It’s Hard Out Here For A Non-Pimp

I have not been posting much lately.  Sometimes, the world is a difficult place, and I just want to sit around and watch “Cougar Town” and eat delicious sandwiches.  (Expect a future post on “Cougar Town,” btw.)

Raising my ire most recently has been the general state of affairs RE women in America, what with the whole “Susan G. Komen Foundation defunding Planned Parenthood”-“Contraceptive use is suddenly controversial and must be decided by a panel of old white men”-“Virginia now mandating transvaginal ultrasounds, the rapiest medical procedure of all, for no medical reason whatsoever!” trifecta of headlines.  Oh, and Chris Brown was all up in the Grammys.  Even The Economist is getting on the ol’ misogyny bandwagon, publishing in its most recent issue a cartoon of Christina Fernandes Kirchner – the second-term president of South America’s second-largest economy – as a witch.  Also, Rick Santorum might win the Republican nomination.  WHAT?!  This is the twenty-first century?!  Jesus H. Christ on crutches, y’all.  Ask me again if we still need feminism and I might just go on a violent spree like Madonna did in that one video about feminism that got banned from MTV.  You know, the network that has no problem with Chris Brown.

Ahem.  Anyway.

Also, New York State is doing GREAT things with its education system, implementing all kinds of reforms to help students!  Oh, except by “help students,” I really meant to say “stomp all over teachers across the state.”  The ever-excellent Diane Ravitch has a wonderful piece at the New York Review of Books which describes why their new system is bullshit, not the least because the state’s new math means a teacher can be rated “effective” in all sub-categories and still come out “ineffective” in the end (which leads to termination).  Too bad these educational reformers never bothered to learn some goddamn arithmetic, huh?  But don’t worry, New York wouldn’t ever do anything irresponsible with their data, like randomly release to the press the performance metrics of the 18,000 teachers of the New York City school system… except that they just did!  That’s sure to have some positive outcomes for approximately nobody.

(The reformist love of data handily ignores data showing that the highest job growth is, by and large, in low-skill areas, not in fields requiring a college degree; college for all is the ostensible end goal of all this reform, never mind if it’s realistic or even a good thing.)

Finally, the MPAA continues to suck.

That’s enough of a Saturday-morning rant, I think – now it’s time to go kick some whippersnappers off my lawn and watch more “Cougar Town.”  Peace.