southeast asians and mount rushmore

(Joshua Masayoshi Huff)


...not necessarily together. The BBC has an interesting piece on why Southeast Asians in America (particularly Indians) are so good at spelling bees. Namely, they have parents who are willing to help them study (even taking off work to do so!) and that they are smart kids. The lure of getting college scholarships through these things are big too.

But is it also because American kids are just lazy and don't care? I mean, it's like America being terrible at basketball on a world scale. Yeah, it's our game and yeah we should win it, but we've just become so blase about everything that it doesn't matter.

I mean, essentially, this article goes for why Americans suck at everything: dissolution of families, lack of work ethic (laziness), and being really, really jaded. It is less of a "why they're good" and more of a "why we're terrible"

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In Calculus class, my mind started wandering (between checking the Guardian for the latest scores in the France-Italy and Holland-Romania games today) and I saw the Guardian's banner, which features Mt. Rushmore (this may just be in the states).




I mean, if the US government hadn't worked on this, would it be considered anything other than a tourist trap, like the world's largest twine ball?









I mean, seriously--it's the faces of our presidents cut into the side of a rock. It's absolutely absurd. The only people you'd expect to do things like this are absolute nutcases and governments. We spent billions of dollars cutting faces of past presidents into a rock for people to go and look at and say "Wow. Yup, that's them, alright."

I mean, there's no other reason to visit the Dakotas, right? Should we just put really hackneyed, nutzo homages to America in every boring state in the Union?

And does it get any better than building it on land that the US stole from the Indians? I mean, building a memorial to oneself on lands illegally and wrongly annexed. Sure, most of America was taken illegally, but this is kind of ridiculous.