Category: Dumbasses

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I Just Hate This…

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.

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“Free speech? F*** that!”

(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?

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.

[audio: What-a-maroon.mp3]

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.

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Hyperventilating Tinfoil Hat Wearers

 

 

*sigh*

Probably once a week I get email trumpeting this, that or t’other conspiracy theory of the week, or whatever. Usually, these come from people who are easily smart enough to either know better or be able to find out “better” with a couple of simple clicks. Here’s the most recent from the tinfoil hat population, although it’s actually been around for three or four years in some form or another and its ancestry goes all the way back to conspiracy theories and hoax petitions circulated in the 60s and 70s, at least.

The text of the hoax/tinfoil hat conspiracy theory is this:

REFUSE NEW COINS

This simple action will make a strong statement.

Please help do this.. Refuse to accept these when they are handed to you.

I received one from the Post Office as change and I asked for a dollar bill instead.

The lady just smiled and said ‘way to go’ , so she had read this e -mail.

Please help out..our world is in enough trouble without this too!!!!!

U.S.Government to Release New Dollar Coins

You guessed it ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’ IS GONE!!!

If ever there was a reason to boycott something, THIS IS IT!!!!

DO NOT ACCEPT THE NEW DOLLAR COINS AS CHANGE

Together we can force them out of circulation…

The email included one picture of the obverse of the 2007 issue (so much for the contrafactual “U.S.Government to Release New Dollar Coins “) of the George Washington dollar coin and went on to “argue” that this supposed elimination of the motto was a part of a conspiracy to remove God from the public forum, yada-yada.

Here’s a picture of the obverse side of the coin:

 

 

 

 
Sure enough, “In God We Trust” isn’t there. How about the reverse side of the coin?
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*huh* Not there either. So, at least the “missing motto” part of this nutso email is right, right?

Nope. If you buy the thing with only this much information, you’re the sucker.

 

 

 

 

That’s right, the “edge-incused inscriptions” include “In God We Trust,” “E Pluribus Unum,” and the date and mint marking. But since this idiot-attractor conspiracy theory/hoax gained so much traction a few years ago, dumbasses in Congress felt it necessary to assuage their dumbass conspiracy theory-hoaxed constituents who were up in arms over the “missing motto” and ordered the mint to redesign future American President coins with the motto where even idiots could find it (if they could manage to puzzle out the letters well enough to know what it said), and so in 2009 the motto was moved to the obverse of the coins with the minting of the Harrison and all future Presidential series coins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, although the first eight Presidential series coins had the motto, “In God We Trust” on the edge, where it was subject to less wear than on the coins’ faces and even served a sort of symbolic purpose, to my mind (a part of “binding” the two sides together, eh? ;-)), all eight coins already circulated in the years 2009 and 2010 had the motto plainly on their faces where even the stupidest sheeple might eventually find them.

But has that stopped this dumbass hoax/conspiracy theory from circulating? Nope. Not any more than the facts have stopped the “Madeline Murry O’Hare/FCC” hoax petition that’s been around in one form or another for 40-some-odd years.

Dumbasses come in all sizes, shapes and IQ measurements.

 

 

Yes, I suppose I could be more charitable in correcting this sort of thing, and I was with the person who sent me the email. As Jerry Pournelle put it when someone corrected him about a factual error he made,

One of the neat things about the Internet is that if you get something wrong you’re not stuck with being an uncorrected idiot. There will be someone out there who knows, and will offer the correction. My thanks.

Classy, Dr. Pournelle. But then, the error he made wasn’t so glaring as the ones in the email, nor was he hyperventilating about some vast conspiracy. Indeed, his error was a simple lack of information in a specific field of endeavor in which he has never claimed expertise, and the person correcting his lack of knowledge understood that.

The chief differences between Dr. Pournelle’s error and the ones in the email are several:

1. The email called for widespread social action based on grossly inaccurate and quite likely deliberately deceptive (as it originated) information. Dr. Pornelle’s inaccurate comment fit neither of those criteria.
2. ANYONE–literally, anyone with literacy skills above that of a typical kindergärtner–could readily verify the falsity of the claims made by the email simply by looking at one of the coins. Not so with the information a reader corrected in Dr. Pournelle’s offhand comment.

Still, I recognize that “smart” people say and do as many stupid things as anyone else, and so calling people who fall for things like this hoax “dumbasses” may be a bit harsh.

But it’s still true, IMO.

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Plunder Day Postponed by Celebration of Fraud

OK, by now almost everyone and their pet goats know that the IRS has delayed the sack and pillage of the middle class to April 18. Why? Because Washington D.C. is scheduled to have a holiday that day, whether an unscheduled “holiday” from budget disagreements is on or not.

And what, pray tell, are the Beltway Bandits celebrating? That great fraud, the Compensated Emancipation Act, which president Abraham Lincoln signed on April 16, 1862, and which D.C.ers celebrate annually on April 16. Since April 16 is a Saturday this year, in order to give the suckers-at-the-public-teat another day off, the “holiday” was moved to the 15th.

And why do I call both the celebration and the object of celebration a fraud? Read the thing sometime. The Emancipation Proclamation which announced its signing didn’t note the provisions of the act (another of Mr. Lincoln’s frauds), which were the abolition of slavery in the Southern States (where Congress exercised no authority at the time) but a strange silence about continued legally practiced chattel slavery in Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and West Virginia.

Neither Lincoln nor the Congress “freed” a singe solitary slave with the the Compensated Emancipation Act or Mr. Lincoln’s disingenuous “Emancipation Proclamation”. They were frauds from the get-go. Pure propaganda. Lies.

NATURALLY, such a massive and pervasive historical fraud deserves celebration in Washington D.C.!

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Defund NPR!

No Shiite! (Seriously: the Muslim Brotherhood which is the pretext for this investigative report, is Sunni, so “No Shiite!” is correct… in more senses than one*… )

*Recently, in “polite” conversation, I have taken to substituting “”Shiite!” for a word that means much the same thing but which has only one “i” and no “e”.

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It’s No Longer Simply Ironic

With the open display of antipathy toward democracy in recent days–so-called “Democrats” using various tactics to avoid the outcomes of democratically-decided elections, beginning with the “Democratic” State senators of Wisconsin fleeing the state to avoid providing a quorum–isn’t it time the party was formally renamed the Anti-Democratic Party?

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Is It My Fault?

Well, partly, I guess. After all, with the weather dominating my thoughts recently, I’ve actually been watching TV weather ‘casts. But really… Sticking a sharp stick in my ear with abortions of the English language like “tempature” and “FebYOUary”? Over and over and over again!

*arrrggghhh!*

And it’s not just some regional crapspeak limited to local yokels, no!

Why are these people allowed to poke me in the ear with a sharp stick? Why is there no capital punishment for these crimes?

But no! It’s my fault for watching these idiots. But they accept pay to butcher the English language! It’s criminal, I tell you, criminal. They should all be hung by dangling participles…

I’m going to pledge to myself to stick with accuweather.com, weatherbug.com (although the weather station at the local high school is giving some weird, anomalous readings recently) and weather.com. At least I don’t have to listen to “dumbassspeak” when I read a web page (just poke a fork in my brain and twirl when reading some web pages *arrrggghhh!*).

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What’s the Matter With Kids Today?

*heh*

Okay, so my topic’s not the same as the Bye Bye Birdie tune’s. Here’s a switcheroo. A recent (well, 2007) book on school reform and what can go dreadfully wrong with reform efforts had one comment that made me hoot til I almost cried. “Oh, what was it?” you ask. Praising the intent of the “New Math” era and how it breathed life into Math curriculum.

Yeh, right. If anything were deliberately designed to wreck budding students’ interest in or understanding of math, it was New Math. Either it was a conspiracy of evil persons to completely screw kids up or it was a conspiracy of dunces who were too stupid for words… completely screwing kids up. That is, if their “intent” was good, the people who designed and implemented “new math” were monumentally stupid people.

4th Grade: “new math” screwed me up so badly, it wasn’t until I had a high school geometry teacher who was teaching just for the joy of it (her family was in Big Bucks City) that my head started to come unscrewed from “new math” so the threads could be reworked and I could have the thing screwed on right (as to math). From there, calculus, stat, whatever, was fun.

What’s the matter with kids today? A lot of it is remote educrats having screwed up public education for decades (with the complicity of lazy, dumbed down by their own school years, parents and stupid, compliant pubschool administrators).

[great story excised to protect the innocent]

Asshats.

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Gad!

And people get paid to write mind-numbing crap like this!

“A large and potential [sic] historic winter storm is bringing blizzard conditions to the central Plains as it spreads north and east into Midwest and Great Lakes.”

The guy who wrote the sentence above ought to have “Butt Stupid” tattooed on his forehead in red lettering. Just how freakin’ hard would it be to add two letters to make that sentence’s grammar correct?

“A large and potentially historic winter storm is bringing blizzard conditions to the central Plains as it spreads north and east into Midwest and Great Lakes.”

See? Not hard at all, but some dumbass actually got paid to encourage subliterate morons to stick a (metaphorical, folks) fork behind their eyeballs and stir vigorously. *feh* At least the offenses against English I commit here aren’t paid, so I’m not a thief as well as being occasionally grammar-challenged.