Credit: New York Times, October 23, 2023
The wealth effect is even more evident when one takes into account that poorer students are less likely to take the SAT test. The New York Times article points this out as well.
I’m guessing that my parents’ income rank was in the top 30-40% nationwide when I took my first SAT test 55 years ago. They had me take the test three times; unfortunately, since my parents did not get richer, my test scores did not significantly improve.
Read 2 comments and add yours
Read other posts in News and Comment, One-Foot Putts No credit to myself, but I have read so much about the geopolitical origins of Palestine, Israel and Gaza in the past few days, thanks to accessible and even-handed articles in Wikipedia, that my prior ignorance of the many factors leading to the present war is almost shameful.
While I chide myself for not having more fully researched the history of Palestine, I also take issue with the tens of millions of Americans — if not the majority of us — who offer our knee-jerk support for the state of Israel along with our hand-wringing sympathy for Palestinian refugees, and then leave it at that, as if there is nothing else to be said.
No discussion about Israel and Palestinian Arabs ever seems to get very far in the U.S. without devolving into shouting matches. Criticism of Israeli policies or defense actions is a political and social third rail in this country, almost approaching the status of banned speech, never mind our First Amendment. Expressions of support for the human rights of displaced Palestinians must necessarily begin with the phrase, “Of course we reject Hamas and Hezbollah and terrorist acts.” But even that prefatory remark does little to open ears.
Protestors for each “side” in this conflict have been gathering in many cities and college campuses to air their respective viewpoints. Those supporting the cause of Palestinians are at a disadvantage in the public eye, because support for Palestinian human rights has been successfully re-cast, by Israeli hard-liners, as opposing the existence of Israel. And where do you go from there, when you have the Holocaust as your trump card.
• • •
To be somewhat fair to myself, it’s not like I hadn’t done any reading on the Middle East before now. A decade or so ago, when our attention was focused on Iraq, I read Quataert’s “
The fact that these articles felt like unfamiliar, untold stories to me is because U.S media covers Israel — and the U.S. government handles Israel — as if it were our 51st state; whereas Arab Muslims are cast as pariahs if not terrorists-in-waiting. The information and intonation imbalance is striking.
One thing I will say, without malice to my Brit friends, but Sirs, your early 20th-century Empire did its ignorant best to bollox up the world big time, on each and every continent you stepped foot on. The human toll of your arrogance may very well outlast that of our own. Thank God the U.S. does not (usually) combine such lofty ambitions as yours with such colossal stupidity.
Read 3 comments and add yours
Read other posts in News and Comment 
Last year, I posted an editorial cartoon about Melania Trump cashing in on the dubious and now quickly-fading NFT fad. To refresh your memory, NFTs are to actual art what cryptocurrency is to real money — a few hundred bits of computer memory, backed by no authority whatsoever, which supposedly denotes ownership of an item of value. You can read about how NFTs are supposed to work, and why they exist, here.
But the point of this post is not that NFTs are exploited by savvy grifters like Melania, which they certainly are; rather, it is that NFTs reveal just how lazy such grifters are, laziness being the essential quality that defines people like the Trumps. Donald J. and Melania and Don and Eric and Ivanka — they all have trained themselves to look for the lowest-hanging, most-readily-dropped fruits to gather into their bottomless ego-baskets. NFTs were practically designed for people like the Trumps. Whom I wish were rarer.
As a point of evidence, here is one of Melania Trump’s NFTs, titled Melania’s Vision and touted thus by the so-called NFT “broker” that offered it:
Melania Trump’s personal journey has been enlightening; from Slovenia through Europe and into the United States of America — including as First Lady. The beauty and hardships of individuals, majestic landscapes and profound architecture have entered her lens and remain in her heart. Marc-Antoine Coulon’s breathtaking watercolor embodies Melania Trump’s cobalt blue eyes, providing the collector with an amulet to inspire. Melania’s Vision provides the collector with strength and hope.
I’ll give you a moment to catch a fresh breath after that inspirational floe of rotten algae.
[Inhale through your nose, draw the breath into your belly… hold the breath a moment… now exhale slowly through your mouth… it’s okay if you make a soft, cleansing sound.]
According to the NFT trading site OpenSea, this digital rendition of Melania’s eyes is going for 0.o2 Ethereum (the second-most-popular cryptocurrency) or $38.o6.
May I venture that $38.o6 is pretty generous for this piece of flotsam. One needn’t look very closely to see that this image signed by PERSON WHOSE SIGNATURE HAS DENSE VERTICAL STROKES JUST LIKE DONALD’S is less an original watercolor than a Photoshop creation. Melania’s right eye is an obvious digital mirror image of the left, or vice versa. The computer-artist simply did a cut-and-paste-and-flip. Only Melania’s washy eyebrow strokes are non-mirror-image.
Not that time-to-create is the essence of art, but I genuinely doubt that Melania’s Vision took more than 20 minutes to produce. Graphic artists, as I once hoped to be, learn to do things super-quickly because they are paid so little. The majority of the time spent on this work no doubt took place on the upper floors of Trump Tower, discussing the best way the Trump grift family could make a buck off it. They could care less that Melania’s right eye was a mirror-image, down to the smallest eyelash detail, of her left eye.
To them, it’s just another part of the unreality show that the Trumps star in.
Half of Americans want this guy, and his family, to rule this country again. If only I could make an NFT of my head-slap, but it may not matter. Americans vote for people of their class these days: Trump the Grifter, along with his Fagin Family, has somehow convinced a multitude that he’s one of them. This doesn’t speak well of the multitude.
As to the other half of America… well, there’s my market. If I want to make a difference, I had better start perfecting my head-slap and hire a graphic artist who works cheap but markets well.