03.16.11
The wart on the tip of Malaya
Strikes again.
Singapore and other countries not at all like the United States, from the New York Times:
On the most recent Pisa [test], the top-scoring countries were Finland and Singapore in science, Korea and Finland in reading and Singapore and Korea in math. On average, American teenagers came in 15th in reading and 19th in science. American students placed 27th in math. Only 2 percent of American students scored at the highest proficiency level, compared with 8 percent in Korea and 5 percent in Finland.
And what science is Singapore or Finland or South Korea, even in 2011, known for?
[Sound of crickets]
So, yeah, they do their fractions great in Singapore, as Tom Friedman has told us. And their beggars and homeless are less obvious, maybe, then in LA.
But even Pasadena kills it as world class city. Really. There’s no Huntington or Route 66 or Rose Bowl and parade in Singapore. And there’s no view of the mountains.
And we don’t need the US to sell us a multi-billion dollar air force of McDonnell Douglas F-15’s to make the dicks in a token military of no consequence hard.
Your host is getting a serious hate on for Singapore in the news as a meaningful measure of anything other than how to run a place only for the wealthy and vain in a high button zip code, except on an island. And we have orders of magnitude more of that here.
I was raised in a community of teachers at Pine Grove Area High School in the Sixties and Seventies in woodsy Pennsylvania. We didn’t have an F-15 air force.
I’m betting schools in Singapore now aren’t really much better than it was. And I’ll wait for someone to prove me wrong.
F— Singapore and the very very small number of Americans obsessed with it.
Singapore — as it appears in my archives.
If I were President I’d send classified diplomatic memos to all the Singapore chambers of whatever saying this: “Whenever you show up in some news story in the New York Times for any reason, I’m clawing back five F-15’s or refusing the sale of parts to service all of your fleet until you have none or just airframes that won’t fly.”
Dick Destiny » The Empire’s Dog Feces: US Arms sales explode, wow, big news said,
June 16, 2011 at 11:35 am
[…] Technically, there’s a small third class, too. Really small countries with lots and lots of money and with no reason to have massive US arms shipments except as shiny trinkets. Like Singapore — the famous wart on the tip of Malaya. […]