Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Soft Bigotry
…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.
Gerard Van Der Leun
Happy Rebirthday!
Only In LA
Columbus Day
I meant to post on this yesterday, whichToday is the real day, not the fake one the government made up to create a three-day weekend. Here’s an oldie but a goody on how we may be celebrating the wrong Italian.
The Drug War
Forty years of failure.
Continuing To Be President
Why does Obama want to do it?
The Media And Obama
They loved him to death. More on the divorce theme.
The Libertarian Democrat And Fifties Radios
Some thoughts from Lileks.
I was struck by the prices of those old AM radios. I hadn’t realized how expensive they were back then. In today’s dollars, you’d be paying two or three hundred for an AM radio, though it would probably have much better sound quality than a modern one. The tubes have their own audio quality that remains hard (and expensive) to replicate with solid state. Of course, they were also built to last, and unlike a modern device, repairable.