Mind and Spirit – Page 50

Silly supremacists

Published June 30, 2015 11:40 am by Claire

Supremicists are pathetic. White supremacists may be the most notable of the breed. Their websites are loaded with scary-looking skulls and lightning bolts, but their prose is barely literate and their “proofs” of their superiority tend to be long-ago debunked books and transparently bogus “scientific evidence.”

They operate in cells of one (or two or three) not because it’s a wise security measure but because they can’t get along with each other for 10 minutes. And much of their semi-literate ranting consists of denunciations of each other.

Not one of these “superior” beings has made a single impressive accomplishment in any area of endeavor — except, rarely, murder. Which gets headlines but fails to impress as a great work of humanity.

But they are far from the only variety of supremacist, and all of them are pathetic.

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Pugs as a symptom of the collapse of Western civilization

Published June 25, 2015 10:56 am by Claire

Ever notice how many people have pugs these days? And how big pugs figure into “funny dog” videos? They’re funky little dogs with not-horrible personalities, but they have so many health problems that you have to practically become a vet to deal with them all. You wonder why people want them. They want them because they look like nonagenarian Alfred E. Neumans. Period. It wasn’t like that back in those mythic golden days. Back then, everybody wanted Rin Tin Tin. Lassie. Roy Rogers’ Bullet. Even though in my neck of the woods we usually just got, “It followed me home,…

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Monday roundup of observations on life and stuff in general

Published June 15, 2015 9:00 am by Claire

Today is the 800th anniversary of the ~~signing~~ sealing of the Magna Carta. Good article on things we mostly don’t know about it and why it still matters.

ADDED: Here’s Bovard’s take on it. (Never trust a king, even after you think you’ve beaten him.)

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I’m sort of getting used to having neither a functional vehicle nor functional legs. There are still moments I want to weep. Like on Friday when a mechanic told me the Xterra was all fixed, running perfectly, even got the service-engine light to go out — and I got in it, found the light back on, and had to limp back home after driving the mere half mile to town.

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Weekend links

Published June 14, 2015 9:35 am by Claire

Hastert may be a criminal. But other feds are worse. (Never mind that Hastert and his ilk made them worse.) I admit it. Maeve Binchy, the mega-selling Irish author of simple domestic tales, is one of my guilty girly pleasures. Binchy died in 2012 of heart problems. While looking for something completely unrelated to her health, I stumbled upon this nice article about how she made the best of her initial diagnosis. Inspiring. The fedgov has recently made it 5x more expensive to do. But Americans are again surrendering their citizenship in small but record-setting numbers. (Tip o’ hat to…

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Thursday links

Published June 11, 2015 6:25 am by Claire

The fedgov’s new attempt to ban tech speech about firearms appears to be an attempt to slap Defense Distributed for getting uppity. But attacks on free speech are getting more ominous — and sometimes more stupid — by the minute. Thank you, Ken White, for revealing this outrage. Another good commentary on the subpoena served on Reason. Intellectuals: Leviathan’s Praetorian Guard. Thanks to a recent WSJ editorial, the world seems to have awakened to the fact that social “science” is little more than an intellectual justification of liberalism. Big debate now going on. Cameron of The Passive Habit agrees, but…

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The art of not going bonkers

Published June 10, 2015 1:02 am by Claire

The good news is that I haven’t gone stark bonkers.

The even better news is that Ava hasn’t. That’s what I dreaded most when I learned that in addition to having a non-working ankle I had a non-working (or at least unsafe) vehicle and was going to be housebound for some unknown time.

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Tuesday links

Published June 9, 2015 1:34 am by Claire

You knew this was coming, didn’t you? (And not a bad thing, IMHO, though why the government should have anything to do with it, I don’t know.) Same-sex marriage and plural marriage. “A Modest Proposal.” If withdrawing just under $10,000 from your bank account should be a crime, then how about … oh, driving just under the speed limit? Carol Browne didn’t have to die. Creative people. Yes. It’s true. They tend to be crazy. “[A]nd writers, specifically, are likelier to possess some sort of mental illness.” (Thanks a bunch, guys.) True, he’s just a Republican politician and it’s nerve-grating…

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The perplexity of complexity

Published June 6, 2015 2:27 am by Claire

Kind of strange. This whole business with the unfixable vehicle has got me feeling absurdly vulnerable. Rationally, this makes no sense. Even with the car business coming on top of the broken ankle (and on top of $500 worth of car repairs in April), it doesn’t put me at any real risk. I’ve got neighbors who’ll pick up my mail or give me a lift to the post office. I’ve got friends who’ll get me to the grocery store. It’s not like I’m going to be stranded in a blizzard by the roadside and get eaten by passing Bengal tigers.…

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Thursday links

Published June 4, 2015 1:20 am by Claire

Deep Web. Looks like an intriguing documentary. (H/T GL) Why does Google want to harvest and store your media for “free”? The four most dangerous words in the English language. (Tip o’ hat to MJR) And 24+ words that ought to be in the English language. (Ditto — and not all the words are SFW.) As usual, The Onion has the best commentary on our newly granted “FREEDOM” from NSA snooping and scooping. (H/T jed) Well, maybe. Millennials are destroying banks and the banks are to blame. Dunno if it’s worth $100k to learn the dreadful details of the secret…

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