The Stupid, It Burns

I actually started writing this post a few days ago and then several personal issues came up.  My disgust with politics, what passes for news (it used to be called gossip), the lack of intelligence and the stunning erosion of critical thinking of the average American has prevented me from caring as much as I used to about the future of America.

And then, sure enough, another act of stupidity wasted no time raising my blood pressure to the boiling point.  Banning the Merriam Webster Collegiate dictionary from the Menifee Union School District because a student found the definition of oral sex in a dictionary. Menifee may be located in California, but it is definitely behind the Orange Curtain.

The Golden State's Menifee Union School District has yanked all copies of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary from its shelves and is investigating the classic American text for containing "age-inappropriate" words.
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Menifee, which is composed of 9,000 students between kindergarten and 8th grade, is forming a committee of principals, teachers and parents to pore over the book and determine whether it's fit for young eyes. It could take a while: the unabridged edition available online contains over 470,000 entries.

Cheese and rice, these people are just plain stupid, there is no other way to put it.  In the mid nineties "oral sex" was all over the news, now it can't be in a dictionary because kids might find the correct definition instead of what they hear on the playground.

Up until this morning my, and most other liberals, definition of "f*cking retarded" was when you screw over 88 percent of the people who approve of most of what you're doing AND WHO GOT YOU ELECTED in the first place in order to please the same 22 percent who still thinks Bush and Cheney walk on water that isn't frozen and who wouldn't approve of anything the Obama did if God himself came down from on high and anointed Obama as his son by a different mother.  Now it seems to encompass everything in politics.

Of course there is going to be political pain on the democratic side, what did they expect?  Flowers thrown in the street for not doing the job that the American people elected them to do?  For saving Wall Street instead of Main Street and then letting Wall Street enjoy bonuses completely out of proportion to the crappy job they performed?  After suffering through eight years of the the Bush maladministration, the last thing that the democratic base wanted was to be ground under the jackbooted heel of the same people who caused the country to head into the crapper in the first place.  Sure, you can blame it on the economy, and you would be right.  It's too bad that what passes for leadership these days only cares about the economy of the working people when it's time for them to get reelected.

Living in an unequal society creates shorter lifespans.  That would be for the poor and the middle class, the rich have all their needs met.  Even when they contribute nothing to society except to increase the inequality.  Welcome to America, land of the free, home of the brave.  If you have lots of money .

Over 200 studies since the early 1980s have now documented that people living in societies where wealth has concentrated at the top of the economic ladder live significantly shorter, less healthy lives than people who live in societies that spread their wealth more evenly.

And we’re not talking just poor folks here. All people in unequal societies do worse. Middle-income people in the United States, the world’s most unequal developed nation, have shorter lifespans than middle-income people in Japan, Sweden and a host of other more equal nations.

So, my newest iWant is called iPad?  What the hell was Apple thinking?  Aren't there any females in their advertising department?  It reminds of some comedian in the nineties who made fun of sanitary pads.  As he said, why not call them what they are instead of some gussied up name that has no relation to its purpose.    He used the example of Always and thought a better name would be cranky hanky.  I realize that the iPod saved Apple's bacon, but there were a slew of better names than iPad.  Duh!

BBB