Rolleyes News of The Day

[jimzinsocal]

Rest up. Hope you got some pics to share.
Well keep the porch light on for you when you wake up!!

[Dutchcedar]

What... who?

Slowly catching up... and sleeping in. Vacation really took it out of me. I'll be up to form in a few more days.

I thought he was talking about Obama or Pelosi... even went to News Right Now to check... and it was only YOU!!!

Hope ya had fun.

I'll get ya, jimz... one of these days... when ya aren't expectin' it.

[jimzinsocal]

Ill keep this and my thoughts out of the threads for Dems and Republicans.

Politics at Saddleback [Byron York]

Greetings from Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, where in a and hour and a half, we'll begin the "Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency," to be moderated by Pastor Rick Warren. A question: Should the first joint general-election appearance of the candidates be held in a church?

08/16 06:39 PM




My short answer? I wont listen or read because its bull shit for me.
I dont care how either candidate goes to some religious issue or point of view.
When Catholics stop molesting kids and Muslims stop killing each other?
Perhaps the religious pov may have some meaning for me.

I may voice concerns for religious freedoms....but Im not big on religious dominance.
May as well be a back and forth with motorcycle gangs so far as it means anything to me.

[Fluff n Stuff]

Will the Church lose it's Tax-Exempt status for holding a political event? (Quickly checks who the Pastor has supported up until now...) Nope, they're safe...

[jimzinsocal]

Sheesh. Buddy...get a grip. Count the money and take a Tylenol PM every evening

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayof....ap/index.html

[Orangutan]

Sheesh. Buddy...get a grip. Count the money and take a Tylenol PM every evening

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayof....ap/index.html

I was just reading that and the first thought in my head, "What a damn crybaby."

[Dutchcedar]

Windmills will be the penitentiaries of the next decade... people will claim we need 'em, but not "in my backyard".

Personally, I'd rather see nuke plants (in someone else's backyard... we have rivers with turbos here). At least they operate when you need them, not when the weather allows them to.

[tucker]

Ex-Marine Decries Prosecution in Civilian Court

AP Exclusive: Ex-Marine charged in civilian court warns of broad consequences

By CHELSEA J. CARTER AP Military Affairs Writer
The Associated Press
IRVINE, Calif.



A former Marine sergeant facing the first federal civilian prosecution of a military member accused of a war crime says there is much more at stake than his claim of innocence on charges that he killed unarmed detainees in Fallujah, Iraq.

In the view of Jose Luis Nazario Jr., U.S. troops may begin to question whether they will be prosecuted by civilians for doing what their military superiors taught them to do in battle.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=5599017

That’s a good reason why not to join the US military.

[Nate]

Another example of us being stupid:

China Expanding Nuclear Power Role Outside Borders

The important part:

Belarus originally approached three other companies to bid on the project, including the U.S.-Japanese Westinghouse-Toshiba consortium. However, any participation by Westinghouse would require an agreement between the US and Belarus on the peaceful use of nuclear power. Such an agreement could take years, and thus US involvement in the multi-billion dollar project appears very unlikely.

Sort of like the off-shore drilling near Cuba...would you rather have US doing it..or them. (which isn't a knock on China necessarily)

[Orangutan]

I was going to put this in its own thread but I decided to spare the forum that rant. I spent a year grading college students' tests, quizzes, and so on and here's the situation: they're idiots who are unable to form complete sentences with coherent thoughts, much less spell correctly or use punctuation at a level beyond a kindergartner. When grading you have to ignore their grammatical and syntactical errors in an attempt to focus on the answer to the question, which is exceedingly difficult when you cannot even discern what they tried to write.

http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...0.html?cnn=yes

[sic]

Spoiler!

Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2008
Making an Arguement for Misspelling
By Laura Fitzpatrick

Most teachers expect to correct their students' spelling mistakes once in a while. But Ken Smith has had enough. The senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University in Buckinghamshire, England, sees so many misspellings in papers submitted by first-year students that he says we'd be better off letting the perpetrators off the hook and doing away with certain spelling rules altogether.

Good spellers, Smith says, should be able to go on writing as usual; but those who find the current rules of English too hard to learn should have their spelling labeled not wrong, but variant. Smith zeroes in on 10 candidates for variant spellings, culled from his students' most commonly misspelled (or mispelled, as Smith suggests) words. Among them are Febuary, instead of February, twelth instead of twelfth, and truely instead of truly — all words, he says, that involve confusion over silent letters. When students would ask him why there's no e in truly, Smith didn't really have an answer: "I'd say, 'Well, I don't know ... You've just got to drop it because people do.'" Smith adds that when teachers correct spelling, they waste valuable time they could be spending on bigger ideas.

Word nerds aren't the only ones with a stake in the proposal. People who have trouble with spelling are punished when it comes to applying for jobs or even filling out forms, even though their mistakes are far from unusual, says Jack Bovill, chairman of the British-based Spelling Society, an international organization that has advocated simplified spellings since 1908. A 2007 Spelling Society survey of 1,000 British adults found that more than half could not spell embarrassed or millennium correctly and more than a quarter struggled with definitely, accidentally and separate.

Smith and Bovill are part of a long and illustrious line of spelling malcontents. Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, Teddy Roosevelt and even Noah Webster, the father of American lexicography, all lobbied for spelling reform, their reasons ranging from traumatic boyhood spelling experiences to the hope that easier communication could promote peace. In 1906, Mark Twain lobbied the Associated Press to use phonetic spelling. "The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet," he once wrote. "It doesn't know how to spell, and can't be taught."

Non-English-speaking countries have been simplifying their spelling for centuries: Spain, France, Germany, Russia, Norway, Ireland, Indonesia and Japan, among others, have all instituted such reforms, with Portugal in May amending its spelling to follow the simpler Brazilian rules. Since 1755, when the English language was standardized in Samuel Johnson's aptly named Dictionary of the English Language, many variant spellings have become widely accepted on both sides of the pond. In 1864, for instance, the U.S. government officially changed the spelling of words like centre and timbre to end in the variant -er,/i>, and more recently, at the beginning of the twentieth century, fantasy became an accepted variant of phantasy.

But some language purists insist that there is value to top-down rules of English. "People who spell a lot of words incorrectly either aren't paying attention or don't care," says Barbara Wallraff, who writes the "Wordcourt" column on language and writing problems for the Atlantic and King Features Syndicate. "Why are we changing our language to accommodate — with two 'm's — them?"

Joe Pickett, executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, says that changes to dictionary entries are always on the table, but he and his seven fellow editors are a tough crowd. They keep an eye on print publications to see whether a variant usage has started to become mainstream. Any word that seems to be a good candidate for an update undergoes rigorous scrutiny as the editors seek input from a panel of some 200 orthographic and lexicographic whizzes. Even among this writerly crowd, 13% admitted in 1996 to combining a lot into a single word. But 93% still considered it an error and corrected it in their own writing — leading the editors not to change the entry. Variants are added to the dictionary, Pickett says, "only when we're really convinced that even people like us don't notice [the misspelling] much."

Smith, for his part, insists that he is advocating only for minor changes. "I'm not saying to people who have actually gone to all the trouble to learn all the exceptions to the rule that they should unlearn it. I'm just saying, let's have a few more variant spellings," he says. And if that doesn't catch on, he has another idea: "In the twenty-first century, why learn by heart rote spelling when you can just type it into a computer and spell-check?"

[BlackDragon24]

I was going to put this in its own thread but I decided to spare the forum that rant. I spent a year grading college students' tests, quizzes, and so on and here's the situation: they're idiots who are unable to form complete sentences with coherent thoughts, much less spell correctly or use punctuation at a level beyond a kindergartner. When grading you have to ignore their grammatical and syntactical errors in an attempt to focus on the answer to the question, which is exceedingly difficult when you cannot even discern what they tried to write.

http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...0.html?cnn=yes

[sic]

Spoiler!

The movie "Idiocracy" come to mind.

I feel your pain Orang....had to teach for two terms while in grad school....what a friggin nightmare. You'd think that students in upper division sciences would be able to write complete sentences properly. It's friggin embarrassing.

[AMDScooter]

The movie "Idiocracy" come to mind.

I feel your pain Orang....had to teach for two terms while in grad school....what a friggin nightmare. You'd think that students in upper division sciences would be able to write complete sentences properly. It's friggin embarrassing.

I watched that movie... "Idiocracy". Premise was hilarious.. reverse Darwinism.. sort of. Shame the rest of the movie past the first 15 minutes sucked.

[jimzinsocal]

The Storm of The Century. "Deadly Fay" so says ABC News.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/grap...?3day#contents

Run for your lives!! Its going to rain!!

[jimzinsocal]

Too funny. Althouse has a poll on the "Cone of Silence"

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2008/08...t-in-cone.html

I suspect my vote is obvious...

[TBird761]

OMFG BIG roll <-- that's right, this one deserves the elusive quintuple rollseyes award

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,405161,00.html

Why is it rollseyes material?

After the whole article about a girl who killed herself by being drunk while driving and sending text messages at the same time, the article's helpful conclusionary note is a quote from the mother: "Preuss' mother Kelly said she hopes the accident will make other people think before texting and driving."

That's right, folks. You heard it here. Apparently the lesson to take away from this one is not to send text messages while driving. It's hip to talk about cell phones interfering with driving right now. I guess being drunk just doesn't compare to sending text messages while driving. Pfft. They're both stupid activities, but this is like blaming guns for murders like they're the problem instead of figuring out what the fark was going on in the twisted murder's crazy mind.

Seriously: We as a society are absolutely in love with banning and blaming things, but when it comes to fixing social or mental problems we don't know what to do...so we grasp for things even harder. Often times, we come up with indirect culprits. Some times we come up with ludicrous non-associations.

</rant> I'm not so much saying the above applies to this particular case in its entirety. This is just on the same subject, and I like to vent some times.