11 Things You Won't Learn In School

 

Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this! To anyone with kids of any age, here's some advice.

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

1. Life is not fair - get used to it!
   
2. The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
   
3. You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
   
4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
   
5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity.  Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
   
6. If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
   
7. Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
   
8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
   
9. Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
   
10. Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
    
11. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
    If you agree, pass it on.

If you can read this - Thank a teacher!

If you are reading it in English -

Thank a soldier!

Jeff Jarvis (Buzz Machine) Free Speech Segment

The war is over. No, not that war. I mean the war between mainstream media and bloggers.
It never really was a fight – because we are on the same side. We all want the truth:
When bloggers called Dan Rather on errors in 2004, he dismissed them as partisan operatives. But when bloggers recently exposed faked photos from Beirut, Reuters thanked them.
So we are making progress.

Together, professional and amateur journalists can gather and share more news than ever. Bloggers just forced two senators to admit they were secretly blocking a reform bill. And bloggers goaded Dell and Apple into recalling burning batteries. Dell, which once ignored bloggers, now blogs itself.

See, it doesn’t hurt. Bloggers are just people talking. We are your viewers, your voters, your customers, your neighbors.

Now that we, the people, are armed with our own printing presses, old media have nothing to fear and everything to gain – so long as they’re wise enough to trust us.

Trust us to be smart; if you can’t, then what’s the point of democracy?

Listen to us and what we truly care about – and that’s not endless Jon Benet.

And let us share your best reporting: The networks should be fighting to get the most stories watched on YouTube – for those are the stories that are part of our conversation….

Just because newspapers and networks are shrinking, that doesn’t mean journalism must whither. No, we have to expand the definition of news and change the role of the journalist from oracle on the mountaintop to member of our community.

We’re in this together.

O'Reilly's Crystal Ball

Donald Rumsfeld Out After the Votes Are Counted

Thursday , November 09, 2006

By Bill O'Reilly

The secretary of defense was the latest casualty of the Iraq war, which gravely wounded the Republican Party in Tuesday's vote. Let's take a look at it.

Talking Points believes most Americans revere the U.S. military. Most of us feel terrible when Americans are killed or wounded on the battlefield, but the Iraq situation isn't about ideology. Most Americans don't want to cut and run. They understand that would put America in great jeopardy.

But after three and a half years, Americans are still dying every day and many voters believe there's no strategy for victory in Iraq. Thus, Rumsfeld's resignation on Wednesday.

Of course, that came too late to help the Republicans, who find themselves in the minority on Capitol Hill. If visible progress had been made in Iraq, that never would have happened.

So that's where we are. And every poll showed that Americans wanted change in Iraq and that's why the Democrats won.

Now the unintended consequence of the power shift in D.C. is that some Democrats will try to impose a secular-progressive agenda on the country.

First, there will be an attempt to raise taxes — Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel will lead that.

Second, new speaker, Nancy Pelosi, will encourage investigations of the Bush administration, seeking to create a scandal which would help the Democrat presidential nominee in 2008.

But that could backfire on the Democrats as most Americans do not want Mr. Bush attacked. They want to see if the Democrats can do better. They do not want to see their government ripped apart in a time of war.

There is a struggle within the Democratic Party itself. Far-left zealots like Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean are stacked up against moderates like Joseph Lieberman and — dare I say it — Hillary Clinton. Senator Clinton knows she can't win the presidency, which she desperately wants, by throwing in with the far left.

So here's what's going to happen in the next few years: President Bush will not get much done. He will veto any attempt to change his agenda, and Congress will not be able to override those vetoes. So there will be a stalemate and a chess game about the 2008 presidential votes.

Right now, the Democrats are in a good position. The country is giving them a chance to improve Iraq and the basic tone of politics in America. But if the Democrats try to destroy Mr. Bush or impose San Francisco values, the country will turn against them. There's no question in my mind.

And that's the Memo.