Monday, March 10, 2008

Re: The Negro Project

To find out what this Glenn McCoy cartoon is about go here.

RLC

Saturday Night Live

In case you've missed these clips of Saturday Night Live's parodies of the treatment the MSM has been giving Barack Obama you can watch them below. If you've seen the actual CNN and NBC debates the parodies will make you laugh, especially the foreign policy questions at the end of the NBC debate.

RLC

Seven Questions

Dennis Prager suggests seven questions parents should ask of any prospective college or university which their child is interested in attending. Here are three of them with some of his remarks:

1. Can one obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree at your college without having read a single Shakespeare play, one Federalist Paper or one book of the Bible? If so, why attend such a college?

5. Can my child live in a same-sex dorm and are the bathrooms co-ed?

One generation ago and for all of American history, the university acted in loco parentis, in the place of the parent. You could send your daughter to college more or less assured that the college would act on behalf of her welfare as you would -- meaning, for example, that boys had to leave girls dorms by a certain hour. Now, most colleges have no boys or girls dorms and do everything they can to enable boys and girls to fraternize in each other's rooms at any hour of the night and even share bathrooms.

7. Would a typical graduate of your university be able to say anything intelligent about Josef Stalin, Louis Armstrong, Pope John XXIII or Pope John Paul II, differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, Cain and Abel, the Gulag Archipelago, Franz Josef Haydn, Pol Pot, Martin Luther, Darfur, how interest rates affect the dollar, dark matter, and "Crime and Punishment"; explain what the Korean War was about and when it was fought; identify India on a map; and know the difference between the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council?

If not, why not? How could someone be considered in any way educated and not be able to intelligently answer all or nearly all of those questions? If they don't know about such essential and basic things, what do they know? Movies? The supposed dangers of global warming? The importance of race, gender and class? The meaning of menage a trois (or "threesomes")? Great gay writers?

Read the rest at the link, and check out the readers' comments, too. Some of them are pretty interesting.

RLC

Review of <i>Expelled</i>

Film reviewer Brett McCracken was pleasantly surprised by Expelled. He feared that it would be a documentary that tried to prove that evolution was all hokum but found instead that it's a funny yet disturbing look at censorship in American universities. He writes:

Indeed, the film hits a nerve in its critique of the contemporary American academy. As a graduate student immersed in academia and all its idiosyncrasies, I can attest to the pervasive and disturbingly hypocritical sense of close-mindedness that stifles the spirit of progressive discourse. It goes beyond the scientific communities in higher education and touches many disciplines.

Quite simply: if you are not on the "right" side of the wall (whatever wall it may be), your voice is stifled, your work discredited, and your intelligence questioned. It's gone beyond political correctness and is now something altogether more militant and sinister. Sadly, the academy today is less about the sharing and discovery of truth as it is about the wielding and protecting of power.

Critics will attack this movie and claim that it is manipulative propaganda, but if Michael Moore can get an Oscar for it, why hate on Ben Stein?

Read the rest of the review at the link. Expelled is due to be released to the general public April 18th.

RLC