{"id":226,"date":"2010-02-08T03:01:18","date_gmt":"2010-02-08T10:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/?p=226"},"modified":"2010-02-08T03:01:18","modified_gmt":"2010-02-08T10:01:18","slug":"monday-miscellany-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/08\/monday-miscellany-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Miscellany"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><b><a href=\"http:\/\/thomasmullen.blogspot.com\/2009\/12\/us-constitution-18th-century-patriot.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Constitution as an 18th-century Patriot Act.<\/a><\/b> Hm. I&#8217;ve always thought of that applying more to the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts\" target=\"_blank\">Alien and Sedition Acts.<\/a> But it&#8217;s an interesting point. Anyhow, I&#8217;m definitely of the school that says, &#8220;The Constitution isn&#8217;t perfect, but it&#8217;s better than what we have now.&#8221; (Any idea who originated that quote?)\n<li>Last week while looking for a link to the Whiskey Rebellion, <b><a href=\"http:\/\/www.happymountain.net\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">I stumbled across this cool site<\/a> dealing with booze<\/b>, with some emphasis on the bootleg variety. I&#8217;m not a drinker myself. I fall asleep after one glass of wine. I think beer tastes like dish detergent and whiskey tastes like something regurgitated by a particularly dissolute wino. But lots of friends are, or want to be, homemade brewers or vintners. Same site also has an irreverently honest <a href=\"http:\/\/www.happymountain.net\/prohibition.html\" target=\"_blank\">look at prohibition<\/a>. The original one, that is.\n<li><b>Comment spammers.<\/b> They&#8217;re getting more clever at not being obviously spammy. Early on, I approved &#8212; then unapproved &#8212; a few dubious posts. Reason I&#8217;m saying this is that I might be getting <i>too<\/i> suspicious; if you&#8217;ve posted a real, but not real specific, comment and didn&#8217;t see it, I may have &#8220;spammed&#8221; it. BTW, I&#8217;ll never ditch a comment just because it&#8217;s critical; criticize away. The only non-spam comments I ever plan to delete are ones that are vulgar, threatening, irrelevant to the topic, or childishly insulting. (If you want to insult me, do it with class. Extra points for including five-dollar words instead of four-letter ones. \ud83d\ude09 )\n<li>On the contrary, some comments around these parts are so good they could be stand-alone blog posts &#8212; like the <b><a href=\"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/2010\/02\/04\/three-great-sites\/\" target=\"_blank\">ones here<\/a><\/b> and <b><a href=\"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/2010\/02\/07\/does-anybody-know\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a><\/b>. Some comment threads are turning into active dialogs. Short, but thoughtful.\n<li><b><a href=\"http:\/\/www.csmonitor.com\/Commentary\/Walter-Rodgers\/2010\/0203\/Survivors-know-best-Torture-is-always-wrong\" target=\"_blank\">Survivors know best: Torture is always wrong.<\/a><\/b> And &#8220;survivors&#8221; emphatically include those who <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/features\/2008\/08\/hitchens200808\" target=\"_blank\">volunteered for the experience<\/a> knowing they would live and walk free minutes later. Imagine how much worse when <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nydailynews.com\/news\/national\/2010\/02\/08\/2010-02-08_us_soldier_joshua_taber_waterboarded_his_daughter_4_because_she_couldnt_recite_a.html\" target=\"_blank\">you don&#8217;t know how far your tormentors will go<\/a> [link added after entry posted], or when the agony will end.\n<li><b>From the There-Are-No-Coincidences department.<\/b> Or maybe it&#8217;s the It&#8217;s-a-Small-World department. Two days ago, at P.T.&#8217;s suggestion, I watched <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0056241\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The Miracle Worker,&#8221;<\/a> a movie I hadn&#8217;t seen in decades. This morning, I decided that each Monday Miscellany section should have some &#8220;news you can use&#8221; in it. But what? What? Into my head pops &#8220;unschooling.&#8221; The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.unschooling.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">very first site I hit<\/a> contains (to my non-Javascript-accepting browser) nothing but a quote from that very Miracle Worker herself, Annie Sullivan, teacher of Helen Keller. It&#8217;s a good one, too. And here&#8217;s more on unschooling (aka &#8220;delight-driven learning&#8221;): <a href=\"http:\/\/home-educate.com\/unschooling\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sandradodd.com\/unschooling\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.holtgws.com\/whatisunschoolin.html\" target=\"_blank\">here.<\/a>\n<li>Finally, I can understand how bloggers fall into the trap of just tweaking on government stupidity instead of offering real content and real solutions. Gummint supplies <i>so<\/i> much material. Here&#8217;s <b><a href=\"http:\/\/stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com\/2010\/02\/04\/government-response-to-upside-down-faxes\/\" target=\"_blank\">John Stossel on the patent office&#8217;s response to upside-down faxes.<\/a><\/b> And how about that laugh-a-minute Census Bureau? They spend a third of a billion to promote the coming head-count, then make a <b><a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/news\/nation\/census\/2010-02-04-censusgripes_N.htm\" target=\"_blank\">gloriously inept error<\/a><\/b> perfectly calculated to scare the heck out of one entire ethnic group.\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Constitution as an 18th-century Patriot Act. Hm. I&#8217;ve always thought of that applying more to the Alien and Sedition Acts. But it&#8217;s an interesting point. Anyhow, I&#8217;m definitely of the school that says, &#8220;The Constitution isn&#8217;t perfect, but it&#8217;s better than what we have now.&#8221; (Any idea who originated that quote?) Last week while looking for a link to the Whiskey Rebellion, I stumbled across this cool site dealing with booze, with some emphasis on the bootleg variety. I&#8217;m not a drinker myself. I fall asleep after one glass of wine. I think beer tastes like dish detergent and&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/08\/monday-miscellany-2\/\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Monday Miscellany<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}