Category: education

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Wolcott pointed to this:

We are now at the start of a long process of rationalization over the US defeat in Iraq. The most common of these rationalizations include: if only we had “…not disbanded the Baathist army,” “…sent in more troops,” or “…become better at nation-building.” However, in each case the approach is one dimensional, since we tend to view ourselves as the only actors on the stage. The actions and reactions of the opposition are discounted and explained away as fluff and background noise (those pesky terrorists…).

Anyone remember this?

The New York Times > Magazine > In the Magazine: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush:

guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Study it or clean up afterward?

No, not like buying votes: I mean expressing your opinions through how you spend your money.

Amanda goes to see An Inconvenient Truth:

[S]ince I’m a liberal and since ours is really the political philosophy that occupies the moral high ground, I knew that I should see it, encourage others to see it and make sure that my ticket-buying “vote” was registered in their receipts. So that’s what I did Monday night.

But let me say, this movie is anything but boring. Apparently, there’s a lot about global warming I didn’t know. I didn’t know how severe it is. I didn’t know how obvious the effects already are. I didn’t realize how much I’d already been taken in by the fabricated myth that there’s controversy over it.

Yeah, I need to see it as well. I’m already a convert, but I suppose I’ll learn still more gloomy facts.

$17B/year is looking like real money.

Document This!: by Shaula Evans

Latino Pundit has a truly brilliant quote from HispanicBusinessForum on undocumented taxpayers:

There are revealing contributions of undocumented-essential workers to the U.S. economy. When the Social Security Administration collects payroll taxes for someone for whom a valid Social Security number cannot be found, these earnings go into a “suspense file.”

Since 1937, this file has collected $265 billion in wages and, the report says, the file has grown $17 billion annually since 1990. This makes a good case that those workers that many like to call illegal aliens are really undocumented taxpayers.

Interesting. Taxation w/o representation comes to mind.

The film was in backwards.

Rats.