Author's archive
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
A polite society is a clean society.
The man was cleaning a gun when it fired, striking him. It was inadvertent, police say.
“He shot himself in the leg,” said Las Cruces Police Department officer Jason Sauceda.
It’s the American Way 0
Tony Norman looks at the college admission cheating scandal and argues that, once you look past the patriotic propaganda, cheating is woven into the fabric of America. Here’s a nugget:
We’re even cheating the future by saddling coming generations of Americans with trillions of dollars of debt to finance obscene tax cuts for the wealthy. Our descendants will also inherit a much-degraded environment because the political party most devoted to protecting the interests of the rich doesn’t believe in climate science.
More at the link.
Fatal Afflictions 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Stanton Peele argues that addiction and Islamaphobia (and other manifestations of ethnic, religious, and racial hatred) satisfy similar emotional drives. Here’s bit:
It’s a short piece, but heavily annotated with links supporting his position. It is worth your while.
The Connection 0
Thom searches for the common denominator.
Meritocracy 0
Ed over at Gin and Tacos, who is an academician, expects any efforts to prevent another such scandal will yield more bureaucracy without positive results. Here’s a bit from his piece:
(snip)
I’m not saying it isn’t worth it to strive toward fairness and equality, but given the systems in place in this country we are so ludicrously far from either that we’re flat-out lying to kids by telling them anything is either fair or equal.
Eye Candy, Again 0
The KDE Plasma desktop on Debian Sid. Konsole is on the left with transparency enabled, Dolphin is shaded*, Swisswatch is in the upper right, and GKrellM is running in the bottom right. (If you haven’t figured it out by now, GKrellM is my preferred system monitoring application.)
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*Shading or “rolling up” is one of my favorite features of *nix desktop environments and window managers.
The Privatization Scam, Chartering a Course for Disaster Dept. 0
The Arizona Republic’s Laurie Roberts comments on a recent charter school “reform” bill in the Arizona state legislature. A snippet:
Follow the link for more.
Aside:
Charter schools were a con from the git-go.
Driven to Destruction 0
The headline for this story in the print edition was “Doomed Buggies.”
Sports cars don’t perform so well on the deep sands of the Outer Banks, but they keep coming anyway.
A purple Dodge Challenger bogged down on the Currituck beach Sunday. It was the third stuck sports car captured on social media since late December, and that’s just a sampling.
More tales of the stupid at the link.
