Where a Hispanic Catholic, and a Computer Geek write about Gun Rights, Self Defense and whatever else we can think about.
A district attorney in upstate New York dropped the last of five criminal probes into former Gov. Andrew Cuomo over allegations of sexual misconduct and implored the state legislature to change the sexual harassment statutes.
Who did not see this coming?
I am no longer surprised or even mad. I am just waiting for the unavoidable shitstorm and hope I have enough “supplies.”
I have been going on for a couple of days about the Leftists who canceled To Kill a Mockingbird.
There have been comments about a school district in Tennessee canceling Maus.
As of yet I haven’t posted on it, but I value my integrity and I realize my silence on this topic may have been quite loud.
First, the reason I focused on the canceling of To Kill a Mockingbird is that it was canceled out of pure naked racism.
A black woman decided that a white woman who was born in Alabama in 1926 couldn’t possibly understand, or sympathize with enough, a black man to write a book about his plight that is accurate enough to be worth reading.
Never mind that the book in question was galvanizing for the Civil Rights Movement in the South and propagated positive change for the black community.
According to the Progressive Left, white people should not write about black people. That is racist and intellectually segregationists.
The situation in Tennessee is different, or at least what I have seen is different.
As far as I have read, the school district had objections to some of the language and imagery in the graphic novel. Particularly nude female mice in a gas chamber.
The district claims it is looking for a new text for covering Holocaust history.
At face value, this is not antisemitic.
I was going to hols my judgment (and post on said topic) until it is fully resolved.
Personally, I hate Maus, so I’m fine with removing it as the Holocaust text.
There are several reasons.
In general I hate graphic novels. I’m not going to get into the debate if graphic novels are literature or not.
I find them hard to read. I didn’t grow up reading comic books, my parents thought they were garbage and I owned none. Few words and panels of pictures is distracting to me. I can’t read them. I’d rather a book.
For Maus specifically, I hate that the Jews are mice and the Germans are cats.
Mice are a rodent and that hits too close to Nazi propaganda of Jews being rats and vermin.
Moreover, it makes the Jews a prey species and the Germans a predator species.
We Jews are not prey. A half a century of Israeli history has demonstrated that.
Depicting tyr Nazis going after the Jews as predators going after prey is the antithesis of the lesson of Ordinary Men.
Both the Jews and Germans were human. Equal. Tantamount.
Kids reading Maus can say “I’m not a cat.” Reading Ordinary Men, you learn that yes, you too can be made into a mass murder without ever truly understanding (grok is such an appropriate word in this case) that you are in fact the bad guy.
If your goal is to teach kids about antisemitism and the Holocaust, Night, Entombed, or one of several other texts does that. Then make the seniors read Ordinary Men.
I unstable that Maus was written by Art Spiegelman as a way for him and his father to process the trauma and memory of what his father went through and I don’t want to demise that.
I do think there are better educational texts.
I’ll follow back up with a final conclusion when I see what the school board decides.
It’s Pinewood Derby season for Scouts.
Engineer dad refuses to lose.
The boy designed the car body and did a good job at making it aerodynamic.
In his words “it’s slick so the air moves around it.”
I’ve been truing and polishing axles, burnishing wheels, applying bake-on graphite dry films, casting lead weights (I refuse to buy $20 tungsten weights), etc.
For the first time in a while I’m glad I’m not in Huntsville anymore. I’d be going up against actual fucking rocket scientists. Guys who design their Scout cars with CFD and machine them CNC.
My wife keeps reminding me this is another boy having fun. This isn’t just a Scout competition. This is my reputation as an engineer.
At around 1130 hours today we did some site maintenance. During this time people might have seen errors where the site reported that it was unable to connect to the database.
This is to be expected and has been corrected.
We will be doing a server reboot at some point in the near future to take advantage of some software upgrades.
Reader Erik Wilner pointed out today we are celebrating this joyful occasion and we need a proper post for it. It is a good thing that LawDog already has the best story out there:
Now, when I say pink, I don’t think y’all quite understand the depth of pinkness we are contemplating here: It was pink, pink. Neon pink. Fluorescent pink. A pink not found anywhere in nature. A pink that, in and of itself, constituted a radiation hazard. A shade of pink which, after a single glimpse, would cause the most flamboyant Mardi Gras costumer to protest that things had gone too far.
The LawDog Files: The Pink Gorilla Suit <- Go Read it.
Don’t freak out…much. I am working on it and trying to make it available for all formats since there are weird people that no longer use desktops and almost exclusively them “smart” phone <cough J Kb cough>.
I think the one I chose is neat and a wee bit more pleasing to the eye., but I want to make sure I don’t miss anything and also prune out some stuff no longer relevant.
One thing I did get in this new theme is that the authors of the post will be more clearly defined. I know this was a point of contention among many readers.
Incidentally, the Presidential Blog Pool came and went and unfortunately for the participants and country in general, nobody won.
UPDATE: As you can probably (and hope) see, we are up and running the new theme. Go through the site and let me know how do you like it and any suggestions you may have.