Sarge couldn't be adopted--he bit two shelter employees--so he's going to a no-kill shelter in Utah

Well, first off, I feel very sorry for poor Sarge.

Second, I feel really sad for the people that Sarge has attacked and will attack in the future.

Third, Sarge is a dog. Yes, that's a "sentient being" but please grow out of your Disney cartoon simplicity and realize that a duck, a mouse, a dog, are not human beings. I know they have feelings, and yes, at some very low level they even are self-aware. Precious doggies keep us company, warm our hearts, rescue people, and even one doggie was caught rescuing another doggie from the freeway.

But doggies are not people.

This one is going to cost money to store at a shelter (or some no-kill rescue) for the rest of his life. That means resources. Somewhere else there is a really sweet, non-biting dog that's starving for food. That dog would be a good place to spend Sarge's upkeep after Sarge is dead and doesn't need it any more. And don't forget the children across the world who are starving, or whose villages could use electricity or clean water. It infuriates me that some nitwit has found his or her fulfillment in life in the feeding and care of A VICIOUS DOG, when that money and time would be so much better spent on some worthier cause.

Shoot the damn dog, and buy a water reservoir for some village where the children hike five miles each way every day to get the family some water instead of going to school.

"I wanted her to have whatever she wanted. It's her day."

So goes the common saying about weddings: it's her day, her chance to shine. Well, these days it's the common saying, anyway.

When did a wedding become the chance for a bride to get out on a stage and have everyone coddle her? Isn't that what a quinceaneros is about? or maybe an eighteenth birthday? But the wedding?

Once upon a time the wedding was a social event. No, I don't mean the newspapers made a huge fuss over the socially prominent people and their big party. It was something the whole village sponsored, took part in, and in fact performed. The girls on one side, the boys on the other, both sides decking out the bride and groom in their finest (not their sexiest) uniting attire, which could mean special jewelry, special paint, special hairdo, special clothing. There was special music and special food, followed by special dancing.

The women, both married, older, wiser women, and younger, unmarried, giggly, silly girls would prepare the bride for the union. The men had rituals as well, guy rituals, and they didn't involve trying to turn the groom into a last-minute whore with a dozen other women straddling his lap, his last chance to have sex (and father babies out of wedlock) before his lifetime of imprisonment with the woman on the other side of the village.

Finally the big moment comes. The bride AND THE GROOM are brought together before one of the elders, a priest or shaman or chief, though usually it's a spiritual leader of some kind. The families stand around and beam. This is a VILLAGE event as the families are being built up, the village is being built up, and a new social unit is created and the old social units, the families of the bride and groom and the extended families (generally that means the whole village) is built up and improved in a dozen new ways.

IT IS NOT A GODDAMN PERFORMANCE FOR EVERYONE TO APPLAUD THE DAMN THIRD-RATE CHICK WHO'LL NEVER BE IMPORTANT IN HER LIFE AGAIN. It also isn't a chance for a twenty-four-year-old slut to show off to everyone how she's had sex with this guy she's been living with the last four years, and expose as much skin as possible to everyone in her village. Get back to that old-fashioned dress, the one that said "this event is so important I've put as much lace and tulle and satin into this thing as I could possibly think where to sew it in." It is NOT a statement of "Hey, I'm hawt in bed and we're going to go there as fast as possible."

There was a wedding chapel in Las Vegas (yes, that says almost everything you need to know) that offered one option, a performance that would bring the groom and groomsmen out to stand in front of the congregation (I use the loosest sense of the word). Then as the music swelled, the lights would dim and a bank of spotlights would blare against a white wall. Slowly the wall would turn as the rotating platform that held it also turned, and there would stand revealed in all her bridely glory ... the bride. Then after enjoying a minute or two of thunderous applause, Miss Bride would move forward to step down off the rotating platform. One, two steps down, then her walk up the aisle. Her first step into this aisle would trigger an electric eye, and a new set of flood lights would come on. Three more steps, a new electric eye, more flood lights. And so it went up the aisle, new lights at each reveal.

The groom? He's irrelevant.

This event has now become the time when fat, stupid, ugly, empty-headed American bimbos of both sexes will get their one and only chance to be important and stand in the middle of the village and be applauded. Tomorrow she'll go back to being the insignificant nothing that she's always been, so she'd better make the most of this day.

And that's why Daddy has to shell out fifty thousand dollars on his princess.

Soft tyranny

Nancy Pelosi wants to know who's "funding" the opposition for a mosque.

Sorry, gang, but Pelosi has a history of lying for distraction. Remember "the TEA parties are not grass roots, they're astroturf"? Coming from a member of the Democratic Party, which funds everything to do with democrat issues and hasn't seen a real grass roots issue in fifty years, that's pretty funny.

What issue is she talking about, though? All those riots in the streets? All those demonstrations with the professionally printed signs with hate slogans on them? I guess Nan thought she wasn't watching an SEIU-led demonstration the last time she was watching an SEIU-led demonstration. We say a person like this is "in denial."

That might be Pelosi's excuse, but I don't believe it. I think she knows perfectly well which demonstrations were organized from above and which demonstrations were organized by word of mouth and talk show hosts, and is simply saying about the one what she should be saying about the other. We call this "LYING".

Just don't lose sight of this, though: Nancy Pelosi is telling you that any demonstration organized from above is invalid, phony, is artificial, and you must not listen to them.

Think on that the next time you see a demonstration or protest.

Learning tolerance?

Okay, when I was a kid I was in the highly-gifted program in El Cajon. We were taken out of various schools and sent to a central classroom at Chase Ave. School where we were supposed to get an "enriched" education that would make the best of our excessive brainpower and hopefully turn out some thirty exceptionally educated persons per year.

This program and similar programs across the country, such as tracking or acceleration, were vehemently opposed by our political Left wing as promoting inequality and elitism as far as the education we got, but far more important was the social deprivation we were supposedly suffering from: we wouldn't get to know kids who "weren't like us" so we could never learn to get along with them and tolerate their "differentness".

And so, programs that catered to the higher intellects of kids were phased out in the late sixties and seventies. The exceptionally brilliant kids with IQs as high as 205, who could have handled algebra at age 7 and chemistry at age 9 were forced to sit and NOT learn at the same pace as the kid sitting next to him, the kid who didn't like to read, refused to learn to write, and hated math and science.

In the nineties the fad of "tasking groups" (or whichever of a dozen other asinine names you could apply to them) swooped into our schools. Teachers no longer taught because they had been taught not to in education college. "Children learn best when they learn on their own. They don't listen to teachers and never learn from them. Their best teacher is a same-age peer who already knows the subject, but they still learn best when they discover for themselves."

The supposed result of the tasking group was to split the room up into groups of four or five and let them work on a "task" (that's newspeak for "assignment") and discover the answer as a team. A leader would evolve, supposedly a different leader for each task, depending on who knew the material. This leader would assign kids in his tasking group to tackle different parts of the task. Kids would look in the materials the classroom contained, such as the World Book Encyclopedia, gather information which they would pass on to each other, and the pieces would be connected and the task would be completed.

What actually happened was the smartest kid in every group got stuck with the job of solving the problem alone, giving out the completed answer to the other kids, and the work would be avoided in an incredibly boring manner, but at least there would be the hope of getting out of doing the work and sticking that bright kid with presenting to the teacher the group's final result.

From what I've learned from kids who went through school in the nineties, they didn't learn to "tolerate" their less-intelligent fellows. They learned to hate them. How stupid is this?

What is wrong with this generation

Okay, I know the older generation has been bemoaning that topic since Aristotle's time. The kids don't know anything, they're lazy, they're immoral, they're insolent to their elders.

Well, what generation grows up polite, obedient, considerate, and intelligent if they're not trained to be? The answer is, none.

But this generation is special. Its parents, my generation, were reared under the guidance of that demon from hell, Dr. Spock. "Just leave the kids alone" was Spock's favorite saying. Not leaving the children alone would cover such objectionable parent-type activities as teaching them manners, teaching them to read, teaching them any kind of intellectual discipline or moral discipline or even self-control.

So my parents didn't give us regular chores to do and never heard of "No TV until you've done your chores and your homework." I was, however, taught to say "Please" and "Thank you" and not to hurt the animals for the fun of it. On the other hand, it would seem that many in my generation were not taught that a crap-ass who hurts other PEOPLE for the fun of it is a disgusting, shameful creature.

When this generation grew up and reproduced, we had very little to pass down to our babies. We were even taught that it was immoral to pass down anything to our kids, because kids are so brilliant and parents are such garbage. Which is pretty funny, considering that we were just the aged version of the first generation who were taught that WE were so brilliant and our parents were garbage. How did we lose all that brilliance and turn to trash just because twenty years had passed?

So our children grew up thinking they were the most brilliant generation ever to happen; even more brilliant than the brilliant generation who came before them.

Okay, so every generation has thought that they were the most brilliant generation ever. What's different about this one?

In past generations, when the kids announced "We're brilliant, we're wonderful, we're thinking these thoughts and holding these values for the first time in history and all the generations who came before us were stupid," they got laughed at. Laughed at by the very elders they were ridiculing, told they should just hold on for five or ten years and they'd see how stupid they'd been. "Just you wait, you young whipper-snapper, you'll see how silly you sound." And it wasn't long before their eyes were opened and they realized the old parents weren't so stupid after all.

But THIS generation has nothing laughing at their self-important, narcissistic stupidity. In fact, the entire culture supports their nonsense. Movies aimed at the 16-to-25 crowd, popular music, MTV, sitcoms, commercials, teenager-angst shows, games, pop literature like "Twilight" and "Harry Potter", all shout, "You're the most wonderful thing ever to happen! Your parents don't know anything! Old people have NOTHING to offer!"

Even in our schools, my generation is hard at work pumping them so full of "self-esteem" and putting them into "tasking groups" where they reinvent all the errors of the past and enshrine them in projects and papers that are glowingly approved by teacher regardless of the lack of intellectual content. They are told that the most important thing on earth is their own feelings, which is also the only subject they have to write about. Said one high school teacher, "I can't expect them to write a simple thesis and support it with arguments. But they sure can emote about it!"