The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Quote of the Day
Public schools aren’t simply incompetent. They’re doing an excellent job of creating a people fit for socialist tyranny, which means a people unable to govern themselves. – DJMoore at Ricketyclick
Our culture is doing a lousy job transmitting itself, because the people charged with doing so, the teachers, have by and large been trained to think that it’s not worth transmitting. – Also DJMoore Ricktyclick
It’s a twofer!
(P)olitics is what determines whether specific ideologies become prevalent or irrelevant for peoples’ daily lives and what we see today is a West that is not willing, because of multiculturalism and other ideologies that are reigning in Western intellectual life, to defend itself and to assert the values on which it’s based. – Caroline Glick from a recent Atlas Shrugs interview.
I wonder, is there a school system in any other part of the world that teaches “ethnic studies programs” like ours do? Does Mexico, for instance, teach “American-Mexican Studies” that highlights the laws that apply to Americans in Mexico, but not native citizens? Property law, traffic law, employment law, immigration law?
No?
Do you wonder why that is?
Quote of the Day
In a comment to my post titled Obama Leaves Trinity, “HokiePundit” left this:
So…is it Father, Son, or Holy Spirit that’s now the open position?
That wins “QotD” for today.
(And the answer is: “Yes.”)
Quote of the Week
Proofs in geometry class have been a mainstay of mathematics. In fact, proofs were always considered an essential part of high school geometry, not only because of their importance in higher math, but because learning the rules of logical argument and reasoning has applications in science, law, political science, and writing. To see proofs being shortchanged in a geometry textbook was shocking. – Barry Garelick An A-Maze-ing Approach To Math, Education Next, Spring 2005, Vol. 4, No. 2
If you have young children in school, read the piece. If you have older children in schools using “Everyday Mathematics” or other National Council of Teachers of Mathematics approved curricula, get them out.
Secondary QotD from the same piece:
The education theory at the heart of the dispute can be traced to John Dewey, an early proponent of learning through discovery.
My buddy Dewey…
Quote of the Day
Stress is the great finisher of the unpracticed shooter. After the battle of Gettysburg, 27,574 muskets were collected from the field. Of these, 24,000 were loaded; 12,000 were at least double-loaded, and of these, 6,000 had anywhere between 3 to 10 charges down the barrel. The soldiers who had left them behind were so terrified that they loaded without realizing they were not firing. – David E. Petzal, Field & Stream’s “The Gun Nut,” Amateur Hour
I’d seen those stats before, I believe, in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by LTC Dave Grossman, but I thought it was interesting enough to be QotD.
Quote of the Day
Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss. You have a right to seek satisfaction in accomplishment. And if you chase after the almighty dollar, you just might find that you are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do things that improve the lives of others. – David Boaz, Our Collectivist Candidates, Wall Street Journal Online, 5/28/08, p. A17 of the dead-tree version.
Found at The Volokh Conspiracy.
And I still think we have to “embrace teh suck” and vote McCain, because – as Rachel Lucas opined –
I don’t give a flying fuck that McCain is more liberal than we would like and that he’s basically an asshole, because I’m operating with the awareness that he’s still better than Obama by about a hundred orders of magnitude.
Okay, maybe only five or six orders of magnitude…
Quote of the Day
In an educated world, Rep. Waters would be hounded from office and reduced to asking if Mr. Hoffmeister would like fries with that; an occupation admirably suited to her self-evident lack of economic acumen.
In this world, however, her constituents will cheer her words, and vote her another term.
There’s a lot more that’s even better, but this piece makes a nice standalone quote.
This was in response to Rep. Waters’ (Socialist – Los Angeles) pronouncement to oil company executives that “This Liberal will be all about socializin… ah, uh, uh… Will be about… basically taking over, and the government running all of your companies.”
Fox News said that the word she was so desperately searching for was “nationalizing,” but I disagree. She recognized her Freudian slip. “Socializing” was precisely the right word, and the one that could not be uttered in a chamber where she swore to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. (And obviously lied about it.)
Quote of the Day
This is bad in a jaw-dropping “they can’t really be serious, can they?” kind of way. The closest comparison I can draw is to Neil LaBute’s “Wicker Man” and, like that film, the only consolation I can offer potential theater-goers is that you might want to see it just to be in on the ground floor when the film gets its ass handed back to it. – An Early Review of M. Night Shyamalan’s THE HAPPENING
It looks like Shyamalan’s directorial career has bottomed out.
After viewing Lady in the Water I didn’t think he could go any lower. It would appear I was mistaken.
(h/t to Ian Hamet for the heads-up.)
Quote of the Day
Somewhere, there is a line between reasonably prudent and cautious, and stark nutjob paranoid. The Secret Service doesn’t even trust the soldiers, sworn to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and obey the orders of the President.
Screw those Praetorian assclowns.
Heartless Libertarian – Forget “No Guns in the McCain Room”
Wow. Did the Secret Service require the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln to disarm all the aircraft and disable all the anti-aircraft weapons when he flew aboard on that COD Viking?
RTWT. This is nuts.