Combs Spouts Off

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

CA school to kids: look at both sides of Holocaust controversy

Posted by Richard on May 6, 2014

I kid you not: Eighth-graders in Rialto, California, were assigned to write an essay regarding the Holocaust. They were given 18-page instructions (!) that referred them to specific online sources they were to use, including a Holocaust-denial website. Their essays were to argue either for or against the claim that the Holocaust was a hoax.

Incredibly, the school district initially defended the assignment and said it had received no complaints from parents, teachers, or administrators. But after the Los Angeles area chapter of the Anti-Defamation League brought the matter to public attention, the school district said it would revise the assignment.

“It is ADL’s general position that an exercise asking students to question whether the Holocaust happened has no academic value; it only gives legitimacy to the hateful and anti-Semitic promoters of Holocaust Denial,” read an email to the school district from ADL Associate Regional Director Matthew Friedman.

The ADL posted a statement, including the quotes from Friedman, on its blog on Monday.

“ADL does not have any evidence that the assignment was given as part of a larger, insidious, agenda,” the blog post read. “Rather, the district seems to have given the assignment with an intent, although misguided, to meet Common Core standards relating to critical learning skills.”

Apparently because of this reference to Common Core standards, PJMedia’s Bryan Preston tried to make this a Common Core issue. I’m no fan of the top-down, one-size-fits-all Common Core standards, but this has nothing to do with them.

As for ADL’s statement regarding an agenda, I see at least some circumstantial evidence of one. We don’t know who is on the district’s CORE committee that created the assignment, but we do know who the superintendent and his spokeswoman are (emphasis added):

Interim Superintendent Mohammad Z. Islam was set to talk with administrators to “assure that any references to the holocaust ‘not occurring’ will be stricken on any current or future Argumentative Research assignments,” a statement from district spokeswoman Syeda Jafri read.

Why, yes, I am profiling.

I’m going to jump to another conclusion, too. I bet if students were told to write an essay defending either creationism or evolution, or arguing for or against anthropogenic global warming, and given sources to use for both sides of each issue, “progressive” parents and teachers would have been picketing noisily in front of the school district offices.

Subscribe To Site:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: education, holocaust, islam | Leave a Comment »

Benghazi, Ft. Hood, and the Bundy Ranch

Posted by Richard on May 6, 2014

This picture perfectly illustrates how messed up the “conventional wisdom” is in America today.

Benghazi, Ft. Hood, and the Bundy Ranch

Subscribe To Site:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: benghazi, bundy ranch, fort hood | Leave a Comment »

How a persuasive scientist with poor evidence ruined our diets

Posted by Richard on May 6, 2014

ICYMI: Put away that box of breakfast cereal and have some ham and eggs. That’s the take-away from a fascinating essay by Nina Teicholz in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal:

“Saturated fat does not cause heart disease”—or so concluded a big study published in March in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. How could this be? The very cornerstone of dietary advice for generations has been that the saturated fats in butter, cheese and red meat should be avoided because they clog our arteries. For many diet-conscious Americans, it is simply second nature to opt for chicken over sirloin, canola oil over butter.

The new study’s conclusion shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with modern nutritional science, however. The fact is, there has never been solid evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics and bias.

The persuasive scientist who derailed nutrition policy was Ancel Benjamin Keys, and it’s an interesting story. The unintended consequences of the adoption of Dr. Keys’ diet recommendations, chiefly the increased consumption of carbohydrates and vegetable oils, have not been good. For one thing, eating less fat and more carbs, ironically, makes us fatter:

One consequence is that in cutting back on fats, we are now eating a lot more carbohydrates—at least 25% more since the early 1970s. Consumption of saturated fat, meanwhile, has dropped by 11%, according to the best available government data. …

The problem is that carbohydrates break down into glucose, which causes the body to release insulin—a hormone that is fantastically efficient at storing fat. Meanwhile, fructose, the main sugar in fruit, causes the liver to generate triglycerides and other lipids in the blood that are altogether bad news. Excessive carbohydrates lead not only to obesity but also, over time, to Type 2 diabetes and, very likely, heart disease.

Read the whole thing. You may want to change your breakfast routine.

Subscribe To Site:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: diet, health, medical research | 2 Comments »

Israeli Independence Day

Posted by Richard on May 5, 2014

Happy 66th birthday to Israel, still the only country in the Middle East that embraces reason, the Enlightenment, democracy, and freedom.

israel-66

Subscribe To Site:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: independence, israel | Leave a Comment »

How unique is Obama’s cabinet?

Posted by Richard on May 4, 2014

This bar graph tells you everything you need to know about the Obama cabinet.

cabinet-comparison

Subscribe To Site:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: anticapitalism, obama | Leave a Comment »

Children, chicken, and aggression

Posted by Richard on May 1, 2014

Breitbart posted a UPI story about a Cornell University research study that sounds like a parody, but isn’t. Researchers had some kids, age 6-10, eat pieces of chicken with their hands off the bone, and had others eat pieces of cut-up boneless chicken with a fork. They determined that eating the cut-up chicken made kids more docile and eating food they had to hold and bite made them more aggressive.

How did they determine the relative aggressiveness? A commenter on the story explained:

… Look at the study’s actual “aggression measure” : Compliance with instructions to say seated after eating or remain within 9′ f table after eating

That is NOT a measure of aggression or disobedience — that is a measure of being a kid or a compliant slave to meaningless instructions!

Study actually concludes that eating boneless chicken makes your kid less of a kid, less independent, less fun, and a mindless idiot who obeys pointless instructions from authority no matter how silly.

No doubt this absurd bit of “scientific research” was paid for by your tax dollars.

Personally, I think it’s raaacist.

Subscribe To Site:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: aggression, children, pseudoscience, research | Leave a Comment »

That “smoking gun” Benghazi email

Posted by Richard on May 1, 2014

By now, you may have heard about the email that’s been labeled a “smoking gun” regarding the administration’s Benghazi coverup. It’s one of 41 documents finally obtained by Judicial Watch as the result of an FOIA lawsuit filed last summer. The email in question, written by Ben Rhodes on 9/14/12, sets out the talking points for Ambassador Susan Rice to use in her multiple Sunday news show appearances two days later. Rhodes’ title is “Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting.”

Is this email a smoking gun? If you rely on the Associated Press story (as it appears in the Denver Post), you have no way of knowing. AP simply presents it as “Carney said, Graham said” — as if there’s no definitive way of determining the truth. But there is.

ABC’s Jonathan Karl tweeted a picture of the relevant section of the email, which Carney insisted was not about Benghazi. It contains the heading “Benghazi.” The first talking point under that heading tells Rice to say “the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by protests at the US Embassy in Cairo” (see below). We know from other information (including earlier messages in the same email thread) that everyone involved at the White House was already aware that this was a planned terrorist attack and that there was no preceding “demonstration.”

@PressSec says @rhodes44 email not released bc “explicitly not about Benghazi.” It has section entitled “Benghazi” pic.twitter.com/SP3c5MynS6

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) April 30, 2014

If you rely on CBS for your news (really?!), you don’t know anything at all about this email because CBS News hasn’t reported the story. I wonder if that is in any way related to the fact that presidential advisor Ben Rhodes is the brother of CBS News President David Rhodes.

Subscribe To Site: