Baxil (baxil) wrote,
Baxil
baxil

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19 out of 20.

I happened across a geography literacy quiz in today's web browsing.

These were not particularly difficult questions; one of them (and, no, not the one I missed ;)) was "Find the United States on a world map." And yet a score of 19 out of 20 put me in approximately the top 10 percent of Americans in my age bracket.

I'm not at all patting myself on the back for being a trivia geek -- the sort of questions they asked should be basic knowledge. For instance, less than 15 percent of Americans aged 18-24 could find Iraq on a map, but all 100 percent of them were eligible to vote for the president who wants to invade it.

Speaking tangentially of which, here's your quote for the day:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.
"The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."

      -- Alexander Tyler

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