Can I be reader number four, please?

Via Moira (again):

The Machinery of Night claims to have readers in the high twos or low threes.

Low class lout or not, she deserves more.

 
The dreaded Berkeley Bozo virus strikes again, this time with near fatal results:

The Sept. 11 Day of Remembrance, sponsored by the Chancellor's office, the student body government and the Graduate Assembly, will also feature student leaders distributing white ribbons, instead of the red, white and blue ones they had originally planned.

"We thought that may be just too political, too patriotic," said Hazel Wong, chief organizer for the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC). "We didn't want anything too centered on nationalism-anything that is 'Go U.S.A.'"

Wong said the event organizers are "trying to steer away" from anything political, and that, she said, includes singing the National Anthem and displaying the red, white, and blue. She said they don't want politics disrupting mourning and grieving.

What are they going to do with the white ribbons, surrender?

Recently identified by research scientists from the Directmail Institute Program To Study Hopeless Idotartarian Types (DIPSHIT), the Berkeley Bozo virus outbreak was initially limited to city administrators and school officials in the California city whose name it bears by the relentless and widespread application of fact checking to the derrieres of a cross section of the city's population last fall. Institute researchers say that a new outbreak has been identified, however, which threatens to consume Berkeley, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Developing.

 
This time I knew it was coming. It wasn't like reading Terry Oglesby's post about the engineer who wished he could have made the WTC stand up. I saw it coming and I still read on. Is that progress? I doubt it.

Anyway, I woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep, so I came downstairs, made coffee and went to the computer to read Lileks, as I do every morning. And there it was:

Tonight I was googling around looking for a picture of Christine Hanson, the daughter of Kim Ji-Soo and Peter Hanson. She was two. The family was flying to Disneyland when the terrorists slaughtered the flight attendants, stabbed the pilots to death, and drove the plane into the building...

Little Christine was Gnat’s age, give or take a month; bin Laden’s lackeys killed her - and did so to ensure that other fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters died as well, preferably by the tens of thousands. This little girl’s death wasn’t even a comma in the manifesto they hoped to write. They made sure that her last moments alive were filled with horror and blood, screams and fear; they made sure that the last thing she saw was the desperate faces of her parents, insisting that everything was okay, we’re going to see Mickey, holding out a favorite toy with numb hands, making up a happy lie. And then she was fire and then she was ash.

I've already told you that I am pretty much without religion. I don't know whether God (or the gods) exists and if He does (or they do), I don't know which God of the many who are worshipped actually exists. Given that, I can't really dispute anyone else's beliefs. As far as I am concerned, they have as much chance of being right as I do, and, in any place I'ver ever been, it hasn't really mattered all that much. Certainly it was not a matter of life and death.

But the God in whose name that act was supposedly perpetrated is a God that I refuse to acknowledge. The particular faith professed by the 9/11 hijackers will never, under any circumstances, be acceptable to me. It is beyond my ability to understand or accept. It will always be. According to the perpetrators and their fellows in faith, that makes my life forfeit. My life is less than nothing to both them and their God, and they, in their wisdom, can and will chose the moment and the means of my death for their own purposes. Someone is going to die, either them or me. They have made of their religion a matter of life and death. Mine or theirs.

I vote for them.

And if that makes me an intolerant ignoramus, that is just too damn bad. For tolerance and understanding to be anything other than slow motion suicide, it must be reciprocal.

 
In this post, I asserted that the word "niggardly" had absolutly no connotations associated with race, and that the word had been in the English language for centuries. Yup, I was right (pats self on back). From Take Our Word For It:

Niggardly, of course, means "miserly" or "stingy". The first written record we have of its use is from 1530 but the noun niggard, "miser", has been around much longer, having been used by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1374. Middle English also used nig for a miser or stingy person. All these words have their venerable, if unpronounceable, origin in the Old Norse hnøggr, "stingy", "niggardly" although there was a related Old English word hneaw, "stingy".

Etymologically nigger is a doublet with negro as they both ultimately derive from niger, the Latin word for "black". Note that it does not necessarily mean "a black person", just "black" the color. On the other hand, Africa's Niger river and the country of Nigeria were given those names because of the color of the people there. Nigger entered Middle English as neger, a form of the Old French negre, itself borrowed from the Spanish negro, "black". Never in its history has it ever been connected with the word niggardly. Well, not until now, that is.

 
Steven den Beste has repeatedly pointed out (one example is here) that "diplomacy always succeeds". There is never a failure. Simply put, there never can be a "failure" because "success" is defined up or down to coincide with the outcome of any particular diplomatic initiative. Well, boys and girls, it happened again, this time in connection with the International Criminal Court.

The EU strongly favors both establishing the court and granting it universal jurisdiction. The US just as strongly opposes both of those objectives. The US appears to be on the losing end of things, so it has sought bilateral agreements which seek to exempt its soldiers and citizens from the jurisdiction of the court. The EU issued a warning to all nations attempting to gain membership in the EU that they if they entered into such an agreement with the US before the EU established a "common policy" (read that, "before we formalize our opposition to such bilateral agreements"), their application for membership in the EU would be jeopardized. The US countered that we couldn't believe that the EU would do such a thing (and, oh, by the way, if you want into NATO, or if you want continued military aid from the US, you should seriously consider entering into such an agreement).

And the EU just blinked. The Washington Times reports:

"Most states looking at the advisory [the EU warning noted above -CG] coolly and rationally think it's at least partly wrong," said one European diplomat. "We are trying for a common EU position, but that may just be that each country makes its own decisions."

In other words, our common position will be that there is no common position. But, by God, we reached an agreement!

Via Drudge

 
We have yet another incident in which someone's ignorance combines with ridiculous racial politics and results in complete idiocy.

Stuart Buck links to an article in the Wilmington Star in which it is reported that one Akwana Walker is offended by the word "niggardly". Akwana Walker is black. Her daughter attends fourth grade in a public school. The daughter's class was going over a story in which a boy was described as "stingy". As part of a vocabulary building exercise, the teacher, who is reported to be white, asked her students for other words meaning stingy. The children's dictionary provided "self-centered", which, of course, is not a particularly good synonym for stingy, since it could also mean a lot of other things. So the teacher kept looking and came up with "niggard". She added the "ly" suffix to make the word an adverb (which the class was studying).

From Dictionary.com:
nig·gard·ly Pronunciation Key (ngrd-l)
adj.
Grudging and petty in giving or spending.
Meanly small; scanty or meager: left the waiter a niggardly tip.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
niggard·li·ness n.
niggard·ly adv.

I seem to have missed the racial component of the word. Oh, you mean there is no racial connotation?

But Akwana Walker doesn't care what the word means. She cares what the word sounds like. She has so little faith in her daughter's ability to learn the very subject that the class is studying that she thinks her daughter is incapable of telling the difference between niggardly and the word she finds so offensive that no one should be allowed to use words with similar sounds. So she complained to the administration.

Now, I don't think there was a problem here. "Niggardly" is not offensive, has no racial connotations at all, and is perfectly acceptable, even in polite company. But when bureaucrats are confronted with an angry mother, they have a problem, and they tried to solve it. They transferred Ms. Walker's daughter to another class. The teacher wrote a note of apology and agreed never to use the offending word in her class again. The newpaper doesn't report whether the teacher was ordered to apologize and promise not to use the word.

Way to go bureaucrats! That's a sure fire way to endear yourselves to the teachers you want to attract and retain: Dump on them in order to get an angry mother off your back, when the mother has absolutely no cause for complaint. And what about the other students in the class? Why are they being denied the opportunity to learn about word which has been a part of the English language for centuries just because one parent doesn't like what it sounds like?

The situation never should have progressed as far as it did. But there's more: the transfer and the apology are not enough for the vocabulary challenged Ms. Walker. She wants the teacher fired.

Where does this stop? Think of George Carlin's list of the seven words you can never use on TV. "There are some people that aren't into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television... And words, you know the seven don't you? Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits."

OK, class, let's think of words that sound like those seven, so as to be able to instruct whatever teacher is lucky enough to have Ms. Walker's daughter in her class what not to say.

Shit: Mit, Lit, Kit, Sit, Bit, Fit, Hit, Pit, Rit(alin), Tit (oh, sorry, that one's already covered elsewhere), Wit.

Piss: Abyss, Apes (might be mispronounced), Diss, Discover, Disdain, Dismount, Discord (alright, that's enough disses, we can't go on all day), Disk, Fist, Gist, Hissed, List, Miss, Mist, Psst (not really a word, but ...), Quist, Wrist, Risk, Fisk, Tsk (again, not a word), Whisk.

Fuck: Buck, Cluck, Duck, Huckster, Luck, Muck, Puck, Pucker, Ruckus, Suck, Succubus, Tuck, Yuck.

Cunt: Bunt, Shunt, Font (close enough to offend? I don't know, but le'ts be good little bureaucrats and be safe), Gun, Bun, Dun, Fun, Hun (Attilla the WHAT!!!!!!!!!! How dare you!), Lunge, Nun, Pun, Run (there goes Dick and Jane, but then Dick's name was always a little, you know, edgy), Runt, Sun (I guess astronomy is out as a fourth grade subject), Ton, Won (well, the "can't allow our children to lose their self esteem" crowd doesn't want that word used anyway), Yum.

Cocksucker: This one's a little harder because of the complexity of the word. The only one I can come up with is Muckraker. Oh, all right, Lockpicker. Back to Carlin: There are double-meaning words. Remember the ones your giggled at in sixth grade? 'And the cock crowed three times.''Hey, the cock the cock crowed three times. It's in the bible.' No giggling allowed in whatever class Akwana Walker's daughter is in.

Motherfucker: Another tough one. How about Mother? That requires the repeal of Mother's day for fear of offending the Wilmington Word Police. Do you think Hallmark might object?

Tits: This is too easy. Bits, Flits, Flips, Glitz, Hits, Lit (the singular form of Lits), Mits, Pits, Sits, Wits, Zits.

Note to young Ms. Walker's new teacher: Use any of the foregoing words at your own risk.