Now, normally, if someone wants me to remove them from the list, all they have to do is ask.  There's no need to shout.  There's no need for rudeness.  People's priorities change.  I fully realize this.  So I politely emailed him back:

Sir, that's no problem.  There is no need to get 
upset or shout.  I was given the list when 
I took on the job of disseminating armed self 
defense stories.  I will be glad to remove your 
name from it. 
 
Sincerely, 
Nicki Fellenzer 

Well, THAT just set the boy off on a rant!

Date: 
Friday, March 31, 2006 12:34 PM 
From: 
Cockrell, Gregg (NBC Universal, MSNBC) <*********@MSNBC.COM> 
To: 
******@adelphia.net' <******@adelphia.net> 
Subject: 
RE: (LA) Police: Witness shot man five times 
Size: 
22 KB 
I'M NOT UPSET AND I'M NOT SHOUTING...IF I WERE UPSET YOU'D KNOW IT. 
JUST DON'T EMAIL ME AGAIN. 
EVER. 
IS THAT CLEAR? 
YOU DON'T HAVE TO ANSWER THAT QUESTION. 

I didn't reply, of course, but upon doing a Google search on this jerk, I found out he apparently works as a producer for MSNBC.  As a producer, I would think he would be very familiar with netiquette -- familiar enough to know that when you use all caps and communicate with a person in a confrontational tone, that certainly denotes shouting.  I don't know if this jerk thinks that being an MSNBC producer entitles him to treat everyone else like crap, or whether he's an anti gun loon who somehow wound up on this list inadvertently, but I would certainly hope that he learns a bit of common courtesy before he pisses off the wrong person.

Got another one of those scam letters by e-mail today. The pitch in this one was that the fellow ("My name is John Nelson from South Africa ;living in Madrid,Spain") wanted me to pay his Dad's medical bills.

 

You see, says the would-be e-scammer, "his heart is not functioning properly and it was due to a fatal accident."

 

Fatal accidents will do that.

"Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country," Nagin screeched like an apoplectic photo negative of Robertson.

"Surely he doesn't approve of us being in Iraq under false pretenses. But surely he is upset at black America also. We're not taking care of ourselves."

That's not to mention his promise that New Orleans will be "chocolate" again.  Gee... I wonder what he meant by that remark!

Now, the last time Pat Robertson opened his yap and let something idiotic fly about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon being punished by God with a stroke as divine retribution for dividing up God's land, the Israelis looked at him and said, "Hey, asshat!  Remember that big, multi-million dollar plan you had to build Jesusland on our land?  Well, you can just piss off!"

Now, I've been to Louisiana. I was deployed there in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  And while a lot of folks I met were very nice, I'm thinking if we're waiting for the residents of New Orleans to hold Nagin accountable for his ignorance and make him face political consequences of his words, we could be waiting for quite a while.

UPDATE:  After opening yap and accidentally spewing toxic waste, Nagin tries to wiggle out of taking responsibility for his comments.

Asked by a television reporter afterward whether his vision of a "chocolate" city might be racially divisive, Nagin explained that he hoped for a racially diverse New Orleans.

"Do you know anything about chocolate?" the mayor said. "How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That's the chocolate I'm talking about."

Right.  And rabid monkeys might fly out of my ass on national television any moment now.

The inability to fire the bad and reward the good is the biggest reason schools fail the kids. Lack of money is often cited the reason schools fail, but America doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years. Test scores and graduation rates stayed flat. New York City now spends an extraordinary $11,000 per student. That's $220,000 for a classroom of twenty kids. Couldn't you hire two or three excellent teachers and do a better job with $220,000?

Only a monopoly can spend that much money and still fail the kids.

The U.S. Postal Service couldn't get it there overnight. But once others were allowed to compete, Federal Express, United Parcel, and others suddenly could get it there overnight. Now even the post office does it (sometimes). Competition inspires people to do what we didn't think we could do.

If people got to choose their kids' school, education options would be endless. There could soon be technology schools, cheap Wal-Mart-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows? If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.

This already happens overseas. In Belgium, for example, the government funds education—at any school—but if the school can't attract students, it goes out of business. Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents. "If we don't offer them what they want for their child, they won't come to our school." She constantly improves the teaching, "You can't afford ten teachers out of 160 that don't do their work, because the clients will know, and won't come to you again."

...they're probably following the UK model of teaching:

Don't tell off bad behaviour, teachers told

Teachers should tackle bad behaviour in class by praising their pupils instead of telling them off, according to research published today. ...

 

Dr Swinson insisted his approach was not "soft" on discipline.

You know, I seem to remember a comment made at the Defense Information School recently, after a particularly challenging written exercise that precipitated a "sea of red" on most students' papers that sounded something like, "Maybe we should use another color.  Red is intimidating."

Now, in case you didn't know, DINFOS is a school run by the military - primarily for servicemembers.  I can't imagine any one of us in uniform being terrified or intimidated by the color red on our assignments.  But apparently this sort of snugglesome quasi-education isn't limited to DINFOS.

At Daniels Farm Elementary School in Trumbull, Conn., Karwoski’s teachers grade papers by giving examples of better answers for those students who make mistakes. But that approach meant the kids often found their work covered in red, the color that teachers long have used to grade work.

Parents objected. Red writing, they said, was “stressful.” The principal said teachers were just giving constructive advice and the color of ink used to convey that message should not matter. But some parents could not let it go.

So let's get this straight.  No more berating students in front of the whole class if they misbehave.  No more "stressing" them out by using red to grade their papers.  No more violent, barbaric games such as "Cowboys and Indians" and Dodgeball.  What's next - a volunteer wetnurse for those who haven't been properly weaned?

I wouldn't be at all surprised.