Gun Rights Lesson #109 – Guns Don’t Stop Crime
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is one of a series of articles on gun rights. Each addresses a common anti-gun trope. This article builds on Gun Rights Lesson #488, which discusses mass shootings and offers a list of incidents where an armed civilian successfully acted against a...
Staying Sane in the Trump Era
Back in the day, in this case the early 1980s, radio shock jock Howard Stern was driving scolds, prudes and nannies crazy with his antics on WNBC in New York. Stern's success and the loyalty of his listeners, as the story goes, was parsed by radio executives as being...
The Heckler’s Veto In The Age Of Offended-ness
Words hurt, and feelings matter. Or, so goes a guiding philosophy of modern social justice. We bear witness to it, domestically, in the disinvitation of speakers at college campuses, in the establishment of safe spaces, in the rise of hate-crime and hate-speech...
It’s Complicated
In a move that set the political world into a frenzy and the blogosphere on fire, Trump fired FBI director James Comey yesterday. Chaos ensued. Skyscrapers collapsed. Earthquakes swallowed Tokyo, San Francisco, Manila and Jakarta. Tidal waves wiped out low-lying...
Zero Tolerance? Try Zero Responsibility
The latest entry in the OFFS files comes from Edgewood Middle School in Ohio. A student clicked the "like" button on an Instagram photo of an Airsoft pellet gun posted by another student. Both students were suspended by the school, because "we act on any potential...
Peak Gullibility
There's an old gag I used to try on some of my more gullible friends in times past. Should gullibility ever come up, mention "did you know that the word gullible is not in the dictionary?" The goal, obviously, is to get them to look it up (and its effectiveness as a...
Transphobia, or Common Sense?
The transgender "controversy," for want of a better word, has seemed to me very much a tempest in a teapot, an issue that's resolvable by basic free market forces and basic courtesy, and that has been used as a source of deliberately excessive outrage. And, given that...
Catharsis, Ego, and Peril
Have you ever known someone who cheated or otherwise wrong his or her spouse or significant other, then felt that "coming clean" was the proper course of action and the way to fix things? Me too. The logic, I suppose, is that such honesty will demonstrate a commitment...
America’s Century Of Making The World Safe For Democracy
Part 1 - On The One Hand.... The phrase, "Make the world safe for Democracy," Shakespearean in its ubiquity in America's philosophical framework on foreign policy, sincere and cynical, wise and reckless, was President Woodrow Wilson's as he sought a Congressional...
Peak OFFS
This week, the streaming network Hulu premieres its original adaptation of Margaret Atwood's best-selling novel The Handmaid's Tale. The novel, a dystopian near-future tale about an America that has descended into theocratic patriarchy, reflected fear (some would call...
The Pit And The Pendulum
The 100th day of a new administration is always considered symbolic, a time for assessment and retrospection. Today, Trump's 100th day, and by extension the 100th day of the current incarnation of one-party governance, it's worth noting that, once again, in Lucy vs...
Poking Holes
The satellite radio in my car offers me all sorts of programming apart from music, and I often tune into the comedy channels to hear some stand-up. Yesterday, one comic started a bit by noting that he didn't know where he stood politically, but liked to "poke holes"...
Reputation Bests Regulation
The story of United Airlines and Dr. David Dao offers a superb rebuttal to the people who reflexively argue that government is needed to forestall bad acts and address wrongs committed by Corporate America. For those few who remain unaware of the incident, United...
Gun Rights Lesson #840 – The Mighty NRA
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is one of a series of articles on gun rights. Each addresses a common anti-gun trope. "Were it not for the NRA's incredible power over politicians, we'd have common sense gun control!" Saul Alinsky, leftist community organizer and author of the...
Motivated By Fear
The science fiction classic Dune finds the main character invoking the "Litany Against Fear" as he endured a test of will. The Litany, which reads: I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear....
Do You Trust The Government?
Sharyl Atkisson, an investigative journalist formerly of CBS News, compiled this timeline of events and instances regarding government surveillance of Americans during the Obama years. Read it. Consider the high hopes that came in with Obama. Consider the long history...
The Big Bomb
Recently, as part of the seemingly endless war in Afghanistan, the US military dropped a massive, 22,000 lb munition on an ISIS tunnel complex. The munition, formally named GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), but happily dubbed "Mother Of All Bombs" by the war...
Hating Success
It's generally a good idea, when a news bit elicits either a "hoo-rah" moment of empowered concurrence, to take a breath and ponder the why and wherefore of that hoo-rah. So it should with the story of the Fearless Girl statue recently placed in front of the iconic...
Amalgamating Antipathy
Hollywood wunderkind and vocal anti-Trump activist Joss Whedon offered up a lulu of a tweet a couple days ago, where he suggested that the reported kidnapping and murder of a number of gay men by authorities in Chechnya is a prelude of what will happen in America if...
We Need a Political Peel
The tradition of ad-hoc cobbled-together investigations of politicians looking into their own misdeeds needs to be over. They can no longer be trusted to contain their factional warfare, they can no longer be trusted to act for the overall public good, if they ever...
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