"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
…no wonder we have the kleptocratic, anarcho-tyrannical “feddle gummint” kakistocracy we have. Massive ignorance (and shameful–WILFULL–stupidity) reign supreme in our society today.
Remember third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom:
“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”
More and more I’m convinced that truer words were never spoken.
I’ve said it before, but I’m giving into the temptation to reiterate what runs through my mind every time I hear or read the phrase, “It’s only semantics”.
Semantics is the single most important thing about language. Without it, spoken language becomes nothing but (tautology alert!) meaningless whistles and clicks and moans and grunts and written language becomes nothing but weird squiggles, signifying nothing.
Now there abide these three:
Phonemes (sounds and their and written phoneme analogs)
Syntax (structure) and
Semantics (MEANING), and the greatest of these is semantics.
“It’s only (or just) semantics” is an utterance by an idiot, full of sound (and whimpering), signifying nothing* (at least nothing useful, save for confirming that the one saying it has no argument or defensible position).
Insincere apologies to The Bard and all that…
* Aside: For something with much,much more sense than the “nothing (useful) conveyed by the idiotic “It’s just semantics” try this disquisition on Nothing. Not all that edifying, but it did keep me in stitches for days after I first read it. Imagine breaking out in laughter in the middle of a Greek class. The prof was understanding once I had explained and shared the article with him. Nice guy.
“News” of the “who cares what his latest ploy is” variety:
Weiner seeking treatment amid growing pressure to resign
While the New York congressman seeks treatment at an undisclosed location, he will take a “short leave of absence” from Congress, Risa Heller said in a statement.
A Democratic source, familiar with conversations among Weiner and Democratic leadership about his fate, did not know what specific type of treatment Weiner would undergo.
What “type of treatment”? Frankly, I’m thinking his treatment should follow a line from an old Cheech and Chong bit, “Bailiff! Whack his pee-pee!” *heh*
Bank of America Gets Pad Locked [sic] After Homeowner Forecloses On It
It seems the Bank of America decided to foreclose on the home of a couple who had paid cash for their home. Unfortunately, all the judge in the case did was declare that bank of America had to pay the couple’s legal fees, not some truly righteous damages, but still the bank refused to cough up what they owed. So, the layer got a court order foreclosing on the branch the fake foreclosure had issued from:
After more than 5 months of the judge’s ruling, the bank still hadn’t paid the legal fees, and the homeowner’s [sic] attorney did exactly what the bank tried to do to the homeowners. He seized the bank’s assets…
…Sheriff’s deputies, movers, and the Nyergers’ attorney went to the bank and foreclosed on it. The attorney gave instructions to to remove desks, computers, copiers, filing cabinets and any cash in the teller’s drawers.
After about an hour of being locked out of the bank, the bank manager handed the attorney a check for the legal fees.
Too bad. It’d have been better to have socked the BoA with a much bigger bill and foreclosed the entire BoA operation, the friggin’ cheats.
I do wish people who wrote and edited copy for a living were more ethical about their work. The stupid errors in the original noted above ought to have those responsible docking their own pay, since, after all, they make their living as wordsmiths, don’t they?
“Pad Locked”-nuh-uh: padlocked.
“homeowner’s”–nope. The article made it clear the couple owned their home, so it is “homeowners'” with the apostrophe following the plural “s” creating the possessive form. F’in’ idiots. I don’t get paid for this stuff, and even I know that.
From an AP report about the document posted/released by the White house recently in response to The Donald’s success in pushing the question about The Zero’s strange reluctance to release his birth certificate:
…For much of the past two years, the issue has been marginal. And then it flared again as critics clamored for the long-form certificate of birth.
In response, Obama secured special authority to secure two official copies of the more detailed certificate. He dispatched his personal attorney to fly to Hawaii, get the certificates and hand deliver them back to the White House. [emphasis added]
“[S]pecial authority”?!? WTF? From Hawaii’s own DOH website,
“Vital records (birth, death, marriage, and divorce certificates) for events that occurred in Hawaii are received and preserved by the Office of Health Status Monitoring, a unit of the Department of Health (DOH). In Hawaii, access to vital records is restricted by statute (HRS §338-18).
“Certified copies of these records may be issued to authorized individuals and used for such diverse purposes as school entry, passports, Social Security participation, driver’s licenses, employment, sports participation, survivor’s benefits, proof of property rights, and other needs.
“This is only an ordering system for certified copies of vital records. The certified copies being ordered WILL NOT be issued online as a part of your transaction. You will receive the ordered certified copies via first-class postal mail within 4-6 weeks…
“…You may order certified copies only of your own birth and marriage certificates or of an immediate family member (e.g., a parent of his/her child’s birth or marriage certificate) on this web site…” [emphasis added]
And it doesn’t take spending many multiples of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money to obtain those records by sending an attorney to get a copy in person, either. Total cost for one: $11.50, including an electronic handling/processing fee, and I imagine one could pay for special handling by the post office to ensure the thing was delivered in a timely and safe fashion.
But “special authority” needed? Nah. Just a copy of one’s driver’s license or other verifiable ID. Easy-peasy.
Why lie about how easy it is to get an official, certified copy of a Hawaiian birth certificate? And heck, I’ll say it again, if some rubber-stamped signature is the equivalent of the normal embossed seal that has appeared on all the other Hawaiian B.C.s I’ve seen images of, then I’m a red-tailed baboon.
And these obvious dumbass mistakes in presentation, things ANYONE with access to the internet can check for themselves, are just icing on the cake amid the substantial questions the documents as presented have raised when simply looked at with the naked eye, let alone the fakery discovered by folks who’ve made more thorough examinations of the White House’s pdf file.
Sure there could be some innocent excuses for all the different issues that have come to light about this latest offering from The Zero, his minions and his handlers, but any innocent explanations of them all have to depend on incompetence from The Zero, his minions and his handlers and the JDs (no, not juris doctorates: juvenile delinquents, no matter what their chronological ages) effecting this shit.
This is all just so patently stupid that I must keep reminding you to look for what the other hand is doing…
There were some very, very sound reasons the Founders designed the Constitution to define a timocratic republic, and very,very sound reasons they eschewed mob rule (democracy).
And there are some very, very shrewd–and really stupid–reasons why our political masters have sold the sheeple a bill of goods concerning democracy.
Chew on those two thoughts for a while and get back to me, ‘K?
Was watching an episode (number 1 of only 2) of the short-lived and now history Paul Reiser Show when a commercial for audible.com provided welcome relief. Unfortunately, the relief was very short-lived too. *sigh* The commercial touted audible.com as a way to catch up on one’s reading.
Roll that around in your head for a bit. Some bubbleheaded blonde sitting at her ease on a patio supposedly listening to a recorded “book” as a model for catching up on one’s reading!
If you are behind on your reading, the solution is to pick up a book on your reading list (you do have a reading list, don’t you? Hmmm?) and READ it.
*sheesh*
Note: while listening to someone else read a book pretty much bores me to tears, I can see its value for some folks, but representing that sort of thing as “catching up on one’s reading” is just stupid. For one thing, even assuming a rather slow rate of reading speed, how many people can listen at 500-700 words per minute? Heck, it would seem to me that listening to someone else read a book would result in falling behind on one’s total consumption of books in whatever form, quite apart from the fact that listening ain’t reading!
BTW, after about 10 minutes, I couldn’t take any more of the Paul Reiser Show. NBC did the right thing to kill it early. Just not early enough, IMO. Killing it before airing would have suited it better.
Nothing much, just another now less useful word, the product of subliterate morons (usually in the Hivemind and Academia–people with NO excuse for misusing words, since, after all, words are their trade) misusing it so often:
decimate
Look at the word. Really look. “Deci-” is a prefix we’re all familiar with (well, all the folks who read here, meaning at least literate enough to read their way out of a paper bag). From the Latin, “decimus,” which means (roughly) “a tenth part”. Yep, until subliterate morons began debasing the word, “decimate” meant to punish (by death) a tenth of a group of people. It came into being as a punishment for a century of Roman soldiers whenever any of their group deserted in battle: any ONE soldier fled the field (or tried to) and 1/10 of the soldiers of that century were selected by lot for execution.
Decimation was a terrible punishment and a strong pressure on the group to make sure ALL soldiers stuck to the line of battle.
“Decimate” as it has come to be used as a result of influence by dumbasses no longer has that useful meaning of a destruction of a tenth of a population but means only the destruction of some meaninglessly general and unknown number. “Decimated” as used by even more massively stupid people is sometimes used in the construction, “utterly decimated” to mean “completely destroyed”.
These “people” make me want to puke. Yes, I meant “people” as a sneer.
This:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p8-I3UTLD8
With all that’s facing this society, this is something to be selling? Decorated menstrual pads?
…and the lemmings* swarm as one over a cliff…
*Yeh, yeh, I know they don’t really, but shepple seem to.
(Post title is my reasonable translation of the response made by a whiny LGBT dumbass “professor” at the University of Iowa to a “Coming Out” email sent out by a Republican student group.)
WTF?
So a college student group sent out an approved (by the university) mass email to school email addresses advertising “Conservative Coming Out Week”. And what happened?
[audio: What-a-maroon.mp3]Ellen Lewin, a professor of Anthropology and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies in the Department of Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, responded to the email by writing, “F*** YOU, REPUBLICANS” from her official University of Iowa email account.
That “professor” (of useless crap) really needs a spanking. I’d prefer a public flogging, but a spanking would probably drive her (further) insane, so that’d work for me.
Still, I could have wished for a better text than what was sent. After all, this was from someone(s) who graduated high school and gained *coug* admission to university schooling, sent to students and faculty who also ought to be presumed to be literate enough to read their way out of a paper bag, and yet…
From: UI College Republicans
Subject: [NonAcadStudorg] Conservative Coming Out Week
Conservatives in Iowa City it is now time to come out of the closet!
I know at times it feels like you are the only person that [should be “who” but I’ll count this one as a “gimme”–ed] disagrees with this liberal town, but you are not alone! We are asking all Republicans, Independents leaning right, or just anyone slightly frustrated with the current one party controlling every level of Johnson County, and some levels of Iowa and U.S. government to STAND UP!
Conservative Coming Out Week will be April 18th – April 22nd. Here is the schedule of events that will be going on throughout the week:
Monday: Whose [SIC] Conservative Anyway? Guess which athletes, movie stars, and performing artists are Republican. 11-1 on Kautz Plaza off of the T. Anne Cleary Walkway.
Tuesday: Red vs. Blue Blood Drive from 2 to 6pm at the Carnival Room in Burge. Competition between the Republicans and Democrats for a good cause!
-College Republican meeting that night at 8pm in 71 Schaeffer Hall with showing of “Journey’s with George” in honor of President George W. Bush.
Wednesday: Come pick up your Doctors’ Notice to miss class for “sick of being stress” [SIC], just like the Wisconsin public employees during the union protests from 11 to 1 on the Pentacrest.
Thursday: Red vs Blue games! Beat the UDems in kickball and flag football from 4-6 in Hubbard Park. Wear your respective political parties [SIC] color!
Stick around for a [SIC] Animal Rights BBQ at 6 p.m.
Friday: Wear RED Day! Come out of the closet and show your true colors!
Should be a great week! Lets [SIC] come out!
*sigh* The best I could give the author(s) of this email would be a “C”–a “B” for creativity and a solid “D-” for all the mistakes.
But at least the author(s) was(were) trying to play–though fairly (how weird! ;-))–by Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. *heh*
Complete rabbit trail (with no roast rabbit at the end): I regret having missed the PETA Roast Animal Rights BBQ. But I did burn some animal flesh in honor of the event, anyway.