Is This Any Way To Run a Drug War? (Video)
Nick Gillespie | April 18, 2007, 9:25am
The Smoking Gun is turning 10 years old and they're celebrating by beefing up the video component of that invaluable source for all sorts of official, semi-official, and secret documents.
Here's a clip they're touting that will be of special interest to Reason readers--and to all opponents of the War on Drugs and stupid government in general. Watch as a Drug Enforcement Administration agent literally shoots himself in the foot with a Glock handgun while teaching Florida school kids about gun safety. "I'm the only one professional enough in this room that I know of to handle a Glock 40," boasts the agent immediately before injuring himself.
After the boom-boom, he sagely adds: "Guys: Never play with guns."
Which, if nothing else, should have made the kids glad that he wasn't teaching sex ed.
Take the rest of the morning off and check out TSG's video archive here.
John | April 18, 2007, 1:21pm | #
"Why the love affair with the letter "x"? The formation of the modern baseball leagues coincides, more or less, with a broad movement to simplify English spelling. The father of the movement, Noah Webster, had pushed to create a "national language" a century earlier. Webster wanted to distinguish American English from British English by correcting irregular spellings and eliminating silent letters. Some of Webster's suggestions took—"jail" for "gaol"—while others haven't caught on—"groop" for "group."
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Near the turn of the century, advocacy groups like the Spelling Simplification Board pushed for spelling reform with renewed vigor; they argued that millions of dollars were wasted on printing useless letters. The editor of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill, supported the idea. Medill stripped final "e"s from words like "favorite" in the pages of his newspaper and even suggested more wholesale changes that would have made written English look something like e-mail spam. In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt ordered the government printer to adopt some simplified spellings—such as replacing the suffix "-ed" with "-t" at the end of many words—for official correspondence. Congress responded by passing a bill in support of standard orthography later that year.
By the first decade of the 1900s, "sox" was already a common way to shorten "socks." The "x" version of the word frequently appeared in advertisements for hosiery, for example. And in his 1921 tome The American Language, H.L. Mencken described "sox" as a "vigorous newcomer." "The White Sox are known to all Americans; the White Socks would seem strange," he wrote.
The spelling reform movement weakened over the course of the 20th century. But by the time "sox" fell out of fashion, the baseball nicknames were already entrenched in the sports pages and in the hearts of the teams' fans."
http://www.slate.com/id/2128744/
Jack, Rywyn, No I really don't just make shit up.
