote for Cain). I don't want the choice between her likely incompetence and the proven incompetence of the current office holder, between a religious nutjob and a leftist nutjob.