Stan Taylor

According to Reuters,

Iraq has emerged as the world’s second most unstable country, behind Sudan, more than four years afterPresident George W. Bush ordered the U.S. invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, according to a survey released on Monday.
The 2007 Failed States Index, produced by Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace, said Iraq suffered a third straight year of deterioration in 2006 with diminished results across a range of social, economic, political and military indicators. Iraq ranked fourth last year.

I’m a little late on posting this, but security expert Bruce Schneier tells it like it is:

Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots — and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse — is wrong.

Remember, folks, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. Don’t be scared of something that, statistically speiaking, barely even makes the list of things likely to hurt or kill you.

“Let Are Kids Walk!”
From the accompanying article:

FORT WORTH — Students who had been planning to walk across the stage at graduation ceremonies this weekend were instead walking a picket line Thursday morning.
The Trimble Tech High School seniors marched in front of Fort Worth Independent School District headquarters to protest Wednesday’s decision by trustees to bar students who failed the TAKS test from commencement exercises.

This is an AP story, but if it’s not a hoax, I’m not going to sleep well: 11-year-old boy kills a 1050-pound wild hog with a pistol.
UPDATE: Looks like I can sleep well after all. StinkyJournalism analyzes the photos and concludes that the pig wasn’t really as large as claimed. Quelle surprise!

Today, Fred Clark blogs about a growing movement in the Southern Baptist Convention to urge parents to pull their children out of public schools. One of the motivations for this movement is to remove children from the “‘metastasizing spiritual, moral and intellectual pathologies of the government school system.'”
As usual, Fred does a very good job of covering the political, cultural and religious aspects of the issue. But his post reminded me of something from my own past. I grew up in the Texas Hill Country just north of San Antonio. We lived just beyond the fringes of suburban San Antonio at the time; you could live more or less in the country and still commute into San Antonio, though it was a long commute.
I can think of quite a few families who moved out of San Antonio to remove their kids from the perceived negative influences of the city’s schools. But by and large, these families continued to deal with the same types of problems with their kids even in the idyllic Hill Country. In my opinion, those families chose to blame the city for their kids’ problems, when in fact the problems lay with the kids and families themselves; moving to the country didn’t change things. Sounds to me like some Southern Baptists might be suffering the same delusion.

This comment on MetaFilter sums up my feelings about many of my grad school professors quite well:

Respect for academic achievements is slowly eroding into extinction. Good riddance, I say. I have been working several years at a university known as one of the top in the country for its particular field, and here’s what I found out: it’s meaningless. It is an institutionalized popularity and writing contest. It’s as if these folks who probably suffered from social ineptitude at some point in their lives (or continue to suffer from it) are using their intelligence as a substitution for charisma and basic, decent human behavior. Which is fine for them inside their own circles I suppose. However, I personally have little respect for titles, authority, position and supposed academic credibility. The result of your work may be astounding and important, but that doesn’t make you a good person or a decent human being, and it damn well doesn’t mean that I have to show you any respect until you earn it. If I don’t understand how great your work is, then you get to earn your respect from me by being a good person on a general level.

A while back, I winced when I saw the word ‘congradulations’ on the sign in front of our local middle school. But that ain’t nothin’. Check out this letter from a Staten Island middle school administrator.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between faith and spirituality. I’ve finally nailed down a definition that makes sense to me. Spirituality is a sense that there’s something bigger, transcendent in the universe. This is religion:

Enter Sam: I got sober, I got pregnant, don’t ask me how that works, it is just the way it was. And as some of you may know, there were these tiny little problems. For instance, the father was — comment se dit — not that enthusiastic about my having a baby, and I had no money. But I’d been going to this little church for a while by then, and when I announced during worship that I was pregnant, people cheered. All these old people, raised in fundamentalist houses in the Deep South, cheered. It was so amazing. They almost immediately saw me as the incubator who was going to bring them a new baby, to have and to hold. So they set about providing for us. They brought clothes, they brought furniture, they brought me soul-food casseroles to keep in the freezer, they brought me assurance that he was going to be a part of this family. And they began slipping me money.

Go read the whole essay. It’s amazing.

This just makes my head hurt. Get the whole story from Pam’s House Blend.

via Slacktivist

So, a Vietnam war veteran decides to give his Purple Heart to President Bush:

Thomas said he and his wife came up with the unprecedented idea to present the president with the Purple Heart over breakfast one morning a few months ago as they discussed the verbal attacks, both foreign and domestic, the commander in chief has withstood during his time in office.
“We feel like emotional wounds and scars are as hard to carry as physical wounds,” Thomas said.

OK, it’s a free country. Whatever. The surreal thing is that President Bush invited Mr. Thomas to the White House to present him the medal.
Mr. Thomas’ remark after the ceremony: “He said he didn’t feel like he had earned it.”
Gee, ya think?