When it comes down to it, everyone's been doing stupid things from the start. However, occasionally a country takes it upon themselves to go above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to the number and magnitude of stupid things done in rapid succession, and then gets a huge bug up their ass when someone notices. The US is one of the countries currently engaged in that sort of stupidity. France is another, but right now France isn't in a position to do as much damage as the US, so they're easy to overlook.
My problem mainly lies with UN's obvious contempt towards America, with no explanation of why it exists.
"Pathetic Amercans," he says. He also makes mention of his desire to have said this for awhile. Did an American destroy his house? Did an American not tip him at his job at the discotheque/waffle house where he worked as a child to support his older brother's cocaine addiction (as Germans are wont to have). Who knows? He made an insult at a group of people to which I belong, there was no hint of jest, and he's quite new. Things don't grab my goose often, but in this case, consider my goose not only grabbed, but also stroked to furious orgasm. Not only that, but he quickly changed subjects afterwards to some sort of tangent involving arcades. Was this a metaphor? I don't know. If it was, it was extremely poorly set up, as I don't think anyway caught it.
Drooling Iguana can make fun of America all he wants, though. That to me is more poised at the government and how our foreign policy is run. These are things far out of immediate control of laymen like myself, and so the insult misses me and hits my leaders in the chest. They can die if they'd like. I don't care.
I can not grasp the confusion of ideas that decides Americans have any universally shared traits, and while I oppose the idea of mindless patriotism, calling a group consisting of a significant percentage of the world's population communally pathetic irritates me.
Calling us pitiable for the inevitable skullfuck that arrives with the real estate economy collapsing, or our apparent inability to discover an electoral system based upon public desire, though, I can entirely see.
I said that statement as a joke. I only recently moved to Germany a few years ago. And if your 'goose has been grabbed' just let it go, you don’t need it. Who cares man? I’m just some dip shit on the internet whom you’ve never met before, and if any of my words disturbs or insults you I’ve already won. Does it matter? Do I care? Hell no? Call me anything you one. Tell me how we lost the war. I’ve NEVER heard it before.
I can not grasp the confusion of ideas that decides Americans have any universally shared traits, and while I oppose the idea of mindless patriotism, calling a group consisting of a significant percentage of the world's population communally pathetic irritates me.
Well, the state of your public education system is pathetic, which, combined with your culture's contempt for knowledge and intelligence (Bush's state of borderline retardedness actually helped him win his elections) make things like the average person's ignorance of their own constitution not terribly surprising.
I think contempt for knowledge is a little strong, Drooling Iguana. I would refine it to contempt for knowledge which does not currently involve America.
American news doesn't give a shit about countries that we aren't currently bombing or fighting, so we learn very little about them. Look at most news sites' world sections (like cnn). We have a great deal of stuff in the middle east, but they quite nicely condense over 2 billion people of the world in a small web section called Asia.
And our education system is pathetic, I will admit to that. Take any middle schooler or high school who bitches about an hour of homework here to Asia. Let them gasp in horror at the Japanese high schooler who after regular school, goes to a club for a few hours, then to a cram school for several hours to receive more homework, and then occasionally to a second cram school for several more hours to receive more homework, only to return home at 11pm every night and have homework on history, Japanese, English, chemistry, psychology, math, and I could go on. This is all in order to be smart enough to pass the test into a good college, so you can get a good job to work for the rest of your life.
I wouldn't say the whole culture has a contempt for knowledge. As an exchange student, I have a voracious thirst for knowledge.
I think contempt for knowledge is a little strong, Drooling Iguana. I would refine it to contempt for knowledge which does not currently involve America.
I would further refine that to contempt for knowledge that doesn't directly relate to the specific person to acquire that knowledge. Remember that I teach in these public schools that we're all bashing, and I can attest that the number one problem is that children are not interesed in learning for education's sake. One of the only ways you can get any lesson through to the kids is if you somehow transform the lesson into a neat little package that somehow directly relates to them... a somewhat fine idea, until you realize that each of these kids have different interests, and also that by teachers doing the work of 'relating" it to them, they never really learn how to relate it to themselves. Thus, many of these kids never really develop a higher level of moral or cognitive development.
Oh man, I'm way to hung over to get up on a soap box right now.
Well, the state of your public education system is pathetic, which, combined with your culture's contempt for knowledge and intelligence (Bush's state of borderline retardedness actually helped him win his elections) make things like the average person's ignorance of their own constitution not terribly surprising.
While a frightening amount of the population does follow this description, a not insignificant minority completely defies it. Living in Silicon Valley California probably places me in a happy little shell of liberalism, but the fact that several pockets exist makes the idea that we are universally ill-educated and in fear of anything vaguely resembling intelligence annoying.
The trend I see with poor education seems to be an entire lack of fundamental knowledge in maths and science. While my school, with it's absurdly high Asian majority, and more relevently, universally high annual income of parents, is known for high math and science scores on tests, hardly anobody seems to get past rote memorization and use any logic. Most people just seem stubbornly against understanding fundamental concepts, and are perfectly happy to believe that something works just because they are told so. It's this sort of eagerness to believe that things magically work, and do not need to be based upon logical ideas that gets people to prefer a president who makes vague, unsupported statements and to allow their public schools to teach creationism as a legitimate theory.
To Sepherel, many Americans actually seem more reluctant to learn facts about the current state of America. They'll learn about whatever silly scandal is going on, they'll cheer or despair at another of Bush's speeches, but they won't take a look at the cost of the Iraqi war, or the one-quarter of the population being employed in building or selling real estate in an entirely improportionate manner to the population, or the concentration of wealth. They won't take time to learn about the number of people that can not afford basic medical care, or the number of people whose two jobs will never earn them enough to get out of debt. Who can blame them, though. After all, it's so much more important to know that Cheney shoots someone accidentally.
A college student who used modified song lyrics to describe the violent death of President Bush on a Web site said he meant no harm -- but the U.S. Secret Service seized his computer nonetheless.
Tim Willis, a freshman at Mars Hill College, said he made the posting to myspace.com in late February in response to a posting by a friend, whose computer also was seized.
The lyrics were from "Bullet," a 1978 song by the punk band The Misfits. Willis replaced references to President Kennedy with Bush's name.
"Even though I don't like the president and I don't like his policies ... I don't want to hurt anybody," Willis said. "I'm very peaceable. I don't desire any conflict or anything."
A Secret Service agent who seized Willis's computer on March 7 declined to discuss the case.
"We don't comment on any ongoing investigations," Jamie Cousins said.
Willis said he was contacted by Cousins early this month.
"He said he needed to talk to me because I threatened the president," Willis said. "At the time I didn't think I was threatening the president. It's just lyrics to a song."
Willis met Cousins at the college on March 7 and signed papers agreeing to turn over his computer.
Dan Lunsford, president of Mars Hill College, said he had little information about the case.
"The only thing I would be able to say is we certainly will look into the case and we will cooperate with law enforcement officials," he said. "But we certainly want to protect our students' rights as well."
WASHINGTON -- Children surfing the Internet could be buffered from pornography under legislation introduced in Congress Thursday.
Sens. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., and Max Baucus, D-Mont., proposed a bill that would require adult Web sites to have a .xxx domain.
"The only way parents can really block or screen out or protect their children is literally just stand there and look over their shoulder as they're online," Pryor said at a news conference. "And it really shouldn't have to be that way."
The Cyber Safety for Kids Act would require the Commerce Department secretary to develop a domain name for adult Web sites with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
The group is an international non-governmental organization that designates domain names like .com, .edu and .gov.
Under the bill, companies that fail to register with the new domain name within six months could face civil penalties.
Pryor, the father of two children, cited a Kaiser Family Foundation study that found 90 percent of kids between the ages 8 and 16 have come across pornography online, mostly in the course of using the Internet to help with their homework.
The senators acknowledged the bill was a first step and would not completely protect children from Internet porn.
Many of the companies that comprise the $12 billion Internet porn industry operate offshore and would be difficult to regulate, they said.
"We are not saying this is going to work 100 percent of the time in every single case," Pryor said. "We do think that this would be a dramatic step in the right direction."
Adult industry representatives say the bill if enacted would have a chilling effect on free speech.
"This is constitutionally protected speech -- we're not talking about illegal content," said Tom Hymes, a spokesman for the Free Speech Coalition, the trade association representing the adult entertainment industry.
The proposal is an ineffective approach to the problem since many of the adult Web sites are based outside the country and the civil penalties would not apply to them, he said.
Hymes said the companies would find ways to circumvent the new designation, including moving their operations offshore.
Instead, he proposed setting up a .kids domain name for children-friendly content.
The industry would incur costs from new registration fees and losses from existing marketing campaigns on .com and .biz domains, Hymes said, but he did not think it would get that far.
"The likelihood is that this legislation would be challenged as being unconstitutional were it to go through," Hymes said.
If the bill passes, software could be developed to block the .xxx domain from Internet searches, Baucus said.
Pryor likened the proposal to the sanctions on adult magazines at convenience stores and zoning laws restricting strip club locations in neighborhoods.
Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., introduced similar legislation last summer calling for a 25 percent tax on Internet porn transactions that would pay for programs protecting children's online use. Lincoln's bill was sent to the Senate Finance Committee.
I don't think that's going to infringe much on free speech rights. All this will do is label sites containing adult content differently, giving users the option of not visiting them. Those who genuinely want to see .xxx websites would not be prevented from doing so. Unless they're suggesting that content-filtering programs like Norton Internet Security go against one's freedom of speech.
From the comfort of owning my own computer that my mother wouldn't know how to install a filter on, I really don't disagree with the labeling. It does seem like a waste of resources to worry about this, but I suppose people need jobs.
Wouldn’t this at the same time make porn easier to find? I know allot of adults today don’t know one thing about computers, and will just let their children run rampant trough the internet, using abbreviated words and what have you. Now suppose a friend tells them the domain name .xxx? Now that child has access to every porn website on the web. If he wasn’t looking for it before, he is now.
1) I think we've learned from recent news that myspace.com is the most dangerous site on the web, because it is creating new super terrorists. Everyone who uses myspace needs to be arrested. Everyone.
2) Some porn sites may happily grab the .xxx domain names if they can get some easy to remember ones. I also agree with Mario that it's not going to limit free speech much, because it's just relabeling them.
3) So, the pizza wasn't cooked at all? If it had pepperonies on it, that wouldn't be too bad.
That is pretty fucked up. "EAT THIS PIZZA, BITCH!" "Oh god! Oh god! Not the pizza! Please, anything, anything but pizza!". "Mr. Hagewood! Get on the ground!
Get down now! Make him eat another pizza and well open fire!".
http://flakmag.com/features/best/politics/1997.html
This isn't really news, being how it happened 9 years ago and all.. However, considering in what state of unstability and general madness the country was left, I consider it to be definetely fucked-up.
South american politics are so much fun.
The Decade in Politics
1997
Whitewater, the democratic fund-raising scandal and rumors of sexual impropriety on the part of the Player in Chief — 1997 was a year many will remember as a series of presidential imbroglios. And yet in that year, our own presidential predicaments paled in comparison with those of an often overlooked South American country: Ecuador. Be forewarned — the story involves a lunatic, milk and an apartment block full of mistresses.
In 1996, a millionaire and sometime politician named Abdala Bucaram rode a wave of populist, anti-System sentiment into the presidency, a furor which he had fueled with his claim to be a "force for the poor" against the neo-liberal policies of his predecessors. Bucaram, also known as "El Loco," bucked the rather staid Ecuadorian political scene with stunts like touring at the head of a rock band, raising money for the poor by shaving his moustache and handing out free cartons of his own brand of milk, Abdaleche.
His campaign antics led to a lot of light-hearted jesting about his sanity, but Bucaram was out to prove to his critics that he wasn't just your run-of-the-mill wacky politician. While in office, Bucaram maintained his notoriety through such public acts as a lavish reception for Ecuadorian-born Lorena Bobbit; he also rented several apartments in a single, downtown Quito building for several of his mistresses — with government funds, of course. He even installed his relatives and friends in key financial and customs positions, the better to implement his plan to drain several millions of dollars from the national coffers.
Eventually, Bucaram was caught, but therein lay the catch — in its rush to democracy in the late 1970s, Ecuador had forgotten to add an important line to its constitution; basically, there was no legal way to remove or prosecute the president while in office. Unless, that is, his opponents could prove him incompetent. And so in March, 1997, without so much as a psychological evaluation, the Congress declared him unfit to serve for reasons of insanity. Bucaram barricaded himself in the presidential palace, declaring war on his enemies. Eventually he capitulated and fled to Panama.
But it seems, in retrospect, there was a method to the madness of "El Loco" — in the days following his ouster, Bucaram's stalling allowed him to plunder the presidential palace, stealing paintings, nabbing furniture and cutting $14 million in checks over a three-day period. The total take was estimate at over $100 million.
By Tillie Fong, Rocky Mountain News
February 22, 2006
BENNETT - A music teacher placed on leave last month after some parents objected to the showing of a video of the opera Faust to elementary school students says she's been called a devil worshipper and a lesbian in this small town 35 miles east of Denver.
Some parents reportedly objected to the video because of references to the devil, while others were troubled by a scene in which a man was killed in silhouette and by allusions to suicide.
Faust is about the extremely negative consequences of selling your soul to the devil.
That reminds me of my old english teacher. Nothing bad ever happened, but apparantly, some parents called her a communist for teaching slaughterhouse five.
I'm going to show Invader Zim to my my iLEAP kids on Thursday, when we have nothign to do for about 3 hours. Keep your eyes on the news for me, I guess.
Comments
and zombie DeGaulle!
"Pathetic Amercans," he says. He also makes mention of his desire to have said this for awhile. Did an American destroy his house? Did an American not tip him at his job at the discotheque/waffle house where he worked as a child to support his older brother's cocaine addiction (as Germans are wont to have). Who knows? He made an insult at a group of people to which I belong, there was no hint of jest, and he's quite new. Things don't grab my goose often, but in this case, consider my goose not only grabbed, but also stroked to furious orgasm. Not only that, but he quickly changed subjects afterwards to some sort of tangent involving arcades. Was this a metaphor? I don't know. If it was, it was extremely poorly set up, as I don't think anyway caught it.
Drooling Iguana can make fun of America all he wants, though. That to me is more poised at the government and how our foreign policy is run. These are things far out of immediate control of laymen like myself, and so the insult misses me and hits my leaders in the chest. They can die if they'd like. I don't care.
Calling us pitiable for the inevitable skullfuck that arrives with the real estate economy collapsing, or our apparent inability to discover an electoral system based upon public desire, though, I can entirely see.
American news doesn't give a shit about countries that we aren't currently bombing or fighting, so we learn very little about them. Look at most news sites' world sections (like cnn). We have a great deal of stuff in the middle east, but they quite nicely condense over 2 billion people of the world in a small web section called Asia.
And our education system is pathetic, I will admit to that. Take any middle schooler or high school who bitches about an hour of homework here to Asia. Let them gasp in horror at the Japanese high schooler who after regular school, goes to a club for a few hours, then to a cram school for several hours to receive more homework, and then occasionally to a second cram school for several more hours to receive more homework, only to return home at 11pm every night and have homework on history, Japanese, English, chemistry, psychology, math, and I could go on. This is all in order to be smart enough to pass the test into a good college, so you can get a good job to work for the rest of your life.
I wouldn't say the whole culture has a contempt for knowledge. As an exchange student, I have a voracious thirst for knowledge.
I would further refine that to contempt for knowledge that doesn't directly relate to the specific person to acquire that knowledge. Remember that I teach in these public schools that we're all bashing, and I can attest that the number one problem is that children are not interesed in learning for education's sake. One of the only ways you can get any lesson through to the kids is if you somehow transform the lesson into a neat little package that somehow directly relates to them... a somewhat fine idea, until you realize that each of these kids have different interests, and also that by teachers doing the work of 'relating" it to them, they never really learn how to relate it to themselves. Thus, many of these kids never really develop a higher level of moral or cognitive development.
Oh man, I'm way to hung over to get up on a soap box right now.
While a frightening amount of the population does follow this description, a not insignificant minority completely defies it. Living in Silicon Valley California probably places me in a happy little shell of liberalism, but the fact that several pockets exist makes the idea that we are universally ill-educated and in fear of anything vaguely resembling intelligence annoying.
The trend I see with poor education seems to be an entire lack of fundamental knowledge in maths and science. While my school, with it's absurdly high Asian majority, and more relevently, universally high annual income of parents, is known for high math and science scores on tests, hardly anobody seems to get past rote memorization and use any logic. Most people just seem stubbornly against understanding fundamental concepts, and are perfectly happy to believe that something works just because they are told so. It's this sort of eagerness to believe that things magically work, and do not need to be based upon logical ideas that gets people to prefer a president who makes vague, unsupported statements and to allow their public schools to teach creationism as a legitimate theory.
To Sepherel, many Americans actually seem more reluctant to learn facts about the current state of America. They'll learn about whatever silly scandal is going on, they'll cheer or despair at another of Bush's speeches, but they won't take a look at the cost of the Iraqi war, or the one-quarter of the population being employed in building or selling real estate in an entirely improportionate manner to the population, or the concentration of wealth. They won't take time to learn about the number of people that can not afford basic medical care, or the number of people whose two jobs will never earn them enough to get out of debt. Who can blame them, though. After all, it's so much more important to know that Cheney shoots someone accidentally.
Mars Hill Student Loses Computer Over Bush Criticism
Pryor introduces .xxx domain name bill
http://www.sploid.com/news/2006/03/hitcher_forced.php
actually, im not sure if this is fucked up or slightly ammusing...
2) Some porn sites may happily grab the .xxx domain names if they can get some easy to remember ones. I also agree with Mario that it's not going to limit free speech much, because it's just relabeling them.
3) So, the pizza wasn't cooked at all? If it had pepperonies on it, that wouldn't be too bad.
Get down now! Make him eat another pizza and well open fire!".
This isn't really news, being how it happened 9 years ago and all.. However, considering in what state of unstability and general madness the country was left, I consider it to be definetely fucked-up.
South american politics are so much fun.
ETA: That story with the president of ecuador is actually kinda funny, but I feel bad for thinking that.
Faust is about the extremely negative consequences of selling your soul to the devil.
As far as corrupting the innocent goes, that's not what I'd call impressive.