Questions: are these real? Are they legal? Can I use them to defend myself from neighbors’ dogs that ILLEGALLY run around in public areas unleashed?

As I always said, the supporters of the academic boycott of Israel have zero interest in or understanding of the region. They care about what happens in Israel / Palestine just as much as the general American public cares about Benghazi. For the most part, academic limit themselves to voicing the “bad, mean, evil Israel” point of view in a half-hearted and listless way as a means of confirming their academic identity. The content of this position is of zero interest to them.

This completely impotent and blabby response to Jonathan Marks’ intelligent and detailed discussion of the boycott I linked to above proves the point even further.

What is this, the day when I keep being proven right about everything?

First there was some completely idiotic study that said students didn’t learn to think critically in college. Everybody talked about this stupid study because, apparently, people who criticize the analytical skills of others are incapable of realizing the simple truth that critical thinking cannot be quantified.

Now there is a competing study that says students do learn to think critically in college. Since this claim is as unprovable as the competing one, the study is just as worthless. Still, the debate rages on.

It is hilarious that people are still debating whether college is useful. It’s like they are collectively stuck in the reality of 30 years ago and are stupidly repeating the mantras that worked then. It is really cute, for instance, to see how often some particularly clueless person is repeating the adage of “Not everybody needs to go to college, of course. Some people can just start businesses right out of high school.” This statement is as outdated as shoulder pads in women’s business suits, yet many people are passionately devoted to it.

Given that today’s high school graduates overwhelmingly

– don’t know how to attach a file to an email;

– have no idea how to organize business correspondence;

– have never seen Microsoft Excel;

– do not speak any foreign language;

– are not sure what countries border the US;

– believe, at best, that “save the file with the .rtf extension” means “write the letters rtf in the file’s name.” At worst, they just refuse to do the assignment altogether because the instructions confuse them;

– cannot format a simple Word document;

– have the communication skills and the emotional maturity level of petulant kindergartners;

– think that the language and format of text messaging are appropriate in all contexts;

– can’t spell worth a damn;

– can barely focus on a single task for more than five minutes;

– believe that it is a duty of everybody older than them to adopt them emotionally on the spot;

– and so on and so forth*,

I have to ask, what kind of businesses will they be opening with this impressive skill set?

The world has changed in the past 30 years and, in case nobody noticed, there is no employment left for people who can only provide manual labor. We are moving to the kind of society where at least one college degree will be needed to have a semi-decent job. Since the secondary education is not doing its job and parents like to infantilize their children to impossible degrees, this moment will be here sooner. It would have arrived either way (because of the technological revolution) but the lousy quality of secondary education makes it happen much sooner.

* Yes, I know you are not like this, otherwise you would not be reading this blog. Even though you have managed to become a very special and highly literate young person (and kudos to you), the sad truth is that the secondary education system and the fashionable parenting strategies do not prepare today’s young people to negotiate the job market successfully at the age of 18.

As my friend Javier always says, “it’s hard to be so perfect all the time.” See who was right when she said that the voters don’t care about either Benghazi or the IRS-Tea Party scandal:

According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president’s approval rating was at 51% in CNN’s last poll, which was conducted in early April.

“That two-point difference is well within the poll’s sampling error, so it is a mistake to characterize it as a gain for the president,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Nonetheless, an approval rating that has not dropped and remains over 50% will probably be taken as good news by Democrats after the events of the last week.”

We can disagree on whether the voters should care, but the indisputable reality is that they don’t. As I said from the start.

Contrary to popular opinion, the autistics’ unsociability and incapacity to notice non-verbal clues don’t necessarily make them bad judges of either societal trends or individual people. Here is an example. Once, an administrator was being hired at my university and everybody attended introductory meetings with him.

“Well, he might be a tough administrator,” people agreed afterwards, “but at least he is completely honest and open about everything. You can just see that he is incapable of holding back his opinions.”

I was the only person in the entire group who disagreed.

“No,” I said, “this is a very insincere and fake person. When somebody repeats the words “honesty” and “openness” so many times in one encounter, this must mean he is conscious of possessing neither characteristic.”

Everybody stared at me with a barely concealed exasperation reserved for the deeply unsociable who pretend to understand how the “normal” humans function.

Years passed and the new administrator turned out to be the most dishonest and fake person most of us had ever seen. His capacity for lying and scheming was unparalleled. It turned out I had been completely right about him from the start for the simple reason that I never paid attention to the fake body language and facial expressions meant to convey honesty (and that sociopathic personalities know very well how to imitate) and concentrated only on the words.

The greatest mistake people make when analyzing others is believing that everybody has to be exactly like oneself and attributing one’s own beliefs to everybody else. If I care deeply about Benghazi, then everybody else surely must too, many people say to themselves. This is a mistake which an autistic, a person whose central life experience is that of being different, is a lot less likely to make.