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Friday, March 2, 2012

Schools Matter: The Gates Solution to Political Deadlock: More Technocrats in Charge from ALEC

Schools Matter: The Gates Solution to Political Deadlock: More Technocrats in Charge from ALEC:

The Gates Solution to Political Deadlock: More Technocrats in Charge from ALEC

At the heart of this generation's retread argument for post-partisanship in all things political, there is another, though more dangerous, version of rule by the experts lurking there. Society engineered by scientific managers or "experts" was tried a hundred years ago, but since Bill Gates doesn't read history, apparently we must go down that dollar-strewn road again, this time with Gates playing Andrew Carnegie and Barack Obama playing Woodrow Wilson. We may hope that the first half of this century turns out better than that the first half of the last, when our determination to create a smooth running and perfectible industrial society got rolling with eugenics and then culminated with the Holocaust.

Today the New York Times offered Gates a 6+ minute free infomercial hosted by America's most prominent Readers Digest version of an intellectual, Tom Friedman. It's well worth viewing, for in it we see the enabler role of the New York Times in foisting a patronizing, officious, and saccharine version of political reality, and we see