Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for January 27, 2017

“Can’t you get her interested in recreational drugs or booze?”

Better that approach than the one my old school’s parents took. (telling their kids to beat on anyone who did better than them)

Just look at what happens when you dumb down a country.

It is difficult to compare the achievements of US schools with others because our systems are so different. When you compare US cream of the crop schools we do very well. In other countries, they do separate the cream of the crop much more often and efficiently than we do. Read Diane Ravitch’s books about this for more information. It is impossible to address fully in a comment.

One of the commenters yesterday suggested that GT was guilty of ‘race identity politics back in 1988.’ It seems that calling out racism makes one guilty of race identity politics. The right has codes for these things in order to justify a nasty thing they wish to ignore, such as racism.

Take a look at the nose on Kim’s dad. Who does that look like? I always wondered what Kim saw in Mike. Perhaps now we know.

In the first ever Spanish-language Presidential debate held on September 9, 2007, remarks by candidates were translated into Spanish. The ground rules for the debate were that candidates had to answer in English EVEN THOUGH TWO OF THEM SPOKE FLUENT SPANISH. The stated reason was “to make sure that no candidate had an advantage in appealing to the Spanish-speaking audience.”

Yes folks, having a relevant skill was literally labeled “unfair.”

For the benefit of people too lazy to cut and paste into Google, here’s a link: https://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/english-only-at-spanish-debate/

If you speak several languages, you’re called a polyglot.

If you speak three languages, you’re trilingual.

If you speak two languages, you are bilingual.

If you speak one language ( poorly ) you are an American !

Still true today. Most schools are more interested in sports than in intelligence. Meanwhile, in India, the local papers all over the country sing praises of every single person who gets into college

Why we will never have a world language:

— Polish has no vowels

— Hawaiian has no consonants

— English has no sense

:-)

How dumbed down is USA becoming? In a few new buildings on my campus – a state university – there are signs which say “STAIRS TO OTHER FLOORS”.

Snowflake is a term being used by trumpsters to disparage liberals because there was a popular concept at one time not long ago that we should think of each individual (especially youth) as unique as a snowflake. So now, this whole idea is thought to be a terrible idea, just because someone (humanist) was trying to connect (shudder) with other human beings and to value them for their uniqueness. Compassion is considered a thing of weakness in the era of trump.