🚀 go-pugleaf

In article 
<albert.finney000-2036B1.08253908032008@news-server.tx.rr.com>,
 Al <albert.finney000@geemail.coom> wrote:

> In article 
> <wildbilly-CF15F3.18430207032008@c-61-68-245-199.per.connect.net.au>,
>  Billy <wildbilly@getthe.net> wrote:
> 
> > In article 
> > <albert.finney000-965814.07494303032008@news-server.tx.rr.com>,
> >  Al <albert.finney000@geemail.coom> wrote:
> > 
> > > In article 
> > > <wildbilly-623104.22340602032008@c-61-68-245-199.per.connect.net.au>,
> > >  Billy <wildbilly@getthe.net> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > In article 
> > > > <albert.finney000-26C38A.07290902032008@news-server.tx.rr.com>,
> > > >  Al <albert.finney000@geemail.coom> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > We'll not revisit the record numbers of democrats connected to the 
> > > > > Clintons who fell under the purview of jursiprudence, but we will 
> > > > > note 
> > > > > that the democrat party represents voter groups which traditionally 
> > > > > have 
> > > > > higher per-capita criminal convictions than those traditionally 
> > > > > associated with repub's. I'm sure you catch my drift.
> > > > 
> > > > Why not? Go for it. As lame as Clinton  was, he looks like a white 
> > > > knight next to this gang of liars and thieves.
> > > 
> > > You're missing my point. I'm referring to voters.
> > > 
> > > As to your opinion, it's just that - and by any legal standard this 
> > > administration is squeaky clean 
> > What kind of drugs you on boy, I gotta get me some of them. Or did you 
> > just go for the full head-on lobotomy?  
> > 
> > They brought back the Iran-Contra gang. 
> > 
> > Elliott Abrams pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress, 
> > then was pardoned bythe first President Bush.
> > 
> > Poindexter was convicted in 1990 on five felony charges
> 
> I was unaware GW Bush was in power in 1990.
> 
> 
> > Otto Reich, the State Department's top official for Latin America
> > 
> > Executive privilege and national security concerns keep us from finding 
> > out what this government is doing form the secret attendees of Cheney's 
> > "Energy Summit" which was followed by de-facto deregulation which lead 
> > to the "Clean Air Amendment", "Clean Water Amendment" (of course neither 
> > was clean), and the screwing of Californian electrical rate payers.
> 
> 
> All charged and jailed on your opinion alone.
>  
> > Then there was the bald face lying that got us into Iraq.
> > 
> > Niger yellow cake uranium?
> 
> The British intel, or Joe Wilson's report of seeing a top Iraqi official 
> in Niger? Granted, Wilson is a proved liar, but he's on your side, right?
>  
> > Let's not forget the stripping of the Constitution and the loss of the 
> > 800 year old right of habeas corpus and the right to a jury of your 
> > peers, illegal invasion of everyones privacy (foreign and domestic).
> 
> Are you thinking of the "drug war", or do you call Iran frequently?
> 
> > 
> > Oh and the killing of "SUSPECTED" terrorists and the torturing of 
> > "SUSPECTED" terrorists and the very real kidnapping of a Canadian and a 
> > German who were tortured.
> 
> Oh my.
>  
> > At present the US is supplying weapons to both Sunni and Shia forces in 
> > Iraq, which keeps the violence going and justifies our continued 
> > presence and the spending of big bucks, so that Daddy Bush and friends 
> > can continue to make big bucks.
> 
> Decreasing violence = increased violence.
> 
>  
> > And the thing that really is the symbol for this administration of 
> > thieves, liars, and murders is when we invaded Baghdad, the only part of 
> > the infrastructure that was guarded was the Ministry of Oil.
> 
> How odd, that we would protect an element of Iraq's Number one source of 
> income.
> 
>  
> > Squeaky clean? You're nuts boy.
> 
> Well, boy, by legal measure - indictment, conviction, incarceration, you 
> seem to have failed to make the case.
> 
> Sadly, your outrage is not prosecutable.
> 
> > > compared to previous admins. 
> > 
> > > If we had a system which relied on 
> >    public opinion,  
> > > many critics of this administration would be in the slammer as well.
> > 
> > You do know that Bush is a very unpopular person don't you?
> 
> 4 out of 5 Islamists, communists and neo-marxist wankers hate the guy. 
> You're in good company.
> 
> > You must 
> > know that. Lunatic Republicans (ask for them by name) are his only 
> > supporters. If it was up to popular opinion, this administration would  
> > be in prison or the Hague.
> 
> So that's it.
> 
> You set out to straighten me out about this, and end up making my case 
> for me, you weren't even smart enough to mention Libby.
> 
> Care to try again?
> 
> List the indictments and convictions of the people in and surrounding 
> the administration, then compare that list with previous 
> administrations, and you will arrive at the same conclusion I just 
> offered.
> 
> This is really 9th-grade stuff, youngster, are you still in 8th?
> 
> 
> (BTW, you, like the other outraged ninny, failed to get the gist, so 
> I'll repeat it once again. The democrat voter base is comprised in no 
> small part by criminals)

I have to hand it to you. You certainly are an arrogant idiot. Proud of 
your own ignorance.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021
502901.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1&sub=AR

washingtonpost.com  > Opinions  > Outlook
The Dumbing Of America
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces
By Susan Jacoby
Sunday, February 17, 2008; Page B01

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon 
itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his 
words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United 
States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of 
losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of 
anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long 
and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk 
about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national 
problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful 
pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. 
Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just 
"folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in 
important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here 
highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and 
that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not 
perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the 
distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian 
Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was 
published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the 
McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter 
saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon 
that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's 
democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of 
anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who 
died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a 
modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment 
has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of 
American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has 
been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of 
heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video 
culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital 
media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between 
Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of 
basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism 
with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is 
video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an 
old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it 
continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education 
levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a 
report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 
percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two 
decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of 
Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction 
-- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read 
nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 
1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of 
personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of 
print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book 
"Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually 
Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we 
have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and 
active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these 
zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're 
signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are 
screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized 
by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as 
young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on 
a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study 
released last August, University of Washington researchers found that 
babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight 
fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.

I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I 
was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering 
away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the 
inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from 
brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately 
related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news 
events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from 
the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of 
the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have 
been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, 
emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to 
keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of 
information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New 
Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is 
cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, 
the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he 
started watching."

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process 
of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find 
themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as 
possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. 
Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the 
average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring 
the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. 
By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite 
was down to just 7.8 seconds.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to 
the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the 
erosion of general knowledge.

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy 
choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to 
imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months 
after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one 
defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged 
Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that 
they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores 
throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American 
adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters 
that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the 
distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they 
can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but 
also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to 
satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning 
and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by 
National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 
24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in 
which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not 
at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent 
consider it "very important."

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American 
dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of 
knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider 
the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science 
Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming 
number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to 
know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a 
syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and 
discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an 
important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such 
knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of 
anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy 
on topics from health care to taxation.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism 
and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores 
by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on 
specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify 
the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes 
himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is 
past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, 
we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be 
a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind 
taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change 
agenda.

info@susanjacoby.com
-- 

Billy

Impeach Pelosi, Bush & Cheney to the Hague
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/
http://rachelcorriefoundation.org/