Today is that silliest of all holidays, Martin Luther King Day. Okay, the man had his good points. But does anybody on the planet really believe he’s the one American who merits a holiday in his honor (ever since Washington and Lincoln got combined into the drearily homogenized “Presidents Day”)? Ridiculous! What makes him so special he should be elevated above Jefferson, Franklin, Thoreau, Washington (Booker T.), Lysander Spooner, Victoria Woodhull, George Washington Carver, Clara Barton, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aaron Copland, Alexander Graham Bell, Anne Hutchinson, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Nellie Bly, Malcolm X, Andrew Carnegie, Maria…
Month: January 2011
I’m a little late getting to this, but for your weekend viewing pleasure: The entire film Guns and Weed (whose creators I interviewed earlier this month) is now on YouTube. No more need to deal with Pirate Bay and BitTorrent clients.
Hooboy. We’re never going to hear the last of this from the “guns as phallic symbols” hoplophobes. The first WikiLeaks revolution? I think the moral here is that, if the government of your country is reasonable and transparent (yeah, rare, I know), WikiLeaks can’t possibly hurt it. But if it’s already corrupt to the core (I mean more corrupt than usual) … Scanners. Detecting nothing. How come government mainstreamers only “get it” after it’s too late for them to do anything about it? The miracle of Wikipedia. Sometimes it’s just great to be reminded that freedom can work so brilliantly.…
6 Crackpot Conspiracy Theories (That Actually Happened). Crackpot bonus question: What would you say if somebody told you that one of the best coffees in the world is made from sh*t?
Via Rational Review News, here’s part IV of Devi Barker’s provocative series on authoritarian sociopathy. All four installments have been good, but this is both the best and the scariest. If the studies Barker cites tell the truth, then the truth is that most people who receive even a hint that they might be powerful a) demand higher standards for other people’s behavior and b) think they’re entitled to be given a pass on their own immoral or illegal acts. It apparently takes very little to put the average Jill or Joe into that mindset. (Likewise, it doesn’t take much…
You. Me. Our firearms. So “Mr. Homeland Security” proposes. Exemptions for The Only Ones, of course. Which goes along with this. Which at least has the virtue of containing the most unintentionally hilarious quote from a congressthing yet this year. ADDED: A freedomista agrees with the elite. Sez their proposals to protect their august selves from hoi palloi like us simply don’t go far enough. 🙂
If you think the weather’s bad in your neighborhood, take a look at this footage from Toowoomba in eastern Australia, where (at latest count) 10 are dead and 78 missing after six inches of rain fell in half an hour. And that’s after weeks of earlier “slow-motion disaster” due to flooding.
Jason Richwine of the American Enterprise Institute asks all the wrong questions: Full-body scanners, invasive pat-downs, harsh carry-on restrictions—has the Transportation Security Administration gone too far? Critics and defenders of the TSA tend to talk past each other, so I propose a new approach to answering the question. Let us imagine there were a major airline that could opt out of all TSA regulations. Call it “Liberty Air.” Liberty Air openly advertises that it takes zero safety precautions when it comes to screening passengers and baggage. Would you fly on this airline? … To bolster the argument, imagine that Liberty…
So what happens now? A politician got a bullet in the brain. A federal judge got dead. A wonderful little girl had her future blown away. Innocents dead and wounded all over the place. And as usual, bystanders did what needed doing. And never mind that the shooter was a well known loon with a long history of weird behavior. Even those elitists who have enough grace to admit that the young jerk’s politics were a devil’s brew of left, right, and total nonsense are sure the real cause is uncivil “right-wing” rhetoric.. Even the local sheriff, making the first…
I must apologize. The creative juices are flowing about as fast as wet cement this week. Multitudes of distracting things going on. In addition to helping screen adopters for a litter of pups being fostered by another volunteer, I’ve acquired a foster puppy of my own (dumped in my neighborhood on a sub-freezing night and rescued by some alert children) and have been following her around all week with paper towels and a bottle of Nature’s Miracle. And today’s the day — tada! — that the kitchen finally gets a new floor. So the refrigerator’s in the living room, the…