Category Archives: Education

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

Illinois

11 Comments

Thoughts on the president’s home state:

Illinois politicians, including the present President of the United States, have wrecked one of the country’s potentially most prosperous and dynamic states, condemned millions of poor children to substandard education, failed to maintain vital infrastructure, choked business development and growth through unsustainable tax and regulatory policies — and still failed to appease the demands of the public sector unions and fee-seeking Wall Street crony capitalists who make billions off the state’s distress.

But other than that, it’s great. And California’s pretty much in the same boat.

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Mann-Made Lawsuit

66 Comments

Get the popcorn going.

[Afternoon update]

I, Mark Steyn, National Review and CEI have been named. It’s four separate suits. I may be setting up a legal defense fund.

[Update a while later]

Here’s the story, at Fox News.

Legal Times has a story, too, as well as Ron Bailey at Reason. Also, Scientific American.

[Update a while later]

For those unfamiliar with the background, here are a couple articles at Forbes about the climate-gate whitewash.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Economic Brilliance

26 Comments

…of Obama supporters:

Let’s say that you have the ability to print your currency using your computer printer, and every merchant accepted your printouts as a valid exchange for goods and services. You need to pick up your dry cleaning? You printout a $20 bill and your cleaners hand over your garments without question. Same would be true for your mortgage, groceries, car note, etc. Your creditors even accept your printouts as payment on your debts.

Given this, how can you ever be broke? Answer, you cannot be broke. The U.S. government is not in debt simply because it can create currency to pay off the debt, and our creditors gladly accept our currency as payment on our debts. You see, the world needs our dollars because the world needs oil, and in order to buy oil, you need dollars, which means that the world needs to stockpile dollars, and that means that the U.S. can print all of the money that it wants without incurring massive hikes in interest rates to attract lenders.

This person is serious.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Soft Bigotry

18 Comments

…of low expectations:

Nothing works to destroy self-esteem quite like telling a black child he will be held to a far lower standard than whites, Asians, or Hispanics. Recognition that poverty plays a role in lower test scores is one thing; codifying that difference by telling students that you are expected to underachieve compared to other children is tantamount to surrender. The problem is too large and too complex to solve so we will hide our failure by simply dumbing down the standards by which we judge our own progress.

The bigotry actually isn’t all that soft.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Fooling Themselves

23 Comments

The Left’s narrative problem:

Because they basically control the mainstream media, and because they have created for themselves a fictional conservative worldview (evident in many an Aaron Sorkin project and Barack Obama speech) rather than confront the actual conservative worldview, liberals are often caught off guard when faced with an actual argument for positions they disagree with. What we’ve seen in the wake of the debate is that some on the Left are so wedded to their imaginary right-wingers that when their actual opponents advance positions or make arguments that are different from those imaginary ones they will call those actual opponents fakes and liars. They believed their own caricature of Mitt Romney, and his unwillingness to play into it strikes them as dishonest. Or put another way: Confronted with evidence of their own dishonesty about who Romney is and what he stands for, they call the evidence a lie.

It’s often been noted that the Left has trouble debating when they get in real debates, where they have to confront real arguments instead of their fantasy straw men. That’s the disaster that comes from cocooning yourself in academia or a news room where your assumptions are never challenged. Even Dana Milbank sees the problem:

Obama has set a modern record for refusal to be quizzed by the media, taking questions from reporters far less often than Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and even George W. Bush. Though his opponent in 2008 promised to take questions from lawmakers like the British prime minister does, Obama has shied from mixing it up with members of Congress, too. And, especially since Rahm Emanuel’s departure, Obama is surrounded by a large number of yes men who aren’t likely to get in his face.

This insularity led directly to the Denver debacle: Obama was out of practice and unprepared to be challenged. The White House had supposed that Obama’s forays into social media — town hall meetings with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the like — would replace traditional presidential communication. By relying on such venues, Obama’s argument skills atrophied, and he was ill-equipped to engage in old-fashioned give and take.

And unfortunately for Milbank, he’s much too optimistic about Obama’s ability to fix it in time to save the next debates, or his campaign.