Saturday, July 31, 2010

Howard Zinn Was A Communist

Prior to now I've mentioned Howard Zinn only three times on this blog, and in none of those posts was I favorably inclined towards him. With good reason, too--it turns out Zinn was a communist.

And perennial useful idiot Matt Damon will probably still make a movie of Zinn's book.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Matt Damon is rich!

Darren said...

Ironic, no?

allen (in Michigan) said...

But it's an irony only conservatives can appreciate. Lefties have their sense of irony surgically removed. It's part of the initiation ritual.

Malcolm Kirkpatrick said...

I took __A People's History...__ from the bookstore shelf and opened it at random. I read that the US provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor by placing an embargo on shipments of strategic material to Japan after the invasion of Manchuria. Interested, I turned to Zinn's treatment of the US response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Zinn criticizes the US for NOT placing an embargo on trade with Italy. I returned the book to the shelf and have not read anything more of Zinn.

Matt Damon gets beaucoup credit for the put-down of the preppie in the bar in Good Will Hunting. Otherwise, the movie is an infantile power fantasy.

Hey teach, nice to meet a fellow Math teacher.

Here's a worksheet generator for the equation of the line.

Exercise in the Euclidean algorithm: Find t such that 187^t gives a remainder of 12 when divided by 41 and a remainder of 23 when divided by 47.
187 is any generic positive integer. 12 and 23 are generic remainders and 41 and 47 are generic primes. You get huge answers like (I'm making this up) t= 280+475n for all n in Z+.

Turns out this is something a normally bright 8th grader can learn in three lessons and do in 1/2 hour, without calculator, if the primes are reasonable (53 or less).