Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Bush Recants, Says Terror War Will Be Won (AP). AP - President Bush said repeatedly on Tuesday that the United States will win its war against terrorism, trying to contain political damage from the doubt he expressed a day earlier. [Yahoo! News - Top Stories] Obviously, he has no clue about what he is saying.  After all, as I have previously discussed, you cannot kill an -ism.  You may be able to force it into seclusion, but you will never kill it.  Mr. Bush will be long out of office before anyone has any real ideas for taking care of al Qaeda.  As I read more and more of the 9/11 Commission report (and hear some absurd reason why people are not reading it) it becomes even more clear that the operation is very sophisticated (even if its attacks seem half-assed) and still well funded.  This is an organization that is making do with "out of date" technology that cannot be easily tracked, detailed or derailed, but can pry into the ever open systems and methods of the "modern" world.  They don't use cell phones and computers, except to plan.  Key decisions are made face to face.  Cash, rather than credit is the coin and it is transferred through couriers rather than wire transfers.  This is a 1900s style operation - how do you wire tap a conversation between two people who meet in the middle of nowhere?  How do you follow money that goes from briefcase to briefcase in small, nonsequentially numbered bills.  How do you bring down a loose affiliation of cells where the people in them may only know one or two other people?  And more importantly, how do you do it when the language and the social climate that "undercover" operatives have to function in is so completely alien to the average person in North America?  This is not the Soviet Union, where other than a language difference, someone from Hoboken looks more or less like someone from Mirmansk and the difference in religion is minimal.  This is the Middle East where religion (and one that is different) is as much a part of the culture (for good and bad) as politics is in North America.  Where history cannot be learned from a book, because it is generally not written down but is passed on from family to family. So, if the President, or any other member of his or any other administration think that al Qaeda can be defeated, they are sorely mistaken.  At best, all we can hope is to minimize the impact. 7:30:03 PM    comment []

Monday's Washington Post had an interesting article on the increase in the summer workload that children in the Metro Washington area are faced with and the reality that most of them are just now getting started on it.  I have noticed a similar trend as parents are coming into the bookstore with reading lists in hand (several books long) and trying to get them for their children. What makes me scratch my head is not that there is a reading list - those have been around for a long time - whether it is to encourage the children to keep reading or because the school time is so short that they want the children to have done the reading so they can jump right into the evaluation of the book phase - that hasn't changed a lot since the dark ages when I was in school.  What I found interesting to the point of absurd is the amount of other "real" work they are expected to do - math problems, book reports, dioramas etc - and for a grade!  This is not optional material where the ones that don't do the work will only be behind when the year starts, the ones that don't do the work are looking at being behind a scoring 8-ball. Now the pundits say that there is an "education loss" during the summer (something like a month worth of material) which translates to folks don't remember from May on (and since nothing other than testing occurs in June, what is there to remember?).  But let's back up and look realistically at the issues.  Most kids play from dawn to dusk during the summer.  They may not play outside as much as they used to (which is too bad) but they are doing something (just look at the local pool or sports camp).  Even my daughter, who is only 4 spend her mornings at a "day camp" where she coloured and had fun.  So the kids come home from playing (or recreating) and they last thing they want to do is sit down in front of their homework.  So it sits.  If we are serious about reducing teenage obesity (and I really don't see any proof that we are, but go with me on this) then sitting inside doing homework over the summer is not the right answer.  Quite honestly, if the issue is lack of retention, then perhaps it is time to seriously address the issue of year round schooling.  But, since that requires money that most school districts don't have, I hope the teachers are not really expecting quality work from the homework they assigned over the summer, because unless your parents are teachers, you are probably just getting around to doing it...and in some cases, school started yesterday. 7:09:58 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 David Lane.