February 28, 2013
Kind of Like the Civics Test in the Post Before Last
...the tweet being mocked
here is depressing and not a little frightening.
Bob Woodward of course is one of the reporters who took down Nixon. This is major 20th century history, and history it seems is at least as poorly understood by our polity as civics.
Of course one might ask why Bob Woodward came up in casual conversation and then one would find oneself in the middle of something even more disturbing.
Worse it involves #politics.....so we'll continue this below the fold.
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Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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Minor nit. TOE the line.
It is particularly striking to me how much the left has turned on Woodward. He didn't change. He was telling the truth before, and he told the truth now. They only like the truth when it works in their favor. Otherwise, it can get stuffed.
Posted by: Mauser at Fri Mar 1 03:21:02 2013 (cZPoz)
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February 27, 2013
That Civics Quiz
...that's making the rounds, is
here. Everybody else on the starboard side of the blogosphere seems to be missing two, which is much better than most Americans.
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Full Civic Literacy Exam (from our 2008 survey)
Are you more knowledgeable than
the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking
the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%. Can you do
better? Questions were drawn from past ISI surveys, as well as other
nationally recognized exams.
Yikes!
Pete and other immigrants should do very well as they have to take a civics exam as part of the naturilization process, yet with most of the country getting an "F" ...well this is a serious problem that explains rather a lot.
How'd ya'll do?
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Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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100%, but I'm not surprised that a lot of people do badly. The questions seem evenly divided between Constitutional Law, Economics and American History, with most of the questions being suitable for an undergraduate college-level course.
Few Americans have studied all 3 subjects at a college level, and probably fewer still remember all that they learned.
Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at Wed Feb 27 20:57:35 2013 (poC8e)
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Likewise 100%. Political science degree with a minor in economics. There's a FEW questions in there that are more "trivia" than "civics", though - two or three that relied on your knowledge of certain speeches, etc. Granted that they were generally important speeches. And the question about foreign policy being shared between Congress and the President is... well, it's much closer to what you'd find in a textbook than in the actual world, hm?
A politically active conservative OUGHT to get 100% on this test, or at least damned near.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Wed Feb 27 23:24:29 2013 (pWQz4)
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27 out of 33; not bad for someone who has never taken a Poly Sci, Law or Econ class in his life, and darned little American History (yes, I know).
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thu Feb 28 01:14:19 2013 (PHdMw)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thu Feb 28 11:09:17 2013 (+rSRq)
Posted by: dkallen99 at Thu Feb 28 11:39:22 2013 (2lHZP)
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...yet with most of the country getting an "F"...well this is a serious problem that explains rather a lot.
Heck, I got 31 out of 33, and (as I mentioned in a previous comment) I'm not even an American. I did take some economics electives in university, and I'll admit to making educated guesses on a few questions.
Posted by: Peter the Not-so-Great at Thu Feb 28 19:14:57 2013 (ElBzz)
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PTNSG proves the wisdom of the cornerstone of US military policy since 1814.
'Don't screw with Canada'
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thu Feb 28 20:33:20 2013 (F7DdT)
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February 10, 2013
It is Vital to Remember That Dispair is a Sin...
...because it is the surest path to oblivion.
Do not give up hope.
Do not yield to anger.
Do not succumb to fear, for while the situation is dire, all is not lost.
"You don't understand! No one believes me, but I have
SEEN the math!"
Oh...
Oh dear...
Well, I still prefer tilting at windmills to oblivion or serfdom so lets discuss this below the fold.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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People have trouble visualizing the scope of the debt. Telling them that a stack of 16 Trillion dollars would reach the moon doesn't help, because they can't get their brain around the distance to the moon.
They've seen Airplanes though. I tell folks at work, where we build 787's this:
1 787 lists for around $200 Million. So 5 of them is a Billion dollars.
(And here's where the numbers still get all mind-boggly)
So FIVE THOUSAND 787's is a Trillion dollars.
So our national debt of $16 trillion would take EIGHTY THOUSAND 787's to pay off, if the world could afford to buy them all. But at the projected production rate of 10 per month, it would take 666 years to build them.
And that's not counting new debt.
Posted by: Mauser at Sun Feb 10 23:33:11 2013 (cZPoz)
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Being a Canadian, I don't really have a dog in this fight. However, I am still worried about what's happening in the United States right now, both out of concern for the welfare and liberty of people in the US and a more self-interested concern about the knock-on effects that future economic and political turmoil in the US will have on Canada. (After all, the US is my country's neighbour, closest ally, and biggest trading partner.)
If I may, I'd like to ask your opinion about the "going Galt" and "let it burn" movements I've read about in the small-c-conservative US blogosphere. If I'm understanding things correctly, the starting premise behind these movements is that the leftists are going to win, no matter what--which seems at first glance like giving in to despair. However, the idea seems to be more like letting the leftists build the New Socialist Worker's Paradise, in the sure and certain expectation that the New Socialist Worker's Paradise will collapse under its own weight, much like the old one (the Soviet Union) did. Then, once the dust settles and the leftists have been run out of Washington in disgrace (tar and feathers will presumably be involved), sensible people will have a chance to rebuild the republic on a sensible basis. (The "going Galt" movement seeks to speed the process up by starving the
Worker's Paradise of tax revenue it will need to fend off collapse.) It's not so much giving in to despair but enduring short-term pain for longer-term benefits, or so the theory goes.
Posted by: Peter the Not-so-Great at Tue Feb 12 23:54:42 2013 (ElBzz)
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That is a good question. I'll try to answer it in a bit of depth later this weekend.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Fri Feb 15 11:46:00 2013 (vp6an)
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February 03, 2013
Matt Yglesias Makes a Profound Discovery
That name....it means politics is afoot, so the post is below the fold.
For those of you uninterested in such things here's a shorter, less comprehensive version of the post.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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Posted by: J Carlton at Mon Feb 4 22:16:28 2013 (i0RQw)
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Jerry Pournelle's page had this little comment on his mail section a while back, which I thought was appropropriate.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=10667
Important comment:
"on the end of entrepreneurship
Being a founder of a startup here in silicon valley, I can comment on Spengler's essay. In the EDA business (Electronic Design Automation) everyone expects to get bought by one of the large EDA companies. No one expects to go IPO. Why? All of those wonderful laws the democrats passed after the fake energy crisis. Once you pass the small business threshold and enter big business, the cost of doing business goes up prohibitively. Further, the extra burdens placed on IPO's in the last 10 years, make it much harder to go public. The net result is we all (if we are lucky) join the collective. We get paid for our stock or get new company stock, stay the minimum required time and leave. Those of us with the energy, do it all over again. The unintended consequence is we build bigger and fewer large companies. Just what the democrats like. As Amity Shlaes pointed out in "The Forgotten Man", bigger companies act more like the government and are easier to manipulate. Resistance is futile."
The Spengler column:
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/11/07/if-you-believe-in-staples-clap-your-hands/
the big problem right now is that we need 100 Facebook IPO's a year right now just to make good on the recession and we are not going to get them.
Posted by: J Carlton at Mon Feb 4 22:29:32 2013 (i0RQw)
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J Carlton. Thank you for that comment and the links! You very succinctly conveyed what I was trying to.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Feb 6 15:42:08 2013 (vp6an)
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Your welcome. Ever since I was "restructured" out of a job, I've had a fair amount of time to catch up on reading stuff like this. It beats running around and looking at all the "for rent" signs.
Posted by: J Carlton at Wed Feb 6 16:04:00 2013 (i0RQw)
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