The density of front lawn signs in our corner of Florida has been less than 1/100th of what it was in Maskachusetts. In fact, it seemed fair to say that an N95 mask is far more popular in Florida than expressing one’s political and social justice beliefs via lawn signs or bumper stickers.
It turns out, however, that our neighbors do celebrate Pride Month in June and signs have appeared on 1 out of 20 front lawns and house facades. Here’s one neighbor, for example:
For the other houses that we regularly pass by, however, the pride signs have all been related to a child graduating from middle school, high school, or college. Examples:
(We were fortunate to meet Ellie, a hard-working young lady who has completed Jupiter High School (run by Palm Beach County) and will soon be a student at Florida State. She did not say anything about identifying as 2SLGBTQQIA+)
Here is a house where Henry and Sean are celebrated for finishing an arts magnet middle school and being admitted to the arts magnet high school, funded by a former MIT board member.
Speaking of Pride, “Miami teen accepted into all 8 Ivy League universities” (Good Morning America):
First-generation Nigerian American Ashley Adirika became one of few prospective students to be accepted into all eight Ivy League universities.
“The tears just started to come out. Like they started to flow out,” she said of her reaction to finding out. “My siblings and I were just really excited, like screaming, jumping around. It was crazy,” she said.
From being a teacher to sitting in the Oval Office, Adirika’s dreams have changed over time, but now she is focused on empowering young women of marginalized identities with her organization, Our Story, Our Worth, which she started as a high school sophomore.
She said she looks forward to learning more about herself, her place in the world and how to “maximize the impact” she has in empowering communities when she starts at Harvard University in the fall.
The recent Miami Beach Senior High School graduate and student government president also credits her time on speech and debate teams with building the confidence to make her voice heard.
She did not attend one of the killer magnet schools in the Miami area, but just a regular neighborhood high school, thus proving American Pravda correct once again: “Surprise: Florida and Texas Excel in Math and Reading Scores” (NYT, 2015).
Readers: What are you doing to complete your celebration of Pride Month?
> What are you doing to complete your celebration of Pride Month?
I tried to transition female mosquitoes to vegetarian male mosquitoes, so far without success. The toxic femininity prevails.
Non-woke mosquitoes?
I’m still buzzing from celebrating Gay Black Father’s Day, the trifecta of pride month + Juneteenth + Father’s Day. Whew!
The lion kingdom probably could have gone to an ivy league school. Anyone with the money could just transfer to an ivy league school after going anywhere else for a year. The mane limitation was paying for it. $25,000/year was a lot of money for tuition in those days. 40 years later, everyone in the news & getting the big jobs for the last 20 years was from MIT, Stanford. No-one from San Jose State amounted to anything. It was surprising how sharp the cutoff was between the top 2 & the rest. You’d think at least 1 genious who wanted to save money by going to Las Positas Community College would have hit a home run.
I think that Google founders had no Ivy background. And Elon Musk can be only tangentially linked to Ivy . And who among rulers of the world came from MIT undegrad?
Wot now, the Google guys were grad students in Stanford’s database group; I even recall using google.stanford.edu for a short while before they went for the brass ring.
Tom, grad students – but one got BS from u of Maryland and another from u of Michigan. Gradschool = trade school, not the same as doing undegrad at prestige Ivy or Stamford. Stanford and Ivys PhD programs accept many accomplished applicants from not so prestigious colleges and Master programs accept almost anyone who pays. My understanding is that lion’s beef is that he went to a state school for undegrad.
Every year, there’s a story about some black student–often an imported black student–who gets into the entire Ivy League. These stories pretty much all run the same way. Having gotten into them all, the student naturally chooses the most rigorous, Harvard, and among the Harvard departments likewise chooses the most rigorous, Mathematics.
I assume that’s what she means by her desire to empower communities.
What are you doing to complete your celebration of Pride Month? Nothing. I still don’t care about Black Lives Matter!
Few hours ago, I packed all my #Pride flags, #Pride banners and #Pride yard signs into their own beautiful rainbow boxes and headed to my local contactless [1] Public Storage for storage. Only realizing that that July, August and the following months are still #Pride months here in Maskachu$etts. So I came back with my #Pride rainbow boxes and tomorrow they are going backup again on my front yard to continue my #Pride celebration for the months to come.
[1] https://www.publicstorage.com/blog/public-storage/public-storage-launches-contactless-move-ins-for-peace-of-mind
Will you have room to put up a flag or two for the Fourth? It just celebrates the founding of the country, so only one day.
@Anonymous, sadly there was no room left for the Red, Blue and White flag. Next year, I will plan accordingly to make sure I have room for 1 American flag on 4th of July.
But the reason why I’m replying to this post isn’t because of 4th of July, it is because just now I got a company wide email from my Big company titled “Requesting Voluntary: Inclusion makes us Stronger” The body of the email has the rainbow colors and all the brainwashing slogans.
See, as I stated above, #Pride is a year long event.
My impression from these photos: “This area of Florida is still mostly sane. How long can they hold out?”
hrc.org wants visibility and inclusivity and all the rest of the -ivities being celebrated at all times, everywhere, and that’s where the first photo’s sign came from.
https://www.hrc.org/in-your-area/florida
I don’t know what to think about all these “Yay! My Kid Managed to Make it Eighth Grade!” signs, though. I think they’re pretty stupid, and somebody in the sign business managed to get that fad started and are now rolling to the bank with 65 foot trailer trucks full of cash. They’re even more obnoxious than the “My Kid is an Honor Roll Student at the Liganbond High School” stickers used to be. Do they recycle them? They’re plastic, for the most part.
Everybody gotta do it or their kids are Officially Stupid, I guess. We never had those when I was growing up and I don’t think people have become much smarter in the interim, so I see them as another kind of “arms race” escalation.
I spent Pride month working, basically, so that I can indirectly pay for organizations like hrc.org. They should be Proud of me.
Here are the Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze Corporate Partners for hrc.org.
https://www.hrc.org/about/corporate-partners
I’ve done business either directly or indirectly with many of them over the past Pride month, paid them to do what they’re supposed to do, and also to support HRC.ORG. The page doesn’t discuss what the difference in terms of $$$ is between the tiers. I also know that Jeff Bezos doesn’t give a Flying Fox about what I think. Why should he?
https://www.hotcars.com/jeff-bezos-yacht-interior/
Yeah, I also don’t get it. It’s like the gender reveal parties, another fad that has gotten out of hand. The signs for kids finishing kindergarten or 8th grade is just funny. In Europe this has not caught on at all, thank god. Everything is a show in America. And it’s never enough. I don’t even remember high school graduation being such a big deal with my parents. We only celebrated when I finished college or when I finished my PhD. My parents weren’t like the Asian father meme either, but it was clear high achievement was a priority.
@D-man: I can see maybe having a private party or celebration for kids who’ve achieved something they worked hard for, but this epidemic of turning ordinary achievement into a row of coroplast signs like they’re running for Comptroller of the Eighth Grade is absolutely “Cabbage Patch Kids” territory. Fortunately for the people printing the signs, in addition to being asinine, this new fad transcends most socioeconomic bounds. Even in my relatively “poor” area of MA everybody wants their neighbors to know that their child is somehow exceptional because they were able to attend school. I see this in part as a counterreaction to the left’s war on meritocracy (hi Larry Lessig!) but I’m no metaphysician.
Which tells you something about how bad it really is. My thoughts here tonight are not entirely clear because it’s been a very long day, but I think it’s very American and also very “doofus.”
When my father graduated from high school and was accepted to a Pretty Darn Good university (in part because he had constructed his own scanning electron microscope) his family celebrated by throwing him a small party and buying him a wristwatch, but no signs were implanted in the lawn to broadcast it.
In a strange sense, it reminds me of this hilarious parody from The Onion, ca. 1996. Or at least, it was just hilarious then and now it’s a little too real:
“Coca-Cola Introduces New 30-Liter Size”
https://www.theonion.com/coca-cola-introduces-new-30-liter-size-1819564066
“…Sociologists see Coke’s plan to manufacture the 30-liter bottle as the logical next step. “It makes sense,” Stanford Professor Edmund Tillerton said. “Americans like big things. Big sky, big cars, big stereo speakers, big dicks and big TV sets. It would follow that we would like big bottles of Coke. We like things to be larger than life, and that’s what the new Coke size is…”
In any case, that’s a good “sanity test” comment to hear and I wish you a good night. America is a very loud, show-off nation in almost every way, and almost regardless of political philosophy in doing so.
Well, there’s nothing wrong with being “loud and proud” for the right things. Fourth of July is coming up and growing up in Florida I have fond memories of big fireworks shows in the stadium after watching the Tampa Bay Rowdies play a soccer match. Neil Diamond “They’re coming to America!” song blasting on full to the explosions. Here in Germany you don’t hear a peep on their holidays , not even on “German Unity” day – which you’d think was an important event to them (they’d just shrug and complain about the solidarity tax to support east Germany, which btw ended last year). They got the nationalism beaten out of them. In good American fashion, with my tax savings I bought a 70 inch flat screen for 500 euros in a fire sale (upgraded from a 43 inch!) and plan on hanging my USA flag on the balcony and doing some BBQ while blasting out “I’m proud to be an American”, “Living in America”, the national anthem and other classics, just to annoy my German neighbors for one day and remind them of the vassal state that they are. It’s also close to July 9th for Argentina’s independence day, so I give the German and Europeans a double whammy of Independence and Freedom and I will play some classic Argentina marching band music (La Marcha de San Lorenzo and Avenida de las Camelias)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvwnu31PG1E
I had a Nigerian guy (with Harward CS degree) in my group doing software development; and he was on the level with other smart guys.
Apparently, there are two tribes in Nigeria (Igbo and… sorry I don’t remember, Edo maybe?) which have reputation for being smart, and they certainly dominate Nigerian tech (including Nigerian spam operations). The average IQ in Nigeria is abysmally low, though, at mere 84. Another interesting tidbit – quite a lot of Igbo people practice Judaism.
Ignoring your bigoted, hate mongering, self-hating opinions.
averros: What’s your source for the Nigeria average IQ? I seem to remember reading that IQ results aren’t comparable between people in writing/reading-oriented societies and those in hunter/gatherer or agricultural societies. Much of the IQ test measures symbol processing, which is not a task at which you’d have a lot of practice if you grew up without a lot of symbols (e.g., letters and numbers or, better yet, Chinese logograms!) that needed to be processed.
I would ignore a country-wide IQ number for Nigeria and look only at Abuja or Lagos and maybe restrict to people who’d had the same number of years of school (i.e., symbol processing) as the comparison group in Asia or North America. Admittedly, this approach is subject to sample bias. Unless there is a massive welfare state providing free apartments, food, health care, smartphone, broadband, etc., it will be primarily the smarter people in a country who are able to thrive in a high-cost city while the below-average folks stick with a traditional rural lifestyle.
If an intelligence test were based on the ability to navigate through an Xbox game, I would fail! Does that mean every 13-year-old in the U.S. is smarter than I am? (please don’t say yes!)
IQ tests are relevant for doing well in Harvard math courses…much same type of abstract thought ..not useful predictor of success in hunting. True that
Not sure about IQ as an artifact of testing, but intelligence is crucial in all types of non-instinctive tasks, be it graduate mathematics, X-Box playing or hunting (the last one for primate humans, not lions). If someone is healthy and can not learn X-Box or hunting skills after applying some effort then it is in fact indicates that 13 year olds and hunter-gatherers are smarter then he/she.
US (and other successful western-style) military had used IQ testing in military specialty assignment and used it as cut-of indicator for acceptance into military, so IQ testing seems to reflect real world intelligence and basic survival skill.
In my view and limited experience, intelligence is almost always is necessary for top-level achievement but is not sufficient: other factors, including luck and enlightenment from God play major role.
perplexed: I think Xbox, drawing and also hunting require intuitive skills.
One could not teach Goedel to play Xbox or the average software engineer to draw a face. Hunting also seems more like tennis.
The highest paid people are often those with moderate IQs but with other skills like sports aptitude, people manipulation and exploitation, lying, artistic skills etc.
Anon, under instincts I meant inherited instincts, not acquired by practice. Anyone intelligent should able to acquire physical skills in his/her body parameters. Tennis is a good one, I learned it in the middle age and beat experienced players, limiting factor being my fitness and physical parameters (could not match Roddick’s serve). Physical skills are too mental one, related to geometric thinking and quick approximation based on your own body experiences, and easily trainable. Best athletes are not brutes but hardworking and smart people (or cheats). Same goes for XBox. Western militaries discovered that it is easier to enhance smart soldier’s perception and reaction by using meds then teaching brutes complex military skills. Similar for hunting. Practice makes it perfect. I have many example of it skill being acquired and perfected by people brought up as text analysts.
@ philg – I got it here (it refers to the original study): https://brainstats.com/en/average-iq
I pretty much agree with perplexed that decent IQ is needed but not sufficient for success in modern society. As for it being an artifact of testing… well, no. It is one of the most strongly heritable traits (0.7-0.8 in adults), on par with height. So, yes, persistent strong genetic difference in IQ between populations is strongly supported by the current understanding of population genetics.
Selection for some traits always results in degradation of traits not selected for, so the real explanation for observed difference could be that in some regions of Africa there is strong selective pressure on something not influenced by reasoning abilities… such as resistance to pathogens.
averros: But resistance to pathogens is entirely determined by intelligence, according to Science. For example, the high-IQ residents of New York and California entirely avoided infection by SARS-CoV-2 by wearing masks and getting vaccinated.
@philg: ROFL 🙂 Love your sense of humor.