As it happens, walking is more dangerous per-mile than cycling.

This is one reason why dedicated trails and sidewalks are more dangerous for cyclists than the road. I know that the most dangerous place on my commute is similar, whether I stop or not before the road, visibility is poor and more importantly many drivers just aren't looking (never mind that the cars have a yield sign while I have a stop sign so it's wonderfully ambiguous).

Recently opened bike network is probably a sign of increasing ridership—between it being built for increasing numbers of cyclists and its presence encouraging more. So no wonder the accidents are growing faster than population, if more and more people are starting to ride.

They are perfectly qualified to speak about their own, personal, user experience. No one better.

What does keeping a straight face have to do with art?

Please don't try to educate me about conceptual art. Maybe instead of telling us about your magic power to determine what art is objectively the best, you should educate yourself about why many people who love art disagree with you.

Some art is bad. Doesn't make it not art.

I understand that many people don't like projects like this. That's fine. Others might disagree. But no matter what—there's no reason to insult the entire discipline because you don't like one project.

As an artist whose work is very different than this, I still can't help but be disgusted every time I see someone talking about "artists" in quotes, or with an extra "e" on the end (as they do elsewhere in this discussion), or making silly comments about blank canvases and reductive caricatures of conceptual art and uneducated statements about what art "has" to do—that's actually the position that the onion comment is making fun of: the conservative assertion that inauthentic "crap" art and artists are damaging society (in a classic moral formation as "sicko painters" and in a contemporary misguided-fiscal-conservatism way).

Even if those imperative statements were unproblematically true, they still wouldn't answer the just-this-side-of-trollish questions at the top. Why not drive around for half a day collecting random crap, then toss it all in a public square? What if that was beautiful?

That's the same problem: reducing public subsidies to educational institutions encourages them to feel desperate and start trying to maximise their other income. It leads to them treating students as customers, where tuition payment becomes a simple transaction which pays for an entitlement to a degree title.

Better public funding is absolutely part of the solution to declining academic cultures and performance standards.

The new CGI effect example in the article is terrible. The article notes that the animated ship looks noticeably different from the model in the rest of the episode, but it also looks like junk on its own merits.

1. On the 95% number, the actual quote from Ron Paul's 1992 newsletter is: "Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/12/ron-pauls-shaggy-defense/250256/

So, "at worst...disingenuous, but still true"? There's also some good stuff about how Paul's longtime staffer and likely ghostwriter of these articles is famous for saying that the only thing wrong with the Rodney King beating was that it was videotaped, etc.

I don't know what you're defending with your comments about my statements being unsourced, given that I just critiqued the linked article for being a bad example and even went on to suggest ways that you might find more of the content (given that we're talking about years of newsletters, it's a bit much for a random comment). But I posted simply to correct any misperception that that may have caused, despite your rather high expectations that I was going to instead offer an encyclopedic counter-example. The content of the newsletters is public knowledge; you don't need me to google for you. But when I said before that the sources were a few clicks deep into the post's references, I wasn't kidding, I clicked a link in the first paragraph, and scrolled down to where the second author was recommending excerpts and commentary, and clicked on that. It took maybe a couple of minutes.

2. Moving on to your fight: "Once these kids are adults out in the world, how does [giving them access to the sytem] help them?" Well, it means they are qualified for jobs based on the piece of paper that they now hold. This is another matter and despite your attempt to bring it up here it is not really what Paul's newsletters are about except in a passing "look what else they are doing to us!" way. Despite your long explanation and justification the reason why you disagree with people about it is because the idea that giving the underprivileged access to the educational system is the same as "lowering standards" or "artificial equivalency" is in fact the part that is in question—your paragraph is a classic example of begging the question, leading with the conclusion couched in a quick, easy statement and constructing an argument based on tautology.

Worse than that, you wrap it up with "...instead of dealing with the underlying problems..." which is a flat-out insult to the people you seem to think you are arguing against, because in your effort to fight off their imagined attacks you are telling them that they are denying reality and that they haven't done anything useful. Because their personal experience and their own efforts to fight social problems are getting in away of your imaginary objectivity, "the ability of society to properly assess the matter and move forward" which I'm sorry to say doesn't have a very good record of eliminating oppression quickly in the US or anywhere.

Again, I'm not sure what you are defending. Maybe, given your eagerness to bring up your white-with-a-conscience cred you are protecting your privilege and sense of righteousness by loudly declaring yourself to be not racist. Maybe you just really really love Ron Paul. In any case I doubt that most people who are seriously working on solving racial inequality care about you and the way that you write off their efforts, because they know that white people do that all the bloody time.

That article is kind of a bad link, since it doesn't actually talk about the content at all, and assumes a background knowledge. You've got to click a few links deep into its references or do a google to find the bits that are causing trouble. Like the part where his newsletters claimed that 95% of black men in DC are criminals, or that statistics has proven that only 5% of black people have "sensible" political views. Or other longer more complicated bits, like the part where they talk about black youth carjacking as a trend and reprints advice about how to shoot them and get away with it, or laments the victimisation of whites time and time again, or brings up random bizarre individual crime stories in a way that suggests that, say, black girls running around randomly sticking whites with used hypodermic needles, is a thing that is happening all the time and the fact that we don't hear about it more is because they don't want us to know cue spooky music.

And yeah, meanwhile Paul was using these newsletters to build his support base and also make a whole ton of money at the same time because they cost. Either he's a racist or the most slippery manipulative politician you've ever seen who's happy to use this material for his own purposes.

Oh yeah: and when he's challenged about it, he doesn't always bring up the "I didn't write it" angle, sometimes he says something along the lines of: "but no actually probably 95% of them are criminals with no sensible beliefs, that's not an unreasonable thing to say at all, because I'm an old privileged white man and I think 95% of everyone is criminal (but especially black people)".

Whereas, if you are using debit for all your purchases, the moment you make a similar mistake you have actually no money and are getting hit by overdraft fees and the like anyway. Where's the upside?

That's just the issue: the reason that he took the test in the first place was because he was seeing many students who did well in their earlier grades fail the 10th-grade test.

Well, they're not. Not only is the test he took set by a different organisation with a tougher reputation, but it's a 10th-grade test, where as the questions on the site are grade 4 and 8.

So don't panic, you just need to do some prep for the reading comprehension portion.