Khan speaks

Salman Khan Speaks at GEL (Good Experience Live) Conference

This is good. But you really have to visit his website to appreciate the scale of what he's up to.

This guy is in the process of changing skills education forever, and everywhere. The question is how far the model can be pushed, into what sorts of subject matter vs. where its limits lie. Another issue will be whether the reasons for his success will be correctly analyzed so they can be routinely incorporated vs. the production of haphazard replicas that don't work because they adopt the surface technology but lack the crucial pedagogical aspects. Anything can be done badly, and that's nowhere more true than in education.

Toward the end he gives some hints about why his stuff works so well, and I think what he says is the key to all types of teaching. Namely, extremely careful sequencing that does not skip any steps. In my experience, people who do not think that way themselves are, without exception, bad teachers; and I've seen plenty of them. If you can't think in an orderly, sequenced way, then you simply are too disorganized to be a teacher and should not be allowed within 50 feet of a classroom, lecture hall, or student.

(btw, his series on the French Revolution is very good.)

Byron

CBS polling hijinks

CBS poll puts Obama at 48% approval …
Ed Morrissey explains it in the link above. I also noticed that CBS had Obama at 48% approval, up from 44% in their previous poll. Those are lousy numbers, but I wondered how he could possibly have improved by 4%? One way would be to jimmy the polling so an artificially high proportion of Democrats get polled -- that will produce an overall higher approval number for any Democrat president.

And that's what CBS did. Polls generally find the current self-designated partisan split to favor Democrats by 1-3% points. But the people sampled by CBS were 32.6% Democrat and 28.8% Republican, a 3.8% sample bias in favor of Democrats. (Obviously, the more heavily Democratic the sample, the higher will be Obama's average approval.)

THEN, instead of weighting their biased sample so as to correct for bias, CBS made it more lop-sided and biased by weighting the sample to produce a 7.4% Democrat advantage. (And even that nonsense only got his average approval up to 48%.)

It's panic time in the ObamaMedia.

Byron

economic team

Minority leader Boehner to call for mass firing of Obama's economic team

This is gonna hurt.

That July crash in home sales was over twice what was predicted. Now Obama has to stand by his economic team and defend those fools publicly, even though they've demonstrated to everyone on the planet that they're catastrophic failures. No place to hide, and voluntary resignations won't help a bit. Too, too late.

It should be entertaining to watch Hopey try to talk his way around it all, especially if he does it from a $20 million dollar rented place on Martha's Vineyard with Michelle Antoinette at his side. Bad optics. Bad everything.

The only positive is that Obie can take more vacations during the upcoming election season, because no Democrat candidate in his right mind will want him anywhere around his campaign.

Byron

classic democracy quote

Elmer T. Peterson in The Daily Oklahoman (9 December 1951):

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury."

Surely, leadership should mean leading people away from that idea. Stewardship of a democracy requires doing that. If that's so, then what do we call what Obama is doing? Demagoguery, pure and simple.

Through the ages, many have considered democracy to be a degenerate form of government, on the argument that, sooner or later, it always falls prey to a demagogue.

It's not money that's the root of all evil; the root of all evil is being empowered to spend other people's money for your own benefit. Democracy depends on principled leaders who see their position as a sacred trust, and who operate with as much wisdom and restraint as they can muster. Rather than operating with respect and reverence for the nation and its history and traditions, Obama holds those in contempt; he sees himself as a Sun King, larger than the office he holds. As we are seeing, the damage that an arrogant, shallow, glib, half-educated fool like Obama can do is practically unlimited.

Future historians may decide that America had been mostly lucky, somehow or other beating the averages and ending up with better leaders than we deserved or had any right to expect. It that's so, then it was inevitable that we'd suffer a long-term erosion of principle, and that sooner or later we'd have an Obama at the helm. Too bad it didn't happen before the Executive Branch and its agencies and bureaucracies became so massively powerful, not that the Founders didn't warn about that in every way they could.

Byron

Ground Zero Mosque

Pat Condell hits the nail on the head again.
Pat Condell on Ground Zero mosque: "Is it possible to be astonished, but not surprised?"

Also see WTC Mosque, Meet the Auschwitz Nuns.

The question of the mosque near Ground Zero should not be framed as simply a matter of legal right. It's about basic human decency, as that is expressed in recognition and respect for the feelings of other people. If Islam wants to improve its image in the world, the way to do it is by graciously declining to insist on something that may be a legal right, but which would inflict completely unnecessary pain on others.

Almost everybody thinks this is a test that will be resoundingly flunked, and Muslims should take note of what that says about Islam's well-earned nasty reputation. But if the true intent is to make an in-your-face triumphalist statement, then they won't care a whit about that, either.

Byron

The harm Zinn did

NBC-Owned History Channel to Air Howard Zinn’s ‘The People Speak’

Comment:

The harm will continue for a very long time. It's interesting, and it must be dismaying to genuine liberals, how these Left icons (I.F. Stone is another recently-exposed example) turn out so often to have been working for the communist enemy.

Howard Zinn, the old America-hating historian and, it now turns out, Communist Party USA member, is lionized by the liberal arts academic left, which is the large majority, and by the usual half-educated Hollywood and media tools. These will insure that his rotten legacy lives on and on. Zinn apparently is some kind of intellectual father figure for Matt Damon, who seems to have been instrumental in getting the History Channel to sully itself by becoming a mouthpiece for Zinn's poison. "The People Speak," indeed. Now that this junk is on video with the History Channel brand on it, generations of school kids can be indoctrinated and demoralized. How nice. Next, no doubt, will be a hagiographic film bio lovingly directed by Oliver Stone, music by Pete Seeger.

(Aside: Some may point to Zinn's service in WWII as exculpatory. But that's not necessarily so, pending more information about the course and timing of his seeming patriotism in those days. Here's why:

Leading up to America's entry into WWII, CPUSA switched from one side or the other, according to orders from Moscow. Initially, instructions were to be on Britain's side, as Hitler had wiped out the Left when he took power in Germany. (The communists actually facilitated that by refusing to ally themselves with "softer" leftist groups, selling them out instead, and dooming themselves in the process.)

But in 1939 Stalin and Hitler suddenly became allies by signing a non-aggression pact: The two powers agreed to divide Poland, Stalin would become a supplier to Hitler's war machine, and Stalin would get the Baltic states. The idea was for Stalin and Hitler to enjoy a post-war Europe divided between them. So, Moscow sent out a directive to all its foreign puppets, including CPUSA, that they must now reverse field and oppose the war against Germany. CPUSA dutifully and immediately issued strong condemnation of any US involvement in the "capitalist" war of Britain against Germany, resistance that included attempts to sabatoge US military aid shipments to Britain.

That all changed on a dime in 1941, when Hitler double-crossed his ally Stalin and invaded Russia. Moscow immediately sent orders to its foreign pawns that all good communists should immediately AGAIN switch sides, and now flock back to the Allied side. Which they did. As committed communists, their fight was on the side of Stalin, whichever side that was at any given moment. The question is whether Zinn's war sentiments followed that pattern, directed by CPUSA under orders from Moscow; if so, it would indicate who he was really fighting for.

For me, the naive and idealistic American communists, the ones who deserve forgiveness, were the ones who bailed in 1939 when Stalin allied with Hitler. But the ones, like Pete Seeger and Lillian Hellman, to name just two, who stuck with Stalin even then, deserve nothing but scorn. Based on his writings and late membership in the Party, it would appear that Howard Zinn belongs in the latter category.)

Byron