Somebody over at Examiner.com has begun disappearing David Codrea’s columns on phony premises. Ironic considering David’s earlier censorship by the new JPFO. Really bad considering David gets paid by the page view for his Examiner work. Here, have a cigar. But only if you’re rich enough to qualify for the “crony exemption.” The corruption of DA’s offices. It just gets deeper and dirtier. (H/T S) So Ross Ulbricht thought he was better than the laws of this country. But then (as Neil Smith likes to point out) we’re all better than the the law. Sounds as if the judge sentenced…
Category: Mind and Spirit
Spirituality, moods, feelings, and thinking free to live free.
“The Haunted Beach.” (pdf, about 4,600 words) I submitted this to a short-story contest/anthology a few months ago. It was rejected. Maybe because it was no good. Or maybe because the theme of the anthology was “optimism.” The rules said submissions could have dark elements but needed to be optimistic overall. I thought this story just bubbled with optimism (after said “dark elements”). But you can probably see why contest judges might disagree.
And some cool custom knives (below) My ankle was feeling good enough this morning that the boot was actually more of a nuisance than the break. Got Ava back from Furrydoc’s kennels. ‘Bout the second thing she did was body-slam herself right into that leg. How did I end up with such a lunatic dog? She was amusing when she was a year or two or five years old. But she turns 10 this fall. Why can’t she just sleep a lot like a good senior dog? —— MJR, who sent this article decrying the current trend in “loud manliness,”…
The Boy Scouts: doing their best to close the gender gap. (Yeah, don’t ask me how that became their mission.) By Eagle Scout Jim Bovard. And don’t even get my friendly local Scout leaders started on the Michelle Obama-inspired (recently) new requirements for the cooking badge. Where’d the fun go? Any kid who had to learn cooking that way would probably avoid the kitchen for the rest of his life. You want to be treated with dignity? Behave with dignity. (Via ML who, like me, doesn’t agree with all Ringer’s points but thinks the overall piece is spot on.) Six…
UPDATE: August 18, 2017. Christopher Cantwell — an angry supposed libertarian at the time I wrote this post — has since moved into the dark world of white supremacy and hatred of Jews. This is the second time I’ve known someone to do this. It’s incomprehensible to me how someone could rush (and in both cases they did rush) from individualist to the worst sort of collectivist. All I can say is that in both cases the a**holes in question were consumed with anger even before they made the change. When I write this post back in 2015, I found…
I’m deadlining. Um … s’posed to be. I’ve actually been in that blank, dull state that’s 100x worse than the next-worst part of writing. I just got over it a few minutes ago and though I might push my deadline by a few days (hate that, but it’s a monthly magazine and I suspect they may not even look at submissions for a week or two), I’m now breathing a different, clearer air. I hear there are scribblers, quite a few of them multi-millionaires, who don’t suffer writer’s block. I hate them all. Hate them indiscriminately, regardless of race, creed,…
“‘Safe Spaces’ and the Mote in America’s Eye.” For some time I’ve been mean to university students who feel entitled to a “safe space” — by which they seem to mean a space where they are insulated from ideas they don’t like. I call these young people out for valuing illusory and subjective safety over liberty. I accuse them of accepting that speech is “harmful” without logic or proof. I mock them for not grasping that universities are supposed to be places of open inquiry. I condemn them for not being critical about the difference between nasty speech and nasty…
Immune-system drug combo “melts” tumors. Yeah, I know there are always reports like this that eventually come to nothing. But this is pretty dramatic. Are you nuts, Mr. Cop??? Officer shoots (at) dog in a crowd. Fortunately misses. Dog just looked as if it was being rambunctiously friendly, too. (Here’s the video if you can’t see it on that page.) If you’re going to have anti-abortion laws, you’re going to have to be prepared not only to prosecute every doctor, nurse, and med-tech for murder, but to investigate every miscarriage as a potential homicide. Some countries do. Results aren’t pretty.…
Where were you on April 19? On April 19, 1993 I was on a long drive toward a client’s headquarters when I heard the Branch Davidians were burning. For some reason I hadn’t taken the siege very seriously to that point (even though I’d taken the earlier Weaver siege as seriously as I’d ever taken anything in my life). Just a bunch of Jim Jonesy cultists, I thought. I figured the FBI would wait them out until Koresh got done with his preposterous “seven seals” manuscript, then peaceably arrest and later release most of them. Cause you know, why would…