https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-this-the-end-of-college-as-we-know-it-11605196909

Great piece in the WSJ on how college works in America in 2020:

For more than a century, a four-year college degree was a blue-chip credential and a steppingstone to the American dream. For many millennials and now Gen Z, it has become an albatross around their necks.

It starts with a 33-year-old woman who makes $94,000 a year and still carries $300,000 in student debt.

I'd hope any young person today who is not planning to enter what used to be called "the professions" finds happiness in skilled labor or a portable, not-easily-offshored job like nursing.

That looks like ITA - Initial Teaching Alphabet. It's a simplified phoneme based form of spelling that substitutes certain regularly occurring letter combinations with phonetic symbols.

At one point educators adapted this system for new readers, as the symbols were easier to recognize and remember than some commonly occurring letter combinations that novices often find difficult to interpret as word sounds. I suspect it was dropped because students then had to relearn those words with their correct letter spelling.

Parable of Do stuff.

Wait - have you not seen Chaucer?

"'Wepyng and waylyng, care and oother sorwe I knowe ynogh, on even and a-morwe,' Quod the Marchant, 'and so doon oother mo That wedded been.'"

The disdain for learning attributed to the South today is a fiction invented by those eager to show a difference between those horrible slaveowners and their identically poor kinfolk up North. This even extends to the contraction, "ain't", once used in proper English as the compact of "am not".

Any outrage today at seeing this example above is shockingly misplaced by comparison to the putative worship attending "Ebonics" and all other "urban" slang. I suggest that it would be eagerly included in modern, diluted "language arts" classes if it had been invented by either a teacher's union or, er, elsewhere.

Coney enjoys actual meaning more than factoids, but might nonetheless enjoy this list.

• When kids stay home for a year and can't make friends

• Thing about this is, in better world, some community group would seize the list and be reaching out to help the kids instead of doing Tom Cruise Pre-crime with the data.

• Rube Goldberg.

• From Mel, another list.

• One order, without, please.

• Look at me

Some animals are more equal than others:

https://mobile.twitter.com/SallyMayweather/status/1329439450284388354

Rod Dreher points out that Trump doesn't have a second-term agenda, which is true.

But GHWB didn't have one either

But GHWB didn't have one either ~ Crid at November 19, 2020 12:10 PM

Few presidents do. The excitement of the "change" they represented from the prior administration has worn off. The challenger usually represents "change" and "transformation."

In the case of GHWB, his first term was sold as a third Reagan term, but veered strongly from Reagan-esque economic principles. So, selling a second term for a president who had never sold a first term to the voters proved difficult.

Mostly, their intent in their second terms is to complete any unfinished items from their first terms and to sit back and enjoy whatever the first-term agenda has created; and to cement their legacies.

Mid-terms often turn against sitting presidents as the dissatisfied voters are motivated to go to the polls more so than the satisfied voters, so the ability to implement an agenda usually slows by midway through the first term.

The thirsty Pope:

https://mobile.twitter.com/LunarArchivist/status/1328201517069983744

When I was 3, we were snowed-in for about 2 months on our ranch and my mother taught me to read.
Today, I’d probably be untaught and she’d be investigated for child abuse.

I want—

1. To hear more about growing up on a ranch.

2. To hear Raddy complaining (in sympathy with his beloved Trump Administration) about how Hugo Chavez stole the 2020 election.

Lots of daddy issues in the replies:

https://twitter.com/AP_Planner/status/1329130315697229834

If you're 50+, just watch the video.