We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
New Englanders have lived intimately with the sea since the earliest days of exploration and settlement. The rich legacy of three and a half centuries is recounted by three noted scholars of New England history, and handsomely illustrated with 125 images selected from maritime archives throughout the region.
The story of a seafaring land, but it is not so much anymore.
That evil, if true, quote comes from a Quilette post on The Narrative and Its Discontents. Who constructs our realities? Scott Adams likes to talk about how we are all hypnotized, and there is some truth in that. The awareness of that might be the way out of it.
I first heard Rush Limbaugh years ago when I had long commutes. I thought "Who the heck is this guy."
He was articulating, humorously, thoughts and doubts that had been bubbling in me just below the surface. At the time, I was a normal uncritical Liberal thinking the same way I had been since age 17. I would not term it a conversion, but my mind did open to a kind of "critical thinking" that I was not getting from the news. As somebody put it, "awakening from a mindless political slumber."
Today, math is challenging for many and so is reading Shakespeare. It's not exactly a different language, but it sort-of is. His plots are not too difficult to suss out and his characters are usually interesting and colorful, but his language is the thing for me.
It is not for kids.
I wonder whether the teachers just want to avoid things that are challenging to deal with.
I suppose it would be possible to come up with a better plan to destroy black academic performance than by telling black students not to worry about getting the right answer to a math problem, but I can’t think what it would be.
Many people have trouble getting their minds into the logic and language of math at different levels. It takes focus and concentration, like learning a language.
I am back on that topic, which is always a fun and semi-controversial one here at Maggie's. Our list, from the past, includes everything from dining manners to weights to firearms, but we'll try the topic again sometime.
How many knots should a 16 year-old American know how to tie?
A good winter activity with kids, besides Monopoly, checkers, and Chess, is practicing the basic knots with eyes closed. Bowline knot is essential, among the others. What are parents for except for things like these?
Yes, the downtrodden pigs, the exploited horses, and the victimized sheep finally did expel Farmer Jones from America’s Animal Farm.
But in his place, as Orwell predicted, revolutionary pigs began walking on two feet and absorbed all the levers of American cultural influence and power: the media, the bureaucracies, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, publishing, the academy, K-12 education, professional sports, and entertainment. And to them all, the revolutionaries added their past coarseness and 1960s-era by-any-means-necessary absolutism.
We are now finally witnessing the logical fruition of their radical utopia: Censorship, electronic surveillance, internal spying, monopolies, cartels, conspiracy theories, weaponization of the intelligence agencies, pouring billions of dollars into campaigns, changing voting laws by fiat, a woke revolutionary military, book banning, bleeding the First Amendment, canceling careers, blacklisting, separate-but-equal racial segregation and separatism.
Conspiracies? Now they brag of them in Time. Read their hubristic confessionals in “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Once upon a Time, radicals used to talk of a “secret history” in terms of the Pentagon Papers, or a “shadow campaign” in detailing Hollywood blacklisting. They are exactly what they once despised, with one key qualifier: Sixties crudity and venom are central to their metamorphosis.
Our left-wing American revolutionary cycle from the barricades to the boardroom was pretty quick—in the manner that the ideology of the Battleship Potemkin soon led to Stalin’s show trials, or Mao’s “long march” logically resulted in the Cultural Revolution. The credo, again, is that the noble ends of forced “equity” require any means necessary to achieve them...
Last year, students at New York’s elite United Nations International School launched an anonymous social media campaign denouncing the school’s teachers and administrators for their “vast history of systemic racism,” “white liberal racist thinking,” and “direct, intentional, repeated racial trauma.” The students threatened to “cancel” their “oppressors” through social media shaming. Administrators immediately caved to their demands.
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