Comment Re:Obligatory Onion link (Score 1) 314
I knew the comments on this article would deliver the laugh lines. I can't mod you up so I just came to say "thank you".
I knew the comments on this article would deliver the laugh lines. I can't mod you up so I just came to say "thank you".
The looney left thinks that planning ahead is racism. People who plan ahead typically do better in life, but the idea is to claim that anybody who "does better" is in that position due to societal structures that benefit them.
The Seattle Public Schools issued a statement that talked about racism and one of the elements was "future time orientation", another way of saying "planning ahead".
http://www.seattlepi.com/local...
According to the district's official Web site, "having a future time orientation" (academese for having long-term goals) is among the "aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype and label people of color."
The school district took the site down a few days later after widespread criticism, but you can see it here:
https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourm...
Cultural Racism:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.
Ironically the anybody who would come up with this stuff, particularly planning ahead and individualism, is acting in a racist manner. It's pathetic.
The victim might well be some poor fellow in Mexico who got gunned down by the cartel which supplies the drugs used in "nonviolent" drug offenses.
Except that if drugs were legal the poor fellow wouldn't get gunned down. It's kind of fascinating to blame drugs for the problems that are actually caused by criminalization.
The other thing is that they are also freeing up a tremendous amount of tax dollars from the general fund by not arresting, trying, and housing non-violent drug offenders. My guess would be those savings absolutely dwarf the tax revenue. Also there's a societal benefit, fewer people labelled as criminals means more people able to access gainful employment outside menial entry level jobs which should lead to a higher GDP.
Exactly! People don't seem to realize that jailing someone hurts the country twice - first in the direct costs to jail them ($20K/year and up) and second in the lost productivity since they can't contribute to the GDP. We have a GDP of $17T with 350M people. Or, a GDP of $17,000,000M with 350M people which works out to $48,500 per person. If jail costs the low end of $20K per year we're paying 2.5 times that much in lost productivity. The costs are staggering. Of course not everybody in jail would contribute to the GDP but there's no reason to believe that pot smokers wouldn't.
We need to seriously take that into consideration when looking at the best options to punish people for crimes, and when looking at what activities need to be punished in the first place.
I doubt that stone age man spoke fluent American like that.
Nah, probably plain old English.
Look into the issue and you'll find that there's no real definition of "assault weapons" and it usually comes down to simple aesthetic components that have nothing to do with the lethality of the weapon.
If those components were purely aesthetic, the manufacturers would have simply removed them to circumvent a ban.
LOL. My favorite part about you looney lefters is that you don't even recognize the fact that you live in a self-parody world. I'm sorry to do this to you, well, LOL, I lie. i find it hilarious.
You're right that you have to deal with people like this all through life, and I can definitely sympathize with what you've written having dealt with the "you're not as smart as you think you are" bs many times when I actually *was* as smart as I thought I was. It may not sound like it from above but I'm acutely aware of my limitations.
I will say, though, that I also stood up for myself and detention wouldn't have happened to me. I never had any qualms about handling issues directly and going to higher authorities where necessary, the highest being my parents. Still teaching my kids about that concept.
The 6th grade teacher referenced above actually wrote on my report card mid-year that I was a trouble-maker. My 6th grade home room teacher (we had two teachers in grades 4-6) actually wrote at the end of the year that she had asked the students in class and I wasn't the trouble-maker, my other teacher was the problem. That particular woman, by the way, came out strongly against ongoing teacher testing when it was proposed in Indiana. Surprise, surprise.
My hometown isn't a very wealthy area and our teachers were paid terribly back then (starting salary in 1982 was $13,000/year). Still, we had some great teachers who really put everything into it and didn't let the lack of resources hamper their teaching noticeably. I didn't mind the few who were subpar because they were the exception.
To give you an idea of what our monetary situation was, we had a junior high (7th and 8th grades) and a high school (9-12) a city block apart with classes in each building. Junior high was built in the mid 1940s and the high school was built in 1916. I graduated in 1986 and the building was about to fall in. I could talk a lot about it but the county was able to put new schools up I think the year after we left. We had steam heat, asbestos-covered pipes, we were poor but we loved it. Had to wear coats to some classes. Those were the days...
Note that I said nothing of the books being on a tablet. While that's certainly possible it would be nice to see text books distributed solely for the cost of printing and distribution.
I'm pretty sure I knew math, science and sometimes English better than my teachers through high school. Experienced teachers know how to deal with students like us - how would this be any different?
The real difference is you thought you knew math, science and sometimes English, but when it really came down to it, masters-level mathematics could be whipped out to gently remind you, or perhaps break down some English sentence structure to show your actual understanding vs. what you think you know.
Experienced teachers know the difference between knowledge and wisdom. The difference today is you don't have students going home spending another 4 - 6 hours every day tinkering with math or English like you might with computing.
Um, don't know about you but I quite well did know math and science far better than many of my teachers. I don't think you know the difference between knowledge and wisdom, either.
I first pointed out an error in a text book in 3rd grade and explained it to my teacher who was quite impressed (yes, I was correct and the book wasn't). I wasn't wiser than her by a long shot. But I was a little smarter in one area.
My 6th grade math and science teacher hated me because I had to point out the errors that she made on her exams. One of my favs was when she insisted that a geiger counter detects "visible light". She was copying the tests out of the back of the book and rearranging the answers. Since she had little actual knowledge of the subject she didn't know or care. She refused to look at the page in the book that clearly contradicted her answer. I finally got her to fix the answer by pointing out that I don't need a fancy detector to detect something that's visible. She generally missed one or two answers on her math tests and the occasional science test, too. She would then humiliate herself by not simply listening when I would politely point out the problem.
The record, though, was set in an 8th grade electronics class that I took. The teacher there managed to miss 14 on his first test. Not his strongest subject. To be fair, he was a gym teacher that was forced to teach a subject of which he had no real knowledge. He also taught drafting, and actually marked one of my drawings as incorrect because I had studiously drawn correctly a partially hidden line. He said it was "wrong" because there was no need to actually make it so exact.
I was well ahead of most of my math teachers past 7th grade or so. I remember one particularly humiliating experience that my 8th grade math teacher had. I was thinking about squares one evening and was thinking about how if you knew a certain square you could easily calculate forward or back one square. For instance, 25 squared is 625 so to get 24 squared I subtract 25 and then 24 from 625 giving 576. The reason that works is easy: when you subtract 25 you end up with 24 x 25, subtracting 24 then leaves you with 24 x 24. One of my examples was 50 squared at 2500, meaning the squares on each side are 2401 and 2601.
The next day in math class my teacher was pissed at something I did so he decided to humiliate me in front of class. He looked at me in front of everybody and said "if you're so smart tell me what 49 squared is." Yes, this happened. I didn't miss a beat and said "two thousand four hundred and one". He actually didn't know the answer so he looked at a kid in the front row with a calculator and said "check it". The kid said "he's right". My teacher would have crawled into a hole had one been handy. He never pulled that stunt again.
I could go on and on, but, yes, at an early age I was advanced in *knowledge* beyond many of my teachers. I did spend hours reading mundane crap - I think I had read through all science books in the school libraries and city library by 9th grade or so. I also had a teacher with a masters level education who was just brilliant and taught physics and science and such. We never tried to pull one over on him. My shop teacher totally rocked, too (and he was the husband of my 6th grade teacher - go figure). My band teacher? He knew how to play every instrument in the room. Literally. He scored music for us while watching football. Think you're going to teach *him* something? Ha! He was in his late 20s at the time, how badass do you think he is after 30 more years of experience?
I had a bunch of great teachers. And some of the best weren't as knowledgable as I was in the subject but that didn't bother them at all. I don't know why it would. They supported us as best they could and I really appreciate them for it, all of them.
What we need is to develop open text books with a creative commons license. Doesn't work for everything - sure - but let's face it: math, algebra, works of Shakespeare, these are things that never change (and Shakespeare isn't copyrighted, anyway, although I'm sure you can find copies of the works that are "protected"). Basic science changes slowly - talking about stuff that kids learn in school here. Really, there's no reason anybody should be making money from elementary school textbooks at this point in history.
Voter shows ID to election worker.
RACIST!!!!
telling their members to vote against a candidate because she's going to take their handguns and hunting rifles away, when all she said was that she'd look into restricting sales of assault weapons.
Look into the issue and you'll find that there's no real definition of "assault weapons" and it usually comes down to simple aesthetic components that have nothing to do with the lethality of the weapon. And it's usually pushed by people who openly want to ban general ownership of guns.
From this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09...
But in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.... It was much the same in the early 1990s when Democrats created and then banned a category of guns they called “assault weapons.”
abortion results in a dead baby
No. it doesn't. "Pro-life" extremists may believe it, but Christian faith is no stronger a justification for violence than Muslim faith. Abortion clinic bombers are terrorists by definition.
It has nothing to do with anybody's faith, and I find it odd that people always try to portray it as such (on both sides, I might add).
We have the pro-abortion crowd advocating for abortion at any time up until birth. You cannot argue that a baby aborted at 9 months or even 8 months is anything but a baby. I know a girl who is now 5 years old who was born just after 5 months and she's still alive. You might have called her a bundle of cells but she's now a living breathing (and highly intelligent) human.
On the other hand I can understand that a fertilized egg that has been dividing for the last 3 days isn't exactly a baby, either.
Like most folks, I don't know where to draw that line so I'd rather err on the side of caution as much as possible.
Why you think that requires some sort of "faith" or whatever is something that I find bizarre, but it's likely just your way of shutting down argument...
The Motor Pool supervisor gets a 7 WORK day suspension
I'm sure you are happy to have the same rule applied to you at your job.
At all the actual jobs I've had that bad of a screwup would simply mean getting fired. Of course, I didn't have a highly politicized union making sure that I could shamelessly break laws and face no consequences.
These are the same guys who broke the antennae off their cars to disable audio recorders that they had to wear. Nobody ever faced any punishment even though over half the antennae in one precinct had been broken off.
The cameras are good, but they need statutory backup making it a felony to not have the camera turned on. There also needs to be a statutory presumption that in the absence of camera footage anything the "defendant" says is considered absolute truth in court and the officer doesn't get to testify.
Without these basic laws in place (which no honest officer would disagree with, by the way) it's useless.
A successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author. -- S. C. Johnson
