ParisTampaBlog

That Amr Moussa, the former chairman of the Arab League, would take at face value the Libyan government’s words to the effect that allied bombardment had killed dozens of civilians. That he would believe the Libyan government, in particular Qaddafi and his sons, about anything at all. Unbelievable.

There is no evidence on the ground of the allied bombardments having killed dozens of civilians. Whereas there is ample evidence on the ground that Qaddafi’s mercenaries have killed hundreds, if not thousands of Libyan citizens. And of this Moussa has had little, if anything to say.

Now who is Amr Moussa? May we trust him, listen to his words and take seriously what he says? Hardly. His own career does not inspire our confidence. Between 1991 and 2001 he was Hosni Mubarak’s foreign minister. And then in 2001, probably pushed by Mubarak, he became Secretary-General of the Arab League.

Neither position was known for its truth telling.

It is from the League platform that he is now speaking out, although just recently he has announced his intention to resign and run for the Egyptian presidency, and with good chances of winning that post!

What does this man’s probable emerging prominence promise for the future of the Middle East? Does his experience as Mubarak’s man for most of his career, and most recently his position as head of the Arab League qualify him for the presidency, let alone deserve to have the confidence of the Western democracies?

I don’t think so. In regard to the Arab League, here is what Jeffrey Goldberg writes about that organization:

Does anyone believe that the Arab League, whose members include Bashar al-Assad, the Saud family, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, Muammar Qaddafi (now suspended for non-payment of dues and an overly-gauche defense of his regime) and until a few weeks ago Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak, is a force for progressive politics and humanitarianism? [Does anyone believe] That it would ever stand with the West when it was uncomfortable to stand with the West?

And as Goldberg also asks, in the same piece: “Who could have guessed that Amr Moussa and the braver-than-brave Arab League might now have doubts about military action against Libya?” Yes, who could ever have expected that this man, the product of a lifetime spent coddling Arab dictators, would see the justice of the freedom fighters opposing Qaddafi and the West’s duty to defend them? Given that the Arabs themselves were not going to do so.

Who would stop Qaddafi’s mercenaries, when they were just about to take Benghazi, the last remaining Rebel stronghold in the East?

Qaddafi had boasted on a call-in radio show on Friday: “We are coming tonight,” he had said, and “you [the people of Benghazi] will come out from inside. Prepare yourselves… [and if you  don't come out] we will find you in your closets.” And we knew already all about the slaughter he intended.

Just a day or two earlier he had spoken of the rebels as rats, and told them there were only two possible outcomes, either they surrender to him, Qaddafi, or they run away.

Well it would be the French, our socialist, nanny state ally who would stop him, and they would do it almost by themselves. The life spirit, the sense of right and wrong, of what in some instances just had to be done if we would go on standing tall — all that sort of thing had evidently not been crushed by decades of French bureaucratic rule.

The people, huddled in Benghazi before Qaddafi’s tribal armies almost at the gates, were, at least to our eyes, freedom fighters, fighting for a democratic government, and as such we were obliged to defend them, or at least keep them from being overrun and slaughtered.

Were they in fact freedom fighters? I don’t know. Probably some were, and some weren’t. Probably they were of all kinds. In any case if given a chance they might become such, and didn’t we have to give them that chance?

In any case President Sarkozy had been the first to recognize the legitimacy of the Libyan rebels, and yesterday, Saturday, March 19, he alone of the world’s countries and peoples stood tall and sent his Mirage jets to crush Qaddafi’s armor at the very gates of the city, allowing the rebels to pull back from their own wild flight to Egypt in the East, and to return to their homes and businesses.

Whatever the final result, that action by the French President was a good one. Here is a description, taken from the Times, of the punishment wrought by the Mirage pilots.

Merci Sarkozy, et merci à vous, les pilots. Chapeau!

The attack seemed to have come out of clear skies onto a field of wildflowers.

Littered across the landscape, some 30 miles south of Benghazi, the detritus …offered a panorama of destruction: tanks, charred and battered, their turrets blasted clean off, one with a body still caught in its remnants; a small Toyota truck with its roof torn away; a tank transporter still on fire. But it did not end there.

For miles leading south, the roadsides were littered with burned trucks and burned civilian cars. In some places battle tanks had simply been abandoned, intact, as their crews fled. One thing, though, seemed evident: the units closest to Benghazi seemed to have been hit with their cannons and machine guns still pointing toward the rebel capital.

To the south, though, many had been hit as they headed away from the city in a headlong dash for escape on the long road leading to a distant Tripoli.

“They were retreating,” said Col. Abdullah al-Shafi, an officer in the rebel forces, which had clamored desperately for the allied air help that arrived on Saturday. “Soldiers had taken civilians’ cars and fled. They were ditching their fatigues.”

Among it all, across an area the size of four football fields dotted with trees and white and yellow flowers, hundreds of Libyans solemnly picked through the debris on Sunday, gazing at the results of a last battle in Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s assault on Benghazi, the de facto rebel capital.

At one point, the onlookers carefully extricated the body of a soldier from the remnants of a tank, turned to cinder like five more bodies, unrecognizable on the roadside….

But given the distance from Benghazi, it was clear that Colonel Qaddafi’s forces had been moving into position, at least to encircle the city or possibly reinforce advance units already there.

“This is all France,” a rebel fighter, Tahir Sassi, told a Reuters correspondent as he surveyed the devastation on Sunday. “Today we came through and saw the road open.”

You may not believe it but there are a couple of things that still need to be said about our public schools. Things that while they are being said, not just by me, but by many other blog voices on the internet, are not widely listened to, and certainly not heard by the educational establishment.

First that the educational establishment needs to welcome an injection of common sense into their discussion, that which is not always present when they talk about the schools. For example it needs to be said and heard by the establishment that the schools will significantly improve, student proficiency, student achievements will rise, only when the students themselves simply work harder at their assignments, when they become more responsible for their own learning.

For common sense tells us that student learning, in particular students being held accountable for their own learning, ought to be the centerpiece of all our conversations about the public schools. Instead we talk about other things, much less important, about money, common core standards, the curriculum, testing and student data keeping, and lately, perhaps, most of all, about the importance of the teacher in the classroom.

It’s true that our best and brightest do not go into teaching (if they had we might have avoided Vietnam, and Iraq?). It’s true that the quality of our teachers is not up there with that of the other professions. Why is that?

Is it because teachers are not paid enough? I don’t think so. I would say, much more, that it’s because too many students, and in particular too many of those in our inner city schools, show little interest in classroom learning.

I say “classroom learning” because these students, like all young people are learning all the time, probably most of all out of class and out of school. And, because of their minimal participation in classroom learning, the teacher loses his or her interest in being there.

I know I left the public school classroom myself because my students showed little interest in what I would teach them. At best the best of them wanted to know what they had to know for the test. The others, well if obliged they did for the most part attend my class. Although when I gave them a choice they didn’t and I lost my position in the school.

The other thing, or things, that needs to be said about our schools is simply that the present structure neither corresponds to what society needs, nor to the way kids best learn, and should be abandoned.

I read this early on in my own career in the brilliant writings of Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, John Holt and many others, who were not at the time, and are still not, alas, listened to by the educational establishment.

I read it again just yesterday in comic form in a Blog piece by Frank J. Fleming, entitled: Why Every Kid in America Doesn’t Need to Be Educated.

Here is the gist of what Frank Fleming says, leaving out much of the humor, and the exaggeration, but with, I hope, the substance of his message:

Why do we spend so much money on education? I think a lot of people would answer, “Because educating our kids is important.” Really? Why? ….

We have 7.2 million teachers in this country and about 76 million students. Children are taught for 13 years in grade school, and many people want everyone to get at least 4 years of college on top of that. And what exactly do we get out of all this? ….

What is our goal? …. The future still needs people to cook, clean, and manufacture goods — and it doesn’t take a decade of education in math and science to be able to do those things. So why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make sure every fry cook at one point in his life knew what a gerund is?

Is there a benefit to educating everybody regardless of actual need? We keep hearing that we’re falling behind the rest of the world in our average math and science scores, but let’s look at some of the countries ahead of us: Finland, Lichtenstein, the Czech Republic. I’m sorry, but did I miss all the huge technological innovations that came out of these countries? ….

Now, obviously some people …need education…. But is the most efficient path to that really to teach absolutely everyone and hope a small percentage actually retain some of what they’re taught? …. why don’t we just focus on what the average citizen actually needs?

Everyone needs literacy, as you have to have some reading skills …. And then we should also teach everyone how to use Google, as that will cover science, history, and math whenever those come up. No reason that basic knowledge can’t be knocked off in a year for each kid…..

So there’s our solution to the education problem: Instead of trying to make a lot of bad education for everyone when most aren’t even going to use it, let’s focus on making the absolute best education to give to the few who will. Everyone else gets to learn useful skills, and as a bonus we bring manufacturing jobs back to our country.

His message, like the earlier one that the students themselves need to be held accountable, is also not new, and also not widely heard. For we go on insisting that if not everyone, most everyone be prepared for college, that which means for lives most of them will never lead.

For example we know early on that not everyone will take the calculus in the senior year of high school but continue promoting a mathematics program that is by and large a preparation for the calculus.

And the same is true throughout the program. Kids, if they remain in school through high school, all but about a quarter of them (and what have our schools done for this quarter?), will take subjects such as math (as I’ve said, a kind of precalculus) and science, language, literature, and history, in a form that is mostly irrelevant to their lives, and for the most part they will not achieve a college ready preparation or readiness in any one of these areas (that which makes it necessary for so many entering college freshmen to do remedial work before, too many of them, dropping out).

And while giving all those years as Fleming points out to not learning anything useful to them, students (better, kids) will therefore not have learned all those really useful things not in the program, the skills and knowledge regarding just about everything else that does go on in our society, the jobs and work and other activities needed by society, all those things they might have learned in school most useful to their own futures.

I woke up this morning (with three little birds?)

and smiled with the rising sun. I did a garden walk and checked on our mango tree the first flowers

of which had been mostly destroyed by nesting green caterpillars.

Not this one:

But this one:

Those three little birds had not been doing their job.

Back at my desk I read that not the 28 members of NATO, not the 15-member U.N. Security Council, not the 22 nations of the Arab League would save Libya’s rebels

from being obliterated by the mad and murderous Moammar Gadhafi, that which meant, according to Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal, that our world was watching the collapse of internationalism.

Turning from the opinion pages of the Wall Street to the NY Times I went on to read that the cooling pool at reactor No. 4 at Fukushima was especially worrying because the rods immersed in that pool had been removed from the reactor core in December 2010, and were therefore generating more heat than the used fuel rods stored elsewhere at the site.

Also, according to the report in the Times, the Japanese authorities were reaching for ever more desperate and unconventional methods to cool damaged reactors, deploying helicopters and water cannons in a race to prevent perilous overheating in the spent rods of the No. 3 reactor. According to a spokesperson, “the spent fuel pool at that unit had lost all or most of its water and radiation levels “were extremely high.”

And finally was it true, I wondered, as the Japanese television drama, called “Shikaotoko Aoniyoshi,” or “The Fantastic Deer-Man,” would have it, that in a country, plagued by worsening and worsening earthquakes, that unless the giant catfish

that lives beneath Japan were finally subdued the country above, in this case, Japan, would be destroyed?

Well I thought, wouldn’t it be best to sing, to shout rather, right along with Bob Marley, that we needn’t worry “bout a thing,” because “every little thing was gonna be all right.”

As a rule I like David Brooks, often find myself saying that he speaks (writes) for me. But this time, in a NYTimes op ed piece, The New Humanism, he’s terribly off base. Most of all in this piece he’s not in command of his subject, as if he were writing about an idea he hadn’t fully digested or understood himself.

His idea is that our policy failures, of which there are certainly many, the mediocre achievement of our public schools, our stalled and costly military presence in the Middle East, our failure to recognize and appropriately manage bubbles, especially that in the housing market in 2006/07, our annual trillion dollar budget deficits, that these and other failures all stem from an “overly simplistic view of human nature,” one in which reason was to be trusted and emotions considered suspect.

But, as it seemed to me while reading Brooks, couldn’t one just as easily have said that in all these instances of policy failures we had too much trusted our emotions and set reason aside?

Closing the achievement gaps between different groups of our student populations; narrowing the widening income gaps between the upper, middle, and lower classes; attempting to help the Arab and Muslim peoples of the Middle East establish democratic governments; lowering mortgage rates and thereby extending home ownership to as many of our people as possible, thinking that this will make them more responsible and more productive citizens….

And most of all not wanting to take away from large numbers of our citizens any of the health, old age and other benefits that we had earlier given them and that they had come to depend upon, (and thereby creating the envisioned and now much talked about but still not reasonably addressed inevitable budget deficits for our children).

In all these cases we acted from our feelings, from our feeling about what was right. In all these cases we acted unreasonably, from how we wanted things to be, and not from an understanding of what was the nature of the problem, and not at all how, by well reasoned initiatives, we might have in fact changed things for the better.

We acted most of all out of generosity. From a desire to help ourselves, yes, but no less from a desire to help other peoples to better their lives. And in what we did we were not trusting our reason, rather our hearts.

For reason if listened to in any of these instances might have told us what was possible, and what was not possible, and we would have done things differently from what we’re now doing, swayed as we are by our affective side.

In other words, Brooks seems to have it just backwards. In a sense there has been too much “humanism,” new or old, and what we need more of is clear and yes, cold, reason.