Day: October 28, 2005

Found this puppy at Cao’s. Whadda ya think? Should I sell out? 🙂

OK, so what’s with all the traffic I’m getting to this post over the last month from people searching for “swedish pants”?

What’s that all about, anyway? People all over the world searching for “swedish pants” and ending up here.

I dunno. Some people are just stupid, I guess…

(Make of that what you will. 😉

I get flashes of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron as I read Peggy Noonan writing about “…Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us….” in her article titled “A Separate Peace” from yesterday’s Opinion Journal.

A thoughtful read. It may have you studying survival manuals and heading for the hills, though.

I suspect, though, that Noonan is being too kind in her assessment that there are two groups of the elite, one that’s made ‘a separate peace” with the fact that our society’s off track and veering for a crash and one that’s working diligently to get it back on track and steered to safety. No, I suspect the first group is made up largely of those who have worked diligently to destroy our society and are now enjoying the fruits of their anarcho-tyranny. Or are still working feverishly to hasten America’s crash.

If Noonan is right about the direction our society is headed, I suspect the self-appointed deconstructionists (like the ACLU) are beginning to celebrate their anticipated victory in the 80-plus-year war of subversion they have been waging to destroy America.

(Yeh, feeling a bit disgruntled today. Not full-blown curmudgeonry, yet, but that may well yet come… 🙂

Linked at Cao’s Blog Friday Open Trackback party

Commenting over on Liberal Quicksand…

…where a neat “guess who” game’s being played out on some intriguing quotes. It struck me, “Hmmm… there’s a blogpost in this somewhere.”

heh

Sooo… here is an edited reproduction and (very) slight expansion of those comments.

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Janice Rogers Brown?

When Republican Senators whimped out the last time her name was brought forward (2003)*, they taught GWB a lesson: most Republican Senators have no stones… and no sensible philosophy of “advice and consent”—best to play without counting on their support. Two years of stalling by Dems aided by whimps on the Republican side of the aisle.

Shameful.

[Brown w]oulda been on my VERY short list for the SCOTUS. Would have preferred her to Miers, but Republicant Senators and hypocritical whines and screams from ill-qualified pundits like the egregious David Frum have pretty well settled the deal: everything will be played by the Democraps’ rules from here on out. Brown is now a very dark horse…

[Next day]

Slept on this one. Were Machiavelli pulling the White House strings, I might suspect the Miers nomination to have been a stalking horse, effected to stiffen the spine of some single-celled Republican Senators.

But surely no one in the White House—not even Karl “Satan Incarnate (to Demoncraps)” Rove—is that Machiavellian… are they?

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*Yeh, yeh, I know Brown was “brought forward” in the “Snooty Boys’ Club” again this year and FINALLY she was given her proper place.

Excerpted from “Letter from A Young Jacobin”

From grade inflation…

Deliver us, Oh Lord

From the depredations of sports-besotted administrators

Defend us, Oh God

And remember education departments, their fads and empty promises

Smite them, Sweet God, in your mercy

Amen.

PS—from the “Young Jacobin’s” own postscript:

“…if I were the head of a Committee of Public Safety for a day I would let lose the guillotines on every dept. of ed in this country (both faculty and grad students just to be sure) and burn every book ever written by someone with a PhD in education. It wouldn’t solve all of our problems I know, but a) damn it would be fun and just, a thousand times just and b) it would be a good start, esp. since I would only have a day.”

Preach on, brother, preach on!

(And were I Emperor of America, I’d appoint this “Young Jacobin” as “head of a Committee of Public Safety” for as long as it took to erradicate the breed of pestilence he rails against.)

heh

edited to close that darned parentheses… *sigh* 😉

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”—George Santayana

A sad commentary on “prisons for kids” today.

Jerry Pournelle notes:

The Lays of Ancient Rome was once part of high school education; indeed I read the Horatius in 6th Grade in Capleville, Tennessee. Now of course we were a poor school district, and couldn’t afford expensive textbooks, so our readers tended to be filled with public domain materials. Still, I am not at all sure that was inferior to the expensive books filled with squish now written for our students.

I’d read Tacitus and Plutarch (and others) on my own by the time my high school years had rolled past. All we had in school were textbooks filled with what I thought of as the kind of “squish” Pournelle refers to above.

And that was 40 years ago.

The link is to Pournelle’s intro to Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome.” See the Gutenberg.org version available here. I missed, because I’m a sort of hit and miss autodidact in history, Maccaulay’s histories of England when I was in school. They’re available at the Gutenberg Project, as well.

Students (I almost wrote more honestly, “inmates”) in today’s “prisons for kids” have even fewer opportunities to study history. Hmmm… Ask students about the research papers they’ve written for history classes in high school. None, of course, will be your likely answer. Oh, some feelgood “projects” and such, but research papers where they are asked to dig in and explore then distill an historical event or era? Not.

Even in my educationally impoverished (by the standards Pournelle generally outlines—or by my grandfathers’ standards, for that matter) grammar and secondary school years I was required to write several research papers for history classes each year. Ancient middle east. Feudal medieval Europe. WWII. Had to narrow down a topic, expore it and relate it to the critical events of the time period. Yeh, complete bibliographies and footnotes. This was high school, after all, wasn’t it? (And the research papers were also a way for what I now know in retrospect were some good teachers to make up for the “squishy” history texts the school required us to use.)

I finally saw some of those kinds of papers required of my daughter, for example, after she went off for her bachelors degree…

*sigh*

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”—George Santayana

Perhaps Santayana should be modified for today: The clueless have inherited the earth. Those who have refused to learn from history are those now repeating its silliest mistakes. Witness the Miers flap, appeasement and coddling of terrorists—within Republican ranks!—and on and on…

Keep in mind: a ruling elite in a supposedly democratic republic needs an ill-informed—indeed, ignorant—electorate. We supply that with a yearly dose of high school graduates.

Let me offer another exegesis of what I guess I’ll call “The Santayana Rule”: if a ruling elite can keep its subjects dumb, fat and happy, then it can be free to pursue repeating the mistakes of ruling elites throughout history without serious challenge to their stupidities. Or, all that is necessary for the enslavement of a populace is the willfull creation of stupid, ignorant sheep.

“Public education” today has been almost completely transformed into a tool for the carefully considered rape of liberty in America. Consider: how many Republican [speech-impaired piscines] even stopped to consider the irony of their critique of Miers’ lack of judicial experience in the face of Rhenquist’s long and at least moderately successful stint as Chief Justice of the SCOTUS? Oh. Didn’t know? Rhenquist had no experience as a judge before his appointment to the SCOTUS. Neither had Marshall… Republican critics of Miers were too stupid to actually look at—or apparently even know—that the historical record essentially gutted some of their strongest arguments against Miers. And their supporters were also… too ignorant to know and too stupid to check. Public “education” strikes again.

Now, was that a rant or what? 😉