SICK EDUCATION

Soviet history lives! In Australia. Australian academic historians want to make it an offence to "publicly question the integrity or competence of their colleagues". No free-speech, no academic freedom, no open debate -- just a licence for Leftists to lie. No wonder they mourn the downfall of the Soviet Union. You can see what they liked about it.

Bureaucracy versus education: "When it takes an average of six years to build a new public school in California, what industrialist David L. Brennan did eight years ago in Cleveland borders on the miraculous in the slow-moving world of public education. When Brennan discovered, two weeks before school started, that some 360 initial voucher applicants could not find places in the city's private schools, he created two new HOPE Academies in just 15 days."

Teachers versus education: "Some say high-stakes testing is to blame for cheating in the classroom. But in this case, it's not the students getting caught -- it's the teachers. A recent study shows as many as 200 teachers in California were caught cheating to help their students perform better on rigorous new standardized tests, which are part of the President Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' education plan, which calls for greater accountability among teachers. Since the law was implemented, more teachers have been caught helping students cheat in about a dozen states around the country."

From a reader: "It occurred to me that perhaps there is more than meets the eye in Leftist support for more and more access to higher education. At the risk of sounding 'conspiratorial', do you suppose that they so strongly support easy, cheap, and open access to higher education so that they, since they so thoroughly control higher education, will have the opportunity to indoctrinate more and more people to their way of thinking?"

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KUDOS

Keith Burgess Jackson has a recent post on misuse of the word "kudos". I posted on that too -- on Oct 3, 2003. I said: ""kudos" is only a borrowing in English. It is the ancient Greek word for "fame". Interesting factoid: According to my Abbott-Smith Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, "kudos" does not occur in the Greek New Testament. Early Christians obviously did not think much of the Greek obsession with fame and renown."

And that is no coincidence. Christ saw this life primarily as a preparation for the afterlife -- the "kingdom of heaven", as he so often put it (e.g. Matthew 5:20). Greeks however mostly saw this life as all there was and so their purpose was to gain immortality in the form of "kudos" -- having people notice and remember them admiringly. That is one reason why I sometimes refer to leftists as pursuing kudos -- because being looked up to and cheered is what they hunger for and aim for above all. Strictly speaking, however, it is an insult to the Greeks to describe what Leftists seek as "kudos". The Greeks wanted lasting renown -- not the eternal present that Leftists like John Kerry live in. If something will get him a cheer today Kerry will say it -- then say more or less the opposite tomorrow to a different audience in order to get a cheer from them too. Leftists are in general amoral and have only temporary postures that they adopt for convenience. There is no lasting renown in that. But for irreligious people -- which Leftists usually are -- I suppose that even a bastardized form of kudos makes some sense as your goal in life. I see other goals as healthier, however -- such as raising a happy family.

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ELSEWHERE

The religion of peace again: "A young woman and her baby have been attacked in a suburban train near Paris by unidentified men who drew swastikas on the mother's stomach. Police today said it was an anti-Semitic assault. The six attackers who were armed with knives clipped the 23-year-old woman's hair, and cut her tee-shirt and trousers before drawing three swastikas on her body. The men of North African origin also overturned the pram holding her baby, aged 13 months."

Amusing: A fiercely feminist and Leftist blogger has just had an unplanned baby at age 33 and suddenly discovers that she loves being a stay-at-home mother and regrets she wasted so many years doing the usual feminist man-aping stuff! She even wishes she was married! What a come-down for a feminist. Leftism always is good in theory only. She'll even end up voting conservative one day. (Via Oz Conservative).

Lies about jobs: "Sen. John Kerry and his fellow Democrats seem to believe that by attacking President Bush for 'inadequate' job creation the Republicans will be too inept to remind the American people that it was the Clinton economic policies that gave us the recession and the job losses. With polls showing Kerry ahead on economic issues, the Democrats chutzpah is succeeding. Kerry and his allies say they will bring back the 'Clintonomics' that gave us 'great prosperity.' It requires no great skill to take over a growing economy with a falling unemployment and leave it in a recession, which is precisely what Bill Clinton did. Democratic propagandists have also led many Americans to believe Clinton's economic performance was vastly superior to Ronald Reagan's, but the real facts show quite the reverse."

There is a BIG posting up at Gene Expression about the latest scientific findings on IQ. Like all other research on the topic, it shows IQ to differ greatly between individuals, to be highly heritable and to be strongly related to measures of brain function. But they have now got more precise about the brain functions involved and seem to be zeroing in on the specific genes behind it. So it's pretty technical.

Good to see: Britain's Radio 4 actually had a serious discussion of withdrawal from the European Union!

Dick McDonald has just got himself into a lot of hot water for saying that all the illegal immigrants around the place in Califonia are not such a bad thing. The discussion he has up about it all does expose the dilemmas involved.

Wicked Thoughts has a rare story of a doctor getting his own back against a lawyer.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights.

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