Oklahoma: Filling in the Blank

So why am I even here in Oklahoma? Why do I continue to live in a state that can’t even kill people on purpose cleanly, accept federal dollars to improve the health care provided to its citizens, resist electing the most extreme kind of dumb-asses the country has to offer, etc?

It’s simple: I was born here, my kids live here and if I were to just write the state off… well, the terrorists would win.

It wasn’t but a year or two ago when a co-worker came to me to ask if it wasn’t true that “Obamacare” required that children be injected with a microchip (“the Mark of the Beast”). 70+ percent of the voters approved a statewide referendum to prohibit ‘Sharia Law’ here. As many people that claim, nationally, their belief that the Hebrew God created the world less than 10,000 years ago, I’d bet that almost twice as many Oklahomans believe the same. If a plurality of my statesmen aren’t home-schoolers that are ‘hooked on phonics’, they wish they had the patience/resources to be.

Oklahoma’s people are largely an ignorant and fearful folk: they fear negroes (especially the President), non-European immigrants, change, secular anything,  books, the commie United Nations, most new ideas and the Big Scary World.  Believe me, I know about Oklahoma. I was born here, grew up here and stayed here.

Believe me: it was not always this FUCKING STUPID A PLACE TO LIVE.   No, the Dark Flame of Ignorance has been carefully tended and stoked to make Oklahoma a Beacon of Idiocy:

• Governor Mary Frick’n Fallin, the adulterous darling of the Tea Party, has been paid to oppose damned near everything that could make things better for this state while her spoiled brat daughter openly mocks Native Americans
• Senator James Mountain Inhofe, who has for years been a global laughing-stock over his conspiratorial thinking on human sexuality, climate change and the dang-nabbed 20th Century in general
• The numb-skull state representative that put a 10 Commandments monument on the grounds of the capitol but couldn’t get the spelling right
• Another cretin on the state payroll that campaigned against using human fetuses in food products
• The list goes on and on!

So why am I still living in Oklahoma?

Some amazing things have happened here.
I have fond memories of ‘liquor by the wink’.
Once upon a time, we had the highest per capita membership in the Communist Party in the nation.
Cannabis was once the number one cash crop.
The musicians are amazing here.
The state bird, the scissor-tail flycatcher, is cool.
Gas prices are low.
Maybe I’m too lazy to move and if I did only the Crazies would be left!

Fuck Governor Fallin and all her kind.
Fuck the followers of Oral Roberts and his fellow travellers.
Fuck the Koch Brothers and their veinal scheming.
Fuck all the manipulators of well-meaning Okies! Their hearts are pure, but —

I’m staying here to fill in the blank, the blank that they told me to erase and write something else in (but I won’t!).
I’m staying here to remind them of every time they are so terribly wrong that they pretend like they weren’t.
I’m the fly that stays clear of their patent medicine ointment.
I’m no Tom Joad, but for crying out loud, if people like me left this state, what would be left besides the easily led?
I am an Oklahoman, and I’m  staying here whether they like it or not: I want to rub them the wrong way.

Maybe I’m staying just to annoy the rest of ‘us’… because ‘we’ need to be annoyed.
What they’ve done to us shouldn’t be forgiven or forgotten or excused.
Those bastards did it for money and power and greed, straight up.
I wanna be here to watch the payback, if it ever comes.

 

 

Dead Parrots and Southern Fried Boneheads

Maine ‘Mystery Beast’ could be a ‘Chimichanga’! Run for your lives!

The United States and five other world powers announced a landmark accord Sunday morning that would temporarily freeze Iran’s nuclear program and lay the foundation for a more sweeping agreement. Now, the hard part: the Obama administration must convince U.S. lawmakers to back the plan. Let the games begin!

According to the Department of Defense’s Military Sexual Assault Report for 2012, an estimated 26,000 members of the United States military were sexually assaulted in that year.  Of those sexual assaults, 53 percent (approximately 14,000 in 2012) were attacks on men.

Monty Python adds four dates after their reunion show sells out in 43.5 seconds.

‘How does a plant make their food? Do they use a microwave?’: The failure of science education in the United States.

Southern fried boneheads have been arrested in connection with a fire that destroyed the LeBeau Plantation house in St. Bernard Parish. The men were apparently looking for ghosts at the mansion, which has long been the subject of ghost stories in St. Bernard. When no ghosts emerged, the group set the mansion on fire. Drugs and alcohol were involved, along with just being a bunch of dumbasses.

An Ex-Cop’s Guide to Not Getting Arrested. Rule #1: stay invisible. And don’t burn buildings down. Sheesh!

From Dangerous Minds: ‘EEFING’: CAN YOU HANDLE HILLBILLY BEATBOXING? I knew I hadn’t just imagined this!

Your Brain on Poverty: Why Poor People Seem to Make Bad Decisions. Could this explain why the poorest states keep voting for the GOP/Tea Party candidates, thus making things ever worse for themselves?

A British academic believes she has identified the precise spot of the elusive Hanging Gardens of Babylon… only it wasn’t exactly in Babylon.

More on Public Transportation in Tulsa

I found an interesting discussion at Stack Exchange on public transit bus efficiency. An analysis of the average  BTUs/passenger-mile figures for U.S. cities shows:

• Cars: 3,437 BTUs/passenger-mile
• Buses: 4,348 BTUs/passenger-mile

This is aggregate data for all buses in all cities in operation, with some cities doing better than the average, others considerably worse. Passenger-miles are a summation of (passenger_n * miles_n) for all passengers (1 passenger mile = 1 passenger travelling 1 mile, 2 passengers travelling 0.5 miles, etc).

The state of Oklahoma shows something over 5,500 BTU/passenger mile for buses, reflecting the outcome of running empty buses on routes at times of low ridership. Running ‘behemoth buses’ at any time other than high-load times is obviously a complete waste of money. Smaller, more flexible vehicle options (such as jitneys) would address this problem while cutting costs and improving service.

Considering that the busses used by Tulsa Transit carry sticker prices somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 each, maybe its time Tulsa Transit, INCOG and the powers that be get their heads together and come up with a transit plan that makes more sense than just throwing more ‘behemoth buses’ at the problem? I mean, if they really want a sustainable, working public transportation system. That IS what they say they want, isn’t it?

It’s probably good GM’s gas-guzzling “Leisure-Mobile” never got made, or Tulsa Transit would want to run it.

Mr. Cause, meet Mr. Effect

The movie we’ve all been waiting for! “Hell No!”, the sensible horror movie.

Right out of “Creepshow“: Russian team recovered a half-tonne chunk of the space rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk earlier this year, but they broke it.

What fact do you accept intellectually, but still feels “wrong” to you? It’s quite a discussion over at Reddit.

A herpes drug can make people with renal failure insist they are dead – a condition called Cotard’s syndrome – and may provide insights into consciousness.

Here’s what the fox really says, Ylvis.

Connecticut College students and a professor of neuroscience have found “America’s favorite cookie” is just as addictive as cocaine – and just like most humans, rats go for the middle first.

Donkey Baseball (which is, as the name implies, baseball played while riding on donkeys) became a popular fad in the 1930s. In 1934, William Beck became the first fatality for the fledgling sport.

How the Bible and YouTube are fueling the next frontier of password cracking.

A drug similar to ketamine has been shown to work as an antidepressant, without the psychosis-like side effects associated with the party drug.

Billionaire businessman Richard Branson last week spoke on CNN against the ‘War on Drugs’, labeling it “an abject failure”. Speaking in purely business terms, Branson said that if he “had a company that had failed for 60 years I would have closed it down 59 years ago”.

Q: How many cops does it take to throw a suspect down a flight of stairs? A: None; he tripped. More police-state fun! 

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” -Mark Twain

Besides the train-wreck the GOP and their fellow travelers are causing, the U.S. really doesn’t have a debt crisis. What we do have is a crazy crisis!

More than half of low-wage workers employed by U.S. fast-food restaurants rely on public assistance to get by, possibly due to laughably low wages.

So, let me get this straight: you voted for werewolves to dismantle the government and now you can’t get any help? SD ranchers demand to know “Where’s that gubbermint we voted against?”. Pardon my shocking lack of sympathy.

Here’s the plotting of the “Putz Putsch” conspirators, caught on video. Shipping all those teabagger pukes to Gitmo is better than they deserve.

Assad, Azathoth and what have you

A gargoyle on a historic 13th Century abbey has caused a social media sensation with its resemblance to the monster from the Alien films. The prosaic explanation is quite prosaic.

The police, an open door, and probable cause: Seven things Maggie Koerth-Baker and Her Husband Learned at 4 am on a Tuesday.

Earth life ‘may have come from Mars’, New research supports an idea that the Red Planet was a better place to kick-start biology billions of years ago than the early Earth was.

Meet Lisa/S, the world’s smallest UAV autopilot! At $230 each, there’s no excuse to not build your own flying kill-bots!

Here’s some good Oklahoma weirdness! Strange monument mysteriously shows up in front of Paseo area restaurant: “In the year of our lord 2012 Creer Pipi claimed this land for Azathoth“!

True to form, the Texas State Board of Education has nominated several well-known creationists to review high school biology textbooks. The battle against Reality continues.

Poverty and the all-consuming fretting that comes with it require so much mental energy that the Poors have little ‘mental bandwidth’ left to devote to other areas of life, according to the findings of an international study published on Thursday.

Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr., who said he handled debris from the 1947 crash of an unidentified flying object near Roswell, N.M., has died at the age of 76.

Beach’s short list of Totalitarian Bizzarreness. I was let down that he didn’t mention Josef Stalin’s round-up of those decadent saxophones.

All that Syria Jazz-

Reporters for Le Monde spent two months clandestinely in the Damascus area alongside Syrian rebels. On the scene during chemical weapons attacks, they bear witness to the use of toxic arms by the government of Bashar al-Assad.

5 Possible Repercussions of a U.S. military Strike on Syria – ABC News

Analysis: Strike on Syria could trigger retaliatory attacks, cyberwar – Reuters

Alleged CW munitions in Syria fired from Iranian Falaq-2 type launchers, from The Rogue Adventurer, and stills of the launch process from Brown Moses Blog.

Loaded:

Firing:

Carbon with a side of Pasta and Beethoven

MIT researchers have developed a lightweight structure whose tiny blocks can be snapped together much like the bricks of a child’s construction toy.

Bucky Fuller thought about much more than just building domes and Dymaxion houses. He had a pretty insightful grasp of the history of things, and was convinced that specialist training and the debt-based economy worked together to limit people’s capacities to really think things through. He blamed the “Great Pirates” of history for screwing us all up.

There’s a new carbon in town! Dubbed carbyne, it is stronger and stiffer than any known material. In fact, carbyne is about two times stronger than graphene and carbon nanotubes, which until now were the strongest materials by some margin.

Reuters reports that Germany’s No.2 utility RWE followed peers by announcing cuts in generating capacity, blaming an expansion of renewable energy that has pushed many gas and coal-fired plants into losses. RWE said it would take offline 3,100 megawatts (MW) of power plant capacity in Germany and the Netherlands, about 6 percent of its European total of 52,000 MW.

The Moscow police press service told RIA Novosti that eight “Pastafarians” were detained for “attempting to hold an unsanctioned rally.” Our Russian Pastafarian brothers were holding “pasta processions” in Moscow and St. Petersburg to celebrate the birthday of actor Robert De Niro, who played a character nicknamed “Noodles” in Sergio Leone’s 1984 mafia drama Once Upon A Time In America. Pastafarian militants will be flooding into Russia to respond to this outrage just as soon as we can find some.

Thanks to Bad Astronomy, here’s something you don’t see every day: ‘Ode to Joy’ on theremins in Matryoshka dolls:

We are ‘GO’ for the Tulsa Mini Maker Faire!

(Update: This Saturday, 28 September is the big day. I’ve been nervously watching the weather forecasts and trying to optimize my load-out for the possibility of clouds and/or rain. Since my original plans were for solar, electrical and chemical manipulations of matter, rain is decidedly counter to my plans, so I’m hoping it won’t be happening.  If it’s overcast, maybe I won’t be able to cook hot dogs with the Fresnel spiral solar concentrator, but the electro-etching and stove-top brass making demo can still happen. A full downpour will put a damper on pretty much everything. Keep your fingers crossed!)  

My theme is “Make It: Cheap and Dirty” – or – How to do stuff you shouldn’t be able to do… for next to nothing!”  I’m placing a heavy emphasis on re-use, re-purposing and the “it isn’t junk unless you don’t use it” principle.

I’m going with more an “open play” format than a fixed spiel. Sure, I’ll have some handouts of the how-tos that ran in Steampunk Magazine, some basic “Ohm’s Law” level electronics theory, some link-lists of fun/educational stuff and I’ll have some of my cheap/dirty projects on hand to show how little refinement is required to get usable results. Mostly I’ll be demonstrating simple methods of making-tweaking-hacking things and generally trying to get people used to the idea that tinkering is rewarding! 

My updated agenda:

• Fire up the ‘Eurosealer’ and clothes iron to illustrate plastic fusing techniques to improvise a rain-shelter from plastic grocery bags and drop-cloths (and possibly floatation devices, as required)
• Turn dull, everyday bronze pennies into golden BRASS pennies for the kids (and others), just to break the ice
• Talk about the cheap tools I just can’t live without, the beauty of pawn shops, garage sales and why “cheap” can be “best”
• Give a quick rundown of some of my favorite household chemicals and the amazing things you can do with them (with demos), applied dumpster-diving, constructive cannibalism, why you should never throw away a “wall-wart”, general Q&A and other cheap-simple-dirty topics, tips and tricks
• Etch some printed circuit boards with cheap, simple and surprisingly “green” chemicals, demonstrate electro-cleaning and galvanic etching
• Provide a hands-on soldering tutorial and demo ‘surface mount’ soldering without special tools (you got a hot air gun, toaster oven or electric skillet?)
• Share a couple of really cheap/simple solar concentrator designs (Update: no sun, no point- information only)
• Assure you that you can take on that ‘Wild Blue Project’ you’ve been putting off, extoll on the value of creative failure and the benefits of a ‘Stop Planning and Just Do It, Already!‘ attitude

More than this I cannot say at this time.  If you’ve got any ‘idears’ to add (I’ve got eight hours, 8!) let me know early so I can be prepared!

I’m certain that this will be a whole lot of fun and I hope you’ll all come by to say howdy, and be sure to visit Dana Swift@Swift Science (he explained digital electronics to me the only time it ever stuck, back when I still fit my Star Trek uniform), the Tulsa Garden Railroad Club (my very oldest friends!) and all the other fine presenters at this, the very first Tulsa Mini Maker Faire!

It’s “Whack-a-Mole” Wednesday!

“Anybody who watches Fox News knows that there is an inherent anti-Muslim bias in their reporting and has been for quite some time,” Reza Aslan said on Wednesday. “I don’t actually blame them for it. They’re a commercial enterprise. They know how to sell a product and, frankly, fear sells a product.” Lauren Green’s interview with Aslan set a new low for television interviews, even for Fox News, and Aslan says he feels really bad for her.

National Security Agency director Gen. Keith Alexander was met with jeers and heckling Wednesday at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, and for good reason.

Oklahoma native Bradley Manning faces up to 136 years in prison, despite being cleared of the “aiding the enemy” charges brought against him. The sentencing phase of his trial began today. I say we bust him out!

The Real House Thieves of New Jersey: David Dayen points out the absurdity and hypocrisy of the Obama/Holder Justice Department. Wall Street banksters illegally foreclosed on 244,000 customers for an estimated $48 billion, defrauded mortgage investors, manipulated energy prices, and fraudulently tampered with lending rates at a total cost that may well run into the trillions. How does the Obama/Holder DoJ indictment count reflect the magnitude of criminality? Let’s look at the record.

Indictments for reality TV stars who accused of defrauding banks in order to obtain approximately $2.4 million in loans: 2.

Indictments of bankers who falsified millions of loan documents, defrauded homeowners and investors, evaded local property sales taxes, and committed multiple other frauds large and small: 0.

Sometimes we do see a glimmer of justice: Judge to serve 28 years after making $2 million for sending black children to jail.

Craven senators Max Baucus and Orrin Hatch want to use this one weird trick to shield authors of toxic tax giveaways from the public view.

A new analysis of the writings of mass killers reports they suffer from an intense form of paranoia.

On the occasion of Stanley Kubrick’s 85th birthday, explore the director’s favourite films.

Avondale (AZ) police say they arrested a man Monday afternoon who allegedly started a fire in his bedroom closet because he was trying to rid his room of demons. Haha- demons LIKE fire, you whacko!

Looney Pat Robertson tells viewer with ‘demons’ to ‘burn the house down’ or get exorcism. Haha- demons LIKE fire, you whacko!

Aleppo rebel religious committee forbids ‘colonial’ croissants.

Dog eats paralyzed man’s testicle.

Here’s Boris Karloff’s sherry-infused guacamole recipe, because it’s AWESOME that Frankenstein liked guacamole.

Donald Duck teaches us about family planning, a dozen years before this bizarre ‘abstinence only’ horseshit took hold:

And now for a word from our sponsors!

NASCAR fans attending the 2013 Brickyard 400 races are being greeted by this beer ad spoof on a jumbotron at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The ad was produced by the Marijuana Policy Project and highlights the relative safety of marijuana compared to alcohol by characterizing marijuana as a “new ‘beer’” with “no calories,” “no hangovers,” and “no violence” associated with its use. End times, dogs lying with cats, etc!

Highly creative people often seem weirder than the rest of us. Now researchers know why (or are they just putting on airs?).

Why the last gasp push to “defund” Obamacare? Quite simply: because it’s actually doing some good and that flies in the face of GOP/teabagger doctrine.

This PSA by David Cross and Amber Tamblyn about GOP ‘Gynoticians’ is no laughing matter. GOP politicians setting health-care policy? Terrifying thought!

“New Rose Hotel“, anyone? The problem of assemblers giving variable output isn’t limited to just the software kind: DNA sequence assemblers make mistakes as well, which raises serious safety questions.

Like a strong fem-bot in a starring role? Just watch this weird Kia commercial.

Steve King (R-IA) continues to bloviate about DREAM Act youths being drug mules with “cantaloupe-sized calves”. What’s he looking at minors’ legs for, anyway, the perv?

They’re smart, conniving and work in cahoots. No, not humans this time, I’m talking about bacteria like Myxococcus xanthus. There’s a world going on underground!

Science-based medicine vs. religious scams: “The deaths of children whose parents belong to sects of Christianity that rely on faith healing is an unfortunately common topic in the newspaper. It has been known for years that relying of prayer as a substitute for medical care leads to a shortened life expectancy.”

Here’s a good end to bad rubbish: Gary Bolton has been found guilty of a charge of making an article for use in the course of fraud and one of supplying an article for use in the course of fraud between January 2007 and July last year. His crime? Selling fake “detectors” for explosives, drugs, tobacco, ivory and cash. His devices were widely used at checkpoints in Iraq. Maybe that’s how so many bombers were able to kill so many people? Let’s hope sentencing takes away all his money and requires him to live in areas “protected” by his GT200 detectors, huh? He follows James McCormick to the stripey place for essentially the same offense.

What, no magic rubber bracelets? A federal judge found TV pitchman Kevin Trudeau in contempt of court Friday for failing to pay a multimillion-dollar fine stemming from fraudulent infomercials and ordered him to transfer all of his hidden assets to a court-appointed receiver or risk going to jail. Trudeau made a fortune touting products such as pain-relief adhesive tape and a cancer cure involving coral calcium.

This story has special local resonance after Tulsa’s recent police corruption scandal. In one of those A Scanner Darkly episodes we’ll be seeing more of as time goes on, if the smoke shop owner hadn’t been surveilling himself, he’d probably be facing hard time. Did the informant supply his own crack to plant, or did the police department? Good cops (and we know they have to be the vast majority) have got to hate seeing footage like this:

A Short, Sharp Sunday Morning

I’d been thinking about an Android for my next phone. Now I’m not so sure, since the NSA has already had their way with it. Security-Enhanced Android: NSA Edition.

With the government increasingly protecting corporations instead of people, as with Citizens United, it won’t be long before corporations become more important than people – if they aren’t already. Nicholas Soutter has imagined this world where corporations own everything, including people, in his dystopian novel The Water Thief. Makes me want to go back and re-read “2018AD or The King Kong Blues”, by Sam J. Lundwall (“If you love OPEC, you’ll love the water monopolies!”).

Behold these weird-ass living rocks with guts: colonies of Pyura chilensis, a brainless filter feeding organism found in shallow waters off the coasts of Chile and Peru, resemble squiggly rocks made out of cooked ground beef with nasty guts inside.

The ruins of Calleva (near modern Silchester), preserves the end of the Roman era, holding out against the invading Anglo-Saxons (the early English) for perhaps as much as a century, with its children still going to school to learn Virgil and being told not to wander too far from the walls. Romano-British men and women of Silchester probably complained of the lack of garum and olive oil, no longer being shipped in from the Mediterranean, as they walked to the still-operating coliseum there. They lived through the aftermath of Rome’s abandonment of Britannia in the early fifth century, watching as the light went out across Britain, gradually sinking back from its Iron Age height, forgetting the forging of metals and even how to make functional chimneys. The town was one of the few that wasn’t re-settled and rebuilt, so their story remains in the ruins for us to see. Celebrate or mourn the fall of Rome, but embrace Calleva’s struggle to keep the lights burning as long as it did. (Thanks again, Beach!)

The Zimmerman Verdict

If the prosecution can not close the deal with the jury, the defendant is supposed to go free. Some observations from Jonathan Turley in USA Today- “Why was Zimmerman overcharged?“:

A juror could not simply assume Zimmerman was the aggressor. Zimmerman was largely consistent in his accounts and his account was consistent with some witnesses. After 38 prosecution witnesses, there was nothing more than a call for the jury to assume the worst facts against Zimmerman without any objective piece of evidence. That is the opposite of the standard of a presumption of innocence in a criminal trial.

Even for manslaughter, the jury had to find that Zimmerman intentionally committed an act or acts that caused the death of Martin. The jury instruction on deadly force states in part: “A person is justified in using deadly force if he reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself.” That lesser charge still brings the jury back to the question of who started the fight and how the fight unfolded. The prosecutors never had evidence to answer that question in a reasonably definitive way. The jury had no serious alternative to acquittal. That does not mean that they liked Zimmerman or his actions. It does not even mean that they believed Zimmerman. It means that they could not convict a man based on a presumption of guilt.

Under current law, one can contribute to creating a “reasonable fear” scenario, allowing the use of deadly force, by blunder or even intent. The survivor gets to testify that he was all scared and stuff, the jury has a reasonable doubt and the Zimmerman verdict results.  I don’t much care for laws that make lethal outcomes more, rather than less, likely. Giving lethal arms to fearful weaklings with a sense of empowerment just sets the stage for more tragedies like the Trayvon Martin killing.

Statesmen should be able to explain this to their fearful electorate in ways they can understand, but they are lazy and corrupted, taking checks from decidedly evil groups like ALEC and the like, rubber-stamping their cookie-cutter “model legislation” and cashing out after a few terms.

Over and Under

Yeah, this is just like every game of D&D I ever played… just dripping in blood!

George Dyson has a refreshing view of the Turing Test: “I think the test of a truly intelligent machine is if you really had an intelligent machine, it would not reveal it’s intelligence to us. It would play dumber than it really is.” Refreshing, yet slightly sinister.

How Fox News created a new culture of idiots. Cable news has created an entirely new breed of blowhards — and the style has infected banking and even the arts. Maybe they just aren’t revealing their intelligence to us? </snark>

A French software company reveals an actual Sarcasm Detector. It keeps exploding when they point it in this direction.

Japan’s biggest yakuza organised crime group has printed their own motivational magazine that includes a poetry page and senior gangsters’ fishing diaries, reports said Wednesday. Why should AQAP have all the fun?

How a Syrian activist is crowd-sourcing warnings of SCUD missile launches against civilians in Aleppo and other opposition-held areas. “There is value to doing something, even if that something is imperfect, to counteract feelings of helplessness”.

Advertizing via bone conduction coming to mass-transit near you? “Auditory Hallucinations, Brought to You by [Insert Name Here]“.

I hate it when Oklahoma appears in the news. Trogs like this guy explain why we keep electing the ass-clowns we do.

A NY school board lawyer has been fired for calling a parent a ‘fat c*nt’. Loudly, in public and caught on video.

A Florida doctor hopes that his plan to perform vasectomies before a live audience and also stream the procedures on the Internet will make the world a better place. When will he be touring this state?

Manufacturing Can Help Save the Economy, If We Fix These 6 Gaps. “In a 2009 study of high school graduates around the world, the U.S. ranked 31 in math, 23 in science and 17 in reading. China, by the way, ranked first in all three”. It sounds optimistic, but fixing what’s broke is a good first step.