1776 - Thomas Paine published his pamphlet “Common Sense.”
1840 - The penny post, whereby mail was delivered at a standard charge rather than paid for by the recipient, began in Britain.
1861 - Florida seceded from the United States.
1863 - Prime Minister Gladstone opened the first section of the London Underground Railway system, from Paddington to Farringdon Street.
1870 - John D. Rockerfeller incorporated Standard Oil.
1901 - Oil was discovered at the Spindletop oil field near Beaumont, TX.
1911 - Major Jimmie Erickson took the first photograph from an airplane while flying over San Diego, CA.
1920 - The League of Nations ratified the Treaty of Versailles, officially ending World War I with Germany.
1920 - The League of Nations held its first meeting in Geneva.
1926 - Fritz Lang’s film “Metropolis” was first shown, in Berlin.
1928 - The Soviet Union ordered the exile of Leon Trotsky.
1943 - U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt sailed from Miami, FL, to Trinidad thus becoming the first American President to visit a foreign country during wartime.
1943 - The quiz show, “The Better Half,” was heard for the first time on Mutual Radio.
1946 - The first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly took place with 51 nations represented.
1949 - Vinyl records were introduced by RCA (45 rpm) and Columbia (33.3 rpm).
1950 - Ben Hogan appeared for the first time in a golf tournament since an auto accident a year earlier. He tied ‘Slammin’ Sammy Snead in the Los Angeles Open, however, Hogan lost in a playoff.
1951 - Donald Howard Rogers piloted the first passenger jet on a trip from Chicago to New York City.
1957 - Harold Macmillan became prime minister of Britain, following the resignation Anthony Eden.
1963 - The Chicago Cubs became the first baseball club to hire an athletic director. He was Robert Whitlow. (MLB)
1969 - The final issue of “The Saturday Evening Post” appeared after 147 years of publication.
1971 - “Masterpiece Theatre” premiered on PBS with host Alistair Cooke. The introduction drama series was “The First Churchills.”
1978 - The Soviet Union launched two cosmonauts aboard a Soyuz capsule for a redezvous with the Salyut VI space laboratory.
1984 - The United States and the Vatican established full diplomatic relations for the first time in more than a century.
1986 - The uncut version of Jerome Kern’s musical, “Showboat”, opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
1990 - Chinese Premier Li Peng ended martial law in Beijing after seven months. He said that crushing pro-democracy protests had saved China from “the abyss of misery.”
1990 - Time Inc. and Warner Communications Inc. completed a $14 billion merger. The new company, Time Warner, was the world’s largest entertainment company.
1994 - In Manassas, VA, Lorena Bobbitt went on trial. She had been charged with maliciously wounding her husband John. She was acquitted by reason of temporary insanity.
1997 - Shelby Lynne Barrackman was strangled to death by her grand-father when she licked the icing off of cupcakes. He was convicted of the crime on September 15, 1998.
2000 - It was announced that Time-Warner had agreed to buy America On-line (AOL). It was the largest-ever corporate merger priced at $162 billion. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved the deal on December 14, 2000.
2001 - American Airlines agreed to acquire most of Trans World Airlines (TWA) assets for about $500 million. The deal brought an end to the financially troubled TWA.
2002 - In France, the “Official Journal” reported that all women could get the morning-after conraception pill for free in pharmacies.
2003 - North Korea announced that it was withdrawing from the global nuclear arms control treaty and that it had no plans to develop nuclear weapons.
Archive for January 10th, 2007
Peace! Love! Freedom! Happiness! Stop the cycle of violence!
Members of a close-harmony group from Yale University are recovering after being ambushed and beaten up while on tour in California.
Members of the a cappella Baker’s Dozen were performing at a party in San Francisco at the new year when their rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” apparently sparked taunts and threats from fellow partygoers.
As the group left the house, they were attacked by dozens of assailants, suffering scrapes, black eyes and concussions, said Connecticut’s News Channel 8.
“Besides any bruising or scrapes to the face, the main injury I suffered was I broke my jaw in two places,” one of the singers, 18-year-old Sharyar Aziz, was quoted as saying.
Kumbayah, my lord! Kumbayah!
Kumbayah, my lord! Kumbayah!
Kumbayah, my lord! Kumbayah!
Oh lord! Kumbayah!
Someone’s beating fascists! Kumbayah!
Someone’s beating fascists! Kumbayah!
Someone’s beating fascists! Kumbayah!
Oh lord! Kumbayah!
Hat tip: California Conservative
UPDATE: HotAir has a video.
When I fired up Firefox today, that little screen popped up to say that there was an update for the Web Developer plug-in, so I clicked install. Everything was fine until a few minutes ago when I was in the middle of writing something to post, and my screen went nuts. Some Web Developer function was running, and all I got was style info about wherever I clicked. Escape didn’t work. So I shut down Firefox and lost what I was going to post.
It was pretty snarky anyway.
Exploding the myths of teachers unions (not to mention liberals).
“More money for education!”
At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars. By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then, it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002.
Since the early 1970s, when the federal government launched a standardized exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it has been possible to measure student outcomes in a reliable, objective way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled. So if more money produces better results in schools, we would expect to see significant improvements in test scores during this period. That didn’t happen. For twelfth-grade students, who represent the end product of the education system, NAEP scores in math, science, and reading have all remained flat over the past 30 years. And the high school graduation rate hasn’t budged. Increased spending did not yield more learning.
This big-picture evidence is strongly confirmed by academic research. Though you’d never know it from the tenor of most education debates, the vast majority of studies have found no sustained positive relationship between spending and classroom results.
“Teacher certification!”
In a review conducted for the Abell Foundation, researchers found that teachers holding a master’s in education did not produce higher student performance, and among new teachers, traditional certification made no difference in student performance. After examining every available study on the impact of teaching credentials on job performance–171 in total–Eric Hanushek found that only nine uncovered any significant positive relationship between credentials and student performance, five found a significant negative relationship between the two, and 157 showed no connection. Looking at Teach For America–a program that lets recent college graduates become teachers without obtaining traditional education credentials–three scholars at Mathematica Policy Research found that students taught by these non-credentialed instructors made significant gains in math in one year, and kept pace in reading. Current policy–which generally centers on teachers having education certificates–therefore appears to be seriously misguided.
“Private schools have more money!”
However: it simply isn’t true that public schools are penniless while private schools are wealthy. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the average private school charged $4,689 per student in tuition for the 1999Ã2000 school year. That same year, the average public school spent $8,032 per pupil. Among Catholic schools (which educate 49 percent of all private-school students), the average tuition was only $3,236. The vast majority of private-school students actually have less than half as much funding behind them as public-school students.
And speaking of private schools and myths, Joanne Jacobs says:
In Washington, DC, Catholic K-8 schools are celebrating a 10-year campaign to boost achievement by their students. Sixty percent of students in the consortium schools come from low-income families and nearly all are minorities. By the mid-’90s, test scores were well below the national average and half the teachers quit each year.
Yet the Washington Post reports:
Scores on the TerraNova standardized test at these schools jumped sharply over a five-year period, according to new figures from the consortium. Average reading scores rose more than 60 percent from 2000 to 2005, the data show, and math scores rose 78 percent. Meantime, the teacher turnover rate in the consortium schools dropped from 50 percent in 2000 to 10 percent in 2005.
So what did they do? They changed what they were doing and raised their standards, instead of sitting around whining about needing more money and smaller classes:
Consortium teachers say higher learning standards have raised teacher morale and made good teachers more willing to stay. The schools use the Saxon math program, which emphasizes basic skills and frequent review, and the Open Court reading program, which emphasizes phonics. The Indiana standards were adopted because they got high marks from the Fordham Institute, which promotes rating schools by test results, and because the Archdiocese of Indianapolis recommended them.
Stanton said students who use vouchers to move from public schools to consortium schools find a new attitude about learning. She told of one such student who was asked why she had not done her homework. The student replied casually: “Oh, okay, I’ll take a zero. That’s what they do at my old school.”
“We don’t do zeroes here,” the teacher explained, sitting her down to do the work.
Excellent.
I have this really annoying habit and I’ve just got to do something about it. I’ll see something on the blogosphere and think, “Hm, that’s interesting, maybe I’ll blog on that,” and then go somewhere else without bookmarking it. When I want to find it, I can’t.
Really annoying.
From Moonbattery:
In a move likely to tighten the Democratic Party’s death grip on New Jersey, the state may remove the politically incorrect word “idiot” from its constitution so that mental defectives won’t be barred from voting.
I’m not going to say it, I’m not going to say it, I’m not going to say it . . .
Pie. Specifically, homemade apple pie.
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