Listen, My Children...

The Last Laugh

Think you can't make Muslim jokes anymore?  You're not the only one.

Babysitting

I had the good fortune to spend half of my high school career elsewhere (England and Germany), and never went on a school trip while in high school in Houston.  Due to that background, I might be forgiven for having had no idea why so many American teenagers go entirely crazy as soon as they get to college. 

At the American School in London, when we went on a school trip, the teachers would plunk us down in some foreign city and tell us to be back at the hotel in time for dinner.  We had an open campus, and we'd leave during lunch or an off period to go get a half-pint at the local pub (all within the legal drinking age, of course) or zoom downtown for some quick shopping.  If not exactly encouraged by our parents, it was with parental permission, and our parents were expected both to teach us how to take care of ourselves and to instill us with a sense of responsibility. 

When current American high schools (public, private, and parochial) take school trips even within the country, the children are watched night and day.  They are babied, told exactly where to go and what to do and when, and those who are acting in loco parentis must either believe they are acting as parents of nine-year-olds or that the parents they are replacing are nitwits who have instilled no self-control or maturity in their offspring whatsoever.  (To see the panic on students' faces when told they have to think up an activity on their own, perhaps there's some truth to that belief.) 

If they have never been allowed any freedoms, and have not been taught how to do things responsibly but have instead not been taught about anything at all (because ignoring the existence of things will mean they aren't ever thought about by your children, right? as my mother thought with the Kid Brother, before he bit his breakfast toast into a gun and shot her at four years old, at which point she realized responsible use or responsible disuse was better than ignorant obsession), is it any wonder American college students are, as a whole, remarkably immature and with absolutely no grasp of the practical repercussions of their actions? 

News Roundup

Why post one myself, when other people do it for me?  There, a roundup of opinion across Germany on the infamous cartoons, freedoms in Turkey, and other issues.

Worth 1000 words?

From the Guardian:

Passersby stopped police officers to ask why the marchers were being allowed to carry banners threatening further suicide attacks in the city [of London]. One police officer replied: "Don't worry. We are photographing them."

Yes.  That's clearly going to do a lot of good.  Especially when you can see their faces so very clearly.

Excellent fun!

The Creation Story.

Oh, that liberal media

Now, this is different:

The US media reached an "all-time low" in failing to reflect public opinion and Americans' desire for trusted information, instead acting as a "cheerleader" for war...

Racism

I'm so glad I don't live in Chicago.  It would be awful enough having such racist families, but to also be surrounded by people like this: "There are all these negative messages that are out there in society about people. I think there's still this belief that black men have large penises, white men have small penises. And your friends want to know." 

Yes, I know, it's not just Chicago.  Still, I haven't come across anyone (well, anyone non-desi) in Houston who still thinks things like that are issues.  There were a lot in Boston, though; and according to the Chicago Sun-Times, it's a Big Thing when someone doesn't mate based on skin color.  Meh.

The end of the telegram

It's stopped.  Of note: the author says, "It may be that telegrams are still offered in a handful of countries around the world."  Last time I was at a hotel in Madras, the little guide poster on the back of the door included telephone number, address, and directions to give someone who wanted to send you a telegram.  I guess India's one of the "handful."

Anti-War

I'd heard that the "World War Two was a bad idea and we shouldn't have gotten into it" crowd was growing, but I didn't believe it until I started watching the current PBS show on the war in the Pacific: The Perilous Fight: America's World War II in Color.  All death counts, all quotes by men on how nasty it is to see people die, all letters from parents complaining that they didn't approve of the so-called liberty their sons were dying for.  So far, after half an hour, no hints of any reasons why anyone might have thought our involvement was the right thing to do...

Blind Optimism

Here's to it.