The Pro-Life Hypocrisy

The Article: Pro-life groups don’t really protect the unborn by Elizabeth Jahr in The Christian Science Monitor.

The Text: Religious and political groups that funnel tremendous resources into a legal war to limit and even ban abortion in America are at best, wasting time, and at worst, damaging efforts to protect the unborn. Texas’s new abortion law – one of the toughest in the country – is only the latest in a string of efforts to limit abortions in numerous states across the US.

Members of the pro-life movement spend countless dollars and hours on rallies and lobbying without providing adequate financial and emotional support for women to actually maintain pregnancies. And the majority of women who have abortions cite not being able to afford a child as one of the main reasons for their decision.

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John Kerry’s Morally And Historically Obscene Case for War In Syria

The Article: John Kerry’s Morally, Linguistically, and Historically Obscene Case for War in Syria by Matt Welch in Reason.

The Text: If we are to take our roles as citizens as “seriously” as members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee claim to take their decision to support the bombing of Syria (“very, very seriously,” said Bob Corker [R-Tennesse]; “seriously and solemnly,” added Dick Durbin [D-Illinois]), then we really ought to give full attention to the testimony yesterday by the war’s principal salesman, Secretary of State John Kerry.

Unfortunately for the politician who made famous the line “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”, Kerry’s case in front of the committee was more a textbook example of how acting as the world’s policeman for decades has warped the country’s values, judgment, and even language.

I counted at least seven moments that qualified in my judgment as obscene, exposing along the way the administration’s empty and contradictory arguments for air-mailing death upon a regime that does not pose a direct threat in the United States:

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Noam Chomsky On Syria, Palestine, Iran And Afghanistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFsmMyr_SIM

Describing the civil war in Syria as a suicidal pact, renown political dissident Noam Chomsky doesn’t see any plausible exit beyond negotiations…and negotiations that aren’t administered by the United States.

How School Is Killing Our Kids

The Article: School is a prison — and damaging our kids by Peter Gray in Salon.

The Text: Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that’s what they need to become productive and happy adults. Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests.

But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.

School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

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Is This The Best Public Evidence On Assad’s Chemical Weapon Use?

Obviously, one blurred video shouldn’t sway us one way or the other in determining who used chemical weapons in Damascus last August–but as a public deprived of almost all information, this is as close as we can get to the smoking gun. For now, at least.