Is it any wonder that our children are growing up so ignorant, when this kind of thing isn’t a rarity, but probably typical? A history teacher who thinks that George Washington wrote the Bill of Rights?
I guess we should be thankful that he knows that George Washington even existed. This is why people home school.
I am also awed by Cam’s ability to maintain his civility and politeness with this ignoramus.
Tyler Cowen has a brutal review of what looks to be an idiotic ant-capitalist documentary:
A few months ago I went back and tried to read some Ayn Rand. As Adam Wolfson has suggested recently in these pages, it wasn’t easy.1 I was put off by her lack of intellectual generosity. I read her claim that “collectivist savages” are too “concrete-bound” to realize that wealth must be produced. I read her polemic against the fools who focus on redistributing wealth rather than creating it. I read the claim that Western intellectuals are betraying the very heritage of their tradition because they refuse to think and to use their minds. I read that the very foundations of civilization are under threat. That’s pretty bracing stuff.
I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not (if the stalking presence of Naomi Klein has not already done so). If you are looking to benchmark this judgment, consider this: I would not say anything similar even about the movies of Michael Moore.
In this movie, the causes of poverty are oppression and oppression alone. There is no recognition that poverty is the natural or default state of mankind and that a special set of conditions must come together for wealth to be produced. There is no discussion of what this formula for wealth might be. There is no recognition that the wealth of the West lies upon any foundations other than those of theft, exploitation and the oppression of literal or virtual colonies.
“Narrated by Martin Sheen” would be the first clue.
…to the Great Depression and New Deal
Despite the claims of MADD, the federally imposed minimum legal drinking age of 21 doesn’t save lives. But it does restrict the freedom of adults, and erodes federalism. In fact, that 1984 act (under Reagan) is one of the reasons that I don’t miss Elizabeth Dole.
From a libertarian perspective, your generosity is reflected in what you do with your own money, not in what you do with other people’s money. If I give a lot of money to charity, then I am generous. If you give a smaller fraction of your money to charity, then you are less generous. But if you want to tax me in order to give my money to charity, that does not make you generous.
But it does seem to make you self righteous.
There are plenty of much greater criticisms, and I have them, as any regular reader of this site knows, and no one was more irritated by George Bush’s “nucular” than I was, but I find the new president’s own verbal affectations quite annoying.
“Tahleebahn”? “Pahkeestahn”?
Who talks like this?
As Glenn Reynolds pointed out a long time ago, it’s like the NPR correspondents who work mightily to get their local Spanish inflections exactly correct when reporting on their communist heroes in Central America while not bothering to learn the difference between an auto and semi-auto gun.
Hey, it’s just “Taliban” (like “tally” and to “ban” a book), and “Pakistan” (like “pack” for a trip, and “Stan,” Oliver Hardy’s partner).
And don’t even get me started about “Oreeon.” What does he, think it’s a cookie? That one will be a real problem for the next four years unless he kills the NASA program.
[Monday morning update]
And yes, before anyone asks, while (unlike many, apparently) I had no problem with Sarah Palin’s speech patterns in general, I did find her “Eye-rak” kind of grating.
A (dead) British girl was banned for the prom for poor school attendance.
Well, that will teach her.
An invitation for Bill Ayers to speak at Boston college has been rescinded, under public pressure.
…of the travesty, indeed atrocity that American public education has become:
The reporter, Ginger Thompson, describes how a teacher prepares students for a standardized test. It’s a classic case of “teaching to the test” rather than teaching the subject itself. But that’s only part of the problem:
“If you see a question about Bolsheviks on the test,” Ms. Cain said, “the answer is probably Red Scare.”
So that’s the one thing Virginia high school students are apparently expected to understand about the Bolsheviks: They inspired American paranoia. That’s the Bolshevik legacy, you know.
Sadly, it’s no doubt a tip of the iceberg. And of course the NYT reporter found nothing remarkable about it.
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.