Deli Men August 22, 2014August 21, 2014 SUCCESS! Jim Batterson: “Wow. I am as impressed as you are at the wonderful results of Success Academy, and I understand that it is a model within the public school system entirely publicly funded. But it is also perceived as a ‘private school,’ albeit within the public school system, and accentuates the problems of the rest of the public schools. It reinforces the Republican argument for vouchers to allow all parents the freedom to get their children out of the public schools and into the (hereby demonstrably superior) private school model. . . . I know, I know, I know: $4,000 a year tuition voucher will not let a poor family send its children to Lawrenceville or Foxcroft, it is more like a tax credit for rich parents who already send their children to private school. Nevertheless, the argument will be made.” ☞ The argument may be made, but as you say, it’s a really poor one. Charter schools are public schools. Zero tuition — and in the case of the Success Academy schools, zero testing requirements to gain admission. Enrollment is by lottery, and almost everyone in the neighborhood enters that lottery. The more proven ideas and methods traditional public schools can borrow from successful charters, the better. (Not all charters are successful, by any means.) And the more successful charters are allowed to expand, the better as well. Success Academy has gone from 1 school to 22 with 7 more coming on line this year, if memory serves. If it keeps going like this, one day every lottery entrant might win. BELGISTAN John Carroll: “The thing that governs all of your commenters [on Muslim rule in Belgium by 2030, as described in these 5 minutes], perhaps without their being aware of it, is the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In 1918 the Ottoman Empire was defeated. The whole region around what we now call Palestine-Syria-Iraq existed under the Ottoman Caliphate and Empire since 1453, and in 1920 the Sèvres treaty partitioned all that to satisfy the British and the French (and the Russians). An example of an implication of this is to be found in a reference to ‘ISIS.’ The second ‘s’ in ‘ISIS’ is not ‘Syria,’ it is ‘al Sham.’ Usage of ‘Syria’ is European in origin. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is moving to redress what he perceives as the colonial arbitrariness of the borders of Syria, and establish ISIS as a caliphate. Mixing together Sharia and ISIS points to an awareness of some sort of movement, and I would suggest that across the Muslim Brotherhood, al Quaeda, and ISIS there is a goal of reestablishing a Caliphate to succeed what was torn apart in 1920. “The citation of Dr. Arieh Eldad in Monday’s post is an interesting one. Dr. Eldad was a representative in the Knesset, and established the Otzma LeYisrael party. When he states that ‘the war between Jews and Muslims in the Land of Israel is not a territorial conflict,’ his use of the term ‘Land of Israel’ negates that claim. In fact Dr. Eldad is quite vocal about dedicating his time to preventing the creation of a Palestinian state. He is also forgetting that many of the people whose land he is seeking to settle on are Christians. In 2006 Dr. Eldad complained that when he was injured in a confrontation with the Israeli police that he ‘was being treated like an Arab.’ “The main problem with the Dr. Eldad citation is that it plays directly into what is not solving the conflict, and it refers back to the Sykes-Picot Agreement. You have really got to wonder who did due diligence for the Zionists when they decided to make Palestine the national home for the Jewish people instead of Uganda. No matter how miserable one regards the the people living in Palestine as being, they had a frame of reference for five hundred years, and even if you possess the nod of the Abrahamic god, and merit compensation for suffering elsewhere, and dispossess people to create a superior civilization, it would seem reasonable to anticipate some ill will. Demonstrating the inferiority of these non-Jewish inhabitants, their moral deficiencies, their dysfunction, is not going to make them compliant.” AND NOW . . . . . . try the pickles! Have a great weekend.