December 08, 2004
The Party Of "Small Government" Strikes Again
In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval.
The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States.
The ban is being fought on anti-censorship grounds, as it should. But it's also a marked slap at literacy and knowledge. One would think that in a country whose citizens consistently rank near the bottom in such measures, the Feds would consider anathema the placing of restrictions on learning.
In a very recent "news cycle", for example, we learned that:
Fifteen-year-olds in the United States don't have the math skills to match up to peers in many other industrialized nations, test scores released yesterday show.
Ah well, as long as we've got televangelists to interpret the fucking Bible for us, what else do we really need to know?
Posted by Eddie Tews at December 8, 2004 04:28 PM
Comments
niggers are americas trash 87% of crime,,,niggers 90% welfaRE BECAUSE SOME LAZE JIGGABOO WANT WORK!!! -- Posted by: fred flintstone on December 11, 2004 07:09 AM
I guess that response says it all. -- Posted by: me on December 11, 2004 08:03 AM