Gosh, this is so fucking dumb, I can’t believe it:

The inability of too many Americans to learn or speak anything but English constitutes a foreign language “emergency” that could end up harming the economy and impairing U.S. foreign policy, according to a survey.

Only 20.7 percent of American adults can speak a foreign language — compared with 66 percent of all European adults who know more than one language.

I’m a foreign language speaker and a multilingual person but this article makes me angry because of its sheer dumbness. The only language those 80% of monolingual Americans speak just happens to be the current language of international communication. You don’t fucking need to speak anything else if you happen to be an English-speaker. The whole world is busy learning English. 

I’m all for learning foreign languages – obviously! – but I detest these panicky, link-baiting titles. Emergency! The end of the world! The Dutch are desperate to learn English, which we already fucking speak! Let’s all collapse in outrage. 

I’m also very much over this idiotic trend of wailing about how everything is SOOOOO superior in Europe. This has been going on for centuries, it’s tired and boring. Some things are better here, some there, and some others, elsewhere. Let’s stop with the dumb Europe-worship already.

The publishing house where one of my edited collections will come out has outsourced its editing work to India. I’m glad that somebody in India will have a job but I’m not happy that these jobs are being shipped out. It’s not a blue-collar job, obviously, so people who don’t understand why white-collar folks should worry about globalization are idiots.

My testimony was also part of this proceeding aimed at jostling the IL Republicans into giving us a budget.

An eerily true description of Russian-speaking parents. 

A completely deranged new system of student evals

 It’s not surprising that community college profs are horrified with the idea of the UBI while ultra-rich businessmen applaud it. Consider this as you make up your mind. 

Related: video games are the equivalent of jobs for the young. 

A beautiful and touching post by somebody who was brave enough to find his own path. 

Why, why, why is it that the environmentalist message is so often delivered by such insufferable, smug assholes? I’m starting to think these folks are on the payroll of oil corporations. 

The prof who raped a disabled man will go free. I see a sexist double standard in this. 

The making of the Muslim world by Kenan Malik.

Goodthink for teens. Remember the discussion we had about transcriptless college admissions? This is part of the same trend. The goal is to produce future business leaders who will know how to mimic the pathetic vocabulary of social justice to fleece people even more easily. 

While everybody is celebrating Pauline Porizkova’s inane letter, somebody is pouting because the letter stole her right to see herself as a victim. Remember, the worst thing you can do to a first-world person is tell them they are less pitiful than somebody else somewhere on the planet. 

This is what happens when people start to use the word “racist” instead of “something I don’t particularly enjoy or find useful.” Now an effort by a very rich chef to sell overpriced restaurant meals is positioned as a fight against racism. 

This is what McGuigan has termed “cool capitalism.” The idea is to get people to spend as much as possible by positioning the spending as part of a virtuous, cool, caring and progressive lifestyle. Help the suffering Mexicans by buying a $100 dinner! No? What are you, a racist?

Hey, people, look what a reader sent in:

Rao postulates three groups in any organization: the Clueless, the Losers, and the Sociopaths. The Clueless mistakenly believe that the organization is actually supposed to do whatever it pretends to be for: selling widgets, saving endangered herons, or educating school-children, for instance. They are dedicated to this mission and work hard, and creatively, to further it. The Losers have a job because they need a paycheck; their motivation is to make work reasonably pleasant in exchange for minimal effort. The Sociopaths recognize the reality that the organization is just the setting for a power game played among themselves.

I’m a total Loser in this classification. I’d be glad to be somebody else but, unfortunately, my institution doesn’t have a mission I can support. Plus, my individual mission is at odds with that of the institution, as I only recently started to realize. 

Did you, folks, hear how Trump humiliated the congressional Republicans by berating them for passing the “very cruel” AHCA? And the poor dumb buggers only voted for it to support him. 

Where did all the dandelions go all of a sudden? Are they no longer in season or whatever? I have a child here who loves to pick dandelions and accepts nothing instead. 

She also loves to watch the bunnies we have in the back yard. The only problem is that when a bunny runs away, she wants me to pick her up and chase after it. Which is not very realistic. 

And a few hours after signaling my willingness, I already have my first review request. 

Moral of the story: it doesn’t hurt to ask. 

The doctor’s office just asked me what gender I identify with. Weird.