Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Red Lines and Morality


As I write this post, the situation in Syria is in the news.

If you read this a few days after it was written, there may be a U.S. involvement in that civil war by then. I hope not.

Since an attack hasn't happened yet, as of today, I have the luxury of sitting back and analyzing why the U.S. should or should not get involved. In my view, there are better reasons not to get involved than to go ahead and get involved. Here are the points that are running through my mind right now:

1. The Obama administration (and others) believe there was a chemical weapons attack on the rebel forces in Syria. They believe this attack was done by the Syrian government forces.

2.  The Obama administration (and others) seem to believe that this chemical attack requires a response by the U.S. military.

Why?

Apparently Obama feels outraged that some sort of moral line has been crossed. Hundreds of dead children were wrapped up and placed in long lines in a warehouse for the cameras. As Bush the elder might have said, "This will not stand." Ok. And I'm thinking that if hundreds of dead children had been killed instead by machine gun fire, and wrapped in white linen and placed in long lines in a warehouse for the TV cameras, then a moral line would not have been crossed? - a moral line that hadn't been crossed by the killing of 100,000 people before the gas attack? And I'm thinking, Obama cares for these children. His heart breaks. He must put a stop to it. Well then, why the hell doesn't this child-mourning morally outraged man stop the killing of thousands of AMERICAN babies every year? Is it ok to hold Syrian tyrants accountable with military action, but not ok to hold teenagers accountable for not getting pregnant?

I know, I know - I am the only one who thinks these kinds of crazy thoughts.

Obama feels that chemical weapons are a step too far, and some action must be taken to let the tyrants know we won't stand for the killing of people in THIS way. Do you think Obama's limited missile-only three or four day "lesson" (guaranteed not to kill any people, btw) is going to make these dictators quake in their boots, learn their lesson to never try that chemical crap again? Do you? I'm thinking Assad and his boys are not exactly fouling their trousers at the thought.

And I'm also thinking, do we have any of those "bunker buster" bombs left over from Iraq and Afghanistan? Because, if we do, maybe we could use them to set Iran's nuclear weapons program back a couple of decades. I think I could get behind something like that because I can clearly see a benefit to America by doing so. A few melons on the mullahs, eh? Then watch the "Syrian situation" quickly take care of itself. A miracle.

Tell me what the benefit to America will be by wasting some very expensive missiles on Assad? Such a little tantrum will change nothing. And don't say it is the moral thing to do because a line has been crossed and, by god, we just can't let 'em cross them red lines. Because American society has been so corrupted over the years that it finds NOTHING immoral anymore. It is outrageous to hear the war-boy politicians crying MORALITY! MORALITY! while they go about their daily business of taking bribes and screwing the American public.

Two-faced septic-tank bottom feeders.

Give me the Pharisees any day.


Sunday, August 25, 2013

"Founding Father" observation


"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."

—Benjamin Franklin

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Are you smarter than an eighth grader?


There is a TV show (or at least there used to be one) called, "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?" I watched it a few times. I did pretty well - better than a lot of the contestants who had to get help from the kids, but not as well as some of the kids.

We make a lot of jokes today, sad jokes, about high school graduates often not even knowing how to read or write. Some of that is probably true, although not as bad as the British pundits running edited film clips depicting Americans in general as morons would have you believe. I hope.

Anyway, I ran across (online) an old graduation test (eighth grade) from a Kentucky school district from a hundred years ago, in 1912. Remember that back then it wasn't the norm to finish high school, and an eighth grade education was deemed adequate for many, even less for the farm boys. One would imagine that such a test for eighth graders would be a breeze for us modern folk to pass today. I thought I could. I quickly realized I couldn't. Not off the top of my head without further study.

The first thing I noticed about the test was that there were no multiple-guess questions; the kids had to write out their answers on many of them, and prove they could read by doing it in public. Writing too.  There were several sections to the test, and it must have taken quite some time to complete. I assume the kids were timed. The sections were:

Spelling-Reading-Writing
Arithmetic
Grammar
Geography
Physiology
Civil Government
History

I thought I could do most of this stuff pretty easily, but it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. I don't think I would have passed. Back to eighth grade for me. Want to try a few questions? There's a lot of questions so I don't expect you to wade through it all. Also, some of this stuff is obsolete information today. I didn't understand the questions on some of them.

The reading and writing were given by teachers and judged by proctors. Can't do any of that here, but here are the words they had to spell:

(Click to enlarge if needed)



I liked the Arithmetic section because I like to analyze things. When I was still in school, I could often arrive at the right answer eventually, even if I couldn't remember the actual formula. I was very inventive. :)

Give some of the below arithmetic questions a shot.



Grammar I passed on. Some of the Geography questions were challenging though:


Anyway, I would like to see this test given to high school 10th graders today, and without multiple choice options.

If you would like to peruse the other sections, the entire test can be viewed here, and the answers can be found here.

School's out.

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