That Last Full Measure...

Every year about this time, I see water in bottles, in glasses, pouring from the tap, and I start thinking about going down to the river.  It's not about fishing, or swimming, or boating, though.  I look to the water which connects me to the unspoken heart of our family, the exceptionally unexceptional sailor who lies beneath.

The waters which embraced my father's father on one fateful day are far from those flowing through the heartland where I now live.  Still, even in elementary school we learned that water on the surface of this earth, like the air that we breathe, carries itself far and then returns again, slightly changed, in a natural cycle.  If it hasn't already done so, a drop of rain may yet fall on my face which once splashed his.  And so, I seek the solace of waters near me, passing along a half-understood prayer, hoping the currents will carry it to a place where it will be heard and completed, and the heart renewed.  As was Norman MacLean before me, I am haunted by waters.

Nearly seventy years ago (long before I was born), my father's father wore his bell-bottoms proudly and served his nation faithfully to his last breath, going with his ship to the depths of the Pacific surrounding Guadalcanal.  My grandfather was not alone in his sacrifice.  His generation was rife with  real men, men who believed in something greater than themselves, men who believed in faith, nation, service.  Too many of those men -- and others of each generation -- saw their days cut short.

Nearly every family has been touched by the loss of somebody who wore a uniform.  We suffered a loss, sometimes so obvious that all around us can see the wound, sometimes leaving its scar deep below the surface.  But that loss comes with a special gift: we know that we were so loved, they defended us to their last.  They gave their all for us, for our freedoms, perhaps even for our souls.

With each of these servicemen (and women) in mind, it doesn't seem terribly fitting to wish others a "happy Memorial Day."  I would, though, wish everyone peace on this and every Memorial Day, and I offer loving thanks to those for whom this day is dedicated.

I raise a glass to you -- a glass of clear, clean water.

How do you stand on domestic terrorism?

We have trouble, right here in internet city.  Some of our conservative bloggers are facing a genuine, credible threat, actual terrorist tactics, and the usual sources of relief seem to be incapable of seeing the problem.

Like several other good, conservative, hard-working bloggers, Patrick Frey of "Patterico's Pontifications" fame, has been living in hell for a while, now, and has blogged a brief accounting of the worst of it:

You’re about to listen to one of the most bone-chilling pieces of audio you will ever hear. At least, it was to me when I first heard it. 

It’s a phone call that could have gotten me killed. 

In this post you will hear that audio clip. You will also read about a months-long campaign of harassment carried out by at least three individuals: Ron Brynaert, Neal Rauhauser, and Brett Kimberlin — much of it directed at critics of Brett Kimberlin. This harassment includes repeated references to critics’ family members, workplace complaints, publication of personal information such as home addresses and pictures of residences, bogus allegations of criminal activity, whisper campaigns, frivolous legal actions, and frivolous State Bar complaints.

Please, go read the entire article.


What makes this particularly ugly, especially with the thugs menacing Frey, Aaron Worthing, Robert Stacy McCain (The Other McCain), and some of their blogging friends, is that the thugs have full financial and "moral" support from people like George Soros, the Tides Foundation, and other leftist "philanthropic" groups, plus a number of individual who ought to know better.  And, as Patterico mentions, there is a hint of direct access to at least one Congressman.  If this does not trouble you, then I'd guess you are part of the problem.

After all, from Patterico:

Remember how I said one of my commenters was outed? And this crew started talking about his parents? And his divorce records? For being a commenter of mine? 

What happened to me could literally happen to anyone. It could happen to you. 

If you take nothing else from this post, remember that. It could happen to you.

Why is nobody in MSM talking about this?

I originally wanted to ask in the header why they weren't talking about this man, but I am loath to apply that label to a scum like this.  I've shared a few blog links with my friends on other social media, but it's time I came back home to my old blogstead.  This has to be made public, via as many outlets as possible.

There's plenty of information, background on the individual, his actions and his connections, here (Donald Douglas has a good roundup, so please, follow as many of his links as you can) (and, hit tip jars if you can, especially for Robert Stacy McCain).

You're not likely to see any of this on the evening news, or the local/national papers... your guess is as good as mine, as to why.  har har.

Lifeboat ethics and rational thought...

There's a long-ish but intriguing piece on the failure of education, at Blogodidact, which got an instant reaction from me... had to share the blog entry with everybody I could think of, and anybody else who might happen by.  

I'm no deep thinker.  At least, most days, I can only pretend to go there, mostly because of other noises going on in the background. Still, I think I'm a little farther along than the folks who see the Lifeboat Problem as answerable in either/or.   Even as I was reading the paragraph, I saw a major flaw in the question: where is the actual human element?

 To quote from blogodidact:


Here's the content of one of the slides: 

The Lifeboat Problem You are on a lifeboat with 11 people (including you) aboard. The water surrounding the lifeboat is freezing such that no one can survive in the water. There is no rescue ship in sight and worse yet, the lifeboat is sinking. You then notice there is a sign posted on the lifeboat that reads "Capacity 10 normal sized persons." Looking around you notice 10 normal sized persons and one 400 pound man. No one wants to jump out of the boat and if nothing is done it will sink leaving all 11 to die. Would you: 

• A. Push the 400 pound man out of the boat to save everyone else. (Achieving the greater good.)
• B. Refuse to push the 400 pound man or anyone else out of the boat and hope for a miracle.

He adds a third option (go see it for yourself). I can't merely go where he goes, I have to pause and ask the question: tell me more about the other passengers.   I need to know pluses and minuses for each and every one of the eleven. Does any one of them have a history of violence against innocents?  Is any one of them, perhaps, a physician, a navigator, a SEAL, or some other necessarily-skilled individual?  Maybe the 400-pounder is an exceptional engineer who can figure out how to MacGyver the boat to hold even a few more passengers. Maybe one of the "normal-sized" people is an asshole whose grating voice and behavior are causing the boat's hull to crack and take on water.  And, besides, what's wrong with hoping for a miracle?  

The truth is, humanity is more than kill-or-be-killed.  We actually developed social structures -- society -- to make that whole scene obsolete.

In other words, when somebody presents a false dichotomy such as this, I have a deep and abiding need to poke holes in his virtual lifeboat.  Life is seldom about either-or situations, but the lazy, manipulative jackasses, who pretend they're teaching philosophy, allow themselves to fantasize that, hey, it could happen, and, presto! their uneducated, indoctrinated sheep create situations which may yet prove them right.

Quite frankly, though, that's not a very bright thing to do, since they're the ones who don't believe in keeping and bearing arms.

Free Tweets for me, but not for thee

Sunday night, a conservative talk show host, Dana Loesch, received a Twitter message suggesting that the sender would encourage the rape and murder of Loesch.  This "tweeter" has had along history of referring to women who share a moderate to conservative viewpoint on Twitter as "ignorant, bigoted, RACIST, Right-Wing, Neo-Fascist KKK*NTS" [asterisk mine.  You can fill in the blank.  I didn't have to, since he directed this same title at me as he had to at least three dozen other moderat/conservative women].*

Shortly after this man posted his disgusting statements to and about Loesch, her husband posted a defense of her.  For that sin, a rather large contingent on the left branch of twitter ran a series of 'bots to file "spamming" charges against him.  His account was suspended, merely for posting defense of his wife!

Chris Loesch is not the first conservative to see his account suspended due to false spamming charges, and it looks as though, unless Twitter fixes its algorithm, he will not be the last.

If you think this system of attacking and shutting down the speech of those who disagree with you is funny, I must laud you for maintaining a level of development most of us lost out on by having graduated from eighth grade.

If, on the other hand, you have a modicum of common decency and common sense, I hope you will be as appalled by this as I am.

Because worse than puerile, the idea that using lies to silence others is the first step in a very short progression toward true fascism.  And, when you've successfully shut down the voices of dissent from your church of leftism, you can kiss your own freedom goodbye -- or did you learn nothing from the French Revolution, as it cannibalized itself?... oh, sorry.  Maybe you didn't get that far in your world history classes.   Let's just suffice it to say, it was a very ugly season.  We wouldn't want a repeat.


Update:  more here.

*Correction:  The "person" who suggested rape and murder was not the same as the one who used such colorful language toward me and other women.  However, they both lay claim to having helped force Chris Loesch off twitter, so my conflation of the two might be forgiven.... I hope.

Your government doesn't want your kids to learn farming

Farming is the one industry nobody wants to kill off, and yet, somehow, government regulation seems to be doing just that.  It's bad enough that the EPA has decided that dust is a "pollutant" to be limited, and farmers who produce more than a set number of days of flying dust will be fined out of existence.  It's bad enough that the paperwork in order to legally hire help is so byzantine as to have forced many farmers out of the business of working the land their great-grandfathers originally cleared. 

Now, to add insult to injury, it has come to the attention of many on the internet that, last year, another of our federal government's non-elected agencies, the Department of Labor, announced it was planning to "update its child labor policies," especially as applies to agricultural and related industries.  In other words, they're looking to change the rules about having kids do any work on farms.  

In their press release, they stated, "The proposed regulations would not apply to children working on farms owned by their parents." 

Well, whoop-de-do.  It never occurred to these bureaucrats that, among other things, when we talk about family farms, we don't always mean "owned and operated exclusively by Mom & Pop & Sonny-makes-three."  Sometimes, family farms involve multiple generations, including aunts and uncles and cousins all working on each other's patches of ground (yeah, we actually do come across non-dysfucntional families, from time to time).  Sometimes (more often than we'd like), farming involves friends and their families pitching in when there's a crisis.  And, sometimes, farmers open up space in their barns, sheds, and fields for kids to learn about the process of becoming a provider to the world, by process of housing 4-H projects, rural schools' agricultural education programs, or other, similar arrangements.  This "backwards" industry yields a lot of good Samaritans.

Also, occasionally, farmers will offer to trade, as one person suggests, riding lessons for having a kid load hay or muck out stalls.  Some have traded eggs and roaster chickens for similar clean-up work in the (small, non-industrial) henhouses.  I know one who offered to teach a friend's kids how to drive a tractor... for the fun of it.  Plus, he got a little time to kick back and enjoy the scenery -- and the company -- while a few furrows were plowed.  

Barter has long been a practical means of doing business, especially in rural settings.  It often stays off the books, but the whole cash-free subculture is a part of what drives us, these days, out here in the economically-hurting sticks.  

And, actual, hands-on experience is the best education as to where food comes from and how it gets here.  

But then, I suspect that's the real problem the federal government has with kids working on farms.  They can't put a dollar value on it and tax it to high heaven, the influential labor unions with politicians in their pockets can't force farmers' families to pay union dues, and the teachers' unions, equally politically-connected, can't get their hands on this field training and bend it to their own narrow causes.  Therefore, they'll simply regulate it to death, instead, micromanaging us all into starvation.  

It's all about control.  

Today's earworm: I had to mention nickelodeons

A little cheap entertainment.  That's all we ask.  Okay, maybe some that won't grate on our last nerve.




Sorry.

Twitter as the new nickelodeon

It's funny how the campaigns are all about the serious issues, but the rest of us are having fun with the trivial nonsense, like sluts and dog-eaters and crazy, gun-toting, aging rock stars...  maybe it's like choosing a movie:  during the Great Depression, Busby Berkley and other escapist stuff sold out in cheap cinemas across the country.  Star Wars led the box office during Carter's "malaise" (and, in the same year Lucas' blockbuster was released, the majority of other top-grossers turned out to be comedies or escapist thrillers.  Or, just plain nonsense --  see: #19 on the list linked).

The public may simply be looking for cheap escapist fun for a brief moment before they go back to living the issues.

Certainly, I've been greatly enjoying the sorts of stuff posted on Twitter, of late.  For example, this.  And this.  This, too. And, of course, this.  Serious politics.  heh.

But that doesn't mean I don't care about the "big picture" beyond the Twitterverse.  And, in truth, I've even seen the people there discuss real issues, and how to approach them realistically.

It's just that, while we have the opportunity, we might as well have a little inexpensive-to-free fun.  I get the feeling there won't be much of that, in a few months.

Today's earworm: a crooning Paul

This little number has been amusing the cats as I shower.  Or, maybe they just want to see the train wreck that makes so much painful noise while I'm ostensibly singing.



The video's notthing... in fact, it's just the cover of the "White Album", but the song is... well, the song is pretty white, too.  It's pale as a black & white Betty Boop cartoon.  Actually, whiter, because the Boopster had some sweet Cab Calloway tunes   (please, click on this link & mellow out totally, so you don't get stuck with one of the Beatles' few totally insipid numbers.  Unless you really are masochistic).

Today's earworm: One step ahead of Neil Finn

Time is running out... for what, I'm not sure.  Still, this little number plays in the back of my head since the first day of MTV broadcast, thank you very much.



That was, of course, back when MTV actually played music videos.  Back when nobody had heard of "reality shows".  Back when... television still sucked.  That much hasn't changed.

Now, though, the best place for music videos is not on your television....  it's in the back of your head, incessantly pounding its unhealthy beat as it stays one step ahead of you.

Beauty is as beauty does

This past week, some poor deluded woman went public about how hard it is to be beautiful.  Then, she got so many unpleasant responses to the article about her great burden, she had to go back into the public eye to cry some more about the hard, cruel life she has, being so beautiful and all.

I've never been a runway model, and it's been a very long time since I had the right stuff for even a local department store catwalk.  Still, I can safely say, I understand where she's coming from.  Like me, she has a little trouble dealing with reality;  in other words, she's nuts.  I do, occasionally, wish I had her kind of looney-tunes playing in my head.  My voices tell me I'm stupid, ugly, or otherwise useless.  I have learned to ignore them, to the best of my ability.  This poor woman -- she keeps listening to the great and glorious sound of her own fantastic voices.

I'm not saying that she's ugly.  I don't really know her well enough to establish that, one way or another.  But, as an artist,  and as a student of masterpieces, I can safely say she is not interesting enough to warrant anybody making a fuss over her physical attributes.  That mug on the front of her head is bland.  Her physique appears, in  the photos provided in the articles, to be no great shakes, either.  Sure, she looks fit enough, but does anybody imagine romantic poetry extolling the virtues of her petal-formed lips, her subtle silken shoulders, her thighs of alabaster?

Even her darling hubby looks a bit pained as he stands beside her.  I believe he might recognize, too , that a woman of true beauty would never waste another's time in whining about how difficult her god-given features had made her life.   A woman of true beauty might not even have been blessed with symmetrical features, with a comely frame or a smooth complexion and pearly-white, straight teeth.  Her beauty would be apparent to all, regardless of her physical attributes.  She would, by virtue of her exceptional soul, share a smile as often as possible, and do all she could to use her gifts to make others' lives beautiful.