A Disarmed Populace = Sitting Ducks

Right now, the shrinks and the talking heads are formulating their questions: Who bears responsibility for the massacre? Why did it happen? What can we do to make sure it never happens again? They'll talk about the killer's emotional state, they'll talk about the "Gun Culture" and the dangers inherent to violent videogames and Tarantino movies.

It's all sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing. The Boomtown Rats had it right twentysome years ago: 'You can see no reasons cause there ARE no reasons.' Furthermore? I don't give a flying fig newton for what the shooter thought or felt. Why? Because I don't think EVIL can ever really be comprehended by ordinary men. What matters to me is that last question, the whole "How do we ensure it doesn't happen again?"

The answer to that seems so obvious to me that I can't imagine why anyone else cannot see it. Simply put, no one has as vested an interest in your own well being as you do. Ergo, enable everyone to protect themselves, and the problem solves itself.

I'm sure it's not a new idea to anyone. But watching the news, all I can think is, "If only some of them had been armed." But no, VA Tech was a "Gun Free Zone" for the safety and security of its students. Everyone felt soo much safer after concealed carry was banned from campus, I'm sure. Right up until the shooter chained the doors, lined people up, and started mowing them down like paper targets at the gun range.

The bad guys will get weapons. There isn't a damn thing anyone can do about that; if they can't get them legally then they will get them ILLEGALLY. But bad guys don't respect "Gun Free Zones" or anything else. If you don't mind killing people then you don't mind breaking a few arbitrary rules. Hell, in the case of Gun-Free Campus rules, you RELY on them to make your murder easier to commit. ARMED people make bad victims. They don't do what you tell them to, and they have this nasty habit of SHOOTING BACK.

An armed society is not only a polite society, it is a safer society. No matter how loudly the antigun zealots protest, the logic cannot be denied: Unarmed people are just easier to murder than people who can fight back.

The Global Warming Swindle

Some days I just LOVE Littlegreenfootballs. Today? Would be one of those days. I have heard nothing about the Channel Four Global Warming documentary. So I didn't get a chance to be properly upset that I haven't seen it mentioned on the news, before tripping over the whole damn thing on LGF.

It's entertaining. It's well made. And it's intelligent, informative, and incredibly daring in this time of anthropogenic global warming mass hysteria. I can't believe they were brave enough to air this in Britain.

I am not going to argue the issue with anyone else ever again. Henceforth, when someone annoys me with their ignorance or cites AlGore at me... I'm just going to send them a copy. No more debate, just "Here, go watch this and leave me alone."

Hmm. Wonder if I can get a copy into Gore's own hot little hands?

Anyway- Watch. Learn. Understand the myriad ways in which you have been deceived.

Great Reagan Speech

I can't believe I'd never seen this bit before. But it is surprisingly relevant, even now. Damn, but I love this man. Damn, but I do miss him.

Tipping my hat to The Anchoress and Cuanas for bringing this to my attention.

Never too late to learn

I left school six weeks before my high school graduation. In the intervening years, I have gotten my diploma and am no longer stigmatised as a "dropout." But the sensation of intellectual inferiority remains. I frequently encounter "holes" in my public school education. (This, despite having received what JCPS called an Advanced Program education from the third grade to the twelfth.) I learned more about US history doing genealogy research in adulthood than I had ever learned in school. (Aside from "Wash Ad Jeff Mad Mo Ad Jack Van Har Ty..." I learned nothing of our presidents. I'd have been hard pressed to discuss with certainty anything that occurred after the Civil War. And we can thank my grandfather for my familiarity with that period- not my teachers.) I learned my meager math skills calculating change and tips in my first few jobs.

That is not to say that I am stupid. Far from it; I consider myself relatively bright, and fairly well educated on a number of subjects. I read extensively, and have perseverating interests in a broad variety of topics that permit me to bore my friends and relations on a regular basis. But those holes, they remain. And I trip over them all too often.

One of the areas of confusion for me has always been earth history/geology. I did not take classes in the subject. Back in elementary school, I recall cutting apart a map and gluing together Pangaea for an assignment; that was my first and last childhood exposure to continental drift or plate tectonics. Later, I would have half a semester of "earth science"- which nicely informed me that some rocks form from molten lava, some from smushed sediment, and some from alterations of the first two. That's pretty much all I took away from that class.

But I don't live in a vacuum. I read, I watch Tv. I talk to people with better academic backgrounds than my own. And so I understood, academically, at least, the idea that continents had once been united. But I didn't really comprehend it. I'd often wondered "but what about what was under the water? How does Pangaea relate to that? What topological features would have existed there? If earth is a sphere of rock, floating on a molten core, where does continental drift come in? Where would the LAND go? Where did all that land at the bottom of the oceans come from?"

Only I was much too ashamed to ask for an explanation. I am allergic to looking stupid.

Bear with me. Y'all had the benefit of learning this stuff in school; I didn't.

So I am all excited to say that, as of an hour ago this morning, I get it! I have a mental picture for the formation of seafloor. (But I still want to know what Pangaea's seafloor would have looked like.)

Lovely, lovely website. http://www2.wwnorton.com/college/geo/egeo/welcome.htm

It's like the science textbook I never had. I bookmarked it, and plan to read much more. But the best thing so far?

http://www2.wwnorton.com/college/geo/egeo/index/animations.htm

Have a look-see at that. Nifty animations that show how it all works! I can't wait to show this to my children.

Copyright Law

I wrote a letter to some newspapers recently, and I think it might be enjoyed over here. So I thought I'd post it. I babble rather too long, about a subject that bores too many people, so it probably won't make print. But here goes:

I just put a book in the mail again. It's my tattered sixteenth printing of Lucile Morrison's "Lost Queen of Egypt." This book has been out of print for decades, and I loan it to at least two or three new readers every year. It's not a spectacularly important book, just a once-popular piece of young adult fiction published in the 1930's. It contains no great governmental secrets or dangerous ideas. Walt Disney has not seen fit to make a movie out of it. Simply put, the book is no threat to anyone. It is not making any money for any publisher. And it is firmly out of reach of the public domain, thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension of 1988. It will continue to be so, as long as the nice folks at the Walt Disney Company keep paying our congressmen for eternal copyright on the installment plan.

I love this book. But no school library is going to carry it today, as they did when I was growing up in the seventies. They cannot afford it. No sixth grade girl is going to stumble over a copy, discover Ancient Egypt and fall in love with the Amarna Period, as I did, unless a collector puts the book into their hands.

"Lost Queen of Egypt" was due to enter public domain concurrent with Disney's "Steamboat Willie" cartoon. This unfortunate coincidence, coupled with the heavy lobbying of our lawmakers by Disney and its subsidiaries, will keep this book forever out of the reach of its target audience. This would be a terrible thing in its own right. But Morrison's book is merely one of thousands of pieces of media essentially locked up, locked away, by this misguided piece of legislation. Right now, as I write this, there are early twentieth century newsreels and films, relics of our national history, disintegrating to dust. They are unable to be restored because of their copyright situation. There are books that will never interest another publisher, which cannot be legally distributed by any means, regardless of whether an audience exists for them.

The public needs to be made aware of the manner in which our rights in the public domain have been stolen from us. Were Walt Disney alive today, he could not legally create his "Steamboat Willie" cartoon, because that cartoon itself was a derivative of Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill" movie. The Disney corporation has ensured, through their deep pockets and legalized bribery, that no creator of new content is able to do to them, what Walt himself did to the Brothers Grim and Buster Keaton.

We as a culture are poorer for it.

The copyright issues facing this country are not about property rights. They're not about "theft" or "piracy" or any of the other buzzwords the RIAA, MPAA, and the like enjoy in their thirty second soundbytes. The issue is public culture- who controls it and who benefits thereby. Right now, the only people benefiting are those with enough money to bribe the senate and the house of representatives. Our common culture is for sale, and big business is buying. Congress is having a bargain basement fire sale of our intellectual liberties while we sit around arguing over who got a low-quality digital copy of this week's number one bubblegum pop tune without paying for it.

Altering our children for convenience

I'll be honest. I'm an opinionated sort of person. Rarely do I come across an ethical issue which confounds me- by and large, my innate sense of right and wrong comes through loudly, and clearly.

So when I read about the girl who will never grow up, my first instinct was horror. How could a parent do that to their child? Certainly, she'll be easier to lift, bathe, feed, and dress in the body of a six year old rather than a fully grown woman. And that might keep her at home, and out of an institution, longer. In the care of her parents, and not strangers.

I discounted the idea that keeping her from growing breasts will prevent rape; that is so much nonsense. There are scores of children the world over who've been sexually assaulted. Cutting out her uterus? Well, she wasn't going to be using it, I suppose. And that definitely won't prevent rape, but it would prevent a pregnancy. And lord knows her caretakers have enough responsibility without dealing with a future pregnancy anyway.

But it didn't sit well with me, the idea of carving off "unnecessary" bits on a human being.

But I've been thinking about it, and I find myself, if not fully endorsing, then at least Understanding, their choice. I tried putting myself in the girl's position (a decidedly uncomfortable task) and tried to imagine what it would be like.

Imagine the intellect and comprehension of an infant; or even that of a very young child. Then imagine the body undergoes puberty. What would that be like? How frightening might it become?

It's not that hard for me to imagine, actually. Precocious puberty is defined in females as early onset of menses. For me, this horror struck at age eight. It came coupled with b-cup breasts and, in short order, height greater than the tallest boys in my school. Back in the seventies, no one called this a medical disorder. You just "Bloomed Early." And the physical and psychological effects were not discussed nor commonly understood.

Today that would be a treatable disorder. Puberty may be staved off to a more developmentally desirable time. I cannot blame my mother; she did the best she could with what she knew. There was no option of stalling the clock for me. But what if there had been? Would I have been better or worse off? I might have eliminated some of the terrors of my own childhood- the embarrassment, the teasing, the unwanted male attention in gradeschool. I might not have tried to stuff my breasts into my armpits and I might not have walked slump-shouldered to appear shorter. But I cannot actually KNOW that I would have turned out any healthier, or been more welcoming of menses at a later date. I might have hated my boobs and dreaded my periods anyway. Plenty of women do.

But I think of that fear and uncertainty- the worry that I was bleeding to death. The sudden clumsiness that came with a radically altered center of gravity. The disbelief and disgust when the biological purpose behind all these changes was made clear to me. ("THAT's how you make babies? Ugh. Gross!")And I can ask myself, if that was a traumatic thing to go through as a bright, healthy third-grader- how much worse would it be for someone with the mind of a baby? To suffer the menstrual cramps and indignity each month, for no earthy reason?

This poor girl is never going to marry or become a mother. She will never have intelligence enough to consent to anything. She will remain a happy, burbling infant, but now she'll be travel-sized for her parents' convenience.

Perhaps that last was uncalled for. But it does express my own murky feelings on the subject. I understand why they did it. I can even argue their point logically. But emotionally? It doesn't sit well. It feels dirty to even think that way, to think about making those kinds of very permanent decisions for another human being, even if it were my own child.

Because I have to wonder... if it's okay to shrink your mentally disabled child so you can always lift her, how far away is it to consider altering other aspects of biology in order to make your child easier to handle? We've already got mass dopings for difficult kids. We make them sit still, make them cooperate... when will we start making them prettier? Smaller? Bigger? Thinner?

And I worry. Because if you'd asked me at age nine, I'd have agreed to anything to keep from reaching this height. I once went to my mother to ask if anyone in this country practiced feet-binding. I was hoping to prevent my own (inevitable) growth into a size eleven shoe. What if my mother had encouraged me? What if she had allowed that? Is mutilation for acceptance that much of a stretch from mutilation for accessibility?

Justice is served. Dessert, anyone?

It's confetti time in hell.

And frankly, I loved the Fark.com headline. "Saddam Hussein officially starts his homosexual relationship with Satan"

I know. I'm a terrible person. I should be praying for the repose of his soul right now, and instead I'm envisioning the poor fella arriving in hell, disoriented, disappointed, and wondering where his virgins went. Or perhaps since he wasn't really a "religious" man, maybe his soul just crumbled like dust and he got no afterlife at all...

I wonder which would be worse?

A Woman After My Own Heart

Have y'all read this yet?

One of the dispossessed in the whole Kelo Vs New London fiasco has sent the most thoughtful sort of holiday greeting to those who forced her out of her home (and helped destroy personal property rights in the US.) Apparently the supreme court have yet to recieve their cards, but I do hope she sends them as well. Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer should all choke on their Christmas pudding thinking of what they have done to those poor people, and to the rest of us in time.

You know, with the war, and the usual media scandal du jour, it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. But as time goes on, I think we will come to see that Kelo Vs New London was the first step along a disastrous road for our country. I think the judges' statements on the decision will be regarded as perhaps the most wrongheaded bits of legislative fiction in more than a century; the decision itself the equivalent of Dred Scott in warped reasoning, (if Roe V Wade itself doesn't take that dubious honour.)

At any rate, a Merry Christmas to those who fought so hard in a futile attempt to save their homes. And Lord forgive me for hoping that curse carries at least a little weight, and some karma for the guilty.

At least ONE fella in Hollyweird gets it...

Wow. I feel all weird now. Because at this moment? I'm finding Danny Bonaduce incredibly hot. Having a reasonable amount of sense, the ability to speak coherently, and the balls to put a moonbat in his place, is just downright sexy! Thanks to the Jawa Report for bringing this gem to our attention.

Enviro-wackiness Continues to Ensue...

Sigh. Take a moment to remember what "Everybody knows." Not too long ago, everybody knew that bad air caused malaria. Everybody knew that you could determine a person's criminality by the bumps on their head. Everybody knew that regular bathing would kill you. Everybody knew that the world was flat. Everybody knew that the brain existed to cool the blood. Everybody knew that demonic possession made you sick, and your neighbour could curse your cow and make it die.

So right now everybody knows that the planet is succumbing to something called Global Warming.

In a hundred years, what will everybody know?

Hot Priests??? Huh?

Okay. For the record? I have no problem with pretty priests. In fact? I'd probably enjoy mass a little more with a handsome young priest to look at. Purely aesthetics, right? Just as I enjoy beautiful cathedrals and beautiful music, I can see myself definitely appreciating a beautiful priest.

But Blogger AtHomeInRome had such an interesting link up I felt I had to discuss it over here. Because somebody has decided that hot priests, in Priest-of-the-month-format, is the next big thing in calendars.

ooh, boy. I'm not at all sure what I think about this. It seems... unseemly. And yet? I sort of want to look at the rest of the pictures.

I swiped this well timed quote off another blogs comments section...

""A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear."---Cicero



This is the fear that lurks in my heart, when the optimism begins to fail. That the weaker elements in our society, compounded by the open complicity of the media, have substantially damaged our strength both in the war, and in the world. When I saw This this morning, it made me shake. I cannot hear those words in any context but jihad, anymore. Brutal, bloody jihad that kills innocent Americans.

If and when the next volley comes, will those who gave aid and comfort to the enemy finally feel shame and remorse?

I guess it's too much to expect a little sanity right now...

Oh, My God. Am I reading this right? Are they really trying to say that Republicans fixed the election- and threw a win to the dems in order to set Repubs up for a cheating win in '08?

Oi. My head hurts just trying to wrap it around liberal groupthink. Someone get me an aspirin or ten.

Some positive thoughts for the day...

After a good night's rest and a fresh cup of coffee, I'm trying to see the positives in yesterday's elections. And there were positives- the negatives are scary things, involving national security. But let us not forget a few other salient points. Things to be thankful for today:

1. We have now seen, in four separate elections, that every single vote counts. No one should ever feel that "my vote doesn't mean anything" because we are getting closer every time to single digit differences in vote tallies. Your lone vote literally could be the difference in the direction your country takes, on myriad positions.

2. The public gives a damn. Sure, I think most of them were WRONG yesterday- but if the networks were right, then voter turnout was huge. Fewer folks opted out than anybody expected. And in a democracy, that is never a bad thing.

3. The pre-election rumblings of "voter fraud" and "voter intimidation," and the legal teams the democrats were supposedly keeping on standby, are not materialising to make us relive the Florida debacle. Most defeats were handled graciously, without lining up soundbytes and legions of lawyers. I have yet to see my compatriots threatening to relocate to Canada or anywhere else.

4. Many of the newbies on the left side of the aisle campaigned on very conservative positions. There were Pro-life dems, fiscal responsibility dems, even a pro-weapon ownership dem. If their positions were represented honestly, then Ms. Pelosi may find they don't dance to the tune she pipes for them quite so well as she'd like them to.

5. George may finally feel how the administration's leadership has let us down with regards to the immigration issue, and perhaps he'll harden his line against illegals now.

6. We have further evidence the majority of the country supports defending traditional marriage.

It was a bad night for us, no doubt about that. But perhaps the new folks will come up with something useful for us, something beyond "We hate Bush," as a party platform. Hope springs eternal. I have to think that among at least a portion of their party, are a number of people who will take the issue of terrorism seriously, who will recognise that we are in the middle of a war, and that the war must be fought. That the troops must be provisioned, the intelligence funded, the course plotted, and the battle carried through to a victory. It is now their obligation to do so, and perhaps now they can stop shouting about the last two elections long enough to realise that.

What part of "They want to kill us" Don't you Understand? Part Two

I'm coining a new word tonight: Demmitude. It's the state of being dhimmi by choice.

I'm watching the coverage on television, and I've come to a profound and disappointing realisation... Bin Laden was right about us all along.

That's right. We're soft, we have weak stomachs. We don't like war, and death is unseemly. It makes for nasty soundbytes on tv, and ugly pictures in the paper. We are a peaceful lot, by nature. We like to mind our own business, and keep to ourselves. We don't always keep our word and we lack the gumption to see through difficult tasks. We want to watch American Idol and eat Cheetos and listen to our Ipods and not have to think about ugliness in the rest of the world. Tell us nice things, like you're moderate and you love America, and we'll believe anything. Tell us scary things, and we'll throw you out of office. We don't like being scared. Much more comfortable not to look at the bad pictures or talk about the scary things.

Do you think that the Romans knew what was coming, as they paid their money to the waves of barbarian hordes? Did they foresee their end? Or did they think, "It's only money, and we've got plenty of it. We'll buy their friendship and they'll leave us in peace." How long was it, in human terms, between an international empire, and complete subjugation? One lifetime? Two?

Incessant whining on the daily news has taken its toll. The public is tired of war. We don't want to watch it, or read it, or hear about it. Round the clock coverage has given us all ennui. And we've long since become immune to the mudslinging of political ads. And the war is so far away. Who really cares what happens in places we can hardly find on a map, to people with names we can't begin to pronounce?

Yes, I know, the final counts are not in yet. It does not matter; these races should never even have been close.

I hear Ms. Pelosi assures us the dems won't try to cut funding to the war, at least not immediately. That's nice. Reassuring, isn't it, that they aren't going to turn off the supplies and money first thing in the morning? I'm sure our boys dying in the desert are going to be so relieved to hear that they'll still have bullets in their guns for a few weeks. Nevermind the targets we've just painted on their backs for our enemies.

I am disgusted. Because we cannot be isolationists in the modern world, as much as we might like to. The islamofascists will never leave us alone. They will scent the weakness on this country like blood on the cattle that they think we are. And they will move in for the kill.

If the dems have their way and we pull out of Iraq, then we will have delivered a clear message to those who want to kill us. It is an engraved invitation to another 9/11, more bombed embassies and ships, more hijackings, and more beheaded Americans abroad. When Bush1 pulled out after the Gulf War, he left our allies to be slaughtered and dumped like garbage into mass graves. Hussein is one part on a multiheaded hydra; we cut him out and more grew in his place. They will carry on his atrocities. And anyone who has helped us fight this war has a deathmark. When we leave, they are as good as dead. We promised our soldiers and our allies that we would stand by them, we would support them.

And every vote for the democrats today was a vote not to keep our word. It was a vote for Sharia law.

Appeasement never works. You cannot negotiate with terrorists. They want us dead, or in subjugation.

My friend Cyndi sent me this link just now. The original is broke, but here's google's cache. http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:Qu5wMpEIpkYJ:www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm+dan+simmons+%22Time+Traveler%22&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&strip=1

Despite the fact this was posted in April, I'd never read it. Wow. Just- Wow. Good piece. I'm shaking a little.

Now I want to read more of this guy.

Friends don't let friends vote Democrat....

I've just come back from doing my civic duty. I hope everyone reading this did so as well. If you didn't vote today, I don't want to hear diddly squat from you in the months to come about how the congresscritters are "ruining the country."

Nobody is ruining anything. Democracy is messy business, all those differing opinions demanding equal time and discussion. But equal time is not equivalence; indeed, some of those opinions are more valuable than others. He who screams the loudest is not always the most important, honest. And perhaps the least valuable opinion of all belongs to he who couldn't be bothered to collect his identification and show up at the polling place today. Okay, scratch that. It probably belongs to he who showed up, but still couldn't fill out his damn ballot.

A little not-so-common sense for y'all on election day. Part of me wants to cut 'n paste this link's contents into an email to every leftwing, bleeding heart, liberal friend in my address book. Nice folks, my friends. Good people, sweet people... but in some cases, damnably wrongheaded, impractical people. But I think I know what would happen if I did that. They'd see "Political linkage from the Ornithophobe, " and think, "Poor Ornithophobe- she didn't go to college. This is what happens to smart girls who don't go to college. They wind up in a Red State, raising babies, and never amount to much." And then most of them would hit delete, sight unseen.

Because every argument, every bumpersticker tag line discussed in that blog entry- I've seen them before. I've read them almost daily, in the journals and blogs and on the backs of the bumpers of so many of my friends. And whenever I see that, when I read "Bush Lied, People Died" and "No Blood For Oil," I wonder- do they really believe that stuff? Have they ever sat down, and picked through the idea logically, looking for evidence of truth or falsehood? Have they ever even ASKED a soldier who has served in Iraq, what goes on there? What we're doing there? What do they think really happened on 9/11 and have they ever considered the fates of our supporters after we pulled out of Iraq under Bush 1? Do they even give a thought to the allies we left to be plowed under into mass graves all over the country? Do they watch the news and see the same things I see every night? Have they yet realised, will they EVER realise, that militant Islam is at war with the whole world?

Or are their politics another bloodless, murky idea, that they picked up at University? Another bit of intellectual masturbation, an unproductive mental release that doesn't generate anything of substance? A bit of social affectation that doesn't really have an impact on their everyday lives?

I know without a doubt that our everyday lives will feel it, in a million ways, if the democrats have their way and pull us out of Iraq before we achieve a comprehensive victory and lasting regime change there. I don't know about you, but I'm not much looking forward to Sharia Law and wearing a burka, no matter how great I look in black. And that environment they're all so worried about won't fare particularly well if too many whackjobs get hold of nukes. Nuclear Winter is bad for the environment, y'all. It kills trees and little woodland creatures and other growing things. Of course, on the plus side, it'd probably clean up that whole "global warming" problem...

What part of "They Want to Kill Us" don't you understand?

This is a PSA. Please make time to watch "Obsession" on Fox News Saturday or Sunday. It is required viewing for an educated electorate. In the meantime, head over to the website and look at a few trailers, or read some of the press kit stuff.

I know it's easy and comfortable to fall into old patterns, to blame and mock and enjoy politics as a sport. I know I do it. But this election is about much more than who gets to decorate what in Washington. We cannot afford to forget what is at stake here. It is no less than the future of Western Civilisation itself.

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it....

The story that nobody in the mainstream media is talking about. Why is this not on CNN and Foxnews nonstop?

Ah, yes. Because there are smutty stories and stupid politician tricks to discuss, instead.

More murdered babies

There must be something in the air, or the water. Lately, it's all about the babies. The murdered babies, alas.

I suppose that if you're hired to abort a baby, there must be some pressure to provide a dead one at the end of the "procedure." It can't be good for business when they come out pink and breathing, after all.

Holy mother, bless the souls of the innocent who die today. And every day. Amen.