(1) NYPD bearing machine guns on the subway today post-Moscow. I say good for them — I could have only wished that the SLPD would send some machine gun-bearing cops on board St. Louis’s buses during certain times of the day — You know, around 3 PM, at about the time of day when many of the high schools let out, and when the buses are full of loud, obnoxious, threatening, potty-mouthed black teenagers.
(2) Let me translate this into English for you — Once there was a mall, now there will soon be a Wal-Mart SuperCenter.
(3) Race to the Bottom: California will pretty much give up on what was in all honesty a pipe dream to start algebra in the 8th grade. Even if they dumb down the standards, it will be even worse than it appears. The reason for that is because the material actually taught in the classroom is sometimes far less strenuous than the title of the course would suggest. They call it course title inflation, and it’s rampant in black and Hispanic schools.
(4) Martha Stewart wants her own network? Hell, she once almost had her own cable system. A once upon a time chatroom buddy of mine, who lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, noted (at the time he said this), that on his Shaw Cable system in Fredericton, that the daily hour-long syndicated Martha Stewart Dying was available on at least one channel in their lineup continuously every weekday from 5 AM to 2 PM, his time. Between 10 and 11 AM, three different channels had it. One reason why that unhappy circumstance came about was that Canadian cable carriers are required to carry a local affiliate of the American major broadcast networks on their system, but they don’t have to take them all or any from the American TV market nearest to them, in Fredericton’s case, the logical choice would have been Boston. His Shaw Cable, for some reason, took ABC from Detroit. The other three (NBC, CBS, Fox) all came from different cities. All four of them had Martha Stewart, and all at different times in the morning. Some of the regular American cable networks had it, one or two of the American superstations had it, and two or more Canadian cable channels had it.
(5) The man who would be the Schools Minister for a Tory government wants longer school days and Saturday school days for “poor” (read: minority) children. He cites the American KIPP academies as success stories. Before he gets too close to anything resembling real power, perhaps he should read this.
Beyond that, if they can’t learn during normal school hours for five days a week, what makes him think that they’ll learn any better for those extra hours and that one extra day a week?
(6) A British teachers’ union wants the average working man to be elevated to the status of a role model, to assuage the poor academic performance of many working-class white boys, and to counter the icon status of the celebutard soccer star. Fine, as far as it goes. Except there aren’t any average white working men left. All their jobs have been outsourced to China and India, too.
Otherwise, this is nothing more than “hurry up and pretend that we care about working class whites in an election cycle, so that the schmucks don’t run out and vote for the BNP/vote out Labour.”
