Musings of a Madman

Reuters
Thursday, November 24, 2005

NAIROBI, Nov. 23 — Increased naval military maneuvers and submarine sonars in the world’s oceans are threatening dolphins, whales and porpoises that depend on sound to survive, a United Nations report said Wednesday.

The report concluded that the use of powerful military sonar is harming the ability of 71 types of cetaceans — whales, dolphins and porpoises — to communicate, navigate and hunt.

The report, by the U.N. Environment Program and the Convention on Migratory Species, said species such as the beluga whale, Blainville’s beaked whale and the goosebeak whale are at risk.

Researchers found that a stranding of 12 goosebeak whales in the Ionian Sea in the 1990s coincided with NATO tests of an acoustic submarine-detection system.

Other goosebeaks were stranded off of the Bahamas in 2000, and experts link that to military tests.

Tests on the bodies of seven whales that died near Gran Canaria in 2002 found hemorrhages and inner-ear damage, which experts said was caused by high-intensity, low-frequency sonar used in the area.

In October, a coalition of environmental groups sued the U.S. Navy over sonar, saying the ear-splitting sounds violated environmental protection laws.

The Navy said it was studying the problem but said sonar is necessary for national defense.

Animal-protection groups have lobbied to restrict sonar, saying the sound blasts disorient the sound-dependent creatures and cause bleeding from the eyes and ears.

There are no laws governing noise pollution in the oceans, but western governments, considered largely responsible with their increased military presence in the seas, say they need more research before taking action.

Charles Galbraith, a senior wildlife adviser to the British government, said, “The issue is still in a relatively grey area in terms of scientific proof, and we need to do more research before the government can review its defense systems.”

By BRENT STAPLES
Published: November 21, 2005

The United States will become a second-rate economic power unless it can match the educational performance of its rivals abroad and get more of its students to achieve at the highest levels in math, science and literacy. Virtually every politician, business leader and educator understands this, yet the country has no national plan for reaching the goal. To make matters worse, Americans have remained openly hostile to the idea of importing strategies from the countries that are beating the pants off us in the educational arena.

The No Child Left Behind Act, passed four years ago, was supposed to put this problem on the national agenda. Instead, the country has gotten bogged down in a squabble about a part of the law that requires annual testing in the early grades to ensure that the states are closing the achievement gap. The testing debate heated up last month when national math and reading scores showed dismal performance across the board.

Lurking behind these test scores, however, are two profoundly important and closely intertwined topics that the United States has yet to even approach: how teachers are trained and how they teach what they teach. These issues get a great deal of attention in high-performing systems abroad – especially in Japan, which stands light years ahead of us in international comparisons.

Americans tend to roll their eyes when researchers raise the Japanese comparison. The most common response is that Japanese culture is “nothing like ours.” Nevertheless, the Japanese system has features that could be fruitfully imitated here, as the education reformers James Stigler and James Hiebert pointed out in their book “The Teaching Gap,” published in 1999.

The book has spawned growing interest in the Japanese teacher-development strategy in which teachers work cooperatively and intensively to improve their methods. This process, known as “lesson study,” allows teachers to revise and refine lessons that are then shared with others, sometimes through video and sometimes at conventions. In addition to helping novices, this system builds a publicly accessible body of knowledge about what works in the classroom.

The lesson-study groups focus on refining methods that improve student understanding. In doing so, the groups go step by step, laying out successful strategies for teaching specific lessons. This reflects the Japanese view that successful teaching is the product of intensive teacher development and self-scrutiny. In America, by contrast, novice teachers are often presumed competent on Day One. They have few opportunities in their careers to watch successful colleagues in action. We also tend to believe that educational change would happen overnight – if only we could find the right formula. This often leaves us prey to fads that put schools on the wrong track.

There are two other things that set this country apart from its high-performing peers abroad. One is the American sense that teaching is a skill that people come by naturally. We also have a curriculum that varies widely by region. The countries that are leaving us behind in math and science decide at the national level what students should learn and when. The schools are typically overseen by ministries of education that spend a great deal of time on what might be called educational quality control.

The United States, by contrast, has 50 different sets of standards for 50 different states – and within states, the quality of education depends largely on the neighborhood where the student lives. No Child Left Behind was meant to cure this problem by penalizing states that failed to improve student performance, as measured by annual tests.

The states have gotten around the new law by setting state standards as low as possible and making state tests easy. This strategy was exposed as fraudulent just last month, when states that had performed so well on their own exams performed dismally on the alternative and more rigorous test known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

No Child Left Behind was based on the premise that embarrassing test scores and government sanctions would simply force schools to improve educational outcomes for all students. What has become clear, however, is that school systems and colleges of education have no idea how to generate changes in teaching that would allow students to learn more effectively. Indeed, state systems that have typically filled teaching positions by grabbing any warm body they could find are only just beginning to think about the issue at all.

Faced with lagging test scores and pressure from the federal government, some school officials have embraced the dangerous but all-too-common view that millions of children are incapable of high-level learning. This would be seen as heresy in Japan. But it is fundamental to the American system, which was designed in the 19th century to provide rigorous education for only about a fifth of the students, while channeling the rest into farm and factory jobs that no longer exist.

The United States will need a radically different mind set to catch up with high-performing competitors. For starters we will need to focus as never before on the process through which teachers are taught to teach. We will also need to drop the arrogance and xenophobia that have blinded us to successful models developed abroad.

My thoughts: Pretty lousy approach to education we have. All things lead by to racism in my mind….sorry.

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: November 24, 2005

A day after the disclosure of a new Vatican directive that deters most gay men from joining the priesthood, some priests say they are shocked by one easily overlooked clause. It says that spiritual directors and confessors in seminaries “have the duty to dissuade” any candidates “who show deep-seated homosexual tendencies” from joining the priesthood.

These priests said this would turn the confessional and spiritual counseling sessions, which seminarians previously regarded as private and supportive meetings, into a tool for weeding gay men out of seminaries.

“The relationship between a seminarian and his confessor or his spiritual director should not be about enforcing church documents, but to serve as spiritual guides,” said the Rev. Michael Herman, a priest in the Archdiocese of Chicago who has recently publicly identified himself as gay in order to speak out against the Vatican’s action.

“They’ve gone so far as to say your confessor’s and spiritual adviser’s role is to talk you out of” becoming a priest, Father Herman said.

His reaction to the document was echoed by other priests and Roman Catholic organizations, who said that the church’s decree was discriminatory and hurtful to faithful chaste gay priests and would only exacerbate an already dire shortage of Catholic clergymen.

But that was only one reaction to a Vatican directive that church experts say is intentionally sprinkled with undefined terms and left open to interpretation.

Some priests and church officials welcomed the document as a corrective to what they call a gay subculture in some seminaries. Others said it merely restated an existing policy and would have far less impact than advocates of gay priests and their opponents have claimed.

“There is nothing in this document that would require a change in the current practice,” said the Rev. James Bretzke, chairman of theology and religious studies at the University of San Francisco.

Father Bretzke said it had long been true that some American bishops and superiors who lead religious orders would automatically disqualify candidates for the priesthood who claimed a gay orientation, while other bishops would consider them.

“Unless you get a critical mass of bishops and religious superiors who say, Now we can’t admit any gay men, I don’t think it’s going to have any discernible effect,” Father Bretzke said. “There are lots of excellent gay priests and seminarians, and we have a priest shortage. We’re not exactly in a buyer’s market here. If you’re not going to ordain gay men, and not going to ordain married men, and not going to ordain women, well then who’s left? It’s not exactly a big pool.”

Estimates of the percentage of priests who are gay have varied from as low as 10 percent to as high as 60 percent. The directive applies only to seminarians, not to priests.

The document, written in Italian, was posted on an Italian Catholic Web site on Tuesday, one week before the Vatican was set to formally release it in Rome. It was signed by the heads of the Vatican office that oversees Catholic education and approved by Pope Benedict XVI.

Vatican documents dating as far back as 1961 have proclaimed that the church should not ordain gay men. But this document goes further in saying that a chain of church officials have the responsibility to make a “morally certain judgment” about whether a candidate’s sexuality would disqualify him.

“The church, even while deeply respecting the persons in question, cannot admit to seminary or Holy Orders those who are actively homosexual, have deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called gay culture,” it says in one key passage. “Such people, in fact, find themselves in a situation that seriously obstructs them from properly relating to men and women.”

The document does not define “deep-seated homosexual tendencies,” and the meaning was debated yesterday.

The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, a conservative journal about religion and public life, said the Vatican was referring to “dominant or exclusive same-sex desires.” Father Bretzke, at the University of San Francisco, said the Vatican meant “activities” like frequenting gay bath houses or bars, or looking at Internet pornography.

The Rev. Stephen P. Rossetti, a psychologist and president of St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Md., said bishops would require further consultations before they knew how to apply the document.

The document is clear, however, about the role of the spiritual director – a priest, a nun or even a trained lay person assigned to each seminarian to talk with him about his spiritual life, in meetings that are supposed to be private and confidential.

“If a candidate is actively homosexual or shows deep-seated homosexual tendencies, his spiritual director, as well as his confessor, has the duty to dissuade him, in conscience, from proceeding towards ordination,” it says. It does not suggest that spiritual directors violate confidentiality or inform others of the candidate’s homosexuality.

One gay priest in Boston who said he was afraid to be identified because of the current climate said his spiritual director knew of his sexuality and “in fact encouraged me to proceed toward ordination.”

This priest, who is now himself a spiritual director, said that if a gay man told him he wanted to join the priesthood, “I would evaluate him on the basis of the whole person.”

“The job of spiritual director is not to turn people away from vocation but to help them understand what God is calling them to do,” he said.

At least one gay seminarian has already quit in anticipation of the document’s release. Tim Powers, 30, said he left Holy Name College in Washington in October because he was struggling with celibacy and wanted to live a more honest life. Mr. Powers said he talked with his spiritual director about his conflict.

“Both she and I realized that it was something I had to try and figure out in a way that was both authentic and had some integrity to it,” he said. “The leaving part was really something I decided on my own.”

By DAVID S. CLOUD
Published: November 24, 2005

WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 – The Pentagon is planning to make modest troop reductions after next month’s elections in Iraq and, if security conditions improve, could begin reductions next summer that would drop the American force level below 100,000 by late next year, Defense Department officials said Wednesday.

Troop reductions of this magnitude have been discussed by military commanders in the past, and it is not clear to what extent the most recent statements by various officials reflect the pressure on the Bush administration from Congress and even some Iraqi leaders to begin laying out withdrawal options. Officials said that no decisions had been made and that tentative plans for troop cuts could be abandoned if the insurgency gained strength or Iraqi security forces did not progress as quickly as their American trainers hoped.

“There is planning that is looking at, if the conditions are such that there could be reduction of the U.S. presence, how we could do that,” said a Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman. “We are also looking at contingency planning where you need to increase troop strength in Iraq.”

In recent days, President Bush and his top advisers have all rejected calls to set a timetable for withdrawal, saying that to do so would embolden the insurgents. But they have talked, if only vaguely, about the possibility of reducing the numbers of troops. “I suspect that American forces are not going to be needed in the numbers that they are for that much longer,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an interview on CNN on Tuesday.

Mr. Whitman said that “the current thinking” is that the number of American troops, which is now over 150,000, would fall to around 138,000, where it was before a buildup to help provide security for the referendum on the constitution in October and the coming elections on Dec. 15 to choose a new government.

Officials have repeatedly emphasized that any decisions on troop reductions depend on whether security conditions worsen or whether Iraq’s new government demands quicker reductions. For at least the past year and a half officials have held out the prospect of troop reductions, but those reductions have not occurred.

A major decision point will be reached next spring, the officials said, after the new Iraqi government forms. Assuming security conditions allow it, the troop levels could drop by 20,000 to 30,000 more soldiers by then, the officials said.

A military officer in Iraq said Wednesday that the pace of the drawdown would be driven by how many Iraqi units were able to reach a readiness rating of level two, under the military’s scale of one to four. Level two means an Iraqi unit is capable of taking the lead on military operations but still needs American military support, as opposed to level one, in which an Iraqi unit can operate independently.

“The key is level two,” the officer said. At that level, an Iraqi unit “will be able to control a local battle space just fine” as long as it receives continued American help with logistics, intelligence and transportation, he added. An increasing number of level-two Iraqi units in coming months will make it possible for a significant number of American combat troops to withdraw, he said, declining to specify how many.

Of the roughly 120 Iraqi Army battalions that are trained and conducting operations, roughly 40 are at level two, Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who commanded the training effort in Iraq until earlier this year, said in a speech this month. The readiness of most police units, which some officials say are at least as important as the military in achieving stability, is still far below that of the Iraqi Army.

Senior Army officials remain concerned that pressure for withdrawals will drive officials in Washington to reduce the American troop levels before the Iraqis are ready to handle the primary role in fighting the insurgency. An Army official said that planners were discussing the option of keeping a brigade of 2,500 to 3,000 soldiers in Kuwait, so the unit could be rushed back to Iraq if security conditions worsened.

By Marilynn Marchione
Associated Press
Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Children who are overweight face more than future health problems. They appear to have broken bones and joint problems more often during childhood than kids of normal weight, research suggests.

“A lot of people think that if you’re an overweight kid . . . that later on in life you’re going to run into having heart disease or Type 2 diabetes,” said Susan Yanovski, director of the obesity and eating disorders program at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

“But kids and adults who are overweight are already having problems with their mobility, fractures and joint pain.”

A study led by her husband, obesity researcher Jack Yanovski, found that children and teenagers who are overweight are far more likely to have had a fracture than their ideal-weight peers. They also have more bone and hip joint abnormalities, which can lead to permanent deformities.

The research involved 227 overweight children and adolescents and 128 who were not overweight. The children had an average age of 12. All were enrolled in various federal health studies between 1996 and 2004 and were considered overweight if they were in the 95th percentile of weight and height for their age and sex.

A review of their medical history revealed that 13 percent of overweight kids had had at least one broken bone at some point in their lives, compared with less than 4 percent of ideal-weight children. Similar results were found for how many had muscle, bone or joint pain, and restricted movement.

“The combination of musculoskeletal pain and poor mobility may possibly lead to less physical activity . . . and perpetuate the vicious cycle,” said Jack Yanovski, head of the growth and obesity program at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He presented results of the study at a recent meeting of the Obesity Society in Vancouver, B.C.

Children often say their knees hurt, but the real problem is the malformation that is starting to occur in the joint, said Junichi Tamai, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati. Being unable to exercise makes the situation worse.

“If a child is very active, chances are the bones are very strong,” because weight-bearing exercise promotes bone density, Tamai said.