Thursday, August 17, 2006

Reality and Hollywood - a convergence at last?

Instapundit cites this article about an ad some Hollywood people are taking out in the LA Times that is against terrorism, specifically mentioning Hezbollah and Hamas. (Presumably Nicole Kidman is featured because she's Australian and the paper is Australian).

Well hot diggity dog, could reality be sinking in out there? We'll see. The first bite of crow is always the worst, but there's plenty more to go around.

According to the article, two of the undersigned are Sumner Redstone and Haim Saban. They also happen to be two of the biggest Democrat donors around. Talk is cheap - let's see what they do with their donations now. Because whatever else might be said about Democrats, they're not facilitating efforts against Islamofascism.

Monday, August 14, 2006

A schoolhouse of Davids?

It's hard to go wrong with Stuart Buck's blog, which always has a number of interesting posts. But this one made me think.

In it we heard the typical lament of "teaching to the test". That's only a problem if a) the test is lousy, or b) you resent the idea of having your performance measured, as education establishment personnel always seem to do.

It's not that they have no case at all - you sure can't test everything with true/falses, multiple choice, or the various other types of questions you can grade with a computer. We still need the kinds of insights that only human brains can provide. And to keep the system honest, we need this input from outsiders.

And nowadays we have cheap telecommunications and plenty of people with the skills needed to provide the kind of grading we need (seniors, perhaps). Could such testing be outsourced?

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Finish the story!

Headline: Bush sought to cut $6M in screening technology. Why, on it's face it must be an outrage, right?

That's a tempting conclusion. But we aren't told exactly what the $6M was for, nor where it was redirected. In particular, I want to know if it was taken from research in *liquid* explosives detection.

You can bet your sweet patootie that we wouldn't have heard a peep about this but for the latest events in the UK. Instead we might be hearing "why are we spending all this money on explosives detection technology? It's been years since the terrorists blew up a plane, and our boys need more body armor!" or whatever last captured the critics' imaginations.

So I'm not prepared to make this out as if it shows that the Bush administration is screwing up. Give us the rest of the story first. Given the media's persistent bias against Bush, I wouldn't be surprised if the *whole* truth sounded a lot more innocent.