Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

Posted on Apr 10, 2011

 By Chris Hedges 

www.truthdig.com

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.
Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.

“Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”

Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized, poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside. 
“It is extremely dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”

“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and are increasingly micromanaged. Students have been given the power to fire us by failing their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.”

The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.

“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”

“If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This is not how you run a school system. It’s how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty, depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work and the Effective Teacher.”

The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought is a dialogue with one’s inner self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness. The capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to live with criminals—themselves.

“It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,” Socrates said.

Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
“The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become totalitarian wastelands.

“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.” 

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COMMENT: I am a truth-loving visionary genius - exactly what is not wanted in this evil goddamned country, my home. Thinking is not wanted. The truth is not wanted. ESPECIALLY not the truth.


Thinking, challenging, asking questions, trying to create greatness efficiently would only disrupt the FRAUD that the APPARENT business activity is only a cover for. 


What job can I get that will pay me enough to be middle-class, will not be serving Evil, and is not de-humanizing? The vast majority of rich and middle-class in this country today are rewarded for their OBEDIENCE. I am a white, heterosexual male of very high ability, and I have worked hard at various jobs. I have always been poor, as punishment for my failure to obey.


What are you risking to resist the evil in real life, my fellow humans? If the answer is "nothing", then you are a worthless piece of shit who should be killed.


MY NAME IS JOHN GALT, AND I DECLARE A STRIKE.
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For life, liberty and the burqa: Muslim women defy France's ban on full-face veils 

By Dheepthi Namasivayam 
April 11, 2011 1:05PM

• French ban on full-face veils starts today
• Risk of fine if women refuse to show faces
• Muslims women say they are not oppressed
• Libs back minister who called burqa alien

THEY are the women prepared to defy France for the burqa.

From today French police have the power to stop Muslim women wearing full-face veils and to threaten them with fines or prison if they refuse to expose their faces.
All over France posters have been put up reminding veil-clad women that “the Republic lives with its face uncovered”.
Last year, President Nicolas Sarkozy pushed through a controversial law banning Muslim women from wearing burqas or niqabs in public. He said the law was to increase security but claimed it would liberate Muslim women from the oppression of their veil.
Any woman who refuse to lift her veil can be taken to a police station, fined 150 euros ($205) and ordered to attend re-education classes.
Anyone found guilty of forcing a woman to wear face veils in public or in private faces a fine of 30,000 euros and a year in jail.
However, some women have vowed to defy the law.
“I will not obey it,” said Wahiba Mebrek, 25, from the suburb of Villepinte, north of Paris. “I will only respect laws of the French Republic which are not in contradiction with me, my religion and my faith,” she added.
She is angry the Government and media peddled this image of them as being oppressed. For her, it was a conscious decision, made by her and husband when they became devout Muslims eight years ago.

Violent reaction
Hind*, a 31-year-old single mother from the suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois outside Paris, switched from the “miniskirt to the veil” after converting to Islam six years ago.
She said that her wearing of the veil had provoked hostile, even violent reactions in the street. She was recently attacked in front of her daughter by a couple.
“People’s reactions weren’t as violent until this issue was mediatised. Now that the law has passed, they feel that their violent behaviour towards us is justified,” she said.
“People have the impression that we are totally cut off from the world, but we have normal relationships like everyone else, we are accessible."
Hind will not take off her niqab, if asked by police. “Never ever will I apply this law,” she said. “It is not up to the government to meddle in my private life and my beliefs.”
French officials estimate that about 2000 women, from a total Muslim population estimated at between four and six million, wear the full-face veil.
Many Muslims and human rights groups accuse Mr Sarkozy of targeting one of France's most vulnerable and isolated groups to signal to anti-immigration voters that he shares their fear that Islam is a threat to French culture.

Years of abuse
Other critics worry the law may be hard to enforce, since it had to be drawn up without reference to religion to ban any kind of face covering in public and since police officers will not be allowed to remove women's head coverings.
But for other women, wearing the veil was not a choice.
Zeina*, 31, was forced to wear the niqab by her abusive ex-husband. She lived with his abuse until one day, a neighbour saw her bruises and took her to a women’s refuge. She details the ordeal in her autobiography, Sous Mon Niqab (Under my Veil).
“When I wore the niqab, I felt excluded from the world, from society,” she said. “Taking it off was a sort of freedom, a liberty for me.”
But she opposes the law, saying it will further oppress women. Unable to wear their veil in public, Zeina fears their abuse may go unnoticed as they will be confined to their homes.
As for those women who wear their niqab in the street for Friday afternoon prayers at their local mosque, they too risk being fined.
This is what worries Mrs Mebrek.
“The veil is an exterior manifestation of my religion but in a secular country, I am free to do so,” she said. “All this will stop from April 11.”

*Names were suppressed or changed as requested

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COMMENT: No, you are NOT free to do whatever you want.


The PSYCHOPATHS promote "freedom" as the highest value, because THEY want to be free... to continue all their ridiculous and evil bullshit.

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Brain structure differs in liberals, conservatives: study

(AFP) – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON — Everyone knows that liberals and conservatives butt heads when it comes to world views, but scientists have now shown that their brains are actually built differently.
Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology.
"We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala," the study said.
Other research has shown greater brain activity in those areas, according to which political views a person holds, but this is the first study to show a physical difference in size in the same regions.
"Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual's political orientation," said Ryota Kanai of the University College London, where the research took place.
"Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure."
The study was based on 90 "healthy young adults" who reported their political views on a scale of one to five from very liberal to very conservative, then agreed to have their brains scanned.
People with a large amygdala are "more sensitive to disgust" and tend to "respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions," the study said.
Liberals are linked to larger anterior cingulate cortexes, a region that "monitor(s) uncertainty and conflicts," it said.
"Thus, it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views."
It remains unclear whether the structural differences cause the divergence in political views, or are the effect of them.
But the central issue in determining political views appears to revolve around fear and how it affects a person.
"Our findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty," the study said.

Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved.

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COMMENT: It is inherited.

Conservatives - SJ - can feel shame, but cannot feel compassion; that is their defining characteristic. We can never allow them to be in charge of anything ever again.


Liberals - SP - can feel compassion, but cannot feel shame; that is their defining characteristic.


We iNtuitive types - NT and NF (inherited a preference for the behaviors that make a person acquire depth) - can feel both shame and compassion. We deserve to rule over the Sensation Types.


[Note: For those who CAN feel compassion, learning to NOT give love to those who do NOT deserve it is a major life lesson.]


Psychopaths cannot feel either shame or compassion.
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Child-porn discovery not a 'licence to kill': Crown

By QMI Agency

Last Updated: March 29, 2011 11:18am

MONTREAL - A man who beat his neighbour to death after finding child pornography on his computer should serve six years behind bars, says the Crown.
Patrick Belanger, 28, has pleaded guilty to manslaughter for the July 2009 beating death of Leonard Wells, 63, in west-end Montreal.
Prosecutor Thierry Nadon told a Quebec Court judge the sentence would send a clear message to society that vigilante killings are unacceptable and that a man's pedophilic tendencies don't give citizens "a licence to kill."
Belanger will be sentenced on April 21.
He was initially charged with first-degree murder following the attack on July 25, 2009. He had been helping Wells to move and had asked to use his computer while the two were taking a break.
He flew into a rage when he stumbled across images of children being sexually assaulted. Belanger called 911 and warned he would take matters into his own hands unless Wells was arrested immediately. He began punching and kicking the man when police failed to arrive after 20 minutes.
Belanger called 911 a second time as Wells lay in a pool of his own blood. The victim was transported to hospital in a coma and died a month later.
Belanger later told the court the child-porn images triggered memories of his own father's tale of childhood sexual abuse. The defendant also said he was drunk at the time of the beating and he had been an alcoholic for several years.
But the Crown said the "horrific" and "revolting" images did not give Belanger an excuse to kill a man.
"We cannot allow people to mete out their own justice," Nadon told the court.
"(Otherwise) we would be promoting anarchy. Incidents such as this one ... do not give him a licence to kill."
The prosecutor said the fact Belanger waited 20 minutes to administer the beating was evidence the killing was premeditated.
Defence lawyer Julien Archambault countered Belanger had no criminal record and has been in alcohol rehab for two years.
He requested a three-year prison term.
Belanger told judge Louise Bourdeau he's a changed man and was "not thinking rationally" at the time of the deadly attack.
"I'll have to pay for what I did," he added. "I have no hard feelings towards the Crown. Justice must be served."

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COMMENT: Justice WAS served by killing the evil child porn guy; the human who did the justice going to prison is a mis-carriage of justice.

"But the Crown said the "horrific" and "revolting" images did not give Belanger an excuse to kill a man."

Yes, it did.

"We cannot allow people to mete out their own justice," Nadon told the court."

The question "was justice done?" must ALWAYS be asked - and answered - in deciding if a crime has been committed, and if so what punishment is appropriate if any. Mindlessly applying laws without context is evil.

"(Otherwise) we would be promoting anarchy."

No, you IDIOT; "justice" does NOT equal "anarchy." We the people institute a government because it benefits us to do so; what does the gov have to do to be LEGITIMATE?
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Research shows not only the fittest survive

Contact: Daniel Williams
d.d.williams@exeter.ac.uk
44-013-927-22062
University of Exeter

Darwin's notion that only the fittest survive has been called into question by new research published today (27 March 2011) in Nature.
A collaboration between the Universities of Exeter and Bath in the UK, with a group from San Diego State University in the US, challenges our current understanding of evolution by showing that biodiversity may evolve where previously thought impossible.
The work represents a new approach to studying evolution that may eventually lead to a better understanding of the diversity of bacteria that cause human diseases.
Conventional wisdom has it that for any given niche there should be a best species, the fittest, that will eventually dominate to exclude all others.
This is the principle of survival of the fittest. Ecologists often call this idea the `competitive exclusion principle' and it predicts that complex environments are needed to support complex, diverse populations.
Professor Robert Beardmore, from the University of Exeter, said: "Microbiologists have tested this principle by constructing very simple environments in the lab to see what happens after hundreds of generations of bacterial evolution, about 3,000 years in human terms. It had been believed that the genome of only the fittest bacteria would be left, but that wasn't their finding. The experiments generated lots of unexpected genetic diversity."
This test tube biodiversity proved controversial when first observed and had been explained away with claims that insufficient time had been allowed to pass for a clear winner to emerge.
The new research shows the experiments were not anomalies.
Professor Laurence Hurst, of the University of Bath, said: "Key to the new understanding is the realisation that the amount of energy organisms squeeze out of their food depends on how much food they have. Give them abundant food and they use it inefficiently. When we combine this with the notion that organisms with different food-utilising strategies are also affected in different ways by genetic mutations, then we discover a new principle, one in which both the fit and the unfit coexist indefinitely."
Dr Ivana Gudelj, also from the University of Exeter, said: "The fit use food well but they aren't resilient to mutations, whereas the less efficient, unfit consumers are maintained by their resilience to mutation. If there's a low mutation rate, survival of the fittest rules, but if not, lots of diversity can be maintained.
"Rather nicely, the numbers needed for the principle to work accord with those enigmatic experiments on bacteria. Their mutation rate seems to be high enough for both fit and unfit to be maintained."
Dr. David Lipson of San Diego State University, concluded: "Earlier work showed that opposing food utilisation strategies could coexist in complex environments, but this is the first explanation of how trade-offs, like the one we studied between growth rate and efficiency, can lead to stable diversity in the simplest possible of environments."

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COMMENT: Liberals, motivated by the desire to promote the IDEA of "diversity" (with all its implications for gov policies) PRETENDING to do science.


There are many people on this planet right now who CANNOT understand the Scientific Method, but they just PRETEND they are scientists anyway. In science, you have to be willing to discover what the truth is NO MATTER WHAT it turns out to be. Liberals - like Conservatives - LOVE science whenever it supports what they WANT to be true... or seems to. When it violates their desires, the Liberals say "that's racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever smear is applicable." (The Conservatives say it's "elitist", or lately, "lib-tard".)


Charles Darwin's proposed explanation for the mechanism of evolution - which he called "natural selection", meaning the local environment naturally selects those inherited characteristics which best fit that environment - has been proven correct over and over, etc. You are not free to believe whether it's true or not.

However, Darwinian evolution supports SOME of what the Conservatives have been saying all along about different races and sexes, so the Liberals are utterly DESPERATE to "prove" Darwin wrong. 

The Truth is Good, The Lie is Evil. Choose.
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Book review: ‘Moral Landscape’ examines science behind human values

Saturday, March 19, 2011 10:48 PM CDT

The goal of this book is to begin a conversation about how moral truth can be understood in the context of science. There is an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. This isn’t surprising, as very few scientific truths are self-evident and many are deeply counterintuitive.”

So writes Sam Harris in his latest best-seller, “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.” Harris is co-founder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation that advocates for science and secular values; he has degrees in philosophy and neuroscience from Stanford University and UCLA. His previous books include “The End of Faith,” which won the PEN Award for Nonfiction in 2005, and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

At the heart of “The Moral Landscape” is the notion that all human values have their genesis in the natural order and, as such, we do not need “God” or anything else to define concepts of right and wrong or to otherwise make judgments about the inherent efficacy of different behaviors. To illustrate this point, he examines a number of values that tend to be common to people in most societies. For instance, acting in one’s own self-interest has often been characterized as being beneficial from an evolutionary perspective. Conversely, most religions tend to articulate, in one way or another, that cooperation and empathy for others are higher-order aspirations that allow us to transcend our more primal tendencies.

“Many people imagine that the theory of evolution entails selfishness as a biological imperative,” Harris observes. “This popular misconception has been very harmful to the reputation of science.” He then proceeds to provide several examples of how selfishness has been counterproductive to the evolution of some species, while cooperation has led to a competitive advantage for others.

“We have good reason to believe that much of what we do in the name of ‘morality’ - decrying sexual infidelity, punishing cheaters, valuing cooperation, etc. - is borne of unconscious processes that were shaped by natural selection,” Harris adds.

Harris thinks that scientists should not shy away from passionately extolling the virtues of their particular medium for pursuing new insights into reality that bring us closer to defining the perpetually elusive “absolute truth.” Specifically, he would like to see his colleagues become a lot more vocal in their critique and criticism of the proponents of religion. “The scientific community’s reluctance to take a stand on moral issues has come at a price,” Harris notes. “It has made science appear divorced, in principle, from the most important questions of human life.”

When you dig a little deeper into his thesis, however, it becomes increasingly obvious that Harris has embedded his own self-serving agenda in “The Moral Landscape.” As is the case with so much of what is done in the name of motives that are alleged to be altruistic and pure, the allocation of financial resources - i.e., money - seems to be a driving force behind this book. “Many of our secular critics worry that if we oblige people to choose between reason and faith, they will choose faith and cease to support scientific research,” Harris contends. “Currently, federal funding is only allowed for work on stem cells that have been derived from surplus embryos at fertility clinics.”

The author also seems to understand that the scientific community can sometimes be its own worst enemy. “There is no question that scientists have occasionally demonstrated sexist and racist biases,” Harris concedes. At the same time, he seems in denial when he argues that science is somehow impervious to these deleterious attitudes. After providing several examples of where less than admirable human qualities have arguably distracted from the quest to advance knowledge, he comes to the rather dubious conclusion that “none of these facts, alone or in combination, remotely suggests that our notions of scientific objectivity are vitiated by racism or sexism.”

To his credit, very few books are as extensively researched and referenced as “The Moral Landscape.” There are 43 pages of notes in the back, together with 40 pages of citations. Harris is intimately familiar with both the current and the historical literature that forms the nucleus of his work. When discussing the debate concerning whether creationism should be included in curriculum, he does a reasonably balanced job of providing both sides of the issue, although his personal bias does tend to shine through in various passages.

A primary problem with Harris’ argument is that he assumes the scientific method is the only valid method of inquiry; i.e., the only mechanism through which legitimate knowledge can be satisfactorily derived. Ultimately his belief in science comes down to a matter of faith, and this is the glaring contradiction at the core of “The Moral Landscape.” The scientific method is admittedly very useful for dealing with the empirical world, but it does exhibit rather severe limitations when it veers outside that realm.

“The Moral Landscape” is not a bad book. It is a fairly interesting read that tends to stimulate critical thought and reflection in an area of life that touches us all, although the author’s intolerance and contempt for opposing perspectives is definitely a distraction. It’s one thing to passionately advocate for your position - it’s quite another to claim that your position is the only viable way of understanding and interpreting the world.

— Reviewed by Aaron W. Hughey, Department of Counseling and Student Affairs, Western Kentucky University.

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COMMENT: Sam Harris said


"At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.
Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria.. "


and


"In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.
Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah."
http://www.rationalresponders.com/head_in_the_sand_liberals_by_sam_harris

thereby identifying himself as PRETENDING to be rational.

P.S.
Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are all evil.
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White House wants new copyright law crackdown

March 15, 2011 10:51 AM PDT

by Declan McCullagh

The White House today proposed sweeping revisions to U.S. copyright law, including making "illegal streaming" of audio or video a federal felony and allowing FBI agents to wiretap suspected infringers.
In a 20-page white paper (PDF), the Obama administration called on the U.S. Congress to fix "deficiencies that could hinder enforcement" of intellectual property laws.

The report was prepared by Victoria Espinel, the first Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator who received Senate confirmation in December 2009, and represents a broad tightening of many forms of intellectual property law including ones that deal with counterfeit pharmaceuticals and overseas royalties for copyright holders. (See CNET's report last month previewing today's white paper.)

Some of the highlights:

• The White House is concerned that "illegal streaming of content" may not be covered by criminal law, saying "questions have arisen about whether streaming constitutes the distribution of copyrighted works." To resolve that ambiguity, it wants a new law to "clarify that infringement by streaming, or by means of other similar new technology, is a felony in appropriate circumstances."

• Under federal law, wiretaps may only be conducted in investigations of serious crimes, a list that was expanded by the 2001 Patriot Act to include offenses such as material support of terrorism and use of weapons of mass destruction. The administration is proposing to add copyright and trademark infringement, arguing that move "would assist U.S. law enforcement agencies to effectively investigate those offenses."

• Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's generally illegal to distribute hardware or software--such as the DVD-decoding software Handbrake available from a server in France--that can "circumvent" copy protection technology. The administration is proposing that if Homeland Security seizes circumvention devices, it be permitted to "inform rightholders," "provide samples of such devices," and assist "them in bringing civil actions."

The term "fair use" does not appear anywhere in the report. But it does mention Web sites like The Pirate Bay, which is hosted in Sweden, when warning that "foreign-based and foreign-controlled Web sites and Web services raise particular concerns for U.S. enforcement efforts." (See previous coverage of a congressional hearing on overseas sites.)

The usual copyright hawks, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, applauded the paper, which grew out of a so-called joint strategic plan that Vice President Biden and Espinel announced in June 2010.
Rob Calia, a senior director at the Chamber's Global Intellectual Property Center, said we "strongly support the white paper's call for Congress to clarify that criminal copyright infringement through unauthorized streaming, is a felony. We know both the House and Senate are looking at this issue and encourage them to work closely with the administration and other stakeholders to combat this growing threat."

In October 2008, President Bush signed into law the so-called Pro IP ACT, which created Espinel's position and increased penalties for infringement, after expressing its opposition to an earlier version.
Unless legislative proposals--like one nearly a decade ago implanting strict copy controls in digital devices--go too far, digital copyright tends not to be a particularly partisan topic. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, near-universally disliked by programmers and engineers for its anti-circumvention section, was approved unanimously in the U.S. Senate.

At the same time, Democratic politicians tend to be a bit more enthusiastic about the topic. Biden was a close Senate ally of copyright holders, and President Obama picked top copyright industry lawyers for Justice Department posts. Last year, Biden warned that "piracy is theft."

No less than 78 percent of political contributions from Hollywood went to Democrats in 2008, which is broadly consistent with the trend for the last two decades, according to OpenSecrets.org.

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COMMENT: Once again, Obama proves himself evil by carrying on the policies of the Bush 43 admin.

If I steal your car, you don't have your car anymore. If you put a song, movie, book or whatever on the web, and I - and millions of other people - download it, you STILL HAVE it, and now millions of others do too. They are NOT the same thing. The term "intellectual property" is psychological warfare.

AND, by linking this to the Patriot Act, will people be classified as terrorists just for violating copyright?

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