That would go back on policy established before George Washington's time, and which he endorsed as wise and fruitful. And who would be next? I'd nominate the Scientologists. And then the Santeria. And then the Bahai. *The list would just keep growing. It's like potato chips. Who eats just one? * Not really. They're nice.

In the Muslim world, Israel is widely considered to be illegally occupying Tel Aviv. As to "facts presented", did you read the part about the Guardian poll? Or the Pew poll?

Correction: the standards do not, after all, abolish algebra until high school. I wrote going on the assumption that Ransom would not make a simple claim of fact that was flat wrong. Silly me.

The basic idea of common core is good. Japan has a national common core. Then again, in Japan, algebra starts in 7th grade. In New York, they're now using a "core" for reading instruction built around the idea of E D Hirsch that students should learn to read by reading about stuff that they'll need to know anyhow. So, instead of stories about nothing of note, they'll read about Columbus, about the first airplane, etc. Abolishing algebra from school until it's too late for students to hit their pace and be ready for college is an atrocity. Just because some students aren't ready for algebra until late in the day is no reason why others should be denied the right to a developmentally appropriate education. (Yeah, Edu-Speak!)

That one percent includes the OKC bombing and it wasn't peanuts.

In one throw, some day down the road, North Korean communists could kill a thousand times as many Americans as all the Muslim terrorist attacks combined have ever killed. We have our quarrels with Islam but a sense of proportion is necessary. Right now, NK's missiles probably don't have the reliability at the extreme range they'd be firing at to hit the US. But they're not stupid and they're persistent. Given time, they'll achieve the capacity. And right now, their talk is carpet chewing Hitler-like frenzied rants.

Two men, two bombs. There is no evidence at all that this Saudi man had anything to do with this attack. Interrogating him would be a total waste of time, his and ours. You need to be careful here to distinguish: nowadays, with the Communists and the anarchists gone dormant, and with Aum Shinrikyu taken down, almost all such terrorists are Muslim. Almost all, but not all. William Ayers and Katherine Boudin are off the hook and beyond reach of any further legal punishment. Tim McVeigh has quite properly been executed. Terry Nichols is in jail. But in the other direction, the "almost all" becomes false. Most Muslims are rather decent folk. Most of the rest lack that cold steel that makes a mass murderer unafraid of death.

You will find that speeding tickets are less expensive in states where people are generally law abiding and hardly ever speed. The reason is that the sterner deterrent of large fines is unnecessary. Same thing with the death penalty. You have cause and effect reversed.

As it happens, as often happens to those who jump to conclusions, there was a reason to the "madness" of the people who refused to name this guy a suspect. He's clean.

Williams has a point but it's not as strong as he makes it out to be. There is a division of labor because some people get really good at what they do. Say it would cost me $200 to get my computer fixed by Joe The Expert. I earn 260 doing what I'm good at, have 200 left over after taxes. Joe gets the 200, has 150 left over after taxes. Why don't I do it myself? Because it would cost me endless hours of study to learn enough to fix the thing myself. I'd have to forgo much more than $260 in wages to put in that time. These differences in efficiency across tasks make possible transactions that are taxed at 20% or 30% and sometimes even at 50%. It's low skill transactions that dry up.

From Ransom's article, you might conclude that the "new paper" asserts that sea level rise can be largely avoided by cutting short-lived climate pollutants. The author did provide a link, though. The article he links presents a very different picture. "In the end, the researchers found that an immediate reduction in short-lived pollutants could reduce the rate of sea level rise by about 18 percent. In addition, cutting these gases can cut the annual rate of sea level rise by 24 percent." That is, absent some sort of action on CO2, more than 3/4 of the sea level rise we can expect from business as usual will still occur, however well we address the secondary but meaningful side issue of short-lived climate pollutants.