Day: June 17, 2005

After this post, and this one, well, three in less than a 24-hour time period makes a theme, doesn’t it?

Just read Academic Boneyards, the current issue of Credenda Agenda.

“FoxNews Responsible for Global Warming

NEW YORK—New studies looking at warming oceans and melting Arctic ice find FoxNews broadcasts emit really hot television signals, Tim Moore of the Scripts Institution of Oceanography said.

Speaking at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Moore said, “I’m surprised people’s eyes haven’t melted inside their heads while watching FoxNews. Other network news programs emit waves that bring life and health and nutrition to the world’s ecosystems.” Moore said the pattern of evidence also suggests that FoxNews also contributes significantly to poverty, tsunamis, mad cow disease, low test scores, and the expansion of mean people…”

Walter E. Wallis on Jerry Pournelle’s Current Mail page, commenting on typical Mass Media Podpeople misconduct at White house press conferences:

The latest “You are dethpicable” response to White House critics demonstrates the need for a change in that office to someone who can respond more in the language of today’s discourse.

Gulag/Nazi accusations need something more than prissy tsking.

I propose that the office be shared between Ann Coulter and John Bolton, with the occasional addition of a sock puppet to respond appropriately to the more idiotic, Helen Thompson type questions. If that does not bring the press conference back from the gotcha game it has become to a sincere machine to answer questions, we can borrow one more device, pouring green goo down from the ceiling on really inappropriate commenters.

Maybe we can expand on this idea…

A followup to “Nearly speechless” below

“… I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I’ve come to see that truth and teaching are incompatible.”

“…We’ve had a society increasingly under central control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.”

“Somehow out of the industrial confusion which followed the Civil War, powerful men and dreamers became certain what kind of social order America needed, one very like the British system we had escaped a hundred years earlier. This realization didn’t arise as a product of public debate as it should have in a democracy, but as a distillation of private discussion. Their ideas contradicted the original American charter but that didn’t disturb them. They had a stupendous goal in mind—the rationalization of everything. The end of unpredictable history; its transformation into dependable order

“From mid-century onwards certain utopian schemes to retard maturity in the interests of a greater good were put into play, following roughly the blueprint Rousseau laid down in the book Emile. At least rhetorically. The first goal, to be reached in stages, was an orderly, scientifically managed society, one in which the best people would make the decisions, unhampered by democratic tradition. After that, human breeding, the evolutionary destiny of the species, would be in reach. Universal institutionalized formal forced schooling was the prescription, extending the dependency of the young well into what had traditionally been early adult life. Individuals would be prevented from taking up important work until a relatively advanced age. Maturity was to be retarded.”.–The Underground History of American Education

Also see, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

So there I was, perfectly set for another curmudgeonly day…