Oh, balderdash. I'm 56, never owned a gun, and haven't held one since I was 16 (target shooting with a
You can call them any derogatory term you like, but I think people who are stockpiling guns and ammo privately are just trying to protect themselves against an on-rushing police state. And the amorphous left wants to disarm them because those busybodies realize that their dream of controlling every aspect of our lives, from the food we eat, the soda we drink, the lessons we learn, the jobs we hold, to how much of our own money and property we're allowed to keep is made much tougher by having an armed populace.
Are you unaware the ban was declared unlawful by a judge?
Using Reverse Polish Encryption, no doubt.
In my last year of jr. high, my father challenged me to write the scholarship exams to a prestigious boys' school. I won one. And so I left a co-ed school for a male one. The atmosphere was completely different; moments of rowdiness would be tolerated by the master (there were no female teachers), but he would then instruct us to settle down, and the class would continue. Unlike the 45 minute periods at jr. high, our periods were only 35 minutes. The school realized that teenage boys have to get up and move frequently, which is why we still had recess each morning - unheard of at the public high schools. We also had an hour for lunch, giving us time to play ball hockey or basketball or touch football, and burn off some energy so that we could sit through the afternoon.
Wolfing down your lunch in ten minutes, playing 50 minutes of basketball with all the intensity teenage boys can muster, and then racing to class, tieing your tie with one hand whilst carrying your books in the other - it was thrilling. We would, literally, stampede through the halls in a way that wouldn't have been tolerated at public school. We were FREE to be BOYS, and I would not give up the memory of those days for anything.
With no girls to show off for, we competed at everything - academics, sports, arts, clubs - without fear of being labelled, for example, a 'browner' or a 'jock'. Many of us were a bit of both. The school encouraged you to be an "all-rounder", and while classes ended at 3:15, you were expected to participate in some extra-curricular activity until 4:30 or so. My friends at public high school envied that; most of their teachers were out the parking lot 10 minutes after the last bell.
Teenage boys, adjusting to the suddenly changed levels of testerone in their bodies, don't fit well into the female-dominated "sit still and be quiet" mode prevalent in the co-ed school. They need space and more importantly, time to move and burn off some of that raging energy. Women don't understand that at all, which is why so many bright young boys are being mis-diagnosed with ADHD/ADD/whatever, and being put on drugs because they don't fit into women's world view.
I had two beautiful and bright daughters, who chose public school. Had I had a son, though, I would have pushed him for all I was worth to go the school. I know he would have been treated like a young man there, with the understanding of a young man's particular needs, and not have been pushed into a feminist/schoolmarm charicature of what a boy should be.
Regardless of what anyone thinks of MS products, (and I use Win7 everyday, and think it's perfectly fine), my candidate for understatement of the decade.
Here's a clue: a "fairing" is a piece of equipment on the leading edge of certain vehicles designed to improve aerodynamics. One sees them on airplane engines and motorcycles.
And my sharper point is that people who are only good at English disparage math and science, while people who are only good at math disparage English (and all the humanities), while people, like me, who are good at both, despair at the two intellectual solitudes that have been created.
"Does knowing how one is fairing relative to immediate classmates "
While I don't know how either of you are doing in the real world, it's a pretty fair bet that neither of you would fare very well on an English test.
But I bets both of you can al-jabber with the best of them!
UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker