The Pokemon Center(OOC Chat Thread)

[Dumb Furret]

Holy crap I am not tired what the butt DST  

[Netherworld Overlord-Has]

Y dis heer?  

[Dumb Furret]

because stone cold said so  

[Darksol88]

Moving this back to the original board since there's very little point to it being here.  

[Netherworld Overlord-Has]

smell wat sone cold cooked?  

[Dumb Furret]

FOR THIS TRANSGRESSION, I NOW OWN SOL'S BUTT

which i will now gently caress  

[Dumb Furret]

alias ocrawl='ssh crawl.akrasiac.org -l joshua'  

[Dumb Furret]

Says the one that bathes in black sharpie ink.  

[Netherworld Overlord-Has]

mommy loves you both equally stop fighting  

[Dumb Furret]

>Hitomoshi (607): Hitomoshi’s light burns brighter when it’s sucked up a human or Pokemon’s life energy.

>Lamplar (60 cool : It’s feared as an ominous Pokemon. It drifts unsteadily through town, searching for the souls of the deceased.

>Chandelar (609): It blazes when it absorbs a soul. It swings the flames on its arms to put opponents into a hypnotic trance.

>Hitomoshi 607: While appearing to shed light and serve as a guidepost, it sucks out creatures’ lifeforce.

>Lamplar 608: It appears before those on their deathbeds, severs the soul from the body, and immediately sucks it up.

>Chandelar 609: If something is wrapped in Chandela’s flame, its soul is sucked out and immolated. Only the cast off body remains.  

[Dumb Furret]

As a parent, what I hate about these tests is that it forces the teachers to teach a very specific, test-related curriculum that I feel is not educating the kids adequately. The teacher has 20 minutes each day that they can use for non-TAKS material. They did not begin to teach my daughter how to properly add multiple digit numbers until 4th grade, until then they taught them how to round off and estimate. Practically ALL my daughter's math work in 2nd and 3rd grade was practicing estimating sums and then picking which one of the four answers was most likely. Our school gets very high marks in grade school math, because they have been taught how to game multiple choice math questions.

On the other hand, these are things that the school made no attempt to teach the kids:

No phonics instruction until 1st grade, all reading was word recognition with no training on how to sound it out, and they didn't even start in on reading until near the end of kindergarten. We taught our daughter how to sound out words, and the teachers told her to stop doing that because it was too slow, if you don't know the word, skip it.

No proper multiplication, yet. They were taught in fourth grade a system where they round off and estimate and then check the different close potential answers by that method where you can tell if one number is not the correct product of another by adding together the digits and such. When I went to school, I was put in remedial math in the fourth grade for not having my multiplication tables memorized all the way up to 12x12. If my daughter just knows that 6x8=48, the teacher still requires her to SHOW HER WORK. For multiplying two single digit numbers, in fourth grade (where we learned long division and multiple digit multiplication).

No clock reading skills, NOT EVEN DIGITAL - we didn't realize until last year my daughter didn't know how many minutes were in an hour or hours in a day.

Likewise, no calendar skills.

But they have that week or two after the tests to teach them some stuff not on the test, right? No, they just watched movies every day.

Every year we come closer to pulling the kids out of school and homeschooling them. They're getting all their real learning at home, anyway.  

[Dumb Furret]

Now, as I'm sure all of you know, the Iowa Supreme Court last year decided unanimously to allow gay marriage in the state of Iowa. After all the jokes of "Wait, Iowa? They have gay people there?" were done, this was pretty widely regarded as a good decision, and a big step forward for the whole Gay Rights Movement. Of course, no big steps forward for the Gay Rights Movement come without someone whining about it, but this time, the whining has come from people who actually have the power to change things, and (unfortunately), the very people who gave us this decision are at risk for losing their positions. The attack on the Iowa Supreme Court is coming in two stages:

Stage 1: Remove the justices who made this decision

Three Iowa Supreme Court Justices are up for retention this year, and unlike the past 38 years, it's looking like a real race, instead of a no-brainer. Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and Justices David Baker and Michael Streit are the three, and all were a part of the decision to allow gay marriage in Iowa, which is something that, according to Bob Vander Plaats, failed gubernatorial candidate and CEO of MVP Leadership in Sioux City, IA, cannot stand. Vander Plaats, like most republicans in the state, thinks that the "judicial activism" that made that decision possible was a gross misuse of their power, and that the judges should have given the choice to either the people of Iowa, or the Iowa Legislature. Unlike most republicans, however, he's take up to very actively campaigning against the three justices, and because of this campaigning, he's made it a real race. Now, these are not bad judges by any stretch of the imagination. In the plebiscite published by the Iowa State Bar Association, the lowest of the three judges recieved a 72% retention rating, and the highest recieved an 83.7% rating. However, in a recent poll by the Des Moines Register, only 44% of Iowans say they will vote to retain all three judges, 40% say they will vote to remove all three, and 16% say they will vote to retain "some". This state hasn't had a justice removed since the non-partisan method we use to choose our judges was put into place in 1962, which leads very nicely into the second stage of this assault.

Stage 2: Change how the Iowa Supreme Court justices are chosen

Along with his campaign to remove the 3 judges from the Iowa Supreme Court, Bob Vander Plaats is also campaigning to change Iowa's judicial system from a non-partisan, merit based selection system to a system much closer to the US Supreme Court's selection method, where the governor appoints and the Iowa House and Senate vote to approve the justice, a method which would lead to the court as a whole being much more partisan. Now, thankfully, some very powerful people (including former US Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor) have come out in support of keeping the courts in Iowa as they are right now, as well as the Iowa State Bar Association.

Well, is this actually gonna happen?

Unfortunately, it's looking more and more likely. Vander Plaats has gotten the support of former Iowa Governor and current Iowa Gubernatorial candidate Terry Branstad, who left his position as President of Des Moines University and came out of retirement from politics to run in this year's election for governor, and Branstad has said that he thinks "the system is flawed", and that he is in favor of a system like the Federal Court's, where the governor is not limited to two or three selections given to him by a non-partisan committee. Branstad is the big favorite in this coming election, and it's looking like changing the judicial system here is one of the first things he's going to try to get done while in office.

As for the judge retention, I'm not going to have a good answer for whether or not they'll be retained until after the election. What little poll data I could find is split almost down the middle, and all that's needed for retention is a simple majority, so I honestly can't say whether or not I think they'll be retained. I do know that more money has been poured into the vote for their retention, from both sides, than ever before for a retention vote.

What exactly does this mean?

Well, what this all comes down to is gay marriage. That's the reason for the backlash, the reason for the worry about the retention votes, and the potential change in the Iowa Supreme Court. The republicans in charge of their party in Iowa don't want gay marriage, and are trying everything they can to get rid of it. Luckily, even if these changes do go through, the road to getting rid of it isn't that easy, as they can't simply remove that decision from the books. Either another case involving gay marriage has to come to the Supreme Court, and the court has to have enough different people for the decision to counter the original decision, or there has to be a constitutional amendment. Luckily for people against gay marriage, this is the year that Iowa has a vote for a constitutional convention, and a lot of money has been thrown around, mostly by anti-gay groups (and the Catholic Church, though the two aren't entirely mutually exclusive) to get one going, with the ultimate goal being a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. This would still be a few years down the line, and I'd hope that by the time it happens, citizens of Iowa realize that gay marriage has not affected them one bit, and they reject the amendment entirely (a long shot, but possible).

Why am I telling all of you?

Because this is wrong. I know gay marriage is an issue a lot of people on this board care deeply about, and that is really at the core of this whole situation. For those of you who live in Iowa, I want you to vote next Tuesday for retention, and against a constitutional convention, and even for Not Terry Branstad, if this so drives you to. Also, I want this to be known, because this is one of the most important things up for a vote this election day (at least in terms of gay rights), and it would be a shame for a judicial system as highly praised as Iowa's to become even more partisan politics, especially in the judicial system, where they don't need to be.