No one made any noise but a few religious-right types. Until recently it never even showed on that bastion of wild, right-wing insanity, FOX News. No leftwing papers, no liberal press, none of our wonderful "women's rights" groups, and no self-styled human rights groups ever even turned over a piece of paper or pushed a dollar across a desk in opposition to stoning women to death. (Men are stoned, too, but we seem to have lost sight of that fact.)
But finally, a right-wing movie named "The Stoning of Soraya M" has awakened a few slumbering people. FOX interviewed the producer, I believe, and a few others who know what stoning-torture is all about. More people, conservatives generally, got involved. We heard the spokeswoman on a few talk shows, and her presentation moved hearts. Finally we can admit that Iran is a barbaric country, stoning is deliberately designed to be torture while killing, and this practice has no place in the modern world. That's why it's okay in the Middle East.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Quincy charging drivers for accident site cleanup
Okay, we pay taxes. Isn't this stuff corporately shared by all of us?
Let's charge the householder every time there's a fire. Whenever there's a mugging let's charge the muggee. Let's charge parents who have children for their children's education.
On the other hand, I have long advocated that we need to charge people who engage in risky behavior for the helicopter that flies into some out of reach location and taxis them to the hospital, because they chose to go mountain climbing during a blizzard, fell, and broke both legs.
I say if you're going to stick your head into a lion's mouth, you should be prepared to pay for the funeral. But here we have plain old shared risk. Anyone can have a car accident. Anyone can have their house catch on fire, even people who are careful.
Let's charge the householder every time there's a fire. Whenever there's a mugging let's charge the muggee. Let's charge parents who have children for their children's education.
On the other hand, I have long advocated that we need to charge people who engage in risky behavior for the helicopter that flies into some out of reach location and taxis them to the hospital, because they chose to go mountain climbing during a blizzard, fell, and broke both legs.
I say if you're going to stick your head into a lion's mouth, you should be prepared to pay for the funeral. But here we have plain old shared risk. Anyone can have a car accident. Anyone can have their house catch on fire, even people who are careful.
Headline: New plan to grade teachers' performance to save money
This refers to something that's up in LAUSD, where recently they spent over a million dollars in legal struggles to try to fire seven extremely inadequate teachers. I'd guess at least half those teachers had molested (seduced) their students. Maybe even all of them.
Jonathon Hoenig is telling us that only 25% of kids who take the ACT are actually prepared to do college work. We used to prepare kids for college work by the time they were fourteen; why can't we do it now?
...
I think I need to start up my "education" blog. I'm ready to scream about this stuff. Your children are getting a fifth-grade education while you're paying for twelve (thirteen, if they go to kindergarten, and now Obama wants to cram them into pre-school starting at age 3, so it will be fifteen years) of schooling. Compare this to the kids in Paraguay who are just as well educated at age 11 (the age many of them drop out of school) as ours are at 18.
Jonathon Hoenig is telling us that only 25% of kids who take the ACT are actually prepared to do college work. We used to prepare kids for college work by the time they were fourteen; why can't we do it now?
...
I think I need to start up my "education" blog. I'm ready to scream about this stuff. Your children are getting a fifth-grade education while you're paying for twelve (thirteen, if they go to kindergarten, and now Obama wants to cram them into pre-school starting at age 3, so it will be fifteen years) of schooling. Compare this to the kids in Paraguay who are just as well educated at age 11 (the age many of them drop out of school) as ours are at 18.
Headline: The Biggest Rip-Off in America is College Tuition
Apparently if you go to one of those big-ticket colleges, those with the $56,000 annual tuition and estimated $70,000 in living expenses, your ROI (return on investment) will be negative. That is to say, that in spite of the popular perception that "four years of college will get you so much better an income that it's a worthwhile investment", the truth is that if you spend your head off on these colleges you'll actually lose money.
Said one commentator on the panel: "That's because the internet allows people to learn what they need to know in order to do what they want to do."
Well, it has been the case for thirty years that going to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale isn't a guarantee that you'll become educated. Quite the contrary, these schools are so obsessed with "innovative" curriculum they'll actually interfere with your education and make you stupid. Why would any college offer a course in "Video games as gender territory"? This is not scholarship in any way other than that you can say it feeds more dissertations, which in turn unleashes more uncritical, unthinking people onto the scholastic world where they shout from their bully pulpit that only morons would not see how important their field of study was.
Emperor's new clothes much?
Said one commentator on the panel: "That's because the internet allows people to learn what they need to know in order to do what they want to do."
Well, it has been the case for thirty years that going to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale isn't a guarantee that you'll become educated. Quite the contrary, these schools are so obsessed with "innovative" curriculum they'll actually interfere with your education and make you stupid. Why would any college offer a course in "Video games as gender territory"? This is not scholarship in any way other than that you can say it feeds more dissertations, which in turn unleashes more uncritical, unthinking people onto the scholastic world where they shout from their bully pulpit that only morons would not see how important their field of study was.
Emperor's new clothes much?
Health care limits our choices
Wow. All across the country "health care panels" have swooped down on agencies that administer care, and told them they can't use such and so drug or treatment because it's "too expensive".
The quality of care is going to go down, plain and simple. That is the main reason so many of us oppose the imposition of a national health care bill. If you were stupid enough to buy into the "everyone has to have health insurance" baloney thirty years ago, you were part of a movement to give control of your medical decisions over to someone who wasn't either you or your doctor, in the name of getting something for free, or so you thought. Your health insurance didn't come out of your pocket, but your employer certainly had to figure into your salary the money he was paying as your "salary plus benefits". You thought it was free so you loved it.
What you didn't see, and probably never even thought about, was that instead of your expenses being between you and your doctor and the fee he needed to live on and the supplies he (or you) had to buy to administer any treatment, your money was going to pay for twenty unrelated people and their bosses and their stockholders to handle your paperwork and push the money around from desk to desk before it ever got to your doctor, and thus the price of health insurance (and thus the perceived price of heath care) soared. Yes, soared. It wasn't just the MRIs and ultrasounds and trial lawyers and hospitals billing ten dollars for an aspirin. You personally, and all the other people rushing to jump onto the health insurance bandwagon, were inflating our medical care horribly.
So in about twenty years' time we went from a nation who spent like $300 a year (for a family of four) for annual doctors' visits and the occasional "Doctor, Johnny has a cold, can you stop by on your way home?" to "Your family's premiums are going to cost six thousand dollars a year." Yet we were still getting the three hundred dollar a year treatment.
Then, in the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton needed a meme to remind Americans that we need democrats to "fix" our lives and campaigned on "ohhhhh, cry cry, so many millions of people in this country need health insurance." From there the demand for universal health care soared, since people had completely lost sight of the fact it's coming out of our damn pockets, and started believing what children believe, that everything that's "given" to them was free.
But that takes me back to better schools and a better-educated public. So I'll stop here.
The quality of care is going to go down, plain and simple. That is the main reason so many of us oppose the imposition of a national health care bill. If you were stupid enough to buy into the "everyone has to have health insurance" baloney thirty years ago, you were part of a movement to give control of your medical decisions over to someone who wasn't either you or your doctor, in the name of getting something for free, or so you thought. Your health insurance didn't come out of your pocket, but your employer certainly had to figure into your salary the money he was paying as your "salary plus benefits". You thought it was free so you loved it.
What you didn't see, and probably never even thought about, was that instead of your expenses being between you and your doctor and the fee he needed to live on and the supplies he (or you) had to buy to administer any treatment, your money was going to pay for twenty unrelated people and their bosses and their stockholders to handle your paperwork and push the money around from desk to desk before it ever got to your doctor, and thus the price of health insurance (and thus the perceived price of heath care) soared. Yes, soared. It wasn't just the MRIs and ultrasounds and trial lawyers and hospitals billing ten dollars for an aspirin. You personally, and all the other people rushing to jump onto the health insurance bandwagon, were inflating our medical care horribly.
So in about twenty years' time we went from a nation who spent like $300 a year (for a family of four) for annual doctors' visits and the occasional "Doctor, Johnny has a cold, can you stop by on your way home?" to "Your family's premiums are going to cost six thousand dollars a year." Yet we were still getting the three hundred dollar a year treatment.
Then, in the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton needed a meme to remind Americans that we need democrats to "fix" our lives and campaigned on "ohhhhh, cry cry, so many millions of people in this country need health insurance." From there the demand for universal health care soared, since people had completely lost sight of the fact it's coming out of our damn pockets, and started believing what children believe, that everything that's "given" to them was free.
But that takes me back to better schools and a better-educated public. So I'll stop here.
News Item: "Schools sitting on bailout money to save teachers' jobs"
Yeah, well, that's because they think the most important place to spend money is on teachers, more teachers, administrators, bureaucrats, and educrats.
The salient point is that the schools were claiming "we need money NOW or the school will collapse." Meanwhile, they're still making parents (who have already paid their taxes and therefore have already paid into the school's support) to send toilet paper and other supplies, bring cakes for bake sales, staff a booth for the annual (or quarterly) "carnival" fund raiser, and on and on.
The salient point is that the schools were claiming "we need money NOW or the school will collapse." Meanwhile, they're still making parents (who have already paid their taxes and therefore have already paid into the school's support) to send toilet paper and other supplies, bring cakes for bake sales, staff a booth for the annual (or quarterly) "carnival" fund raiser, and on and on.
Friday, August 20, 2010
We should be proud to be at war with these people
I heard a teaser for a radio program today. I don't know the host but I heard his voice: "The Taliban stoned this couple to death. We should be proud to be at war with these people."
Amen, brother!
What the hell is the matter with our left wing, that they go insane over a lethal injection execution, during which the condemned person feels a pinprick, or, as in one case, several pinpricks; but they have no problem with leaders in the Middle East torturing someone to death. Yes, stoning is torture. Oh, wait, I forgot--an action can be called torture only if a white American does it, and no leftist EVER EVER EVER protests anything some bastard from the Third World does.
Amen, brother!
What the hell is the matter with our left wing, that they go insane over a lethal injection execution, during which the condemned person feels a pinprick, or, as in one case, several pinpricks; but they have no problem with leaders in the Middle East torturing someone to death. Yes, stoning is torture. Oh, wait, I forgot--an action can be called torture only if a white American does it, and no leftist EVER EVER EVER protests anything some bastard from the Third World does.
Double standards much?
How come when Bruce Biden called Barack Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean...", he wasn't called an ignorant fool at the very least, nor was he called a racist as you know any Republican would have been, had they said the same ignorant, stereotyping foolishness.
Yes, I want to vomit.
Yes, I want to vomit.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Jefferson Starship's 40th anniversary tour
Oh, please, Grace, give it up. You're an ancient old fart whose politics were au courant forty years ago, but they're just dinosaur bones now. You still believe the same "radical chic" crap you bought into back then. Those of us who have brains actually figured it out and dropped the Marxist trash we used to spout; as far as I know, you didn't.
Now, if you're making the tour to keep yourself alive in the memories of ancient leftist geezers everywhere, don't bother, we haven't forgotten you. I even still have your albums, and a turntable to play them on. There are others who never had your albums but share your mp3s on the internet or watch your videos on YouTube. You'll live on--as an attractive young hippie chick, not as a wrinkled old Marxist nitwit who has outlived the stupid philosophy she used to push in her songs--as long as those old videos survive.
Wanna do yourself a favor? Rewrite the words to "Lather" or "We Can Be Together" and bring them into the world of common sense. We don't want a revolution. I figured out that America wasn't such a crappy place after all--and never had been, not even in those nasty old 'Fifties--shortly after the time you released that album, but like a million other hippies and former hippies, I dumped the Marxist garbage while you kept on with it.
Please, get a clue.
Now, if you're making the tour to keep yourself alive in the memories of ancient leftist geezers everywhere, don't bother, we haven't forgotten you. I even still have your albums, and a turntable to play them on. There are others who never had your albums but share your mp3s on the internet or watch your videos on YouTube. You'll live on--as an attractive young hippie chick, not as a wrinkled old Marxist nitwit who has outlived the stupid philosophy she used to push in her songs--as long as those old videos survive.
Wanna do yourself a favor? Rewrite the words to "Lather" or "We Can Be Together" and bring them into the world of common sense. We don't want a revolution. I figured out that America wasn't such a crappy place after all--and never had been, not even in those nasty old 'Fifties--shortly after the time you released that album, but like a million other hippies and former hippies, I dumped the Marxist garbage while you kept on with it.
Please, get a clue.
More leftist lies
You know about this argument that's going on, where they want to build that mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, and Obama wants to plough through all opposition to it on the grounds that they have freedom of religion and we have to be tolerant?
Well, there's been a group who want to rebuild their Greek Orthodox church in the same environs, and have been told to go blow for years.
One, where is their freedom of religion, that our government can tell them what they can and can't build in that area? and
Two, who is being the intolerant party, if it isn't the government? aren't we supposed to demonstrate our tolerance to the Greek Orthodox? Or is that kind of intolerance okay with our left? and
Three, how about tolerance for the views of thousands of families who lost members or loved ones in the attack?
No one is restricting their freedom to practice their religion. This particular bunch already has a mosque twenty blocks away. But they have a hundred ten million dollars from Saudi Arabia to spend, and their mission is to show America who's boss.
IT ISN'T A RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ISSUE, IT'S A ZONING RESTRICTIONS ISSUE, AND GOVERNMENT HAS THE RIGHT TO TELL THEM "NOT THERE".
Well, there's been a group who want to rebuild their Greek Orthodox church in the same environs, and have been told to go blow for years.
One, where is their freedom of religion, that our government can tell them what they can and can't build in that area? and
Two, who is being the intolerant party, if it isn't the government? aren't we supposed to demonstrate our tolerance to the Greek Orthodox? Or is that kind of intolerance okay with our left? and
Three, how about tolerance for the views of thousands of families who lost members or loved ones in the attack?
No one is restricting their freedom to practice their religion. This particular bunch already has a mosque twenty blocks away. But they have a hundred ten million dollars from Saudi Arabia to spend, and their mission is to show America who's boss.
IT ISN'T A RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ISSUE, IT'S A ZONING RESTRICTIONS ISSUE, AND GOVERNMENT HAS THE RIGHT TO TELL THEM "NOT THERE".
"Rosetta Stone revolutionized the teaching of languages"
Well, sorta. Unlike your high school Spanish One textbook, Rosetta Stone shows you pictures and you speak the word, or they speak the word and you pick out the picture.
"The Learnables" did it first, though.
Sadly, both these methods are painfully, sickeningly slow, and most people don't stick with them. I tried to get my kids to learn French. They sat through about four minutes of "Un (pause seven seconds) Deux (seven seconds) Trois (seven seconds)..." and that was the end of that.
"The Learnables" did it first, though.
Sadly, both these methods are painfully, sickeningly slow, and most people don't stick with them. I tried to get my kids to learn French. They sat through about four minutes of "Un (pause seven seconds) Deux (seven seconds) Trois (seven seconds)..." and that was the end of that.
You're being bilked
Three hundred seventy-seven million dollars.
That's how much money the NEA collected, $355 million of it from teachers' pockets. That doesn't include the dues that the AFT collected.
And then our members of Congress voted in an $8,000,000,000 bailout for them.
My sympathy to the teachers. It would be nice if they actually ever saw one drop of that money. It will soak into the education industry like water on the desert sand--it will vanish into the sand and never be seen again, nothing will change, nothing will improve, and they'll be back asking for more, with tears in their eyes and stories about charming and wishful little minority children (see beautiful photos of same, which will be attached to their story) who just aren't getting taught because the schools just don't have enough money.
I said "my sympathy to the teachers" but it only goes so far. While I want to see them make a living while teaching, I am sick up to here with their phony professionalism and their phony colleges of education and their phony post-graduate degrees and their week-long workshops on how to blame the kids for not learning. And by that I mean their phony issues of dyslexia, dyscalculae, ADHD, parents are bad, kids need a full breakfast, lunch, and dinner or they can't learn, twenty student limit, parents are fools, it's anything and everything but us.
That's how much money the NEA collected, $355 million of it from teachers' pockets. That doesn't include the dues that the AFT collected.
And then our members of Congress voted in an $8,000,000,000 bailout for them.
My sympathy to the teachers. It would be nice if they actually ever saw one drop of that money. It will soak into the education industry like water on the desert sand--it will vanish into the sand and never be seen again, nothing will change, nothing will improve, and they'll be back asking for more, with tears in their eyes and stories about charming and wishful little minority children (see beautiful photos of same, which will be attached to their story) who just aren't getting taught because the schools just don't have enough money.
I said "my sympathy to the teachers" but it only goes so far. While I want to see them make a living while teaching, I am sick up to here with their phony professionalism and their phony colleges of education and their phony post-graduate degrees and their week-long workshops on how to blame the kids for not learning. And by that I mean their phony issues of dyslexia, dyscalculae, ADHD, parents are bad, kids need a full breakfast, lunch, and dinner or they can't learn, twenty student limit, parents are fools, it's anything and everything but us.
Truck race, eight die
I don't have all the facts, but like Obama, I have an opinion.
Less of an opinion, of course; it's more of a prediction.
The spectators were supposed to keep back fifty feet from passing trucks. They didn't. And the race organizers didn't force them to stay back. They got so close, in fact, that it looks on the videos as if they could touch the trucks as they raced by. Knowing people, I would assert that that was exactly what they were trying to do. Cool, look how close I am. The wind from a passing truck is tugging at my clothes.
I have never believed that the so-called "responsible party" was anyone but the people who took action that was flagrantly stupid and outside of common sense.
The butane barbecue lighter tells you to be sure to point it away from your face when starting it.
The rotary lawn mower tells you not to use it to trim the hedge.
and the organizers of this race didn't build a monkey cage to keep a bunch of ignorant fools from getting their moronic bodies underneath the wheels of a truck zooming past at sixty miles an hour.
Boo hoo.
So what's my prediction? That the organizers of the race are going to be held responsible for the idiocy of these people.
Less of an opinion, of course; it's more of a prediction.
The spectators were supposed to keep back fifty feet from passing trucks. They didn't. And the race organizers didn't force them to stay back. They got so close, in fact, that it looks on the videos as if they could touch the trucks as they raced by. Knowing people, I would assert that that was exactly what they were trying to do. Cool, look how close I am. The wind from a passing truck is tugging at my clothes.
I have never believed that the so-called "responsible party" was anyone but the people who took action that was flagrantly stupid and outside of common sense.
The butane barbecue lighter tells you to be sure to point it away from your face when starting it.
The rotary lawn mower tells you not to use it to trim the hedge.
and the organizers of this race didn't build a monkey cage to keep a bunch of ignorant fools from getting their moronic bodies underneath the wheels of a truck zooming past at sixty miles an hour.
Boo hoo.
So what's my prediction? That the organizers of the race are going to be held responsible for the idiocy of these people.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
"More well"
English uses "well" to modify many adjectives. Well known, well ordered, well educated.
So after we've said someone is well known or well educated, what do we say about someone who is more famous or more knowledgeable?
For some stupid reason, we turn to "more well, more well."
It's not. The comparative of "well" is not "more well", it's "better". The friend is better known, better educated, better ordered.
We have a deafness toward language or phrases we're not familiar with. Thus, in the minds of the unlearned and unread, who have never had the pleasure of learning language they didn't pick up on the street or in their living rooms, the ear hears the word "alien" and thinks of a green, bug-eyed monster rather than "someone who is not a resident of my country," which was the original meaning of the word. Or "black holes" is an insult to African-American women, because someone who has no clue what a black hole is has heard "black ho's".
It's a pity, though, that some of these illiterate and uneducated people have huge political clout, along with a bully pulpit from which they get heard. They scream and they howl and the Old Stream Media (which is populated by the Journolist.com Four Hundred--modern products of our unbelievably bad education system), agree with their complaint, pick it up, and give it a loud voice across the nation.
It's a pity. I like our language and I love its suppleness, and I hate to see it deformed.
So after we've said someone is well known or well educated, what do we say about someone who is more famous or more knowledgeable?
For some stupid reason, we turn to "more well, more well."
It's not. The comparative of "well" is not "more well", it's "better". The friend is better known, better educated, better ordered.
We have a deafness toward language or phrases we're not familiar with. Thus, in the minds of the unlearned and unread, who have never had the pleasure of learning language they didn't pick up on the street or in their living rooms, the ear hears the word "alien" and thinks of a green, bug-eyed monster rather than "someone who is not a resident of my country," which was the original meaning of the word. Or "black holes" is an insult to African-American women, because someone who has no clue what a black hole is has heard "black ho's".
It's a pity, though, that some of these illiterate and uneducated people have huge political clout, along with a bully pulpit from which they get heard. They scream and they howl and the Old Stream Media (which is populated by the Journolist.com Four Hundred--modern products of our unbelievably bad education system), agree with their complaint, pick it up, and give it a loud voice across the nation.
It's a pity. I like our language and I love its suppleness, and I hate to see it deformed.
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