Tag: You’re Doing it Wrong

Well That’s Retarded

With ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, our economy in the toilet, our money losing value faster than Obama is losing voter approval, and hundreds of out major issues our representatives are wasting their time on political correctness:

The measure, passed by the House by voice vote Wednesday night, changes the phrase “mentally retarded” to “an individual with an intellectual disability” in existing health, education and labor law.

I think I finally understand something. Political correctness is directly proportional to the number of words used to describe something. Being “retarded” is one word it’s very politically incorrect but “an individuals with an intellectual disability” is six words so it’s six times more politically correct.

The only thing the politically correct crowd has accomplished here is turning the word disabled into a future insult. Insults such as idiot, moron, retard, etc. all derived from their legitimate medical usage:

At the May 18, 1910 annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded, Goddard proposed definitions for a system for classifying individuals with mental retardation based on intelligence quotient (IQ). Goddard used the terms moron for those with an IQ of 51-70, imbecile for those with an IQ of 26-50, and idiot for those with an IQ of 0-25 for categories of increasing impairment. This nomenclature was the standard of the field for decades. A moron, by his definition, was any person with mental age between eight and twelve. Morons, according to Goddard, were unfit for society and should be removed from society either through institutionalization, sterilization, or both. What Goddard failed to see was that his bias against morons would greatly influence his data later.

So what is my point here? Simple people used the words moron, imbecile, and idiot as insults due to their medical meaning. A person who is being a dumb ass is often called an idiot because they’re acting with the mental age of an infant. Retard is used as an insult because it means somebody who is mentally slow. Changing the term from retard to individual with a disability is just going to make people start using the term mentally disabled as an insult in 10 years. At that point it will be politically incorrect to use the term mentally disabled and we’ll have to come up with a more flowery and politically correct term which will probably end up being at least 10 words in length.

Why the Hell am I paying my taxes for our representatives’ payroll? Oh that’s right because the government has a gun to my head.

Where Can I Buy One

Apparently Mayor Daley is trying to get his police for a new type of firearm. I’ve not heard of this but thanks to Every Day, No Days Off I know about the amazing new semi-fully-automatic weapon:

“Many times [the police are] outgunned, to be very frank,” Daley said at an event in the Englewood neighborhood. “When they come to a scene, someone has a semi-fully-automatic weapon, and you have a little pistol, uh, good luck.”

What these new semi-fully-automatic weapons are I haven’t a clue. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around this advanced technology. I’ll post up more details on this amazing new weapon system when I have them.

Down the Memory Hole

So our Department of Defense (DoD) decided to do a book burning at the taxpayers’ expense because some content irked them off. The publisher apparently didn’t see the possibility for infinite revenue though. Instead of publishing more copies of the book for the DoD to purchase Bruce Schneier informs us that the publisher has reached an agreement with the DoD. The agreement involves removing all the “offending” material from the book. What a poor business decision.

Climate Something or Other

If at first you don’t succeed change the name of your target and try again. Just as corn syrup is changing it’s name to corn sugar and Blackwater changed their name to Xe global warming climate change is getting a name change to climate disruption. As with most thing involving climate something or other Borepatch has a good writeup about how a certain staffer in the Obamessiah’s administration came up with the glorious idea of doing the name swap.

I’m not a rocket scientist but I believe if your crusade lacks so much popular support and scientific backing that you have to change the name twice to drum up fear you should find something else to make money on. It seems people don’t really want to jump on the carbon credit scheme and climate something or other isn’t scaring many people anymore. Just give up and find another scam already.

Canadian Will Keep Wasting Millions of Dollars

Every Day, No Days Off informs us that our friends up north have decided to keep wasting millions of dollars on a point long-gun registry. This is both a blow to the civil rights of Canadian as well as a boon from criminals whom ignore the registry anyways and know any slight inconvenience for citizens self-defense is a convenience for crime.

If It Doesn’t Work Just Do It Again Only Harder

Snowflakes in Hell has informed us gun ban activists are at it again in Germany. A German woman went on a shooting spree killing four and injuring another 18. When strict gun control laws aren’t preventing shootings what’s the best way to deal with it? According to gun ban activists ban guns entirely.

I’ll never be able to wrap my head around the idiocy of these people. It’s been shown time and time again that enacting draconian gun control laws doesn’t prevent gun violence. In the real world where I operate most of the time when something doesn’t work we stop doing it and try to solve our problem in a different manner. If you’re using a hammer to pound in a screw and getting sub par results the answer isn’t to get a larger hammer but to get a different tool all together.

Gun ban activists seem to be believe if something isn’t working you just need to do it harder. German already has some of the strictest gun control laws on the books and they still have to deal with shootings every now and then. Britain which almost has a complete ban on gun ownership also have to deal with shootings periodically. People are going to go crazy and kill others. If somebody is willing to commit murder they’re willing to break gun control laws. Knowing these two things maybe the best option is to loosen gun control laws and allow people to arm and defend themselves. Obviously gun control laws aren’t doing a damned thing.

The Woman with No Name

So some dumb ass went and trademarked her own name and is actively protecting that trademark. This is an amusing block of text from her website:

[Name removed to avoid trademark violation] name is a Federally Registered Trademark. It is illegal to use the name ([Name removed to avoid trademark violation]) on any website or document without prior written permission.

See the problem there? If you trademark you name and don’t allow anybody to use it without written permission nobody is going to use your name and you won’t gain any recognition. This effectively means you become an anonymous entity on all websites who don’t see written permission to print you name. There is also another amusing piece:

Separately, I should note that Dr. Ann De Wees Allen’s website has an amusing bit of javascript that tries to prevent you from copying and pasting any text and on doing something so simple as right clicking and trying to open a link in a new window. The best part, though, is if you have javascript enabled, and do try to right click, a pop up windows shows up with the text saying “Copyright Protect!”

I didn’t notice that as I’m always running NoScript. It’s amazing how much stupid shit on the Internet you get to bypass and ignore with that little add-on.

Global Warming will Kill Us All

Or not. It seems Dutch and United States scientists have come out and said the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica should be halved:

In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually.

Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise in sea levels, a pace that compares dramatically with 1.8mm (0.07 inches) annually in the early 1960s.

But, according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, the ice estimates fail to correct for a phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment.

This is the term for the rebounding of Earth’s crust following the last Ice Age.

Oops.

DHS Network Security Failure

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) apparently doesn’t practice what they preach. The DHS is tasked with securing the computers and networks of other government agencies but are unable to security their own network. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) found 1,085 instances of security holes.

I guess good enough for government work has an all new meaning now.