1. According to the College Board’s internals, only 43% of high school graduates’ SAT scores indicate college-readiness. From a Chronicle blurb:
Members of the high-school Class of 2012 who took the SAT represented the largest and most diverse pool in the test’s history, according to the report. Of the more than 1.66 million test takers from the Class of 2012, 45 percent identified themselves as minority students, up from 38 percent in 2008. Thirty-six percent of test takers said their parents’ highest level of education was a high-school diploma or less.
While participation has increased 6 percent since 2008, SAT scores have decreased slightly. Mean scores for critical reading are down four points, writing scores are down five points, and mathematics scores have remained stable, compared with four years ago. The overall mean for the Class of 2012 was 1498, substantially below the 1550 benchmark.
2. “How Self-Expression Damaged My Students“. Now they listen.
3. The death of mom-and-pop pharmacies has been good for female pharmacists. The key here is that women are more likely to fare well vis a vis men in occupations that are relatively easy. Feminists can take solace in that…if they want. More on the “pharmacist track” here, with a nod to John Derbyshire.
4. More from the Atlantic. Apologies. This news should make David Futrelle happy. Castration increases life expectancy in men.
5. The new face of country music? While not nearly as radical as rock, country music has long maintained a sense of nostalgia but also a cynicism towards traditionalism. I don’t really like country music all that much, but I respect that the genre actually quibbles with this tension that society writ large has been trying aggressively to figure out for the past 40 years. Rap/hip-hop has its own “answers”, and rock is married to modernism.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Here’s a link that’ll have the feminists creaming themselves in validation:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/science/bias-persists-against-women-of-science-a-study-says.html?ref=science
That whole castration bit is hilarious. Neutering men isn’t going to make women any happier with themselves.
Moreover, why the hell is length of life so important? I’d rather live 30 or 40 years as a red-blooded male than 80 years as a eunuch.
I noticed that the self-centered nutjob on role reboot closed comments with zero comments posted.
“lalalalalalala. I can’t hear you. I’m a victim. Pity me. lalalalalalalala me first. me lalalalalala…”
I am incredibly bored by the idea that it’s new and fresh to question traditional values. I mean, it’s Slate, so no surprise. But questioning traditional values is by far more common than affirming them, much less than questioning “modern” values.
That pharmacists thing is really dubious. In the bad old days of independent locally owned pharmacies, women who didn’t own the pharmacy probably made about the same, hour for hour, as men who didn’t own the pharmacy.
Also, the other day a commenter at Steve Sailer’s said that economists are around just to provide an intellectual veneer for the plutocrats. This is a case in point. The conclusion of that article is that more consolidation of ownership is good.
Modern rock is overwhelmingly terrible, and I don’t see this Musgrave song being outside what I hear from female rock and pop stars.
The female artists are all about being ‘stoic’ in the sense that nothing is good enough for them, and beating the drum of no mercy for the weak and to hell with beta males. You occasionally get the angry rant song about the most recent alpha asshole in their life. This is rock and pop (the latter of which has many more female artists of course).
Meanwhile the male artists are busy playing a game of oneupsmanship in emasculating themselves singing about their most recent heartbreak, which is basically every rock song now.
Pop even outdoes rock in terms of not being faggy in terms of lyrical content. Even in the broken hearted paeans from jilted men you occasionally get lulz worthy gems that say things to the effect, ‘Woops, I’m a fucking star, so ditching me was dumb, I’m going to fuck all your friends’ or ‘Please come back, I won’t cheat on you (again, for real this time)’.
Just a generation ago songs had stories to tell, now it is all woe is me, please come back baby, I love you even though you were fucking all of my friends behind my back for the past 15 years.
This country artist is just going in the direction of female pop which is either full-time bitching about how either nothing is good enough for princess or variously crying or ranting about how they can’t secure the loyalty of the most recent alpha.
Keep your ears peeled for more Musgrave tunes that detail her escapades riding the cock carousel while maintaining the veneer of the genre’s implicit conservatism a al Taylor Swift.
Chuck, did you see this?
http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/09/25/4285774/men-can-paddle-girls-under-revised.html
The headline choice seems pretty biased given the school policy appears to be gender neutral. I.e., opposite-sex corporal punishment is now allowed, not just same-sex, and the Startlegram headline wants to panic the reader into clicking on the article by highlighting that men can now hit girls. And the quote from Watt trying to make it about men’s higher strength is bullshit. Women certainly can hit a child hard enough to bruise, child abuse cases will easily prove that. She really thinks women cannot bruise using a paddle? Come on. And if she’s concerned enough that men could bruise girls to disallow men hitting girls altogether, why does she think it’s ok for men to hit boys? Shouldn’t she be advocating for only women to administer, or disallow corporal punishment completely?
(I’ll add that I’d never give permission to have that done. if any adult other than his parent hits my kid, I’ll break the arm s/he used to do it.)
I saw the paddling article. If the parents or the kid had a problem with how the paddling was going to be carried out they could have easily declined before it took place. It’s not like the girl was taken away with a burlap sack over her head and beaten.
Regarding that Slate article where Jody Rosen champions the new, feminist country singer. What’s she’s singing isn’t all that different than what Loretta Lynn sung in songs like “The Pill” or the point Jeanne C. Reilly was trying to make in “Harper Valley PTA.”
The point this critic is trying to make, though, is: middle American values = bad! My own urban, ethnic values = good! It almost makes you appreciative of a traditionalist asshole like Toby Keith.
I wonder what would happen were those college board stats re-done in regards to race and ethnic background.
I wonder how many East Coast Jews and small-town white people are not yet ready for College. Or Asians in Irvine, CA.
Pingback: LIGFY – After The Hang Over Recap | Society of Amateur Gentlemen