Reply #8: Katz on the learning disabled and on climate change

[IndianaGreen]

Obama Appoints Jonathan Katz, Homophobe Apologist and Critic of Learning Disabled Education to "Oil Spill Dream Team"

May 14, 2010, 10:51PM

Katz on the learning disabled:

``Learning disabilities'' are another example of denying reality, and a growing problem at American universities. Some children are brighter than others, and learn faster. Pre-college education is a universal right in America, and it is common sense to give the slower children extra help. But some ambitious parents of slow children are not satisfied with this. They wish to pretend their children can do everything brighter children can do. When their children get to college they demand to be excused from doing anything they do badly, and when this is not possible they demand softer standards and relaxed rules. With the help of cooperative psychologists who certify these supposed ``disabilities'' and a misinterpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, these students demand privileges such as double time on examinations. Grades earned this way are lies, but these lies maintain the fiction that the slow students are not really slow at all.

and Katz said in relation to a Paul Krugman article in the NYT:

....On the other hand, there is no evidence that warming will lead to droughts, more severe heat waves (warming occurs almost entirely when and where the weather is cold, for very good physics reasons), more severe storms, or any other bad effects....We can be sure of only two things: that a warmer climate will lengthen growing seasons in temperate and sub-arctic regions, and that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes plants grow faster. These are surely good for humanity. The rest is only guesswork, propelled by contagious hysteria of which this column is a prime example

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/n/o/noblecommentdecider/2010/05/obama-appoints-jonathan-katz-h.php?ref=mp