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73·13 hours agoReally depressing to see what a wet blanket he became after he took the Letterman spot, especially given how much leyway Letterman had to fuck around with prior to his departure.
Some of Colbert’s best material is when he’s got nothing to lose. The last six months have been a breath of fresh air on that alone.
Banning something is a sure fire way to give it oxygen.
It’s a clever bit of marketing to queue this up and make a big stir and drum about being censored.
The allegations feel… thin? This is a primary race in a state that’s been sandbagged for Republicans for decades. But as a piece of campaign material, it’s par excellance. More people are going to see the clip passed around online than ever would watching it broadcast on a Monday night.
The problem Trump has in doing this type of suppression
I doubt this was anyone’s serious intent. Republicans pull this gag all the time. They deliberately try and trick the alarm for censorship and then scream ten times as loud “LOOK AT ME! I’VE BEEN CENSORED! CHECK OUT THE VIDEO THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE!”
Liberals (or, at least, this one guy fighting for his life in a deep red state) finally seem to have caught up to the game.
Brilliant bit of marketing to blare “We’ve been censored by the FCC!” from the rooftops, on the day the Texas primary starts.
Texas is a hell of a state
text book industry gets to extort students then it’s fine for the tech bros to do it now too.
Good thing nobody said that then.
teaching staff who are now more credentialed than ever, but know less than ever.
They’re not more credentialed than ever. The days of a teacher needing a master’s degree, much less a PhD, are well behind us. Modern teachers - across both public and private sectors - can start working with as little as a GED and a state-issued teaching certificate. They don’t need a bachelor’s in their subject of expertise or in education as a degree. They don’t need to undergo an apprenticeship under a more experienced professional. They don’t need good references to land a job. All they need is a willingness to undercut existing (unionized) teaching staff and a clean criminal record.
Schools in low-budget districts onboard these green recruits in droves. Then they use the added manpower as an excuse to fire anyone on track for a pension or old enough to receive full benefits. Education has become the default job for drop-outs and victims of industry layoffs. It’s the employer of last-resort, with enormous churn, as rebounds in the job market vacuum people out as fast as downturns dump them in.
the issue is the metricization of education
Metricization is used as an excuse to conduct these wholesale purges. HISD is ground zero for this experiment in privatization, as the state takes over local school boards, fires teachers by the dozen, and consolidates students into larger and large class sizes with fewer resources.
Standardized testing is used to justify the initial purges. Then rebounds in testing (as students are purged and private testing companies manipulate exam scores) are used to validate the decisions of newly installed administrators. Don’t look at college placement or applied skills tests, just focus on Pearson’s latest “Number go down / Number go up” announcements, as the state leaders funnel more and more money to the testing companies.
By the metrics these districts are degrading and collapsing. But through propaganda, school residents are brow-beaten into doubting their own eyeballs.
not to mention the changing in parenting
You can blame “parenting” for a single kid’s mistakes.
Once you start blaming “parenting” in the aggregate, you’re inevitably full of shit.
The common denominator in these school districts isn’t “parents” and its absurd to pretend otherwise.
No one actually explained why they ate the pineapple.
This is why I look sideways at the “Americans only read at a 6th grade level” statistics. Because technically speaking you should be able to derive this answer from the content of the story without having it explicitly laid out. Only, the standardized question adds so much incoherent fluff to the narrative as to make deriving the answer ambiguous at best.
As for wisdom, I would argue that the owl is the wisest for not having attended this foolish event
This still feels like a trick answer, because “owls are wise” is a cultural trope not included in the story itself in any meaningful way.
You could argue the crow is the wisest for discerning the possibility of a trick. And then you could argue that wisdom is not synonymous with correctness to justify why the crow was savvy but still wrong.
You might argue that the moose is the wisest, because it was able to identify the moral of the story in advance.
You might argue the hare is the wisest, because it knew it could win a race against a pineapple.
But all of this would need to be laid out in an actual fully-written argument. It’s not the sort of answer you can pick out of a multiple choice exam. It’s the a debate you can have between peers where the analysis of the work is more valuable than the final selection.
Just gotta read the article now and figure out if I’m supposed to be dumb for even trying or whatever lol
The story is highlighted precisely because it is nebulous and confusing. I suspect the authors of the question intended it to create the illusion of a weed out question by guaranteeing a low success rate at selecting the answer.
But you could achieve the same results by asking “What side will a coin land on if I flip it?” a. Heads, b. Tails, c. The Edge, d. The Coin will not land
Since there’s no explicitly correct answer, you are - at best - going to get a roughly even distribution of answers between a. and b. Then you get to report up to your bosses that you’re filtering out a certain number of students as “failures” without interrogating why they failed or what you’re even testing them to do.
Not everyone has patience for kid friendly activities and some find them incredibly boring.
In my experience, kids love to imitate whatever their parents are doing. But they struggle to operate at an adult level. So you provide them with kid-friendly activities to bridge that gap with an eye towards full participation as they get older.
When my son was 1-year-old, I couldn’t put a baseball glove on him and toss a baseball around. But I could kick a rubber ball back and forth. I could get him to throw his ball into his toy box. I could roll a ball to him and have him pick it up, then two-hand throw it back. I’d do this with an eye to the future. And then he got older and stronger and more dexterous, and we could elevate what he tried to do.
I get that this isn’t the most stimulating for the adult. But, at some level, you need to enjoy being around your kids generally speaking. Otherwise, I’ll spot you that having kids is going to be miserable. At another level, learning how to teach is its own hobby and challenge. Experimenting with what your child can do is interesting. Reading about the next milestones and testing whether your kid can do them is exciting. Watching your kid improve over time is fascinating.
If that’s not for you… okay, fine. Maybe you take your kid to daycare and let them figure it out. And you just treat your kid like an appliance - fed, rested, healthy, etc. I’ll spot you that this isn’t very fun (on its face, anyway).
If I busted out a super violent video game or something they’d probably cool with it. It’d be my fellow counselors and parents who’d take issue.
I mean, I don’t see an enormous difference between Splatoon and Team Fortress. I got Sonic: The Hedgehog collection for my son, and we can play it without any serious fear of trauma (although he has thrown the controller a few times). You can curb the degree of gore and still keep all the elements that make an activity fun.
If anything my experience with kids almost softened my desire to get sterilized and cement my child free life.
More power to you. Just crazy to see people blot their own childhoods from their heads and insist you simply can’t have fun under the age of 20.
I mean, as a 90s-kid, we used to install video games and other entertainment gimmicks on our graphing calculators. That’s when kids weren’t coming to school with gameboys and walkmens, already.
I gave my high school teachers fits because I’d sit in the back of the class and read my dad’s old fantasy paperbacks - Game of Thrones, LotR, Dragonriders of Pern. They’d be annoyed to see I wasn’t grinding my way through “Crime and Punishment” or “Great Expectations”, but reluctant to object given that I was technically reading books above my grade level.
Similarly, kids in math class fucking around with Sudoku puzzles or Rubix Cubes or other math-adjacent gimmicks tend to turn teachers sideways. Especially when they’re getting middling grades on the actual material, but obviously smart enough to practice and improve.
Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.
From my perspective, the three things that have fucked schools most over time have been
- Larger class sizes
- Teachers with less education / professional experience
- Shorter school days / school years and bigger gaps in continuous education caused by the need to start work sooner
Going back to the 1970s, professional academics have known that these are the hallmarks of a bad education system. But fixing all of them costs money. And if there’s one thing a school district hates to do, its spending money to improve education.
It feels like fiddling with the aesthetics of schooling rather than addressing the fundamentals. The idea that a computer terminal is bad for literacy doesn’t seem to match out with empirical evidence.
If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it’s because someone is making money off of it.
People make money coming and they make money going. I don’t think it is reasonable to say “profit exists, therefore problems”, as a lot of these prescriptions and changes are non-scientific and populist-driven at the outset. Whether they work or not isn’t really the goal. Political outsiders simply need to establish a scapegoat to pin on their incumbent opponents in order to sell their own ascendancy to office.
If you can campaign on undoing harm, cool. You’ll do it. But if you just need to throw darts and hope you hit something, blaming “the kids today and their computers” is as good a vector for attack as anything.
Not as though selling kids school supplies, hard cover textbooks, and other more traditional school trappings wasn’t profitable enough forty years ago.
It’s everything to do with curriculum requirements and the lack of explorative reading thanks to standardized testing.
The Pineapple And The Hare: Can You Answer Two Bizarre State Exam Questions?
spoiler
In the olden times, animals could speak English, just like you and me. There was a lovely enchanted forest that flourished with a bunch of these magical animals. One day, a hare was relaxing by a tree. All of a sudden, he noticed a pineapple sitting near him.
The hare, being magical and all, told the pineapple, “Um, hi.” The pineapple could speak English too.
“I challenge you to a race! Whoever makes it across the forest and back first wins a ninja! And a lifetime’s supply of toothpaste!” The hare looked at the pineapple strangely, but agreed to the race.
The next day, the competition was coming into play. All the animals in the forest (but not the pineapples, for pineapples are immobile) arranged a finish/start line in between two trees. The coyote placed the pineapple in front of the starting line, and the hare was on his way.
Everyone on the sidelines was bustling about and chatting about the obvious prediction that the hare was going to claim the victory (and the ninja and the toothpaste). Suddenly, the crow had a revolutionary realization.
“AAAAIEEH! Friends! I have an idea to share! The pineapple has not challenged our good companion, the hare, to just a simple race! Surely the pineapple must know that he CANNOT MOVE! He obviously has a trick up his sleeve!” exclaimed the crow.
The moose spoke up.
“Pineapples don’t have sleeves.”
“You fool! You know what I mean! I think that the pineapple knows we’re cheering for the hare, so he is planning to pull a trick on us, so we look foolish when he wins! Let’s sink the pineapple’s intentions, and let’s cheer for the stupid fruit!” the crow passionately proclaimed. The other animals cheered, and started chanting, “FOIL THE PLAN! FOIL THE PLAN! FOIL THE PLAN!”
A few minutes later, the hare arrived. He got into place next to the pineapple, who sat there contently. The monkey blew the tree-bark whistle, and the race began! The hare took off, sprinting through the forest, and the pineapple … It sat there.
The animals glanced at each other blankly, and then started to realize how dumb they were. The pineapple did not have a trick up its sleeve. It wanted an honest race — but it knew it couldn’t walk (let alone run)!
About a few hours later, the hare came into sight again. It flew right across the finish line, still as fast as it was when it first took off. The hare had won, but the pineapple still sat at his starting point, and had not even budged. The animals ate the pineapple.
1. Why did the animals eat the pineapple? a. they were annoyed b. they were amused c. they were hungry d. they wanted to 2. Who was the wisest? a. the hare b. moose c. crow d. owl
read books, go for walks, hang out with friends instead
He found the box of “Kingdom Death: Monster” board game figures I’d been sitting on since he was born.
The Goof Who Sat by the Door
Nancy Guthrie, 84-year-old mother of NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie, was reportedly abducted from her Tucson, Arizona home on February 1, 2026,
18·1 day ago
father backing child into a corner
“It’s time for a six hour road trip listening to my favorite podcasts, son. And after that, I’m making you watch classic movies. And then we’re going to play catch in the yard. After that I bought a model kit we’re going to put together. And then we’re going fishing!”
child-like screaming
Adults Im talking to are like
It’s funny, because I hear this from childless adults all the time, as well. More often than not, they’re complaining about being overworked (and underpaid) at the office. The parents I know more commonly complain that they don’t get enough time with their kids, bemoaning how much time (and money) go to day cares and after school activities, while they’re stuck working weekends or extra shifts to make ends meet.
In large minority districts of entrenched Republican enclaves