Category: Ranting

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“Enter title here”

So, I let WP do the automagic upgrade to 3.0 business, and what to my eyes does so stupidly appear? First time I click to start a new post, the software “helpfully” places “Enter title here” in the title bar.

*feh* That’s just insulting. Is there really any great number of WP users who are so abysmally stupid that huge masses of WP users cannot figure out where the post title goes? The way I see it, if a WP user cannot figure out where to put the post title, then that user should be assigned a guardian, placed in an “Assisted Computing Facility” (“Here, dearie, let me make that mouse click for you!”),strapped into a straitjacket (or chained to a Mac; same difference *heh*) and fed through a tube.

“Enter title here” MHWA!

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Yet Another Gripe

I do wish folks would think before they speak/write. The difference between “all men are not” and “not all men are” is obvious to anyone with more than two active brain cells, but I see and hear “all men are not” used frequently in sentences that make no sense if one were to read those words to mean what they say.

“All men are not thieves,” for example, is plain foolishness, because some men certainly are. “Not all men are thieves,” is certainly true, because some men are not thieves. This, of course, does not apply to congresscritters. Clearly, one cannot with assurance say, “Not all congresscritters are thieves,” because it would be nearly impossible (if not clearly impossible) to find one congresscritter that has not voted in support of spending tax monies on illegal (unconstitutional) projects.

But that’s another rant.

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Again With Subliterate Moronics

*sigh* One can always pick out writers who have read darned little (and that of little worth) in their lives by misuses or even complete misstatements of common phrases in their writings. ( Always? OK, not always. Sometimes other clues tip the scale. Back to the regularly-scheduled rant.)

Case in point: While reading a political article (which I shall not link in order to protect the guilty), I read, “For all intensive purposes,” and immediately stopped reading. I did make a comment about subliterates at the site (and left out “does”–an essential word in the sentence! *heh*), but methought, “Hmmm, blog rant!”

OK, here’s the deal: when I run across someone pontificating from a self-appointed position as a pundit who uses such subliterate goonerosities *heh* as “for all intensive purposes” (add to the pile of subliterate crap, “irregardless” and “escape goat” and “hone in on” and “tongue and cheek” and… you perhaps get the picture), I simply stop reading their writing. Why pollute my brain with more literary sewage from someone who’s read little and whose selection of reading matter–what little there has been–has obviously been subliterate crap? (A typical subliterate construction in that sentence would’ve been “whose” for “who’s” or vice versa. ;-))

I blame it all on TV. 😉

(Well, and lazy people.)

Micro-mini-update:

I just thought to google, “common errors in English” and found this. It looks as though it covers an abundance of the kinds of things that make me want to slap silly those dishonest word jockeys who are paid to spout subliterate crap (taking good money to perform shoddy work is theft, IMO. Ah, well, bad money’s driving out good money, now, anyway… ).

Thanks to TF and his reminder of Norm Crosby’s malapropisms. Here’s a takeoff on that theme:

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Gagamaggot

Things like the “Seventh Generation” ad I just saw (while watching HGTV) just make me want to puke. The ad promoted “Seventh Generation” chemical cleaners as not being “chemicals”. Assinine. Of course their products are chemicals. For example, according to the company’s own (required by law) Material Safety Data Sheet on its Chlorine Free Bleach, it contains “Cosmetic Grade (whatever that is) Peroxide” and as anyone not “educated” in public schools in the past quarter of a century knows, peroxide is a chemical. And a poisonous chemical that is a dangerous eye irritant as well. (Do note: some miseducated in public schools correct some of public school’s–A.K.A., “prisons for kids”–flaws with autodidacticism and so know that companies like “Seventh Generation” are bloviating, putrescent liars.)

Ditto for the rest of the “Seventh Generation” so-called “non-chemical” chemicals.

Companies like this depend on an enstupiated, illiterate public to survive. I say, kill such companies off, if for nothing else their dishonesty and concerted efforts to further lobotomize an enstupiated population of sheeple.

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Oh, Just Grow Up

*sigh*

Rant: on

Some folks are so very intent on remaining irritating, illiterate boobs that they’ll even refuse to use a mature browser (or even a semi-mature browser like Firefox) and so continue to post comments on blogs, social networking sites, etc., that are evidence they even refuse to use a spell-checking browser with a decent dictionary.

Sure, even using spell checking won’t make such folks’ blather make any more sense, but at least it might avoid assaulting others with the most obvious misspellings. That’d be a start.

Rant: nah, not turning this off yet.

Worse: “text-speak” or the asinine abbreviations and cryptic comments folks post from their phones to their own blogs, etc. Get a keyboard and some bandwidth. Stop “talking” like 6th-grade “tweens” already!

*sheesh!*

*heh*

Rant: off.

Continue reading “Oh, Just Grow Up”

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Writers for C- Movies Should Stick to the SyFy Channel…

…not become “New York Times Best-Selling” authors.

*sigh*

All these idiots do is accelerate the pejoration of the English language as a whole, dumb down the reading public even further (actually, quite an accomplishment, when you think about it) and increase the bloated landfill “wannabes” that our public libraries and book stores seem to aspire to being. Commas splices, split infinitives (where none are needed for jargon or idomatic speech and where such abortions of syntax and semantics actually harm clear communication), and inapropriate word usage when compounded by drearily banal plots, laughable and completely inexcusable historical and factual faux pas, and stereotypes in place of characters, just make for poor reading.

But that’s what passes for “New York Times Best-Sellers” in a post-literate age. *sigh* I know, because I just struggled through another one such book in an attempt to find a new author I might enjoy reading. Why did I not close the book and end the torture after the first page? Frankly, I wanted to give it a fair and honest read and the author a chance to redeem himself, but Raymond Koury just would not cooperate, and so–on to the dreadfully predictable end, slogging through some of the crappiest writing I have ever subjected myself to–I persisted. And I regretted it “alright” (one of Koury’s many, many assinine pejorations of the English language appropriated from such subliterate American pop culture “literary giants” as The Who, The Killers, Janet Jackson and Jennifer Lopez *feh*).

I feel certain that reading Koury’s writing has killed enough brain cells (they suicided as prodigious rates the more I read of Koury’s drek) to lower my IQ by 10 points. Oh, I can afford the loss, though, since I live in a society dominated by stupified dolts who, for one example of many, voted to ensconce The 0! in the White, urm, “Café au Lait” House. The lower ones IQ, the more sense the passing scene makes…

But just a fair warning: if you don’t think you can afford to kill off a lot of brain cells, take a pass on books written by Raymond Koury.

Note 1: It didn’t help Koury much that I had just read a very nice piece of fiction by Lawrence Block. The comparison between Block’s literate style, wry wit, tight plotting and spare but nevertheless vivid charactizations and Koury’s “anything BUT the above” only served to highlight Koury’s faults as a writer.

Note 2: the SciFi channel’s recent name alteration to “SyFy” is just another of the many unutterably stupid word alterations that subliterate idiots in marketing and advertising (and “news” and contemporary “music” etc., etc.) have inflicted on American English. *feh” on them all. Of course, ignoring the SciFi (or SyFy if one wants to be a complete idiot) Channel is no great loss, as a general rule. Has anyone among the readers (assuming more than one *heh*) of this blog yet “succeeded” in watching ANY of the “made for SciFi/SyFy ‘movies'” all the way through? Thought not. Dreck of the lowest order. Labeling them “C- movies” is probably an insult to the makers of C- movies everywhere.

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Fear-mongering

In the decade or more before his death, Michael Crichton spoke widely about fear-mongering in science circles (often coupled with making a religion out of science), exacerbated by the pressing need in media to market fear (the pun was intentional; if you groaned, shame on you :-)). The Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind (and the politicians who bow before its altar) openly embrace fear-mongering both for immediate audience share and to enhance the addiction of the masses to its poisonous screeds.

Both those who embrace a strictly dogmatic scientific approach to issues and those who rebel against such dogmatism seem to often embrace fear-mongering as a primary persuasive tactic. Take “natural” foods proponents and “scientific nutritionists” or medical establishment dogmatists and “holistic medicine” proponents and put them in the same room, and you’d likely end up with a kilkenny cats donnybrook of fear-mongering. Just one example can serve as a cautionary: chelation therapy is presented by some alternative medicine proponents as THE answer to a host of ills–ills they often imply the medical community only want to treat with very expensive therapies that work less well. The medical establishment counters with scary threats of death from chelation therapy, often pointing out that more than 30 deaths from chelation therapy have occurred… since the 1970s while noting that more than 800,000 inpatient/outpatient chelation treatments are administered per year. Let’s see now… that’s about 0.0000000125% of treatments have resulted in deaths!

*feh* Fear-mongering. Since chelation therapy for other than heavy metals poisoning is most often for alternative medicine treatment of heart and artery disease how about comparison to another common treatment for heart and artery disease? Heart bypass surgery results in at least a 1.0% death rate. That’s about 80,000 times more risky than chelation therapy. *heh*

The dire warnings from the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming (which previously was the Church of Anthropogenic Global Cooling and is now transitioning to the Church of Anthropogenic Global Climate Change) have all been nothing but crying wolf. Not one of the warnings have come to pass–not one!–and so, like other whack job religious nuts who keep pushing back the date they prophesy for the end of the world, the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming keeps having to move the goal posts in their deadly game to keep the fictional fear-mongering within the realm of the sheeple’s oh-so-flexible suspension of disbelief.

Lies, lies and more lies, built upon grains of sand, less than even kernels of truth, lies designed to induce fear in the credulous sheeple who, thanks to long term media brainwashing aided by a public education system that seems to be designed to produce idiots and individuals who cooperate in their own lobotomization, are completely unable to even parse this moderately complex sentence, let alone deconstruct the lies fed them by The Powers That Be.

As a popularly-voiced, accessible (to anyone who really can read and do simple arithmetic at a genuine upper grade school level) preparation to skeptical perusal of contemporary science-as-religion as presented for sheeple consumption, I recommend once again James Hogan’s Kicking the Sacred Cow. It’s an easy read for any even minimally literate person, and the footnotes are well worth following.

it’s not just literacy that’s a problem, although that certainly is a problem, but, as I found out in a recent conversation with someone locally, most people can’t even tell when they’re being manipulated with numbers. The “more than 30 people have died since the 1970s” attempt to frighten people away from thoughtful consideration of chelation therapies noted above is one such example. By contrast to the 30 or so deaths out of 24,000,000 or so chelation treatments in the U.S. since the 1970’s, 90 people a year are killed by lightning strikes. That’s roughly 0.000000003% of the population… per year! Ooo! Scary, huh? Not. Sure, ones chances of dying from a chelation therapy treatment are more than ones chances of dying from a lightning strike, but compared to other risks, both are neglible in the extreme. (I’m not advocating chelation therapy for anything but heavy metals poisoning. I’m just noting that scare tactics are reprehensible… and that the only defense is knowledge.) WHat’s my point here? Most folks wouldn’t even bother to count the zeros in the numbers offered above, and even more wouldn’t be able to discern how they were educed. The “recent conversation” that spurred this observation? Someone who’s back in school commented on how much trouble her statistics course was for her. Numbers are haaaard. *heh* Without a calculator, most folks can’t even balance their checkbooks. Heck, with a calculator many folks can’t. (OK, even I don’t do as many maths problems in my head as I used to do. I’m slowing down.) Even with calculators, math is just too hard for most folks, Why? Because most folks can’t do simple math at all and have no idea what that calculator they’re using is doing with the garbage they input–garbage because they don’t know what to input to get answers they need.

The simple answer is to learn to read. No, not how to read: to read. Read copiously, and choose books that are both well-written and have something worthwhile to say and that are well-grounded in reality. Even science fiction or fantasy novels can be more well-grounded in reality than much of the fear-mongering toxic waste poured down the gullets of credulous UNliterate sheeple by the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind and its partners in crime found in Academia Nut Fruitcake Bakeries and Congress.

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, Democrat=Socialist, The World According to Carl, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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The Wonderful Gift of Illiteracy

No, not just the inability to mumble through painfully puzzling out what printed words say, much more (or less *heh*) than that. What is even worse than the inability to painfully decrypt the squiggles written onto a page into sounds is the fact that more and more people have no idea what those painfully decrypted sounds actually mean. We see this every day in illiterate folks’ pejoration of words’ meanings and misuse of words (like those who think “everyday” means the same thing as “every day”).

Example (taken from multitudes proffered daily by Mass MEdia Podpeople, politicians *spit*, Academia Nut Fruitcakes and others): decimate. Mass Media Podpeople have so long used the word to mean something more akin to “annihilate” that we’ve lost the very useful meaning, “to execute one-tenth” of a population–whatever that may be–given us from the Roman practice of decimating a military unit which had members who refused to fight or who fled (NOT retreated under orders) battle. No, that perfectly useful distinction is now lost to almost the entire population of English speakers because some illiterate boobs misused it so often to mean “annihilate” (or something barely short of that), when they had other perfectly useful words… words that they apparently didn’t have access to because of the woeful paucity of their vocabularies.

*feh*

“Free speech” in the mouth of a leftard has become an oxymoron, because of the inability of our population of illiterates to distinguish word usage.

And the list could go on almost endlessly.

Words are tools of thought, and the fact that most people in our society have a very small bag of very dull tools means that thinking is half murdered in our public discourse.

What am I saying?!? “Half murdered” by dull tools wielded by dull tools?” Nah. Completely murdered by dull tools wielded by dull tools…

A written IQ and general knowledge test requirement for voting wouldn’t be enough to salvage the republic, but it could be a decent start… And don’t even start in with me about it being anti-democratic or violating people’s rights. *feh* Voting is a privilege with enormous responsibilities, and the ability to think, know what the words on a ballot mean and vote accordingly are base level skills the electorate should have… and does not.

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Those who do not learn from history…

…are doomed to repeat it.

Sadly, this is not necessarily true. I’ll get out the “splainsit stick” in a bit to expound on that.

/curmudgeon’s rant: on

George Washington was not the first president of the United States. Seriously. Now, I know many would deride such a comment as silly, even those who already know, as any student of American history knows, that John Hanson was the first president of the United States of America under the Articles of Confederacy, because some do not believe the United States existed before the Constitution of 1787-1789.

Pish-tosh. If the United States of America did not exist before then, then what entity was it that foreign governments treated with under that name? What authority paid troops, what authority issued the Great Seal of the United States in 1782, if the United States did not exist until the Constitution of 1787 was ratified?

Why is it important that we acknowledge that there were seven presidents before George Washington, despite the naysayers who wrongly assert there was no United States until the 1789 ratification of the 1787 Constitution? Because the Articles of Confederacy form the backbone of the fleshed-out Constitution, just as the Declaration of Independence describes the blood that flows through its veins.

Oh, dear me! Did I just make an allusion to a “living document”? Continue reading “Those who do not learn from history…”