Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Restating the Obvious


This is a good one.

Madness and Political Life

"Is it not obvious, by now, that a cyclical climate change is part of the history of our planet? (Has that not been obvious since we knew about the ice ages?) And is it not obvious that we do not even know whether the planet is growing hotter or colder? (What if the real problem turns out to be global cooling? Then we have no time to lose in doing all we can to heat up the environment and increase our individual carbon footprint.) The depressing part of all this is that otherwise sane people seem invested in catastrophic silliness. We are reduced to restating the obvious."

And,

"Universities have become havens of official intolerance and bigotry the likes of which American society has seldom experienced. More galling is the fact that almost everyone encourages young adults to go to college, that parents and students spend vast amounts of money for this education, and that even more billions for university education is funded by taxpayers. Yet university administrators and professors seem overwhelmingly hostile to America, to Judeo-Christian moral traditions, and even to honest science (as in the case of global warming or arguments on the utility of Darwin's Theory of Evolution.)

Our universities have almost morphed into an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. The dangers of a monolithic and totalitarian system of education in a democracy are obvious to anyone but the willfully ignorant. We have sunk to a depth where restatement of the obvious is the duty of intelligent men."

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