One by Dennis Prager on the cowardice of Hollywood, and why you should go and see The Stoning Of Soraya M.
And one by Christina Hoff Summers (and yes the articles are related) on the entrenched dishonesty of contemporary academic feminism.
Day: June 30, 2009
That could be the headline for a story about Michael Jackson, but it isn’t.
There is an interesting and moving story here of the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz.
In August 1943, the Austrian musician Alma Rose was coincidentally discovered at the experimental medical station. She was named as the new conductor, despite the fact that she was Jewish. The thirty-seven-year-old violin virtuoso was the daughter of Arnold Rose and the niece of Gustav Mahler.
Rose’s fellow prisoners described her as an extremely charismatic woman. The SS treated Rose with respect, often referring to her as Frau Alma (Mrs. Alma). From the beginning, Rose was the protégé of Hoessler and
Mandl. They placed an entire barrack at the musicians’ disposal for their personal and work use. Alma Rose was even allowed to exchange the old instruments for newer ones with better tone; she herself was given a particularly valuable instrument.
Through diplomatic maneuvers, Rose was slowly able to obtain better living conditions for all members of the orchestra. Each woman had her own relatively clean cover, straw mattress, sheet, and slept on her own plank bed. The musicians were able to wash daily and use the provisional toilet.
Nonetheless, music was forced labour, and Rose died before the war ended, probably by poisoning.
But music was also a means of survival, both in the sense of providing some security or (minimal) protection when surrounded by sudden death and unsepakable horror, and as way of finding hope and humanity and beauty.
Whatever qualifications to be president he has or does not have, Barack Hussein Obama is not disqualified by his birth.
There really is adequate proof that he was born in the US. Conservatives who continue to obsess about this are making themselves look like idiots, and consequently, doing the liberals a great favour.
Move on!
Numbers can prove lots of things. But not in the case of supposed election fraud in Iran.
Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco’s Washington Post story of statistical anomalies seems at first read to prove the Iranian election was a fraud. I would have been happy to have been convinced. Sadly (because having that proof would have made complaints of a lack of concern for democracy against the government of Iran much stronger) the numbers prove nothing of the sort.
John Graham-Cumming explains (from a statistician’s point of view) why the Washington Post’s analysis is faulty. I found his article hard going in places (I did stats at university when I studied psychology, but only one semester).
Hannah Devlin’s article on Times Online is a bit easier to follow.
This doesn’t mean the election was OK. I still think it probably was not. It just means statistics based on oddities in the count are not going to give us a definitive answer.
Qohel Blog Author Peter Wales
