If the Republicans were on the ball, and had the money in the bank, they should look up the parents of the kids who are about to get kicked out of the school that the president’s kids are attending as a result of the Omnibus Bill, and have them plead for a veto of it in front of the camera. Then run the ads.
[Update late evening]
For those who don’t want to follow all the links in the linked article, here is the relevant one.
Thoughts on the decrepit state of the teaching “profession.” Like the commentator, I find the notion of a “graphic novel” of the teachings of the terrorist sadly ironic. As one commenter notes, in a sane world, holding a teaching certificate would bar you from the classroom. And there would be no federal support for colleges of “education.”
Megan McArdle says (correctly) that no one knows, and anyone who tells you that they do is lying or fooling themselves, but that what you were taught in school is almost certainly wrong. She also notes (again correctly) that there was a lot more to the New Deal than simply government spending (which likely didn’t have much stimulative effect), some of it good, much of it disastrous (particularly the artificial propping up of wages and prices by fiat).
One can’t run controlled experiments in economics, so we can never know for sure, but I’m inclined to at least go with economic theories that make sense and for which there is useful empirical evidence. Someone has to tell me what Hayek and von Mises got wrong to persuade me that Keynes is right. And most people who think that Keynes is right haven’t even read them.
[Update a few minutes later]
“Mr. Obama, give back my wallet.”
[Update a while later]
OK, so I’m not as impressed with David Brooks as the intelligentsia want me to be, but he does have some good thoughts occasionally:
The correct position is the one held by self-loathing intellectuals, like Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Burke, James Madison, Michael Oakeshott and others. These were pointy heads who understood the limits of what pointy heads can know. The phrase for this outlook is epistemological modesty, which would make a fine vanity license plate.
The idea is that the world is too complex for us to know, and therefore policies should be designed that take account of our ignorance.
What the world needs now is not love sweet love, but epistemological modesty. Particularly inside the Beltway. Unfortunately, the perverse nature of humanity is that often the less one knows about something, the more certain one is in his knowledge. They have never learned from the ancient Greeks that to admit the limits of your knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.
[Via Manzi, who reads David Brooks so I don’t have to]
[Late morning update]
Are we going to emulate Japan’s lost decade? It seems to be what they want to do, unfortunately.
[Bumped]
[Update a couple minutes later]
Renters are angry. They should be. They’ll probably join the tea party, too.
And here’s a novel concept: let housing prices find their clearing price. Can’t do that — it makes too much sense.
Jim Manzi has some thoughts. As he says, they’re not going to happen, but at least they provide an alternate framework for debate.
Thomas Sowell has some useful thoughts.
Did Harry Reid commit one?
While I defer to no one in my disdain for our mentally challenged Majority Leader, this may be a little unfair. Unless he wrote it, how can one be sure that he said “…another thing coming,” rather than the (correct) “…another think coming”? I haven’t heard the audio, but how does the listener discern between the “k” sound at the end of “think” and the same consonant sound at the beginning of “coming”?
I discussed a similar problem previously, in speculating why aerospace engineers say “detail design” rather than (the more grammatically correct, in my opinion) “detailed design.” The “d” at the beginning of “design” masks the one at the end of detailed, and perhaps many just hear “detail design” and it has become an industry standard phrase (that I hate).
And yes, I was in fact previously unfamiliar with the concept of an eggcorn.
[Friday update]
Wow. I feel like I’m living in an alternate universe.
I have two commenters (one close to my age) who have never (or at least they think that they’ve never) heard the expression “…another think coming” and always heard (or said) “…another thing coming.” I am exactly the opposite. Until yesterday, I had never heard anyone say “…another thing coming,” whereas I’ve heard the expression from childhood with the word “think.” While it’s not grammatical (yes, “think” is a verb, not a noun), it’s colloquial, and it makes sense — “if you think that, you have another think coming.” Another “thing” coming makes no sense at all to me. “Another” implies that there was a first one, but what was the first “thing” being referred to? I’m pretty sure that it’s a confusion caused by the similar consonants that join the two words.
And while we’re on the subject, another one that I see on line all the time (and was very prevalent in Usenet) is “dribble” for drivel. Again, a case of mishearing the word.
I guess it’s too much these days to expect a Secretary of Education to know basic English grammar:
I want to thank our mutual friend John Rogers, who’s been a mentor and friend to me since I was 10-years-old. He gave my sister and I the opportunity to start a great school in the Southside of Chicago, and that has become a model for success in urban education.
I know it’s a nit, but after all the Bush bashing for the past eight years, I can’t resist.
Mary Graber writes about the academic cocoon and ongoing denial, and the disastrous and unrecognized effects on college students’ knowledge and thinking ability.
Professors use school funds to attend conventions, where they meet at “round tables” and share strategies for surreptitiously introducing “gender” — all nine by famous feminist theorist Judith Butler’s count — into discussions about Russian history or Renaissance literature. Even where core curriculums are still in place, be aware: these teachers are infusing such Marxist-inspired theories. Even schools affiliated with Christian denominations have professors who brag, “Nobody knows. I teach the way I want to” — as one did to me last weekend.
So terms like Obama’s “spreading the wealth” and “redistributing income” clang pleasantly inside a freshman’s skull, echoing such cozy nostrums as “social justice” and “sharing.”
Yet, while asking one of my students why he was voting for Obama, I learned that he was for “change.” (Full disclosure: this was after the student brought up “change” as point of comparison to another “historic” personage whose speeches we were discussing.) But no one in class knew who Bill Ayers was, who the Weathermen were, and what they did. Such evidence of ignorance, however, does not dampen their estimation of their own decision-making abilities.
As anyone who has dealt with the four-year-old who insists “I know how to do it!” understands, arrogance is inversely proportional to age. Professors who themselves are perpetually in the stage of rebellious adolescence are not likely to recognize or report their own biases on surveys. Their students don’t know enough to know what they don’t know, and how much of it their professors are keeping from them.
It’s a bubble waiting to pop. Do parents really realize what a poor value they’re getting for high college expenses?
From Ruth Marcus, of all people. Was Larry Summers right?
This is a depressing story about the inability to enforce rules against plagiarism, and the comments more so. I don’t think it was this way when I was in school.
And of course, it’s of a piece with a general decline of ethics among the young. And why should they care? The system doesn’t. I’m starting to think that Glenn Reynolds is right — academia is the next overfunded speculative, empty bubble about to burst.