The Circle of Cognitive Dissonance

High School graduates are not college-ready!

You must raise standards — hold them to a rigorous standard and they will be college-ready.

So you raise the standards. Many fail — because despite myriad interventions and creativity on the part of the educator, they just couldn’t or wouldn’t reach the standard.

Statistics fall! If graduation rates drop and not enough students pass the state-wides…. it’s catastrophic.

So you spoon-feed them in order to pad the stats. Coddle them, chase them around with support, call home, stay long after, provide all the support they need. And they squeak by with a 67 or a 70 on the state-wides….

….and get to college. Where nobody will spoon-feed them, nobody will coddle them, nobody will chase them around with support, call home or stay long after to provide the support they have been programmed to need. So they drop out of college, woefully unprepared,

High School graduates are not college-ready!

You must raise standards…..

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Extraordinary

One can’t help but marvel at a society who could be made to care about the affairs of a bicycle rider who took drugs and a football player who created an imaginary dead girlfriend.

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U.S.S. Quotient

I would like to postulate that a civilization begins its rapid decline when it reaches its Useless Sacks of Shit Quotient (USS Quotient for short). I lack the data offhand, but I would bet that a civilization begins its rapid decline when the public figures and elected policy makers reach a point where they are more concerned with oneupmanship of each other than actually serving the needs of the public. The public, docile and baffled by the spectacle comply in bewilderment as these public servants enrich themselves while sparring with each other.The public can’t really do anything else. Most have been trained to watch slack-jawed as the flashing distractions play loudly. The few who are wise are rendered impotent by the elaborate sucking vortex created by the Useless Sacks of Shit as they spin around each other. As the Useless Sacks of Shit reach critical mass they fail miserably at their task of serving the public and the civilization rides the log flume of decline into the annals of history. Has the U.S. reached the USS Quotient yet?

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Sports Illustrated, after being fooled into believing Manti...

Sports Illustrated, after being fooled into believing Manti T’eo’s girlfriend existed, reveals the cover of this year’s swimsuit edition.

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Over. Easy.

So, I was just in my kitchen, talking to an egg. The egg was sad. I said, “why are you sad, egg?” It replied, “I don’t know what to use as a profile pic for my Twitter account. Everyone will just think I just wasn’t creative enough.”

So I cracked it open, scrambled it, and fried it.

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Intervals of ∞

When I was smaller than I am now I fleetingly received a message that all that will happen, all that has happened, and all that is happening will happen, has happened, and is happening at the same time.

I looked to some distant future where I was an adult and for some reason I was a dark-haired, besuited man like some character in a black-and-white movie. That was an adult. Young and light blond I knew I would never look like that grayscale father from My Three Sons, but that was my chosen archetype for adulthood.

I am wondering in one of my memory-rooms… the images of Holland Street, the alcove on West Street, the Living Room at 103 Madison Avenue and I’m wondering what will life be like when I’m a grown-up?

This thought comes to me, clear as any I’ve ever had and more vivid then any memory that there is no use waiting or wanting for it will come, it is, and if you blink your eye you are there so much as you are here.

Here is there, there is here, and I can hear you there in the middle of their living room while they’re watching TV and smoking cigarettes. Eyes burn from the smoke as I crawl on the floor exploring an unexplorable continuum.

And here I am years removed but never left… skin, muscle, bone, fat, encircling like the rings of an old cut-open tree. I am the Russian doll and somewhere I’m there while I’m here.

And while the line of this time has unfolded I’ve been drawn back to that thought… I remember it more now… somewhere between the imaginary boundary between the Living Room and the Dining Room at 103 Madison Avenue looking toward the smoky glow of the kitchen… the sound of a soap opera on the little TV that I can barely see through the smoke rings and a fresh perm.

So whenever I find myself waiting for something… I still wait. But I remind myself that there really is no wait. Nothing waits except waiting and waiting isn’t real. The weight of waiting hangs on this bag of matter, giving it mass, density, but briefly I break free…

Light as light and as fast. Speed of light. Not a speed at all. Unchanging. Defying explanation. If you run toward a ray of light at 1000 Miles Per Second and the light is coming toward you at its speed of 183,000 miles per second… no matter how fast from or away from it… it’s still the same. Defies wait. Defies weight. Light as light.

Intervals of infinity free

Contemplating what will happen,

What will be.

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I think that someecards were funnier back before any ignorant...

I think that someecards were funnier back before any ignorant a-hole could use one to make a turd-juggling political statement.



Via someecards

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