The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Have a Few Hours to Waste?
I found this game a while back, but now it’s new and improved – and it’s Shareware
Prairie Dog Hunt Pro ’97 (hey, I didn’t say I’d visited it recently.)
It’s got it all, but mostly it’s got exploding prarie dogs! (no SARS here!)
They blow up REAL good!
Give it a shot (pun intended.)
Correction: Kim du Toit pointed out (damned quickly, I might add) that prarie dogs are spreaders of monkeypox not SARS. See the cartoon:
(Steve Benson, of the Arizona Republic)
This is a view of the smoke plume from the Aspen fire in the Catalina Mountains North of Tucson. It’s taken from the Northwest suburb of Oro Valley, not too far from where I live.
The smoke today isn’t as bad as this, but that’s because the worst of the fire has descended down the back slope of the range. Ugly.
The story is here.
I guess I won’t be going up to Summerhaven for a while.
“Oh, we almost forgot to unplug Kevin…”
I think I spend entirely too much time on-line.
If you haven’t been following this story, Bishop O’Brien of the Phoenix, AZ diocese made a deal with Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley to admit that he’d sheltered priests who had sexually abused parishioners. Worse than that, it appears that Phoenix was made the dumping-ground for “troubled priests” as Boston’s Cardinal Law (no saint, himself) considered Phoenix a diocese “with policies that are less restrictive than ours.” Then, O’Brien backpedaled on his statement.
Then O’Brien was involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident. He is now the first Bishop to have felony charges pressed against him.
Frank Keating, former governor of Oklahoma and a member of an investigative board examining the breadth and scope of sexually abusive priests in the Catholic church was recently forced to resigned from the board after he “compared the Catholic Church’s instinct for secrecy to that of La Cosa Nostra.”
Chuck Asay, once again, hits the nail on the head:
Pickings must be slim.
The local lefty rag here in Tucson, the Tucson Weekly, is a fairly amusing paper I read every now and then just to see what the other side is up to. And, give them credit, they do a better job of bird-dogging the local government than either of the two local “mainstream” yellow-journals. They even print stuff by conservatives! (Well, one conservative, and he’s pretty close to where the right-wing raving lunatics meet the left-wing barking moonbats.)
What they do print, though, is letters to the editor, and I’m three-for-three now. The Weekly has a far-left columnist by the name of Renée Downing who publishes every other week or so, who wrote a column for the April 3 edition entitled “A Fine Line” that – to put it bluntly – pissed me off. So I wrote a letter to the editor. And they printed it, almost verbatim. They only edited it for length, and the cut was minor. If you want, you can read it here. (It’s entitled “Meet Renée Downing, Hateful Liberal” – I’m not responsible for the title. Scroll down, it’s the last one on the page.) That column drew fire from at least one other person. In the April 24 issue, see the letter entitled “Renée Downing’s Biggest Fan”.
The same week they published my first missive (and after the taking of Baghdad) Renée equivocated with her column, “In Search of Some Good Amusement” and I felt I ought to task her for it, so I wrote another submission. It was accepted. It’s in the May 8 issue, entitled “Yet More Love for Renée Downing” (next to last letter on the page).
Well, apparently the criticism got to old Renée, so in the June 12 issue she wrote a column entitled “I Can See Clearly Now” that, once again, inspired my pen keyboard. I was tempted to write a complete rebuttal column, but I knew they’d never print that, so I whipped out a short and pithy piece and wafted it through the ether to them Tuesday afternoon. They called me today and told me to expect to see it in a week or two.
In order to spare you the wait, (like you really care) here it is in its entirety now:
I see Ms. Downing’s been affected by the volume (and vitriol) of the mail responding to her op-eds. (“I Can See Clearly Now.”)
Alas, her conversion seems somehow…contrived.
The heart of the liberal still beats firmly in that breast. Yes, the caring and compassion of the true liberal still shines through like a beacon. There’s no fooling us. She cares deeply about everyone and everything around her. I mean, just read her words:
“I’m a female Republican so reading and listening aren’t really necessary for me.”
“…those soft, balding, white men who, even in middle age, must struggle every day with crippling mother issues.“
Yes, by G_d, she does care about each and every one of us! She wants us to get everything that’s coming to us. Good and hard!
But on the off-chance that some of that criticism did crack the liberal shell, I sincerely invite her to join this soft, balding white man (who has no mother issues I’m aware of, crippling or otherwise) at the Tucson Rifle Club where I would be pleased to introduce her to some of the contents of my in-home arsenal so that she can free herself of the crippling fear that most liberals seem to have of firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens. Any step forward is a positive one, I always say.
I cannot help but wonder if she’ll take me up on the offer….
As I noted here I have started reading Ayn Rand’s seminal work, Atlas Shrugged, a book that at least one survey deterimined was the most important book after the Bible to a good number of people.
Normally I’m a voracious reader, and I read quite quickly.
No offense to people who love this book, but IMHO it’s dreck. Her characters are cardboard cutouts with psychoses for personalities – all of them. Her prose is stilted, repetative, and bombastic. Her world-model has all the intricacy and detail of a Leggo construction, but less color. And the BIG Leggo blocks, not the little ones. I’m not a third of the way in, and it’s almost painful to read. Dagny and Reardon have (in the modern vernacular) “hooked up” and they’re so dysfunctional that I keep expecting Francisco to show up in leather and dominate them both. Methinks Rand had some pretty severe issues with sex.
Her essays are interesting, though her style even there is heavy. (Struggle through The Comprachicos some time. I think her analysis is correct, and a few decades after she wrote it we’re paying the cost of what she accurately described, but a stylish and engaging writer she was not.) I give her the benefit of the doubt because English was not her native language, but this manifesto badly camoflaged as a novel is almost more than I can deal with. I have been promised that it will improve, but there’s this thing called “suspension of disbelief” and it requires better writing than Ms. Rand seems capable of. If I haven’t suspended disbelief by now you can bet your a** I’m not going to.
I’m going to slog to the finish, I’ll read all the essays she writes as dialog and cringe at the relationships between the pricipals, but I doubt that I’ll enjoy the experience as so many others seem to have.
(I wonder if this will result in hate-mail?)
UPDATE: As of August 8, 2013 due to the herculean efforts of reader John Hardin, the original JS-Kit/Echo comment thread for this post is now available (for reading only) here.
This news is from Canada, but it’s an idea that I think is probably a good one: Hamilton school to offer single-sex classrooms
Learning improves when boys, girls are separated, studies say
An Ontario school is giving parents an option rarely offered in the public school system — all-girl and all-boy classes.
Starting in the fall, parents of Grades 7 and Grade 8 students at Cecil B. Stirling School in Hamilton will have the choice of keeping their children in a co-ed classroom or moving them into single-sex classes, which have traditionally been limited to private schools.
The program taps a growing body of research that suggests boys and girls learn differently and benefit from being separated, particularly in such key subjects as mathematics, reading and writing.
Teachers used to worry about girls falling behind in science and math but the concern has now switched to boys.
There’s more, go read the rest.
I think that there’s a lot wrong in the school systems here that single-sex classrooms aren’t going to affect, but any effort to actually improve things is welcome. I’ve become convinced that the destruction wrought on our schools cannot have been an accident – at least not completely.
There’s nothing that can’t be fixed with the proper application of a little high-explosive, I always say.
Artist is David Jacobson, Journal-News, NY.
Then There’s This:
Isn’t THAT the truth.
Artist is Chuck Asay, again, from the Colorado Springs Gazette.
