Free Republic

If you watch TV, you are seeing ads for a new Alien movie (i.e., Alien Covenant). All hail Ridley Scott. This will be the sixth in the franchise. One thing all of the entries have in common is that a ghastly alien emerges, often with pointy teeth and covered in drool, from an egg or an astronaut's chest. This signature sudden, unforgettable moment is the essence of the cinematic covenant. An entirely hostile organism will burst out somewhere when you least expect it and kill you. That has to remind us of the year 1931, when the Education Establishment sprang...

Hundreds of websites still casually assert what is probably the most destructive sophistry in the history of education: The Dolch Sight Words [created in the 1940s] are a list of the 220 most frequently used words in the English language. These sight words make up 50 to 70 percent of any general text….Dolch found that children who can identify a certain core group of words by sight could learn to read and comprehend better. Dolch's sight word lists are still widely used today and highly respected by both teachers and parents. These sight words were designed to be learned and mastered by the third grade....

...So, while my Journal of Ohio Archaeology paper concludes rather pessimistically that there are no documented early American Indian traditions that speak reliably to the original purpose and meaning of the ancient earthworks, there is no reason to believe that traditional stories of contemporary tribes with historic roots in the eastern Woodlands could not include themes and elements that echo, if faintly, traditions of the Hopewell culture. And if that’s conceivable, and I think it is, then it would be worthwhile to look for them... One reason why it’s important to take seriously what American Indians have had to say...

Mayor Mike needs lessons on when to shut his yap -- like when he's galli vanting around the globe and is suddenly moved to bash a key part of the US government, using crude hyperbole. "You look at who we're electing to Congress, to the Senate," the mayor said in Hong Kong last week, days after the midterm elections. "They can't read." He went on: "I'll bet you a bunch of these people don't have passports. We're about to start a trade war with China if we're not careful here, only because nobody knows where China is." Some folks, understandably,...