Non-IT News Thread
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$5 million is a big incentive to just drop a bomb on someone's house.
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Hopefully the Columbian government manages to collect on the reward.
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Guatemala mudslide leaves hundreds missing
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-34431285 -
New York Jets NFL team ship 350 toilet rolls to London
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-34430305 -
Dianna Duran: New Mexico Secretary of State Facing Identity Theft Charge Along With 64 Other Charges
Duran is facing 64 charges related to fraud, embezzlement and money laundering. The 65th charge, identity theft, was added Friday after an interview with her former colleague.
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McGraw-Hill Education: Publisher to Rewrite Textbook After Portraying Slaves as 'Workers'
Roni Dean-Burren posted a video on Facebook Thursday criticizing the publisher for depicting slavery as immigration and calling slaves "workers" in a textbook. The company responded Friday.
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@scottalanmiller said:
McGraw-Hill Education: Publisher to Rewrite Textbook After Portraying Slaves as 'Workers'
Roni Dean-Burren posted a video on Facebook Thursday criticizing the publisher for depicting slavery as immigration and calling slaves "workers" in a textbook. The company responded Friday.
Huh, I thought everyone was thinking like this these days - revisionist history seems to bee the norm. Next thing we'll see is that America is evil for doing the Boston Tea Party and Revolutionary War.
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@Dashrender said:
Next thing we'll see is that America is evil for doing the Boston Tea Party and Revolutionary War.
We are, ask the British.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Dianna Duran: New Mexico Secretary of State Facing Identity Theft Charge Along With 64 Other Charges
Surprised she was not the Governor. Oh wait, that was my state (Illinois) that sent the last two of them to prison..
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Dianna Duran: New Mexico Secretary of State Facing Identity Theft Charge Along With 64 Other Charges
Surprised she was not the Governor. Oh wait, that was my state (Illinois) that sent the last two of them to prison..
You are thinking of Arizona, I think
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@scottalanmiller said:
You are thinking of Arizona, I think
Nope, and this is old news.
Illinois Governors In Prison: 4 Of State's Last 7 Governors Were Convicted, Imprisoned
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/30/illinois-governors-in-pri_n_2581182.html -
The Best Little Porno Movie on the Internet [Very NSFW]
http://gizmodo.com/the-best-little-porno-movie-on-the-internet-very-nsfw-1734350782Wittiest line from said article IMO
Seriously, you try to time your orgasm to four other people’s, after three hours of physically demanding work, while two people film you, one directs you, and a nerdy tech blogger sits there tapping out notes on her laptop.
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@Dashrender said:
Next thing we'll see is that America is evil for doing the Boston Tea Party and Revolutionary War.
We fought a war to avoid paying our taxes. The Boston Tea Party was an attack on a basically innocent shipping company that was not the party responsible for the taxes that people didn't want to pay (which were to finance their own defenses that they were not paying for.) There is really very little defense for the Revolutionary War from an ethical perspective. Do wars need to be defended? Perhaps not, to the victor go the spoils and all that. But to think that a voluntary war over taxes rather than over rights, freedom, protection, etc. is ever not evil is really not an option. Killing people over a tax dispute that was equal for all (people in England could come to the US voluntarily and vice versa and have their tax status be the same as everyone else in that location) isn't just in any way.
The Revolutionary War was fought by a few ultra-rich elites who managed to leverage the war into their own private fortunes while using the war as a means to enslave and oppress the bulk of the population. Were there upsides? Sure, we think, although who really knows how things would have gone. The bad crap coming from England was rapidly rectified on their side too. The US ended up being a non-free slave country a lot longer than it likely would have been had the Revolution not happened and protected slavery for another century.
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I'm not saying that England wasn't asking for it, and that they didn't set themselves up for it to happen. They did not think things through very well. They now know that the kind had literally lost his mind and that led to much of what happened. But revisionism has been what has created the ultra-pro revolutionary propaganda that has fueled American textbooks for so long.
The same kinds of things like how they teach in Texas that Texas is unique having been a republic (a legal requirements for all 50 states, never something that is unique) or that it has the option to leave the union (there was a war over that, the answer was a resounding "no".) Yet they teach those things that are clearly untrue and super obviously illogical and yet, somehow, the whole state fails to notice them because, I guess, they never learn how states work in general or that there was a Civil War over separation of states.
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A really great history book is "Lies My Teacher Told Me", in it the author (who won a court case against Mississippi that they didn't have the legal right to not buy textbooks based solely on the fact that the books were factual) talks about how history is the only subject where students entering college are hoped to have had as little as possible former education rather than as much as possible because colleges have found that the US high school education of history is so generally inaccurate that it is better if the students had not attended as the more they've been taught, the harder it is to get them to have a useful perspective and working knowledge of history.
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@scottalanmiller said:
The US ended up being a non-free slave country a lot longer than it likely would have been had the Revolution not happened and protected slavery for another century.
Yes, let us not forget that The next US holiday celebrates a man reviled pretty much everywhere in Central America.
Discussed last year in case you missed it: http://mangolassi.it/topic/2670/everything-that-you-need-to-know-about-columbus-day -
That one truly amazes me that any region has allowed Columbus Day to have ever existed let alone continue and actually be recognized at a National level! It's so inconsiderate and misguided, there are so many amazing people (American and otherwise) worthy of a holiday and yet that guy (who, BTW, never came to the US and has nothing to do with American history in any way) gets one of the few national holidays? But not John Brown, not Alexander Hamilton, not John Adams, not even Washington or Lincoln (they each get half a holiday tops) - it's crazy. Not just crazy, but super random. We might as well celebrate any random well known name (but unknown actions) from history.
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Hmmmm... sounds like it's time for a petition!
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It's really kind of politically schizophrenic that we celebrate both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Christopher Columbus. One celebration of civil rights and racial unity, the other celebrating racial genocide and intolerance. Which is it that we admire more? Or do we like to strike a balance between the two so celebrate both in the hopes that they cancel each other out?
Next we'll have the Knox/Arnold Summer Picnic event! (Knox being the soldier hero of the Revolution, Arnold being the traitor who went British on us.)
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Interesting historical tidbit.... in King Philip's War, one of the bloodiest in American history, most modern Americans identify themselves with the side of the war that lost - and with which we are not genetically descended from. History has distanced us from the war and culture has shifted so much that most Americans which that what became America would have lost the war.
