“Just the right amount of sin” ~ “Just the right amount of feces in a glass of milk.”
Oh, yummy.
I did not need to know this
I hope you don’t need to either.
There. I just thought that since once seen, I couldn’t unsee it, so why not spread the “joy”. . .
A Few Modest Proposals
Nothing I propose (call it “pie in the sky dreamin'”) will ever likely come to pass, but if it were to come about. . .
How about these proposals to fix elections for public office:
Each candidate must put forth a platform as a proposed contract with the electorate. If elected, the candidate must make a good faith effort to effect the platform or be removed from office, possibly with prison and fines. Mechanisms for punishment would be tricky details, but could be worked out.
NO elective position should have the names of the candidates or their party affiliations listed on the ballot. Only the platform the candidate is committed to would be listed.
ALL voters would be required to complete a short, easy-peasy civics quiz like this one. A passing grade of better than 70% and their vote counts. I’d prefer better than 90%, but yeh, OK, since I’m dreaming anyway. . . *heh*
All ballot positions would be required to also list None of the Above as a legitimate ballot choice. If NOTA received a plurality of votes, the slate for that position would be wiped and another election held for that position.
All voters be required to produce valid photo identification.
All-in-all, these are quite modest proposals, don’t you think? *heh*
Signs of Tyranny
Here’s one: King Putz wants “security” labels to mean whatever he wants to assure his own and his cronies’ privacy, but privacy for the peasants? Notsomuch. When it comes to the peasants, well, they only want privacy if they are criminals, ya know?
Welcome to anarcho-tyranny, where privileged groups can get away with darnedd near anything, while common citizens are deemed criminals if they simply want to exercise their rights.
And note well: I actively HATE drunk drivers and believe any drunk drivers who commit vehicular homicide should be executed in the most horrible manner allowed under law. Still, even they have rights, rights which no law can sever, but which can only be denied exercise by a tyrannical state.
Three of many Reasons Things About The Trumpery That Chap My Gizzard. . . Plus a Bonus
It’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it, unless someone can give me verifiable facts and sound reason to modify it. So there.
Here are three:
“Just to show you how unfair [1] Republican primary politics can be, I won the State of Louisiana and get less [2] delegates than Cruz-Lawsuit coming.[3]”
#1 is a two-fer, but we’ll call it just one. The Trumpery whiny baby. And he lies. What’s “unfair” about following the rules? Only dummies don’t bother to even learn the rues before trying to play the game at master level.
#2 is easy. He’s subliterate at best. He wants to run the country and is too butt lazy to even learn English. “Less” is for things that are measured. “Fewer” is for things that can be counted. Any person who has bothered to become literate knows this. The Trumpery is too butt lazy to bother his “good brain” with speaking literate English. Impressive in a president, no?
#3 His resort to losing because he was too butt lazy to do his homework and to do the essential ground work to actually win is to threaten a lawsuit he cannot win. *yawn* Moron. Go ahead, emphasize your weakness.
And last, the whole, “I was cheated” is just another page in his primary life strategy: lie, lie, lie and then? Lie again.
Here ya go: 101 of The Trumpery’s lies. Oh, the list is nowhere NEAR exhaustive, but it’s a place to start.
Warning Signs
1.) The book blurb for a self-pub contains orthographic and grammar errors as egregious as this, first sentence of a blurb did,
“A global flu pandemic has wiped out ninety nine [sic] percent of the worlds [sic] population.”
The first page of the book includes, among other offenses, “He staggered back, unable to breath.”
You might well, with signs like this, think, “Hmmm, Cupcake, if you haven’t bothered to learn basic English, why should you expect to have English speakers/readers buy your book?”
Oh, and if “Cupcake” thinks so highly of his own subliterate capabilities (and is so dismissive of his readers) as to eschew paying a competent line editor to mend his execrable grasp of grammar and vocabulary, well, that’s another strike against him and his “literary” non-efforts.
(And yeh, the butchery of English continued in that case, until I finally exited the snippet and sought some mind-cleansing in better-written text.)
Note: there is a lot of non-fiction written nowadays that is just as bad as in the fiction referred to above. Damn democratic influences in the arts! *heh*
Zoning Out
I use Freecell for a bit of nearly mindless relaxation/”zen-ish” non-exercise of my “little grey cells” (which, of course, aren’t grey at all). *heh* Of course, I cheat. How? Oh, I long ago observed patterns and combinations, and, more importantly (for values of “importance” that include playing a mindless lil computer card game), I simply learned to take advantage of patterns and combinations of moves in such a way that doing so is almost unconsciously “automagic”. Since Freecell is apparently supposed to be played by people who just semi-randomly move cards around until they “lose,” what I do is cheating. *heh*
Of course, I really “cheat” at computer solitaire by setting the games to one-card play. Solitaire at 3-card is seriously stacked in the house’s favor. But at one-card play, it’s strongly biased in my favor. There should be a middle ground there, somewhere, but I’ve not found a balanced-odds straight solitaire game for computer play yet.
What I really wish I could erase from the end of these games’ score displays are the lil congratulatory attaboys. It’s really insulting to be congratulated for beating a “(nearly) mindless relaxation” computer card game.
Propaganda Clues
This “apology” for Texas is clear, blatant propaganda, and could be a textbook case for student analysis. I’ll just point to a couple of the really obvious points of interest and let the student winkle the others out for themselves, mmmK? 😉
Here’s a sample:
After citing one Texas political loon and another would-be politician with some strange views (though she shows more historical literacy than the writer does), the writer says, “You might gather from this that Texas K-12 schools leave a lot to be desired.” Now, while the wannabe pol was, at the time of the writing, running for (not sitting on) the Texas State Board of Education, which is also responsible for the Texas university system the writer praises, the other pol has nothing at all to do with Texas education. Both of these “proofs” are irrelevant.
And in this, and further rags on the Texas K-12 schools, the writer includes nothing to support his statement about the poor state of K-12 education in Texas.
But of course, despite having the nation’s largest ratio of non-English-speaking (mostly illegal) immigrants, Texas public schools actually rank in the top third nationally, much better than the writer’s home state of Oklahoma, or bastions of his Blue State views such as Illinois and Wisconsin.
[Note: for those who have been paying attention in the past, I do also believe–note, statement of opinion only :-)–that Texas pubschools are in a horrific state, BUT that state is certainly better that more than 2/3 of the rest if the country’s states.]
So, argument by assertion. Irrelevant “facts” and no recognition of contradicting facts. Pure hand waving.
Next up: Sneers at the UT Austin bell tower being lit orange with every athletic triumph. . . morphing into sneers at Texas law allowing students to carry firearms on campus, in class.
Historically illiterate or simply deliberate propaganda? The guy knows all about the importance of the UT Bell Tower, and rants on about athletics vs. academics using it as an emblem of misplaced priorities, then sneers at Texas Law allowing self-defense on campus. The connection is strangely drawn. Some students actually fought back against Charles Whitman in the 1966 Bell Tower shooting spree. *meh* That was 1966. Of course it was too far back to mean anything to the dork writing the article. Probably. Still, the strained evolution from the sneering at the “oranging” of the Bell Tower for inconsequentials, to his lefthanded presentation of guns in the classroom, plain and simple propaganda. Argument by statement with no substance.
With those two samples to go on, I leave it as an exercise for the student to strip out other elements. Have fun!
They are UNIDENTIFIED Flying Objects
What part of “unidentified” do many UFO “extraterrestrial visitors believers” just not understand?