The number one single in the U.K. todayyyyyyy in 19677777777 …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCYB64Ka8OE
Today in 1968, the Beatles recorded Eric Clapton’s guitar part for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” making him the first non-Beatle on a Beatle record:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3RYvO2X0Oo
The number one song in the U.S. today in 1975:
7The Wall Street Journal weighs in on U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R–Janesville) and his daring to repeat what 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama said:
How dare he so much as mention the Wisconsin assembly plant that President Obama promised to keep open but didn’t?
The claim is that there was nothing the White House could do, because the General Motors facility in Mr. Ryan’s hometown of Janesville was already starting to idle production and slated for closure when Mr. Obama took office. Therefore the empty production lines are George W. Bush’s fault, like everything else in the last four years.
But so what? Mr. Ryan made the factual statement that “we were about to lose a major factory” (our emphasis). Basic comprehension of human language didn’t deter Obama campaign functionary Stephanie Cutter from claiming on MSNBC Thursday that “There’s no delicate way to put this, but he lied. He blatantly lied—and brazenly.”
Coming from a specialist in the form, perhaps that was meant as a compliment, but then again all this is an enormous exercise in missing the point. Mr. Ryan wasn’t saying Mr. Obama should have saved this particular plant, as if it were akin to the sea levels that he promised to command in his inaugural address. Mr. Ryan was mocking the President who promised on the record and apparently believed he could save the plant.
At a campaign event at the Janesville factory in 2008 on “a clean energy economy,” Mr. Obama praised its workers for “how many hybrids and fuel-efficient vehicles you’re churning out.” He added: “And I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to retool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years.”
In October of the same year, when Mr. Obama paid another visit, he promised that “As president, I will lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville so we can build the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow and create good-paying jobs in Wisconsin and all across America.”
In other words, this is another familiar Obama adventure in industrial policy: The government will tell auto makers what kind of cars they should manufacture, even if they’re not the kind of cars consumers want to buy. For the record, all that talk of “retooling” is because the Janesville plant used to make the trucks and SUVs that are being driven from the market in part by $4 gasoline and rising fuel-efficiency standards.
Several additional points come to mind. The aforementioned trucks and SUVs were some of GM’s actually profitable products. GM has been unable to make profitable small cars for decades, whether they tried to build them itself (does the Chevrolet Citation ring a bell?) or import them from one of its subsidiaries (anything with an “Isuzu” or “Geo” label on it), and even the late joint venture with Toyota that produced the last Nova. The federal government has been spending more than a decade legislating popular cars out of existence (for instance, the large station wagon), and there is no question the Obama administration is doing the same thing right now with its 54.5-mpg standard, which will kill everything smaller than a Chevy Spark, including pickup trucks and SUVs.
What happened to GM’s Janesville plant demonstrates that Wisconsin got no benefit at all from the GM and Chrysler bailouts. To assert that GM or Chrysler would have gone out of business without the bailout ignores the fact that companies have reorganized under federal bankruptcy laws for decades (for instance, seemingly every major airline) and stayed in business. To say that not bailing out GM or Chrysler would have hurt auto industry suppliers (for instance, Johnson Controls) ignores the fact that the American auto industry is far bigger than GM or Chrysler, including not just Ford but six Japanese manufacturers, three German manufacturers, and South Korea’s Hyundai.
The bailout was primarily for the benefit of the United Auto Workers, certainly not for GM’s bondholders or its white-collar employees. (Interesting additional fact: None of the Japanese, German or Korean carmakers have UAW-member workers in this country.) Of course, none of the Janesville UAW workers benefited either.
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To participate, click here.
The number one song in Britain today in 1954 was the singer’s only number one hit, making her Britain’s first American one-hit wonder:
The number one song in the U.S. today in 1964:
Today in 1967, the Beatles probably felt like they were the walrus (goo goo ga joob) after needing 16 takes to get this right:
The Democratic National Convention begins today. (You’re welcome for the warning.)
The Republican National Convention one week ago was cut to three days because of Hurricane Isaac. The DNC was scheduled for just three days (which, in both cases, is three days too many) because unions cut back their DNC contributions because the DNC chose North Carolina, a right-to-work state, for the convention.
The Washington Post reports the Democrats’ weak rebuttal to “You didn’t build that”:
On Sunday, senior Obama advisers suggested that they will not address the anti-business allegations directly but will instead try to turn the tables on their GOP rivals by accusing them of being dishonest about what Obama meant. David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser, said in an interview Sunday on ABC News that Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign is engaged in a broader pattern of dishonesty and is “built on a tripod of lies.” Plouffe cited accusations that Obama has gutted the work requirement for welfare and “raided” Medicare to pay for the nation’s new health-care law as other examples of untruths coming from the GOP.
The Obama team thinks that it has effectively dealt with the “build that” attacks and that the issue is overblown — the “drill, baby, drill” of 2012, a rallying cry for the right but ultimately one with limited appeal in the broader electorate.
Nevertheless, there are signs that they see a vulnerability. Obama has not repeated the words that sparked the controversy, and he has toned down the broader argument — that government help is essential to business success — in the six weeks since he ad-libbed the line near the end of a long campaign swing. His speeches have been shorter, with fewer references to wealthy Americans. He is more cautious about portraying the choice that he quite forcefully described that night between Romney’s worldview and his own.
Adviser David Axelrod, traveling with the president in Colorado on Sunday, said the public will come away from the convention “with a very clear sense” of Obama’s values, including his faith in private enterprise.
(I’ll pause here while you recover from those last five words.)
Jerry Bader points out how well the “build that” attacks are working:
“You didn’t build that” has been anything but an “empty hole” for Republicans. It has resonated with small business people, and many of those who work for them, all over the country. What hasn’t stuck is the defense by “fact-checkers” and the liberals they serve is the defense that the quote was taken out of context. Whether President Obama was referring to infrastructure and not small businesses when he said “you didn’t build that” is entirely irrelevant and the left knows that.
What is relevant is that Mr. Obama sees government more noteworthy in the growth of small business than the people who take the risks. It’s clear when you hear the entire quote that he is being dismissive of those who are proud of the businesses they built because they don’t give government enough credit. That’s why those four little words, as Kimberly Strassel called them in the Wall Street Journal, “you didn’t build that,” do strike fear into Axelrod and company.
I didn’t watch the Sunday morning talk shows, but apparently they didn’t go so well for the Democrats, as Bader further reports:
Team Obama now says Americans ARE better off than they were four years ago.David Axelrod whiffed on this, badly, on the Sunday Morning talk shows where he was unwilling to directly answer the question as to whether Americans are better off now than they were four years ago.
ABC’s Jake Tapper Reports that the Obama campaign has decided to fix that debacle by taking a do over. If Republicans are smart, they can turn this about face to their advantage. After seeing how devastating yesterday’s barrage of evasion was they’ve now decided to simply change their answer. This is a target rich envrionment for Team Romney to exploit. Just ignore the second round of responses and use the video from the first, because that was when they caught not knowing what to say.
Well, let’s see. Unemployment is higher than it was four years ago. Personal incomes are lower than they were four years ago. Despite the weak economy, gas prices are double what they were four years ago. Those are the answers to this question:
Today is the first day of classes in almost every Wisconsin school.
The website Education Outrage claims that the next 180 weekdays will be a waste of students’ time:
The other day an article written by me appeared in the Washington Post saying that algebra was useless and shouldn’t be taught in high school.
The hate mail that followed (written mostly by math teachers) was unbelievable. Mostly accusing me of being irrational and incapable of thought, and stating that math teaches people to think. This is pretty funny because if math is supposed to teach one to think, as they argue, they might have looked me up and discovered that not only was I a math major in college, but I was also a professor of computer science.
Of course, it is not only high school math I am against. I believe that every single subject taught in high school is a mistake. What I write here will infuriate teachers, but teachers are not my enemy. It isn’t their fault. They are cogs in a system over which they have no control. I believe there are many great teachers, and I believe that teaching and teachers are very important.
That having been said, in honor of the coming school year, I have decided to give students some ammunition. Here are most of the subjects you take in high school, listed one by one, with an explanation about why there is no point in taking them.
Chemistry: a complete waste of time. Why? Do you really need to know the elements of the periodic table? The formula for salt? How to balance a chemical equation? Ridiculous. Most of the people who take chemistry in college by the way intend to be doctors and while there is chemistry a doctor should know, they don’t typically teach it in college. …
English: this is a subject which has its good points. There is exactly one thing worth paying attention to in English. Not Dickens (unless of course you like Dickens.) Not Moby Dick, or Tennyson, or Hawthorne, or Shakespeare (unless of course, you like reading them.) What matters is learning how to write well. A good English teacher would give you daily writing assignments and help you get better at writing (and speaking). By writing assignments I don’t mean term papers. I mean writing about things you care about and learning to defend your arguments. Learning to enjoy reading matters as well but that would mean picking your own books to read and not having to write a book report. Lots of luck with that.
Biology. Now here is a subject worth knowing about. Too bad they won’t teach you anything that matters. Plant phyla? Amoebas? Cutting up frogs? It can’t get any sillier. What should you be learning? About your own health and your own body and how to take care of it. But they don’t teach that in biology. They teach some nonsense part of it in health class which is usually about the official reason that you shouldn’t have sex, whatever it happens to be this year.
Economics. This subject in high school is beyond silly. … What should you be learning? Your personal finances. How to balance your check book. How much rent and food costs. How you can earn a living. What various jobs pay and how to get them. A high school student needs economic theory like he needs another leg.
Physics. Another useless subject, that could in fact be quite important if the right things were taught. To hit or throw a baseball a knowledge of physics is required. Ooops. I meant the mind has to have an unconscious knowledge of physics. The formulas they teach in high school physics won’t help. To drive a car one needs knowledge of physics. Same deal. Nothing they teach in a physics course will help. But it really does matter that you understand why tires skid in the rain or how a brake works or why looking at your target will help you throw a ball more accurately. We use physics every day of our lives, but the formulas they make you memorize and facts about that the earth’s rotation, and names of planets? Not so much. The Wright Brothers did not have any theory of flight by the way. They simply tinkered with stuff until their plane flew. That is called engineering. Trying stuff to see what works. The physicists came later and explained it. It didn’t help the Wright Brothers. Why don’t they teach engineering in high school? Because engineering wasn’t a subject at Harvard in 1892. (You could look it up.)
French. Another complete waste of time. Why? Two reasons. The first is that you cannot possibly learn a language any way other than being immersed in it and talking and listening and talking. In school they teach grammar rules and nonsense to memorize so that they can give you a test. My daughter could not get an A in English when we lived in France despite the fact that she was the only kid in the class who spoke English. Why? Because she didn’t know the grammar rules of English. The same thing happened when we came back to the U.S. She could speak perfect French (a year in France will do that) but still couldn’t get an A in French. Grammar is like physics formulas, nice in theory but useless in practice, because the practical knowledge we use is not conscious knowledge.
The second reason is more subtle. School happens not to teach the French that people actually speak. No one says “comment allez-vous?” in France. They say “ca va?” But we don’t teach speaking so who cares how people actually speak? The same is true in the opposite direction as well. The French learn to say “good-bye” which no one actually says in English. We say “bye,” “see you,” and a million other things but rarely say goodbye (except maybe on the phone.)
If you want to learn a language, immersion is the only way. …
So, my advice. Know what matters to you. Learn that. Temporarily memorize nonsense if you want to graduate but have a proper perspective on it. Nothing you learn in high school will matter in your future life.
Well, that’s his opinion. (The comments beg to differ, you might say.) I don’t think I’ve used anything from geography (sophomore year) or trigonometry (junior year), and I didn’t take calculus. I did learn a lot from my high school journalism and political science classes. (Journalism is the opposite of math.) In retrospect, I would have taken Spanish instead of French in high school, but given what I retained from French, perhaps I wouldn’t have retained much in Spanish either.
Blogger Penelope Trunk believes education needs to be an individual endeavor, which is why she supports (and claims an increasing number of parents support) home schooling. Learning by doing isn’t really accomplished by sitting in front of a lecturing teacher, either, regardless of grade level. Of course, given the trillions of dollars over the past couple centuries that we have collectively spent on education, the idea of pulling the plug on public schools seems at least impractical.
This ignores the issue of what education is supposed to accomplish. Teach facts? Learn to think? Learn marketable skills? (Remember: What is taught in school is mandated by Congress and state legislatures.) The liberal arts touts itself as teaching how to learn, assuming that, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we don’t know what we don’t know, and for that matter we don’t know what we need to know in the unknowable future.
On that note, happy school year.
The number one song in the U.S. today in 1961:
Today in 1962, the Beatles recorded “Love Me Do,” taking 17 takes to do it right:
Three years later, the Beatles had the number one single …
… which referred to something The Who could have used, because on the same day the Who’s van was vandalized and $10,000 in musical equipment was stolen from them while they were buying … a guard dog:
The Foundation for Economic Education suggests Labor Day be replaced with …
(Before I resume: My philosophy is that if I have to work, it’s not a holiday, regardless of what the calendar says. I had to work Memorial Day and Independence Day, and I have to work today. Any business that’s open today isn’t celebrating Labor Day either.)
FEE says:
Any good economist will tell you that as complementary factors of production, labor and capital are not only indispensable but hugely dependent upon each other as well.
Capital without labor means machines with no operators, or financial resources without the manpower to invest in. Labor without capital looks like Haiti or North Korea: plenty of people working but doing it with sticks instead of bulldozers, or starting a small enterprise with pocket change instead of a bank loan.
Capital can refer to either the tools of production or the funds that finance them. There may be no place in the world where there’s a shortage of labor but every inch of the planet is short of capital. There is no worker who couldn’t become more productive and better himself and society in the process if he had a more powerful labor-saving machine or a little more venture funding behind him. It ought to be abundantly clear that the vast improvement in standards of living over the past century is not explained by physical labor (we actually do less of that), but rather to the application of capital. …
Perhaps subconsciously, Americans do understand to some extent that those who invest and deploy capital are important. After all, most people would surely have an easier time naming the “top ten capitalists” in our history than the “top ten workers.” We take pride in the kids in our neighborhoods when they put up a sidewalk lemonade stand. President Obama continues to be roundly excoriated for his demeaning remark, “You didn’t build that; somebody else made that happen.” …
Like most Americans, I’ve traditionally celebrated labor on Labor Day weekend—not organized labor or compulsory labor unions, mind you, but the noble act of physical labor to produce the things we want and need. Nothing at all wrong about that!
But this year on Labor Day weekend, I’ll also be thinking about the remarkable achievements of inventors of labor-saving devices, the risk-taking venture capitalists who put their own money (not your tax money) on the line and the fact that nobody in America has to dig a ditch with a spoon or cut his lawn with a knife. Indeed, what could possibly be wrong about having a “Capital Day” in odd numbered years and a “Labor Day” in the even-numbered ones?
The number one song in the U.S. today in 1955 was written 102 years earlier:
The number one song in the U.S. today in 1966:
Today in 1970, Arthur Brown demonstrated what The Crazy World of Arthur Brown was like by getting arrested at the Palermo Pop ’70 Festival in Italy for stripping naked and setting fire to his helmet during …
Britain’s number one single today in 1972:
On the same day, the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival was held on Bull Island in the Wabash River between Illinois and Indiana. The festival attracted four times the projected number of fans, three fans drowned in the Wabash River, and the remaining crowd ended the festival by burning down the stage:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 