The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Linda Hafemeister:

This really isn't so strange. There's a significant minority of Palestinians who are Christian, Lutheran specifically, concentrated in and around Bethlehem (yes, that Bethlehem). Their numbers have dropped over the years for a variety of reasons, including emigration -- and apparently some landed in New York.

In that context, I figure 'halal' is more of a shorthand for Middle-Eastern home cooking rather than the religiously-certified foods, although carrying halal foods would certainly expand their customer base!

Re mistrust of elites & diagramming sentences:

I agree that a good deal of the problem with mistrust of experts/belief in bad science is that too many people lack the tools to tell which is which.

A personal anecdote of one cause for this lack --
In the 70s, my high school (semi-rural outskirts of Kansas City, MO) required only ONE year of 9th grade general science. I took all the science I could work in, but most kids never took a science class after.

(The school was fortunate that one of the teachers of that required class intentionally designed the class to be as memorable as possible, and included as many real-world problems and experiments as he could muster, but he couldn't work miracles. Oh, we could get credit for reading science fiction, too. Naturally, it was my favorite class!)

Back to my point...you might think that such a minimal requirement wouldn't be too bad because in four years almost all would take another science class just because they'd run out of anything else that was available. But no -- probably half or more of the kids went for vocational-technical training. I know programs vary around the country & world, but in this district it meant their entire junior & senior year they took a few classes in the morning directly related to their specialty (meaning no general science or history or literature), then spent afternoons at a job.

The upshot was that -- gut feel here -- 3/4 of the students were probably functionally science-illiterate about 5-10 years after graduation.

I thought about this a lot in the 80s when we heard so much ignorance about HIV transmission -- people clearly didn't believe what the experts were telling them because they had no idea how the researchers had arrived at their conclusions or how rigorously they were reviewed. In the absence of that knowledge, the scientific conclusions were viewed as simple assertions that could be believed or disbelieved.

Oh, my high school's other subject requirements were pretty minimal as well: 2 years math; 1 year "social studies" + 1/2 year civics; don't remember the English requirement -- I think 2 years but maybe only 1; 2 years of a language (Spanish, German, French only). The district wasn't *quite* anti-intellectual, but certainly didn't think 'book learning' was anything special.

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