Category Archives: Education

Bi-Lingual Brain Benefits

I’ve always regretted not being bi-lingual. I took Latin in high school, which has been enormously beneficial, but I never spoke it, and I’m really only monolingual. That’s sort of a natural advantage that kids of immigrants have. I don’t know if my half-Iraqi nephew and niece are fluent (they probably just know some words), but I’m sure they’re getting some benefit from hanging out with their mother’s family.

I’d also note, on the education bubble front, that eliminating the requirement of a language for a college degree was an early sign of it.

A Message To Millennials

Kurt Schlichter expresses his gratitude:

I have been told that being hard on you Millennials will turn you against conservatism, that I should offer you a positive, hopeful message that avoids the touchy problem of your manifest stupidity.

No. There’s no sugar-coating it – your votes for Democrats have ensured that you are the first generation in American history that will fail to exceed what their parents attained. Embracing liberalism was a stupid thing to do, done for the stupidest of reasons, and I will now let you subsidize my affluent lifestyle without a shred of guilt.

I’m a 48 year old trial lawyer living on the coast in California – I should have “Hope and Change” tattooed on my glutes. I’d have an excuse to be lib-curious, but you Millennials? Why do you support an ideology that pillages you to pay-off Democrat constituencies? Your time in the indoctrination factories of academia trained you in a form of “critical thinking” that is neither. Somehow, you came to embrace the bizarre notion that conservatives are psychotic Jesus freaks who want to Footloosisze America into a land of mandatory Sunday school and no dancing.

But liberals, in contrast, are nice. Obama is cool. You chose petty fascism with a smile. Not a lot of thought went into it. Facts, evidence – these were mere distractions from the feelings-based validation that came from rejecting us wicked conservatives.

What did you get? The chance to be forced to buy health insurance you don’t want at inflated rates so my rates can be lower. You get to pay more out of your monthly barista take – liberalism ensured that the tanked job market foreclosed a real career – so that I get to pay less out of my lawyer checks. Thanks, suckers.

RTWT.

[Update a few minutes later]

Hey, remember back in 2008, when Barack was going to make government cool again?

Idiots.

Barack Obama’s Narrative Delusions

Thoughts from Andrew Klavan:

Within the narrative cloud created by these journalists, Obama remains safe in his illusions while the rest of us suffer the consequences. He believes that playing the president and being the president are much the same thing. It is as if Bruce Willis believed he could save a skyscraper full of people by jumping off the roof clutching a fire hose.

For those of us who face the world head on? We don’t need Mulder and Scully to tell us: the truth is out there. Obama has lost the gains of the Iraq war and sacrificed the lives of our soldiers in Afghanistan to no purpose. He has alienated our allies in Germany, France and, God help us, Saudi Arabia, while playing the fool for our enemies in Iran and Russia. He has ruthlessly curtailed free speech by abusing the powers of the IRS against his political opponents, spying on and persecuting journalists, and encouraging the imprisonment of a video maker to suit his political ends. He has brutally hobbled our economy with anti-business regulations written by the very legislators who brought on the recession in the first place. And now, through lies and corrupt political machinations, he has saddled us with a chaotic and overbearing health care law that, even when operational, will never be worth its weight in debt and curtailed liberties.

But other than that, it’s great.

[Update a while later]

A phalanx of lies:

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been opposed to government health care because, as I’ve said in at least two books, it fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state into one closer to that of junkie and pusher. But that’s a philosophical position. Others prefer constitutional arguments: The federal government does not have the authority to do what it’s doing. Dear old John Roberts, chief justice of the United States, twisted himself into a pretzel to argue that, in fact, the government does. But he might as well have saved himself the trouble and just used Nancy Pelosi’s line: Asked by a journalist where in the Constitution it granted the feds the power to do this, she gave him the full Leslie Nielsen and said, “You’re not serious?” She has the measure of her people. Most Americans couldn’t care less about philosophical arguments or constitutional fine print: For them, all Obamacare has to do is work. That is why the last month has been so damaging to Big Government’s brand: In entirely non-ideological, technocratic, utilitarian terms, Obamacare is a bust.

I think, and hope, it was a regulatory policy bridge too far.

Public Schools

Who is stupider? It’s pretty tough to choose. But this is a point I hadn’t considered:

…as smarter people abandon public schools, the dumber ones who remain have more impact. They should be subjected to public humiliation, in the hopes that they’ll learn, or at least serve as an example to the others.

I wonder if we aren’t already in a death spiral in that regard.

Teaching History

It isn’t happening:

Questioner: What was the Holocaust?
American College Student: Um…I’m on the spot.

Questioner: Which country was Adolf Hitler the leader of?
American College Student: I think it’s Amsterdam?

Questioner: What was Auschwitz?
American College Student: I don’t know.

Questioner: What were the Nuremburg Trials?
American College Student: I don’t know.

Questioner: How many Jews were killed?
American College Student: Hundreds of thousands.

We’re doomed.

“Myself”

What is the purpose of that word? I hear people use it, and I’ve never heard a proper grammatic usage that couldn’t be simply replaced by “me.” (Ex. “He gave it to her and myself.”). Used as a subject (“He and myself walked over there) it isn’t even grammatical. I could see it as used for emphasis: “I, myself, don’t agree with that.” But other than that, I think it’s an overused, and really useless word.

Thoughts?