Starting off with a smile: The Swiss Reaper. Not so funny: Bovard on the “soft racism” of setting lower expectations for minorities in the classroom. Ugh. Heck, if they were going to ban the poster, it should have been for stupid gun handling, not the shadow of a nipple. (Mildly NSFW.) Suit says V.A. cops stomped on an old vet’s head because he was tired of waiting for treatment. Well, that’s one way to get rid of pesky, resource-consuming patients. You don’t even have to take the time for “death panels.” The Shawshank Residuals. Well deserved. When Earth had two…
Category: Books and Movies
JPFO has a brand-new Twitter feed managed by the amazing Nicki. Obama’s war on government watchdogs. Very nice tribute to Don Kates. Of course the growing cybermilitary will never be used against thee and me. Never. How could you even think such a thing? But now that you have thought such a thing, you can be sure that the NSA, the Pentagon, and a whole bunch of rich government contractors know what to do about it. (H/T H) But while we’re on the subject: “What a toilet hoax can tell us about the future of surveillance.” Eeeeeew. In other non-news:…
This is both fun and educational: How Secure is My Password? Just in case, I suggest you not enter any real passwords, but something entirely different that just has the same general mix of numbers, letters, and symbols as any password you might use. And of course, how long it takes a PC to crack your password and how long it takes some creepazoid with the full power of government behind him are two very different things. Why we should all watch Groundhog Day. (Contains spoilers; but then, is there anybody who hasn’t already seen or doesn’t already know how…
A ramble through human nature …
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Mack. Smack that man. He had to have known — had to from all his years of experience — that this stupid and apparently completely untrue blat would not only be picked up by every enemy of freedom, but that it would be remembered, and exaggerated, for the next 20 years. (“Oh yeah, the Bundy Ranch militia people. They were the ones who used women and babies as human shields …”)
Whatever possessed him?
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A Widow’s Walk Off-Grid to Self-Reliance:
An inspiring, true story of courage and determination
Mason Marshall Press, 2014
$12.95 paperback
$8.95 Kindle
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Photos show a normal, though elderly, little house. But Annie Dodds quickly discovered why she was able to lease the place sight-unseen for just $500 per year. It had no electrical service, no plumbing (not even an outhouse), rats in the attic, a tree staving in one wall, and a host of other cold, hot, wet, dry, dirty, inconvenient problems.
It was the kind of place where, on a bad day, you might open your sock drawer, briefly think, “I don’t have any socks that color,” then realize you were looking at a rattlesnake coiled atop your footwear.
But Annie loved it.
A Widow’s Walk tells the story of how she — recently widowed, emotionally devastated, dead broke, middle-aged, and equipped only with her own resourcefulness — followed her Backwoods Home-inspired dream of living independently and off-grid.
Laird Minor, a good guy and a member of the Living Freedom Commentariat, has just published a new book. It’s called Kairos: A Proposal to Restore Federalism to the United States. Okay, I hear the keyboards of the anarchists and cynics charging up now. I suspect I’m even hearing the sound of a few claws being sharpened out there. I suspect Laird’s expecting that. Nevertheless, some things to note: Kairos is free for the next several days; Laird is more interested in getting it read than getting it sold, so he’s also offering a free .pdf copy to those who…
Inside Her Majesty’s Listening Service. Britain’s GCHQ, NSA’s partner in crime. (H/T JG) Are Bitcoins really just two-bit tulips? Arizona city to checkpoint operators: Get out of town. “Where’s their nerve? Today’s comics mock poop, not the powerful.” Truth. Well spoken. The 15 best movies that didn’t win Oscars. Some good ones in there.
Where were we now? Oh yes, back on the job in California, shortly after my trip to Ireland. Dealing with writers.
I hope not to disappoint after yesterday’s cliffhanger. But this really is about writers and not about defiance and resistance — though it is possible that my old friend Maurice could make another appearance before this story is done.
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Not long after returning, I was making my way down the pile of short-story manuscripts when I ran across another from one of those “two percent” writers — the almost-wonderful ones.
This manuscript told a charming tale, perfect for the kind of magazine we were working on.
Let me tell you a story.
This may ramble a bit because it goes both into the ancient past (well, my ancient past) and into places far away. But it begins with Ms Lynn Shepherd, she of the infamous “JK Rowling should get out of the way so no-talent hacks like me have a chance,” HuffPo journalistic fart.
I never told you, but for a very short time, I was a magazine editor. I mean a very short time. We quickly ran out of ways to praise the airline whose magazine it was and the CEO lost interest.
But in the moments it lived, it took fiction submissions. And paid decently for them. Even then, fiction was dying out in magazines. Had been for decades. The golden days with golden pays of the 1920s-40s were long gone. Nobody wanted made-up stuff anymore. They wanted relevance. But we took fiction submissions.
Boy, did we ever. After our birth announcement appeared in a major writers’-market magazine, we took nothin’ but. Two-foot-tall heaps of it.
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That stuff broke my heart. It freakin’ broke my heart in ways I’ll never forget.
I usually ignore self-important little whiners (like this one, for instance) who think the world would be a better place — for them — if it would only run on their agenda. I mean, seriously. Life is just too short. Anyhow, Ayn Rand, for all her personal and literary faults, said all that ever needed to be said about such types in Atlas Shrugged. Still, it’s fun to watch a master tear self-righteous losers to pieces. To wit: Here’s successful writer Larry Correia savagely fisking a HuffPo whine-a-thon by unsuccessful writer Lynn Shepherd. Shepherd thinks that the world’s most successful…