The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
A few weeks ago, Lissa posted a video of Jenye Butterfly doing a pole dance performance, stating:
This is not pole dancing, this is Cirque du Freaking Soleil!!
Two weeks ago, a member of AR15.com posed the question, Pole Dancing as an Olympic Sport?
Well, why not?
And there would certainly be a Men’s Division….
http://cdn1.static.videobash.com/flash/player.swfUnfortunately.
I stumbled across this post at Pithy Title Goes Here, and had to explore further. It seems that an adult took a standardized test for 10th graders, and failed miserably. What was at fault? Why, the test, of course!
“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.
He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.
“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.
“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.
“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”
Wow, a multi-degreed professional couldn’t do 10th grade math!
I guess I shouldn’t snark so much about “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader.”
Who was this highly credentialed person?
The man in question is Rick Roach, who is in his fourth four-year term representing District 3 on the Board of Education in Orange County, Fl., a public school system with 180,000 students. Roach took a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, commonly known as the FCAT, earlier this year.
—
Roach, the father of five children and grandfather of two, was a teacher, counselor and coach in Orange County for 14 years. He was first elected to the board in 1998 and has been reelected three times. A resident of Orange County for three decades, he has a bachelor of science degree in education and two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology. He has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management and course delivery skills in six eastern states over the last 25 years.
(My emphasis.) Surely it must be the test!
I’d certainly like to see the questions. Let me quote once again from The George Orwell Daycare Center:
“There is really nothing very mysterious about why our public schools are failures. When you select the poorest quality college students to be public school teachers, give them iron-clad tenure, a captive audience, and pay them according to seniority rather than performance, why should the results be surprising?
“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.
“In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.” – Thomas Sowell
—
“It is only from a special point of view that ‘education’ is a failure. As to its own purposes, it is an unqualified success. One of its purposes is to serve as a massive tax-supported jobs program for legions of not especially able or talented people. As social programs go, it’s a good one. The pay isn’t high, but the risk is low, the standards are lenient, entry is easy, and job security is pretty good…in fact, the system is perfect, except for one little detail. We must find a way to get the children out of it.”—Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian.
As Glenn Reynolds puts it, “Credentialed, not educated.”
I’m not discounting the possibility that the questions themselves are ridiculous, after all, I’ve had some experience with “new math” myself. Again from George Owell Daycare Center:
In 1960: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four fifths the price. What is his profit?
In 1970: (traditional math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 80% of the price. What is his profit in dollars?
In 1970: (new math): A logger exchanges set L of lumber for set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100 and each element is worth $1. Make 100 dots representing the elements of set M. The set C of costs contains 20 fewer points than set M. Represent set C as a subset of set M, and answer the following question: What is the cardinality of the set P of profits?
In 1980: A logger sells a truckload of wood for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.
In 1990: (Outcome-Based Education): By cutting down beautiful forest trees, a logger makes $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class discussion: How did the forest birds and squirrels feel?
In 2000: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $120. How does Arthur Andersen determine that his profit margin is $60?
In 2010: El hachero vende un camion carga por $100. La cuesta de productiones…
So I want to see the questions. But somehow I don’t think that would explain the whole problem.
And I really wonder how Mr. Roach would do on the American Civics Literacy Quiz.
As I’ve mentioned before, my first exposure to Walter Russell Mead came from his seminal 1999 essay The Jacksonian Tradition, brought to my attention by Steven Den Beste. Take time to read that, if you haven’t already.
Since then Mr. Mead has become a blogger, posting at Via Meadia at The American Interest, and he’s done some excellent stuff. Yesterday’s essay is an outstanding extension of The Jacksonian Tradition, and applies to the current Republican presidential primary race. Entitled The Age of Hamilton, It too is worth your time. Excerpt:
President Obama will run for re-election as a Hamiltonian and a custodian of the 20th century progressive state. He will argue that modest and careful reforms, trimming a few excesses here, making some innovative policy shifts there, can keep the old ship afloat in the twenty first century. Like JFK, he will argue that the best and brightest can develop government policy that will guide the nation to a brighter future through collective action and state investments.
Governor Romney, so far as one can discern, is at his core a Hamiltonian as well, but he has less sympathy than President Obama and the Democrats for the blue synthesis of Hamiltonianism and social democracy. He stands roughly in a line of Republican presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush who accepted the basic elements of the progressive state. Former Speaker Gingrich is also a Hamiltonian, but much more than either Romney or Obama he believes that Hamiltonianism needs to be re-imagined for our times. Congressman Paul is the one Jeffersonian in the race, and of the four he seems the least likely to be elected in 2012.
Big fleas have little fleas,
Upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
and so, ad infinitum.
Found at Weapon-blog.com today:
I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
Thomas Jefferson
Letter to William Ludlow
September 6, 1824
Every single damned one of the bloodsuckers, from tiniest to largest, suck on the host, not on each other.
And maybe win something nice.
Linoge over at Walls of the City is holding a contest:
The Rules:
How to Earn a Ticket:
1. Every five dollars you donate directly to Soldiers’ Angels nets you one numbered ticket.
2. Every five dollars you spend in their Dollar Days or Amazon shops (where the products are shipped directly to them) gets you one ticket.
3. Every five dollars you spend in the Angels’ Store for any product that is shipped to “ANY Hero”, “ANY Wounded Soldier”, or “A SPECIFIC Soldier” earns you one ticket.
4. DO NOT SEND ME MONEY. All money and goods should go directly to Soldiers’ Angels.
5. DO SEND ME THE RECEIPT. Anonymize it however you like, and use the actual receipt or a screencap, but email from an address I can reach you back at. Send the receipt/proof to “linoge (at) wallsofthecity (dot) net”.
6. Within 24 hours, you should receive an email from me indicating your ticket numbers. If you do not, feel free to email me again or comment here.How We Will Do the Drawing:
1. The drawing will occur in decreasing fair market value (in other words, most-expensive item first, according to MSRP).
2. You can only win once.
3. When you send me your receipt, please indicate how many tickets you want put in each pool.
4. A single drawing will take place for each prize (currently 12), not each pool.
5. Sometime on 01JAN12, with Better Half watching over my shoulder, I will hit up Random.org and generate however many numbers I need. I will email the winners that day.
Go check out the various goodies he’s giving away. If you can’t use ’em you can re-gift ’em! I’ve got $50 in Amazon credit I think I’ll donate to the cause.
Back in August of 2009 I wrote Restoring the Lost Constitution. In that piece I quoted a bit from an Orson Scott Card novel:
(America) was a nation created out of nothing – nothing but a set of ideals that they never measured up to. Now and then they had great leaders, but usually nothing but political hacks, and I mean right from the start. Washington was great, but Adams was paranoid and lazy, and Jefferson was as vile a scheming politician as a nation has ever been cursed with.
…
America shaped itself with institutions so strong that it could survive corruption, stupidity, vanity, ambition, recklessness, and even insanity in its chief executive.
and asked the question, “But can it survive enmity?”
Gerard Van der Leun now addresses that question in his piece, Presence of Malice: Against the Conservative Portrait of the President. You’ll note that it expands upon the point of last Saturday’s Quote of the Day, that also came from Van der Leun’s site.
For that which we are about to receive may we be truly thankful…
Breda‘s other half (no, that’s not a “short” joke) Mike has written a three-piece (so far) essay on the divide in our culture, entitled Concord Bridge or Fort Sumter. I recommend you read all three parts.
I can’t find fault with it.
ETA: Read this too.
Quote of the… well, end, I suppose:
The Republicans more or less follow the laws and constitutional procedures, the Democrats deliberately and consciously break them. But the Republicans, while they complain incessantly about the Democrats, never identify this underlying fact. Why? Because that would show that the system is no longer legitimate. And the function of the Republicans, as “patriotic, conservative Americans,” is to uphold the goodness and legitimacy of the system, a legitimacy which rests on the belief that everyone in American politics shares the same basic principles and loyalties. So the Republicans, as defenders of the system and its presumed basic unity, cannot expose what the Democrats are. If they exposed it, politics would be replaced by open war between two radically incompatible parties and America as we know it would come to an end. — Lawrence Auster, View from the Right, Kagan’s non-recusal and what it means
Found at Van der Leun’s. I’ve been saying it for years. So have others. This is a realization that most people will not be able to avoid much longer, regardless of the education system, the media, and the .gov. Sooner or later Mr. and Ms. MiddleAmerica are finally going to say “ENOUGH!”
From a link at Everlasting Phelps:
Worries about testimony from some officers are not new. Under the former district attorney, Lynne Abraham, city prosecutors would not allow officers deemed untrustworthy to testify in court.
BUT they’ll be allowed to keep working as police officers.
Untrustworthy police officers.
There. Doesn’t that make you feel better, peon?
From Ann Althouse‘s comments via Instapundit:
I think the thing that made Rush so popular was his sense of cheerful optimism. Unlike the O’Rilleys and Savages of the world, Rush has always been optimistic about the future.
I think that the Obama presidency has been such a disaster of Biblical proportions that Rush is no longer optimistic about the future.
— Jim Howard
One of the things about Bill Whittle that amazes me is his nearly unflappable optimism. I wish I could share it, but I don’t.