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April 4, 2005:
Reading and Writing:
We have a secret problem in America about literacy. We have thousands
of adults who graduated from highschool without being able to
read. Not many people want to talk about it, including the victims
who feel ashamed. They should not feel ashamed. The people who
pretended to teach them are the ones who should be ashamed. This
is one of the big lies about our educational system. In too many
cases it does not educate. An inordinate number of people slip
through the cracks and end up as dysfunctional adults for no
other reason than ignorance. In many cases, it is induced ignorance,
induced by a parody of and educational system.
Jane Pauley recently did a show which featured some of these
people. She featured the ones who were able to achieve some moderate
success in spite of being crippled by their teachers. They are
to be admired. What might they have done if they had been properly
educated? We will never know. I have know a few people like these
she featured. Some of their trials can be seen as humorous, but,
to the victims, they are very painful.
I knew one person who had been a successful tool and die maker.
Don't ask me how. This guy was not only illiterate, but also
almost totally deaf. Illiterate and deaf is a real heavy handicap,
yet he managed. It became painful and humorous when his wife,
thinking to help him out, purchase a TV device to enable the
closed caption feature. At the time of the purchase, no one seem
to realize he would be unable to read the captions. After a while
it became painfully obvious and the device sat unused as a mute
reminder of his handicaps.
Another Education Joke:
In one local community, Sebewaing, Michigan, they closed the
schools for a couple of days recently. Why? Because their basketball
team made the state playoffs. The kids missed a couple of days
of education because basketball was seen as more important than
education. Instead of learning they got to watch a primitive
ritual on the field of honor. Duh!
Monsters:
On March 31 we were told Schiavo died in her husband's arms.
She has finally escaped from the monsters who disgracefully used
her in a shabby political game while invoking the name of God.
I would love to see Tom Delay immobilized in a hospital bed with
a feeding tube jammed down his throat. If he were on a feeding
tube, he would never die. He would be immortal. I would love
to see him kept in that condition for 500 years. These fiendish
people claim to believe in God. They claim to believe they will
go to heaven when they die. On the other hand, they wanted to
keep that poor woman locked in hell-on-earth forever.
King George said it is always best to err on the side of life
in extreme cases like this. How many times did he make that kind
of error when he was running the execution capital of the world?
As to the democrats who stood by and let this charade happen,
I mark them as abject groveling cowards. I named them well when
I called them the grovel party.
Competency:
Why should a person have to be examined for competency for trial?
It's a dishonest lawyer trick, nothing more. The trial should
be separate from any competency hearing. Is the defendant guilty
or not? That is all a trial should determine. The penalty phase
might determine the emotional and age aspects of the defendant's
situation. The trial should not be concerned with that.
Fuel Cells:
The auto companies and the government are in the runaway stampede
mode about using fuel cells. Too many people think this will
solve all of our energy problems. Sure! Has anyone stopped to
consider where all of that hydrogen will come from? One clue,
it is not free. It takes energy to produce it. The problem, oh
yea of little wit, is about energy, not oil. Duh! Fuel cells
are a good thing because they can make vehicles virtually non-polluting.
They might also make cars marginally more efficient. What they
will not do is solve our energy shortfall. Fuel cells are not
a silver bullet.
Big Brother:
It has come out that most cars produced recently have secret
data recorders in them. The recorders were put there by the automakers
without the buyer's consent. In fact, they are spy devices that
we paid for that are being used against us. They keep track of
our driving habits whether we like it or not. Now a court has
decided this secretly collected evidence can be used against
us in a court of law. Once again our government has colluded
with our business community against us. This is a gross and deliberate
invasion of privacy. What the hell ever happened to the Fourth
Amendment. What became of our Bill of Rights?
Amendment IV:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon
probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly
describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things
to be seized.
Prince Philip:
He did another faux-pas. He does not like the press, so he said.
He called them bloody something or others. Well, who does like
the press besides the press? But, here's the joke Phil. If you
would stop pretending to be royalty deserving of a lifelong pension
for no good reason at all, the press would stop buggering you.
Turn off the TV:
Whenever we have an event like the Schiavo madness or the death
of the Pope we usually stop watching the television news for
a week or so while the media gets the afterbirth out of their
system. It is really gets kind of disgusting to watch them regurgitate
the stuff and chew it up over and over again. I imagine it's
kind of like watching a savage eat the bloody heart and brain
of his victim.
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