"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
You have to check this out!
The concept’s been around for a while: throw a buncha atomic bombs out the back end and let ’em push… This puppy’s “do-able” in a much nearer time frame than a test bed for a “warp drive” that’s in research now. (Only real barrier? Whiny crybabies scared of the boogyman “A-Bomb”.)
Mars, anyone?
The cat’s outa the cradle over at Adam’s Blog and bombshells are dropping (what a waste of thrust!) at TMH’s Bacon Bits.
Note the 0PEN P0ST info below the edu-rant.
Found this (just a snippet here) over at Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor. Fits well with Fred Reeed’s rant posted the other day as “Enstupiated” Americans.
At one time you could study to be an American, and if you adopted the American Way, which was never narrowly defined but we sort of knew what the American Way of Life was, your origin did not matter a bit. You spoke English, you adhered to Judao-Christian ethics, you vaguely recognized the sovereignty of God and the notion of Divine Providence and some notion that there was a power higher than the will of the people, but mostly the local will of the people and consent of the governed prevailed. Courts decided cases on as narrow grounds as possible precisely to avoid setting out vast and vague rules that enhanced the power of the bureaucracy. But that was long ago.
But, you see, we can no longer require that immigrants learn this stuff, because we no longer know it. Heck, college grads nowadays mostly can’t even read or reason through exceptionally simple documents (now labeled “complex reading” in order to make the idiot grads feel better about being stupid, no doubt). From an AP story, “Study: Most College Students Lack Skills”
Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
Well, duh. Anyone who can and does read knows by now that you have, at best, a 50-50 chance of having an intelligent conversation with recent college grads. NONE of those “complex literary tasks” listed above are. Complex, that is. Not. One.
But this is no surprise, is it? After all, all the national adult literacy surveys of ther past 15 or so years have shown that America is becoming an illiterate nation. And that 50+% of college grads who can’t handle reading and understanding simple documents? I’ll bet you at least 90% of pubschool (prisons for kids) administrators are grouped in that class. And how many of those illiterate dunces are “teaching” in our nation’s classrooms?
No wonder, given the assault on Western Civilization mounted by Loony Left Moonbats, Mass Media Podpeople (“disinformation for sub- and illiterate sheeple”) and their ilk, that people who can’t read and comprehend, don’t. And so, it’s even less wonder that most American’s have no idea what the Founders and Framers were up to; have less idea what a wonderous thing was handed to us in the Amwerican State Papers and other founding documents and acts of those early Americans.
It’s not just history, folks, it’s a wealth of cultural memes and other gifts that are simply not at all available to people glued to their TVs or listening to cRap “music” (or darned near anything “pop-cultural”).
Illiterate college grads? Heck, illiterate college profs. Kris, at Anywhere But Here, cites one example. Why do I call a grad class English prof who had no idea what the story the class was assigned (by her) was patterne after “illiterate”? Read the post at Kris’ place.
I have a ton of those myself. My fav is of the head on an English department at a well-respected East Coast university who asked me once if my citation in an (online) argument of “sound and fury, signifying nothing” were a reference to Faulkner. Seriously. This head of a well-respected English department had never read Macbeth.
Let that soak in: head of English department. Had. Never. Read. Macbeth. Or any other Shakespearean work, it turned out…
Second-greatest influence on the English language, and the self-made idiot had never read a word of his work.
Once, simply saying, “Once more unto the breach…” brought a meme into play. Not just the words from Henry V,
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood…
“Henry V” (5.3.44-51)
But also the history of the conflict behind the play and what importance it had for our own culture and system of government.
You can bet your bottom dollar the Founders knew-and understood-the impact Henry had on England, and what his reign meant in terms of an Englishman’s (by extension, all Americans) rights and duties… as well as the proper rights and duties of a reigning monarch.
And I know my grandfather knew, for he explained much of my foundational knowledge of such things to me when I was a child.
But people who cannot read, who cannot follow a line of reasoning, will fall prey to anyone who tickles their ears. Exactly like most of our contrymen today.
As I said before, this is an 0PEN P0ST, all weekend long. Link to this post and trackback. TMH tells you how:
Kindly add a reciprocal link to this post. (What’s a trackback? Bad Example explains.) If your blog software can’t send trackbacks you can use Wizbang’s Standalone Trackback Pinger. If you have trouble, please leave a comment…
See for more linkfests, as well as the Open Trackback Alliance
TP-ed at TMH’s Bacon Bits (and others as time permits later).
Chapping the gizzards of your pseudo-liberal friends: priceless.
Via Worldnet Daily
Laughing myself silly (yeh, I know, I know: a superfluous redundancy) at TMH’s Bacon Bits
curmudgeonly rant/ON
In 1209, Arnaud-Amaury, the Abbot of Citeaux, won his place in history with a memorable quote. Referring to the people of Beziers in Southern France, he issued the edict, “Kill them all; God will know his own.”
Barbarous, eh? Unconscionable, right? But still historically atypical of Christianity, even of a Roman Catholicism once drunk on the Inquisition.
But the strange thing is that this philosophy has always been (recall Mohamed’s slaughter and enslavement of the Jews of Medina after he accepted their surrender with promises of fair treatment?) and still is a central theological tenet of Islam: submit or die.
I propose we begin considering applying moral equivalency to Islam. Say, not in effect but in fact, to Muslims, “You believe you have the right to kill people who refuse to believe as you do? Fine. Submit or die. Renounce Islam or die.”
Start with Saudi Arabia (and all the other little kleptocratic regimes in the penninsula). Send a company of marines in to kick over the “royal” House of Saud (made so by the Brits after WWI, ya know, when they kicked the Hashemites out of their control of Mecca and handed them Jordan as a sop). Make radioactive glass parking lots out of Mecca and Medina. Then build a monument to the celebrants of 9/11 in the so-called “Palestinian authority”—another radioactive glass parking lot.
Then, making sure the demoncraps keep their stinking hands off our borders, GUARD OUR BORDERS well, catch and hang illegals attempting to enter from THE FENCE for carrion birdfeed and repeat: Submit or die.
Give ’em a little of their own.
Say to CAIR: renounce Islam or die.
Lock all mosques (wait until they are full, please) and deliver the ultimatum: submit or die. (Then, of course, raze the things to the ground, sow the earth with salt, pig manue and the rotting corpses of those who refused such a generous offer.
etc.
I think that’s simply just and fair. Offer them a taste (cram it down their throat, rub their noses in it, no matter how anatomically difficult that sequence of events may seem) of their own philosophical stance: submit or die.
curmudgeonly rant/OFF
[The opinions expressed above do not necessarily reflect my own. I’m in a temporary state of near apoplexy from the suit the ACLU et al are attempting to bring in order to make America even more defenseless against Islamic savage butchery than the Keystone Kops of Homeland Security, the goons of the “Thousands Standing Around” and the *sigh* “Border patrol” have done. Invoking the war cry of the Loony Left Moonbat Brigade (fair’s fair), my feelings and thoughts are all someone else’s fault. Blame “them”—whoever “they” are. The voices in my head, my depraved deprived upbringing, too much sugar, too little sugar, caffeine, no caffeine, violent TV/movies/games red dye number X—whatever boogyman du jour, flavor of the day excuse… Free will? Tell that to the Cat in my lap as I attempt to type this thing… Free will? There Is No Free Will. heh It is to laugh. I am her slave, her slave, I tell you!]
Ranting from a soapbox at Basil’s Picnic (at least ther ants are paying attention).
The battle cry of socialists, soi-disant* progressives and democraps might as well be, “Kill the innocent; save the guilty.”
Typically, those who shudder at the thought of wasting 9 months of a woman’s life “unwillingly” carrying a baby to term (whether she was willing to have the sexual congress that led to her pregnancy or not) and cry us a river over the death penalty applied to the latest scum-du-jour multiple murderer, want an innocent girl put to death.
Just read the whole thing, and follow the links.
[Thanks Woody, for highlighting this story.]
Flogged at TMH’s BaconBits’s (don’tcha love alla the apostrophes?) Bacon Break – Blonde Bombshell.
*You have no idea how many years it took me to exorcise an extra “s” I kept adding to this term… *sigh* 😉
Technorati : right to life
… v. the ACLU et al
From John Stephenson at Stop the ACLU:
Debbie Schlussel, blogger/investigative writer/lawyer, is extending an invitation to citizens interested in intervening in the ACLU’s NSA lawsuit. She practices in Eastern Michigan, where the suit was filed.
Also be sure to read Schlussel’s exposé of some of the shady plaintiffs in the ACLU’s suit.Stop The ACLU will be the first intervening party. Per email of Debbie:
Jay:
For sure. I will make you and/or Stop the ACLU the first intervening party (It will be Stop the ACLU et
al vs. . . . .). But I gotta work on this over the weekend. I’ll get back to you on this.
Want in? Check the post at Stop the ACLU for more info.
This was a production of Stop The ACLU Blogburst. If you would like to join us, please email Jay at Jay@stoptheaclu.com or Gribbit at GribbitR@gmail.com. You will be added to our mailing list and blogroll. Over 115 blogs already on-board.
h.t. to Hugh, again (Man! Get yourself a blog! Tho, admittedly, I appreciate your tips, especially recently wile I’ve been a bit swamped 🙂
Fred Reed again, this time in almost perfect complement to John Stossel’s “Stupid” schools program on 20/20 last Friday:
“I’m going to start a rickshaw factory. It’s so our kids will have a way to make a living, now that America is pulling out of the First World. Maybe I’ll put an iPod socket on the poles or a little tiny television, made in Japan. That way our puzzled offspring won’t inadvertently start thinking. Tradition provides an anchor in the circumambient chaos.
See, what’s going to happen is, all the design work and programming are going to Mumbai, except the part that already has. Manufacturing is pretty much in China already, Mexicans do all the scutwork, and blacks work for the government or not at all, or both at once. That leaves whites as midlevel bureaucrats supervising each other. Thing is, whites are getting so they can’t read either, so they’ll need rickshaws to pull, in case the Chinese engineers want to go somewhere.
It’s over, I tell you. The United Steak has turned into a mess of pale-faced bushmen mumbling in pidgin English, the young anyway, with Orientals as missionaries trying to civilize us. Yes, friends and neighbors! Ain’t it exciting? All the professors in America of anything practical are already Chinese or Indian. Or getting that way fast.”
Read the rest. (Surely no regular reader of this blog is a part of the nearly 40% 60% of adult Americans who are subliterate… )
Reading America the riot act at Conservative Cat (get that sheepskin, Ferdy! 🙂 and TMH’s Bacon Bits.
h.t. Hugh, via email:
“I have 3 demands or I’ll kill the boy!”
Click through the entire series of photos.
Justice, indeed. *sigh* Here, I’m sure the American Criminal Lawyers Union would be all a-twitter, along with a sea of Mass Media Podpeople, Democrappic congresscritters (and no doubt their lapdog Republican’t “me-too-ers”), a whole array of academia nuts, and all the other crybaby loony left moonbats.
Oh, Waaah.
Nah, it’s not quite time for a revolution-apart from a “revolution” at the ballot box. Visiting with an email bud/frequent commenter recently, he said something about voting for NOTA* in an upcoming election.
Now, wouldn’t that be a thought… what if… OK, what if somehow, someway voters could have NOTA printed underneath every set of candidates? Would NOTA be elected to a majority in Congress? How about State legislatures and governorships?
Ahhh, quit dreaming.
*sigh*
I’ve been reading The Founders Constitution, recently. A good intro to the book might be the Continental Congress, Declaration and Resolves of October, 1774-nearly two years before the Declaration of Independence.
Washington D.C. is looking and acting a lot more like King George, the more the Democrapic Socialists and their Republican’t lap dogs heap their endless intrusive laws on their subjects’ heads…
But don’t listen to me. I’m being ruined by reading the Founders’ thoughts and comparing them to what our feddle gummint has become.
This is an OTA (Open Trackback Alliance) post. CLICK the link on the graphic to find out what that means if you don’t already know. Link to this post and track back. I’ll hit up a few myself later in the day.
Lighting the end of the chain at Diane’s Stuff (but the darned thing just refuses to draw… ).
Power Oatmeal? Yeh. Want that warm, smoothe oatmeal breakfast, but also working out and need the extra protein you get from a ham n eggs type of breakfast? Here’s one solution.
Oatmeal (take your pick):
Oatmeal Porridge
Or
Your fav “rolled” oats–the flat stuff you associate with Quaker Oats. Regular or instant, fixed as you usually do or the package directs.
The “power” part?
First: flavor. I like to add freshly-grated cinnamon and nutmeg, margarine (or butter) and some apple jelly.
Then, for added protein, whip up 8 oz of a high-quality, high-protein shake. I use the a super high-quality (ordered over the internet) vanilla-flavored protein shake for adding to oatmeal. Use the protein shake in place of milk. (Drink any shake mix left after pouring an amount you prefer over the oatmeal. 🙂
When I have ’em, I’ll add raisins to the oatmeal porridge as it’s cooking.
Warm, tasty, filling and an extra protein boost.
Update: Oh, where’s the coffee? Already downed by this time and starting on a second third fourth cup. What?!? Breakfast w/o Joe? Say it ain’t so!
UPDATE: In comments The MaryHunter suggests cardamom and brown sugar—each separately or together worthy additions to oatmeal.