Joe Duarte

Yup, they’ve got us on the ropes

When I went to grad school at UNC I played intramural flag football. All the other players were undergrads, mostly 18-19. This was 2007-08, when texting was new and more siloed with teens, not common with most adults yet. It was a brief period when teens seemed to have built their own language. (Also, they were mostly using number pads, since the iPhone had just come out – it was a few years before smartphones became standard.) When the team coordinator (a freshman) texted me or even sent emails, where he used his texting dialect, I literally could not understand what he was saying. I even told him I didn't understand him, and he translated it to English for me... That special Lord of the Flies language went away. Now teens just use bad grammar. But there were a couple of years when we were almost overthrown by teens using their own language.

Last night, after she’d gone to bed, my 16 y/o daughter receives a text from a friend. (We keep electronics in our room at night). I know my daughter isn’t gonna see it for a while and I know the answer to the girl’s dance-class-related question. So I just pick up the phone and answer it really quick as if I’m my daughter and leave it at that. Tonight, I see her giggling over her phone. I ask what’s up. Apparently, the other girl’s mother had just wanted to get an answer to the question really quick, so she picked up HER daughter’s phone and texted mine as if she were her daughter. (basically both of us were too lazy to go through the rigmarole of explaining, “hi, this is Mrs. So-and-so, and here’s why I’m texting you on your friend’s phone…” But the funny part was how the two girls figured this out. Because the first one was so appalled at seeing her mother‘s perfectly punctuated and capitalized sentences, that she felt she needed to come clean that it was her mom lest my daughter think she is that conscientious. And my daughter, likewise, didn’t want her friend to think that SHE uses correct grammar when texting either. So what I learned today is that it is apparently humiliating to be caught correctly formulating sentences via text.

This is not said often enough

Kathy Hochul making a weak plea for wealthy people who have left New York (to red states like Florida) to come back to pay their high taxes to fund failing (unaccountable) social programs: “I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs we have in our state. Some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. Ok! Cut the me the checks. But if you want to supportive, maybe the first step should be go down to palm beach and see who you can bring back home

“was INTENDING to TRY TO recover from the devastation of its nuclear infrastructure.” The IAEA assesses the enriched uranium at Natanz is sealed shut. American blood shed over an intention to try to recover devastated nuclear facilities.

Donald Trump was overwhelmingly elected by the American people to be our President and Commander in Chief. As our Commander in Chief, he is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat, and whether or not to take action he deems necessary to protect the safety and security of our troops, the American people and our country.  The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is responsible for helping coordinate and integrate all intelligence to provide the President and Commander in Chief with the best information available to inform his decisions.  After carefully reviewing all the information before him, President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion.