Mar 14, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
From Lin Zinser:
In "Tackling Hard Thinking," Jean Moroney teaches practical techniques for guiding one's thinking when the task is challenging.
The objective of the course is to teach methods for monitoring one's cognitive progress and strategies for re-directing one's thought when something blocks that progress. Specifically, she teaches tactics for sustaining thinking despite four common problems which can bring the thinking to a halt: blankness, vagueness, overload, and floundering. The course is organized around these four problems. Although suitable for any adult, "Tackling Hard Thinking" is particularly relevant to professionals of all kinds.
Review the course in detail at her website: www.thinkingdirections.com
Mar 14, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
IRVINE--The idea that morality is impossible without faith in God is an endlessly-repeated theme of several Fox News Channel talk show hosts. "This idea must be challenged," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.
"It implies that man has no reason or purpose to be moral; it implies that no rational standard of morality is possible; it implies that in questions of morality man must suspend reason and blindly submit to faith or blindly obey some authority's ‘revelations' or ‘mystical insights.' To imply that we have no earthly reason to be moral is profoundly immoral.
"The purpose of morality," said Dr. Brook, "is to discover and teach the principles that lead to life, achievement, happiness, success, joy. There is only one means to discover and understand these principles: reason. A proper morality, one for living on earth, requires rationality and independence of soul, not faith and obedience to self-appointed interpreters of an alleged omnipotent being. A proper morality looks not to the supernatural but at man's nature and the reason why he needs values--and then defines the values he must reach and the virtues he must practice to reach them.
Dr. Brook concluded: "Properly understood, not only does morality not require faith in God--morality is incompatible with faith in God. The moral is the rationally accepted and chosen, not the mindlessly believed and followed."Mar 13, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
This cartoon is based on a suggestion from Rich Chandler.
Colorado University Professor Ward Churchill first gained national notoriety when it became widely known that he referred to some victims of the 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attack as "little Eichmanns" in a paper titled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens." FoxNews reported: 9/11 Prof Says He Mourns U.S., Iraqi Dead.
But it didn't end there. Los Angeles Times has the latest charges against the professor and a good overview of controversy: One Issue Triggers Firestorm of Doubt About Professor (free subscription required).[Churchill's] claim to be an American Indian, his scholarship, whether he promotes violence and how he got tenure so quickly are issues now under scrutiny. Most recently, he's been accused of art fraud, replicating paintings by the late Thomas Mails and selling them as his own. He said Mails gave him permission. ...
Churchill in the past had ties to militant organizations. On his resume, under the heading "political activism," he wrote that after returning from a combat tour in Vietnam -- Army records list him as a light vehicle driver -- he became an organizer for the Students for a Democratic Society, a radical protest group.
"Later that year I became a member of the Weathermen faction and liaison to the Black Panther Party chapter in Peoria," he wrote. In a 1987 Denver Post story, Churchill said he taught the Weathermen, who bombed two dozen buildings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, how to make explosives.
Other information on the charges regarding academic plagiarism, artistic fraud, Indian ancestry, and terrorist training.Mar 10, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
AP reports today: Annan Calls for Treaty Outlawing Terrorism.U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called Thursday for a world treaty on terrorism that would outlaw attacks targeting civilians and establish a framework for a collective response to the global threat.
Although the United Nations and its agencies already have 12 treaties covering terrorism, a universal definition has been elusive.
World leaders and officials have had deep disagreements over whether resisters to alleged oppression -- for example, Palestinian suicide bombers attacking Israeli targets — are terrorists or freedom fighters; and whether states that use what they think is legitimate force might be branded terrorists.
But Annan was categorical in his address Thursday to terrorism experts and world leaders from 50 countries ... "The right to resist occupation ... cannot include the right to deliberately kill or maim civilians," Annan told the conference on democracy, terrorism and security. The United Nations, he said, must proclaim "loud and clear that terrorism can never be accepted or justified in any cause whatsoever."
However, it's impossible to take Mr. Annan seriously when just days ago AP also reported: U.N. Must Accept Hezbollah, Annan Says.The United Nations must recognize Hezbollah as a force to be reckoned with in implementing the U.N. resolution calling for the withdrawal of all Syrian forces from Lebanon and the disarmament of the country's militias, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday.
He was responding to a question about the disarmament of Hezbollah, which showed its strength Tuesday at a huge pro-Syrian rally in Beirut attended by hundreds of thousands of people who chanted anti-U.S. slogans. Two huge banners read in English: "Thank you Syria" and "No to foreign interference."
Annan said the world needs to accept that in every society different groups may hold different views.
Today is the first anniversary of the Madrid terrorist bombings. Charles Johnson has appropriate comments.Mar 8, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
From the AP:
Hundreds of thousands jammed a central Beirut square Tuesday....[T]wo huge banners read, in English: "Thank you Syria" and "No to foreign interference." The latter was a reference to U.S. and U.N. pressure on Syria--but not to the Syrian military, which the protesters made clear they were happy to have stay. "We're here for the independence of Lebanon but not for Syria to leave," said 16-year-old Esraa Awarki, who traveled to Beirut by bus with schoolmates from Sharkiya, in southern Lebanon...."We are demonstrating here against foreign intervention in our internal affairs, and we're supporting Hezbollah," said Maha Choukair, a 21-year-old Lebanese University student. "Here we are saying thank you to Syria, not asking them to leave."
Mar 8, 2005 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
FoxNews reports: Pro-Syrian Protesters Rally in Beirut.Nearly 500,000 pro-Syrian protesters and members of Hezbollah descended upon central Beirut on Tuesday, chanting anti-American slogans in an effort to counter weeks of huge rallies demanding the immediate exit of Syrian forces.
Coming just one day after Syrian and Lebanese leaders announced that Syrian forces would begin moving out of Lebanon, the protesters were answering a nationwide call by the militant Shiite Muslim Hezbollah group for the public demonstration.
Organizers handed out Lebanese flags and directed the men and women to separate sections of Riad Solh Square, which is near U.N. offices. Loudspeakers blared militant songs urging resistance to foreign interference. Demonstrators held up pictures of Syrian President Bashar Assad and signs saying, "Syria & Lebanon brothers forever."
Other placards read: "America is the source of terrorism"; "All our disasters are from America"; "No to American-Zionist intervention; Yes to Lebanese-Syrian brotherhood."
Black-clad Hezbollah guards handled security, lining the perimeter of the square and taking position on rooftops. Trained dogs sniffed for bombs.
Large cranes hoisted two giant red-and-white flags bearing Lebanon's cedar tree. On one, the words, "Thank you Syria," were written in English; on the other, "No to foreign interference."
Ralph Kinney Bennett at TechCentralStation.com explains why Hezbollah terrorists want continued Syrian occupation of Lebanon: Deconstructing Demonstration Day (Via InstaPundit).Hezbollah, remember, is the 800-pound terrorist gorilla in the Lebanese living room. Heavily financed by Iran at its birth in the early 1980s, this guerrilla group is now thinly disguised as a political party and even has 13 members in the Lebanese Parliament.
But if you want to get some perspective on Hezbollah as a political party (or "Lebanese faction" as the New York Times called it), think Nazi party in the German Reichstag in the early 1930s.
Hezbollah is the only Lebanese political party that has 25,000 men under arms. This is a disciplined militia, heavily armed with heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, some artillery and a little armor.
All the other "factions" in Lebanon, Christian, Druze or Muslim, were formally disarmed when Syria moved into Lebanon at the end of the bloody civil war.
But Hezbollah, under Syria's control, has been allowed to swagger around Lebanon, stage theatric marches of ski-masked fighters for bored TV newsmen, and continue its war of hatred against Israel with few restraints.
And Robert Tracinski comments on the "me-too" demonstrations in today's TIA Daily:The Axis of Evil strikes back, though in a tame, weakened form. A decade ago, anti-Syrian demonstrations would have been put down by brute force. Now, the Syrians try to play by the rules of a whole new game, trying to show that they have broad popular support by getting their Hezbollah lackeys to stage a pro-Syria street rally -- in awkward, self-conscious imitation of the recent anti-Syria demonstrations.
The Hezbollah rally is big, but don't let that fool you: it is the product of an entrenched organization practiced at the old ruse of staging "spontaneous" mass demonstrations. The anti-Syria rallies are far more significant precisely because they are, in fact, spontaneous. Most important, the pro-freedom demonstrators are the ones setting the agenda, not just on the style of the demonstrations, but on the *substance*.
Hezbollah is a factional militia -- yet its supporters wave the Lebanese flag, a symbol of anti-factional "national unity." It is in favor of perpetuating Syrian tyranny -- yet its rent-a-mob holds up pictures of pro-independence leader Rafik Hariri, whom even they must know was assassinated by Syria. And Hezbollah is funded and controlled by Syria and Iran -- yet it steals the slogan of "no foreign interference."
Most of all, the Syrian-staged "me-too" demonstrations, by the very fact that they copy the style of the opposition's peaceful demonstrations, grant the premise that the desires of the Lebanese people ought to be consulted -- a premise no dictatorship or terrorist organization can accept if it wants to survive.
