This user at DanielPipes.org had some interesting comments. Here’s an excerpt:

My child is in the 7th grade in Scottsdale, Arizona. The school’s officially adopted social studies textbook is titled Across the Centuries and is published by Houghton Mifflin. However, Across the Centuries has been shelved and the school is piloting a brand new book from Teacher’s Curriculum Institute, aka TCI, titled History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond (this book is not permitted to go home). In my opinion, this book is highly biased towards Islam, historically incorrect and also includes fake history along with Islamic religious proselytizing and indoctrination techniques.

The school has spent approximately 5 weeks of the third quarter grading period teaching Islam to 12 and 13 year olds. The children had to write a full biography on the life of Muhammad, using the information from the textbook - an extremely indoctrinating exercise. This biography will be a large portion of their grade for the 8 week period. Michael H. Hart’s top 100 list of the most influential people in the history of the world was presented to teach that Muhammad was #1, Sir Isaac Newton was #2 and Jesus was #3. The school hosted two professional Muslim speakers, from the Islamic Speakers Bureau of Arizona, to speak to all 7th grade social studies classes. This took one whole day. The Muslim speakers brought prayer rugs and taught the children to pray the Muslim way. I also believe that there were recitations from the Koran and possibly an Islamic “fashion show”.

I would like to see some corrobration of this story.

Here’s a review of this and other textbooks.

It appears that this book has just five chapters on the Rise of Islam (one unit of eight units), fwiw.

Where is the ACLU?

Via LGF

Wired News wonders if maybe it was something a lot less techie than a “hack” and more like some simple social engineering….

Despite the tossing around of the term “hack,” no one knows whether the data was hacked or if it was obtained with a password.

T-Mobile subscribers can access their e-mail, contacts and photos through a website protected by a user name and password. Given Hilton’s less-than-savvy reputation, the favorite candidate for her secret password is “tinkerbell” — as in one of her pet pooches.

Check out this scathing editorial about parental control given up when placing children in public schools. (Interestingly enough, our conservative friends over at Fark have categorized it with the “obvious” tag).

Any parent with a child in a public school has likely discovered our education system is little more than a means by which liberals indoctrinate children with socialist ideology.

If this seems a radical assertion, I assure you it is not. In fact, examples abound indicating its accuracy.

… some examples of his assertion … and then this bit of interesting info:

California schools have been barred from informing parents if their children leave school grounds “to receive certain confidential medical services that include abortion, AIDS treatment and psychological analysis, according to an opinion issued by the office of state Attorney General Bill Lockyer.”

Which means…

If California’s attorney general gets away with this absurd policy, your kid’s geometry teacher essentially has more right to know your child is pregnant — or has contracted HIV, or is potentially suicidal — than you do. And how is a “medical service” still confidential if someone other than a doctor and patient is aware of it?

In plain English, it isn’t. But this hasn’t stopped school officials and liberal lawyers from assuming they know better than parents what’s best for their own kids.

… and finally:

Public schools can’t even take students on field trips or hand out Tylenol without consent of a parent or guardian, but if they want to toss out condoms and, apparently, schedule abortions for teenagers, why, that’s just not our business.

If this doesn’t convince you that parents practically forfeit all control over their kids upon subjecting them to the draconian fancies of today’s state “education” facilities, nothing will.

The Washington Times says:

Mrs. Clinton “is likely to be the nominee,” [admitted plagiarist] Mr. Biden said of the former first lady. “She’d be the toughest person, and I think Hillary Clinton is able to be elected president of the United States.”

also…

Mr. Biden said that he is seriously considering a second bid for the presidency.

Asked by host Tim Russert whether he was running, he said: “The answer is there’s a lot at stake, and I might.”

The CourierPress has a really fascinating story. They require a somewhat annoying free registration, but it’s worth the read.

Here’s the intro:

In 1962, Ray and Nancy Hagensieker drove to Seymour, Ind., to visit the grieving widow of a favorite uncle. When the Evansville couple arrived, they found their aunt dragging out wooden crates of old books, newspapers and documents that her late husband had collected and stashed away for years. She was piling it all into a trash heap, getting ready to burn it.

“Don’t you think some of this might be worth something someday?” Ray Hagensieker recalls asking. The aunt, left wealthy by her husband’s death and anxious to clear out the clutter of her home, responded: “Go ahead and take what you want.”

And here’s the final paragraph:

“This is certainly different than any case I’ve had before,” said Barsumian. Lawrence, meanwhile, has never wavered in his belief that the Hagensiekers had themselves a real da Vinci, but he understands the skeptics: “The art world is filled with people too arrogant to believe that you could find Leonardo in the basement of a house in Evansville, Indiana.”

Hat Tip: In the Agora

Josh Claybourn is right, it’s like a real life “Da Vinci Code.”

I’ve been waiting for this article from my physical copy of Wired Mag to come out online so I could link to it. This is some incredible stuff.

Matthew Nagle is beating me at Pong. “O, baby,” he mutters. The creases in his forehead deepen as he moves the onscreen paddle to block the ball. “C’mon - here you go,” he says, sending a wicked angle shot ricocheting down the screen and past my defense. “Yes!” he says in triumph, his voice hoarse from the ventilator that helps him breathe. “Let’s go again, dude.”

The remarkable thing about Nagle is not that he plays skillfully; it’s that he can play at all. Nagle is a C4 quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down in a stabbing three years ago. He pilots a motorized wheelchair by blowing into a sip-and-puff tube, his pale hands strapped to the armrests. He’s playing Pong with his thoughts alone.

UPDATE: I just had to post one more paragraph. This is the sort of stuff that just makes me shake my head in amazement…

Other researchers were chasing the same goal. In 2002, Miguel Nicolelis, a neurobiologist at Duke, provided the best evidence yet of the brain’s plasticity. He and his team plugged 86 microwires into the brain of a monkey and taught the animal to use a joystick to move an onscreen cursor (the reward: a sip of juice). After the computer had learned to interpret the animal’s brain activity, Nicolelis disconnected the joystick. For a while, the monkey kept working it. But he eventually figured it out. The monkey dropped the joystick and stopped moving his arm; the cursor still moved to the target. As the monkey calmly downed another swallow of juice, Nicolelis’ lab fell silent in awe. The mammalian brain could assimilate a device - a machine.

Fascinating quote:

“We have worked tirelessly to try to change our products so they’re not only nutritious but acceptable to kids,” said Janie Thornton, Hardin County Schools’ food service director and vice president of the national School Nutrition Association. “If kids won’t eat it, we haven’t accomplished a thing.”

From the Buffalo News…

Bill Logal logged onto his computer Sunday night with the intention of paying his city garbage fee.

Unfortunately for Logal, Buffalo’s City Hall Web site was temporarily down, a claim the city challenges.

What city officials won’t contest is that, yes, the city was late paying its Web site registration fee and, yes, Logal paid it on the city’s behalf.

That’s right. Logal, who lives 1,300 miles away in Dallas but owns a house here, took it upon himself to pay the city’s $46.99 renewal fee. “I did ‘em a favor,” he told Off Main last week. “The site was down, down, down, so I paid to get it up so I could pay my user fee.”

That’s great.

Check out this Howard Dean quote from LJWorld.com.

And concluding his backyard speech with a litany of Democratic values, he added: “This is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.”

Powerpundit thinks we may not need to be too concerned about Dean.

PoliPundit has what I assume is a rhetorical question.

ZardozZ:

We wonder how many Southern / Moderate Democrats will be left after the reign of Howard Dean. Get the straight jackets and thorazine out…. here comes Howard.

Deacon of Powerline, has a column in the Weekly Standard. Check it out.

Both sides in today’s ideological clash stand accused by the other of adopting the paranoid style. James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has argued (in the piece that inspired this one) that the left has become politically paranoid. And a number of leftist bloggers have made the same allegation against conservative blogs. A neutral might be tempted to conclude that both sides are correct. But, as noted, strong partisanship is not the same thing as paranoia. And Hofstadter himself did not adopt a reflexive “moral equivalency” approach–in each of his examples of the paranoid style, it was the mentality of only one side. Thus, we need to explore more carefully the extent to which the two sides of today’s debate exhibit paranoia.

Michelle Malkin takes on the logic in this WaPo op-ed by Michael Northrop of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

His essential argument is that cutting carbon dioxide emissions is good for the environment and it’s profitable for companies, so we need “serious, across-the-board federal and international policies and programs” to solve the “problem” of global warming.

If it’s so profitable, let the free market run its course.

Becki Snow has quite an article this morning on Terri’s situation. Check out the whole thing. Here’s a brief excerpt.

Terri’s slow death will grind down to a brutal, final starvation, executed at Felos’ request. Upon Terri’s death, several hundred thousand dollars that were earmarked for Terri’s long-term care and therapy will finally be released to her husband Michael Schiavo, his new lover and their two children, to his attorney George Felos, and quite possibly in turn to the Hospice itself. It is unknown if Felos would advocate quick death for hospice patients who do not have large sums of money lubricating their exit from life; evidently the Hospice has not been forthcoming with clients in regard to George Felos’ true role at the Hospice.

And later …

This information regarding lack of disclosure of conflict of interest by Felos and “The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast” should warrant appeal of the Court’s Nov. 22 ruling, and should spur a call for further investigation into other cases of conflict of interest concerning the Hospice and Felos. The court’s Nov. 22 ruling is based in part on medical information taken from Terri while she was in the care of the Hospice - information which may have been tainted by the lack of full disclosure regarding Past Chairman/Attorney George Felos.

According to this Time.com story, Mr. Putin is a bit confused about how the free press works.

George Bush knew Vladimir Putin would be defensive when Bush brought up the pace of democratic reform in Russia in their private meeting at the end of Bush’s four-day, three-city tour of Europe. But when Bush talked about the Kremlin’s crackdown on the media and explained that democracies require a free press, the Russian leader gave a rebuttal that left the President nonplussed. If the press was so free in the U.S., Putin asked, then why had those reporters at CBS lost their jobs? Bush was openmouthed. “Putin thought we’d fired Dan Rather,” says a senior Administration official. “It was like something out of 1984.”

And from MSNBC:

When Bush confronted his Russian counterpart about the freedom of the press in Russia, Putin shot back with an attack of his own: “We didn’t criticize you when you fired those reporters at CBS.”

Others have had a few comments.

Kevin Dayaratna has a brief open letter to Mr. Putin (btw, Kevin, what’s up with that squirrel?)

Young Pundit says:

And pass this message to Putin: Our press is free, but isn’t free to slander.

Lori Byrd at PoliPundit has this to say:

the fact that Putin, who has access to CNN and the NYT and every other American and international media outlet, would believe such a thing says a lot about the state of the international media.

Keith Devens is justifiably disturbed.

How could a world leader like Putin be so clueless about how a country he has to deal with works? And not just any country, but the US? What else is Putin wildly misguided on? Very disturbing.

Matt J. Duffy is astounded.

Crazy. That the president of Russia could be that far off base is almost incomprehendable.

UPDATE: The OxBlog has some thoughts on the more substantial portions of Bush’s time with Putin.

Yet whereas Third World dictators have a long history of insisting that their dictatorship is actually a new form of democracy, Putin has abandoned this pledge and acknowledged that democracy has a universal essence. What matters isn’t whether Putin really believes this. What matters is that he told it to the President of the United States, who will be very angry if Putin goes back on his word.

For the reasons given above, I think Bush did a superb job at Bratislava. Now comes the hard part. For the first time, however, I am confident that Bush really understands what is at stake in Moscow.

UPDATE 2: Hey, cool! Andy at SiberianLight threw a compliment my way. Sort of. He includes me in his list of “bloggers who should know better.” And although he’s trying to say I’ve been duped by Time, or that scheming Rove, or somebody, the fact that I “should know better” feels like a compliment … at least looking at life with the glass half full. (Or, as I often think, maybe the glass is simply bigger than it needs to be). Back to the point, check out Andy’s post, where he’s skeptical about this Time story and thinks Putin may in fact be smart enough to know Bush didn’t fire Rather.

From the Associated Press:

The most blunt assessment came from Microsoft chief Bill Gates, who has put more than $700 million into reducing the size of high school classes through the foundation formed by him and his wife, Melinda. He said high schools must be redesigned to prepare every student for college, with classes that are rigorous and relevant to kids and with supportive relationships for children.

“America’s high schools are obsolete,” Gates said. “By obsolete, I don’t just mean that they’re broken, flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools _ even when they’re working as designed _ cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.”

Hat tip: Discovery Toys: Teach With Toys

Terri Schiavo Update:

In a strongly worded ruling indicating he has run out of patience with the years of litigation over Terri Schiavo’s fate, the judge in the case said Friday her husband can remove the brain-damaged woman’s feeding tube at 1 p.m. March 18.

For those who find this sort of thing interesting, check out the stellar eclipse on March 3rd.

Drudge splashed this Variety.com article, which underscores what I’ve been harping on (off and on) on this blog. And that is that as parents, we have the responsibility to act like parents.

“It’s PG-13, my kids is 14, I’m sure it’s fine.”

Right.

The MPAA has just rated “Gunner Palace” PG-13, and it includes numerous instances of expletives (in a war zone), including FU**, SH** and A**HOLE. If that’s what you want burning into the permanent recording devices known as a child’s brain, fine, but at least pay attention to what they’re watching and doing.

And don’t trust any external regulatory or pseudo-self-regulating voluntary body with the welfare of your children.

The arguments in favor of the PG-13 rating are basically that it’s a reality-based documentary. The Daily Brief says:

To me, profanity in a documentary, particularly one about the military, is akin to full frontal nudity in National Geographic. Should we also be taking that out of children’s reach?

The problem is, it’s not that an R rating is a punishment, it’s supposed to give you an accurate representation of the content of the film. And while folks, such as WindOfChange, think it is absurd to rate this film R, the fact remains that if ratings are simply political, they may as well be thrown out.

MPAA says that an R rating means:

In the opinion of the Rating Board, this film definitely contains some adult material. Parents are strongly urged to find out more about this film before they allow their children to accompany them.

An R-rated film may include hard language, or tough violence, or nudity within sensual scenes, or drug abuse or other elements, or a combination of some of the above, so that parents are counseled, in advance, to take this advisory rating very seriously. Parents must find out more about an R-rated movie before they allow their teenagers to view it.

And a war film with lots of expletives surely falls into the category of “parents, you want to find out more about this movie before you allow your teenagers to view it.” And it may well be that the decision you make is that it is appropriate for your child. But the MPAA should not be making that decision for you.

UPDATE: On an almost related note, a school in the UK has banned kids from playing tag becuase it’s too dangerous:

A SCHOOL has banned children from playing tag — claiming it is too DANGEROUS.

Shocked parents were told pupils — aged from five to nine — must drop the centuries-old chase game.

The parents are up in arms, er, upset about it.

If you don’t know about the Lawrence Summers kerfuffle, there’s lots of background online. But basically he suggested:

that innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.

Now the science:

The brains of men and women function in markedly different ways, which means they really do think differently, according to researchers from the University of California, Irvine and the University of New Mexico.

The human brain is composed of two types of tissue–gray matter and white matter. While men and women have about the same amount of gray matter and white matter, men appear to use more gray matter, while women use more white matter.

So I wonder if Nancy Hopkins of MIT has recovered from this reaction:

“I felt I was going to be sick,” … “My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” she said. “I was extremely upset.”

Via Captain Ed.

On a related note, about how the brain works… check out Jeff Hawkin’s book “On Intelligence” or read some of the reviews on it. He’s the guy who conceived the PalmPilot PDA and the Treo smartphone, but he’s been studying the neocortex for 25 years and has some interesting theories.

CNET Summarizes:

Hawkins says the main difference between his idea and others is that the other methods try to copy human behavior using the wrong notion of how the brain works. The brain doesn’t produce an output for every input, Hawkins says. Instead, it stores experiences and sequences and makes predictions based on those memories. Using that realization about intelligence as a starting point, scientists and inventors can create new and smarter machines, he says.

Ok, back to Lawrence Summers. EducationWonk has an interesting “Tale of Two Talkers.” He compares Summers’ comments and the reaction with Ward Churchill’s. DownWithBush offers this breaking news:

“Starting in the fall, Harvard will offer home economics for women who find economics too tricky,” said Mr. Summers, who called the move “long overdue.”

UPDATE: Via WSJ’s Best of the Web, here’s a suggestion :

To help attract female concentrators [in science], students suggested class activities such as an ice cream social for Chemistry 5 students.

*** EXCLUSIVE: MUST CREDIT MYOPIC ZEAL! ***

I have uncovered another work of art. I purchased this from Professor Churchill’s private collection in 1993 for $750. After reading about the “borrowed art idea” scandal, I decided to do a scan of other pieces of art to ensure that the one he sold me was truly an original work. Here is the one I purchased:

But, as original as this might appear, Myopic Zeal has learned that this too is a very close copy of someone else’s original. There are subtle differences, the background scenery is changed, the image is flipped horizontally, the face is slightly masked, but other than that, it appears that there may be some of the original that made it into this painting by Mr. Churchill.

Check out the original and see what you think. The site I found this on is in French, and I don’t read French, so I have no idea if this is a famous work of art or not. Presumably he picked something obscure to copy.

UPDATE: Check out this post for more details, and an observation we have made that calls into question the validity of this whole “art fraud” story.

UPDATE 2: More great ‘originals’ at Etherhouse.

UPDATE 3 (3/2/2005): Could we see a Howard Dean / Ward Churchill ticket in 2008?

UPDATE 4 (3/7): Hmmm…

BREAKING EXCLUSIVE UPDATE: See this post for yet another work of Churchill’s art exposed!

The Ward Churchill saga continues. Not only is he not an Indian, he’s also has done some “original” artwork that is surprisingly similar to other works found elsewhere.

Michelle Malkin has the expose this morning. Check it out!

Others who are on the story include: Doug Petch, Narcissistic Views, and not many others … yet … If you’re posting about this, trackback here and I’ll add your link later in the day.

The original story is here, and has these side by side pix.

This, from the 1972 book The Mystic Warriors of the Plains.

And from Ward Churchill.

Also, there is another that has been allegedly uncovered which is for sale on eBay. See Michelle’s site for the details.

UPDATE: I found this to be a bit ironic. From the guy that owns the “Winter Attack” original by Ward Churchill:

“Sure, it makes me angry, it makes me very disappointed,” Prentup said. “I wanted some original artwork from what appeared to be a very good local artist. Now I don’t know what I’ve got.”

But then there’s this:

Current bid: US $255.00 (Reserve not met)

Tekput has great feedback reviews and ratings, but something about the two pieces of information together in my mind raise some question I can’t quite put my finger on. Guy finds fraudulent work of art, is disappointed, goes to the newspaper, and then immediately lists it on eBay for hundreds of dollars. I’m just raising the question. Is it possible this “fraudulent art” thing is just a well crafted entrepreneurial hoax?

UPDATE 2: Kiliman has pointed out in the comments that there are 250 of these pieces floating around, so it’s pretty likely that my question above - wondering if Tekput was Prentup - was probably makeing a false assumption.

UPDATE 3 (3/7): Hmmm……