[geeks] FYI: CompUSA is offering OS X 10.5 for $99 (after rebate)

[wa2egp at att.net]

> Indeed, the misplaced idealism of the hippie generation is coming home
> to roost in education.  

Find out how many teachers became teachers so they could avoid 
the draft.

> Johnny can't read because Johnny's teacher can't
> TEACH, because even if he knows how, his hands are tied by school
> administrators who've bought into some crock about how everything has to
> be inoffensive and shiny and brightly-colored and nobody's feelings can
> ever be allowed to be hurt or their delicate sensibilities offended. 

I agree.  I have a former student teaching in my school who was taught
not to grade in red pen because that is "too tramatic".  Yet his papers
weere graded in red.  Go figure.

> We have an educational system where a four year old -- no, that's not a
> typo, not a fourth-grader, a four-year-old -- gets prosecuted for sexual
> harassment because he hugged his teacher as he got on the bus, fer
> crissakes.  (And it was the TEACHER who filed charges.  For crying out
> loud, woman, if you can't take a hug from a four-year-old without
> feeling you've been sexually assaulted, what the FUCK do you think
> you're doing trying to teach a class full of four-year-olds?!?  Are you
> planning to teach them all never to touch each other, and have them all
> grow up repressed and emotionally crippled?)

That could have been a case of an offense is a good defense.  Since
kid-touching is a hot topic today, it could be a way of preventing
charges being filed against her.  The easiest way to ruin a teacher's
career is to claim they touched a kid.  Doesn't matter if it happened,
their career is tainted by the accusation.  Then, we don't know what the
kid hugged. :)  If I was in the movie "The Puppet Masters", I would
hav been taken over by aliens.  (Scifi movies buffs would get the 
reference.)  Of course, you could be correct too.

> Guess what.  The universe is not shiny and brightly colored.  It ain't
> inoffensive.  It ain't fair.  And it ain't politically correct.  And
> right now, by maintaining the fiction that it can be (and everything
> that grows out of that fiction), we are doing a WOEFULLY piss-poor job
> of preparing our children to cope with it and make their way in it.

Agreed. 

> Now if I were nasty and cynical and paranoid, I could speculate that it
> was intentionally planned that way because the government loves the idea
> of a docile, sheep-like population that believes whatever it's told and
> votes however it's told to vote.  But I'm just nasty and cynical,[0] so
> I'll just speculate that they're probably not the least displeased when
> it works out that way.

One man's cynicism is another man's truth.

> "If the government is big enough to give you everything you need, it's
> big enough to take away everything you have." -- Gerald R. Ford
 
I like that one. 


Bob