Because we do things like this in Texas…
TEENAGE girls in a US city have been banned from showing cleavage in the classroom because it distracts boys from their studies.
More at http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20067405-13762,00.html
Thank goodness. I don’t know how in the world I, nor any other guy in the USA, ever got an education at all without this ban for all of these years…. Removing the distraction of cleavage will completely make boys forget about the girls…
You know… Maybe we should start wrapping all women up head to toe in sheets and require them to wear sunglasses from the age 2 on…. Oh, we better make it black sheets in case it rains, we don’t want a wet sheet contest…
Hey Mr. and Mrs. Tex… What happens when you find out little Bobby isn’t failing Calculus and Physics or even Intro to Woodshop because of some girl’s cleavage… Will you then be willing to look at what you yourself are doing wrong?
FYI, I got this link from a friend from outside of the US. The subject was “Ludicrous” and the body said “gotta love those crazy yanks!”. I have to agree with the crazy and ludicrous part.
   joe
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Hey Joe, I keep telling you: if you’re so ashamed of being a crazy yank, why don’t you renounce your citizenship, move to Venezuela or Australia or where ever and start again? I still haven’t gotten your answer… 🙂
Funny, when I was a teenager, distraction via cleavage was still a wistful future hope (: I remember the boys being far more interested in making fun of what we didn’t have than being ‘distracted’ by what we did…
The message that the girls cleavage is enticing the boys, and that curbing their shameless hussy ways will help the boys with their studies is unbelievably backwards. It must be something about Texas — they seem to garner more than their fair share of attention for asinine lawmaking.
Pam
Fred: Unfortunately family is here. I would very much love to live in Australia though.
Pam: 🙂
@Pam:
what would you expect from the State that gave our current president his big break ?
Joe,
Are you saying that family is the only thing keeping you in the USA? Come on where is that red, whte, & blue pride? I don’t agree with everything that is going on today but no way would I want to leave this great country.
Mike: Before I answer, what specific great things do you propose US has over say England, Canada, Australia, or even some non-English countries like the Netherlands or Italy?
Oh, it’s _Arlington_, Texas. That makes a whole lot more sense.
Try some more sensible part of Texas. No, not Dallas, something more sensible and realistic.
Although I do remember having a conversation with a teacher who expressed straight-out to me the deeply held conviction that we could make schools so much better if only we were allowed to require the kids to pray. I refrained from telling her that the school-board was hardly likely to fund the prayer mats, and merely responded that it didn’t seem to help my “Church of England” school to have prayer and hymns every morning – I still find myself harbouring fantasies of slowly torturing bullies now that I’m bigger than them.
I still think that the best opportunities are here in the USA. We have great freedoms. If you genuinely work hard and try you will achieve some level of success and at least be solid middle class.
Yes there are examples where people will be layed off and they worked hard and you are from Michigan and Michael Moore did portray some of that in Flint but all countries have those problems.
We have the best schools and the best military. We have great hospitals and doctors.
I was stationed in Stuttgart and I do enjoy Europe a lot and I’m not saying anything is wrong with the countries you mentioned but in the end it’s the USA all the way for me.
Alun: LOL on church of England and bullies. 🙂 As for parts of Texas, I am afraid I don’t know the breakout of the areas. Is that section of Texas more conservative or “controlling”?
Mike: I have friends in each of the countries listed and I am pretty confident that they feel quite the same about their countries in terms of working hard, etc. I don’t think we can say that America is necessarily any better than other first world countries in this regard. As you pointed out the Michael Moore documentary on GM and indicate that all countries have those problems and I would tend to agree though you will find in some countries, it may be a little tougher to do what GM did though that means the government is involving itself in business probably a little more than many would like.
I was just reading an article in some magazine from the rack while waiting in an office about some poor guy from Mexico or Honduras or someplace like that who for the last twenty years has had his green card and daily peddaling his bike 10 miles to a location where people like him can find work and he sits there waiting for someone to draw his number out of a hat hoping to make $8 an hour “under the table” hoping to make $200 a week. Almost certainly he is doing better than he would be in his home country, so in relative speaking America is better for him well until someone busts him for working under the table and puts him jail for tax evasion. I expect he feels working for a living is better than living on public welfare, but maybe he has no training or possibility capability for something else. Just a desire to work hard for his food. Obviously I don’t know his whole situation but just being required to pedal his bike that much every day is harder than vast numbers of people in the US work who have achieved middle class or above. Working hard physically is not likely to get you far in most countries I think.
I grew up mostly in northern lower Michigan where there is no big business outside of maybe tourism which is very up and down and I saw and continue to see when I go up to visit a lot of hardworking people barely scraping by. A $30k a year job is amazing in rural parts of our country and if you make that much and live in one of those areas you are practically a rock star where in the city, you are not living high on the hog unless you live with mom. A job at say McDonalds is really a pretty good job in those areas. Trying to make the jump from some rural area like that to the “big business” areas is a tough thing unless you know someone or you somehow got yourself into college and then make it all the way through on grants (because you didn’t make enough growing up and your parents are trying to keep food on the table themselves or keep heat or electricity on) and your own ability (because the schools in rural areas really aren’t that great normally, no money) then you move to a big city area and get an entry level position and live on the edge of starvation hoping to move up. If you end up making it, I would argue that you could have made it in any of the countries listed.
So we turn to “smart” working and even now that is becoming a more difficult as we ship thousands of tech positions overseas. While I doubt a position such as mine would be outsourced like that as I have had the luck to move up over the years to a rather senior level I have known lots of good people who have lost positions because they have been outsourced. This isn’t something that many in the US/State Governments probably have to worry about since it would be a bit odd for us to ship our government positions to another country, but most others need to be concerned with this especially while corporations who look to do this to operate cheaper do whatever it takes to get government folks who aren’t impacted to allow more and more of it. This isn’t limited to the US, but the other countries seem to be trying to block some of it. I know some companies are bit pissed for instance at Canada which requires certain percentages of all IT work to be done in Canada, it can’t even be outsourced completely say to the US. I think that is very good and needs to be expanded but willinging by the companies involved, not mandated by the government. Shipping our tech positions overseas does nothing to help our country, it actually, in the long run will hurt it pretty bad I think. I don’t think corporate execs will understand how bad this is until Exec positions start getting shipped overseas as well. If some person working at $20 a week can fix computers, who says they can’t do the jobs of a business exec? What incredible saving to go from paying multiple millions for a single Exec per year to paying thousands… That is a better saving than outsourcing the techs. Certainly the consumers would prefer it as they could understand tech support when they called.
I think I would argue the best schools point as well. We have some good schools, but the same as it is with hospitals and doctors, the best are only available to those with the money to pay for it in areas where there is enough money for the school to prosper. So this simply means that the best is going to exist where the money is for them. It isn’t that the country itself is making this so. As a whole for a majority of the country I would tend to lean towards the idea that our medical and education systems are probably on the screwed up side. Medical is completely pushed by business, primarily I think the drug business which spends likely billions on advertising and coaching Drs per year to push their drugs which even with good insurance is costing $30-$40 for a monthly prescription (with the insurance company paying hundreds and sometimes more). Education… well this is how this whole thing started, some school thinks that some little boy seeing some little piece of flesh on a girl’s chest is going to radically impact their ability to learn. We have school boards trying to drag religion and prayer back into schools not to help them learn secular topics but because some people feel their particular religion needs to be fossed onto kids. WTF?
As for the military… It may be the best and I won’t argue because I don’t know the capabilities of the other first world countries though I expect some may argue the point, yet we still live in a world where at the moment I cannot take a bottle of water on a plane. How is that better than what we have in the other countries mentioned? MOst countries look at us and our military as our way to enforce our will on them. It isn’t like our military is holding back a huge invasion of the US. It is out attacking whomever the president feels needs to be attacked at the moment. We don’t live in the time of Hitler and Mussilini and Tojo. We don’t even have the cold war arms building excuse with Russia. I look around and probably the two most advanced militaries are probably the US and the UK and we are two of the biggest targets for terrorist activities. Canada seems to be doing well, I expect any terrorists in Australia would have their assed handed to them by house moms, and I don’t often hear about skyscrapers being dropped by terrorist activity in the Netherlands. So what exactly is it that our military is doing for us besides making people think, we need to do something about the US before they do something to us? We are all supposed to be enlightened at this point? How come the most powerful military isn’t with the UN? It is an easy answer. Because the US Government would never allow it because it means someone could tell them THEY weren’t doing the right thing and come bop them. The general american “equality” is deemed as us first equal. Anytime someone comes forth and says they want to be treated equal, you can usually just replace that with “we want to be the most important and have the most rights and treated specially and do what we want to do”.
This is supposed to be a country of wonder and tolerance and great things happening and mostly this doesn’t seem to be the case. I would love to be able to point at say our space program and say look at all of the amazing things they have done for us and the world and for the most part we hamper them so much and try to tell them you can’t do anything unless it is 100% safe and you have to do it all on a budget that couldn’t run a single department of the Pentagon. Take 50% of the military budget and give it to the space program, I think they will do far more things with it that have far greater future benefit. As for tolerance in America it sucks. We are constantly trying to separate different people’s out into different groups in speech and action and everone is trying to jockey for position with the largest most powerful groups so they can configure laws and anything else to better suit them. It seems to be about control, different groups want to impose their view of what is right and proper over everyone else. This isn’t specific to the US, but it seems to be closest to the surface in the US than other places I have seen. You have white people trying to stick it to the blacks, black people trying to stick it to the whites. You have Christians trying to stick it to the non-christians. Christian Sect A trying to stick it to all of the other Christian Sects. You have hetero’s trying to stick it to the homo’s. I don’t think though tha I have ever seem homo’s trying to get rid of hetero’s… interesting that… We have terms for all of the various ethnic groups, African-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Jewish-Americans, etc… What does that do other than push the differences to the forefront for people to focus on. Do they have African-English? African-Canadians? Chinese-Australians?
If I lived in another country my style of living would change, of that I have little doubt, but I can’t say it would be any worse; just different. The United States is supposed to be about Truth and Justice and Tolerance but I just see that stuff getting bent more and more out of shape all of the time.
So yes, without family ties, I very likely would have moved by now. My problem is that I know if I moved, a vast majority of my family doesn’t have the money to travel to where I would go., Even now most of my family can’t afford to drive the 3-4 hours to to see me, I have to drive to them. Unfortunately I work a lot to make as much money as possible so when I am old and can’t make the money I know I will be taken care of because certainly there is nothing the government has done that makes me think anything I pay into the government every month will ever be available to me later.
Hi Joe,
Don’t know how in the world I managed to come across this site….. In fact am not sure what this site is!!!!!
Anyhow, …..Welcome to Australia.
I truly believe that we are “the lucky country” and whilst I am desperately eager to travel the world I wouldn’t leave my home country for anything.
Don’t get me wrong we have our fair share of issues and the politicos are continually infuriating me.
But the thing is it doesn’t matter who you are were you come from what race sex religion you are every person has the opportunities available to make it as far as they see fit.
I am 21 (maybe you can tell 🙂 ), and grew up with only my Mum and me in a small country town, and despite these things through hard work and persistence, I have been able to complete High school, land a great job and am currently studying Accounting at university.
We have excellent free healthcare.
The opportunity to study at any university on HECS (paid for by the government until you earn over a certain amount.)
Welfare well above the poverty line that provided their is a good reason will never be cut off.
And free public transport (on Sundays).
Their are a million other reasons as to why this country is great but unfortunately I don’t have that much time!
I know that their are probably great places out their USA being one of them I just don’t think their is anywhere in the world that you will have the same opportunities as you would hear.
Cheers, AussieGirl!!!!