Lancaster, TX schoolkids can’t remember anything they’ve learned for more than three weeks — according to the school system’s superintendent.

Just how clueless can these people be? Every time I think they’ve hit some kind of plateau, it’s down into the abyss once more.

Downloading software is a lot more complicated than it should be.

The Washington Post kicks off the new theory: that the federal government’s Hurricane Katrina response was equivalent to the 1993 attack on the cult compound in Waco.

The installation of iTunes is even more trouble than I originally thought.

Apple’s Installer leaves something to be desired.

TV meta-pundit John Loftus appears even more arrogant than I’d thought. Which is saying something.

Another deceptive direct-mail ad has arrived.

Inept attempts at deception to get people to open junk mail

Airline crews need silence to do their work safely, it seems. Uh-oh.

Local TV news stirs the pot of Random Fear. With video.

BBC election coverage includes baffling, pointless, and crude satire of George Bush.

Annoying, crude anti-male sexism still appears to be a growing trend. This time, it's courtesy of Victoria's Secret.

Five sites blocked in January are now available at Panera, but seven that were available in January are now blocked. Two of the newly-unblocked sites are ones that I thought made sense to have blocked; only one of the newly-blocked sites even makes the least bit of sense.

Attempting to buy things online is unnecessarily frustrating.

An article in the Post about the U.S. ‘trade deficit’ is utterly baffling.

A Dr. Pepper ad, ‘Nanny 911’ on Fox TV, and bratty kids. No real conclusion, just some observations.

I've about had it with BoingBoing; my blood pressure can't take it. The Boingers are pretty plugged in and good at finding interesting things, but too, too much of their stuff recently is just mean-spirited leftist whingeing, when it isn't outright leftist threats or racism.

Does no one understand even the rudiments of grammar any more?

Wired magazine's voting-machine receipt from the future (part of its 'found objects from the future' series) has got to be meant as a parody of what such a thing should be.

The Noisy Left are incipient Fascists.

Can we expect the War On Terror to evolve into a war between the EU and the United States, with the terrorists acting as a proxy army for the Europeans? One British MP's comment suggests that he, at least, thinks this way.

Bias or Idiocy or possibly both. A single clause in a Washington Post story offers an insight to the way they think down there.

Non-lethal force, eh? Tell that to Victoria Snelgrove.

The Washington Post calls for the feds to ban guns from airport parking lots in Virginia, presumably so that the airport parking lots can have the same crime rate as other places -- like Washington, DC -- that have strong gun-control laws.

The Washington Post writes:
Kwasi G. Holman, president of the Prince George's County Economic Development Corp., said he thinks African American entrepreneurs think they may have more opportunities in the black majority county. "The county executive places a priority on minority investors participating in the renaissance of the county," Holman said.

Of course, no federal investigation into this racist practice is forthcoming.

People invest in and talk about China as if it's just another 'emerging market' and not a totalitarian communist state. A pair of stories in the same edition of the Washington Post this week shines a light on the doublethink that's behind most discussion of China these days.

DC Activism explained in two sentences

The Washington Post interestingly mischaracterizes a passenger’s encounter with a Metro station manager.

Democrat activists explain to the press how they will attempt to overload GOP websites during the Republican Convention. And this is a good idea how, exactly?

A column in this morning’s Washington Post makes the common mistake of thinking that something must be true if you want it to be badly enough — in this case, that SUVs are the mark of vanity, ego, dilettantism, etc. Debunking statistics included from the Census Bureau.

Self-Service Till Shock Horror in Front Royal

A recent story in the Washington Post about independent toy stores and their battle with the evil Wal-Mart just reinforces the idea that the Post is just going through the motions of journalism these days.

Bill Cosby lets some truth slip out at a recent dinner and points out that the black community deserves at least some of the credit for its own current state; the NAACP, of course, disagrees.

The governor of Maryland admits the obvious, and is of course attacked by the multiculturalists for it.

G. Clotaire Rapaille, everyone’s favorite French semiotician, is now working for the Kerry campaign.

Public-school officials on top of things as usual

An example of why the Left scares me.

John Kerry proposes to force high-schoolers to work for the state for free, and to generously allow high-school graduates to work for the state for half the minimum wage.

It's impossible to summarize this. "D.C. area parents are narcissistic, muttonheaded" is about as close as I can come, I think.

The Left seems awfully tolerant of a certain line of intolerant T-shirts

An interesting juxtaposition of headlines on the front page of today's Washington Post

Unbelievably bad. I mean, I was prepared for the movie to stink, but I never in my wildest dreams would have predicted this.

'Multiculturalism' is really just a code word for 'underdogism', the true guiding principle of the modern Left.

$10 is worth about ten dollars.

The NYT identifies another problem of automated tills: they don't allow employees to tell off customers. That's right, they consider this a problem, not a benefit.

Many Americans are confused about the actual meaning of the word 'decadent'. Their misuse of the word often results in irony.

Nuclear power is selfish and shortsighted? WTF?

'Minority' students in Montgomery County, Maryland score lower than 'white' students, and the answer, of course, is more 'diversity'.

Even the movie reviews in the New York Times are examples of knee-jerk pinkoism

Subsidize Metrorail in a different way, if you want it to work.

Ethnic Identities and the terms we use to describe them get under people's skin. I think this is because a lot of people who are wrapped up in their ethnic identities seem to be ashamed of their backgrounds.

Vignette of something I saw in a parking lot the other day.

Fannie Mae is allowing people to buy tract houses in the suburbs for higher prices, on the reasoning that they're 'transit friendly'. At the same time, they complain that housing prices are too high.

An amusing screed appeared in this Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section as a paid advertisement. I've scanned in and OCR'd the ad, and it's available here.

The 'obesity epidemic' is causing some food companies to promise 'healthier' foods. Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe that these changes will make things any better.

At McDonald's, they don't quite have the hang of the difference between a.m. and p.m.

Recent actions of the UN Security Council have seriously damaged the ability of the United Nations to foster world peace.

The Baltimore Sun has a story about the effects of the false 'Amber Alert' on tuesday in Maryland.

The use of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) for child abductions decreases the usefulness of the system for serious disasters.

Large retailers who do business both online and in the real world are anxious to have online transactions taxed. They only barely veil their purpose.

More things that are making it impossible to not be at least middle-class in America

Anti-smoking health groups reveal their true colors.

Airline employees are actually being trained now to treat their customers like dirt.

Vintage Tino! Tino is not comfortable with constant (and seemingly insincere) public professions of religious faith.

Vintage Tino! McDonald's has discovered new condiments

Vintage Tino! A rather obvious recitation of what's wrong with gun-control laws: criminals by definition don't care whether something is illegal or not.

Vintage Tino! The people who design office interiors don't seem to consider that people work better under natural light.