Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

He really is that stupid.

This really is a full service blog.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

The willow is too close to the house.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

T R E 4 5 O N

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Come on, man.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: Someone Misspelled A-*-*-H-O-L-E-S

Open Thread: Someone Misspelled A-*-*-H-O-L-E-S

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***********
Apart from the Usual Mob of Idiocrats, what’s on the agenda as we gaze longingly towards the weekend?

Reader Interactions

162Comments

  1. 1.

    c u n d gulag

    OY!

    Can YOU spell, ‘TEH SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPID!?!?!?!?!”

  3. 3.

    Hal

    Jay Carney is stepping down, or as noisemax puts it, quits. Cause scandal or something I’m sure.

    Also, those tweets are racist gold.

    Nothing more American than a good spelling bee.. Oh wait all the Caucasians are eliminated

    Shocking that neither of the Spelling bee champs have names that sound American #Sriram #Ansun

    And one of my faves, in the vain of I’m not racist, but:

    If you’re Indian I’m cool with you winning spelling bees but don’t mock my American heritage.

  4. 4.

    Alex S.

    White supremacists should take note: The spelling bee results are definite proof of the inferiority of the white race.

  6. 6.

    Gin & Tonic

    I didn’t see any of this crap when an American named Meb Keflezighi won the Boston Marathon. Don’t think his forefathers came over on the Mayflower either.

  7. 7.

    jl

    The ignorance and contempt in those tweets, it is immense.

    Well, at least some kraut, Italian or, God help us all, Irish kid din’t win it. (/snark, in case it is not clear).

    (Also, euphemisms were used in this comment, if we want to go old-school on the ignorant bigotry)

    [email protected]: Oops, missed the kraut, but I am Swiss-kraut, so I guess OK.

  10. 10.

    Patricia Kayden

    Asian Americans have been winning the Spelling Bee for years. I recall one year when a Jamaican girl won. So what? Why can’t people be happy for the winners regardless of their ethnicity? Sigh.

  12. 12.

    Samuel Knight

    Next years’ spelling bee should emulate our neighbours and go with British spellings just to be more fun.

    Also great link to the Trayvon story. That’s helping another human being.

    Making fun of hard-working kids who look different isn’t.

  13. 13.

    Amir Khalid

    @Patricia Kayden:
    Remember, you’re asking this about the people who know, deep in their hearts, that they’re more American than those other Americans.

  15. 15.

    cleek

    time to get out there and figure out why all my pepper and tomato plants’ leaves are turning light yellow.

  17. 17.

    Rosalita

    yabba-dabba-doo!

    My agenda is to not have much of an agenda for the weekend.

  19. 19.

    Poopyman

    @Patricia Kayden:

    Why can’t people be happy for the winners regardless of their ethnicity?

    Because they’re assholes. End of story.

    Speaking of which, when did we get squeamish about spelling out ASSHOLE? By “we”, of course, I mean yinz front pagers.

  20. 20.

    The Moar You Know

    Hey, maybe next time their spoiled rotten little Caucasian shit kid brings home a C- in English (the “mercy F”), one of these proud patriots could, instead of calling up the school and demanding the teacher get fired, might actually realize take some time and help their little future stockbroker/lawyer/rentier parasite at least learn how to spell common words, like “failure” or “shame”.

    I say this with the sure easy confidence of a teacher’s spouse who knows this will never, ever happen.

  21. 21.

    Belafon

    @Samuel Knight: I’ve contemplated switching spelling of a few worlds, mainly those that end in -or, to -our, just to mess with people.

    I have a theory that, in a 1000 years, when they are writing the history of the world, that the US and India will just be seen as remnants of the British Empire, rather than entities to be written about independently. So, I might as well contribute to that.

  22. 22.

    dmsilev

    @Hal: With regards to NewsMax, their Giuliani headline reminded me that the other day the new Mayor and his administration decided to undo Rudy’s anti-ferret campaign. I hope reporters ask Rudy for his opinion on that over and over again, just to mock him.

  23. 23.

    jl

    @Poopyman:

    ” when did we get squeamish about spelling out ASSHOLE? ”

    I figure it is some song lyric puzzle that I will not understand. Since I almost never do. Dang kids tidee with thir newfangled dang song lerics, get off my lawn!

  25. 25.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Mnemosyne: Glad to hear about this. I could never understand why she was so demonized just because of her accented English. My Jamaican-born father still speaks with a heavy Jamaican accent even though he’s been out of that country for the majority of his life. Of course, if Ms. Jeantel had spoken with a British accent, everyone would have praised her intelligence and bravery.

  26. 26.

    Belafon

    @Poopyman: I believe Anne is playing. Asshole is one of the words you cannot say on television, even though now you can say bitch and bastard.

  27. 27.

    SatanicPanic

    Spelling Bees are kind of fun, but beyond a certain level, they strike me as kind of lame. If you’re going to spend all that time studying, why not use it on something a little more useful than correct spelling of obscure medical terms? Have a History Bee or a Science Bee.

  29. 29.

    Zam

    So what if a Native American won? Would they still be declaring the lack of winning Americans?

  32. 32.

    Belafon

    @SatanicPanic: Not that I find the actual research interesting, but I learned a couple of years ago that they don’t memorize all those words. They actually learn the history of the language, where particular syllables come from, and how they evolved. That’s why they’re always asking for the definition and an example sentence.

    ETA: English wasn’t my thing, so I never made it beyond the spelling bees that tested basically what you memorized.

  36. 36.

    japa21

    @SatanicPanic: A Science Bee, by definition, would have to exclude most of those that are complaining about the Spelling Bee result. They would call discrimination the moment that the answer to “How old is the Earth” of 6,000 years was declared wrong.

  37. 37.

    Steve Finlay

    One of my dearest friends is really stupid in this respect. I once saw a big Indian guy (ancestry from India, not native American) in his 20s signing up for a test prep course. He was wearing a Vancouver Canucks hockey shirt with the name of a Russian player (Bure) on the back. I described this to my friend, and said that this was one of the most truly and totally Canadian things I had ever seen.

    She said he wasn’t really a Canadian. Nothing I could say would change her attitude.

  38. 38.

    gnomedad

    These are probably the same folks who scream “learn English!” Just don’t get uppity and learn it better than real Murkins.

  39. 39.

    SatanicPanic

    @Belafon: I find that sort of thing interesting, definitely. I just kind of feel like the whole thing is a bit odd. The kids are probably being driven by some psycho parents. I guess Spelling Bees just result in better soundbites than essay contests.

  40. 40.

    scav

    That one tweet telling parents of “our kind” to step it up, while clueless as to what constitutes Americans (the definitional core of the breed) does wander rather too dangerously near self-awareness when suggesting there is something wrong with presumably “their” kind of parents. A long treatise / rant about the failings of white judeo-xian culture, its nuclear heterosexual family units and specically the overall detrimental impacts of such culture upon educational standards and children would probably not be appreciated.

  41. 41.

    dmsilev

    @BGinCHI: That’s a slander on all perfectly respectable ferrets.

    @Amir Khalid: I’m not really sure what the root of it was, but he famously had a bit of a on-air meltdown during a radio debate with a pro-ferret advocate; started ranting about weasels and so forth. Really kind of odd; ferrets aren’t all that unusual as pets and they aren’t particularly dangerous or anything.

    Edit: the rant

  42. 42.

    burnspbesq

    @Belafon:

    Depends on how many of them voted against it vs. not showing up, but probably not. Even if you got all 199 Dems and three independents, you would still need to flip 16 Republicans to get to 218, or have a bunch of them not show up.

  43. 43.

    Bobby Thomson

    @gnomedad:

    These are probably the same folks who scream “learn English!” Just don’t get uppity and learn it better than real Murkins.

    QFT

  44. 44.

    Comrade Mary

    Some good-ish news for the family of cellist Zoë Keating. This updated post (scroll down) reports on a call from Anthem Blue Cross. It appears that their letter saying the rush hospital treatment for her husband’s cancer was “denied” was just badly written. When they wrote that the treatment wasn’t covered, all they meant was that the hospital hadn’t provided them with enough information yet. But I’m keeping my pitchfork handy just in case.

    … Patricia: well, we would hope not. uh. but I’m hoping that i can provide a little more insight for you to understand how everything works and give you resources to contact so that we can work with you if anything doesn’t go the way it should. what usually happens is that the hospital notifies us that someone’s gone inpatient and we reach out to them and then there’s a response right away and they can go and say, oh, we see what’s going on and everything goes through. for some reason, in this case, the response didn’t come even after three attempts and we’re looking into why, into what was the obstacle in getting the information to us in the time period of those calls we made to them. so we’re dealing with the facility to see how can we do that better because we don’t want you to go through that.

    Me: ok

    Patricia: and so in normal circumstances we ask for the information and they send it and for some reason it didn’t get sent and we’re going to try and find out why and do better on that. and then we can also say in the letter a little more clearly, um, there wasn’t enough information at the time and then maybe give some explanation as to what, uh, would, you know, something along the sense that says when this information comes in, we can reconsider this. and that would put you at ease.

  45. 45.

    Mnemosyne

    @Comrade Mary:

    Knowing Anthem Blue Cross, I suspect this is after-the-fact ass-covering after media and government attention was drawn to the denial. But I’m sure the family doesn’t care as long as it gets fixed.

  46. 46.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Apparently, only white people can be actual Americans. It’s funny, that excludes the Mohawk, Cherokee, Navajo, Nez Perce, etc…

  47. 47.

    StringOnAStick

    @Comrade Mary: Somehow I have the feeling that the sudden onset of “reaching out” has a whole lot more to do with the bad publicity they were receiving, and not some sudden occurrence of morals or insight into properly interpreting their rules.

  48. 48.

    Interrobang

    @Steve Finlay: Wow. That really makes me sad. One of my “wow, that is the most Canadian thing ever” favourite moments is that the Vietnamese-born-of-Chinese-ancestry guy who owns my favourite local Chinese restaurant is a die-hard Leafs fan. It just doesn’t get better than that.

  49. 49.

    different-church-lady

    This is one of those moments where I’m glad I can’t decipher what the hell people are talking about.

  51. 51.

    different-church-lady

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I didn’t see any of this crap when an American named Meb Keflezighi won the Boston Marathon.

    How about when an American named Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election?

  52. 52.

    scav

    Thinking more, the whole spelling kerfuffle can be traced back to those elitist intellectuals with all their books and things, imposing their spelling upon real ‘mercans. Books! Elitist intellectuals letting in all those un’mercan words too, with Latin and Greek and who-all knows what other sort of wetback roots. Norman even! Jute! The Indo must be purged from the European, no?

    What is clearly needed is a ‘mercan Spelling Bee, Like a ‘mercan Sewing Bee, where everybody just gits up and spells things like they should be spelled, in real ‘mercan. ‘merbonics! Oklahoma and Kansas are chomping at the bit to alter their educational systems to the results of this program — they’re running out of science to ignore.

  55. 55.

    BBA

    And just today Eugene Volokh tells me that Asians have become white. Somebody didn’t get the memo.

  56. 56.

    The Moar You Know

    @Comrade Mary: Oh wow. That is the biggest and steamiest pile of after-the-fact asscovering bullshit I’ve ever read, and I just read only what you posted.

    But that it comes from Blue Cross is no shock.

  57. 57.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    So are the non-Caucasian winners going to different schools than the Caucasian losers? No? Hmm, I wonder what other factors might be in play here. Hint: you can’t glorify stupidity and still expect to win a contest that takes some smarts, studying, and parental involvement.

  58. 58.

    Mnemosyne

    @BBA:

    FWIW, as I understand it, most of the people on the Indian subcontinent have always been “white” — the word “Aryan” originally referred to a civilization in that region. “Asian” (or “Mongol”) usually referred to people further East from places like China, Korea and Japan.

  63. 63.

    jl

    @BBA: Volokh is trying to con his own bigoted rubes, and surprised that a supposedly sharp person would go on such on obviously pointless errand.

    I have read national survey results that suggest that the ‘good’ Asian groups that the GOP wants and thought it might recruit, high income, high education, high political involvement, are mostly liberal and growing more so. That includes includes the youth in groups that the GOP kind sorta expected as gimmies, like Vietnamese. Oh well, sometimes xenophobia, bigotry, hating and ridiculing whole groups turns people off, who knew?

    Reince Priebus was all a wondering at the GOP meeting today why all those other people think the GOP is so white and bigoted. That would be same GOPer meeting where the Duck Dynasty guy who said blacks probably had it so good under Jim Crow is the keynote speaker.

    Wonder if Priebus thinks only African-Americans hear that little love song to them, or does he have a brain?

  65. 65.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    @SatanicPanic:

    The parents may well be too involved. Reasonably correct spelling and reasonably good grammar have stood me in good stead. Becoming a spelling otaku seems to me to be taking things a bit too far. It would be interesting to see whether or not winning the spelling bee presages success in life.

  66. 66.

    jl

    It just now comes to mind, that when I was TAing and teaching intro courses to undergrads, I did have some ‘white’ (in the BS GOP bigoted sense) come to me and plead their ‘whiteness’ as an excuse, and maybe they should get a break. Since because, you know, certain types of people were naturally better at certain subjects than others, typically numbery ones.

    I assured them that smart and not so smart, diligent and lazy, dream and problem, students came in all genders, sizes, shapes, races, ethnicities, national origins, creeds, political backgrounds, hair color, fashion choices, majors, etc. And I had not, to be frank, observed at all, that some types were naturally better at any academic subject than other types.

    My advice was not usually well received.

  68. 68.

    different-church-lady

    @Mnemosyne:

    And, yes, I realize that 99 percent of this race stuff is bullshit, but I love to point out to idiots like these tweeters that their “scientific” racism doesn’t even have science behind it.

    Plus ça change… One of the passages of The Great Gatsby I’ve always found the most memorable is Tom Buchanan’s, “Well, these books are scientific…”

  70. 70.

    Mnemosyne

    @different-church-lady:

    You may find the book Evil Sisters interesting. It kind of goes off the rails at the end when the author tries to expand his thesis a little too far, but up until then, it’s a really fascinating look at how the pop psychology of the early 1900s was incorporated into now-classic literature by authors like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, but that aspect of those books has kind of disappeared down the memory hole and it’s now more often read as abstract thematic touches rather than what it actually was.

    Like I said, interesting book that’s good at digging out some of the forgotten references that were timely in their day, but it doesn’t quite develop into the overarching issue that the author tried to do.

  71. 71.

    scav

    @Higgs Boson’s Mate: Parents get too-involved with sports as well as spelling, they can over-invest in any number of directions, including the direction of my kid is perfect already, how dare you give him this grade, o! consider the fatal blow to his future employment hopes, the crippling impact on her self-esteem! Over-involvement seems the default parenting style in many circles any more.

  72. 72.

    Roger Moore

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I didn’t see any of this crap when an American named Meb Keflezighi won the Boston Marathon.

    Probably because you weren’t looking for it. There were questions about how American he was, even in the sports media, though those were mostly centered around his being an immigrant rather than because of his skin color. Nobody questions the Americanness of athletes just based on their skin color anymore.

  74. 74.

    Anoniminous

    And, because everyone is dying to know, “rimur” is an Icelandic work for a type of epic poetry that evolved from the skaldic poetry of the Viking Age.

    (The useless things one learns while getting a minor in Scandinavian Studies.)

  75. 75.

    Ruckus

    @scav:
    Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
    Can you imagine the shame that comes from little Johnny not pulling up his share of the family bootstraps?

  77. 77.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @jl:
    When you believe these things, they don’t seem insulting. To take Bundy as an example, telling blacks they were better off as slaves rather than welfare that makes them lazy is just trying to give concerned advice if it’s true. The racism is in being able to believe something so horribly insulting. And hey, ‘but it’s true!’ makes them confident they’re not racist!

    EDIT – @Roger Moore:
    This is a very long tradition. Acknowledging blacks as physically superior makes them primitive, less evolved. It was very open in the 1800s. Plus, like ‘Asians are so good at math!’ they get to feel like they’re being kind to other races.

  78. 78.

    srv

    Why should anyone expect an American to win when we don’t have one in the White House?

  79. 79.

    shelley

    Why are there no American kids left in the spelling bee? I’m ashamed of our kind.

    As Charlie Pierce would say, “I despair of the rebranding.”

  80. 80.

    Lurking Canadian

    @Alex S.: Actually, Asians being smarter than white people is part of their usual run of bullshit. Rushton used to console himself with “but they have smaller dicks”. I’m not sure if that’s what they all think, though.

  81. 81.

    Steve Finlay

    @Comrade Mary: I love it! I started trying to learn Punjabi a few months ago, but have not kept it up. The alphabet (unlike Russian) is quite difficult. I did get far enough to figure out that more than half of the “Punjabi” signs in my neighbourhood did not have one word of Punjabi on them. What looks like Punjabi is mostly English words, spelled out phonetically in the Gurmukhi alphabet. So much for the English language being wiped out by them furriners.

  82. 82.

    rikyrah

    ❤EgyptianPrincess❤ @MIMI_DIOR_NYC
    Follow

    CONGRATS! Rachel Jeantel graduated HS today! You’ve made us proud.You’ve made Trayvon proud! Keep up the great work! pic.twitter.com/WGLpxGmA2a”
    3:41 PM – 30 May 2014

    ……………………………………..

    Jeantel will be on her way to college, courtesy of Tom Joyner.

  83. 83.

    Roger Moore

    @dmsilev:

    Really kind of odd; ferrets aren’t all that unusual as pets and they aren’t particularly dangerous or anything.

    Ferrets are a potentially invasive non-native species. They’re actually illegal here in California, which has laws intended to prevent people from introducing non-native animals.

  85. 85.

    rikyrah

    Obama reveals daughter Malia attended first prom
    by Associated Press | May 30, 2014 at 2:55 PM

    A teenage rite of passage has come to the White House, with President Barack Obama revealing that his daughter Malia recently attended her first prom.

    Obama wouldn’t say whether his older daughter had a date or went with friends. He joked it’s “classified information” during an interview airing Friday on the talk show “Live! With Kelly and Michael.”

    But the president said he doesn’t think he’s been too intimidating for any boy who might roll up to the White House to pick Malia up.

    Obama said it was “a little bit jarring” to see his 15-year-old 10th grader in heels for the first time. He said Malia looked beautiful.

    http://thegrio.com/2014/05/30/obama-reveals-daughter-malia-attended-first-prom/

  86. 86.

    SatanicPanic

    @Higgs Boson’s Mate: @scav: Purely anecdotal, but when I was teaching English in Japan there was one kid who was around 9 and was more or less fluent in English despite only visiting the USA on vacation. Kid was incredible- far beyond any other kid his age. But he was doomed. He was talking about suicide because he couldn’t handle the pressure. I will be surprised if he doesn’t come to a bad end. That’s why these kinds of things make me nervous.

    I’m not worried about so-called entitled kids. Yeah, they’re annoying, but unless something really goes wrong and they end up like this UCSB shooter they’ll either get their expectations adjusted by life or their parents will be stuck caring for them.

  90. 90.

    gelfling545

    @SatanicPanic: Back when I knew how these things were run, kids really didn’t have to be able to spell every word in the dictionary. There was a predetermined, though extensive, set of words from which these were chosen. Kids were nominated by their teachers & after winning a school spelling bee, usually under the sponsorship of a local newspaper, went on to local, regional & finally national. Some people spell well, just as some draw well or play sports well. When parents encourage the talent & the kid gets recognition for it s/he puts more effort into it. I don’t really think excessive parental involvement is necessarily a factor in most cases. Of course opinions on what amount of involvement is excessive is excessive involvement differ on a scale from not actually expecting your kid to forage for his/her own food to spoon feeding your perfectly able 10 year old.

  91. 91.

    WereBear

    @rikyrah: They are both lovely girls. I’ve always felt Malia took after her mother, while Sasha took after her father, looks-wise.

    I have always felt for any teen going through these difficult years in the White House.

  92. 92.

    Warren Terra

    I’ll pay respectful attention to these assholes’ demand for more or for only American kids in the spelling bee when the language of the spelling bee is Navajo.

  93. 93.

    Roger Moore

    @Interrobang:
    I’m still a bit boggled by the whole kerfuffle over Huy Fong Foods here in California. It’s about a fight between a company owned by an ethnically Chinese man born in Vietnam that makes a sauce named for a city in Thailand getting in a public pissing contest with a mostly Mexican American city council. The stuff is such a cultural touchstone here that what should have been a minor argument about air quality has turned into a major ongoing news story. I like to joke that Huy Fong Foods’ Sriracha sauce is the only thing the Chinese and Mexicans can agree about around here. That’s not true, of course; they both seem to agree that the Republicans suck.

  96. 96.

    Mnemosyne

    @Roger Moore:

    I have to say, the complaints sounded plausible to me — it’s not like aerosolized pepper isn’t known to be an irritant. Apparently some local politics got the complaints blown a little out of proportion, though. Hopefully the new filtration system will help.

  98. 98.

    scav

    @SatanicPanic: Japan’s got its own extra pressures to throw on people and their place/role in groups, plus an different take on the place/weight of suicide. I’d be wary of a lot of simple cross-cultural comparisons. There are weeds aplenty in our garden. The cumulative dead-weight of a lot of poorly educated overly-entitled kidlets is enough of a social drag to worry about here even without concerns about violence to themselves or others thrown in (it’s just less flashy an issue). Especially if they’re being funneled into positions of control through social inertia. Not a new and unique problem over time and space, but nevertheless a problem.

  101. 101.

    Anne Laurie

    @Amir Khalid:

    Just what did Rudy have against ferrets in the first place?

    When then-Mayor Guiliani ranted about ‘perverts obsessed with their rabid weasels’, many rude jokes were made that he just didn’t want other mustelids in his city..

  102. 102.

    Botsplainer

    Been using “ammosexual” on local news punditry comments. Getting lots of howls of outrage, and some hearty laughter.

  103. 103.

    different-church-lady

    @Roger Moore:

    Nobody questions the Americanness of athletes just based on their skin color anymore.

    Nope. Just presidents now.

    ETA: D’OH! Mnemosyne, right below even!

  106. 106.

    Francis

    @Roger Moore: Irwindale is a very strange city and you need to treat a lot of reporting about it with a huge pinch of salt.

    Its total population is 1,422 in a total of 390 housing units. I’ve been told that the city and/or the few families who control the city own all the housing. So, I’ve heard speculation that the complaints about odors was actually due to complicated infighting between elected officials (and their families) as to who was getting what share of the money being spent by the factory in the city.

  107. 107.

    Roger Moore

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    This is a very long tradition. Acknowledging blacks as physically superior makes them primitive, less evolved.

    There was more than one thing going on there, though. On the one hand, blacks were supposed to be physically superior which ought to make them great athletes. On the other hand, they were supposed to be stupid, cowardly, lazy, etc. which was supposed to let whites win anyway. In the few sports where whites and blacks competed head to head, there was great consternation among whites when the blacks actually won. Jack Johnson winning the heavyweight boxing title is the classic example.

  108. 108.

    SatanicPanic

    @scav: Sure, I’m just speculating that kids who know that many words probably have some parents that are going overboard and pushing them too hard. Probably because the parents are treating their kids like status symbols.

    Even in Japan, a nine year old suggesting they’re going to take their own life due to overwork is highly unusual. Also, I don’t think there is much evidence that our kids are poorly educated. Outside of schools set up for minority children, which is a whole different set of problems, our children compare favorably to any nation in the world. Yes, some Asian countries beat us on math tests. But I wouldn’t subject my child to that system of education. Just not worth it.

  109. 109.

    Roger Moore

    @Mnemosyne:
    AFAIK they didn’t have any problems when their plant was in Rosemead, and that was in a less industrial area than their new place in Irwindale. I got suspicious when they reported that most of the complaints came from just four households and one of those four was the son of an Irwindale city councilman. I thought it looked suspiciously like an attempted shakedown. The bigger point- that it’s a very multi-ethnic situation and the stuff is a major cultural touchstone for the whole area- holds regardless of the merits of the complaint. It’s weird to see the BBC reporting on what I think of as a local thing.

  111. 111.

    Calouste

    @SatanicPanic:

    You’re not serious are you? Education levels in the South are of the level of El Salvador or so. The best state in the US is Massachusetts and that would be 13th or so if it was a separate country.

    There was one article recently (maybe even a post here by Tom Leveson) that I can’t find back, but this article from late last year ranks the US as 36th. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/12/03/248329823/u-s-high-school-students-slide-in-math-reading-science

  112. 112.

    Helen

    I am exhausted from this shit. Honest to FSM. Maybe cuz it’s Friday and I am +4. But really? The stupidity and irony are stunning. Really, fuckers? Americans are stupid? And immigrants are so happy to be here that they work their asses off? Surely you jest.

  115. 115.

    Mnemosyne

    @Calouste:

    Actually, I don’t think you guys are contradicting each other. It’s like our healthcare system: if you’re white and upper-class, you get great outcomes. If you’re not, you get crappy outcomes.

    Upper-class and (to some extent) middle-class white kids are doing just fine in school. But our utter failure to improve rural and urban schools is dragging down the test scores.

    ETA: Also, I would be fascinated to see a map showing that “average” of $115K spent per American student. I have a feeling the highest spending is not in urban areas.

  117. 117.

    JPL

    @Mnemosyne: Supposedly, there is an investigation on how this could have happened. Knowing the Atlanta area though, it will be along time before the report is released.

  118. 118.

    Ruckus

    @different-church-lady:
    Colonoscopies?
    Of course! Go overboard, have them check your teeth when they are in there! There certainly won’t be anything disgusting left in there for them to run into after a few sips of that Drano like stuff they have you drink.

  119. 119.

    scav

    @SatanicPanic: actually, I’ve read a few things suggesting there is more to worry about in middle class education than many care to think about. BBC on breakout of US states against countries (interesting and with unexpected bits) with some class-based comparisons too. ”This analysis, from academics at Harvard and Stanford in the US and Munich University in Germany, punctures the idea that middle-class US pupils are high achievers.”

  120. 120.

    Ripley

    Just what did Rudy have against ferrets in the first place?

    They don’t fit through the gerbil tube.

  123. 123.

    EJ

    I once had a Jewish person tell me with a straight face that there should be an ethnic quota system so that Asian Americans didn’t “take over” all of our top universities.

    She flat out wouldn’t believe me that the Ivy Leagues used to have that exact system for Jews until I googled it for her.

  124. 124.

    JPL

    @EJ: A good friend who happens to be black, mentioned that the civil war was about states rights. I asked if she had read the secession papers.

  126. 126.

    EJ

    @Mnemosyne:

    Actually I ran into the same thing with Anthem Blue Cross on a much smaller scale last year when they sent me a letter saying that they’d only cover 4 days of a 9 day hospital stay (which since I was in the ICU would have put me out of pocket something like $65K I believe). Then the hospital sent them a letter explaining the reason and they reinstated coverage, all within a couple of days. So I guess they really, at least in my case, weren’t lying about needing more info.

  127. 127.

    BBA

    @EJ: In California the otherwise liberal Asian-American population strongly opposes affirmative action. They see it as an Asian quota by other means.

  128. 128.

    EJ

    @BBA:

    I hadn’t realized that was still the case. I remember it when I was in college, but Asian Americans as a whole were a lot more conservative back then (I’m not generalizing down to individuals, just worth noting that Ronald Reagan actually had a greater percentage of the Asian American vote than he did of the white vote – whereas nowadays Asian Americans are almost as likely to support democrats as Latinos are).

  129. 129.

    burnspbesq

    @Randy P:

    Any preppie fool stupid enough to mess with Malia wouldn’t have to just deal with the Secret Service. There is also Uncle Craig, who goes about 6’7,” 250, and “Uncle” Reggie, who played D1 football and spent time in an NFL training camp.

  130. 130.

    gwangung

    @jl:

    I have read national survey results that suggest that the ‘good’ Asian groups that the GOP wants and thought it might recruit, high income, high education, high political involvement, are mostly liberal and growing more so. That includes includes the youth in groups that the GOP kind sorta expected as gimmies, like Vietnamese. Oh well, sometimes xenophobia, bigotry, hating and ridiculing whole groups turns people off, who knew?

    Particularly since they’re using practically the same damn language, word for word, that were used to try to keep previous generations of Asians out of the country.

    Some folks have long memories. Imagine that.

  131. 131.

    ? Martin

    Here’s why I don’t trust Snowden. He told Brian Williams that hackers can absolutely remotely turn on a phone that is powered off. It was a very specific question that he very specifically responded to. That’s bullshit for every phone that I know of. When powered off, phones like the iPhone, Galaxy, etc. do not receive any signals of any kind. That’s just straight up wrong or a lie. I don’t think it’s a misunderstanding, I think he’s simply telling Williams, etc. what he thinks they want to hear.

  133. 133.

    Corner Stone

    “Kaplan’s opinion said that the eavesdropping technique “functioned whether the phone was powered on or off.” Some handsets can’t be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set. ”
    FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool

  135. 135.

    Mnemosyne

    @? Martin:

    I remember linking to an article a while back that claimed that the NSA could access computers that had been powered down and being roundly mocked for it. Funny how the worm turns.

  137. 137.

    Mnemosyne

    @EJ:

    I talked to G about it when I got home (he deals with health insurance companies all day long at his job) and apparently it’s a common way to try and pressure the hospital to respond to an insurance company query that they’re dragging their feet on. An assholish way to do it, but a common way.

  138. 138.

    danielx

    @Corner Stone:

    They’ve been doing that for a while now. I’ve heard rumors that was one of the ways they accumulated evidence against Gotti, among others. Rule of thumb: if you really really REALLY want to be unheard and untracked, remove the battery from the phone.

  141. 141.

    Comrade Scrutinizer

    @? Martin: Not necessarily. This has been discussed since the early 2000s. The baseband chips in the phone basically stay powered on at all times, and have the ability to communicate with cell towers at all times. The only way to defeat this is to remove the battery from the phone. To the extent that the NSA might be able to exploit the baseband (an ability that has been debated for years), something like what Snowden described might be possible. If the NSA has the cooperation of telecom companies, it might not be difficult at all.

  142. 142.

    Mnemosyne

    Goddamnit. Fred Clark wrote a personal story that made me cry.

    (It’s the post titled “Three Years Ago.” I didn’t link directly to it because the pull quote on the main page gives a possibly-necessary oblique hint of what it’s about.)

  143. 143.

    Ernest Pikeman

    @danielx:

    if you really really REALLY want to be unheard and untracked, remove the battery from the phone.

    Sucks for iphone users. “Hold on, I need to dig out my special tools and download this how-to video from youtube…”

  144. 144.

    different-church-lady

    @Ruckus:

    Go overboard, have them check your teeth when they are in there!

    Via the colon?!? Either one of us doesn’t understand basic human anatomy or those scopes are a lot longer than I thought.

  145. 145.

    Corner Stone

    @danielx: I’m sorry but I am going to have to disagree. I have a good friend who has friends that are actual agents in TLA specifically related to hacking/security. And they have shared a great many insights with him, some of which I have been blessed to hear about.
    He reliably informs me that when powered off, phones like the iPhone, Galaxy, etc. do not receive any signals of any kind.
    So, contrary to your assertions here, I’m going to go with his expert analysis.

  146. 146.

    different-church-lady

    @? Martin: It’s the power of incomplete information at work. If (as Cornerstone’s links suggest) you hack the hardware and/or firmware then things that seem unlikely are completely possible.

    The problem comes when people sort of like (nameless prize winning journalist) want to create the impression that a three letter agency can just flip a switch and magically spy on any given person’s phone at any given time, straight out of the box.

    In other words, “Harry, tell them about the time you hid the bug in the parakeet.”

  148. 148.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Corner Stone:

    I have a good friend who has friends that are actual agents in TLA specifically related to hacking/security.

    Since when have you and Martin been good friends? i think that you may be taking liberties with the truth here.

  153. 153.

    different-church-lady

    @Mnemosyne: Well that must be it.

    What I was attempting to say was that in the scenario Omnes describes, there is no longer an affordance for the scope.

    ETA: However, it does tie into the post title nicely.

  160. 160.

    EJ

    @mclaren:

    I thought screwing over rich people was pretty much the basic point off a hedge fund. Promote some manager as a financial rock star, get a bunch of money from rich investors, and create a fee structure so he gets paid handsomely whether he grows their money or not.

  161. 161.

    LAC

    A recurring theme these days: threads going to shit when mcclaren and corner stone stumble in.

  162. 162.

    kindness

    Here in CA we are about to hit the space where white folk are going to be less than 50% of the population. No skin off my nose but I suspect when that happens to some of these Einsteins out there they are going to get even more tweeky. That will suck indeed.

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