48 Comments

All true, all true.

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I can't define 'em, but I know 'em when I see 'em.

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Yeah, isn't that being damned with faint praise.

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'Peabody's Improbable History' libel! With Sherman and the Wayback Machine.

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Teach the controversy!

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Then there was the growing suspicion among the tested that the whole thing might not be worth putting a lot of effort into.

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It all started with the systematic grunting. Then cave paintings, then little triangles pressed into wet clay tablets, followed by scrolls. Soon there were libraries. Eventually movable type, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, TV (!), and now the internet. Now we finally have a real nervous system. The shit is hitting the fan, and in a good way.

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Ha! Made me laugh.

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I do think there might be a place for retroactive abortion. Sometimes I'm in favor of that.

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Also a complete dickhead, don't forget dickhead.

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Damn it, ACLU, you're infringing on my right to infringe on their rights!

(My old fundamentalist pastor used to call them the "Anti-Christian Liars Union," usually in the context of offering whatever straw man argument regarding school prayer that was being shoe-horned into the weekly sermon.)

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No, it was the beards, the long hair and the fringe jackets. Seriously.

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You cannot really make valid comparisons of average test scores on the SAT from different eras because the test has been substantially altered several times over the years, not just in content but in format and scoring. So the authors of <i>Land I Love</i> are really talking out of their asses there. (Big surprise, isn't it?)

With that caveat in mind though, a few attempts have been made to validly track average test scores over several administrations of the same version of the test over multi-year stretches. In the version of the SAT that was administered during most of the 1960s the average scores actually rose from year to year as the decade progressed, reaching their peak in the late 60s and early 70s. This isn't all that surprising in light of the major initiatives to transform, modernize and upgrade K-12 education in the United States following the USSR's successful launch of Sputnik-I in 1957.

It is rather telling that <i>Land I Love</i> makes no mention of this enormously successful effort that was sustained over the course of the the 1960s and 1970s, and instead it characterizes the period as one of decline in educational quality in the US. The textbook describes trends and outcomes that are exactly the opposite of what actually happened.

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So, you must have actually <i>been</i> there.

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The sad thing is that given the route some hippies took after the threat of the draft was done, I'm betting that she married the dude in the background who in turn when on to be the top selling salesman for home siding products in the tri-state area. They had three kids who were generally ignored but sent to the best schools.

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Is there such a thing, other than a picture of me in a tank top, as a bad sideboob?

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