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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Thursday, October 27, 2005
   
   

From the Depths of the Clay-Tablet Archives

Esquire has "memed" The Blog from the Core again.

Re: An Easy Post to Write.

  1. Go into your archives.
  2. Find your 23rd post.
  3. Post the fifth sentence (or closest to it).
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
  5. Tag five other people to do the same thing.

Here is the desired sentence (emphasis and ellipses in original) from Russ Reeves to the Rescue:

I never bothered to tell either of them of my... shall we say... considerable doubts about Wills' reliability, because they would have asked me why, and I haven't had time to adequately research and sufficiently analyze.

I quit now, so I can shower and get all that clay dust off me. :-)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/27/05 10:09:00 PM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.


   
   

Readworthies XIX

A handful of interesting, informative, and insightful articles.

News, editorials, columns, essays, et al.


Academic Postmodernity & the SATs: Dark days in the academy. by Stanley Kurtz @ National Review Online (ht):

The deeper cultural costs of affirmative action are rarely recognized or debated. Liberals frame the issue as a choice between bloodless legal principle and the actual social harm of racial and sexual inequality. Thoughtful conservatives point to the toll affirmative action takes on its supposed beneficiaries, who must always doubt their dessert. But do we really understand how profoundly affirmative action has already undermined America's respect for excellence, or our faith in the framework of democracy? The fateful decision by the president of the University of California to press for the elimination of the SAT as a requirement for admissions compels us to face the frightening truth about affirmative action.
When "right thinking" liberals first introduced affirmative action to our universities, they knew very well that it violated fundamental principles of individual rights and academic excellence. No one at the time imagined that these cherished principles — or the institutions that depend upon them — could truly be threatened. It was simply thought that, for the sake of racial progress, a small and temporary exception to the ordinary rules and standards could be made. Oh what a tangled web they did weave when first they practiced to deceive... themselves. For at every turn, this small, supposedly temporary and exceptional program forced deeper and deeper changes in the fabric of university life....


U.N. Procurement Scandal: Ties to Saddam and Al Qaeda by Claudia Rosett and George Russell @ Fox News (ht):

The scandal engulfing the United Nations Procurement Department now appears to be bottomless. It also shows signs of growing more sinister, especially where it involves a mysterious private company called IHC Services, which did big business with the procurement department until it was removed from U.N. rosters in June.
New details of how dark the scandal could prove to be have emerged from the private sale of IHC on June 3, 2005, just as the procurement scandal was about to break. It now appears that while doing business with the U.N., IHC had links both to Saddam Hussein's old sanctions-busting networks, and to a Liechtenstein-based businessman, Engelbert Schreiber, Jr., known among other things for his ties to a figure designated by the U.N. itself as a financier of Al Qaeda....


The death of Mother Russia by Mark Steyn @ The Spectator (ht):

.... Russia's export of ideology was the decisive factor in the history of the last century. It seems to me entirely possible that the implosion of Russia could be the decisive factor in this new century. As Iran's nuke programme suggests, in many of the geopolitical challenges to America there's usually a Russian component somewhere in the background.
In fairness to Putin, even if he was 'very straightforward and trustworthy', he's in a wretched position. Think of the feet of clay of Western European politicians unwilling to show leadership on the Continent's moribund economy and deathbed demography. Russia has all the EU's problems to the nth degree, and then some. 'Post-imperial decline' is manageable; a nation of psychotic lemmings isn't. As I've noted before in this space, Russia is literally dying. From a population peak in 1992 of 148 million, it will be down to below 130 million by 2015 and thereafter dropping to perhaps 50 or 60 million by the end of the century, a third of what it was at the fall of the Soviet Union. It needn't decline at a consistent rate, of course....
Russia is the bleakest example on the planet of how we worry about all the wrong things. For 40 years the environmentalists have warned us that the jig was up: there are too many people (see Paul Ehrlich's comic masterpiece of 1970 The Population Bomb) and too few resources — as the Club of Rome warned in its 1972 landmark study The Limits To Growth, the world will run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993. Instead, poor old Russia is awash with resources but fatally short of Russians — and, in the end, warm bodies are the one indispensable resource.....


Do college campuses lean left? by John Tierney @ The Star-Tribune from New York Times News Service (ht):

I am in debt to liberal scholars across America. After I wrote about the leftward tilt on campus, they sent me treatises explaining that the shortage of conservatives on faculties is not a result of bias. Professors helpfully offered other theories why conservatives do not grace the halls of academe:
1 Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake.
2 Conservatives do not care about the social good.
3 Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages.
4 Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.
I've studied these theories as best I could (for a conservative), but somehow I can't shake the notion that there just might be some bias on campus....


The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy: Attack on Bill Bennett Was Staged by Todd Manzi @ Human Events Online (ht):

Using the Press to Attack Political Opponents
Everyone is weighing in on what Bill Bennett said on his radio program. Everyone is eager to offer their opinion on his words and whether or not he should have said them. Everyone is missing the point.
The travesty is that we're even talking about this at all. The most abhorrent behavior that occurred regarding this issue came from the Associated Press (AP). Allowing news hit men like John Conyers, Bruce Gordon, Ralph Neas, Howard Dean and many elected Democrats to assault Bill Bennett is detestable and the AP should be held accountable. The only way liberal Democrats can win is by fighting without honor and by perpetrating hideous attacks on innocent citizens.
Dissecting exactly what happened to Bill Bennett helps unveil the insidious vast left-wing conspiracy and exposes the culpability of the AP. A Google search sorted by date creates a timeline that shows that the tail wagged the dog....


Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/27/05 10:00:34 PM
Categorized as Readworthies.


   
   

Thanks to...

... Lead and Gold for the notice.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/27/05 08:29:30 AM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.


   
   

Stand Up and Speak Out

Vide.

(Thanks, Amy.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/27/05 08:14:09 AM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.


   
   

"Looming Catastrophe"

The weekly Coalition for Darfur message.

Lege.

The Blog from the Core does not necessarily endorse every detail of the weekly Coalition for Darfur message.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/27/05 07:59:54 AM
Categorized as Coalition for Darfur.


   
   

RS Interviews: Dr. Andrew Bostom

By Paul Cella at Cella's Review:

Dr. Andrew Bostom is a physician specializing in Epidemiology. Since 1997 he has been part of the full-time medical faculty at one of the two major teaching hospital affiliates of Brown University. His current research focuses on the relationship between kidney and cardiovascular disease. Bostom is also the editor of the newly-released book The Legacy of Jihad, a compendium of writings, both modern and ancient, on the uniquely Islamic institution of Jihad. I interviewed him for Redstate via email over this past week....
AB: September 11, 2001 shocked me out of the complete absorption in my career in medicine and an accompanying uninformed complacency about world affairs. I grew up in New York City, spending the first 34 years of my life there, and the wife of one of our nephrology fellowship trainees barely made it out of the second World Trade Center tower before it collapsed. The cataclysmic events of 9/11 had very little context for me, so I set out to learn about Islam, reading voraciously. Starting with the writings of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito (how naive and ironic it seems in retrospect!), I became thoroughly dissatisfied, in short order, with the entire genre of thinly veiled, treacly apologetics, sadly characteristic of modern popular and "academic" works on Islam. So I began what has become a ceaseless endeavor to educate myself, making liberal use of the vast research resources of the Brown University system. Learned, patient mentors, in particular Bat Ye'or and Ibn Warraq, facilitated my efforts. They encouraged me to complete what became The Legacy of Jihad, sharing the view, expressed so appositely by the prominent Middle East Studies Professor, Dr. Raphael Israeli, that the book filled a "yawning gap" in the literature on jihad. That is why in one rather large volume I combined a comprehensive analysis of both jihad theory and practice, the latter being a detailed survey of the brutal way jihad campaigns have always been waged — using a physician's favorite learning and teaching tool, the mnemonic, in this case "MPED" — massacre, pillage, enslavement, and deportation....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/27/05 07:46:30 AM
Categorized as More Than Blogworthy.


   
   

Bonfire of the Vanities

Vide.

(Thanks, Fr. Jim.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/27/05 07:34:13 AM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.


   
   

Catholic Carnival LIII

At A Penitent Blogger this week.

The Blog from the Core does not necessarily endorse every entry in the weekly Catholic Carnival.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/27/05 07:29:56 AM
Categorized as Catholic Carnival & Religious.


   

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