FRIDAY IS ALREADY A FAIL

HOOO!
HOOO!
HOOO!
HAWHAWHAW!
*flings poo and grins*

I know absolutely how you feel. I work in a large metropolis that sucks, too, and was never designed for the people who work there to live or travel or park there. Traffic every day, even on weekends, is a nightmare. People also drive like morons so you tend to see multiple accidents on all highways and major roads several times every rush hour. I want to get one of those dashcams like the Russians use to record some of the idiots I see every day.

You ever see that insurance commercial that shows all the stupid things people do to cause accidents, like driving their car with their bikes on top into a garage, smashing the garage door, or the guy who cuts a huge tree branch and smashes his neighbor’s car? I see that stuff.
(I SEE DUMB PEOPLE!)
I actually saw the guy with the mattress flopping around on top of his car from the ad driving down I95 at full speed. He had NJ plates on, too, so he may have driven a loooong way with his bed attempting to escape into the wild blue yonder. Damn thing looked like a cheap Toyota with a giant soft taco on top.

Another morning, I was driving down a stretch of empty road that sort of drops down into a valley and makes a sort of S-curve. It’s enjoyable to drive if you’re not behind the kind of idiot who rides his brakes. The pavement was damp from an early morning summer rainstorm, but the roads were fine and safe, yet on the shoulder of the opposite lane, I saw an old, dingy faded white Jeep Eagle (automatically assume illegal alien when you see a crappy car in this area) flipped on its left side and the moron driver poking his head out of the passenger side door, like it was a trap door, looking at me. I laughed my head off for at least 5 minutes on my commute. I almost turned around to pass by and laugh some more. Scenes like that are why I need a dash cam.

The commuter train is no better-last time I rode them, they were run by the French and worked so poorly, rain, wind, cold, heat, and even leaves on the track were sufficient to slow or halt them. Apparently, the continuous welded rails they now use warp in the heat or cold, get wet in the rain, and leaves make them slippery. The part I can’t understand is how you can screw up the rail road, which isn’t exactly new technology. The train was invented, what, 10 or 15 years ago? Seriously, tho-what engineer didn’t think heat would buckle continuous rails?

Bostonbob

No. I worked in the Red Light district, installing my Lighting Rod in as many places as possible.

That’s why I live less than a block from my office…

Muck,
Sorry to say the Red Light District aka “The Combar Zone” is gone. No more Naked I. No more Pricess Cheyenne. Nobody was happier then Chinatown next door. The good old days when you gave the riff-raff their own city block.
Bob.

Steve,
You are the smart one. I have been commuting for 29 years. Just think of all the productive hours spent on the road. I once had a job that the commute was 96 mile each way from the South Shore past Mid-Cape. Those were fun days.
Bob.

JohnQ brings up a great point. I would like to know where it says schools must take in people who are incapable of learning to go through the motions of teaching them. I’ve heard every retard they take in is worth tons of money from the govt, but it really is a waste of time and resources to teach them what they can not learn. I wonder how many parents are desperately pretending their kid is “just like everyone else” and how many are just using the system as a babysitter so they can palm their kid off on someone else for a few hours.

I read an article a year or two back about how unscupulous universities were starting “Special” programs so they could get in on the federal money act. The schools take in retards, put them in pointless classes, and after a few years they get a certificate of attendance! No diploma in any known or suspected area of study, but a piece of paper the recipient may not even be able to read stating they were there for a while. “”M-O-O-N,” that spells Imma colluj grajudate!”

Talk about cheapening the value of a degree! Then again, it isn’t as if a lot of normal college students are much better off. If you go to school for 4 years and walk out with a BA in Gameboy or Applied Pornography or Witchcraft or Feminist Psychology, what does the future hold for you? You’ll be pushing a broom for Didlake with the retarded college grads. “Ged bak to work, noobey. Du yu dink dat floor will clean idself?”

With nothing better to do, how long before the first retarded PhD is frocked?
“Follo yur dureems! Iv yu will it, anyfing is pussibul! Hooray for me! Hooray for skool!!!”
“America’s first retarded doctorate graduated from Harvard today. He has a bright future and has already received offers from the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Environmental Protection Agency, and several offers to write his autobiography…”

Once you overcome those odds, the road to politics and the whitehouse may be wide open for you.
“America elected a developmentally disabled man president today. It was an incredible run, with lots of drama, but many Americans felt a mentally challenged candidate was at least more likely to be honest than the other contenders. Historians are challenging claims this is America’s first retarded president, citing the last three office holders as also being obviously “Special.””

Bostonbob says:

“The unions were the ones pushing for mandatory education back in the 1920′s to eliminate competition from cheap child labor,”

if you fail to educate a child, you end up with an effective retard, if you only have compulsory school to 6th grade as they do in mexico, you have a population that thinks nothing of electing the one-party candidate selected by the outgoing president. you have an education minister skimming funds from the education budget. you have cops that make LA’s old ramparts division look like boy scouts. in short, you have a criminal communist system, ok? much like where we are going.

Admin,
It looks like the ST. Valetines Day Massacre.
Bob.

Sorry, Stucky. You can disagree with the term, but was what I said wrong? I never made a statement about retards per se, I merely criticized the idea of putting them in classes, eating up resources and our tax dollars when they’re not going to learn anything. Life Skills? OK, but I don’t see that as school’s duty-teaching you to survive sounds more like your parents’ job. If it’s true govt schools fight to get as much fed money as possible by having retards as students, then I think it’s wrong.

And personally, I feel like retards and their parents are victimized by colleges who offer them enrollment. We’ve criticized colleges for screwing average people-but it’s OK if they enroll retards? I think it’s no different than when Phoenix and others suck up govt money from veterans and other suckers for no real value, placing them in debt for a degree of dubious value. I think it would be funny for the hungry kids graduating every year with worthless degrees to now find themselves competing for work with “special” employees who now earn their own “degrees.” That doesn’t seem ironic to you somehow?

Next-
Personally, I think it’s funny how we have a cultural tradition of shortening names for things and people, i.e. A-Rod and RG-3 in prosports, I mean professional sports. Dick or Rick for Richard, NYC or Big Apple for New York, TRIBECA for Triangle Below Canal, cop for Constable On Patrol, NAVBUPERS for Navy Bureau of Personnel, ChiCom for Chinese Communist, NORK for North Korean, Nazi for National Socialist etc and that’s all right, but as soon as the same logic/lazy approach is applied to certain groups of people, it becomes a slur.
Why are short names for things bad?

i.e. retard, taken from the word, “retarded,” which according to Merriam-Webster, was coined in 1895 and was a medical term for someone, “slow or limited in intellectual or emotional development or academic progress.” That term was what they used when I was a kid. “Special” didn’t exist. (We also didn’t give prizes to all the kids who competed-just the winners, but that’s another rant.)
Now some object to the use of a term that was perfectly acceptable and legitimately used by medicine to describe a particular person with mental problems. Why? Because the term can be shortened for ease of use? Because the term enters popular use by non-medical people?

Am I wrong? Does changing the term change the physical reality of the thing being termed? Is there an actual difference between “retard” and “retarded,” aside from the amount of time it takes to type/say it? Does the person/group described by the term change? I don’t think so.
I wonder how long before “SpecEd” or “Spec” becomes the term for “Special” people and then we have to all agree THAT is an offensive term and look for a new one. The search for nicknames and shortened terms will continue. Where’s George Carlin when you need him?

BTW-interesting note. At one point, “Imbecile,” “moron,” and “idiot,” were all legitimate medical terms. Later, the public adopted them as insults. Remember the 3 stooges? At some point, those terms fell out of use. The people who were previously termed “Imbecile,” “moron,” and “idiot” didn’t go away-the terms were merely changed.

When you really look at the terms that make people upset, it’s funny that they’re really just shortened versions of acceptable names.
i.e. in WWII, we fought a nation of people located in Asia who, in their own language, called themselves Nipponese. We adopted that name for them, shortened it for ease of use, and called them “Nips” and now that’s a bad word. We also shortened the English name for them to “Japs” and that is also a bad word. Why? Are they different because we shortened it? Nope-they’re still Japanese.
The Brits, um, I mean British (why is that OK?) call us “Yanks,” instead of Yankees. They’re pretty offensive as a rule, calling French “frogs” and the Germans “Jerrys.” We called them “Krauts” and their Italian allies, “I-ties.”

There is some disagreement on the term, but according to some defintions, there was a term for immigrants arriving in the US 100 years ago, Without Papers, or W.O.P. The term was shortened to “wop” and was associated with the dominant immigrant group of the time, Italians, and became considered a slur. I don’t think that’s much different from the move to stop using “Illegal Alien” today. The person being discussed is still here illegally, but “illegal alien” is too offensive to describe them.

Australians have their own offensive term for a group of people who were living in Australia when they arrived, “Abo.” As “Yanks,” we’re unlikely to see it as a slur, but to the Aborigines whose descriptive name was shortened, it is reportedly annoying. But when you think about it, isn’t it more convenient to take a 5 syllable 10 letter word and shorten it to 2 syllables and 3 letters? It doesn’t change who they are at all. Is the shortening disrespectufl?

Thankfully, I can still call Russians “Russkis.” I hear some folks are offended by the term, but I suspect they’re not actually Russian, since in Russian, “Russki” is the word for Russian.

In Iraq, U.S. soldiers used a term for Iraqis, “Hajji,” possibly derived from the old Johnny Quest cartoon. The funny part is, to liberal Americans, “Hajji” was also an offensive term. It was a short name for an ethnic group! To Iraqis, however, “Hajji” turned out to be a term of honor, meaning the person had completed the Haj to Mecca. So they didn’t mind. The fear of short names, however, led the Army to ban the use of the nickname.

I find it amusing that short names for some things and groups makes people angry and upset, but others are OK. We have a culture that loves nicknames. Many cultures love nicknames. Alexander becomes Al-except for in Russian, where it’s Sasha. Elizabeth becomes Liz or Lisa. No one cares. I don’t think the urge to shorten names is intended to offend, necessarily, we just like to cut out words we don’t need. Is the familiarity of a nickname the offense?

Shakespeare said, “A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” I would add a more offensive observation that a “Special” person would be as retarded in 2013 as he would have been in 1895 when the term was coined.

Eyeful,
We call them ‘Tards abd Sped Kids. Just look for the short bus. By the way my wife works with Special Ed kids in pre school and I could give you an earful on that program.
Bob.

it used to be that women who couldn’t take care of their children would take the ones they couldn’t handle down to the river and drown them. not enuf food, crippled, retarded, whatever. That is how nature works. See Darwin for longer explanation. We as a species are doing our genetic pool no damn good whatsoever by perpetuating the lives of those who can/will not do for themselves. Educating the unteachable is what is known as capital misallocation. If we applied social Darwinism to people/bad banks and businesses, we would all be much better off. We can either choose to do this on our own, or we can wait for nature to do it for us. Population die back in one form or another will occur. Notice the rates of autism…they are increasing drastically. So, we can take care of the 100 million people collecting .gov benefits and just keep adding more useless eaters until the middle class ceases to exist, or we can get with reality and fix the problem. Neuter welfare recipients after one fucking kid, and only abort the fetuses that are non-viable due to genetic defect. It would be better to do this before a full 50% of the population is drooling idiots of one form or another collecting off the public dole at the expense of a dwindling worker class. And retarded gimps rolling thru home depot for a paycheck that is subsidized by the government, which is you and me, is not fucking productive. I was at the home depot at the 95 and naamans road and heard the manager tell the gimp to leave him alone and just ride up and down the aisle, so don’t tell me they like those kind of employees for anything other than the government quota/subsidy. At least eyeful gets what some of you obviously do not.

AWD and John Q

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Man, sometimes I wonder if my sarc meter is correctly calibrated.
I also try to remember Mr. Twain’s comment about keeping your mouth shut so folks will have to only suspect you’re stupid.

Thankfully, I didn’t go for that bait…nah, screw it.
DEATH TO TIM!!!!

Got any quotes for over-emotional people responding in outrage to questions?

I guess I touched a nerve, because I don’t think I mocked or insulted anyone.

I thought I raised an interesting issue with the point about colleges moving from fleecing regular students to “special” ones. Your own quotes would seem to apply there, too.

And I thought my look at language was also interesting, but you might have been too outraged to get it. Don’t you ever think language is interesting?

Hmmm … from wheelchair to retards …

I was a tutor at a TAFE college once; asked if I could assist a disabled student. Dunno … I’ll see how it goes. Young woman, cerebral palsy, speech impediment, motorized wheelchair. Took about a week to work out how she spoke, then no problem. Got her through her certificate and she went on to further education at another institution. A messed-up body but a bright mind. And determined.

WPES.