Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. -- MaxedOutMama

I don't just want gun rights... I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance....I want the whole bloody thing. -- Kim du Toit

The most glaring example of the cognitive dissonance on the left is the concept that human beings are inherently good, yet at the same time cannot be trusted with any kind of weapon, unless the magic fairy dust of government authority gets sprinkled upon them.-- Moshe Ben-David

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem. -- Sultan Knish

All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war. -- Billy Beck

Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Nuke the Site from Orbit, Part Who-the-Hell-Knows

More evidence that the public school systems are working about like you'd expect from a .gov system, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars "invested" in it over decades, despite the creation of the Dept. of Education ($1.2 trillion alone - not inflation adjusted - since its establishment in 1980):
Literacy study: 1 in 7 U.S. adults are unable to read this story
Key grafs:
A long-awaited federal study finds that an estimated 32 million adults in the USA — about one in seven — are saddled with such low literacy skills that it would be tough for them to read anything more challenging than a children's picture book or to understand a medication's side effects listed on a pill bottle.

--

How low? It would be a challenge to read this newspaper article or deconstruct a fuel bill.

"They really cannot read … paragraphs (or) sentences that are connected," says Sheida White, a researcher at the U.S. Education Department.
Well, good to know we spent $1.2 trillion to find that out!

But all is not bleak!
In many cases, states made sizable gains. In Mississippi, the percentage of adults with low skills dropped 9 percentage points, from 25% to 16%. In every one of its 82 counties, low-skill rates dropped — in a few cases by 20 percentage points or more.
Still, there's more bad news:
By contrast, in several large states — California, New York, Florida and Nevada, for instance — the number of adults with low skills rose.
Why, you might ask did Mississippi improve so remarkably? Need you even ask?
David Harvey, president and CEO of ProLiteracy, an adult-literacy organization, says Mississippi "invested more in education … and they have done innovative programming. We need much more of that."
We need more money! MUCH more money!

I swear, it's the only play in the playbook. WE NEED TO SPEND MORE (of other people's) MONEY!

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