Remember when you were a child, and you asked your parents a question they didn't want to answer, or maybe you were forbidden to do something, and this circumstance confused your tiny little brain to the extent that you were actually motivated to ask that most-innocent and eternal of questions:
Why?
And your parents, flummoxed, perhaps impatient, could not bother to give you a reasonable facsimile of a definitive, logical, coherent answer, and would simply retort in a brusque tone:
Because I said so....
The subject, at that point, was assumed to be closed.
As you got older, you got another version of this dodge, this inability to answer a direct question with a measured argument, and it went something like this:
You'll understand when you grow up...
And this dialectic, more than anything else, I believe, describes the last four years of the Obama Administration to a tee.
Showing posts with label Child Abuse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Child Abuse. Show all posts
Friday, October 26, 2012
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Call It What It Is: Child Abuse...
...and poor parenting skills.
An article on the so-called Autism Epidemic.
This is exactly what happens when someone manages to evoke political action, and get excessive taxpayer funding, and mobilize it in the "fight" against a perceived-but-not-all-that-prevalent a problem: you suddenly get more of it.
An article on the so-called Autism Epidemic.
This is exactly what happens when someone manages to evoke political action, and get excessive taxpayer funding, and mobilize it in the "fight" against a perceived-but-not-all-that-prevalent a problem: you suddenly get more of it.
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
This Is Why The Public Schools Suck, Part VII...
I really do hate to pile it on, but sometimes things just happen in a certain way as to preclude the possibility of just letting something rest and perhaps fade into the background after a spell. This week, the New York City Department of Education has done some truly stupid things -- banning words that might hurt people's feelings, reinstating school bus services it cancelled despite court orders not to, rejecting tried-and-proven reading systems so as to not show the true depths of the incompetence of it's battalions of overpaid-unqualified teachers -- that there's no way in hell that some things will ever get to die a natural death.
What follows is a synopsis of a discussion I had with my sister last night regarding my junior-high-school-aged nephew's history assignment.
UPDATE: Great response to this post. I'm asking everyone who has a child in a public school, but especially in a New York City -- and specifically on Staten Island -- to pass this post on to everyone you think might be interested...and to the so-called Chancellor of Schools, himself. I'm assuming he'll be able to read it without his lips moving.
Also, if you're intrested in whatever else the City of New york has failed do to educationally, as well as learning about the stupidity of the public workforce entrusted with your child's education, simply click the Education and Public Schools tags at the bottom of this post.
Thanks much!
What follows is a synopsis of a discussion I had with my sister last night regarding my junior-high-school-aged nephew's history assignment.
UPDATE: Great response to this post. I'm asking everyone who has a child in a public school, but especially in a New York City -- and specifically on Staten Island -- to pass this post on to everyone you think might be interested...and to the so-called Chancellor of Schools, himself. I'm assuming he'll be able to read it without his lips moving.
Also, if you're intrested in whatever else the City of New york has failed do to educationally, as well as learning about the stupidity of the public workforce entrusted with your child's education, simply click the Education and Public Schools tags at the bottom of this post.
Thanks much!
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
When The People Are Watching...
...politicians and bureaucrats live in fear.
With regards to an earlier post about sucky public schools in New York City:
New York City School nitwits reverse "word ban" policy.
The reason this policy has been 'reversed" (the official snake oil was that the original ban was never a ban in the sense of being, you know, a ban, but rather a set of "recommendations") is because the general public was made aware of just what sort of dumbass, borderline psychotics are charged with their children's education, and what they were trying to do in the name of Political Correctness.
People: 1, Educrap Union: 0
At least until next time.
UPDATE: Bad link is now fixed.
With regards to an earlier post about sucky public schools in New York City:
New York City School nitwits reverse "word ban" policy.
The reason this policy has been 'reversed" (the official snake oil was that the original ban was never a ban in the sense of being, you know, a ban, but rather a set of "recommendations") is because the general public was made aware of just what sort of dumbass, borderline psychotics are charged with their children's education, and what they were trying to do in the name of Political Correctness.
People: 1, Educrap Union: 0
At least until next time.
UPDATE: Bad link is now fixed.
This is Why The Public Schools Suck, Part V...
Teacher’s unions against a phonics-based reading program that works, as opposed to the current trend in “education: which is to take the taxpayer’s money and run, leaving behind legions of stupid children to choke on your dust cloud.
Then again, it has been noted before in a millions studies on the subject that it’s generally well-known in academic circles that a majority of “education majors” were often themselves the worst college students, and the reason they became education majors – usually after changing majors at least once – is because it’s too easy to achieve a watered-down degree and then an iron-clad-almost-job-for-life public-sector job.
A job, incidentally, which only requires that you be able to pass a dumbed-down qualification exam written at a third grade reading level (because otherwise many minority applicants couldn’t pass it, and who wants to deal with the predictable civil rights lawsuits?).
Your average teacher is no better qualified than your garbage man to teach your children math and reading, and every bit as overpaid.
This is but yet one more reason to break the government monopoly on education in this country.
UPDATE: If you wish to read even more about the insanity taking place within our public schools, click on the taglines at the bottom of this article. Your eyes will be opened once you know just what it is that our so-called "educators" are doing to kids within the school setting.
Then again, it has been noted before in a millions studies on the subject that it’s generally well-known in academic circles that a majority of “education majors” were often themselves the worst college students, and the reason they became education majors – usually after changing majors at least once – is because it’s too easy to achieve a watered-down degree and then an iron-clad-almost-job-for-life public-sector job.
A job, incidentally, which only requires that you be able to pass a dumbed-down qualification exam written at a third grade reading level (because otherwise many minority applicants couldn’t pass it, and who wants to deal with the predictable civil rights lawsuits?).
Your average teacher is no better qualified than your garbage man to teach your children math and reading, and every bit as overpaid.
This is but yet one more reason to break the government monopoly on education in this country.
UPDATE: If you wish to read even more about the insanity taking place within our public schools, click on the taglines at the bottom of this article. Your eyes will be opened once you know just what it is that our so-called "educators" are doing to kids within the school setting.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
This is Why The Public Schools Suck, Part IV...
New York City "educators" compile list of 50 words that are never-ever to appear on a test, just in case someone gets offended...and stuff.
I could expound upon this for hours, but do I really need to? This isn't funny; it's your tax dollars at work, and your children in danger! Political Correctness run amok, is what it is. Shameful is what it is.
If it had not appeared in print -- in a newspaper which is frequently all-too-happy to present the Libtard point of view as if it were a dictate from the Almighty, and then present it as the bestest fuckin' thing evah! -- I would hardly have believed it.
I'd call it "child abuse", but that term has apparently been banned.
I could expound upon this for hours, but do I really need to? This isn't funny; it's your tax dollars at work, and your children in danger! Political Correctness run amok, is what it is. Shameful is what it is.
If it had not appeared in print -- in a newspaper which is frequently all-too-happy to present the Libtard point of view as if it were a dictate from the Almighty, and then present it as the bestest fuckin' thing evah! -- I would hardly have believed it.
I'd call it "child abuse", but that term has apparently been banned.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Some People's Children...
...are unbelievably retarded.
There is no other word for it, and I don't care how many people get offended when I use it. It's the only word that truly fits. There must be something in the air or water here on Staten Island which must be responsible for inflicting a series of horrendous birth defects in the children of a certain class of person.
There is no other word for it, and I don't care how many people get offended when I use it. It's the only word that truly fits. There must be something in the air or water here on Staten Island which must be responsible for inflicting a series of horrendous birth defects in the children of a certain class of person.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
This Is Why The Public Schools Suck, Part III...
Unionized moron with an education degree turns her 10-year-old students into pen pals for her imprisoned boyfriend.
An imprisoned boyfriend, incidentally, once accused of being a child pornographer, with a history of violence against women.
An imprisoned boyfriend, incidentally, once accused of being a child pornographer, with a history of violence against women.
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
This Is Why The Public Schools Suck, Part II...
And yes, that is a picture of the alleged perpetrator dressed as the Easter Bunny.
Makes you wonder what the hell we're spending so much money on; obviously, it's about keeping alleged pedophiles employed instead of educating children.
No doubt this asshole's union will be front and center in defending him to the death. In New York City, even if this man is eventually convicted on these charges, he will no doubt still be collecting a paycheck and a pension the entire time...while in jail.
Because the ultimate purpose of the so-called Education Unions is not to educate anyone, but to ensure that the lowest-common-denominator in American Life gets to enjoy a decent standard of living, free of responsibility and at someone else's expense, in return for dues which then go to buy politicians. If that cause demands that a pedophile be protected from the consequences of his actions, then so be it. Just you watch.
It's never about the kids.
People like this should be taken out and burnt alive at the stake. On Pay-per-View.
Crazy Lady Sues New York For $900 Trillion...
That's 60 times the current National Debt.
That's 64.28571 times the annual Gross National Product of the entire United States.
That's almost 15,000 times the entire budget for the City of New York.
If you lined up 900 trillion dollars bills, end-to-end, it would stretch...well, pretty damned far, I reckon!
That is the sum a Staten Island woman is suing the City of New York for, in a lawsuit over her children.
Friday, June 17, 2011
If the Punishment Truly Fit the Crime…
...then these douchebags would have their heads crushed by a truckload of cinderblocks.
Pennsylvania man crushes newborn's head with a cinderblock.
I can't tell you what I would like to see done to these assholes; it might possibly get me arrested for merely describing it in all it's grisly detail. People like this make me want to rethink my position on Abortion
...at least Retroactive Abortion, anyway.
Children are innocent; only their parents are evil, and these two losers are the very embodiment of evil -- a 20-year-old skinhead degenerate, and a 28-year-old-baby-making-machine who can't keep her knees in the same zip code at least one day out of every nine months. This woman was having so many babies they were dropping out onto the kitchen floor like raindrops upon a tin roof, to read the story.
This doofus killed his child because he couldn't afford to feed it. The so-called Mother let him do it. They deserve to burn at the stake.
We live in a a country where Abortion on Demand (unfortunately) is readily available. We live in a country where it is possible to leave an unwanted child at a hospital, fire station, or orphanage, no questions asked. We live in a society where multiple birth control methods are available to anyone who wants them. Fuck, you can even buy them at the check out counter in some supermarkets. If you don't want to get pregnant, stay pregnant, or keep the baby, you have options.
This mated pair of douchebags instead chose murder.
I stop and think about how many people I personally know who can't have children of their own who would have plucked their own eyes out or paid any price, to have the opportunity to take this child home and call it their own. This didn't need to happen, except for the stupidity, selfishness, and craveness, of some depraved trailer trash.
The Death Penalty hardly suffices in this case. I want these two to suffer, publicly. Flogging, branding, the iron maiden, drawing and quartering, I don't give a shit, just don't keep these two alive in a prison somewhere. That ain't justice.
Rest in Peace, Little One. Your Life on this sorry rock was all-too-short, but considering who and what your parents are, you are, perhaps, the luckiest child in America, in a some sad fashion; You won't have to suffer anything else at the hands of these two murdering cretins; your five siblings, however, are going to have to find a way to live with what their parents have done.
Pennsylvania man crushes newborn's head with a cinderblock.
I can't tell you what I would like to see done to these assholes; it might possibly get me arrested for merely describing it in all it's grisly detail. People like this make me want to rethink my position on Abortion
...at least Retroactive Abortion, anyway.
Children are innocent; only their parents are evil, and these two losers are the very embodiment of evil -- a 20-year-old skinhead degenerate, and a 28-year-old-baby-making-machine who can't keep her knees in the same zip code at least one day out of every nine months. This woman was having so many babies they were dropping out onto the kitchen floor like raindrops upon a tin roof, to read the story.
This doofus killed his child because he couldn't afford to feed it. The so-called Mother let him do it. They deserve to burn at the stake.
We live in a a country where Abortion on Demand (unfortunately) is readily available. We live in a country where it is possible to leave an unwanted child at a hospital, fire station, or orphanage, no questions asked. We live in a society where multiple birth control methods are available to anyone who wants them. Fuck, you can even buy them at the check out counter in some supermarkets. If you don't want to get pregnant, stay pregnant, or keep the baby, you have options.
This mated pair of douchebags instead chose murder.
I stop and think about how many people I personally know who can't have children of their own who would have plucked their own eyes out or paid any price, to have the opportunity to take this child home and call it their own. This didn't need to happen, except for the stupidity, selfishness, and craveness, of some depraved trailer trash.
The Death Penalty hardly suffices in this case. I want these two to suffer, publicly. Flogging, branding, the iron maiden, drawing and quartering, I don't give a shit, just don't keep these two alive in a prison somewhere. That ain't justice.
Rest in Peace, Little One. Your Life on this sorry rock was all-too-short, but considering who and what your parents are, you are, perhaps, the luckiest child in America, in a some sad fashion; You won't have to suffer anything else at the hands of these two murdering cretins; your five siblings, however, are going to have to find a way to live with what their parents have done.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Weiner Steps on the Weiner...
You knew this was coming. It was unavoidable.
Police question 17-yr old girl who had contact with Weiner.
Gonna resign now, Douchebag, before the cops haul your ass off to jail?
In one of those delicious ironies, as Ipost this, I'm watching Special Report with Bret Baier on Fox, and Kirsten Powers, an ex-girlfriend of Anthony Weiner who's part of Bret's panel this evening, has just been asked to comment on this tidbit. She dodged it nicely,but you could see that she wanted to go home and scrub thoroughly with Brillo.
(H/T JammieWearingFool)
Police question 17-yr old girl who had contact with Weiner.
Gonna resign now, Douchebag, before the cops haul your ass off to jail?
In one of those delicious ironies, as Ipost this, I'm watching Special Report with Bret Baier on Fox, and Kirsten Powers, an ex-girlfriend of Anthony Weiner who's part of Bret's panel this evening, has just been asked to comment on this tidbit. She dodged it nicely,but you could see that she wanted to go home and scrub thoroughly with Brillo.
(H/T JammieWearingFool)
Friday, May 27, 2011
This Is Why You Should Never, Ever, Donate Bodily Fluids...
...unless there is a deep level of personal commitment. I wouldn't even think of giving mine to someone who wouldn't, at the very least, make me breakfast before she left, and then didn't make the effort to forget my address or phone number.
And if you can't make the delivery yourself in the time-honored fashion, then you don't want anything to do with being a sperm donor, either. It's not worth it if there's a turkey baster involved. If your recipients are a pair of lesbian chicks you wouldn't fuck without a steel-reinforced concrete condom and a fifth of Johnny Black, then you probably don't even want to be in the same house with that womb. If one of them lists her occupation as 'clairvoyant' and 'funeral celebrant', you definitely don't sell your seed for anything less than your weight in gold, and even then, you might think twice.
Here's another argument against Gay Marriage (as if the anti- argument wasn't already self-evident): how do you redefine 'Fatherhood' when the Warm-and-Fuzzies wear off between the Primaries, and you have to consider the rights of the gamete donor in the 'divorce'?
I feel for this guy, because he has been a father in all respects, it would seem. Especially financially; this pair of carpet-munchers wanted children, but children that someone else would pay for, looks like. This guy paid for the pre-natal care, the midwife, child support, and even offered housing to the mother and the defective she was playing house with. The child, to the...ahem...women, appears but a prop in their bullshit 'lifestyle choice' kabuki play.
He even offered to build them all a house to live in!
I hope this guy can get his daughter away from this pair of ding-dongs.
And if you can't make the delivery yourself in the time-honored fashion, then you don't want anything to do with being a sperm donor, either. It's not worth it if there's a turkey baster involved. If your recipients are a pair of lesbian chicks you wouldn't fuck without a steel-reinforced concrete condom and a fifth of Johnny Black, then you probably don't even want to be in the same house with that womb. If one of them lists her occupation as 'clairvoyant' and 'funeral celebrant', you definitely don't sell your seed for anything less than your weight in gold, and even then, you might think twice.
Here's another argument against Gay Marriage (as if the anti- argument wasn't already self-evident): how do you redefine 'Fatherhood' when the Warm-and-Fuzzies wear off between the Primaries, and you have to consider the rights of the gamete donor in the 'divorce'?
I feel for this guy, because he has been a father in all respects, it would seem. Especially financially; this pair of carpet-munchers wanted children, but children that someone else would pay for, looks like. This guy paid for the pre-natal care, the midwife, child support, and even offered housing to the mother and the defective she was playing house with. The child, to the...ahem...women, appears but a prop in their bullshit 'lifestyle choice' kabuki play.
He even offered to build them all a house to live in!
I hope this guy can get his daughter away from this pair of ding-dongs.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Your Children Are Still In Public Schools, Because...?
New York spends more per pupil, only manages to create more and bigger idiots than any state in America.
Here's a laugher: a good many of these doofuses will, eventually -- because it takes them six to eight years to finish their (remedial) 'education' at City College, where German Shepherds teach English and lack of involuntary muscle responses is no bar to admission -- become the next wave of overpaid teachers in this City. Only in New York could you accept the worst graduates, from the worst colleges, obtaining the easiest-to-get major, and then pay them to teach others.
It's a well-established fact that 'Education' majors are commonly drawn from the lowest echelon of academic achievers, and most of those will have switched majors at least once before settling on 'Education' because most other worthwhile degrees require work. Remember: those who can, do, those who can't, teach...
Nowhere is this more evident than in New York.
Without a cushy public sector union job to fall back on, many of those...ahem...City College graduates...would never be employed in an above-minimum-wage job.
Money Quote fromMichael Goodwin in yesteryday's NY Post:
MANY NYC GRADS CAN'T READ THIS
Responding to my Sunday argument that city schools deprive students of the freedom to fail by promoting too many who aren't ready, a professional aide in a Manhattan high school offers front-line evidence. Here is what she wrote:
"The increased graduation rates are being achieved by means that are absolutely fraudulent and are generally known as 'credit recovery programs.' In exchange for completing a minimal amount of work (and I do mean minimal ), students are granted credit for courses that they previously failed.
"In addition, teachers are 'encouraged' by the principal to pass 80 percent of the students in each of their classes. I can attest, with great confidence, that at least 80 percent of our graduates are functionally illiterate."
The writer, who asks to remain anonymous to protect her job, then quotes from student statements that are rife with errors: " . . . so they started hitting me and I felt to the floor." "I triped and fall with caused bleeding and my pants to torn."
Students say they are "dessie" (dizzy), hurt a "risk" (wrist), have a "hedick" (headache) or are "bruced" (bruised).
"Obviously," she adds, "social promotion is alive and well at all grade levels."
Sadly, her experience is not unique or even unusual. This is the real outrage of too many New York schools.
But then again, the priority is not education at NYC Schools. It can't be, not with all that money to be divvied up. And of course, where's there's taxpayer money to be passed out, there's Political Correctness and Corruption, too. Like these cases, from Andrea Peyser in today's NY Post
:High-school math teacher Rivky Love hounded a girl whom she called her "best friend and sister" with late-night texts signed, "Love you."
The married 36-year-old even offered to slip the Edward R. Murrow student an advance copy of a test. Love was suspended for six months without pay from the Brooklyn school. Then she's back as if nothing happened.
Meanwhile, a devout Christian elementary-school assistant teacher, Anita Wooten-Francis, 52, says she was ridiculed and fired by her principal because she prayed in an empty classroom at Brooklyn's PS 224. This, after more than 16 years of unblemished service.
Why can't Johnny read? At city schools, pervs are a protected class. And quiet devotion is punished.
It's supposed to be all about the chidlren, right? Apparently not in this state, where you have the highest property taxes in the nation and this is the sorry result. Tear thepublic school system down and replace it with private schools supported by tuition. If the dregs of this city can't afford it, then give 'em a voucher; it'll still be cheaper and more effective than continuing to warehouse kids in a state-run babysitting service, run by mouth-breathing retards.
Here's a laugher: a good many of these doofuses will, eventually -- because it takes them six to eight years to finish their (remedial) 'education' at City College, where German Shepherds teach English and lack of involuntary muscle responses is no bar to admission -- become the next wave of overpaid teachers in this City. Only in New York could you accept the worst graduates, from the worst colleges, obtaining the easiest-to-get major, and then pay them to teach others.
It's a well-established fact that 'Education' majors are commonly drawn from the lowest echelon of academic achievers, and most of those will have switched majors at least once before settling on 'Education' because most other worthwhile degrees require work. Remember: those who can, do, those who can't, teach...
Nowhere is this more evident than in New York.
Without a cushy public sector union job to fall back on, many of those...ahem...City College graduates...would never be employed in an above-minimum-wage job.
Money Quote fromMichael Goodwin in yesteryday's NY Post:
MANY NYC GRADS CAN'T READ THIS
Responding to my Sunday argument that city schools deprive students of the freedom to fail by promoting too many who aren't ready, a professional aide in a Manhattan high school offers front-line evidence. Here is what she wrote:
"The increased graduation rates are being achieved by means that are absolutely fraudulent and are generally known as 'credit recovery programs.' In exchange for completing a minimal amount of work (and I do mean minimal ), students are granted credit for courses that they previously failed.
"In addition, teachers are 'encouraged' by the principal to pass 80 percent of the students in each of their classes. I can attest, with great confidence, that at least 80 percent of our graduates are functionally illiterate."
The writer, who asks to remain anonymous to protect her job, then quotes from student statements that are rife with errors: " . . . so they started hitting me and I felt to the floor." "I triped and fall with caused bleeding and my pants to torn."
Students say they are "dessie" (dizzy), hurt a "risk" (wrist), have a "hedick" (headache) or are "bruced" (bruised).
"Obviously," she adds, "social promotion is alive and well at all grade levels."
Sadly, her experience is not unique or even unusual. This is the real outrage of too many New York schools.
But then again, the priority is not education at NYC Schools. It can't be, not with all that money to be divvied up. And of course, where's there's taxpayer money to be passed out, there's Political Correctness and Corruption, too. Like these cases, from Andrea Peyser in today's NY Post
:High-school math teacher Rivky Love hounded a girl whom she called her "best friend and sister" with late-night texts signed, "Love you."
The married 36-year-old even offered to slip the Edward R. Murrow student an advance copy of a test. Love was suspended for six months without pay from the Brooklyn school. Then she's back as if nothing happened.
Meanwhile, a devout Christian elementary-school assistant teacher, Anita Wooten-Francis, 52, says she was ridiculed and fired by her principal because she prayed in an empty classroom at Brooklyn's PS 224. This, after more than 16 years of unblemished service.
Why can't Johnny read? At city schools, pervs are a protected class. And quiet devotion is punished.
It's supposed to be all about the chidlren, right? Apparently not in this state, where you have the highest property taxes in the nation and this is the sorry result. Tear thepublic school system down and replace it with private schools supported by tuition. If the dregs of this city can't afford it, then give 'em a voucher; it'll still be cheaper and more effective than continuing to warehouse kids in a state-run babysitting service, run by mouth-breathing retards.
"But There's Nothing To Do..."
My Doomsday Diary.
Here's how I spent what was supposed to be our Final Day on Earth. Except for the Happy Ending, I found myself that day fervently hoping the planet would, indeed, split wide open and burn to a cinder. It started with my nephews.
I feel somewhat badly for today's children, mostly because they have been robbed of all the things that I believe should make up childhood.
I've been thinking about this notion this past week because of what happened last Saturday...
I have four nephews, aged 14, 13, 11 and 5. They're great boys, and by that, I mean that I love them very much, not that they're the best behaved. In fact, my nephews have the manners of a pack of wild boars...wild boars with toothaches and hemorrhoids, I mean. They can be a touch ornery and rambunctious, to say the least. Part of this is just The Age; two teenagers, busily exploring the boundaries, pushing every envelope. The two younger ones, naturally, mimic what they've seen the older ones get away with, which is quite a bit as my sister and brother-in-law are a bit lax in the discipline department. When I was their age, if I pulled half the stuff they did -- and got caught -- I'd be on the phone looking for organ donors, just in case I needed them in the aftermath of the truly horrendous beating I was going to get.
Worse, I grew up in a house with my grandparents and my uncle and his family. Stepping out of line -- and getting caught -- meant, potentially, three beatings. Even worse, I went to Catholic school, which meant stepping out of line included a bonus beating from the nuns, then three beatings when you got home. Considering that I was a beastly little swine as a child, I'm amazed that I was able to survive a John McCain-like experience of near-constant physical torture. Fortunately, for me anyway, I seem to have gotten away with just enough to avoid permanent brain damage.
My nephews have, thus far, been spared the experience of a truly epic beating at the hands of their belt-and-wooden-spoon-wielding grandparents, wooden-hanger-wielding mother, and the open-hand buttocks assault of an ex-Marine Uncle, and in today's Catholic schools you couldn't find a Shao-Lin- ruler-wielding nun if your life depended upon it. Besides, they all go to public school, except the oldest, and the Catholic school he attends is generally regarded as 'soft'. I went to grammar school with Dominican Nuns who moonlighted as hand-to-hand combat instructors with the Green Berets, and a high school with Black-belt Christian Brothers, half of whom seemed to be tough Hell's Kitchen Irishmen, and every last one of them claimed to have been a Golden Gloves boxer in his youth.
Suffice to say, short of being raised by the Spanish Inquisition, with alternate weekends at Gestapo Headquarters, very few people know physical discipline like I know physical discipline. Today they'd call this 'child abuse', but back then, it was just what parents did to straighten their kids out when that was necessary.
But, I digress...
Anyways, I had occasion to 'babysit' my nephews, despite the fact that none are babies anymore, but the oldest are certainly too irresponsible to be left to care for the younger two when their parents are away. Their father had pulled a weekend overtime shift. Their mother was dragooned by the Little League they've all played in to do her 'volunteer' service. My mother, a woman whom God certainly sent to annoy the living shit out of every other living being on Planet Earth, came along. Heaven forbid she should have to sit at home and rely upon her own wits to keep herself entertained for a day. It began, predictably enough, with constant complaints about 'the Sciatica', her back hurts, her legs, her knees, her sinuses, and even her fucking ass. It's all an act, by the way, it's all a play for attention because she's sympathy junkie and a drama queen.
This is the First Indication that I'm going to have trouble at some point. But I'll get back to that in a moment. Let's start with the Second Indication that it's going to be One of Those Days.
If there's one thing I really dislike about Modern Kids, it's the silly whining they all engage in about having 'nothing to do.'
Mind you, my nephews live in a house which has FIVE televisions, all with cable access including 150 channels and On-Demand programming up the Wazoo, two DVD players (with an extensive library), a Playstation 3, an X-Box 360, and a Nintendo Wii, each again with an extensive library of games. The garage is simply overflowing with bicycles, skateboards, kick scooters and roller blades, not to mention a bewildering array of portable ramps and rails for them. All my nephews play baseball -- Little League, High School, and Travelling Teams -- so there are enough bats, baseballs, and gloves laying around to equip a Major League Team. The only things missing are Buck and McCarver, chewing tobacco, and Yankee Stadium.
There are two computers in the house, both with internet access. I know they have internet access because guess who installed the cable modem and Wi-Fi router (that would be...Me)? There is a vast array of computer games available, as well, not to mention two or three Nintendo DS consoles. There are enough Lego bricks (the five year old is a Lego junkie who might soon require methadone treatments to wean him off of them) to build a life-size replica of the Manhattan Skyline.
There is a small library of age-and-theme-appropriate literature, and for good measure my sister has stocked the house with all manner of Art Supplies, colored pencils, sketch pads, crayons, markers, paints, and so forth, that would have made Van Gogh lock himself in her basement, and kept him far too busy with it all to even have time to think of cutting his own ear off.
Oh, and the three Big Ones have cell phones, too, and text message Lord Knows Who constantly. She just might be raising a passel of boys with the strongest thumbs on all of Staten Island.
I can understand the five year old complaining "I have nothing to do", because, well...he's five. Five year olds have attention spans measured in RPM's, although, like I said, he's a Lego junkie and when he's in his zone you don't hear a peep out of him for hours at a time.
And the Swimming Pool hasn't even been opened for the season yet. On a good day, my nephews will protest, loudly and in a manner which reminds me of a menstrual girl, if their mother suggests they go outside to play. They've been known to cry about 'how unfair' that is. Did you ever know kids to complain they're being sent outside to play? They'd rather ride their kick scooters IN THE HOUSE, on her marble-and-ceramic-tile floors, and she lets them get away with it.
So, who has 'nothing to do'? Well, the 13 and 14 year old, naturally. They're the biggest pests of all that way. They decide that since there's 'nothing to do' why not engage in a bit of absolute stupidity and build a tree swing?
Now, about this swing. It's my brother-in-law's fault. He decided one day that it would be a good idea to find himself a length of rope, toss it over a high branch on the tree out front of the house -- over 30 feet in the air -- attach the broken seat from an old office chair to it, and then encourage his children to swing from it. Even the Biggest Doofus. There's just two problems with this swing; the first is that once you're on it and gain any sort of momentum, you're swinging out into the street, and since there's about 20' of rope involved, you're swinging 20' out into the street and into traffic. The second problem is because of the peculiar position of the anchor branch, once you begin your 're-entry' from the street, you're likely to crash headlong into the trunk. If you're, say, 14, and weigh about 150 pounds and gather enough momentum to make the swing worth your while, if you hit that tree you're probably doing 20-25 MPH when you make contact.
Considering that the other three launch the 5-year old with enough force to loft the Space Shuttle, he's probably going to hit it at closer to 30 mph, assuming he manages to keep his grip at all.
For that reason specifically -- the five year old must be kept off of this dangerous contraption -- they are forbidden to do this thing without their father being there to supervise, so that they don't get stupid and carried away, and a 911 call has to be made. This Swing-erecting event also leads to the most inhuman arguing and crying you've ever heard over 'who's turn' it is; it's like listening to sorority sisters argue about who gets to use the Big Mirror, and there's no place for me to plug in my curling iron in the common bathroom with 12 other girls already in it. The whole operation is far more trouble than it's worth, if you ask me.
But this is exactly what they want to do, and they keep insisting they have the right -- and permission -- to do it whenever they fucking want to. Except that I know they fucking don't. So, I tell them; No Swing, find something else to do. This pronouncement gets the expected grousing, and unfortunately, no surprise at all, a lot of cursing.
I would have swatted them good for sassing me, but I'm not allowed to touch my sister's children that way. Consequently, neither does she...not until they've reached the point of being in close-to-riot condition. No wonder they push the envelope; there's no consequence for even having the audacity to dare it. Someone should smack them around. I took things from them I wouldn't take from a grown man without insisting he step outside and defend his honor.
The Law has been laid down. No Swing. I go back into the house. The The First Indication is now heard from, and you would think the Gates of Hell had just burst open and poured forth a vast horde of soul-stealing demons, red in tooth and claw, fire and brimstone flowing from their flared nostrils.
A bit about my Mother, first, so that you can get some idea of what's about to happen when I continue this story. My Mother is, without a doubt, the most disagreeable person in this Solar System. She's not a bad woman, she just has some rather strange ideas and an overly-inflated opinion of herself which is totally detached from reality. The first problem she has is that whenever she says something, no matter how stupid, how inane, how inappropriate, how non-topical, insulting, no matter how unasked for, she believes it should be treated as if Moses carried the decree down from the Mountaintop engraved in stone. As soon as the words are uttered, she either expects whatever it she wants to be done right this very second, or that it is to be regarded with the same reverence and respect that we have for the law, worthy of immediate attention and action, and we should all fall to our fucking knees and thank the shit out of her for having graced us with her words of wisdom.
I beg to differ. She was a rotten mother who offered no real guidance, and who's children suffered for her poor choices in husbands, and the bad decisions she made that ruined her life. These required her children to pick up the pieces for her, because that would require effort, and then support her for the last 25 years of her life. She's fortunate that we haven't taken her out into the woods, slathered her in animal fat, and left her there to face the grizzlies alone, or just tossed her off a convenient pier in cinderblock underwear, already.
As if this wasn't annoying enough, this distasteful personality trait is attached to a woman with an anxiety complex so monumental, and a variety of other mental issues of the Poor-Me type (the very worst), that it has kept the best therapist on Staten Island busy for 25 years...with no improvement to date, whatsoever. Which leads me to the question; just who the fuck was it who said she was the best in the first place? Because she's convinced that her every word should be an Imperial command, and because every second that passes between command and action builds up the cycle of anxiety and impatience, and because it all plays into this martyr complex of hers, nothing is ever simple. Everything is a fucking imperative, Earth-shattering emergency that is accompanied by That Sound.
That Sound. Look up the word 'cacophony' in the dictionary. Doesn't even come close to describing it. Imagine it like this: the sound of 4,000 cats being castrated simultaneously with a rusty, unsharpened garden scythe, set against the background noise of a pack of constipated wolves baying at the moon whilst being serenaded by some great locomotive that hasn't had it's moving parts oiled in a couple of centuries moving at high speed, which then tries to come to a screeching halt upon a dime.
That's almost it. But still not quite. You also have to imagine someone pouring table salt into your eyes when you're hearing it.
It's a terrible sound. Hearing it gives one the impression of great shards of jagged glass and ten-penny nails being pounded into your skull. The sweat breaks out on your spine. Your teeth are set on edge as if someone just slit your asshole with a razor blade and then poured lemon juice and Liquid Plumber into the open wound. You'd rather be sucked into a jet engine -- and survive -- than to hear that sound. You'd rather have someone open an umbrella up your ass repeatedly than to listen to it. You'd rather be the sex slave of some Al'Qada dude with a sandpaper and blowtorch fetish. It's a sound I've heard -- even in my sleep -- almost every day of my life for the last 44 years, and the amazing part of it all is that I haven't killed her yet.
MAAAATTTTYYYYYY! Come up here...NOW! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod....Look what that LUNATIC is DOING! STOP THEM!
The Swing is being set up. They can't even get the rope over the branch, and already, it's as if someone has just been struck by lightning, run down by a garbage truck and shot eleven times...all at once. And I absolutely HATE being called "Matty". I'm not a seven year old in short pants and knee fucking socks.
So, I tell them. No swing. Now knock it off. "But we have nothing to do." Bullshit, find something else.
Ten minutes later:
MAAAAATTTTTYYYYYY! LOOK WHAT THESE KIDS ARE DOING! Gooutthereandbreakhisass, goddammit!
Guys, I said Knock It Off. No Swing. Do us all a favor, and don't give that pain in the behind inside another reason to start wailing. I don't want to hear it, and it's pissing me off. Just shut her up and stop, or I'm taking this crap away from you.
Not two minutes later, it starts all over again:
So, I take the rope, the seat, and the garden tools they're using trying to get the damned thing over a 30' high branch. Find something else to do, fellas, because if I have to listen to that woman one more time, someone's getting killed, and it might not be just her.
At this point, the little guys want to go to the schoolyard and ride their scooters. Of course they do; it's only a mile walk, and naturally, the Big Ones don't want to go. I can only imagine what I'm coming back to when these two, naturally, resume their stupidity behind my back and Ye Old Nervous Windbag inside has several hours to witness and endure their nonsense and get progressively more aggravated, frustrated -- and even shriller -- because they ignore her repeated commands to stop it.
I take the Little Guys to the schoolyard, and we have some fun. They get to ride their scooters, they jump around on the playground, we play with a football they've found...and I get hit on by a chick. There's two scifoozas that we run into on the street nearby who talk as if they were taught to whisper in a sawmill, and use language that's...well... 'salty' is an inadequate description. It's even worse than mine.
Scifooza Number One can't stop talking about her boobs. In front of my two young nephews. She's telling Scifooza Number Two that as soon as she gets her "chemical balls" (admission: I have never heard this term before) she's going to get "my tits done", and "finally fucking get myself a fucking husband because all they want is fucking D-cups". Sciffoza One apologizes profusely for using such language in front of My Sons. There not my Sons, they're my Nephews, but it's okay. I'll just tell them to ignore you.
"Do you think my tits are alright, or should I get 'em bigger?" Sciffooza One asks. Scifooza Number Two feigns being flabbergasted. One gets the impression that Number One asks every random man she meets this question, and Number Two is obliged to pretend to be embarrassed, even though she's probably shown her tits to twice as many random men. And she might get paid to do it, too.
"Nah, nothing wrong with what you got. They're just fine."
"You boys are soooo lucky! Your father is such a nice man..."
"He's not my father, he's my uncle."
"He's soooo nice!" I'm now having my shoulders and biceps felt up and pinched as if she were looking for a ripe cantaloupe in the supermarket. She apparently likes my hair, too. I'm about to smack this bitch.
"I'm not married, you know...", She says.
"No? You? Can't imagine why not..."
"You have beautiful sons. I wish I had a son...."
"They're my nephews."
"Really? I thought they were your kids..."
"If you could shut up about your tits for three seconds you would have realized you were told otherwise three times. Maybe that's why you're not married: you can't shut up about your tits, you're pushy, and you don't listen very well."
Number Two finds this uproariously funny. We leave. If I ever wanted the local equivalent of Trailer Trash, I now know exactly where to find it. I wouldn't marry this chick for a Green Card and a mention in her father's will. It took near an hour to reach the schoolyard, if only because the five year old has little legs that don't carry him so fast. Twenty-five minutes after we get there they want to go home. Another hour back. And...
There's the FUCKING SWING...naturally. And a crowd of neighborhood kids all waiting for their turn. Mommy Dearest is apoplectic, and on the verge of having puppies. I figure if she does manage this astounding feat, it ought to look like something out of Aliens, only with fireworks and more gunfire. It's now all my fault that this happened because I was away for three hours doing GOD-KNOWS-WHAT-STUPID-SHIT-YOUR-BROTHER-IN-LAW-IS-AN-ASSHOLE-FOR-SHOWING-THEM-THIS-SHIT-GODDAMMIT-WHERE-IS-YOUR-SISTER-THAT-INCONSIDERATE-BITCH-THEY'RE-DRIVING-ME-INSANE.
And people wonder why I am the way I am? If you had my life...
Anyways, here's what I mean by 'losing their childhood".
In my day, if we were told 'you can't do that', we simply found something else to do. And since we didn't have a billion beeping-and-bright-lights-electronic geegaws, we had to make due with whatever was at hand, and somehow manage to have fun with it. Worse, I grew up in Brooklyn, and there wasn't a front lawn, an open field for miles, or a swimming pool in the back yard. We didn't even have a back yard worth the appellation. In those days, we played a lot of wiffle ball (no one plays wiffle ball anymore), and a ton of stickball. These were games that were pretty cheap, and in which you could improvise equipment if you didn't have any, and play for hours. In winter, we played tackle football -- in the street -- and during the fall, we played tackle football...on the concrete in the schoolyard. Hockey was played year-round, either road hockey or roller hockey, ice hockey being something extremely rare: skates were super expensive (your parents might blow a week's salary on skates then), and the only ice was at Coney Island, which required a death-defying trip on the B or D train, dodging muggers and streakers. We used a roll of electrical tape worn smooth on the sidewalk for a puck. It works remarkably well on the well-worn blacktop of a city street.
Protective equipment, if you could find any, usually consisted of a mish-mash of catcher's gear, baseball gloves, football helmets and shoulder pads, and the simple expedient of stuffing magazines into your socks to serve as shin guards. A hockey stick in those days cost about $10, and that was a ton of money, so no one took slap shots -- the best and easiest way to break a stick on blacktop.
There were exactly seven television channels -- and one of them was PBS. Video games consisted of Pong, and if your family could afford it, you might get lucky and have an Intellivision, Atari -- or the Cadillac of them all -- a Commodore 64 with something like 3 really crappy games. Otherwise, you needed to scrounge quarters to go to the local candy store to play pinball, or maybe Space Invaders or Asteroids. When PacMan came around, kids seriously considered taking up a life of crime to support their habit. You dreamed of the days when you had enough quarters to just play a few games of PacMan AND get an Egg Cream. That was like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to us.
We played a lot of common childhood games: Johnny-on-the-Pony, Red Rover, Stoopball (kind of like baseball, only with 'phantom' runners, where you tossed the rubber ball with all your might against your front steps when you were 'up'). We played handball and basketball in the schoolyard, boxball on the sidewalk (like tennis, using the square sections of the sidewalk as a court). When your rubber Spaulding ball split at the seams (they always did) from all that stick- and boxball, you simply took the two halves and played Halfball (a variant of baseball, played with the half a ball and a short length of thick rubber hose).
When you didn't even have a ball, you played Skelly. In this game, you shoot bottlecaps that have been filled with melted wax around a square 'board' drawn on the sidewalk or street in chalk. If you were really serious about your Skelly, you carved your Skelly Board into the hot asphalt of the street in summer with a screwdriver. Kids got very creative with their carved Skelly boards. Some were really intricate and quite challenging.
We didn't have trees to climb, so we climbed fire escapes and 'laundry ladders'. These were skinny, metal ladders, often 30' or more in height -- and not always anchored very well -- that one found behind most houses or apartment buildings, and to which tenants attached clotheslines from their back windows. Climbing a laundry ladder was usually something you did when playing 'War', in which we ran around the streets and the back-alleys in mock combat with toy guns. Try that today, and the local authorities will drag your kids off to a mental institution, just in case they want to grow up to shoot a Democrat. Any fence was like an open invitation to 'come climb me', and it didn't matter if there was barbed wire or razor wire, or even if it was rusty; we climbed them, especially if there was something 'cool' on the other side...like access to Tar Beach (the roof of an apartment building from where one could launch water balloons, or watch the local girls sunbathe).
Bikes and skateboards were rarities. In the Brooklyn of that time these things were likely to get stolen. At knifepoint. I was mugged at knifepoint, twice, before my thirteenth birthday. Nowadays in Brooklyn, they definitely would be stolen, only you'll receive multiple gunshot wounds and might get your house burnt down just so there's no witnesses to the crime for good measure.
Everyone played with matches. Everyone played with magnifying glasses and anthills. Everyone played with magnifying glasses, anthills, model glue and a can of hairspray. You circled the anthill with the glue, set fire to it with paper and magnifying glass, and when the ants came up to escape, you used the hairspray can like a flamethrower. We knew how to make slingshots, and makeshift crossbows with a piece of two-by-four, a thick rubber band, wood staple and a clothespin.
Disputes between kids were always settled with fisticuffs, or a wrestling match, and three minutes after someone got his ass kicked everyone was friends again. We collected comic books, baseball cards, bottlecaps and Matchbox Cars. We 'flipped' baseball cards, we pitched pennies, we played a lot of catch, Tag, Dodgeball (or a rougher variant, Kill the Man With the Ball), Red Light-Green Light, Ringolerio and Bulldog. We built model airplanes and ships. We knew how to build and repair our own toys, or adapt them to other uses. We did it in the CITY, too, with a lack of open spaces and grass, and with what nowadays would be considered Third-World-level disposable incomes.
In short, we knew how to be BOYS. We never had 'NOTHING TO DO'.
My nephews, for all the love I have for them, would have been lost in that world. They would have been constantly bored because no one would be giving them anything. As it is, they get so bored despite all they have, that they become single-minded of purpose when it comes to a tree swing that even in my day would have given Evel Knievel second thoughts. Now, granted, there's some creativity and a sense of danger involved in that swing, but the point is if we were told 'don't do that', we found something else to do, and we had enough of a store of made-up/improvised games/activities at our disposal that it wasn't difficult.
Nowadays, kids seem incapable of doing this. Try to teach these things to them, and they look at you as if you've just emerged from a spacecraft with three heads, green skin, and antennae. They aren't interested unless there's a flashing light, a large price tag, a beeping sound, or a degree of extraordinary, bound-to-end-in-the-emergency-room danger -- they call these things Extreme Sports nowadays, but in my day, they were simply the things The Stupid Kid Who Always Had a Broken Bone did.
There was a degree of danger in what we did, too, but it was always a calculated danger (kids were smarter then, I think). We knew the limits. An equivalent to this swinging between traffic and a great fucking tree trunk in my day was called 'Skitching'. In Skitching, one either wore roller skates, or did it in winter when the streets would be full of packed snow that you could slide on. You simply grabbed onto the back of a stopped bus or truck, and got low where the driver might not be able to see you easily, and got yourself pulled along as if water skiing. At least until the vehicle stopped, and you didn't...you usually only stopped when you got a face full of back bumper. The worst cases saw the Skitcher eat the bumper and then slide under the now-stopped vehicle, and being too stunned to move, get trapped under a wheel to get themselves run the fuck over. Never did it myself, never wanted to. It was just too stupid and dangerous.
But such was the life -- and the joys -- of a city boy in the 1970's, and amazingly, we did these things with no adult supervision, whatsoever. Makes you wonder just what the hell happened to the world and what happened to the Spirit of Boyhood. These kids today are such pampered, spoiled, over-supervised, whining little pansies who don't get beaten on a regular basis for their misbehavior, and who don't know how -- and who can't be trusted -- to play on their own. And who suffered for it all this fine day? Why... I did.
I'm not even their parent, either.
I had to listen to a Screaming Banshee who turns my insides into a knotted mass, and who could curdle used motor oil with her voice alone. I had to hike two hours to and from a schoolyard I didn't want to go to, and we barely stayed. I was nearly sexually assaulted on the street by a bimbo I wouldn't screw with a stolen penis, and who didn't even have the courtesy to offer me a drink before putting her hands on me. I had my nephews actually tell me to do something anatomically impossible -- twice -- and I'm not allowed to feed them their teeth. When my sister finally gets home, she wants to know why I 'didn't do anything to stop those kids from putting up the swing' and has the nerve to ask me if I'll watch them again the following day.
It's a good thing it was supposed to be Doomsday, and there was a 'We Didn't Die' party later that evening. I managed to play a few other games that night that also don't require flashing lights and electronics, or adult supervision...only adult participation.
That was something else we learned to do in the schoolyard, too.
Here's how I spent what was supposed to be our Final Day on Earth. Except for the Happy Ending, I found myself that day fervently hoping the planet would, indeed, split wide open and burn to a cinder. It started with my nephews.
I feel somewhat badly for today's children, mostly because they have been robbed of all the things that I believe should make up childhood.
I've been thinking about this notion this past week because of what happened last Saturday...
I have four nephews, aged 14, 13, 11 and 5. They're great boys, and by that, I mean that I love them very much, not that they're the best behaved. In fact, my nephews have the manners of a pack of wild boars...wild boars with toothaches and hemorrhoids, I mean. They can be a touch ornery and rambunctious, to say the least. Part of this is just The Age; two teenagers, busily exploring the boundaries, pushing every envelope. The two younger ones, naturally, mimic what they've seen the older ones get away with, which is quite a bit as my sister and brother-in-law are a bit lax in the discipline department. When I was their age, if I pulled half the stuff they did -- and got caught -- I'd be on the phone looking for organ donors, just in case I needed them in the aftermath of the truly horrendous beating I was going to get.
Worse, I grew up in a house with my grandparents and my uncle and his family. Stepping out of line -- and getting caught -- meant, potentially, three beatings. Even worse, I went to Catholic school, which meant stepping out of line included a bonus beating from the nuns, then three beatings when you got home. Considering that I was a beastly little swine as a child, I'm amazed that I was able to survive a John McCain-like experience of near-constant physical torture. Fortunately, for me anyway, I seem to have gotten away with just enough to avoid permanent brain damage.
My nephews have, thus far, been spared the experience of a truly epic beating at the hands of their belt-and-wooden-spoon-wielding grandparents, wooden-hanger-wielding mother, and the open-hand buttocks assault of an ex-Marine Uncle, and in today's Catholic schools you couldn't find a Shao-Lin- ruler-wielding nun if your life depended upon it. Besides, they all go to public school, except the oldest, and the Catholic school he attends is generally regarded as 'soft'. I went to grammar school with Dominican Nuns who moonlighted as hand-to-hand combat instructors with the Green Berets, and a high school with Black-belt Christian Brothers, half of whom seemed to be tough Hell's Kitchen Irishmen, and every last one of them claimed to have been a Golden Gloves boxer in his youth.
Suffice to say, short of being raised by the Spanish Inquisition, with alternate weekends at Gestapo Headquarters, very few people know physical discipline like I know physical discipline. Today they'd call this 'child abuse', but back then, it was just what parents did to straighten their kids out when that was necessary.
But, I digress...
Anyways, I had occasion to 'babysit' my nephews, despite the fact that none are babies anymore, but the oldest are certainly too irresponsible to be left to care for the younger two when their parents are away. Their father had pulled a weekend overtime shift. Their mother was dragooned by the Little League they've all played in to do her 'volunteer' service. My mother, a woman whom God certainly sent to annoy the living shit out of every other living being on Planet Earth, came along. Heaven forbid she should have to sit at home and rely upon her own wits to keep herself entertained for a day. It began, predictably enough, with constant complaints about 'the Sciatica', her back hurts, her legs, her knees, her sinuses, and even her fucking ass. It's all an act, by the way, it's all a play for attention because she's sympathy junkie and a drama queen.
This is the First Indication that I'm going to have trouble at some point. But I'll get back to that in a moment. Let's start with the Second Indication that it's going to be One of Those Days.
If there's one thing I really dislike about Modern Kids, it's the silly whining they all engage in about having 'nothing to do.'
Mind you, my nephews live in a house which has FIVE televisions, all with cable access including 150 channels and On-Demand programming up the Wazoo, two DVD players (with an extensive library), a Playstation 3, an X-Box 360, and a Nintendo Wii, each again with an extensive library of games. The garage is simply overflowing with bicycles, skateboards, kick scooters and roller blades, not to mention a bewildering array of portable ramps and rails for them. All my nephews play baseball -- Little League, High School, and Travelling Teams -- so there are enough bats, baseballs, and gloves laying around to equip a Major League Team. The only things missing are Buck and McCarver, chewing tobacco, and Yankee Stadium.
There are two computers in the house, both with internet access. I know they have internet access because guess who installed the cable modem and Wi-Fi router (that would be...Me)? There is a vast array of computer games available, as well, not to mention two or three Nintendo DS consoles. There are enough Lego bricks (the five year old is a Lego junkie who might soon require methadone treatments to wean him off of them) to build a life-size replica of the Manhattan Skyline.
There is a small library of age-and-theme-appropriate literature, and for good measure my sister has stocked the house with all manner of Art Supplies, colored pencils, sketch pads, crayons, markers, paints, and so forth, that would have made Van Gogh lock himself in her basement, and kept him far too busy with it all to even have time to think of cutting his own ear off.
Oh, and the three Big Ones have cell phones, too, and text message Lord Knows Who constantly. She just might be raising a passel of boys with the strongest thumbs on all of Staten Island.
I can understand the five year old complaining "I have nothing to do", because, well...he's five. Five year olds have attention spans measured in RPM's, although, like I said, he's a Lego junkie and when he's in his zone you don't hear a peep out of him for hours at a time.
And the Swimming Pool hasn't even been opened for the season yet. On a good day, my nephews will protest, loudly and in a manner which reminds me of a menstrual girl, if their mother suggests they go outside to play. They've been known to cry about 'how unfair' that is. Did you ever know kids to complain they're being sent outside to play? They'd rather ride their kick scooters IN THE HOUSE, on her marble-and-ceramic-tile floors, and she lets them get away with it.
So, who has 'nothing to do'? Well, the 13 and 14 year old, naturally. They're the biggest pests of all that way. They decide that since there's 'nothing to do' why not engage in a bit of absolute stupidity and build a tree swing?
Now, about this swing. It's my brother-in-law's fault. He decided one day that it would be a good idea to find himself a length of rope, toss it over a high branch on the tree out front of the house -- over 30 feet in the air -- attach the broken seat from an old office chair to it, and then encourage his children to swing from it. Even the Biggest Doofus. There's just two problems with this swing; the first is that once you're on it and gain any sort of momentum, you're swinging out into the street, and since there's about 20' of rope involved, you're swinging 20' out into the street and into traffic. The second problem is because of the peculiar position of the anchor branch, once you begin your 're-entry' from the street, you're likely to crash headlong into the trunk. If you're, say, 14, and weigh about 150 pounds and gather enough momentum to make the swing worth your while, if you hit that tree you're probably doing 20-25 MPH when you make contact.
Considering that the other three launch the 5-year old with enough force to loft the Space Shuttle, he's probably going to hit it at closer to 30 mph, assuming he manages to keep his grip at all.
For that reason specifically -- the five year old must be kept off of this dangerous contraption -- they are forbidden to do this thing without their father being there to supervise, so that they don't get stupid and carried away, and a 911 call has to be made. This Swing-erecting event also leads to the most inhuman arguing and crying you've ever heard over 'who's turn' it is; it's like listening to sorority sisters argue about who gets to use the Big Mirror, and there's no place for me to plug in my curling iron in the common bathroom with 12 other girls already in it. The whole operation is far more trouble than it's worth, if you ask me.
But this is exactly what they want to do, and they keep insisting they have the right -- and permission -- to do it whenever they fucking want to. Except that I know they fucking don't. So, I tell them; No Swing, find something else to do. This pronouncement gets the expected grousing, and unfortunately, no surprise at all, a lot of cursing.
I would have swatted them good for sassing me, but I'm not allowed to touch my sister's children that way. Consequently, neither does she...not until they've reached the point of being in close-to-riot condition. No wonder they push the envelope; there's no consequence for even having the audacity to dare it. Someone should smack them around. I took things from them I wouldn't take from a grown man without insisting he step outside and defend his honor.
The Law has been laid down. No Swing. I go back into the house. The The First Indication is now heard from, and you would think the Gates of Hell had just burst open and poured forth a vast horde of soul-stealing demons, red in tooth and claw, fire and brimstone flowing from their flared nostrils.
A bit about my Mother, first, so that you can get some idea of what's about to happen when I continue this story. My Mother is, without a doubt, the most disagreeable person in this Solar System. She's not a bad woman, she just has some rather strange ideas and an overly-inflated opinion of herself which is totally detached from reality. The first problem she has is that whenever she says something, no matter how stupid, how inane, how inappropriate, how non-topical, insulting, no matter how unasked for, she believes it should be treated as if Moses carried the decree down from the Mountaintop engraved in stone. As soon as the words are uttered, she either expects whatever it she wants to be done right this very second, or that it is to be regarded with the same reverence and respect that we have for the law, worthy of immediate attention and action, and we should all fall to our fucking knees and thank the shit out of her for having graced us with her words of wisdom.
I beg to differ. She was a rotten mother who offered no real guidance, and who's children suffered for her poor choices in husbands, and the bad decisions she made that ruined her life. These required her children to pick up the pieces for her, because that would require effort, and then support her for the last 25 years of her life. She's fortunate that we haven't taken her out into the woods, slathered her in animal fat, and left her there to face the grizzlies alone, or just tossed her off a convenient pier in cinderblock underwear, already.
As if this wasn't annoying enough, this distasteful personality trait is attached to a woman with an anxiety complex so monumental, and a variety of other mental issues of the Poor-Me type (the very worst), that it has kept the best therapist on Staten Island busy for 25 years...with no improvement to date, whatsoever. Which leads me to the question; just who the fuck was it who said she was the best in the first place? Because she's convinced that her every word should be an Imperial command, and because every second that passes between command and action builds up the cycle of anxiety and impatience, and because it all plays into this martyr complex of hers, nothing is ever simple. Everything is a fucking imperative, Earth-shattering emergency that is accompanied by That Sound.
That Sound. Look up the word 'cacophony' in the dictionary. Doesn't even come close to describing it. Imagine it like this: the sound of 4,000 cats being castrated simultaneously with a rusty, unsharpened garden scythe, set against the background noise of a pack of constipated wolves baying at the moon whilst being serenaded by some great locomotive that hasn't had it's moving parts oiled in a couple of centuries moving at high speed, which then tries to come to a screeching halt upon a dime.
That's almost it. But still not quite. You also have to imagine someone pouring table salt into your eyes when you're hearing it.
It's a terrible sound. Hearing it gives one the impression of great shards of jagged glass and ten-penny nails being pounded into your skull. The sweat breaks out on your spine. Your teeth are set on edge as if someone just slit your asshole with a razor blade and then poured lemon juice and Liquid Plumber into the open wound. You'd rather be sucked into a jet engine -- and survive -- than to hear that sound. You'd rather have someone open an umbrella up your ass repeatedly than to listen to it. You'd rather be the sex slave of some Al'Qada dude with a sandpaper and blowtorch fetish. It's a sound I've heard -- even in my sleep -- almost every day of my life for the last 44 years, and the amazing part of it all is that I haven't killed her yet.
MAAAATTTTYYYYYY! Come up here...NOW! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod....Look what that LUNATIC is DOING! STOP THEM!
The Swing is being set up. They can't even get the rope over the branch, and already, it's as if someone has just been struck by lightning, run down by a garbage truck and shot eleven times...all at once. And I absolutely HATE being called "Matty". I'm not a seven year old in short pants and knee fucking socks.
So, I tell them. No swing. Now knock it off. "But we have nothing to do." Bullshit, find something else.
Ten minutes later:
MAAAAATTTTTYYYYYY! LOOK WHAT THESE KIDS ARE DOING! Gooutthereandbreakhisass, goddammit!
Guys, I said Knock It Off. No Swing. Do us all a favor, and don't give that pain in the behind inside another reason to start wailing. I don't want to hear it, and it's pissing me off. Just shut her up and stop, or I'm taking this crap away from you.
Not two minutes later, it starts all over again:
So, I take the rope, the seat, and the garden tools they're using trying to get the damned thing over a 30' high branch. Find something else to do, fellas, because if I have to listen to that woman one more time, someone's getting killed, and it might not be just her.
At this point, the little guys want to go to the schoolyard and ride their scooters. Of course they do; it's only a mile walk, and naturally, the Big Ones don't want to go. I can only imagine what I'm coming back to when these two, naturally, resume their stupidity behind my back and Ye Old Nervous Windbag inside has several hours to witness and endure their nonsense and get progressively more aggravated, frustrated -- and even shriller -- because they ignore her repeated commands to stop it.
I take the Little Guys to the schoolyard, and we have some fun. They get to ride their scooters, they jump around on the playground, we play with a football they've found...and I get hit on by a chick. There's two scifoozas that we run into on the street nearby who talk as if they were taught to whisper in a sawmill, and use language that's...well... 'salty' is an inadequate description. It's even worse than mine.
Scifooza Number One can't stop talking about her boobs. In front of my two young nephews. She's telling Scifooza Number Two that as soon as she gets her "chemical balls" (admission: I have never heard this term before) she's going to get "my tits done", and "finally fucking get myself a fucking husband because all they want is fucking D-cups". Sciffoza One apologizes profusely for using such language in front of My Sons. There not my Sons, they're my Nephews, but it's okay. I'll just tell them to ignore you.
"Do you think my tits are alright, or should I get 'em bigger?" Sciffooza One asks. Scifooza Number Two feigns being flabbergasted. One gets the impression that Number One asks every random man she meets this question, and Number Two is obliged to pretend to be embarrassed, even though she's probably shown her tits to twice as many random men. And she might get paid to do it, too.
"Nah, nothing wrong with what you got. They're just fine."
"You boys are soooo lucky! Your father is such a nice man..."
"He's not my father, he's my uncle."
"He's soooo nice!" I'm now having my shoulders and biceps felt up and pinched as if she were looking for a ripe cantaloupe in the supermarket. She apparently likes my hair, too. I'm about to smack this bitch.
"I'm not married, you know...", She says.
"No? You? Can't imagine why not..."
"You have beautiful sons. I wish I had a son...."
"They're my nephews."
"Really? I thought they were your kids..."
"If you could shut up about your tits for three seconds you would have realized you were told otherwise three times. Maybe that's why you're not married: you can't shut up about your tits, you're pushy, and you don't listen very well."
Number Two finds this uproariously funny. We leave. If I ever wanted the local equivalent of Trailer Trash, I now know exactly where to find it. I wouldn't marry this chick for a Green Card and a mention in her father's will. It took near an hour to reach the schoolyard, if only because the five year old has little legs that don't carry him so fast. Twenty-five minutes after we get there they want to go home. Another hour back. And...
There's the FUCKING SWING...naturally. And a crowd of neighborhood kids all waiting for their turn. Mommy Dearest is apoplectic, and on the verge of having puppies. I figure if she does manage this astounding feat, it ought to look like something out of Aliens, only with fireworks and more gunfire. It's now all my fault that this happened because I was away for three hours doing GOD-KNOWS-WHAT-STUPID-SHIT-YOUR-BROTHER-IN-LAW-IS-AN-ASSHOLE-FOR-SHOWING-THEM-THIS-SHIT-GODDAMMIT-WHERE-IS-YOUR-SISTER-THAT-INCONSIDERATE-BITCH-THEY'RE-DRIVING-ME-INSANE.
And people wonder why I am the way I am? If you had my life...
Anyways, here's what I mean by 'losing their childhood".
In my day, if we were told 'you can't do that', we simply found something else to do. And since we didn't have a billion beeping-and-bright-lights-electronic geegaws, we had to make due with whatever was at hand, and somehow manage to have fun with it. Worse, I grew up in Brooklyn, and there wasn't a front lawn, an open field for miles, or a swimming pool in the back yard. We didn't even have a back yard worth the appellation. In those days, we played a lot of wiffle ball (no one plays wiffle ball anymore), and a ton of stickball. These were games that were pretty cheap, and in which you could improvise equipment if you didn't have any, and play for hours. In winter, we played tackle football -- in the street -- and during the fall, we played tackle football...on the concrete in the schoolyard. Hockey was played year-round, either road hockey or roller hockey, ice hockey being something extremely rare: skates were super expensive (your parents might blow a week's salary on skates then), and the only ice was at Coney Island, which required a death-defying trip on the B or D train, dodging muggers and streakers. We used a roll of electrical tape worn smooth on the sidewalk for a puck. It works remarkably well on the well-worn blacktop of a city street.
Protective equipment, if you could find any, usually consisted of a mish-mash of catcher's gear, baseball gloves, football helmets and shoulder pads, and the simple expedient of stuffing magazines into your socks to serve as shin guards. A hockey stick in those days cost about $10, and that was a ton of money, so no one took slap shots -- the best and easiest way to break a stick on blacktop.
There were exactly seven television channels -- and one of them was PBS. Video games consisted of Pong, and if your family could afford it, you might get lucky and have an Intellivision, Atari -- or the Cadillac of them all -- a Commodore 64 with something like 3 really crappy games. Otherwise, you needed to scrounge quarters to go to the local candy store to play pinball, or maybe Space Invaders or Asteroids. When PacMan came around, kids seriously considered taking up a life of crime to support their habit. You dreamed of the days when you had enough quarters to just play a few games of PacMan AND get an Egg Cream. That was like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to us.
We played a lot of common childhood games: Johnny-on-the-Pony, Red Rover, Stoopball (kind of like baseball, only with 'phantom' runners, where you tossed the rubber ball with all your might against your front steps when you were 'up'). We played handball and basketball in the schoolyard, boxball on the sidewalk (like tennis, using the square sections of the sidewalk as a court). When your rubber Spaulding ball split at the seams (they always did) from all that stick- and boxball, you simply took the two halves and played Halfball (a variant of baseball, played with the half a ball and a short length of thick rubber hose).
When you didn't even have a ball, you played Skelly. In this game, you shoot bottlecaps that have been filled with melted wax around a square 'board' drawn on the sidewalk or street in chalk. If you were really serious about your Skelly, you carved your Skelly Board into the hot asphalt of the street in summer with a screwdriver. Kids got very creative with their carved Skelly boards. Some were really intricate and quite challenging.
We didn't have trees to climb, so we climbed fire escapes and 'laundry ladders'. These were skinny, metal ladders, often 30' or more in height -- and not always anchored very well -- that one found behind most houses or apartment buildings, and to which tenants attached clotheslines from their back windows. Climbing a laundry ladder was usually something you did when playing 'War', in which we ran around the streets and the back-alleys in mock combat with toy guns. Try that today, and the local authorities will drag your kids off to a mental institution, just in case they want to grow up to shoot a Democrat. Any fence was like an open invitation to 'come climb me', and it didn't matter if there was barbed wire or razor wire, or even if it was rusty; we climbed them, especially if there was something 'cool' on the other side...like access to Tar Beach (the roof of an apartment building from where one could launch water balloons, or watch the local girls sunbathe).
Bikes and skateboards were rarities. In the Brooklyn of that time these things were likely to get stolen. At knifepoint. I was mugged at knifepoint, twice, before my thirteenth birthday. Nowadays in Brooklyn, they definitely would be stolen, only you'll receive multiple gunshot wounds and might get your house burnt down just so there's no witnesses to the crime for good measure.
Everyone played with matches. Everyone played with magnifying glasses and anthills. Everyone played with magnifying glasses, anthills, model glue and a can of hairspray. You circled the anthill with the glue, set fire to it with paper and magnifying glass, and when the ants came up to escape, you used the hairspray can like a flamethrower. We knew how to make slingshots, and makeshift crossbows with a piece of two-by-four, a thick rubber band, wood staple and a clothespin.
Disputes between kids were always settled with fisticuffs, or a wrestling match, and three minutes after someone got his ass kicked everyone was friends again. We collected comic books, baseball cards, bottlecaps and Matchbox Cars. We 'flipped' baseball cards, we pitched pennies, we played a lot of catch, Tag, Dodgeball (or a rougher variant, Kill the Man With the Ball), Red Light-Green Light, Ringolerio and Bulldog. We built model airplanes and ships. We knew how to build and repair our own toys, or adapt them to other uses. We did it in the CITY, too, with a lack of open spaces and grass, and with what nowadays would be considered Third-World-level disposable incomes.
In short, we knew how to be BOYS. We never had 'NOTHING TO DO'.
My nephews, for all the love I have for them, would have been lost in that world. They would have been constantly bored because no one would be giving them anything. As it is, they get so bored despite all they have, that they become single-minded of purpose when it comes to a tree swing that even in my day would have given Evel Knievel second thoughts. Now, granted, there's some creativity and a sense of danger involved in that swing, but the point is if we were told 'don't do that', we found something else to do, and we had enough of a store of made-up/improvised games/activities at our disposal that it wasn't difficult.
Nowadays, kids seem incapable of doing this. Try to teach these things to them, and they look at you as if you've just emerged from a spacecraft with three heads, green skin, and antennae. They aren't interested unless there's a flashing light, a large price tag, a beeping sound, or a degree of extraordinary, bound-to-end-in-the-emergency-room danger -- they call these things Extreme Sports nowadays, but in my day, they were simply the things The Stupid Kid Who Always Had a Broken Bone did.
There was a degree of danger in what we did, too, but it was always a calculated danger (kids were smarter then, I think). We knew the limits. An equivalent to this swinging between traffic and a great fucking tree trunk in my day was called 'Skitching'. In Skitching, one either wore roller skates, or did it in winter when the streets would be full of packed snow that you could slide on. You simply grabbed onto the back of a stopped bus or truck, and got low where the driver might not be able to see you easily, and got yourself pulled along as if water skiing. At least until the vehicle stopped, and you didn't...you usually only stopped when you got a face full of back bumper. The worst cases saw the Skitcher eat the bumper and then slide under the now-stopped vehicle, and being too stunned to move, get trapped under a wheel to get themselves run the fuck over. Never did it myself, never wanted to. It was just too stupid and dangerous.
But such was the life -- and the joys -- of a city boy in the 1970's, and amazingly, we did these things with no adult supervision, whatsoever. Makes you wonder just what the hell happened to the world and what happened to the Spirit of Boyhood. These kids today are such pampered, spoiled, over-supervised, whining little pansies who don't get beaten on a regular basis for their misbehavior, and who don't know how -- and who can't be trusted -- to play on their own. And who suffered for it all this fine day? Why... I did.
I'm not even their parent, either.
I had to listen to a Screaming Banshee who turns my insides into a knotted mass, and who could curdle used motor oil with her voice alone. I had to hike two hours to and from a schoolyard I didn't want to go to, and we barely stayed. I was nearly sexually assaulted on the street by a bimbo I wouldn't screw with a stolen penis, and who didn't even have the courtesy to offer me a drink before putting her hands on me. I had my nephews actually tell me to do something anatomically impossible -- twice -- and I'm not allowed to feed them their teeth. When my sister finally gets home, she wants to know why I 'didn't do anything to stop those kids from putting up the swing' and has the nerve to ask me if I'll watch them again the following day.
It's a good thing it was supposed to be Doomsday, and there was a 'We Didn't Die' party later that evening. I managed to play a few other games that night that also don't require flashing lights and electronics, or adult supervision...only adult participation.
That was something else we learned to do in the schoolyard, too.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Baby Survives Eight-story fall Down Trash Chute...
The phenomenon of young girls hiding pregnancies, and then simply disposing of the baby within hours of birth is a frightening one. It is a striking reminder that in someprecints of America, Life is Cheap, and what value one does attach to Life is often conditioned by other cultural values of questionable origin or worth, which are more and more coming to be detached from a commonsense morality.
It's sickening.
Good thing this girl had access to Planned Parenthood, huh?
I hope they flay her alive on national television.
It's sickening.
Good thing this girl had access to Planned Parenthood, huh?
I hope they flay her alive on national television.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
This Is Why No One Reads Wonkette Anymore...
A few weeks ago, I got an mini-avalanche of traffic from Wonkette readers, who apparently arrived because they were looking for pictures of drunken leprechauns. Presumably they needed them to make fun of the proverbial inebriated Irishmen on St. Patrick's Day, and couldn't find their crayons. Now, they make fun of a three-year old with Down's Syndrome just because they happen to viscerally hate his mother. And why do they hate his mother? Because she happens to hold different political and social views than the oh-so-sophisticated Wonkette legion.
They can't stop her, so they might as well attack her children. That's on Page 3 of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, you know.
By the way, these people tend to call themselves "Liberals", but there's very little of the Liberal in them.
Now, I'm no angel, here. I regularly write stuff that's just as vile and which could be considered hateful, unless you have half a brain and a sense of humor, but in my defense Muslims AREN'T regular human beings; they're some sort of inbred mutant strain that diddles livestock and which blows themselves up because God said they should, so that doesn't count. But, I can at least say I've never attacked a child ( parents: hell yes!) just to make what's basically a very stupid political point, i.e. that Sarah Palin, by her very existence, is an affront to everything a committed feminist stands for -- mostly because she's the most glaring and obvious example of just how wrong boilerplate feminism truly IS. Whenever I write something nasty, I do try to at least follow a very simple philosophy:
a. There must be some point that I'm trying to make. It might not be a very good point, granted, and I might not even communicate my point very well, but then again, I'm not one of the oldest political websites on the 'net that still retains a pretense as being THE trendsetter in regards to all things Left-leaning. I don't even claim to be the guy who knows everything about everything and everyone that's anyone. I don't worship at the altar of political power, and I simply do not drool over the thought that I might see and gossip about the really sexy libtard junior Congresscritter from California's 405th District who has a really highly-developed sense of metrosexual fashion. That stuff ain't important, which is probably why fewer and fewer people read Wonkette every day.
b. I don't claim to be, nor do I aspire to be, a professional journalist; I don't own a set of kneepads, never learned to cover my teeth when performing acts of gratuitous fellatio upon the rich and powerful denizens of Washington, D.C., and I didn't spend a shitload of Mommy and Daddy's money on a J-school degree which turns out to be about as useful as one of those "Be a Certified Gun Repair Technician!" certificate courses one used to see advertised on the inside of matchbook covers. I would rather be labeled a Sex Offender, Child Molester, Mass Murderer or Enron Executive than to be considered a journalist. It's a profession which has been so thoroughly discredited that I'd wager that Barehanded-Septic-Tank-Cleaner probably evokes an image of far greater prestige and respect amongst most people. I'm simply a crazy dude with a variety of axes to grind, determined to use my First Amendment Rights before people like the social-climbing-libtard-prostitutes of Wonkette conspire with their democratic (small 'd' intentional) party johns to take them away from me.
c. I wouldn't even make fun of Nancy Pelosi's retarded children (I'm sure she must have many), a person who actually HAS done serious and long-lasting harm to this country (unlikeTrig Palin), and she's perhaps the second-worst person on Planet Earth, First Place being occupied by a three-way tie of Hillary Clinton, Ryan Seacrest, and Kathy Griffin (each perhaps a harbinger of Antichrist?), and all four just nudging that Ama-doo-dad feller into a solid third place. There's no reason to go there, anyway: Nancy, Hillary, or Sarah are all adults, capable of defending themselves and answering their critics, even the unreasonably insane ones -- like me. Attacking children is a really douchey thing to do, and with Sarah Palin, it's become the Libtard's sport of choice. First it was Bristol, then Willow, and now, Trig. At what point does it stop? At what point do you believe you've exposed your pettiness and stupidity enough, and whatever sense of shame you still have left -- finally --kicks in?
I know, I know...If you let something akin to a sense of decency kick in, you'd never get invited to another smart cocktail-cocaine-and-forced-anal-sex party in Georgetown.
As for the author of that piece (my guess is that he learned and honed his fine journalistic skills upon only the very best gas station washroom walls), the fact that he -- after the fact, and after the outrage -- retroactively adds an inadequate apology at the top of the post, cuts no ice. The post, after all, is still there for everyone to view. Frankly, it's probably still there because without the outrage it's caused no one with two braincells to rub together would visit Wonkette anymore. If anyone over there had any class whatsoever, they'd take it down, but alas, they haven't seen traffic like this in years. A dilemma if ever there was one.
Some of the comments to this article were, if you can believe it, far more vile than the post itself.
There's talk going about the 'net about a boycott of Wonkette's sponsors (that would probably be Massengill Disposable Douches, SuperFlow Do-it-yourself Home Enema kits, and Sunstroker 2000: The Solar-powered Men's Masturbation Aid for a Greener Planet!), but I've never been a big fan of boycotts. Mostly because they're stupid, and never hurt the people they're intended to. The good people at ToadinMyHole.com (THE Homosexual Dating Service for the discerning anonymous Interstate restroom sex aficionado) or the Craig's List Adult Services Page aren't responsible for what Wonkette decides to publish, or even has a say over what is published -- the asswipes at Wonkette would scream from the rooftops about censorship if a sponsor ever demanded editorial say-so, even if Wonkette.com does sometimes, hypocritically, scream even louder for the censoring of it's political opponents -- so why should those people, with no connection other than an advertising stake, be unfairly punished?
Don't boycott the sponsors; just stop reading Wonkette. And yeah, I've 'fallen into the trap' of reposting their stupidity while imploring you to avoid it, but this is about something more important than whether or not Wonkette gets a few more readers.
It's about people who would, and do, happily echo the Left's oft-repeated mantra that, for example, a Paul Ryan Budget Plan would cause children with Down's Syndrome to have to 'fend for themselves' taking a position on one hand of standing as the defender of the weak and helpless -- to score cheap political points -- while on the other hand viciously attacking a child with Down's Syndrome -- to score cheap political points.
Wonkette claims that it's a humor site, but it's difficult to see anything funny about any of this. If anything, it's extremely educational: you now know, if you didn't know before, what the self-proclaimed, self-assured, oh-so-fashionable, self-selected 'Liberal' elite really thinks and how it behaves, despite a pretense of intellect and sophistication, or claim to the higher moral ground in all things.
They can't stop her, so they might as well attack her children. That's on Page 3 of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, you know.
By the way, these people tend to call themselves "Liberals", but there's very little of the Liberal in them.
Now, I'm no angel, here. I regularly write stuff that's just as vile and which could be considered hateful, unless you have half a brain and a sense of humor, but in my defense Muslims AREN'T regular human beings; they're some sort of inbred mutant strain that diddles livestock and which blows themselves up because God said they should, so that doesn't count. But, I can at least say I've never attacked a child ( parents: hell yes!) just to make what's basically a very stupid political point, i.e. that Sarah Palin, by her very existence, is an affront to everything a committed feminist stands for -- mostly because she's the most glaring and obvious example of just how wrong boilerplate feminism truly IS. Whenever I write something nasty, I do try to at least follow a very simple philosophy:
a. There must be some point that I'm trying to make. It might not be a very good point, granted, and I might not even communicate my point very well, but then again, I'm not one of the oldest political websites on the 'net that still retains a pretense as being THE trendsetter in regards to all things Left-leaning. I don't even claim to be the guy who knows everything about everything and everyone that's anyone. I don't worship at the altar of political power, and I simply do not drool over the thought that I might see and gossip about the really sexy libtard junior Congresscritter from California's 405th District who has a really highly-developed sense of metrosexual fashion. That stuff ain't important, which is probably why fewer and fewer people read Wonkette every day.
b. I don't claim to be, nor do I aspire to be, a professional journalist; I don't own a set of kneepads, never learned to cover my teeth when performing acts of gratuitous fellatio upon the rich and powerful denizens of Washington, D.C., and I didn't spend a shitload of Mommy and Daddy's money on a J-school degree which turns out to be about as useful as one of those "Be a Certified Gun Repair Technician!" certificate courses one used to see advertised on the inside of matchbook covers. I would rather be labeled a Sex Offender, Child Molester, Mass Murderer or Enron Executive than to be considered a journalist. It's a profession which has been so thoroughly discredited that I'd wager that Barehanded-Septic-Tank-Cleaner probably evokes an image of far greater prestige and respect amongst most people. I'm simply a crazy dude with a variety of axes to grind, determined to use my First Amendment Rights before people like the social-climbing-libtard-prostitutes of Wonkette conspire with their democratic (small 'd' intentional) party johns to take them away from me.
c. I wouldn't even make fun of Nancy Pelosi's retarded children (I'm sure she must have many), a person who actually HAS done serious and long-lasting harm to this country (unlikeTrig Palin), and she's perhaps the second-worst person on Planet Earth, First Place being occupied by a three-way tie of Hillary Clinton, Ryan Seacrest, and Kathy Griffin (each perhaps a harbinger of Antichrist?), and all four just nudging that Ama-doo-dad feller into a solid third place. There's no reason to go there, anyway: Nancy, Hillary, or Sarah are all adults, capable of defending themselves and answering their critics, even the unreasonably insane ones -- like me. Attacking children is a really douchey thing to do, and with Sarah Palin, it's become the Libtard's sport of choice. First it was Bristol, then Willow, and now, Trig. At what point does it stop? At what point do you believe you've exposed your pettiness and stupidity enough, and whatever sense of shame you still have left -- finally --kicks in?
I know, I know...If you let something akin to a sense of decency kick in, you'd never get invited to another smart cocktail-cocaine-and-forced-anal-sex party in Georgetown.
As for the author of that piece (my guess is that he learned and honed his fine journalistic skills upon only the very best gas station washroom walls), the fact that he -- after the fact, and after the outrage -- retroactively adds an inadequate apology at the top of the post, cuts no ice. The post, after all, is still there for everyone to view. Frankly, it's probably still there because without the outrage it's caused no one with two braincells to rub together would visit Wonkette anymore. If anyone over there had any class whatsoever, they'd take it down, but alas, they haven't seen traffic like this in years. A dilemma if ever there was one.
Some of the comments to this article were, if you can believe it, far more vile than the post itself.
There's talk going about the 'net about a boycott of Wonkette's sponsors (that would probably be Massengill Disposable Douches, SuperFlow Do-it-yourself Home Enema kits, and Sunstroker 2000: The Solar-powered Men's Masturbation Aid for a Greener Planet!), but I've never been a big fan of boycotts. Mostly because they're stupid, and never hurt the people they're intended to. The good people at ToadinMyHole.com (THE Homosexual Dating Service for the discerning anonymous Interstate restroom sex aficionado) or the Craig's List Adult Services Page aren't responsible for what Wonkette decides to publish, or even has a say over what is published -- the asswipes at Wonkette would scream from the rooftops about censorship if a sponsor ever demanded editorial say-so, even if Wonkette.com does sometimes, hypocritically, scream even louder for the censoring of it's political opponents -- so why should those people, with no connection other than an advertising stake, be unfairly punished?
Don't boycott the sponsors; just stop reading Wonkette. And yeah, I've 'fallen into the trap' of reposting their stupidity while imploring you to avoid it, but this is about something more important than whether or not Wonkette gets a few more readers.
It's about people who would, and do, happily echo the Left's oft-repeated mantra that, for example, a Paul Ryan Budget Plan would cause children with Down's Syndrome to have to 'fend for themselves' taking a position on one hand of standing as the defender of the weak and helpless -- to score cheap political points -- while on the other hand viciously attacking a child with Down's Syndrome -- to score cheap political points.
Wonkette claims that it's a humor site, but it's difficult to see anything funny about any of this. If anything, it's extremely educational: you now know, if you didn't know before, what the self-proclaimed, self-assured, oh-so-fashionable, self-selected 'Liberal' elite really thinks and how it behaves, despite a pretense of intellect and sophistication, or claim to the higher moral ground in all things.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Girls Will Be Boys and Boys Will Be Girls...
10-yr old Australian boy to get Sex-change "therapy".
You know, if you want to have your privates mutilated, it's not a lifestyle choice or a matter of feelings; it's a fucking mental disorder. Finding ways and excuses to allow people to mutilate themselves (free-of-charge, too) is not 'therapy'; it's insanity. And if you've ever wondered just why the medical community hasn't yet found cures for AIDS, cancer or malaria, it is probably, in part, because vital medical resources are being wasted trying to figure out how to turn vaginas into penises, and vice-versa.
The amount of money this sort of unnatural and medically-unnecessary transformation eats up, from beginning to end -- what with the drugs, the hormone treatments, the surgeries, not to mention the life-long mental health 'support' regime -- is presumably enormous. I'm guessing that if someone were to add it all up, for the expense of granting one demented douchebag -- probably prodded into it by his whackadoo Mother, in the first place -- his Cinderella fantasy, the Australian government could probably provide treatment for four or five cancer victims, if not more.
Worse, once the process is completed (i.e. post-surgical mutilation) it's not exactly reversible, so tough shit if you change your mind when it's all said-and-done.
The following quotes from the article are complete and total bullshit:
"The court heard that Jamie saw herself as a "freak" and a "girl in a boy's body," and had first identified as a girl when she was a toddler."
How many toddlers do you know who are capable of making that determination all on their lonesome, let alone would remember having done so? Is this scientifically possible? Has any reputable scientist studied this phenomenon? Did anyone even fucking check?
"At the moment Jamie can live comfortably as a girl, is socially confident and suffers no teasing or social isolation."
Yeah...riiiight. I don't know what planet these people live on, but here on Earth children the world over are beastly little swine who just can't wait to tease, ostracize, and beat up other children they find weird. It's just what they do. My guess is that this child never goes out to play, has few friends, and probably lives in a hermetically-sealed bubble at home.
This is child abuse, plain and simple. That it is being sanctioned by the Australian government is absolutely astounding.
Without knowing all the particulars, I wouldn't doubt for a second that the kid's mother, disappointed at not producing a baby girl, put this idea into his head or at least decided while he was young to ignore biology and treat him as a her for the sake of her own misguided preferences. Been known to happen. I'd sterilize this 'mother' before she breeds again. It might be the one thing that saves some poor, future child's sanity, and maybe even his life.
In the meantime, we discover that Australia's neighbor, Malaysia, simply sends boys who display feminine tendencies to special camps in order to butch them up. In an Islamically-approved way, of course. The only problem with this, though, is that the people who judge which boys are deemed to be in need of rectification are members of a religion which sanctions sheep-shagging and gang rape, and is part of a greater culture which is notorious for higher-than-average rates of male-on-male sexual assault.
Islamic Madrassas are infamous dens of male rape, you know. How else do you get them into the proper frame of mind to fly an airliner into an office building? When creating future generations of terrorists you need to first destroy their self-esteem and will to live, and endemic poverty, unemployment, sexual frustration and denial of basic human freedoms can only get you so far, you know. I'll bet that on page one of every terrorist in Gitmo's dossier, it's stamped in red: Raped By Imam/Terrorist Recruiter. Send 'em to a camp where sexually-frustrated males (all Muslim men are sexually-frustrated, you know) who live in a culture where male-on-male rape is endemic and systemic on the off-chance that you can 'save' them from homosexuality? Sounds like 66 Islamocally-approved sexual assaults just waiting to happen, if you ask me.
All of this leads me to a very interesting question, however. Assuming the Muslim kids won't be raped by their 'counselors' (it could happen), which approach to building healthy and happy children makes more sense to you: a government-sanctioned medical board deciding to spring for hormone therapy for a10-year old boy so that he can one day -- maybe -- grow tits that won't work, and have his tallywhacker reshaped into a facsimile of a vagina -- that likewise won't work -- or sending kids to a 4-day camp/seminar where someone can give them some advice and counselling, and probably provide a manly role model or two?
I hate to have to admit it, but the Exploding Sheep-Shaggers may just have this one right.
You know, if you want to have your privates mutilated, it's not a lifestyle choice or a matter of feelings; it's a fucking mental disorder. Finding ways and excuses to allow people to mutilate themselves (free-of-charge, too) is not 'therapy'; it's insanity. And if you've ever wondered just why the medical community hasn't yet found cures for AIDS, cancer or malaria, it is probably, in part, because vital medical resources are being wasted trying to figure out how to turn vaginas into penises, and vice-versa.
The amount of money this sort of unnatural and medically-unnecessary transformation eats up, from beginning to end -- what with the drugs, the hormone treatments, the surgeries, not to mention the life-long mental health 'support' regime -- is presumably enormous. I'm guessing that if someone were to add it all up, for the expense of granting one demented douchebag -- probably prodded into it by his whackadoo Mother, in the first place -- his Cinderella fantasy, the Australian government could probably provide treatment for four or five cancer victims, if not more.
Worse, once the process is completed (i.e. post-surgical mutilation) it's not exactly reversible, so tough shit if you change your mind when it's all said-and-done.
The following quotes from the article are complete and total bullshit:
"The court heard that Jamie saw herself as a "freak" and a "girl in a boy's body," and had first identified as a girl when she was a toddler."
How many toddlers do you know who are capable of making that determination all on their lonesome, let alone would remember having done so? Is this scientifically possible? Has any reputable scientist studied this phenomenon? Did anyone even fucking check?
"At the moment Jamie can live comfortably as a girl, is socially confident and suffers no teasing or social isolation."
Yeah...riiiight. I don't know what planet these people live on, but here on Earth children the world over are beastly little swine who just can't wait to tease, ostracize, and beat up other children they find weird. It's just what they do. My guess is that this child never goes out to play, has few friends, and probably lives in a hermetically-sealed bubble at home.
This is child abuse, plain and simple. That it is being sanctioned by the Australian government is absolutely astounding.
Without knowing all the particulars, I wouldn't doubt for a second that the kid's mother, disappointed at not producing a baby girl, put this idea into his head or at least decided while he was young to ignore biology and treat him as a her for the sake of her own misguided preferences. Been known to happen. I'd sterilize this 'mother' before she breeds again. It might be the one thing that saves some poor, future child's sanity, and maybe even his life.
In the meantime, we discover that Australia's neighbor, Malaysia, simply sends boys who display feminine tendencies to special camps in order to butch them up. In an Islamically-approved way, of course. The only problem with this, though, is that the people who judge which boys are deemed to be in need of rectification are members of a religion which sanctions sheep-shagging and gang rape, and is part of a greater culture which is notorious for higher-than-average rates of male-on-male sexual assault.
Islamic Madrassas are infamous dens of male rape, you know. How else do you get them into the proper frame of mind to fly an airliner into an office building? When creating future generations of terrorists you need to first destroy their self-esteem and will to live, and endemic poverty, unemployment, sexual frustration and denial of basic human freedoms can only get you so far, you know. I'll bet that on page one of every terrorist in Gitmo's dossier, it's stamped in red: Raped By Imam/Terrorist Recruiter. Send 'em to a camp where sexually-frustrated males (all Muslim men are sexually-frustrated, you know) who live in a culture where male-on-male rape is endemic and systemic on the off-chance that you can 'save' them from homosexuality? Sounds like 66 Islamocally-approved sexual assaults just waiting to happen, if you ask me.
All of this leads me to a very interesting question, however. Assuming the Muslim kids won't be raped by their 'counselors' (it could happen), which approach to building healthy and happy children makes more sense to you: a government-sanctioned medical board deciding to spring for hormone therapy for a10-year old boy so that he can one day -- maybe -- grow tits that won't work, and have his tallywhacker reshaped into a facsimile of a vagina -- that likewise won't work -- or sending kids to a 4-day camp/seminar where someone can give them some advice and counselling, and probably provide a manly role model or two?
I hate to have to admit it, but the Exploding Sheep-Shaggers may just have this one right.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Where Were These Women When I Was 13?
20-Year-Old Staten Island Woman arrested for Sex with 13 year-old boy.
You'll be happy to know that she was employed as a Day Care worker, and attended one of the finest Catholic School on the island, and was something of a local celebrity as a high-school basektball player.
This is so wrong on so many levels that I don't know where to begin.
You'll be happy to know that she was employed as a Day Care worker, and attended one of the finest Catholic School on the island, and was something of a local celebrity as a high-school basektball player.
This is so wrong on so many levels that I don't know where to begin.
But...It's a Religion of Peace, that Respects Women's Rights!
Fourteen-year-old girl lashed to death in Bangladesh. For having been raped.
Fucking barbarians. The...Man...a married man and the victim's cousin, mind you -- a fucking rapist --of course, is only following The Prophet's sterling, pedophile example, and somehow manages to 'escape' (allowed to?) his punishment. And then, after a fatwa and 70 lashes are administered to a little girl, her death, incredibly, gets ruled a suicide.
What passes for a government in Bangladesh assures you that it has a solution to this onerous, time-honored tradition, of course; a new law. I swear, but governments all over the world are stuffed to the brim with complete idiots who's only talent is for slamming barn doors shut long after the horse has shit and run away. Or for making empty gestures and uttering empty words.
"The government needs to enact a specific law to deal with such perpetrators responsible for extrajudicial penalty in the name of Islam," Kamal told CNN.
They'll never do so, naturally, because if such ever came to pass the inbred-retarded faithful of the Religion of Peace would start planting bombs, beheading folks and making general nuisances of themselves. Better that a14-year old rape victim should commit 'suicide' by having some dingleberry in a black robe reading out a of a sociopath's handbook whip her to death than to risk that. No, we'll just pass a law, that will never be enforced because that will only lead to terrorism, and pat ourselves on the back for being a 'civilized' and 'tolerant' people.
There's a reason why places like Bangladesh, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Morocco and Sudan are inhuman shitholes, you know:
It's because they are full of people who would kill a 14-year old rape/incest victim because their religion says they can...or should. I don't know why we spend blood, limbs, money and cry tears of frustration trying to 'help' these people make the great leap into the Modern World. They obviously don't want to behave like civilized human beings, and at the rates at which they're multiplying they're becoming a threat to decent societies everywhere.
Tell me again, Leftards, how it is that 'all cultures are valid and equal?' How is it again that Islam is a Religion of Peace that respects basic human rights? Every self-described feminist who refuses to speak up about the barbarous treatment of their sisters in Muslim countries is, objectively, responsible for this girl's death. Sorry, but the feminazis are unavailable to help 14-year old rape victims because they're too busy suing Wal-Mart in the Supreme Court, and trying to get Planned Parenthood's funding back right now. Besides, don't you know that the men over there will kill you for daring to question their paternalistic hegemony?
Priorities, and all that.
Feminists only speak out about injustices from the safety and comfort of societies where injustices are least likely to occur. And then they demand to be taken seriously. Otherwise, they withhold sex. Which is rich, because it is precisely because of their actions and ideology that sex without consequence or attachment has become akin to dogshit: it's everywhere, and you often have to make a deliberate effort to avoid stepping in it. Assholes.
Tell me: why is it that we're trying to keep Libyan Al'Qaeda alive in the name of preventing 'genocide', to bring 'democracy' to Iraq and Afghanistan, or bring 'international presure' to bear against Iran, again? To save diseased cultures that flog 14-year-old rape victims to death?
Sounds to me like we should be making an effort to kill them, or to let them go ahead and kill each other.
Fucking barbarians. The...Man...a married man and the victim's cousin, mind you -- a fucking rapist --of course, is only following The Prophet's sterling, pedophile example, and somehow manages to 'escape' (allowed to?) his punishment. And then, after a fatwa and 70 lashes are administered to a little girl, her death, incredibly, gets ruled a suicide.
What passes for a government in Bangladesh assures you that it has a solution to this onerous, time-honored tradition, of course; a new law. I swear, but governments all over the world are stuffed to the brim with complete idiots who's only talent is for slamming barn doors shut long after the horse has shit and run away. Or for making empty gestures and uttering empty words.
"The government needs to enact a specific law to deal with such perpetrators responsible for extrajudicial penalty in the name of Islam," Kamal told CNN.
They'll never do so, naturally, because if such ever came to pass the inbred-retarded faithful of the Religion of Peace would start planting bombs, beheading folks and making general nuisances of themselves. Better that a14-year old rape victim should commit 'suicide' by having some dingleberry in a black robe reading out a of a sociopath's handbook whip her to death than to risk that. No, we'll just pass a law, that will never be enforced because that will only lead to terrorism, and pat ourselves on the back for being a 'civilized' and 'tolerant' people.
There's a reason why places like Bangladesh, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Morocco and Sudan are inhuman shitholes, you know:
It's because they are full of people who would kill a 14-year old rape/incest victim because their religion says they can...or should. I don't know why we spend blood, limbs, money and cry tears of frustration trying to 'help' these people make the great leap into the Modern World. They obviously don't want to behave like civilized human beings, and at the rates at which they're multiplying they're becoming a threat to decent societies everywhere.
Tell me again, Leftards, how it is that 'all cultures are valid and equal?' How is it again that Islam is a Religion of Peace that respects basic human rights? Every self-described feminist who refuses to speak up about the barbarous treatment of their sisters in Muslim countries is, objectively, responsible for this girl's death. Sorry, but the feminazis are unavailable to help 14-year old rape victims because they're too busy suing Wal-Mart in the Supreme Court, and trying to get Planned Parenthood's funding back right now. Besides, don't you know that the men over there will kill you for daring to question their paternalistic hegemony?
Priorities, and all that.
Feminists only speak out about injustices from the safety and comfort of societies where injustices are least likely to occur. And then they demand to be taken seriously. Otherwise, they withhold sex. Which is rich, because it is precisely because of their actions and ideology that sex without consequence or attachment has become akin to dogshit: it's everywhere, and you often have to make a deliberate effort to avoid stepping in it. Assholes.
Tell me: why is it that we're trying to keep Libyan Al'Qaeda alive in the name of preventing 'genocide', to bring 'democracy' to Iraq and Afghanistan, or bring 'international presure' to bear against Iran, again? To save diseased cultures that flog 14-year-old rape victims to death?
Sounds to me like we should be making an effort to kill them, or to let them go ahead and kill each other.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)