Tag: blogging

Debate Invitation # Who Knows?

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Debate Invitation # Who Knows?

I sent this out yesterday:

Subject: Your recent column “Congress Stops an NRA-backed Gun Law?”

Mr. Rothstein:

I read with interest today your recent column, Congress Stops an NRA-Backed Gun Law? What’s This Country Coming To? As you can probably tell from my email address, I’m on the opposite side of this topic from yours. As you can imagine, I have a number of issues with things you stated as fact in your piece that are not so, and a number of questions about those statements.

I’d like to make you an offer: I’d love to discuss this article with you – in print – at my blog, The Smallest Minority. We can do this by email correspondence, or I will be more than happy to give you guest-posting privileges. I promise that I will not edit anything you say, other than for physical appearance and clarity.

I don’t expect to change your mind, nor you to change mine, but I want to have an honest public exchange between two people distinctly on opposite sides of this topic so that the undecided can read – and decide – based on the merits of the arguments.

I’ve made this offer on a number of occasions to a number of your colleagues and others. The acceptance rate has been disappointingly low. Not zero, but low.

Thank you for your attention.

Kevin Baker
Tucson, AZ

24 hours and no response yet, but hope springs eternal.

UPDATE, 8/10: Mr. Rothstein has responded! Via email:

Mr. Baker:

Sorry for the delay in responding to this. It’s August, and things are moving in slower motion than is usual. I received a large number of emails in response to my July 25 column, many of them rightly pointing to errors, and all of them well considered. Today I posted a follow up piece which you can find at:: http://uspolitics.einnews.com/article.php?nid=723681

I’d be happy to take you up on your offer to exchange views on your web site. What do you have in mind for a format?

Joe Rothstein

(Cue Mission: Impossible theme music . . .)

Deaths in the Family

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Deaths in the Family

Just . . . DAMN.

I’ve been reading Rachel Lucas since before I began blogging, and like everyone else, I laughed at her posts about her dogs Digger, Sunny, and lately Maggie. Digger died a while back, but Sunny passed just this Tuesday. Sunny holds a special place in my heart, for when I was selling the “F^*k It! McCain ’08” bumperstickers, Rachel said she’d pose Sunny with one on her head.

And she did:


I think that was good for at least 100 sales.

And today I found out that Chris Byrne and his family lost their companion Mac on Wednesday.

I had to put my dog down Feb. 14, 1996. I haven’t gotten another one. Still miss her.

Dammit.

Words of Advice

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Words of Advice

My wife and I pulled into our driveway at 7:00PM this evening from our weekend in San Diego. I’m just now catching up on a few things on the intertubes. While I didn’t have a laptop with me in California, I did have my Ipod Touch which has WiFi, so I was able to check my email, comments, and traffic, plus surf for information (like Mitsuwa Marketplace and the Embarcadero / Seaport Village, plus where to buy dry ice for all the stuff that needed to be preserved on the six-hour drive home.

BUT – you can’t BLOG from an Ipod Touch. WRITING email is also a no-go. But it was plenty handy to have, plus it provided the soundtrack for the trip, too! Very handy device!

Oh, and the Japanese are some very odd people. In the Mitsuwa Marketplace I saw for sale an $850 toilet seat (marked down from the MSRP of $1,200). It’s available on the web for a much more reasonable $686.40. However, for very nearly $700 (or $850 retail), I believe I would be expecting something more than:

  • Gentle Aerated, Warm Water, Dual Action Spray with cycling movement and massage feature
  • Adjustable water temperature and volume
  • Warm air drying with three variable temperature settings
  • Automatic air deodorizer
  • Convenient wireless Remote Control with large LCD panel
  • SoftClose anti-bacterial seat
  • Convenient Control Panel
  • Heated Seat with Temperature Control
  • Docking Station Easy to Install and Clean

I’m fairly certain it would involve kinky sexual practices illegal in most countries.

And I might never leave the bathroom again.

Either that, or I’d run screaming from it.

You just don’t expect to encounter something like that in what is, after all, a grocery store . . . .

NO BLOG FOR YOU

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NO BLOG FOR YOU!

It’s Saturday. My wife and I have been in San Diego since late Thursday night, and I don’t have a computer with me. (It’s our 14th anniversary.) So NO BLOG FOR YOU!

I’ll be back in Tucson Sunday evening. Maybe something then.

Maybe not.

I love Blogger’s “delayed posting” function!

Well THIS is Interesting

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I received an email this morning:

Dear Editor of The Smallest Minority,

According to Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged has gone from fiction to fact in 52 years. If you haven’t already, now is the time to finally read it, and I would be happy to send you a review copy.

Atlas Shrugged has received praise from Business Week, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fox, CNN.com, among others. Below is an article from the Ayn Rand Institute, explaining the significance of Atlas Shrugged and the tea parties that will be going on this weekend, July 4th.

If you like the article, please feel free to reprint it on your site. There are excerpts and other materials available. Please let me know if you’d like me to coordinate an interview with a representative from The Ayn Rand Institute. Feel free to contact me with your editorial needs.

I’m looking forward to working with you on this controversial novel.

This was from the Publicist for a book marketing company. It would appear that another industry has now embraced bloggers and blogs as a new way to reach a mass audience. Pretty cool, though I don’t think I’m her particular target audience in this case.

Oh, and here’s the rather brief article:

The Significance of Ayn Rand’s Novel Atlas Shrugged
From The Ayn Rand Institute
“I refuse to apologize for my ability — I refuse to apologize for my success — I refuse to apologize for my money.”

The U.S. economy is in shambles, with every nightly newscast bringing word of new government interventions. Americans are alarmed and desperate for answers: How did we get here? How will we recover? That might sound like a description of today’s world, but in fact it’s also a sketch of the world Ayn Rand created in her classic novel Atlas Shrugged.

The tea parties testify to the outrage that many Americans feel toward Washington’s explosive growth in the past few decades — especially under Presidents Bush and Obama. Atlas Shrugged not only gives voice to this outrage, it provides both a profound explanation of the cause of today’s crisis — and a positive, radical solution to it.

Why is it that every problem seems to call for increased government intervention at the expense of freedom? Why is it that businessmen inevitably take the blame for any crisis? Why are the most competent, most successful Americans smeared as greedy and selfish? To these questions and many others, Atlas Shrugged gives answers unlike anything you’ve ever heard.

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns — or dollars. Take your choice — there is no other — and your time is running out.”

* * *

“If we who were the movers, the providers, the benefactors of mankind, were willing to let the brand of evil be stamped upon us, and silently to bear punishment for our virtues — what sort of ‘good’ did we expect to triumph in the world?”

* * *

‘Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. You are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will now take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality . . . but to discover it.”

Learn the meaning of these quotes — and the revolutionary ideas behind them — by picking up Atlas Shrugged. Discover why Ayn Rand held that nothing less than a total separation between state and economics can save this country. Discover Ayn Rand’s defense of the individual’s moral right to pursue his own happiness — the indispensable precondition of his political right to pursue his own happiness. Discover a gripping novel that challenges today’s intellectual mainstream and provides an alternative to the anti-freedom ideas that are undermining American liberty.

Discover Atlas Shrugged.

Personally, I appreciate her philosophical essays far more than her attempts at novels, but your mileage may vary. I could not get through John Galt’s 70+ page speech, myself.

Back Online

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Back Online

The Comcast service guy has come and gone. Yes, a subcontractor cut my cable, and then connected the other end to a spot where it shouldn’t have been in the first place. Took the cable repair guy a couple of hours to patch and fix.

The DTs are starting to abate, now.

It’s Comcastic

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It’s Comcastic!

Apparently a contracted crew working for Comcast in my neighborhood has cut the line going to my house – no TV, no internet, no nada. And they can’t get a technician to look at it until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. I’m expecting no service at home for at least the next couple of days.

Blogging, needless to say, shall be light.

RIP, Acidman

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Three years ago today, Rob “Acidman” Smith passed away from a pulmonary embolism.

Just, damn.

Three years ago, I wrote this:

I’ve been reading Acidman since about the time I discovered the blogosphere. I started this blog just so I could debate one of Rob’s commenters on the topic of gun control.

Say what you want about Rob, he didn’t pull any punches. He said what he meant, meant what he said, and took no shit from anybody. I admire and respect that. It was fascinating watching the ongoing train wreck that was often his life, and I feel for both Sam (his daughter) and Quinton (son from his second wife “the bloodless cunt”), and especially for his Grandmother. Outliving your children is one thing. Outliving your grandchildren must be especially hard.

Rest in peace, Acidman. If there’s an afterlife, I hope yours is a lot like Costa Rica, with sweet nubile women, a working Roscoe, and all the good food, good beer, and good company you could ever want.

I still get an occasional visitor from Rob’s archives. Per his request, Gut Rumbles is still up, and his past posts are rotated around the front page.

It’s really kind of odd, but I “know” more people through the internet who have died than I know personally who have. Cathy Siepp in March of 2007. AR15.com prolific poster “Eric the (fill in the blank) Hun.” Airboss. Christiana Hendrix, wife of Mike Hendrix of Cold Fury. I’m sure there are more, but those come immediately to mind.

Yesterday both Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died, earlier this week Ed McMahon passed. I took a look at Rob’s archives to see what he had to say about them. Nothing on Farrah or Ed, but he had quite a bit to say about Michael:

In MY humble opinion, Michael Jackson is a great performer but one of the most fucked-up human beings (if he’s even human anymore) on the face of the planet. Look at what the confused bastard has done to himself through plastic surgery over the years. He resembles a goddam ALIEN, for crying out loud.

He is a weird dude.

He can sing, he can dance and he can entertain. I don’t know why he couldn’t be happy with those abilities looking just the way he did when he was born. I am not nearly the good-looking guy I was when I was 26 years old. Years of bar-life, shiftwork, hard-drinking and hard-living have taken a toll on me. My hair is gray silver, my beard is the same color and I don’t have the same sparkle in my eyes that I did 25 years ago.

But I remain pretty much who I was back then.

And he remained that way to the end, I think.

Michael Jackson is one fucked-up individual, but I believe that the people going after his ass for child molestation are more fucked-up than he is.

—

I dreamed that I played basketball with Michael Jordan last night. I was proud, and I remember thinking in the locker room after the game, when Mike shook my hand, “I have played with THE VERY BEST, and I didn’t embarrass myself.” I regretted waking up from that one.

When I start dreaming about Michael Jackson, someone drag me off and shoot me.

—

What do YOU think is an erotic fruit? (and any reply containing the name of Michael Jackson WILL be deleted.)

—

Is Michael Jackson a pedophile? I don’t know, but I DO KNOW what he’s guilty of. He’s different. In fact, that crazy bastard is downright ALIEN if you look at what he’s done to himself over the years.

But that shit doesn’t make him a criminal.

People are always too eager to jump on ANYBODY who is “different.” I know that fact because I’ve been different for my entire life. Individuals suffer when they don’t join the mob.

Think back to high school. You needed to wear the “right” clothes, hang around the “cool” people or face scorn and ostrascism. I tried that shit for a while, until I realized that MY worth wasn’t what some fucking spoiled teenager said it was.

Being different is no crime. But being different WILL bring you a lot of grief in life. Just try it and see if a mob doesn’t come after you.

They will. They always have, too. Just read history.

Like I said, Rob didn’t pull any punches. He said what he meant, meant what he said, and took no shit from anybody.

I still miss the guy.