What made you go WTF today?

[Ominous Gamer]

So Texas continues to teach the "abstinence only" sex education. Despite the fact Texas teens are having more sex than before, and Texas had at one point the highest teen birth rate in the nation; and they use information like this:

One Texas public school district's sex ed handout is entitled "Things to Look for in a Mate:"

I. How they relate to God
A. Is Jesus their first love?
B. Trying to impress people or serve God?

Another public school district uses this:

Question: "What does the Bible say about sex before marriage/premarital sex?"

Answer: Along with all other kinds of sexual immorality, sex before marriage/premarital sex is repeatedly condemned in Scripture (Acts 15:20; Romans 1:29; 1 Corinthians 5:1; 6:13,18; 7:2; 10:8; 2 Corinthians 12:21; Galatians 5:19; Ephesians 5:3; Colossians 3:5; 1 Thessalonians 4:3; Jude 7).

So whats the governor say when he is presented with this information?
Abtinence works.

Whats the evidence he presents to defend his position? (after getting laughed at)
Blames the teachers for not teaching it right, and his own "personal life"



EDIT:
I didn't see it right away, so I'm assuming our last abstinence is a failure thread was in the old place?
and yeah, I know this info isn't breaking, and likely making the rounds again because this governor may be considering a run at the presidency(?), but holy hell.

[CitizenCain]

So whats the governor say when he is presented with this information?
Abtinence works.

To be fair, that's our society's approach to just about everything, and one you personally advocate (or at least have in the past) on other issues. Don't like something? Ban it. Can't ban it? Use propaganda to convince everyone else it's wrong, facts be damned.

Maybe if everyone stopped sticking their noses into everyone else's business, we wouldn't have to put up with having a bunch of stupid, incorrect political views being forced on everyone. But, we can't possibly have that; we need to inject our views into everyone else's lives and then complain when views we disagree with are injected into ours.

The short version of this whole issue being: Popularly elected leader uses popular method of spreading popular political viewpoint. Shocking, truly.

[earthJoker]

"Amy Winehouse, 27, found dead at her London flat"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz...ndon-flat.html

Not confirmed. Another one at 27

[Ominous Gamer]

TMZ is considering it confirmed. Not surprising at all. She was one hell of a coke whore.

[earthJoker]

No it is not surprising at all.

[GGT]

Watching C-span and the Senate Armed Services Committee. Wasn't paying total attention, but sounded like one of the Generals said....that optimizing terrorism surveillance could be of "great commercial value" to the United States.

The committee is "vetting" senior commander military nominees. Some over-lap of questions from senators also serving on veteran's committees and DoD budget committees. A fairly strange thing to watch

[Ominous Gamer]

Someone ripped off my don't text and drive bumpter sticker, but left the Turn off Fox one

[GGT]

The amount of new credit/debt solicitations in my mailbox is unbelievable. I paid off the last of my (one) credit card balance, less than a hundred bucks. Then I paid my son's last three monthly orthodontia visits in advance. Now the credit spiders are trying to spin webs around me.....offering zero% interest for two years, special deals and rebates, for everything from beach vacations to leather sofas or entertainment centers. Fuckers.

[Draco]

^^Yeah well my mum keeps on getting a $500+ bill from a major Australian phone company because she apparently signed up for one of their phone + internet plans, which isn't true. She only called the company to enquire about the plan they had going, and a day later we get a call from our original company asking why we were disconnected from them long story short, the company my mum called actually admitted to the mistake, told us that we wouldn't be charged for anything...yet for several months now we've been getting this bill from them, and she's tried calling them again, but all they say is "it says on our system that you signed up for it blah blah" so she ends up arguing with them, and now it's been referred to some "collection agency" who is sending out the bills

[Wraith]

A couple in China were turned into authorities after it was discovered the pair began selling off their children to play online games at internet cafes.

The Sanxiang City News reports (via ABCNews), the parents, Li Lin and Li Juan, began selling off their three children in 2009. One child, a baby girl, netted about $500 U.S., while the two boys, both newborns, netted about $4600 U.S. each.

The couple was finally turned in by Li Lin's mother after she learned of their actions. The parents did not know they were breaking the law, and said, "We don't want to raise them, we just want to sell them for some money."

[Hazir]

Last year's christmas tree at the Elysee in Paris cost €355.000 .... source

[Khendraja'aro]

Last year's christmas tree at the Elysee in Paris cost €355.000 .... source

355 Euros ain't so bad?

[Hazir]

1. I am not American
2. this is the official notation

[Khendraja'aro]

1. I am not American
2. this is the official notation

You're writing in English right now? Then you use a dot as a decimal mark, comma as a thousands separator. Nothing to do with "official" or "american".

And the "official" recommendation, by the way, would be to use a space as a thousands separator.

Numbers may be divided in groups of three in order to facilitate reading; neither dots
nor commas are ever inserted in the spaces between groups

http://www.bipm.org/utils/en/pdf/Resol22CGPM-EN.pdf

[wiggin]

I never really got the point of using a comma as the decimal mark. In normal punctuation, commas denote a phrase, while periods (or full stops for you Brits) indicate the end of a full thought/sentence. I always thought it made more sense to have the punctuation with more 'finality' finishing out the number and commas only being used as thousands separators. *shrugs* There are plenty of US conventions that are pretty dumb (most of our measurement systems, for example), but some of our conventions actually make sense, and ISO be damned. Sunday is the first day of the week; MM/DD/YY makes organizing files much easier, etc.

[Khendraja'aro]

I never really got the point of using a comma as the decimal mark. In normal punctuation, commas denote a phrase, while periods (or full stops for you Brits) indicate the end of a full thought/sentence. I always thought it made more sense to have the punctuation with more 'finality' finishing out the number and commas only being used as thousands separators. *shrugs* There are plenty of US conventions that are pretty dumb (most of our measurement systems, for example), but some of our conventions actually make sense, and ISO be damned. Sunday is the first day of the week; MM/DD/YY makes organizing files much easier, etc.

Uh, I beg to differ. YYYY-MM-DD is actually the best way to organize by dates. That's also the reason why all databases use that format (to display the date. Internally it's just an integer).

And that sunday thing you'll have to explain. I don't see an advantage either way.

[wiggin]

YYYY-MM-DD does work better for certain things, agreed, but for most casual organization the most useful unit is the month; you rarely need to worry about things from across many years, but you frequently deal with things across months. Day-to-day organization is not only useless because it keeps your organization down to a four week period, but also because most people don't think in day increments for files and the like. I'll admit it varies with the application, though. VERY rarely is DDMMYY(YY) useful, though.

As for Sunday, it's not a matter of being an 'advantage', it's a matter of following historical reality. Jews, Romans, and Christians all had Sunday as the first day of the week (I'm not clear what the Babylonians did, but it's not very relevant, now is it?). There's frankly no reason why ISO 8601 should have Monday as the first day of the week. It's like the French trying to switch to a decimalized calender back after the revolution.

[earthJoker]

MM/DD/YY makes organizing files much easier, etc.

I hate middle endian, either largest number first and smallest last or the other way around, but having the smallest number in the middle? Doesn't make sense to me.

As for decimal separator, I use a mix of German and English. I prefer the dot over comma as well, but for grouping numbers I like the inverted comma better, because with small fonts you can see the difference between inverted comma and dots much better than between commas and dots: 5'400'000.233 vs 5,400,000.233

[coinich]

The apostrophe is ok I guess for contrast, but it breaks the flow of punctuation. Its not where I expect it to be visually.

[Veldan Rath]

The Boy has been booted out of Summer Camp. (Verbal/physical misbehavior)

Scrambling to find new digs for him for the day...have a good lead.

[RandBlade]

YYYY-MM-DD does work better for certain things, agreed, but for most casual organization the most useful unit is the month; you rarely need to worry about things from across many years, but you frequently deal with things across months. Day-to-day organization is not only useless because it keeps your organization down to a four week period, but also because most people don't think in day increments for files and the like. I'll admit it varies with the application, though. VERY rarely is DDMMYY(YY) useful, though.

As for Sunday, it's not a matter of being an 'advantage', it's a matter of following historical reality. Jews, Romans, and Christians all had Sunday as the first day of the week (I'm not clear what the Babylonians did, but it's not very relevant, now is it?). There's frankly no reason why ISO 8601 should have Monday as the first day of the week. It's like the French trying to switch to a decimalized calender back after the revolution.

I actually have to sort-of agree with wiggin here, though I've argued (in principle) in the past against the American system.

Since slash is not allowed as a marker in filenames and since day-to-day files don't need to be saved with year normally, the following is how I save a lot of my files:

07-25
07-26
07-28
07-29
07-30
07-31
08-01
08-02
08-03

It works better that way. I never save files dd-mm. The computer system does not sort files by date (if looking by filename) if they're done dd-mm.

Although preferably for most (especially weekly or non-daily files) I will save yy-mm-dd (I'm not planning to still be doing my current job in 2100 so screw yyyy). YYYY/MM/DD makes the most sense of all systems (you can still omit year if it is redundant). MM/DD/YYYY does not make sense logically in principle, or how its supposed to work after the change of year (especially with computers, I imagine old fashioned notebooks it would have been less of an issue).

[Illusions]

This is an underscore _ , it can be used in file names as well. Have a good day.

[CitizenCain]

One of Google's robot/self-driving cars gets in first ever accident, human was driving it.

[Ominous Gamer]

Shooting Sherriffs Saturday

[GGT]

Mine is lame compared to yours. But I saw a commercial for a new reality show about Hicks Handfishing. People wading into muddy water, getting leeches on their bodies and faces, trying to stay away from poisonous water snakes.... just to show how catfish can be caught by hand. Literally, by having the fish bite their hands.

Sorry, after a quick search it appears to be Hillbilly Handfishing. Oh. My. God.

http://www.youtube.com/user/AnimalPl...=%7Bkeyword%7D

[CitizenCain]

Shooting Sherriffs Saturday

Belongs in happy thread.

Or maybe sad thread, if one wanted to acquire this anonymously... want a taste of the 80's?

Mine is lame compared to yours. But I saw a commercial for a new reality show about Hicks Handfishing. People wading into muddy water, getting leeches on their bodies and faces, trying to stay away from poisonous water snakes.... just to show how catfish can be caught by hand. Literally, by having the fish bite their hands.

Sorry, after a quick search it appears to be Hillbilly Handfishing. Oh. My. God.

http://www.youtube.com/user/AnimalPl...=%7Bkeyword%7D

"Catfisting!"

It's called catfisting... and is not a sexual act practiced by lesbian house pets, contrary to how it may sound. It was even prominently featured (several years ago) on that animated documentary series Fox put out about life in small-town Texas. Pity Fox is so crappy about enforcing copyrights on property it no longer develops or has any interest in... otherwise, I'd be able to link to that episode.

[GGT]

I never watched Fox shows. We have a decent local Fox News, but that's only 30 minutes of their whole programming day.

Catfisting sounds kinda stupid. Especially since catfish can be caught from a pole with bait. And I mean....using a long stick as a pole, paper twine as the string, and a glob of peanut butter on the end of a bent paper clip as the bait. Catfish aren't the smartest of fish, they're practically bottom feeders.

[CitizenCain]

The suggestion that all you need to catch a catfish big enough to put a grown man's forearm in its mouth is a fishing pole and some bait made me go WTF?!?! today.

Seriously, that catfish is gonna snap your pole in half, eat it, and suffer from severe G.I. distress. World record catfish weighed 646 pounds when it was caught (Thailand, Mekong River delta), world record "blue catfish" from the Mississippi River basin was 124 pounds. Even an "average" one of those catfish... well, do you really think you're going to pull in 50 pounds of fish with a normal fishing pole? A catfish that can swallow your arm is not going to be the same species of 4-8 pound catfish you find in almost every river and lake in the world.

So, I have to say, getting one of those big things to latch onto your arm sounds like an ingeniously easy way of catching them. Whether or not a grisly, 30 year old bottom-feeding fish is worth catching or not is a different matter... but if you're going to do it, might as well make it easy on yourself. Ick, 30 year-old fish meat. I'm getting queasy just thinking about it.

[GGT]

Sorry, I must have been thinking of Choob's saying he'd never cleaned a fish. Not what kind of fish or how much it weighed. Still sounds stupid to go catfisting, especially for a damn reality TV show.

[Wraith]

A married couple foreclosed on a bank