Gotta say it was a good day

The kids listened and engaged. They were pretty respectful, overall. I even had a couple of classes that felt like real classes, with intellectual curiosity, and everything. It was the biggest sign of hope in this work that I've experienced, yet.

I have considerable confidence in my thinking about issues of teaching and learning, power and manipulation, at this point. Much more confidence than I have in either of the major political parties, that's for goddamned sure, and many of their ideological surrogates, as well.

It's nice, while watching the world go to shit, to watch what has seemed like an otherwise impossible task to me and my colleagues to be coming to fruition: kids who did not give two shits about school or education are starting to care.

And all of us are learning a lot in the process.

Imagine that.

Is anyone else tired of failure?

Is anyone else tired of the failure of our Iran policy?

Iran starts installing new nuclear centrifuges

5 years since this conflict first heated up. All evidence, despite the protestations of the NIE, point in the direction of accelerated nuclear ambitions rather than decelerated ambitions.

Many conservatives, including the President, threaten attack on Iran. It would never be authorized, of course, because we are just not that stupid and they could never get the votes. But it was always about the bluff, anyway. You bluff long enough, by the way, noone listens to you, anymore. That's why bluffing is bad policy.

This is how a nation premised on a governing philosophy of force behaves, by the way:

"State television was repeatedly playing patriotic music while children at schools around the country chanted the familiar mantra of "nuclear energy is our natural right."

Gotta be proud of that. Congratulations to all of those who have taken that noble route.

"The United States has never ruled out military action to bring Tehran to heel, and Iran's arch enemy Israel has expressed alarm about the nuclear drive, especially after Ahmadinejad predicted the Jewish state is doomed to disappear.

Underlining the tensions, Israel's National Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer warned on Monday that Israel would respond to any Iranian attack by destroying the 'Iranian nation.'"

Gee. All this progress just makes me want to pee myself. So much progress, these days. It's amazing how things just keep getting better and better, isn't it? Yay for progress.

And isn't this interesting.

Look at how Iran deals with those who seek to moderate and find a resolution to all of this provocation and confrontation.

"In a warning to Ahmadinejad's domestic rivals, the semi-official Fars news agency reported that Iran had handed former nuclear negotiator Hossein Moussavian a two-year suspended jail sentence for "harming national security."

Moussavian was a leading nuclear negotiator in the moderate team that made a deal with EU countries to temporarily suspend enrichment during the presidency of reformist Mohammad Khatami until 2005."

With force. How the fuck about that. Not too harsh though. I mean, they could have chopped off the heads of that guy's children. Thank goodness they weren't too strict, huh? You got to hand it to the power-hungry. They got a big bag of tricks, don't they?

Damn. The progress is just overwhelming isn't it? Whew. Sometimes when I sit back and think about all the progress from all of this use and threat of the use of force, I just can't contain my enthusiasm and hope for the future. It's all just too progressive for me, I suppose. Thank goodness there are plenty of smarter folks to explain all this progress to me and how much it is really for my own good.

It's amazing, isn't it? In Iran, when people and governments engage in such behavior, we call it illiberalism. We call it backwards. We call it undemocratic.

And when Americans or Westerners do it, we call it progress.

Do you ever wonder why people have such a hard time taking our example or leadership seriously? Me neither.

And what I love about this whole mess, right down to my very soul, is that I am quite confident that at the end of all of this business, when the dust has finally cleared, and these matters with Iran, Iraq, and the world are finally resolved, that Democrats and Republicans, alike, will sit down in a moment of honor and integrity and take responsibility for everything that has gone so swimmingly.

You gotta hand it to the powerful. When they fuck up, they are fucking brilliant about finding the courage to face up to their failures.

And that, dear children, is why they are so goddamn smart and have all that power and influence, and why you and I are so dumb that we could not possibly imagine anything else but to be forced to do their bidding.

It's all so honorable, it almost makes you cry, doesn't it?

This, ladies and gentleman, is what our Founding Fathers fought for. This is what democracy is all about. The right to force, pressure, manipulate, bully, leverage, piss on, fuck with, and otherwise be an asshat to your neighbor in the name of any cause you're feeling friendly to in the moment.

God Bless America.

Torture, hubris, and our humanity

If proven true in a war crimes trial, some of the torture charges the Bush Administration is being accused of are fairly damning.

This discussion puts those charges into perspective.

The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb reads 1984 as a playbook

Andrew Sullivan may be right about a war crimes trial.

We can only hope that the most damning of these accusations are not true.

If they are, the Bush Administration, the American government, and anyone ultimately responsible for these most serious actions will need to account for them.

I am inclined to give American servicemen and women leeway around this issue, to account for hypersensitive political reactions to treatment of prisoners that does not amount to torture. But many of these claims are too serious to pooh-pooh away.

This is a serious discussion for America to be having, right now.