What bothered me the most was the geography...

I live in Israel. Geographically, we're between Egypt (where the pyramids are) and Aqaba (the most south-west city in Jordan). They also travel to Petra after reaching Jordan, which is about 100 miles north of Aqaba in a straight line (and there are no straight roads in that region).

- There is no way to see Jordan from the pyramids.
- There is no border crossing between Egypt and Jordan (Israel is in the way).
- The pyramids are in Egypt. Why would Jordanian helicopters be the ones coming to assist?
- There's no way to get from the pyramids to Petra by ground vehicle in under 10 hours (even if you ignore having to cross two international borders). They do it twice in the movie.
- Petra isn't exactly one tiny spot with only one cave.

So whoever wrote the script for the final 50% of the movie didn't even have Google maps at his disposal.
Either that or mixing facts into the script is a big no-no in Michael Bay movies.

that's the problem with schools is that they rush to get you to memories facts so that you can get a systematic job.

When The primary thing schools should teach is how to teach yourself, fundamentals of reasoin and logic , and then attach stuff like, language, history, geography, English , math

Schools probably wont change though due to the fact that the whole system would need to change and the fact that its time consuming to Test a students intellectual capacity for things like logic and reason,

>> ^quantumushroom:
This little lady has you libs scared shitless and she's nowhere near peaking.

She had just about everyone scared shitless. She's a self-righteous bigot and an anti-science creationist. She's baffled by basic geography, let alone foreign policy. She can't even form a complete sentence on a regular basis... and she was dangerously close to the presidency. Fortunately we avoided that potential catastrophe.

Whatever poor decisions or mistakes Obama makes, as long as he doesn't start huffing paint thinner, he can't be as bad as Palin.

If it weren't for this publicity stunt, she'd have been forgotten by now. I don't think she's going to be able to keep them going for another 3.5 years, though.

Polders... was a bonus question on my last geography test. Land created by dikes. Holland flashback.

these pop up obstacles
and CCTV
create a lot of
fun for me.

I'm with 'drunk gwiz665' on this one: Fake!


But, seriously:


These close encounters can be explained by quick shifts in temperature, said Joe Desloges, a river specialist and geography professor at the University of Toronto.
Mr. Desloges explained that the frozen circles are actually ice pans, or surface slabs of ice that form in the center of a lake or creek, instead of along the water’s edge.
As water cools, it releases heat that turns into frazil ice – a collection of loose, needle shaped ice particles that can cluster together in an ice pan. If it accumulates enough frazil ice and the current is slow, over time, the pan can become a hanging dam – a dense, heavy piece of ice with high ridges and a low centre.
But he admits that the near-perfect circular shape of the Mississauga ice pan is very strange.
“Normally, you do not get edges of the ice pan so clean and even. It may occur when a pan forms quickly, then melts a bit before starting to refreeze,” he said. “There is the chance that these can form so perfectly, but not common at all.”

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/toronto/archive/2008/12/18/man-stumbles-on-round-spinning-creek-circle.aspx

What I would much rather see, is to keep the 7(or is it 8 now?) channel max and clean up the channels we have. Some channels are clearly a subset of others, and for these it would be obvious that the sift should be in both - for instance

music { livemusic, rocknroll, metal, jazz, hiphop }
1sttube { latenight }
religion { cult, islam }
comedy { woohoo }
politics { law, election08 }

wtf { asia } ( )

and we have themes

countries/geography { asia, british, canada, downunder }
time {vintage, 80s, timeshift, election08, history, future }

I think I saw joedirt do a pretty good overview of these in a post earlier.

My point is that I really don't think that just allowing more channels is a good solution, because it increases the complexity for the viewer in the end. A reduction or organization of the existing channels would be better, and could also make it better for future channels.

I understand what you want to seem to be saying... you wanted it to be a BillO style comment, Pprt.

Without even getting into Immigration status, here is the logic I used:

We have a subject who is clearly Non-White. His ethnicity is not known, nor is his residency or country of origin.

You refer to him automatically as a third worlder.

The only characteristic one can deduce was used to make this judgement is this man's physical appearance - WHICH IS DUE TO HIS RACE, ultimately.

You are referring to his Race, and quality of work associated with such Race. Whatever it may be.

In this case, he is non-white, yes. This is where you get fucked: The definition of Third World is technically regarding various stages of economic development, or, the position in the global food chain. You might find White people living in a country denoted as being Third World. It's unfortunate for you I just happened to be taking world geography.

This is what you do -- Link race to something ultimately non-racial --- and that's why it's not nice!!!! you wanker you know what you meant.

It is a slur the way you use the word... It wouldnt be a slur if you werent being racist

tyson gets everyone's merit pay... sorry teachers

"If you shrunk earth down to the size of a Q ball... it would be the smoothest ever manufactured." (explaining relative texture of earth and variances in our geography).

"our [atmospheric layer] is thinner than the shellac on a school globe"

how do i exist that i cannot think as tyson...

don't forget to sterilize your JIMO!

Take an updated version of this, play it on a loop in the back of every US K-4 classroom one day a month, and watch the general knowledge of geography in the US rise by 800%.

"Is Israel not simply a response to outright hostile actions purported by the States of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon?"

The short answer is, no. Israel is a classic settler nation with all the existential attributes and brutality of a colonial ruler.

Sometimes an article deserves reprinting in full.

(copyfree)

Date : 2004-01-29
''Diagnosing Benny Morris: the mind of a European settler''

By Gabriel Ash - YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States)

Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949" is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the publication of the revised edition, Morris was interviewed in Haaretz - ( http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/380986.html,
Hebrew original at
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/objects/pages/PrintArticle.jhtml?itemNo=380119). The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material, Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably "the tip of the iceberg." Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated; concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to Ben Gurion.

Morris also found documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of Morris' problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: "The Palestinian citizens of Israel are a time bomb," not fellow citizens. Islam is "a world in which human lives don't have the same value as in the West." Arabs are "barbarians" at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is "a serial killer" that ought to be executed, and "a wild animal" that must be caged.

Morris' disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil … The native is declared insensitive to ethics … the enemy of values. … He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it … the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces" (from "The Wretched of the Earth"). And further down, "the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches" and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next stage -- murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed, Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization: "if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide."

But Morris sees no evil. Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an "Arabenrein Palestine," he recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, "within five or ten years," under "apocalyptic conditions" such as a regional war with unconventional weapons, a potentially nuclear war, which "is likely to happen within twenty years." For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for "finishing the job" of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable, Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Haaretz, justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape proudly.

Nor should one think the slippage between expulsion, "transfer," and genocide without practical consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining "transfer." We ought to pay attention: with Morris's statement, Zionist thinking crossed another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized, if "apocalyptic conditions" materialize.

The march of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify genocide. Morris' interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris' racism isn't limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it is done for "the final good." But what kind of good is worth the "forced extinction" of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter. (Morris uses the word "Haqkhada," a Hebrew word usually associated with the extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact that Native Americans aren't extinct.)

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris's supremacist view of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of "progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of "human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color of Jews

Morris assures us that his values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality, progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile Morris' double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris' knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans, Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews? How can Morris endorse the "civilizational" justification of genocide, which includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris' disjointed mind doesn't see the connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are "right" assertions of racist supremacy and "wrong" assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim's identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris' mind, one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of "superior civilization," these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel, self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites always had, the privilege to massacre members of "less advanced" races.

False testimony

It would be marvelous if Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of professionalism -- and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris' case -- cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Haaretz, Morris says that, "when the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposal of July 2000 and Clinton's proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything. Lydda, and Akka and Jaffa."

But in his book "Righteous Victims," Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus: "the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to…Israel...keeping 78 percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22 percent. … At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state…[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. … Israel was also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into two…" Morris' chapter of "Righteous Victims" that deals with the '90s leaves a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In contrast, in Haaretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be false.

If Morris lies about recent history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations and cliches. For example, Morris reminds us that "the Arab nation won a big chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert." (What is Morris' point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one battle in 711 A.D. by a band of North African Berbers who had just converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in 1608.

Obviously, Islamic civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century, Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the settler accuses them of "growing soft," and declares himself "the true metropolis." That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can never forgive the land he colonized -- its alien climate and geography, its recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler, condescension thus turns into loathing.

Israeli settler society, especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls itself "the peace camp," "the Zionist Left," etc., is predicated on the loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, there is the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.) "Arab" is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects Morris' latest interview in Haaretz with Ben Gurion's first impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article, published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the "ultra-nationalism, provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism" of Arab Jews in Israel for the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel's generals, leaders, and opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris, everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn't, therefore, doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. Most of what he says hasn't been said already by David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting observations about truisms that recur in Morris' (and much of Israel's) discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a "crusader state," a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also probably true. But it isn't Arafat's fault that Morris is a foreigner in the Middle East. Why shouldn't Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when Morris himself says so? "We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this place, exactly as the crusaders."

It is Morris -- like the greater part of Israel's elite -- who insists on being a foreigner, on loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis, like Morris, who want to rule the Middle East from behind tall walls and barbed wire.

Morris is deeply pessimistic about Israel's future; this feeling is very attractive in Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel's successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the Israeli political system and identity. "Israel" is brute force. In Morris' words: "The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them accept us." But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into account, I'm afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than live on equal terms with Palestine's natives in a bi-national state. It is to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. "The settler, from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest in remaining or in co-existing."

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel.

I used to think the same way to a point, Sketch, but I ran into one slight problem with the idea. There isn't a way in the world that I see to make it anything other than a fantasy. If it won't work then it's not a good idea and it's probably a waste of time and source of inevitable conflicts to pursue.

Best I can tell every culture, no matter how widely separated by geography or time, has had their own creation stories, myths of a superior being or beings, and so on. It doesn't seem to be anything we need to teach each other but a natural human response to the unknown, a way to explain the unexplainable. And it doesn't apply just to religion, Hell, look at those poor people on the other side who think they can use science to disprove God. You can't prove a negative. Not with God, you can't prove there were never unicorns, you can't prove we don't have that legendary flying teapot in orbit up there, not that the FSM didn't do it all. We can say we have no reason to believe it ourselves but we can't prove it. Lots of self titled "atheists" think they can though and is there really any difference in their misplaced faith and the other? Sure, one more damaging if used badly, but both latched onto faith even if only one of them realized it.

Get rid of religion before we're ready for it and what do we have? A culture that still needs to explain the unexplainable and that will latch into anything else that provides it. Politics, Scientology or some new morph of the type, nationalism, etc. Even a misplaced understanding of what science means for some. Wouldn't there be a great risk of trading one cult for another?

Maybe one day we'll evolve past that need but as far as I can tell the need for faith is a part of the species, stronger in some than in others and not there at all for me in this sense at least but it's hard to deny that it seems to be there for some. We aren't going to get rid of it, we just need to redirect it where it's damaging.

The number of people who have jobs, how much they make on average, the change in prices over time, how much the government taxes or spends; these are all objective, scientific measurements that occur independent of capitalism, socialism, or any other political, economic, or cultural system.

"Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services."

"The social sciences comprise academic disciplines concerned with the study of the social life of human groups and individuals including anthropology, communication studies, economics, human geography, history, political science, psychology and sociology."

"science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research."

If you wish to re-define English words, then that is your prerogative, but it serves no purpose in this thread.

I think we're just reading it a little different. Yes, con-creationist Christians, just like non-creationists of any other stripe, know that those stories aren't real. Those aren't the people this video is about. I'll refer you again to the description of the video segment itself. That's the context the arguments are to be taken in. There are some 15 segments in all, way too many to have listed the descriptions here, each cover a different aspect of the debate. This one was "My personal rant against one of foremost falsehoods of the creationism movement; the idea that accepting evolution is tantamount to declaring atheism, or that one need be creationist to be Christian".

The only ones it's intended to confront are those of any stripe who do believe it. The rest is to be taken in that context.

Personally I don't see any interpretation of Genesis that could be considered "scientific". Scientific examinations of what little evidence there is sure, a city was there or something, or an old script found, but how in the world would you go about testing it past the simple geography stuff? The following page describes the scientific method. To me if it can't pass that test then it's a hypothesis at best, and probably not even that in most cases. Confusing that with science is part of what I'd like to see end. http://teacher.pas.rochester.edu/phy_labs/appendixe/appendixe.html

When I first ran across this stuff I tended to take it the same way that you seem to but that was a mistaken impression. There are committed Christians such as djarm67 who I linked above who are just as pissed about this stuff as I am and actually more involved than I've ever been, for many of the same reasons that I care. It's a scam that's hurting all of us. Visit his page and read his description of who he is and such. The religion aside that's how a lot of us approach the issue, even if it might not seem like it at first for those who are used to a different debate.

Peace

"Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at UCLA.

"In 1998 it won a Pulitzer Prize and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book.

"A documentary based on the book was broadcast on PBS in July 2005, produced by the National Geographic Society."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

Just giving a student more attention doesn't automatically mean they're doing better and everyone else doing worse, and it doesn't automatically lead to the better students somehow missing out or getting held back. There's nothing inhibiting students from maximizing their potential, whatever that means. Making sure everyone passes the bar and gets a sound education is what school is about, not forcing everyone to know the same things regardless of their ability to learn. It's about giving everyone as similar an education as possible, which practically means as much personal freedom to pursue ones own goals.
Of course it would be better if there were more teachers and smaller classes. But the fact of the matter is that most kids who do well in school are doing well because they have their parents' and/or private tutors involved in their education, helping out at home and being active in the child's upbringing. You'd be surprised how even the playingfield is when it comes to talent.

There's simply no validity to the saying that putting extra effort in helping the students who have a harder time learning leads to the students having an easier time learning would somehow lose part of their intelligence or are robbed of education. To be more precise: what is it those gifted students are missing out on? Because I still don't really understand what it would mean for a school to "maximize each individual's potential". As you know, school is for teaching kids broad, basic, general and useful information, to give them an understanding of the world and their surroundings and get them in an environment where they get to interact and cooperate with others. In that regard there is no such thing as lowering the bar when it comes to making an effort to get as many kids as possible to pass. In that regard there is only teaching as many as possible what they need to learn, and actually have them learn it. In geography they need to know what continents are located where, major countries and capital cities etc. In music they need to have tried playing a couple of instruments, sung a couple of songs and learned the basics of music creation. By "maximizing their potential", would that mean making them memorize all countries and cities, make them compose music and become proficient in several instruments?
This doesn't mean that because one kid is done with its calculus and another isn't, that the first will sit on its behind until the second is done aswell. That's a ridiculus proposition and one which we all know isn't how schools work. There's advanced calculus, trigonometry and a host of other things for them to learn. But there are base skills that needs to be known by a student,
things that have been agreed upon by society that a student has to have a grasp of. That's why students struggling to learn them need to get extra help, not because they're raising hell and causing a ruckus.

I'd like to point you to a form of education called the "Montessori method", which has shown great potential and results thus far in preschools and gradeschools, and where the students are encouraged to learn by themselves by teachers changing the dynamics of the classroom aswell as have them take on a different role from the standard lecturer. It's shown that children can not only learn faster and more qualitatively by doing, but they're also improving their own knowledge by helping their friends and classmates learn. Your statement about forcing students to become assistant teachers is not only flat out wrong, it shows a lack of understanding of the subject.

There's also university, where people generally go to maximize their potential. That's where they narrow down their education to one or a couple of fields, and develop their personal interests and/or potential into a profession and hopefully a career.