The first stage of discovering the author's message is figuring out what his purpose was for the book itself.
Rowling doesn't have a purpose, except to tell a story people want to hear.
I love to read, everything from Harry Potter to Moby Dick, but God Almighty, did I ever hate my English classes in high school and college. Every dull, incompetent, assistant professor of English pontificating about how he knows more about the story than the person who wrote it. One regurgitated multi-culti left-wing banality after another after another. The words 'deconstruction' or 'post-modernist' or even 'critical' make me want to reach for a revolver.
I shit on what the study of the English language has degenerated into.
The most recent vast government conspiracy is of course that GWB et. al. Either orchastrated, or allowed to happen and then embellished, 9/11. Of course, all of this hinges on a grand conspiracy being meticulously carried out by Bush Administration. I'm sorry. But THIS adminstration? The adminstration that brought you Iraq and Katrina? I'm sorry, but we've seen the MO for this adminstration and competence, just isn't it.
I have to agree. It would have taken months to prepare the WTC for an intentional demolition, and the cooperation of thousands of people from the President to the building's janitors.
Any crackpot "truther" alleging an inside job on the WTC is telling me a lot more about himself than he is about George Bush.
I don't know if Watson has had girlfriends in the past or present, but he is unmarried. He could be hypocritical if he's saying gays should be weeded out of the gene pool if he's being asexual or unsexual himself, not that it's gay or bad
I don't think so. He is widely reputed to be a crude and insatiable womanizer, who screwed (or attempted to screw) every pretty girl who worked for him.
Fuck the poor. Let them put down the crack pipe and build their own fucking houses. God knows the shiftless layabouts have enough time in their hands. Devil take the hindmost.
Right, because everyone knows that France or Russia or China would do nothing of the sort if they were in a similar position. All peaches and cream, they are. Only those warmongering imperialist Americans are so crude as to look out for their national interest.
Mocking NASA like you and the author have done is really pathetic.
Did you really expect any better from the Euro-trash and Turd Worlders? Their entire self-image revolves around mocking the US for not being just like them.
You can be sure that if NASA didn't exist, the very same pipsqueak malcontents would be slagging us for our self-centered, materialistic disregard for the wonders of space exploration.
These people are impossible to please and I don't know one reason why we should lift a finger to try.
This is why America sucks. People think that's funny instead of sad.
Obviously, you have never seen the EU-flag bumper sticker that reads, "My country, Europe". They are common over there, and I've seen quite a few here also.
There are lots of government-fellating tranzis who would see 'Europe' as a perfectly acceptable answer to the question. By European standards, you are tagging yourself as a small-minded right-wing xenophobe if you object to this usage.
Ultimately, everyone's in favor of doing something to help our environment, but there's nearly always something they care more about, and very few people vote on the basis of a politician's stand on the environment.
Put more succnictly, "Everybody wants to change the world. Nobody wants to help Mom wash the dishes." True in all times and all places.
Very funny. Maybe you're right with regard to your grandpa's job making pig iron or automobiles, but the big money and growth is in high-technology manufacturing, and we are BURYING the rest of the world in that.
The EU held about 34% of the world's high-technology manufacturing market in 1980, and now accounts for less than 20%.
The Japanese provided about 14% of hi-tech manufactured goods in 1980, peaked in the early 90's at about 25%, and now make about 12%.
The Chinese have climbed from essentially nothing in 1980 to provide about 9% of hi-tech manufacturing today.
And the obese, burger-flipping, Oprah-watching morans of the USA? We built 24% of the world's hi-tech manufactured goods in 1980, and now produce about 43%.
We'll do even better in the future as the population of Europe ages and the culture decays under the Mahometan onslaught. Your gross national product in fifty years will be measured in terms of how many Muslim nurses are wiping how many elderly white arses in nursing homes, as all your smart and hard-working youth will have fled for the shores of America. Your grandchildren will beg on their knees for the privilege of immigrating to the United States.
I'm sure there was a time a hundred years ago when some preening Euro-trash looked down his nose and sneered about the falling market share of American buggy-whip makers and whale-oil refiners. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. It's pitiable and will only get worse as time goes by. The future will be American for at least the next hundred years.
and your currency is worth so little that your value as customers is steadily dropping.
But our value as suppliers grows ever more formidable. Sounds like you need to ask your pals at Airbus for a basic lesson in the macroeconomics of international trade.
To Arabs: America, Britain, and Israel look like Bullies attacking the Arab world.
So why don't we get any credit when we attack Christian Serbs to protect Muslim Albanians?
Why do we get no kudos for resisting Russian aggression in Afghanistan (and potentially Turkey and Iran and Pakistan too) during the Cold War?
Why does nobody in the Arab world seem to think it was worthwhile to remove Saddam Hussein, who was responsible for the death of more Arabs than any other single leader in all of history?
Why do the Saudis and Kuwaitis give us no love for saving them from Hussein?
Why do the Somalis turn on us when we spill out our blood and treasure to help them restore peace and order to their shitty little country, where we have absolutely no economic or strategic interests worth mentioning?
Why is there no respect for the positive role America played in the Suez crisis? Or the Camp David agreements? Or Oslo?
Really, there is some dark and paranoid corner of the Arab mind that seems to remember only insults and grudges. I wonder if this can ever be overcome.
Driving a company car does not make the company liable for what the employee does in the car, that is why you buy insurance yah douche.
Insurance has limits. Juries filled with Jerry Springer Show audience members routinely listen to the flowery lies of piratical trial lawyer filth like John Edwards, and bring back verdicts for much more money than insurance policies cover.
Even if an award is within policy limits, the next thing that normally happens is that the insurance policy is revoked, or becomes vastly more expensive.
These costs can bankrupt companies who did no wrong except let their employees drive a company car. When that happens, people lose their jobs, retirees lose their pensions and retirement savings, governments receive less tax money, and the employees and stockholders of companies that do business with the bankrupt company suffer.
People who say "that is why you buy insurance" are patsies for the rapacious trial lawyer scum, who steal billions of dollars from real people.
And, let us not forget; even though the Democrats control the Houses of Congress, we still have a Republican President.
Do you seriously think the Republicans have their lips more firmly planted on Hollywood's anus than the Democrats? Both parties are throughly sold out to the copyright lobby. The DMCA of 1998 was passed by a unanimous vote in the Senate and signed by a Democratic President. The TV, movie, and music industries give 68% of their campaign contributions to Democrats.
If anything, divided government makes it less likely that something like this will pass. If a Democrat wins the Presidency next year, I sure hope he has a Republican Congress.
Like hell it is. Educational expenditures have never been higher, even on a per-capita basis. We spend more on education than almost any other country, and get less for our money than almost any other country.
What's more, the school districts that spend the most, like the District of Columbia, tend to be the shittiest at actually educating their inmates.
This country needs to spend less, not more, on our schools.
We need to get rid of bloated administrative overhead.
We need to increase class size, get rid of computers and other distracting frippery in the classroom, and jettison all attempts at building "self-esteem" among little delinquents who don't deserve a particle of it. Let them earn self-respect on their own, through hard work with plenty of drills and rote memorization.
We need to bring back paddling, dunce caps, and shame.
We need to abandon "mainstreaming". Students with severe behavioral problems are causing terrible disruption of classes. They belong in segregated classes and schools. Tough shit for them, but they can't be permitted to ruin the whole educational experience for everyone else. No more social promotions, either. Either pass the requirements, repeat the year, or get the fuck on with your life of digging ditches.
We need to break up the cartel that controls education. Someone with a degree in math or business is far more qualified than the dregs and losers and nitwits that the typical College of Education churns out. He shouldn't have to sit through months of educrat babble and bilge in order to teach in a school. Teacher licensing is nothing more than rent-seeking and featherbedding and guild-gilding. Tenure should be totally abolished. Vouchers should be implemented nationwide. Worthless teachers and administrators should be hounded out of the profession. Worthless schools should be boarded up.
Most of all, we have to CRUSH the teacher's unions. These lazy, stupid, greedy lard asses put the education of our kids about tenth on their list of priorities, far behind fattening their bloated salaries, gold-plating their lavish pensions, padding the length of their 3-month summer vacations, salting the calendar with "inservice" junkets, diverting public money to shiftless in-laws and mobbed-up vendors and left-wing non-profits, and working the phone banks for whichever Democrat makes the most promises to shovel even more taxpayers' money onto the gravy train.
All for the better. Good books, pencils, paper and a desk are all that is necessary and sufficient for elementary education. Computers just waste time and get in the way. And I say that as someone who owns a dozen computers and used to earn my living as a programmer.
Yeah, you're right the foreigner should be scared, not because they are innocent of many of the crimes (I'm sure they have done many), but because we carry the big guns.
See for yourself the increasing negative opinion of the U.S. at http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/ or just ask a few people outside the U.S. for their opinion.
Words can't express how little I care for foreigners' opinions. They should worry much more about what we think of them.
I guess you are mumbling about the USA, which is only a small part of North America, never mind South America...
No matter how much the Latin types insist that they are "americanos" too, nobody outside Latin America pays them the least attention. Nor should they.
I don't want to be a "norteamericano" or an "estadounidense". I am an "americano." The Latinos are oppressing our American cultural identity by denying us our right to call ourselves what we want!
Fact: America sponsored saddam and we sponsored terrorism, it was US who sold Saddam weapons and made him fabulously wealthy
Take a look at the facts about this before you make an ass of yourself.
Then let Mark Steyn explain it to you:"According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, between 1973 and 2002 Russia supplied 57 percent of Iraq's arms, France 13 percent, China 12 percent, Brazil 2 percent . . . Brazil? Hang on, where's Washington? Where's London? Well, it turns out Brazil supplied more arms to Iraq than America and Britain combined. London and Washington between them account for less than 2 percent of the Iraqi dictatorship's weapons; the parties that met on Friday [Germany, France, Russia]account for three-quarters.
"Les Anglo-Saxons" are not perfect. But if the alternative is the French, who never met a dictator they didn't like, then Bush and Blair are the best hope of mankind. France, Germany, Russia, Belgium and Canada are not on the side of peace or morality or the Iraqi people. The pictures from the streets of Baghdad make that plain.
On the other hand, they're cheerfully on the side of Total-Fina-Elf, the Western corporation closest to Saddam Hussein. Total had secured development rights to 25 percent of Iraqi oil reserves, a deal that depended on Saddam remaining in power. TotalFinaElf's largest shareholder is a subsidiary of Montreal's Power Corp. Power Corp's co-chief executives are Paul Desmarais Jr., who sits on the Total board, and his brother Andre Desmarais. Andre Desmarais' father-in-law is the prime minister of Canada, Jean Chretien. Canada a refused to join the war to liberate Iraq on "principle."
Got that? For months, the anti-war crowd has insisted that "it's all about oil," that the only reason the Iraqi people were being "liberated" was so that the second biggest oil reserves in the world could be annexed in perpetuity by Dick Cheney and Halliburton and the rest of Bush's Texas oil patch gang. Instead, it turns out that, if it is all about oil, then the principal North American beneficiary of the continued enslavement of the Iraqi people is the family of the Canadian prime minister-that's to say, his daughter and his grandchildren."
Slashdot Mirror
Rowling doesn't have a purpose, except to tell a story people want to hear.
I love to read, everything from Harry Potter to Moby Dick, but God Almighty, did I ever hate my English classes in high school and college. Every dull, incompetent, assistant professor of English pontificating about how he knows more about the story than the person who wrote it. One regurgitated multi-culti left-wing banality after another after another. The words 'deconstruction' or 'post-modernist' or even 'critical' make me want to reach for a revolver.
I shit on what the study of the English language has degenerated into.
-ccm
Yes, because following Slashdot threads about fictional stories you haven't read is SUCH higher use of your mature judgment and valuable time.
-ccm
She is now teaching Divination at Hogwarts, and rocking Prof. Neville Longbottom's world every night.
That would be SIR Tim Berners-Lee, thank you very much.
I have to agree. It would have taken months to prepare the WTC for an intentional demolition, and the cooperation of thousands of people from the President to the building's janitors.
Any crackpot "truther" alleging an inside job on the WTC is telling me a lot more about himself than he is about George Bush.
-ccm
I don't think so. He is widely reputed to be a crude and insatiable womanizer, who screwed (or attempted to screw) every pretty girl who worked for him.
Fuck the poor. Let them put down the crack pipe and build their own fucking houses. God knows the shiftless layabouts have enough time in their hands. Devil take the hindmost.
Right, because everyone knows that France or Russia or China would do nothing of the sort if they were in a similar position. All peaches and cream, they are. Only those warmongering imperialist Americans are so crude as to look out for their national interest.
-ccm
Did you really expect any better from the Euro-trash and Turd Worlders? Their entire self-image revolves around mocking the US for not being just like them.
You can be sure that if NASA didn't exist, the very same pipsqueak malcontents would be slagging us for our self-centered, materialistic disregard for the wonders of space exploration.
These people are impossible to please and I don't know one reason why we should lift a finger to try.
-ccm
Obviously, you have never seen the EU-flag bumper sticker that reads, "My country, Europe". They are common over there, and I've seen quite a few here also.
There are lots of government-fellating tranzis who would see 'Europe' as a perfectly acceptable answer to the question. By European standards, you are tagging yourself as a small-minded right-wing xenophobe if you object to this usage.
-ccm
Nor can we wait for you to move. There's the door...
-ccm
Put more succnictly, "Everybody wants to change the world. Nobody wants to help Mom wash the dishes." True in all times and all places.
-ccm
Very funny. Maybe you're right with regard to your grandpa's job making pig iron or automobiles, but the big money and growth is in high-technology manufacturing, and we are BURYING the rest of the world in that.
The EU held about 34% of the world's high-technology manufacturing market in 1980, and now accounts for less than 20%.
The Japanese provided about 14% of hi-tech manufactured goods in 1980, peaked in the early 90's at about 25%, and now make about 12%.
The Chinese have climbed from essentially nothing in 1980 to provide about 9% of hi-tech manufacturing today.
And the obese, burger-flipping, Oprah-watching morans of the USA? We built 24% of the world's hi-tech manufactured goods in 1980, and now produce about 43%.
We'll do even better in the future as the population of Europe ages and the culture decays under the Mahometan onslaught. Your gross national product in fifty years will be measured in terms of how many Muslim nurses are wiping how many elderly white arses in nursing homes, as all your smart and hard-working youth will have fled for the shores of America. Your grandchildren will beg on their knees for the privilege of immigrating to the United States.
I'm sure there was a time a hundred years ago when some preening Euro-trash looked down his nose and sneered about the falling market share of American buggy-whip makers and whale-oil refiners. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. It's pitiable and will only get worse as time goes by. The future will be American for at least the next hundred years.
and your currency is worth so little that your value as customers is steadily dropping.
But our value as suppliers grows ever more formidable. Sounds like you need to ask your pals at Airbus for a basic lesson in the macroeconomics of international trade.
-ccm
So why don't we get any credit when we attack Christian Serbs to protect Muslim Albanians?
Why do we get no kudos for resisting Russian aggression in Afghanistan (and potentially Turkey and Iran and Pakistan too) during the Cold War?
Why does nobody in the Arab world seem to think it was worthwhile to remove Saddam Hussein, who was responsible for the death of more Arabs than any other single leader in all of history?
Why do the Saudis and Kuwaitis give us no love for saving them from Hussein?
Why do the Somalis turn on us when we spill out our blood and treasure to help them restore peace and order to their shitty little country, where we have absolutely no economic or strategic interests worth mentioning?
Why is there no respect for the positive role America played in the Suez crisis? Or the Camp David agreements? Or Oslo?
Really, there is some dark and paranoid corner of the Arab mind that seems to remember only insults and grudges. I wonder if this can ever be overcome.
-ccm
There's nothing wrong with Arabs. My cousin is married to a Lebanese Christian, and he and his family are great people. Great food too!
It's the radical Islamists (of all races) that are animals. I hope for speedy martyrdom for all of them. That way, everyone's happy.
-ccm
Insurance has limits. Juries filled with Jerry Springer Show audience members routinely listen to the flowery lies of piratical trial lawyer filth like John Edwards, and bring back verdicts for much more money than insurance policies cover.
Even if an award is within policy limits, the next thing that normally happens is that the insurance policy is revoked, or becomes vastly more expensive.
These costs can bankrupt companies who did no wrong except let their employees drive a company car. When that happens, people lose their jobs, retirees lose their pensions and retirement savings, governments receive less tax money, and the employees and stockholders of companies that do business with the bankrupt company suffer.
People who say "that is why you buy insurance" are patsies for the rapacious trial lawyer scum, who steal billions of dollars from real people.
-ccm
You didn't spend enough time looking around the site.
Viacom Inc. (of which Sumner Redstone is chairman) gives 80% of its bribes to Democrats.
Edgar Bronfman of Vivendi gives 84% to Democrats, but other major Vivendi donors bring the company's percentage of Democratic bribes up to 95%.
Time Warner is positively moderate by comparison, giving only 75% of its bribes to the Democratic Party.
Murdoch's News Corp., home of many famous right-wingers, only gives 60% of its bribe money to the Democrats. Bias! Slant! Crushing of dissent!
-ccm
Do you seriously think the Republicans have their lips more firmly planted on Hollywood's anus than the Democrats? Both parties are throughly sold out to the copyright lobby. The DMCA of 1998 was passed by a unanimous vote in the Senate and signed by a Democratic President. The TV, movie, and music industries give 68% of their campaign contributions to Democrats.
If anything, divided government makes it less likely that something like this will pass. If a Democrat wins the Presidency next year, I sure hope he has a Republican Congress.
-ccm
Like hell it is. Educational expenditures have never been higher, even on a per-capita basis. We spend more on education than almost any other country, and get less for our money than almost any other country.
What's more, the school districts that spend the most, like the District of Columbia, tend to be the shittiest at actually educating their inmates.
This country needs to spend less, not more, on our schools.
We need to get rid of bloated administrative overhead.
We need to increase class size, get rid of computers and other distracting frippery in the classroom, and jettison all attempts at building "self-esteem" among little delinquents who don't deserve a particle of it. Let them earn self-respect on their own, through hard work with plenty of drills and rote memorization.
We need to bring back paddling, dunce caps, and shame.
We need to abandon "mainstreaming". Students with severe behavioral problems are causing terrible disruption of classes. They belong in segregated classes and schools. Tough shit for them, but they can't be permitted to ruin the whole educational experience for everyone else. No more social promotions, either. Either pass the requirements, repeat the year, or get the fuck on with your life of digging ditches.
We need to break up the cartel that controls education. Someone with a degree in math or business is far more qualified than the dregs and losers and nitwits that the typical College of Education churns out. He shouldn't have to sit through months of educrat babble and bilge in order to teach in a school. Teacher licensing is nothing more than rent-seeking and featherbedding and guild-gilding. Tenure should be totally abolished. Vouchers should be implemented nationwide. Worthless teachers and administrators should be hounded out of the profession. Worthless schools should be boarded up.
Most of all, we have to CRUSH the teacher's unions. These lazy, stupid, greedy lard asses put the education of our kids about tenth on their list of priorities, far behind fattening their bloated salaries, gold-plating their lavish pensions, padding the length of their 3-month summer vacations, salting the calendar with "inservice" junkets, diverting public money to shiftless in-laws and mobbed-up vendors and left-wing non-profits, and working the phone banks for whichever Democrat makes the most promises to shovel even more taxpayers' money onto the gravy train.
-ccm
Maybe they don't have a political party that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the teachers' union.
-ccm
Now you're getting it.
Oderint dum metuant.
-ccm
Words can't express how little I care for foreigners' opinions. They should worry much more about what we think of them.
-ccm
No matter how much the Latin types insist that they are "americanos" too, nobody outside Latin America pays them the least attention. Nor should they.
I don't want to be a "norteamericano" or an "estadounidense". I am an "americano." The Latinos are oppressing our American cultural identity by denying us our right to call ourselves what we want!
-ccm
Take a look at the facts about this before you make an ass of yourself.
Then let Mark Steyn explain it to you:"According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, between 1973 and 2002 Russia supplied 57 percent of Iraq's arms, France 13 percent, China 12 percent, Brazil 2 percent . . . Brazil? Hang on, where's Washington? Where's London? Well, it turns out Brazil supplied more arms to Iraq than America and Britain combined. London and Washington between them account for less than 2 percent of the Iraqi dictatorship's weapons; the parties that met on Friday [Germany, France, Russia]account for three-quarters.
"Les Anglo-Saxons" are not perfect. But if the alternative is the French, who never met a dictator they didn't like, then Bush and Blair are the best hope of mankind. France, Germany, Russia, Belgium and Canada are not on the side of peace or morality or the Iraqi people. The pictures from the streets of Baghdad make that plain.
On the other hand, they're cheerfully on the side of Total-Fina-Elf, the Western corporation closest to Saddam Hussein. Total had secured development rights to 25 percent of Iraqi oil reserves, a deal that depended on Saddam remaining in power. TotalFinaElf's largest shareholder is a subsidiary of Montreal's Power Corp. Power Corp's co-chief executives are Paul Desmarais Jr., who sits on the Total board, and his brother Andre Desmarais. Andre Desmarais' father-in-law is the prime minister of Canada, Jean Chretien. Canada a refused to join the war to liberate Iraq on "principle."
Got that? For months, the anti-war crowd has insisted that "it's all about oil," that the only reason the Iraqi people were being "liberated" was so that the second biggest oil reserves in the world could be annexed in perpetuity by Dick Cheney and Halliburton and the rest of Bush's Texas oil patch gang. Instead, it turns out that, if it is all about oil, then the principal North American beneficiary of the continued enslavement of the Iraqi people is the family of the Canadian prime minister-that's to say, his daughter and his grandchildren."