Looking the IAEA in the mouth

The International Atomic Energy Association and Mohamed ElBaradei hand the world community a gift and they just keep looking him and the arms control experts at the IAEA right in the mouth.

Iran hands IAEA nuclear blueprints

If I am Mohamed ElBaradei, right now, I would say, "Go ahead and declare war you fuckin' morons. Why don't you set up sanctions for a 10 year regime, as stiff as you can make them."

"And then, when the 10 years is up and it has failed to deliver the goods - which it clearly will given the track record on this one you, you fuckin' nimrods - give me a call and maybe we'll make progress once you're done fucking it up."

You have to wonder, sometimes, if the Bush Administration and the various U.N. member countries are more committed to soothing their wounded egos because their efforts have so clearly failed in the last 4 years, or whether they actually want to get the job done and get to a real resolution of this situation that allows the IAEA to inspect, that negotiates an end to any weapons program, that makes some kind of allowance for genuine self-defense on the part of the Iranians - who have every reason to be suspect of a world community when lead players are persistently threatening invasion - and which actually reduces nuclear proliferation rather than accelerating it, as the current policy has clearly done to any objective observer not just trying to defend the present failed approach.

So, if I'm Mohamed ElBaradei and the IAEA, right now - who are all, clearly, much more genuine team players than any of the people involved in those inspections or the policy discussion about those inspections - certainly more than the snide, unreflective, and defensive bunch at the Washington Post editorial board and among member countries who can't even consider that they might be on the wrong track with Iran, no matter how much failure they encounter; what foolish, foolish men and women lead the world, sometimes - I would be very tempted to tell the world community:

"Go ahead. Declare war. Set up the harshest sanctions regime you can imagine, you fuckin' dipshits. Go right the fuck ahead, you stupid, petty little shitheads. And when you finally get tired of your failure, you schnooks, you give me a fuckin' call and maybe I'll come help you unravel this fuckin' mess you've created for yourselves, you arrogant pricks."

"In the meantime, get the fuck out of my way while I make things happen you ungrateful little dimwits."

Some people don't have the decency to just say, "Thank you." It gets in the way of their big fat egos and their big fat assumptions about the world that get wounded when they turn out to be wrong. It's a sign of courage, you know. The stubborn refusal to acknowledge you might be wrong. My President carries this "courage" around with him and neither he nor his critics can acknowledge just how much "courage" is involved with such a position because it makes them cranky to face such a difficult fact about their outlook on the world.

That's what courage looks like, children. Just look to the examples of our world leaders who just don't know if they can find it in themselves to admit when they are wrong. And, there, you will find courage.

If I'm Mohamed ElBaradei, I would retire to some island, and tell the world community that when they are ready to pony up, give him a call.

But, alas, I am not Mohamed ElBaradei. Mohamed ElBaradei is a bigger man than all that. And he sticks with this bunch of self-righteous pricks no matter how much they keep fucking up his work and impugning his integrity while he fuckin' gets the job done.

Me, I'd tell them to fuck off and do the job on their own, fuckin' cowards.

Thank goodness Mohamed ElBaradei is in that job. Because I'd let the world nuke itself into oblivion until it faced up to its failures. Then, again, maybe I'd just suck it up and listen to all the bullshit a man of the integrity of ElBaradei has had to listen to and keep plugging away making the only progress the world community has seen in this situation, up till now.

Thank you, Mohammed ElBaradei and all the folks at the IAEA.

Note to Washington Post, the Bush Administration, and the U.N. Security Council: that's what it looks like to appreciate the efforts of those who understand what they are doing better than you. Learn some fuckin' appreciation, you miserable ungrateful fucks.

Love,
Ben

Perhaps hope for New York's public schools after all

The Economist has a far more favorable take on Mayor Bloomberg's efforts to open up New York City's expansive public school system.

New York's schools - The great experiment

With this kind of decentralization and choice and some healthy competition (and better teacher salaries, to boot), perhaps New York's school reforms might be more successful than the top-down model described in that New York Times article led me to believe.

If Bloomberg's strategy is take control to give it up, I'll all for it.

And that, and only that, as far as I am concerned, is likely, at all, to reform public education in New York or anywhere in America. I'm open to something different. But I've worked long enough in public education systems to know that the only thing likely to create the kind of ownership necessary to really dramatically improve American public schools is for the responsibility and the freedom to run those schools, and take credit or blame for them, lies squarely in the laps of teachers and administrators and parents and students who are responsible for them.

Everything else is, generally, people wanting all the power with none of the responsibility. And that, like most politics, is how school politics too often work, as is. And that will only change, I think, as the system opens up and day-to-day decisions are made by the people who are intimately responsible for schools and not people with the comfortable distance of ideological blinders and plausible deniability for responsibility for the problems of schools.

Teachers and schools will take more responsibility for the results produced by their schools the more they are able to live and die by the choices made on their watches of their own making and without the meddling of various agencies and bureaucracies for which noone is ever responsible in any meaningful way.

I have very little confidence in any other means of fixing schools, partly, because so many of the alternatives have been tried and failed. but, largely, because this is the only model that has really ever worked in every other important area of liberal democratic life.