- The brave parents of New Hampshire are protecting their kids from literacy by pulling their brood out of classes that require some Socialist fag-literature called Nickel and Dimed. [Fox News]
- Did you know that tax increases can never, ever, increase government revenue? It’s a startling but true fact, and anyone that believes otherwise is just begging for a lynching, really. [ResistNet]
- Former UN ambassador/mustache John Bolton thinks Obama is worse than all the WikiLeaks, combined. [The Guardian]
- After twenty years of irrational self-interest, Ayn Rand’s Adventures in Wonderland is FINALLY being adapted into a three-part Twilight-style epic. [Visions To America]
- Soon, Twitter will replace marriage as the most sacred institution in America. [WP]
RUMORS ON THE INTERNETS 1:36 pm December 8, 2010
Glourious New Hampshire Saves Children From Sinful World of Literacy
Hola wonkerados.
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{ 113 comments }
Well, is marriage in the Libarry o' congress? No. It isn't.
Ayn Rand’s Adventures in WonderlandAlisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum's Grandiose Exaggerations of Self Worth
(fixed)
So, here's the quote from the book that those parents are p.o.'ed about. She's writing about a church service she attended in Maine:
""It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth," Ehrenreich writes."
Actually, she makes a good point there.
Ehrenreich's whole book is phenomenal, which is probably what pisses these morans off even more. She not only wrote about the economic disparities in the U.S., but she actually fucking LIVED them.
Oh don't worry. Living in New Hampshire, these kids will learn about economic disparities and the problem with minimum wage reeeeeeeeeeeeeall soon.
Not to mention she doesn't knock Christ so much as she does "Christians".
She called him a wine-guzzling vagrant! Burn the witch!
First they came for the wine-guzzling vagrants, so we burned the witches…
Wingnut people think that "socialist" is always an insult. This is because they are dumb.
The comments a priceless. Jesus was never a socialist, because he never advocated FICA tax withholding on income. Jesus said we should only have private charities, and taught that the poor will always be with us, because they're lazy.
It's remarkable. The saddest thing about the story is the kid actually being frustrated with the book and not just the parents – so you know the crazy has sat long and well and our children isn't learning. Everything about middle class poverty bounces off of him and all he can get is someone is questioning the guys who tout his lord.
"Mom, this book is making me think and question my assumptions. Make it stop!"
"Don't worry, dear. We can home school you with a curriculum specifically chosen to teach you how your pre-conceived notions are all correct and don't need questioning, ever. You get an A+ in right-thinking with the like-minded!"
Indeed the book is superb. It is actually quite funny and gives a sweet, forgiving look at some of the troubled people she encounters. The follow up ("Bait and Switch") is good also but even gloomier because it basically describes the first ten years of my life after graduation.
Wingnuts should be made to read it like West Point students are made to read "Howl".
Bait and Switch will only be banned when it's a crime to be realistic AND depressing. So any day now.
"Christ crucified rules"
The walrus is Paul.
Um, Ben, the book controversy was in New Hampshire, not Texas. Still, wingnutty is as wingnutty does, regardless of locale.
oh, good, I read Texas and then read the article and saw New Hampshire- I thought it was my fever and headache but thank gooodness, it was just a wonketty error.
I never thought of throwing down a book I was assigned to read in school and telling my mommy that I wouldn't finish reading it because it offended my delicate sensibilities.
Isn't it the point to read things outside your comfort zone and thereby learn how to "think" and formulate arguements when getting educated?
That's socialism! Or maybe muslinism! I don't know which one but I'm against it.
I tried that once, and was told by my mother that I not only to suck it up and finish it, but that I also had to write her a book report. The offending tome? Gone With the Wind.
Oh Lordy. I love GWTW the book (not so much the movie) but I can't even try to defend the insane racial and gender stuff going on in that book.
I hope your essay was on the fact that Rhett and Scarlett are perfect for each other because they are both giant assholes.
It made me think, and I don't like it! I'll just be home-schooled and learn all about how my pre-existing beliefs are 100% correct.
You seem to have confused "gettin' an education" with actual inquiry and self-discovery. The former is the process of obtaining whatever piece of paper you need to undertake some task/career path. The latter is entierly optional in the American system and actively discouraged at a high number of institutions of "higher learning."
When I started college in '03 (at a school known for being liberal, though I think it's reputation is not so accurate these days), we were assigned to read that book as incoming freshmen and then meet in small groups in our dorms the first week to discuss it.
So many kids threw hissy fits and got their parents to call the school that the school backed down and made it optional. This summer freshmen reading program (that they'd been doing for decades) was canceled shortly after, I believe. And most of the people who objected didn't like it because they disagreed – because "my daddy got himself where he is today with no help from anyone so Ehrenreich is wrong."
None of that thinking shit going on, the parents won't stand for it.
When we saw the words "book controversy" our brain simply assumed Texas because we are terribly prejudiced against those illiterate rednecks. Your Wonkette regrets the error.
If it was Texas, the school would have capitulated, banned the book and fired the teacher who assigned it.
As long as we're in a proofreading mood, that is a seriously whack spelling of 'glorious' in the headline. I don't think the Canadians even spell it that way.
I was going to ask my Canadian fiance if that is how they spell it up there.
New Hampshire is the Texas of New England, anyway. So, same difference, I guess.
Praise
JeebusGreenspan, at last a movie version of Atlas Shrugged! Will it be 12 hours long, with — let's see — Jimmy Smits playing John Galt and reading the entire text of his speech? Cuz if they leave out so much as one word the authentickity of the whole thing will be called into question.Seriously, wouldn't The Fountainhead, bad as it is, make a better movie? Bristol could play Dominique.
Anthem made for a mediocre rock album – try to envision Rush making a six disc concept album of Atlas Shrugged
I'm seeing it more as a Broadway musical.
A really, really shitty Broadway musical.
It might go over well if it was done with an Andrew Lloyd Weber book and a lot of sequins. "I love you Dagny/I loooove you/ the purest love/ a love to convert electrical energy into kinetic energy…"
OK, needs some work
They did make The Fountainhead into a movie in the 1940s. Gary Cooper plays Howard Rourk, and Ayn Rand wrote the screenplay. I gave it two middle fingers up.
Patrician Neal, who was pretty hot in those days – or in “A Face in the Crowd,” a terrific movie – plays Dominique, I see, and from the look of the poster http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041386/, the writers understood what the quintessential moment of the story was: she has her first-ever orgasm when Roark/Cooper rapes her. Obviously a feminist treatise.
Here's a fun fact. Gary Cooper, who was a Republican and married at the time, had an affair with Patricia Neal during filming. When Patricia ended up preggers, he forced her to have an abortion.
Now THAT's Libertarian!
Smits is too nonwhite for the Libertatians to accept him.
The Fountainhead will almost without a doubt remain the better movie, given that Rand's original was turned inside out – to incredibly campy, hilarious effect – by the communist director of the film, King Vidor. One could only wish that someone like Philip Kaufman (or even better, John Waters) would have been chosen to do the same to "Atlas Shrugged," which is just begging for it.
Paul Verhoeven would be perfect, since he pulled a similar trick with Starship Troopers.
I have never been able to bring myself to read Ayn Rand. After I learned who she was and what she thought, I thought why read something that will just piss me off. I am thinking I may have to break down and read at least Atlas Shrugged.
I got around that by reading the Cliff's Notes. The detached, clinical synopsis and analysis made it rather painless. It was sort of the difference between reading a medical text on horrible necrotizing infections, versus having to actually observe (and smell) a horrible necrotizing infection yourself.
Spare yourself Atlas Shrugged. At least The Fountainhead has sexy babes and manly architects with their shirts off, and a is about a thousand pages shorter.
Hey Jerks! Texas has many problems, but that news story isn't one of them. "New Hampshire" is right in the freaking headline!! Get with the program.
There's no way that book would ever get that far into a Texas school.
Nor would Dick and Jane unless Dick was rewritten to include a gun rack on the back of his trike.
Nice cut n' paste job, there Resistenet. Nothing says crazy, hyperbolic, unbalanced screed like a liberal smattering of gratuitous enjambment.
Hard to make it past this subhead:
"Thanks to Dick Morris for bringing this to our attention…"
I think the ladies don't know you don't have to hit "Return" when you run out of room at the end of the computer screen.
'Wine-Guzzling Vagrant and Socialist'
Will there be any bartenders up there in Heaven?
Will the pubs never close, will the glass never drain
No more D.T.'s and no shakes
And no horrors
Very next morning you feel right as rain
God loves a drunk, for ever and ever, amen
"Will they have Mogen David in heaven?
Dear Lord, we'd all like to know.
Will they have Mogen David in heaven?
If they don't who the hell wants to go?"
–Larry Gatlin
I may even want to go if I can keep my attitude adjusted without turning my liver into a lump of dusty coal.
Mustache wrangler and Otter look-alike John Bolton says Obama is worse than Wilileaks? When did Barry get busted for finger-banging a couple of Danish Tarts (Redundant?). Does Michelle know about this? Is Bolton just jealous? Why am I asking you?
The otter visual is a good one – although he's the evil otter, obviously.
Maybe texting Scarlett Johannson is unprotected "thumb sex" in Bolton's world? I mean, I don't think Obama wears finger condoms when he uses his Blackberry, and there is that whole jungle fever angle to consider.
Big time!
I'm definitely considering that whole jungle fever angle right now. Mmm…..yes….mmmm…..nap time!
Was Bolton the evil otter in Florida that chased around and bit the kid trying to video him. Maybe someone from the Bush administration will wind up where the belong at the vet for the needle.
Rabies could explain Bolton's bizarre behavior, fer sure.
New Hampshire had been making such progress in not being New England's retarded little brother. Now this.
There's always Maine.
If less taxes = more revenue, let's reduce taxes to zero and wait for infinity revenue to start rolling in!
I want to add my own.
Drinking booze together saves relationships.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-alcohol-roman…
I've read the whole damn Bible — every incestuous, child-murdering, rape-victim-stoning, fratricidal, racist, xenophobic, begat-ridden, ignorance-endorsing, fatalistic, myopic, hedonistic, misbegotten, drivel-soaked, hypocrisy-loving, self-contradictory, mythological, reason-deprived, glitter-worshipping, genocidal, misogynistic fucking page — several times. So the poow widdle Chwistians who can't abide seeing anybody cwiticize the current crop of scribes and Pharisees can go smoke a pole.
That, my friend, is an IMPRESSIVE array of adjectives.
You forgot homophobic. How could you forget homophobic?
Crap. Don't worry though, I'll include it when I inscribe it on Stone Mountain.
Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Him by His biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same Being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples. Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus.
T. Jefferson
Needs more thumbs up.
You and Mark Twain, dude.
"[the bible] is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
But he really got going in The Mysterious Stranger, eh?
That was way cool — Letters from Earth is even more ranty though — even shocking in its spitting disgust for religion. Now I'm gonna have to go dig it up and read it again.
I can see you've really read it.
The Good Book.
I had to go to the Ayn Rand article. It's amazing how few comments there are. One person was aghast (!) at the parallels between these modern times and Ayn's 'masterpiece".
What might those be, I wonder? Because I certainly can't see any.
The same parallels they see when reading Jesus's bestseller the Bible, do you really think they have read more than a smattering of choice paragraphs in either?
"People want me to do my job. I don't wanna 'cuz I'm special."
Wait, that might be Fountainhead. Which is the one where the
Mary Sueprotagonist blows up the apartment complex he built because someone was egregious enough to not like his design?What's really funny is that Rand was an atheist and hated Christianity. Brinklely hated her, but today's so called conservatives probably don't know who he is.
And hilariously enough, the quoted passage isn't actually un-Christian, it's just anti-the modern day Pharisees that call themselves Christians. Erenrich (who I certainly agree is obnoxious on other accounts) was excoriating the church for pretending the social justice messages that fill out the entire New Testament just don't exist, because it's inconvenient. "Wine-guzzling" might have been a bit inapt, but it's hardly a stretch to go from "It's easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven" to socialism, y'know.
I dunno, must've struck a nerve or something.
The teacher who added this book to his or her curriculum clearly had unrealistic expectations for her students. Also, I'm betting this kid was just looking for a reason not to read this book, knew his parents mind set and knew this strategy would work. Well done, boy.
Twitter will replace marriage as the most sacred institution in America
And do you take this twat to be your lawfully wedded husband? I thought not.
You just need to accessorize…
I dunno about twitter, but these could revolutionize cold-weather finger-banging.
That was my first thought upon seeing them. Or rolling blunts, but I don't know anything about rolling blunts.
The actor playing John Galt was on One Tree Hill. Was the dude who played Dean on Gilmore Girls not available?
Dang. I was really hoping Kirk Cameron would be available for the role.
"But finally he came home one day and said ‘I'm not reading this book, I'm done reading this book, I am not reading any more of this book,' and he slammed it down and said, ‘This is junk!'"
It's a miracle, we actually have a young teabagger; and he's got the petty petulant whining down pat.
Funny, that tactic didn't work at all when I tried it with "Johnny Tremain" in 6th grade.
I should have tried that with Our Town; I was extremely offended by how boring that was.
More high fructose and fries for the kid and pretty soon he will be another illiterate asshole riding his rascal around Washington.
They pulled their kids out because they didn't want them to realize that Mommy and Daddy were pulling in something less than $25K annually – but yet little junior still had his PS3 and Wii. Also – they didn't want the poor little kids to understand that this is their future working for their corporate overlords.
I grew up in that town and believe me, they ain't hurting. THEY ARE THE OVERLORDS.
Awesome, my town makes a Wonkette article.
Ah, Bedford. Home to "Gays can't make a PB&J sandwich" John Cebrowski, Keith Murphy, King Tut lookalike (the mummy, not the mask) Moe Villeneuve and a cast of thousands of entitled upper-middle-class egotists who judge people's worth not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their wallets. I gather your new senator Ray White is pretty much a whackjob, too.
But hey, dinner at the BVI kicks ass. Or so I hear, I don't fart Krugerrands.
I'm fairly certain this town is 100% assholes, myself included. Sadly, I appear to be a very different form of asshole utterly incompatible with the vast majority.
Hey, at least Nancy "wriggling in excrement" Elliot wasn't ours. Boy am I setting a low bar right there…
We've still got Sarah Silverman, right? RIGHT?! Anything?
Uhgg… grew up there and finally escaped two years ago… to Manchester.
Merry Wine Guzzling Vagrantmas, everybody!
Three parts?! I guess the kajillion-page monologue requires its own 2-hour flick.
/seriously, Harry Potter overstepped its bounds breaking up book 7.
A Wholly (unpleasant) Trilogy. It is amazing that these idiots still lap up Ayn's droppings like manna from above: If there is one thing that has been designed into the system, hell the whole of society it is this: Individuals are dispensible. Most of the assholes reading this drivel see themselves as Galt railing against a society leaching away their just rewards for being special. They are not special, even people who know them do not consider them special (although, if they are big enough assholes, they may not get told so to their faces). The idea that if the wealthy suddenly decided to go on strike, that civilization would go on strike is an amusing fairytale. Some other schmuck would walk into Galt's office and pick up the pen and move on.
From the Union-Leader (NH's own horrifyingly bad newsrag), the father of the kid who refused to read Nickle and Dimed said this:
"Nobody gets out of the hole in this book," Taylor said. "Really, is that the message we want to teach children in Bedford, who of all Americans ought to be capitalists, and produce the wealth that other people enjoy?"
I'm just wondering if anyone can help me understand what the hell this means. I'm confused on at least 2 points:
1. I live very close to Bedford, and I'm not sure what about the children in Bedford makes this man think they have more of a – searching for the correct word here – right(?) or responsibility(?) to be capitalist than any other Americans.
2. Why would you want your kids to produce wealth for other people to enjoy? That sounds like socialism, sharing with other people the wealth that you yourself created. Shouldn't your kids try to produce wealth that only they can enjoy?
Any help with these mysteries would be greatly appreciated.
Those NH parents are so dedicated to protecting their kids. Reading that liberal swill, meeting with the principal, talking to Fox News. They'll do anything to make that school the best it can be. Well, except pay higher taxes to fix the building.
But eventually this 16 year old bubble boy will burst out and take a gander at the intertubes. What a day that will be!
"just begging for a lynching, really"
OK, I'm still laughing about that one. Thanks!
And I foresee so-o-o-o-o many occasions in the future when I can trot it out and enjoy it all over again.
Now, back to re-reading Griftopia…
Those parents probably listen to the SteveDahlShow podcast…it's right in the show jingle..reading is for losers, everybody knows…
Since government revenues increase when taxes decrease, we just need to cut the tax rates to zero and our governments will have all the money they need.
Am I right or am I right?
Then we can all work on losing weight by eating more…
"Then we can all work on losing weight by eating more…"
I've got my best man on it.
ResistNet: "Coburn, Crapo, and Gregg are laboring under the grand illusion that tax increases can reduce the deficit."
Deficits are bad unless Mitch McConnell says they are good.
I hope that's clear for everyone.
They're suffering from a Grand Illusion? Then don't be fooled by the radio, the TV or the magazines; they show you photographs of how your life should be, but they're just someone else's fantasy.
This family was equally furious when their son had to read "Huckleberry Finn" because of the constant use of the n-word and the tacit acceptance of slavery and the portrayal of a child who had to deal with an alcoholic father. Right?
12 steps, 12 disciples. Symmetry, baby.
Don't Read or Die!
These people live in myth world, where the Jebus myth has been blended with the America-as-the-land-of-freedom-and-equal-opportunity myth. It doesn't matter that their myth is completely detached from both the Bible and American history — since it is sacred, any facts that go against it are rejected as blasphemy.
Live free, or die trying is what I always say. And 50 Cent. Also.
Jordan Henderson is a complete pussy. He must get his ass kicked at least twice a week.
"And if this happens again in college, well you just trash the teacher who hurt your feelings in evaluations and make a stink and they'll never get tenure, darling."
Isn't that the truth. Student evaluation of teachers turns the job into who gives the easiest A and is the most entertaining. When you live this reality it is apparent who is and who isn't teaching critical thinking.
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