Winning votes
With one week to go, presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry, in a bid to win votes in Iowa, declared that if a woman is raped, the government should force her to have the rapist's baby. I'm not sure what I find more disgusting, Perry's pandering or that there are actually people in Iowa who agree with that sentiment.
But Perry stopped short of going all the way. That would be demanding that the woman marry her rapist. I guess he'd better hope Rep. Michele Bachmann or Rick Santorum doesn't go there first.
MARK EVERLY
Winston-Salem
Without merit
I read, with interest, Cal Thomas' Dec. 22 column, "Death of an atheist," disparaging the personal philosophies of recently deceased atheist Christopher Hitchens and others of similar thought. While some of what Thomas wrote is accurate, much of the column's content was either highly biased or just downright wrong.
Without going point by point, I wish to indicate two portions of the piece that were particularly without merit. Thomas states that, "I have always found atheists to be interesting people because they just may be the world's smallest minority group, one that gets smaller still as its members pass on … ." In actuality, atheists outnumber many highly publicized religious groups, especially when one considers the total worldwide. About 15 percent of the world's population consider themselves non-religious, and of this number about 4 percent are atheists (280 million).
Also, Thomas mentions one of Hitchens' books, "God Is Not Great," and makes a feeble attempt at humor while explaining its title. I suspect, but have no way of knowing, that he has never read the book for himself or, if he has, failed to comprehend its message. Hitchens' purpose in writing the book was to expose the harm that organized religions have done to the world over the centuries more so than expounding a hard-line atheist viewpoint.
So, it should be said that ideas proposed by the author of this column are easily anticipated, as his name is John Calvin Thomas.
LOUIS NEWTON
Winston-Salem
Sum It Up
Have you already decided which candidates you will vote for in 2012?
Correspondent of the Week
We're all 'local' now
As I wrapped my last Christmas gift, I noticed that like most of the others, it was made in China. In my frustration, I decided that for next Christmas I will buy no gift that was not made in the United States. We need to support our own businesses and economy. The gifts may cost more per item, and loved ones may not receive as many, but in this economy, I will not be surprised when my loved ones understand the reason why.
Several years ago, I remember a slogan about supporting our local businesses by buying locally, meaning at that time in our own county and community. What about our country? "Local" now has a new meaning to me. "Local" is the U.S. and is a lot more local than China and other countries.
I want to encourage everyone to extend their definition of "local" and buy locally next Christmas.
Why wait until Christmas? Start buying products made in the U.S. in the New Year. Please support our own local economy instead of China's.
SHERRY WILLIAMS
Germanton
Happy New Year!!!
Happy New Year Everyone!
ReplyDeleteI am off to a good start as I pulled an all nighter last night.....meaning I slept straight through without having to go p.
and the best of New Years to you WW. Sleeping through the night, isn't that the best. I do that occasionally.
ReplyDeleteHey Bob. I am thankful for those rare nights myself as they are seldom. I have read back over the last several days of posting and I do detect our friend Stab can be counted among the living.
ReplyDelete:), I don't know how he does it.
ReplyDeleteHe is irrepressable.
ReplyDeleteI noticed. I used to have some dress shirts like that.
ReplyDelete:)forgive me, there was a Marx Brothers Marathon on TMC yesterday. lol
ReplyDeleteGood humor!!
ReplyDeleteoh yea. I love ice cream too.
ReplyDeleteQue un dia bonito para empezar dos mil doce. LaSombra, :), I'm working on something today that would make Alan Pinkerton turn green with envy.
ReplyDeleteMan. Those days may very well come around again on our present course.
ReplyDeleteoh yea, at one time Pinkerton had a bigger "police force" than the entire US Army. In fact, the state of Ohio banned Pinkerton for just that reason.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete¡Felíz año nuevo a todos! Ojalá que disfruten éxito en 2012.
ReplyDeleteMuch better.
ReplyDelete:) mil gracias, y tu tambien. This year I'm asking for accents and tildes for Christmas.
ReplyDeletethat pocketknife of yours might serve to at least scratch a few onto existing keys.
ReplyDelete@ww: LOL!! I kept mispelling "disfruten" which caused a totally different meaning.
ReplyDelete@Bob: try these tags - - -
For the accent, type these characters:
& a c u t e ; (insert the letter to be accented after the "&" and before the "a")
For the tilde type these characters:
& n t i l d e ;
In order for me to have been able to type these tags, I had to space out the characters so that the actual tag would not appear on this post. Make sure you do not space the characters. It will take practice. I'll e-mail you a cheat sheet of tags I frequently use.
In some parts of South Carolina, older generation folks never bothered pronouncing the letter "r" as a matter of habit.
ReplyDeleteFYI to Bob: I was going to e-mail you a copy of my tags cheat sheet, but I keep getting directed to Outlook, which I don't have. What I your e-mail address?
ReplyDelete@Bob: was able to get that e-mail off to you. Look for it and let me know how it works for you.
ReplyDelete"Sum It Up
ReplyDeleteHave you already decided which candidates you will vote for in 2012"?
Yes
Hey Mr. Pinkerton...I really hope you'll allocate at least some of your vast resources to finding out the bank robber/Schatzman question. I'd really like to know if that rumor is true or not.
ReplyDeleteThere's got to be a retired policeman out there somewhere, that was working during Schatzman's early FBI days that would know the answer. Maybe you know one of the retired policemen.
Have you ever heard of a famous female detective? The only ones I know of are in books, or on TV. Nancy Drew...
ReplyDeleteMost of them are usually too busy trying to figure out how to get a man to do their job to become famous. That's what I think.
We've got plenty of Rielle Hunters out there though.
La Sombra, sorry I went to my cousins for black eye peas and collards. Yes I got your email and thanks.
ReplyDeleteWonder if 'ol Johnny will be able to weasel himself out his pending trial? If he was going to be tried in N.Y. or California, I'd say he'd get off. But here in N.C., there's too many old ladies that don't think to kindly of men running around on their cancer striken wives.
ReplyDeleteSo, me thinks that 'ol Johnny is in trouble.
It IS a beautiful day Bobby. I thought I'd just drop by and say Happy New Year. That way, if I have to call someone an idiot or an 'a' hole later on, maybe the PC police will let me go.
ReplyDeleteI'll check in later.
Ya know, Bob, there IS an option to block posters on this blog . . .
ReplyDeleteAs always, Brokebuck seems to want everyone to know what an utter asshole he is.
ReplyDeleteIn the real world, there are very few "famous" detectives of any gender or race, because most detectives labor away in total anonymity. There are hundreds of women and racial minorities who do this every day in the US.
The military is finally making some progress in incorporating women into its ranks, but most police departments are still mired in the 18th century in that respect.
Even in the 1960s, when women had become uniformed patrol officers in the NYPD, they had to sue to be allowed to take the sergeant's exam, then again to take the lieutenant's exam.
As any psychologist can tell you, hate=fear. Bigots are losers who fear competition from ethnic minorities or genders other than their own.
The first female police detective in the US was Isabella Goodwin, who worked as a matron in the NYPD for 30 years. She was elevated to the rank of detective in 1912 only AFTER she had solved one of the biggest cases in the city's history. You can read about that here in a full page article in the New York Times:
1st Woman Detective
Another NYPD detective, Kathy Burke, wrote a book about her career, much of which was spent fighting the prejudices of bigots like Knothead.
Her career ended in 1986 outside a NY diner when her partner was shot dead and she was permanently crippled by gunfire.
The Knotheads of the world could not hack the pressures of being a school crossing guard, much less those of being an actual police officer.
Mr Everly:
ReplyDeleteWhat's interesting about your letter is your liberal premise. Somehow in your little pea picken brain you think women have to be raped or that they will all get raped during their lifetimes. Therefore, they'll inevitably need an abortion.
I take the position that no woman should ever be raped. So there is no need for a subsequent abortion. If you'd tell you buddies, the liberal judges of the world, to keep these 'a' holes in jail. We wouldn't have to deal with these issues.
Thanks for shopping at WalMart. Here! Let me staple that bag for you.
Hey Rush...have you ever met a black female that has graduated from Harvard Law School? I'd bet not. Forsyth Tech creds are not much an intro, huh?
ReplyDeleteWell, I have. And you talk about Affirmation Action front and center. Wooooooweeeeeeee!
So let's not get over on the minority situation, okay?
Hey Rush....I don't mind the competition, but when they tell you they're not going to hire you because of the color of your skin and your sex. What do you say?
ReplyDeleteIt only discrimination when it's the other way around. Oh, I get it.
In this day and age, ANYONE, black, white, red or blue, male or female, who claims that they cannot get a job because of discrimination is a bag stapling piss-ant loser.
ReplyDeleteKeep on stapling those bags.
This is one time I wish I could agree with you. But I think discrimination still exists on many fronts.
ReplyDelete@Buck the Schmuck: you should know.
ReplyDelete@Bucky. Rape and forced birth are equally unappealing to me.
ReplyDeleteAs always, fools run their mouths about things that they know nothing about:
ReplyDelete1. Number of rapes committed annually in the US: c. 300,000
2. Number of rapes reported annually in the US: c. 90,000
3. Number of arrests for rape annually in the US: c. 23,000
4. Number of undetected rapists annually in the US: c. 277,000
5. Repeat rate for undetected rapists, lifetime: c. 6x
6. Percentage of rapes committed by strangers: 20-30%
7. Percentage of rapes committed by acquaintances: 70-80%
Just for kicks: The "liberal" judges who hear rape cases in NC are elected by the public. The majority of them are members of the Republican party.
As always...
ReplyDelete"This is one time I wish I could agree with you. But I think discrimination still exists on many fronts."
Which does not have anything to do with what I said. Of course there is discrimination, and there always will be. Every time that someone is hired for s job, there is discrimination, whether conscious or not. Sex and ethnicity are not the only discriminatory factors.
A major factor is appearance, including hair and clothing styles, presence or absence of "physical attractiveness", presence or absence of tattoos or body piercings, etc.
Another major factor is use of language and language patterns.
Another is body language.
It goes on and on.
But all of that is situational. Any of those factors can be a minus in one situation and a plus in another.
If an HR person tells you that they cannot hire you because they "have to hire minorities", two things are going on.
1. They are about to lose their own job, because they are not allowed to say such things.
2. They are trying to let you down easy, because the real reason is that you aren't qualified in one way or another.
People who claim that they didn't get a job because of "reverse discrimination" are the saddest, most pathetic of all. They have learned to blame others for every bad thing that they bring upon themselves.
As my father used to say "No excuses."
"They are about to lose their own job, because they are not allowed to say such things."
ReplyDeleteRush-Forsyth Tech Law School Graduate
They're not allow to say it, but they are allowed to practice it?
Racial and sexual discrimination is practiced everyday all over the U.S. under the guise of Affirmation Action. Let's don't kid ourselves.
Wordly...my point is: Mr. Everly just assumes that there will be rapes. That premise is unacceptable to me.
ReplyDeleteForced birth of a child conceive by rape is also unacceptable. I disagree with Gov. Perry's position on the matter. He's going nowhere, so it doesn't matter.
Rielle....I didn't ask you to make a fool of yourself. I hope you called that man, whoever he is, and apologized.
ReplyDeleteOkay....I guess that takes care of everybody except for Stab, Arthur, Fam, Anonymous, and Bobby.
ReplyDeleteI'll deal with them tomorrow. Nighty Night!
Good evening, folks!
ReplyDeleteHello Cuz OT. Re your 8:37 on discrimination: I've hired hundreds over the years (and fired more). You bet there is discrimination in hiring, with the criteria you cited fully in play. Piercings, tats, mullet haircuts, bad grammar were all quick disqualifies for me, if it got as far as an introduction.
I looked at apps and resumes carefully, noting education, penmanship, spelling, even whether the resumes were on colored paper--bonehead resume preparers would tell people color made 'em stand out. It did, enabled me to trash without reading.
Discrimination, continued: I'm sure in my job quests after I turned 50 that my age weighed against me. We older MAWG's are accustomed to having things our way, don't recognize our younger coworkers' wisdom, and we're a drag on health insurance plans, many of which are self-insured. Also, we are thought to be looking for something better, so hiring us is only a short- term arrangement.
ReplyDeleteOK, so I have been the subject of discrimination. I am also subject to getting wet if I go outside when it rains. Both are simply facts of life. I was also the object of discrimination, when I was selected for training and paid post-grad courses, and special assignments (like to Nassau), and promotions. I was good at what I did. Also, the boss was a family friend. So part of my early career success was merit, which I had the opportunity to display because of . . . Affirmative action.
Nighty night, Bucky. Happy New Year. I'll be around tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteThe liar told us that "they" told him that "they" couldn't hire him because they had to hire minorities and women.
ReplyDeleteThe real reason was that "they" didn't think he could hack it.
That coming from somebody that probably can't even see his toes, much less touch them.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds alot like the movie "Falling Down".
ReplyDelete