#6,258 of “Things any rational person doesn’t need to be told”

Is there any doubt that many (perhaps tending toward most) Feddle Gummint judges have their brains surgically removed before taking the bench?

Exhibit number (many–larger than I have time to type, maybe a googleplex squared):

US federal judge declares boating illegal in all US navigable waters.

Also evidence that jackasses don’t like boats, I would guess.

This example of anarcho-tyranny provided by Roland Dobbins

OTA Wednesday/Mini-roundup

Note: Yeh, I know this is up kinda late. Server problems at fatcow’s end this ayem. And I have no idea when they fixed it since I’ve been out for the past four hours… so here’s Wednesday’s OTA post

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Now, the roundup.


Tired of BSODs and such? Don’t spend a fortune buying one of the new INTEL Macs for the Unix-core OSX. Try out Puppy Linux or Ubuntu. I just put Puppy Linux on an OLD 266Mhz comp with a 2gig HD and only 64MB of RAM last night. Ran like The Flash. Minor configs (which the connection wizard walks anyone, even of the “Aunt Tilly” kind) and on the internet and cruising with no problem. I use two other “flavors” of Linux—one is Ubuntu, another is a stripped down Slackware with command line-only for use as a firewall—on a couple of other computers and haven’t had an issue with them yet. Recommended. Oh, and the newest Puppy Linux distro will fit on a “credit card” CD and boot as a live session, so you don’t even have to actually install it if you don’t want to.

Nice.

On a tip from STACLU, I had a chuckle when I read about the ACLU being sued for invasion of privacy and defamation. Rich. The sanctimonious, pusillanimous, hypocritical terrorist-loving bastards… May 1,000 flying camels deposit turds in their soup.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the DLC has had its tax-exempt status revoked. Oh, dear. What will they do for slush funds now? (Yeh, like that’ll make a difference.)

A little over a week after observing rememberance of 9/11, Edward Feser discusses why so many dumbasses still cling to idiotic conspiracy theories about the event. Worth a read.

Bou laments bureaucratic nonsense. (Remember: medical privacy laws and regulations are NOT in existance for the reasons they say; they are there for two primary purposes: to protect the doctors and to make medical care more expensive and inconvenient. *heh*)

Lady Diane has a roundup of a different sort. Why, she even mentions necktie parties in America’s Third World County. (I’ll have to see that Dr. Tarr and Mr. Fether send her an engraved invitation to the next one… ;-))

Don Surber notes something I take as another good reason for the Fair Tax (cos it’s FAIR, that’s why… *sheesh*)

Kat told me to feel free to post at Cathouse Chat while she and her family are in Hawaii, but I’ve been enjoying her Hawaii posts too much to break up the flow (although, yeh, one did sneak in… ). Here’s one; check out at least a few of the others (including the video tour of their timeshare). Have a great time, Kat! Keep those “cards n letters” comin’!

Well, I did say a “mini-roundup” so that’s all for now.

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Have I discovered the purpose of SPAM?

Everything that is must have some sort of raison d’être, mustn’t it? Otherwise, what’s the point? Now, it doesn’t have to be a good purpose or even a notably sensible one, but everything MUST have some sort of reason for its existence.

I think I may have discovered the raison d’être for SPAM. Consider for a moment: how many people are going to be positively influenced by unasked for email or blog comments/tbs clogging inboxes (or moderation queues) touting pr0n, “male enhancement” products, get rich quick schemes, Nigerian bank accounts or any of the other dumbass pitches?

OK, we know from the evidence that there are plenty of folks who are dumber than a bag of hammers, cos SPAMmers wouldn’t keep on spending their money, time and other resources sending out such massive floods of junk for no return at all, now would they? So maybe that is the most obvious reason for SPAM: there are enough genuinely stupid people—as in fewer active brain cells than a head of cabbage—to keep SPAMmers awash in the cash they suck from such idiots.

But is there a higher purpose that SPAM serves (I mean besides the lofty purpose of royally pi$$ing me off–a worthy end in and of itself, some might say)?

Well, yes, of course there is. I refer you to my previous comment about SPAMmers sucking $$ off stupid people and my post earlier today about how stupidity ought to exact a price. The more $$ SPAMmers (or any scammers for that matter) can suck off stupid people, the less stupid people have to spend. In a best case scenario, this could result in some stupid people not having enough $$ left for their grocery bill, and being really stupid, they might, just might, be too stupid to find someone to rescue them.

With any luck at all, SPAMmers could be helping stupid people kill themselves off.

But that’s stretching our luck a lil too far, I fear.

*sigh*

Oh, well. For a brief instant there, I thought I was onto something…

Asking Ferdy for comment

Mini-Roundup/Open Post

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Some links to interesting (and some infuriating) posts/articles/pages I have stumbled across in the last few days:

Flying “car” (not really, but sorta-semi-almost).

Mother jailed for homeschooling. In Germany, but who can doubt educrats and at least some politicians in this country don’t harbor similar desires?

UPDATE: a followup from a reader:

“This is the companion article to the one you linked”:

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/139

Stücher called upon all Christian parents in Germany to withdraw their children from the public schools which, he says, have fallen into the hands of “neomarxist activists propagating atheist humanism, hedonism, pluralism and materialism.”

Well, of course they have. Just as they have in these sorta United States.

The Age of Horrorism. I don’t fully agree with Martin Amis’ points, but the article’s worth a read. 5-parter.

Rick does an alleyoop with the pass from the Pope, all over poor lil Muzzies’ hurt feelings cos of Benedict’s comments… (What a fortuitous juxtaposition: Benedict=good words. Pope speaks truth and Muslims are upset… par for the course.)

And in the same vein, Abbagav looks at current events and includes this lil aside,

Sure, the Pope has sent a message that religion and violence don’t mix, and been greeted with an Islamic response not unlike the retort one would expect from Moe if Curly complained he was too violent — pick two fingers.

And…

Kris lends more perspective on the “Religion of Peace” (MHWA).

UPDATE #2: The Random Yak voices the definitive post on the Pope’s remarks and the tantrums thrown by the follwers of The Butcher of Medina.

And…

“Religion of Peace” MHWH

And, while we’re (very rightly) roasting Muslims, how about a couple from Woody? Here and here. (It’s the SECOND link on that last one that lampoons the followers of the Butcher of Medina. The first link–in the second “here”–is NSFW.)

And…

CrusadeS! (WTG, Angel. :-))

Linknzona: The President’s Little Red Book for Illegal Immigration. Must-read.

“Right to know (nothing)”? Dan Rhiel has the Rhiel deal

And lastly, for those with a desire for a lil light macabre play, here’s the latest Dead Guy on the Sidebar.


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Stupidity ought to have a price

Woman Pays $14,000 to Lease Rotary Dial Phone

The part that gets to me is the comment by a family member:

Strogen’s family is outraged by AT&T’s actions. Strogen’s granddaughter, Barb Gordon said “It’s taking advantage of the elderly. People our age wouldn’t even consider leasing a telephone.” Gordon also expressed her anger and pointed out the obvious that “If my own grandmother was doing it, how many other people are?”

“Taking advantage of the elderly”? How long has it been since everyone who’s paid any attention at all (and has more than two active brain cells) has known that leasing rotary phones from Ma bell is unnecesasary? Sure, the woman’s in her 80s now, but she was only in her 50s or 60s when such information became common knowledge. Anyone stupid enough to pay a $10/month rental/lease fee for a piece of trowaway technology really ought to be paying that money as a fine for stupidity.

But no, our society wants to put bumper guards on life, now… and that’s making us ever more stupid and incompetent. In our economy of abundance and our society of cocooned ease, we are breeding whole generations of incompetent, lazy nincompoops and whimps (or over-reacting hyper jackasses). As a small example, the other day a young nephew of mine asked about some DOS commands so he could play around on an old computer his family had aquired. Almost stumped me. Windows (and Linux, for that matter) are so graphically-oriented, so easy, that I rarely use DOS commands any more, rarely write batch files, rarely even see the command line.

Enstupiating ease. That’s a critical danger to our society. That and cocooning, bumper-guarding children throughout childhood and adolescence to the extent that they never grow up to be really competent adults but sheeple who always need someone else to take care of them, instruct them in how to do things. Incompetent at learning or doing nearly anything on their own.

Filled with an always present undercurrent of fear.

Take a “discussion” I’m having elsewhere with a gal who prides herself on being a swimming inbstructor (for nine whole years! woo-hoo!). Her claim to expertise? She is the ONLY swimming instructor she knows or has even heard of who can teach someone the breast stroke in half an hour!

Gime a break! When I was eight, I saw someone doing a breast stroke in the public pool we frequented. I thought it was cool, so I did it too. (And yeh, if my lifesaving and WSI instructors years later are to be believed, I apparently did it right.) A few minutes later, I “taught” my six-year-old brother the breaststroke. How? “Hey! look what I can do!” “I can do that too!” “Show me.” So he did. Simply by copying me.

Big stinking deal.

But no, not today. Today, apparently it takes instruction by a professional for today’s incompetent whimpy kids to learn an idiot-proof breast stroke. And it takes (apparently) 30 whole minutes to do so. Gee, people really are getting stupider by the minute. Growing up, I never met anyone (who already knew how to keep their head in the water) who couldn’t pick up the breast strooke in under 5 minutes, “instructed” or not.

And so it goes. “Education professionals” (filling positions that formerly would have been filled by teachers) are talking (again) about how training wheel teaching methods (oh! That’s another experience! I never knew there were such things as “training wheels” as a kid. Just got put on a bike and pushed off… ) can cripple students’ intellectual development.

Yeh, it’s all talk.

*sigh*

Guarding The Borders- To Fence Or Not To Fence?

As I’ve said countless times on my own blog, I am not a very political animal. I have my opinions on things of a political nature but I rarely express them, and I very seldom post on anything political because I don’t feel as if I’m well enough informed on particular issues. I do have an opinion on whether or not there should be a fence along the border between Mexico and the States, and it has always seemed like a very good idea to me.

Living in Texas I see a lot of illegals and every time I see someone that’s clearly Hispanic in front of me in the grocery store, paying for their food with a LoneStar Card (plastic food stamps) or presenting a WIC form, I have to wonder how much of that is going to sustain illegal cousins, brothers, aunts, uncles, etc. I’m not naive enough to think that the only nationality that can use our Southern borders as a crossing is Mexican, but let’s be honest here for a minute; aren’t they the main concern?

I posted some time ago about Governor Rick Perry’s “Virtual Border Watch Program” and I thought that too was a good idea.

* With voluntary participation of private landowners, Texas will use $5 million to begin placing hundreds of surveillance cameras along criminal hotspots and common routes used to enter this country. Perry said the cameras will cover vast stretches of farm and ranchland located directly on the border where criminal activity is known to occur, and “not the neighborhoods where families will continue to enjoy their privacy.”

“Landowners will be able to monitor and defend their property from those who might endanger their families. We will make the video feed available to state, local and federal law enforcement agencies so they can respond swiftly and appropriately,” Perry said. “And we will post this video on the Internet – in real time – so that concerned Americans can help protect our nation through online neighborhood watch programs.”

The video will be available 24 hours a day and cameras will be equipped with night vision capabilities. When citizens witness a crime taking place, they will be able to call an 800 number and be routed to the appropriate law enforcement agency.

It just so happens that I have friends who have a 700-acre ranch that also includes a 1/2 mile of river frontage on the Rio Grande. While small by Texas standards, their nearest neighbor is 6 miles away, and the closest town of any size is Presidio where there is a Point of Entry via an International Bridge. Naturally, there is also an Immigration office. This town is approximately 28 miles from my friends ranch, and the other nearby towns are Ruidosa, population 19 and Candelaria, population estimated at 55. They don’t live down there, they’re hoping to retire there though, and they go several times a year to camp out and stay for a week or two at a time. Here is a picture taken on their ranch.


And another-

As you can see it’s very isolated.

I was visiting with these friends a few days ago and the conversation got around to the ranch and when they were going again and as I know the property is right on the border I asked their opinion of building a fence. Below is a quote sent to me via email after I’d asked a few more questions prior to beginning this post.

Candelaria is the last town on Hwy 170 or “river road” as it is known. The population there is a bit bigger I would guess around 30 or so. It is about 20 miles or so after Ruidosa. There is a sign when you get there that “State Maintenance Ends Here”. The dirt road goes on from there to El Paso, about 140 miles I was told, but you ain’t gonna get there unless you have a 4 x 4, extra gas and tires. The dirt road is where I was telling you about the trolleys that go across the river and the religious icons stuff set in small caves along the road. People out there still live in adobe houses and have no phone, lights or other essentials. Our very own 3rd world.

Another interesting fact about Candelaria is the foot bridge from the States to Mexico there (not an authorized crossing). The bridge was paid for with Russian humanitarian aid money! Can you believe that shit…:)

Once you get past the town they couldn’t even get the equipment in there to build the damn fence. Plus all the cattle ranchers on the river from Presidio on would just cut it to allow their cattle to get to the river for water…. it is the desert after all and water is a very scarce resource. A few are lucky enough to have artesian wells but most rely on what rain water they can trap and the river.

As you can tell from that quote they don’t have much faith in a fence doing any good. I asked then what their opinion of the Minutemen was and was told that “Their hearts are in the right place, and they have the right idea, but they’re spread too thin to do a whole lot of good.” So of course I asked what they thought would work. Guards, guards and more guards. An armed border.

One of the reasons they gave me for this was that even if someone saw the illegal crossers climbing or cutting through a fence, say, via Texas Governor Rick Perry’s camera idea, or the Minutemen calling someone, they would be long gone before anyone in authority arrived, particularly in their area where the road is far from straight, two-laned, and often has livestock wandering around. They say that it’s just too desolate to do any good without men on the ground, and then you have the water/rancher/cattle factor to deal with also.

They tell me that at night you can see lights back and forth all night and that while they feel fairly safe during the day, only seeing a few people with bags ready to swim across when they’re down on the riverfront also swimming, that it’s dangerous to be there alone. My friend’s mother recently stated that she wanted to get away, go down there and camp on her own, and they told her absolutely not, no way, even though she’s the best shot they know. There are too many drug runners mixed in with illegal wannabes, and even though there’s the INS station less than 30 miles away in Presidio, that they very seldom see anyone on patrol and we’re only talking here about a very, very small portion of the TEXAS border.

So what’s the solution? To fence or not to fence? Armed guards? It’s a tough one, but I agree, something MUST be done. I think my piranha idea is sounding better all the time.

Cross-posted at “Diane’s Stuff”.

Eight Little Words…

“We are experiencing a service interruption in your area… ”

So, yeh, I know twc is looking a lil anemic today, but I’m currently limited to a very s l o w dialup connection (always have a backup, now matter what, right?) and updates will just have to wait until I have a real internet connection back. I’ll try to stay on top of the comment/tb moderation queue, but no promises.

Maybe tomorrow I can do a roundup of interesting posts and articles, and new (to me, at least) blogs and such.

I’m tempted to think it’s a conspiracy…

histschoolroomcropped.jpg

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Meanwhile, beating a dying horse… (Why? Because it’s not worth the bullet it’d take to put it down, that’s why.)


Yes, an expansion of a post quickly slapped up yesterday

I’ll get back to this in a minute, but for now, just hold this thought in mind, would you?

Commonly reported side effects include difficulty sleeping, loss of appetite, irritability, stomachaches, headaches, blurry vision, nausea, dizziness, drowsiness and tics and tremors. There have been concerns that ADHD medication temporarily delays growth, and one study found that up to 5 percent of children experience tactile hallucinations, often involving a sensation that bugs or snakes are crawling on their bodies. The FDA recently announced that certain ADHD drugs should caution users about the risks of serious heart problems and psychotic behavior.1

I’m tempted to think it’s a conspiracy corrupt young minds and deliberately manufacture easily manipulated sheeple, but then I’m reminded of the quote attributed to Napoleon:

“Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.”

I’m speaking, of course (and again), of the public “education” system in these micromanaged-from-the-swamps-of-D.C. United States.

But it’s not just micromanagement of local schools by remote bureaucraps and educraps or even bad (or lazy–and there are plenty of those) teachers or even pubschool adminstrators *spit* that are at work creating mind-numbed children (future citizens). Nope. Parents are the ones most responsible for the failures of American schools that have created a populace that is largely subliterate (while feeling good about itself, falsely calling itself literate). Parents could require discipline in school, could require their children to learn useful information, turn off the video games and TV and, well, read… Parents could vote in such a way as to lessen or even eliminate remote micromanagement of their public schools, even to voting in school board members who would turn down fedgov funds in order to maintain some semblance of local control.

But no.

Remember that list of side effects for ADHD drugs? Well, apparently more and more parents would rather drug their children out of their minds than address real concerns in public education. From the same source as linked above,

Academic doping — using these stimulant prescriptions in an effort to enhance focus, concentration and mental stamina — first started on college campuses, especially Ivy League and exclusive, competitive schools. Now, the problem is filtering down to secondary schools, Yates says, and more parents are playing a role in obtaining prescription ADHD medication for their teenagers.

So, in order to give their kids an edge in producing grades, grades based on regurgitating crap curriculum that arguably produces subliterate and illiterate high school and college graduates, parents would subject their children to unnecessary risk of side effects like those listed above.

Stupid.

A better way is suggested by the following exchange between Harry Erwin, an university instructor and researcher in England, and Jerry Pournelle (as quoted yesterday):

There is a recent Scientific American article (August 2006) on expertise that suggests what we should do for our students is motivate them to continuously push themselves beyond their current levels of ability and then provide accurate feedback on their performance. I did that this summer with some of my programming students, and their performance was *much* improved. So perhaps the problem in education is not with the students, but rather with the approach to teaching–an interesting implication for the current high- stakes testing regime in the schools–it might be wrong-headed. The SA article also suggests that the differences in talent and intelligence between students are much less important than the differences in motivation. So when your goal is to educate experts, don’t worry about their raw talent and IQ, but instead keep them pushing their limits…

Pournelle rersponded, in part, with:

[T]hat experience exactly matches not only my own experience, but that of most of my generation. Being pushed to just beyond one’s limit is apparently the best way to learn almost anything; and the experience that motivation can be as important as intelligence is very much in line with the work of Marva Collins and some of the other inner city teachers…

But do you think this has a snowball’s chance in hell of impacting prisons for kids in these United States? Nope. Too effort for parents, teachers and students. And it’d put a raft of educrats and professors of education out of work. (Or reveal them for the fools they are–which would be just as bad in their eyes.)

And it would stand a chance of producing an electorate that could see the emperor’s new clothes for what they truly are. And so, 23 years after “A Nation At Risk”—the Congressionally-mandated report from the National Commission on Excellence in Education—sounded the alarm,

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

…we are even more “at risk” than before, largely because of an increasingly “mis-undereducated” population.

But hey! That works just fine for a country with borders like a chicken wire swimming pool, the TSA, generational welfare and all the other abortions of public good wrought by *spit* politicians elected by dumb, fat and sappy Americans, doesn’t it?

But not to despair! Bill Gates, the progenitor of wonderful things like the world’s most bloated, overpriced (even the “free” software, like Internet Exploder) and insecure software (“Where do you want your computer to crash today?”) is coming to the rescue!

Microsoft-designed School Opens in PA

OK, granted the author of the article linked above has a dof in the fight, she still makes a few points I had occur to me when I first read about the Gates school project. I can tell ya one thing” I’m glad the twc.us kids didn’t have to go to a school quite that shallow and stupid.

Ah, but the Gates school is all in the tradition of Dewey, et al, preparing good (dull) drones for American business to turn into wage slaves.