President Obama learns from the media what he should already know. Bill O’Reilly wanted to know “why come” (as they say in Idiocracy English, which approximates Bill’s English tutorials). So he asked bobble-head Kirstin Powers to help him understand. She replied: “Obama’s disengaged.”
Is “disengaged” the new dumb? I need a guide to PC.
Education, English, Family, Liberty, Literature, Political Correctness
Easily more offensive than the salacious sex scene on page 313 of Jodi Picoult’s novel “Nineteen Minutes” is the rotten writing. The book’s titillating topics—bullying, school shootings, teen sex and pregnancy—verge on the political, their effects on young minds is to stunt and steer the child into thinking along certain narrow, politically pleasing lines.
“‘Relax,’ Matt murmured, and then he sank his teeth into her shoulder. He pinned her hands over her head and ground his hips against hers. She could feel his erection, hot against her stomach. ”
… She couldn’t remember ever feeling so heavy, as if her heart were beating between her legs. She clawed at Matt’s back to bring him closer. “‘Yeah,’ he groaned, and he pushed her thighs apart. And then suddenly Matt was inside her, pumping so hard that she scooted backward on the carpet, burning the backs of her legs.
… (H)e clamped his hand over her mouth and drove harder and harder until Josie felt him come.“Semen, sticky and hot, pooled on the carpet beneath her.”
Ugly writing.
A dad who resides in New Hampshire, the state whose motto is “Live Free or Die,” was arrested for protesting the tract, which he felt was pornographic and age-inappropriate for his 14-year-old daughter. William Baer had exceeded his allotted, two-minute complaint time, after which he was cuffed and dragged out of the forum of educrats at the Gilford high school.
If only he had supplied the ignoramuses present with a list of classics without which children’s minds are destined to remain as dim as those of the educators who assign them such piss-poor reading material.
UPDATE (5/9): PARENT ARRESTED for daring to protest. The dulcet voice of a female is heard in the background; how she delights in her petty abuse of power over a powerless parent.
Business, Economy, English, EU, Europe, Law, Taxation, The State
If the law applied equally to the state and not only to its subjects, the colluding governments—a cartel, really—participating in the concerted action against Switzerland would be prosecuted under anti-trust laws, for the creation of a global tax monopoly.
In 2010, it was reported that the US was putting pressure on Switzerland to end that country’s venerated tradition of “helping private property owners shield their assets against legalized theft (taxation).” Uncle Sam was meddling in the financial sector of an ostensibly sovereign state, siccing its legal footsoldiers on UBS AG, a Zurich and Basel-based financial establishment (and its American clients), because of tax evasion.
When they are not bailing out failed financial institutions, our statists are bankrupting viable ones.
Fast forward to 2014, and it transpires that the statists have succeeded—and not only semantically: banking privacy is now referred to as “tax secrecy.”
No secrets should be kept from The State.
At a ministerial meeting in Paris on Tuesday, Switzerland agreed to sign up to a new global standard on automatic information exchange, representing a decisive break with its centuries-old commitment to protecting the privacy of banking clients.
The move is a big step forward for governments that have mounted a concerted attack on evasion in the wake of the global financial crisis and a series of tax scandals.
Swiss co-operation is pivotal to the struggle to prise open taxpayers’ hidden accounts because of its long tradition of bank secrecy and its dominant wealth management sector, which has $2.2tn of offshore assets.
The declaration, which was signed at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, requires countries to collect and exchange information on bank accounts and the beneficial ownership of companies and other legal structures such as trusts. …
“European governments expect billions of euros to be repatriated as a result of the evasion crackdown.” “Repatriate” is yet another bit of semantic casuistry intended to whitewash these governments’ global property grab.
MORE Via FT.
Back to the post’s opening salvo: Sadly, even if a fair adjudicator were able to prosecute the colluding cartel on the grounds stated—the taxpayers would end up paying for the crimes.
Excelling on the new, revised SAT promises to be easier than on the old. The College Board plans on replacing challenging words—a facility with which a student was expected to have—with “high utility” words, whatever those are. The essay (in which students are asked “to analyze a text and how the author builds an argument”) will be optional.
“Both vocabulary and reading comprehension are both highly g-loaded,” writes Steve Sailer.
Yes, why weaken questions that measure the G Factor (general intelligence), unless, as the Washington Post surmised, the intention is to “end the lingering public perception that the test is about IQ or aptitude”?
“[T]he whole topic of intelligence testing is so politically radioactive,” confirms IQ ace Sailer:
As Herrnstein and Murray liked to point out, modern America is a rich place in part because we have standardized national tests in which small town boys like Murray and Jewish lads like Herrnstein could outshine the boarding school scions. America was particularly obsessed with finding talent for about a decade after Sputnik in 1957. But then along came civil rights and other obsessions, and the national clarity that was briefly achieved due to the fear of nuclear destruction has been eroded by wishful thinking and self-serving conniving.
Easily the most unsettling aspect of the exercise is the bureaucrat behind the revisions. He is David Coleman, who was also “a key architect of the Common Core state curriculum standards for schools, a set of guidelines being introduced — and often stirring controversy — in classrooms throughout the nation.”
Common Core is “a lesson plan for raising compliant, non-thinking citizens,” explains John Whitehead, author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. Mr. Whitehead’s Common-Core essay, on EPJ, is a MUST-read for liberty loving parents.
UPDATE: Erik Rush taxes the mind today with a Latin phrase that is sure not to feature in the new SAT: quod erat demonstrandum. I had to look it up, which I like. Funny thing that; I like to learn new things. The version I do know, because we used it in math proofs at school, is Q.E.D. (“that which was to be proven”).
Read Erik on Harry Reid that “putrescent little tin god.”