A 10-year old Ocala [Florida] girl brought her lunch to school and a small kitchen knife to cut it. […] The student now faces a felony charge for the possession of a weapon on school property and the principal suspended her for ten days.
There’s no real need to read farther, is there?
There’s a reason people like me are needed throughout the US — people willing to adopt an older “special-needs” child as opposed to a more-or-less fresh-from-the-package infant.
Special needs is an unfortunate term to use, though, because of the ramifications associated with the phrase special education. The latter generally refers to pullout educational programs intended for developmentally-disadvantaged students, kids with diagnosable organic conditions that put them behind their peers, usually both academically and socially, and generally permanently. A much less polite term for such kids is retarded.
Special needs kids, though, in the adoption world, are basically kids old enough to remember a time before they came to live with their adoptive parent/s (with everything that implies). There’s often no other condition they have than this, but it’s enough to cause them to be defined as special-needs placements.
They almost certainly have psychological and emotional issues, yes; but these are not organic and likely can be overcome with a mix of therapy, possibly some short-term meds, and a consistent, stable and loving home life.
Where do these kids come from? Generally they’re taken from homes that are simply unsuitable for them. For instance, the young children of Jessica Botzko, who kept her sons locked into a two-by-two-foot dog cage when they misbehaved, and who may have used shock collars on them as well. She was sentenced to just below the maximum (5 years) this week for her crimes.
NEW YORK — President Mushmouth made a fool of himself on the world’s stage yet again, this time by addressing the UN General Assembly as though he felt his opinions were relevant, or spoke either for a majority of Americans or, indeed, the rest of the world.
He began by going after Myanmar, conveniently overlooking the fact that his ill-advised sally into Iraq has (sigh) made it impossible for the US to offer military or humanitarian aid to those caught in the middle of its two-decade conflict.
From there he continued his weak justifications of Iraq, segueing into the failing health of Castro and uttering words of such stupidity that Felipe Perez Roque, Cuba’s foreign minister, walked out in protest.
But the highlight of inanity came when Bush had this to say about global poverty and health crises.
When millions of children starve to death or perish from a mosquito bite, we’re not doing our duty in the world. When whole societies are cut off from the prosperity of the global economy, we’re all worse off. […] This great institution must work for great purposes: to free people from tyranny and violence, hunger and diseases, illiteracy and ignorance and poverty and despair.
Okay. Just to put things in context, this comes from the nominal leader of an administration which has seen a massive economic implosion in the wake of an unprecedented period of prosperity and growth; this is an administration which has singlehandedly undone every advance the US made on the world stage over the last five or so decades.
Ha ha, made you look. No, of course not.
The Swedish cartoonist at the centre of a row over drawings of the Prophet Muhammad says police have taken him to a secret location for his own safety.
[…]
The purported head of al-Qaeda in Iraq has offered $100,000 (£49,310) to anyone killing Mr Vilks.
Religion of Peace, huh? I’m beginning to seriously consider the likelihood that no religion is a true religion of peace. Even the “peaceful” ones like Buddhism have histories of holy wars.
There’s simply no way that we can extend the concept of tolerance to any practitioners of the following examples of egregious stupidity:
Officials at Nepal’s state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.
Yep, goat sacrifice. In order to “fix” a mechanical fault with an airplane. Fly Royal Nepal! Now guaranteed 99% exorcised! (Look after the fold for an ad they might run in the future.)
(H/T Pharyngula)
Next we have this lovely little bit of coverage from Fort Lauderdale, FL, whereat asshat mayor Jim Naugle is still failing to recognize his own irrelevance. Extreme right-wing fundamentalist Christian shitbrains were siding with Naugle (and vice-versa) … dressed in masturbatory paramilitary uniforms. Apparently the “persecuted minority” Christians at Koinonia Worship Center in Pembroke Park, FL have decided they need to arm up and take the line “onward, Christian soldiers” a bit too damned seriously.
Gee, I wonder what would happen if similar behavior was observed at the local mosque.
And, of course, it wouldn’t be a roundup of religious retardation without yet another murder burning at the stake execution of witches:
Two South African women have been burned to death after a group of students accused them of bewitching their high school with evil spirits.
We’re putting up with this shit … why again, exactly?
The most interesting questions come your way when you’re a graphics geek with 15 years’ experience in video, multimedia programming and web design.
We’ve got an internal voice-command messaging system that allows various people to be wirelessly contacted and communicated with. Called Vocera, I think the system is viewed as a bit of a Morton’s fork. It’s easier and much more information-rich than being paged, but at least as irritating as having a cellular phone that never stops ringing.
Vocera needs a little training, and to that end they supply a video; but the DVD itself is annoyingly limited. After all, it’s a DVD. How do you make it freely available to hundreds of people any time, anywhere, simultaneously if necessary?
Right. So here’s where I come in.
There are rippers out there, of course; but that is just too goddamn easy. Windows, remember? See, those rippers transcode to MP4. Well, Windows Media Player does not handle MP4, at least not natively, sort of like how a rhino does not handle a human baby with a great deal of grace or, indeed, survivability.
This discovery led to a whole series of steps, none of which involved too much heavy liquor use,* but many of which were unnecessary.
Thus, following is a description of how to convert a DVD video file to a video format that can be played back in Windows Media Player. Note that you do not have to follow all the steps I did. In fact, strictly speaking — and assuming you have VLC, a shweet open-source multiplatform video playback and transcode utility — you could skip straight to step 16.
But golly, what’s the fun in that?
Oh — I’m running Mac OSX 10.4.10, which significantly limited my range of transcode options.**
The most recent GWB-related news is that Bush 41 is now “pained” at how reviled his son is.
We’re reminded that Daddy is 83 delicate years old; we’re supposed, I guess, to feel some kind of sympathy for the old man, and translate that into Good Feeling for his inbred retard of a moron son.
Well, let’s think about that for a minute.
Poor Daddy. Poor, poor Daddy. Gee, where was he when he should have been showing his son, at the age of ten or so, that tossing a ball around in the backyard meant give and take?
Where was he when he should have been reminding his son, at fourteen years old or so, that manhood did not necessarily mean finding the least popular kid and trying to beat him up?
Why, exactly, was Duh-bya so mysteriously absent from service in Viet Nam — and from the ANG duty he was supposed to have been pulling in its stead?
And how, please tell me how, is this touchy-feely bullshit supposed to erase the last seven years?
Feel sorry for Bush 41?
No.
I damn him.
And I damn his child, as well.
And I damn, especially, the “news” “media” which has shamelessly tried to spin a father’s masturbatory fear for his son’s failures into political capital.
Bush wept; Jesus wept much harder, and for a better reason too.
“Liberal media” my ass.
I think Hillary Clinton has lost my vote too. Apparently there has been some discussion of employing nukes — nukes! — against terrorist cells; Clinton refused to say whether or not she’d use them.
The yield of even a small weapon is so tremendous that setting one off to kill the average cluster of terrorists would affect hundreds, if not thousands, of others.
Nukes?
Holy shit. And I thought invading Pakistan was bad.
Apparently Mr. Obama has forgotten something very important about the majority of voters in the US right now.
US presidential candidate Barack Obama has said he would order military action against al-Qaeda in Pakistan without the consent of Pakistan’s government.
Hey. Barack. Diplomacy first, last and always. War is the last recourse of a failed negotiator. It is not the first option of anyone but socially-maladapted cowboys.
We have had more than a bellyful of war and killing, and we are getting tired of asshat politicians, who know they will never be personally risking their lives, who seem so goddamned willing to put our boys and girls into harm’s way at a whim.
I’ve been keeping well away from the contenders’ races; I find all the current “candidates” contemptible. Not because they’re horrible people, but because many of them are elected officials now and seem to believe they should spend the next two years not doing the jobs they were hired to do so they can instead seek office elsewhere.
With the above declaration, though, I’m afraid Obama has lost any chance of gaining my respect or support.
Wherein we read my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling.
Before we proceed: Spoilers. More than a few, because I have to discuss a few things, particularly the ways in which Rowlng somewhat pissed me off with this seventh novel.
I hate deliberate spoilers. I’ve written a few books myself and know what it’s like to try to carefully craft a narrative, to keep the reader engaged and turning the pages, to keep things moving but not so fast no one can keep up, not so slow anyone wants to skip to the end.
This, then, is your last warning. If you haven’t read the seventh Harry Potter yet but intend to, and don’t want the story ruined, don’t read further.
We’ll start with the most irritating deaths.
Tara Smith, a ScienceBlogger, posted a story about a girl in her early 20s who went in for a Brazilian bikini wax. This is the one that pours hot wax on your Most Sensitive Areas, then uses strips of cotton to — with a great deal of pain — strip away all hair, leaving you with a mons pubis resembling that of a Girl Scout.
As a result this young woman suffered severe secondary infections and put her life at risk.
This is the part of sexuality that I least understand. It’s bad enough that women are frankly rated by their looks alone in the US — a shameful practice unworthy of a species that considers itself intelligent — it’s bad enough that many men in the US seem to believe women should put out on demand or they’re automatically Lesbians. It’s bad enough that a woman who chooses not to be pregnant is either a slut or — in the case of abortion — possibly even a murderer.
But when a girl this young is torturing herself and endangering her life in order to fulfill some mythical fantasy of attractiveness, my bewilderment rises to the point of incomprehension.
To make matters worse, after she recovered, she went in for a second bikini wax* — and ended up ill all over again. This is behavior bordering on anorexia for pathology, and all in the name of making herself look “good” according to one very narrow idea of what a woman is supposed to be.
And what does it say about the society of sex in the US that a woman is attractive when her genitals resemble that of an eight-year-old girl?
====
* UPDATE: Actually, the second incident was caused by an attempt at shaving the area, not a followup wax.
