tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57550873492014455372024-03-05T00:12:17.511-05:00Suburban SheepdogThoughts on taking care of the flock.Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.comBlogger115125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-31295113741251776212020-11-10T07:39:00.000-05:002020-11-10T07:44:25.416-05:00EOW 11-10-75 (Redux)<p> <span style="color: black;">You’ve heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Mighty Fitz was a Great Lakes ore boat and, at more than 700 feet, among the largest of her kind. <strike>Thirty-five</strike> <strike>Forty</strike> Forty-five years ago, in a raging late-autumn storm, </span><a href="http://www.edmundfitzgerald.com/">she broke in two and found the bottom of Lake Superior</a><span style="color: black;"> , taking 29 men with her. You’ve heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald because Gordon Lightfoot wrote a </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0DqPSF2fyo">song</a><span style="color: black;"> about her. But you’ve never heard of my Uncle Bill, because no one ever wrote a song about him.*</span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: black;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjyNR7QpAf4Nj0-nB2zwWCwwFu9_Wni7IwIz_0iGWyzzDmQdy0jHU8wkm3pOkU_KC1gDv04R3zk9hzfuJakgxLcFXIbSm0Y4FnqGmDmIACAD3Ox2si_sx-6Y5mQRVVsf-XuQZh3u60DpcD/s1600/bill+color.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjyNR7QpAf4Nj0-nB2zwWCwwFu9_Wni7IwIz_0iGWyzzDmQdy0jHU8wkm3pOkU_KC1gDv04R3zk9hzfuJakgxLcFXIbSm0Y4FnqGmDmIACAD3Ox2si_sx-6Y5mQRVVsf-XuQZh3u60DpcD/s320/bill+color.jpg" width="213" /></a></span></p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><p><span style="color: black;">Bill was a cop’s cop and a detective sergeant in the Cleveland suburb of Bedford Heights. That Monday he and his partner, James Toth, visited Blonder’s Paint Store with books of mug shots. The store had been robbed five weeks before, and there still was no arrest. Bill was a sweet man, but that kind of thing pissed him off, so he was going to work the case until something broke.<br /><br />Nobody was in the front of the store, so Bill walked through to the back. Michael Manns was waiting for him, hiding behind a bathroom door, because he was robbing Blonder’s Paint Store again. Manns and his crew had the employees held hostage in the back room. The moment Bill came through the door, Manns put a pistol to Bill’s neck and pulled the trigger, blowing out Bill’s spine and carotid artery. Bill fell flat to the floor, shattering the big glasses he always wore -- except his official photo.</span></p><p><span style="color: black;">Manns knew exactly whom he was killing when he murdered my uncle. Bill hadn’t wanted to startle store employees fresh from the prior robbery, who might be jumpy at someone coming through the door unannounced. So he’d called out “Sgt. Prochazka, police department!” as he walked through.<br /><br />After firing the shot, Manns fled with his accomplices, George Clayton, Dwain Farrow and Duran Harris. Store employees, now having seen the robbers twice, were able to identify them and Clayton, Farrow and Harris were arrested within a day or so by Cleveland police. Manns was on the run for several weeks, until police caught up with him in Detroit.<br /><br />The funeral procession drew police cars from 49 states, every province of Canada and most of Northern Mexico. Bedford Heights was a small department, but despite all the other lawmen there, the BHPD wouldn’t let anyone else stand honor guard over the coffin, day and night, until they put it in the ground.<br /><br />Bill, with his twin brother Bob – also a cop – was the youngest of ten brothers and sisters. He left my Aunt Loretta, a daughter and three sons. Over the days of viewing, I saw the strongest people I knew – the strongest people I thought there could be – reduced to mewling, groveling beasts by their grief. During the service, someone played “Amazing Grace” on the piano. Bill’s youngest boy stood before the coffin and saluted, exactly like John John in Stan Stearns’ iconic photo.<br /><br />All four men were convicted of aggravated robbery and murder. Our family had people at every day of trial. On the day each man was sentenced to death, all eight of Bill’s surviving siblings, and dozens of cousins, nephews, and nieces stood witness. Not long after that, all of the death sentences were commuted to life in prison when a court ruling banned Ohio’s death penalty. Harris was granted parole and freed in 2003. Corrections officials had failed to inform the family of the parole hearing, so no one was there to oppose his release. Now, as the other men’s hearings periodically arise, someone is always there – led by Bill’s son Robert, a cop in Willowick, Ohio.<br /><br />However much we love or are loved, however deep our connections to our wives and husbands and children and friends, there is a sense in which we each travel through life aboard a ship with a single passenger. Even shared experiences are felt uniquely, individually. Standing in the same storm, each of us hears the thunder at a slightly different moment, feels the wind from a certain, personal angle. So it was that, drenched in sadness that entire miserable, sleet-soaked funeral week – and although I loved him so much – I did not cry for Bill.<br /><br />I was too busy making an acquaintance of hate, whom I hadn’t occasion to meet before then.<br /><br />Twenty-nine sailors, a good cop and a teen boy’s faith all died that day <strike>thirty-five</strike> forty years ago, to be buried under steel gray waves, or brown earth or black despair. I said I was through with God that day, and for twenty years I made good on that vow, except to make war on Him from time to time. But He wasn’t done with me. So today I can pray for Bill, and for his family – and even for Manns, Clayton, Farrow and Harris.<br /><br />But that’s another story.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />*Actually, as it happens, <i>I</i> wrote a song about him -- which amounts to the same thing.</span><br /></span></p><p><span style="color: black;"><br /></span></p>Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-63755537426889448582019-12-30T13:52:00.001-05:002019-12-30T14:05:50.996-05:00Wise as serpents<br />
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<span style="font-size: 18.6667px; text-align: start;">By now you have learned of the incidents among gatherings of the faithful in Monsey, New York and White Settlement, Texas. It’s now time to start learning </span><b style="font-size: 18.6667px; text-align: start;"><i>from</i></b><span style="font-size: 18.6667px; text-align: start;"> them as well.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOTabGuBdAFhmmq6mICztpEBLPNJzWQ2ON_K1vvG_-R8g2z6wl6mO5_k8r1yhrot5nEKBd26484ihwTCsD-rJoGp76j77sC5tFwVGSzD57SLHWOYbSkL8NK5ukXVigqxMoDXzksTkRZSpP/s1600/serpent+dov.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="331" data-original-width="239" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOTabGuBdAFhmmq6mICztpEBLPNJzWQ2ON_K1vvG_-R8g2z6wl6mO5_k8r1yhrot5nEKBd26484ihwTCsD-rJoGp76j77sC5tFwVGSzD57SLHWOYbSkL8NK5ukXVigqxMoDXzksTkRZSpP/s320/serpent+dov.JPG" width="231" /></a></div>
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In the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/29/us/new-york-stabbing-rabbi-home/index.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">former</span></a>, a machete-wielding attacker broke into a home where Orthodox Jews
were celebrating Hanukah with their rabbi. Five people were wounded, some grievously.
The attacker fled the scene and was arrested later in a traffic stop. <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/12/29/21041622/white-settlement-texas-church-shooting-what-we-know" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">In Texas</span></a>,
a gunman stood up during a service at the West Highway Church of Christ, brandishing
a shotgun. He killed two congregants before being killed himself
by a single shot fired by the leader of the church’s volunteer security team.*<br />
<br />There will be many details revealed in the coming days. But there are already
are lessons to be learned – and we have an obligation to learn them. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">As always,
the first lesson is to free oneself from the shackles of two deadly lies: “It
can’t happen here” and “If it happens, there’s nothing I can do.”</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It can
happen here</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">, wherever
“here” is. America is a huge and glorious place, as diverse in a single nation
as any entire continent inhabited by man. Aside from the common characteristic of
humans gathering to live out a life of faith, you’d be hard pressed to find places
more distinct from one another than White Settlement, Texas and Monsey, New
York. A large suburban church congregation is hardly an intimate gathering of
believers at a rabbi’s house. It can happen in your “here,” and if it does . .
.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /><b>You not only can do something, you must.</b> Over and over and over again we
have learned that those who attack places of worship, </span><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">attackers who are not confronted, as in </span><a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2019/03/experience-baseball-philosopher-vernon.html" style="font-size: 18.6667px;" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">the first mosque targeted</span></a><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;"> in New Zealand, will kill and kill and kill. On the other hand, </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">once confronted with any
force at all (even a thrown credit card machine, as in the second mosque targeted
in New Zealand) most attackers will divert or break off their attack. Especially and
necessarily so if the confrontation leaves them dead. So, t</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">o that end. . .</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Arm yourself</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">. Jeff Cooper famously said that “an
unarmed man <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2010/11/can-only-flee-from-evil.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">can only flee from evil</span></a>, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from
it.” The Monsey Jews were disarmed by the State of New York, prohibited most effective weapons even in a home like the one where the attack occurred. The White
Settlement Christians were free under their state’s laws to be armed, and armed
in church, and many of those there <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2012/12/resolved-redux.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">considered all that must considered</span></a>, then
armed themselves. That said, John Steinbeck explained
that no mere gun is enough </span><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">–</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> because the gun is not really the weapon** – so you
had better. . .</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Train</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">. Train with your chosen tools. Train
realistically, frequently, honestly. Practice in a way that provides
relentlessly objective metrics. (“Wearing <b><i>this</i></b>, while seated like
<b><i>this</i></b>, I can draw from concealment <b><i>this</i></b> fast and put
a shot on a target <b><i>this</i></b> large at <b><i>this</i></b> distance 100%
of the time.”) Then tell yourself the truth about yourself. Jack Wilson, the
man who took down the West Highway Church shooter, drew and fired, connecting with a
single head shot, in something under two seconds at a range of perhaps 50 feet.
This is prodigious skill and Wilson, a firearms instructor, had to have trained
long, hard and well to attain it. But what mattered more than that skill was
that he <b><i>knew</i></b> he had that skill. He obeyed the rule that a man has
to know his limitations and then he acted within them.**** Your limitations may
be different and may demand a different action. But whatever those limitations,
you must. . . <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Act</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">. I’ve said it in this space <span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2010/12/youve-got-to-be-carefully-taught.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">time</span></a> </span>and
<a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2011/03/neener-neener-neener.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">time </span></a>again: Do everything you can to avoid violence. But when the time comes
for violence, the crucial thing is to be violent <b><i>enough</i></b> fast <b><i>enough</i></b>.
One could hardly have embodied that more perfectly than Mr. Wilson. But, although he will rightly be lauded as a hero, note that he also understood
that. . . .<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It isn’t
enough to act alone</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">.
Church security is a matter of resolving the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Church-Security-Outreach-Strategy-Ninety-Nine/dp/1545662185" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Pastor’s Paradox</span></a>. This is the
tension between creating a church that is safe for the flock***** while still
open to the very troubled people who need to be there the most. Mr. Wilson was
the leader of a team. I am, too. These demand sacrificial commitment from their
members – to <a href="https://glenevansseminars.com/church-security-trainer/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">train</span></a>, to show up, to do what has to be done. Such teams demand systemic integration into the entire matrix of church security, from the <a href="https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/crime/article238818513.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">congregants themselves</span></a>, greeters
handing out programs to the uniformed security guards in the marked cars. They demand customized tactics, techniques and protocols fit for your unique place of worship. And events like those in Texas or New York -- confrontation of a revealed threat -- are a vanishingly rare departure from a far
less dramatic routine; they are outlier events that most, blessedly, will never
encounter. So your TTPs and training need to be about confronting shooters, but, also about more esoteric practices like threat
recognition and verbal deescalation. You will – and thank heaven for this – talk
down seven times seventy congregants irritated about the parking, or peeved
about the use of handbells during the worship, or vexed about the coffee
running out in the fellowship hall before you ever encounter a “real threat.” But if you have a team
in place,****** then, by the grace of God and to His glory, you will have a
prayer that your own Mr. Wilson is in the right place at the right time.
Because, in the end. . . .<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We are
commanded</span></b><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> to go
forth among the wolves.******* And wisdom demands we learn the lessons we are
given to learn. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 107%;">* We know who carried out the Monsey attack, and why, and how they gained
entry. Details of the West Highway Church attacker aren’t out yet, and we don’t
know how a man dressed as he was, concealing a long gun, evidently wearing a fake beard and wig, gained
entry in the first place. [And let’s be clear from the jump: Neither this, nor anything
below, is gratuitous criticism. This isn’t “Monday Morning Quarterbacking.” We simply
must be unflinchingly honest with ourselves about events like these, ruthless
in our assessments of the events and ourselves. We do the dead and injured no
honor to ignore even the hardest truths about what happened.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><br />** “The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplemental.” John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and
His Noble Knights<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;">*** He was
also blessed with something one will rarely encounter in a crowded sanctuary –
a clear, solid and unoccupied backstop. <span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2013/02/rules-of-engagement.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">The Four Rules</span></a> </span>always apply.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;">**** Tragically,
another congregant did not. He stood up close to the shooter and – having pulled
the shooter’s attention – attempted a draw he couldn’t win against an already
drawn shotgun. This man paid with his life. His actions were heroic. He stood in
the gap. And that may well have been efficacious in that it distracted the
shooter from harming some other congregant. But he had other choices he could
have made (a surreptitious draw, a shot while seated) that might have better
availed him. [As above, I mean this as no judgment on a man who, my faith tells me,
I will one day joyfully meet in heaven. But his death has lessons to teach.
Shame on us if we diminish it by ignoring them.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;">***** That is
easy to do. The result is a church that looks like a prison.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;">****** Those
interested in this topic in a practical way should feel free to contact me via
email. Besides the links provided here to some excellent resources, I can offer other
advice and materials.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;">******* </span><span style="background: white; color: #001320; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Behold, I
send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as
serpents, and harmless as doves.</span> Matt. 10:16<span style="line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-51374505567454439822019-03-15T21:04:00.000-04:002019-06-11T14:01:42.847-04:00You've got to be carefully taught<br />
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“Experience,” baseball philosopher Vernon Law famously said,
“is a hard teacher, because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.” Oxford
don philosopher C.S. Lewis put it like this: “Experience: that most brutal of
teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHBSXBsU5Gr4fwCnShk89rTLxAkfeGTDYjLJBBW1TepE_kMWPR4lQGED4CYfI1BAdv0b2q-4AB38FtdXwtSckBt_O06a0racgUW3Ey7gcpgIfjFerVFGDaKkmNEXqrmxTGCbGxTy7j9U72/s1600/blackboard.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="554" data-original-width="797" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHBSXBsU5Gr4fwCnShk89rTLxAkfeGTDYjLJBBW1TepE_kMWPR4lQGED4CYfI1BAdv0b2q-4AB38FtdXwtSckBt_O06a0racgUW3Ey7gcpgIfjFerVFGDaKkmNEXqrmxTGCbGxTy7j9U72/s400/blackboard.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br />
The ballplayer, who was merely characterizing experience, turns out always to be right. The don, predicting its effect, sadly, isn’t. It turns out
that the modern human capacity for ignoring hard-taught lessons is profound. You will be able to watch this play out in the next few days as the world assesses
the lessons from the mosque shootings in New Zealand. Predictably, most
folks will “learn” the exact lesson that best suits what they already believe.
Those convinced that evil arises from the barrel of gun will “learn” that lesson
again, ignore all others, and fight to force it on all and sundry. Those
inclined to attribute <a href="http://www.tunisiesoir.com/international/chelsea-clinton-confronted-by-nyu-students-for-new-zealand-mosque-attacks-14213-2019/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">mystical, evil, trans-global powers</span></a> to politicians they
despise will “learn” that the political leaders they despise have <a href="https://twitter.com/Suntimes/status/1106754015700889600?s=19" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">mystical,evil, trans-global powers</span></a>, ignoring all other possible motives and means.*<o:p></o:p></div>
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Those of us who take the world as it comes, who try to be
clear-eyed about the lesson the harsh schoolmistress teaches, must do better. We have learned <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2010/12/youve-got-to-be-carefully-taught.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">here</span></a><a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2010/12/youve-got-to-be-carefully-taught.html" target="_blank"> </a>before. In the most terrible way imaginable, we have been brought to class by a unique
teacher.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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For what has to have been the first time, the shooter in the
first mosque wore a camera. Despite the best efforts of benighted officials
seeking to repress this vital tool, I’ve seen it. I watched its nearly 17
horrific minutes four times before the link was sent where governments often send hard
truths. Because while it is horrible,** it is true. It is the truest thing you
will ever see. And it has lessons to teach.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Observe: The shooter was able to approach from down the
block and enter the building unchallenged while in full tactical gear and
carrying two long guns.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Lesson: Live in <a href="https://www.bsr-inc.com/awareness-color-code-chart/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Condition Yellow</span></a></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Observe: He passed several members of the mosque, who did
not even call out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Lesson: SEE something so you can say
something.</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Observe: He entered through an open gate and an open
exterior door. (The side exterior doors to the Mosque were also open.) T</span><span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">he shooter then walked up and down the same hallway repeatedly, but never even tried the
several doors on either side of the hallway where other worshipers were hiding.</span></div>
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the shooter. Lock the door if you can.</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Observe: The shooter was on scene for six minutes, returning once to
his car down the block to retrieve another weapon and more ammunition, then re-entering the mosque. There was no police
response while the shooter was on scene. After a second entry to the Mosque,
the shooter went back to his car and drove calmly away.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Lesson: You have to solve the problem
without the police. You are your own first responder, and likely the only one who can be there on time.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Observe: No one made any attempt to intervene with him, to attack him, to get inside his <a href="https://taylorpearson.me/ooda-loop/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">OODA Loop</span></a>. (One worshiper ran into him as the worshiper tried to flee, but made no
effort to disarm the shooter.) This despite the fact there were multiple
opportunities to engage the shooter during many clumsy reloads and many
malfunctions he had with his weapons. He frequently turned his back on his
victims. He walked blindly through openings.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Lesson:
Mass shooters will provide opportunities for violence of action. Take advantage
of them. You're probably going to die, so take your best shot.</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Observe: Most victims died cowering in corners. The shooter
shot everyone he could see – many times. Needless to say, no one was able to
exchange fire with the shooter, because New Zealand largely disarms its citizens.</span></div>
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You have to stop the shooter, because the shooter won’t stop until he’s done.</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Observe: The shooter was, in fact, very poorly trained if
trained at all. He charged into rooms, he had lousy target awareness, he turned his back on people who should have been threats to his safety, he could not clear a failure-to-feed,
fumbled reloads, and more. An armed worshiper with even minimal training and<span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2012/12/resolved-redux.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;"> the right mindset</span></a> </span>would
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<b><span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Lesson:
Have a gun. Carry the gun. Get trained with the gun. Be prepared – morally,
spiritually, physically – to employ the gun to save your life and others’
lives.</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Observe: We know the point above is correct because this
shooter’s accomplice DID encounter armed resistance at the second mosque. A
worshiper (likely “illegally” armed given New Zealand’s laws) fired at the
shooter there and that shooter instantly abandoned his attack.</span></div>
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<b style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "calisto mt" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Lesson:
Armed resistance stops mass shooters.</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* I was able to come back twelve hours after this post originally went up and add links demonstrating exactly my point. That Chelsea Clinton and Donald Trump were both credited with such powers makes the point an even finer one.</span></div>
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** <span style="font-size: x-small;">And it is utterly horrific. Human bodies piled like snow drifts in
the corners. The impact of shotgun rounds striking skulls. The shooter’s cavalier, flippant
commentary as scores die crying out for mercy. You should watch it. Because it’s true. But I
won’t think less of you if you can’t. The lessons are still the lessons, but
they do burn in a bit more deeply with the viewing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-28861737117089544632018-04-19T10:32:00.000-04:002018-04-19T10:34:37.155-04:00Battle Road Redux<span style="color: red;"><b>On this 243rd anniversary, a re-post is in order. (Originally posted 17 April 2015.)</b></span><br />
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As the rising sun pierced the billowing gun smoke that April morning 240 years ago this Sunday, I suspect the British regulars were thinking something along the lines of “Well, that’s for them.” The truth is that the “<a href="http://www.nationalcenter.org/ConcordHymn.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Shot Heard Round the World</span></a>” echoed over an inauspicious field abandoned by a beaten militia in full flight. The only would-be rebels who remained on the Green did so because they were dead or dying.<br />
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So British Colonel Francis Smith might well have thought that, with one lot of traitors shown conclusively who was master, well begun was half done and the day portended well for King George III. It must have been with more than a little confidence that Smith turned his troops down the road toward Concord, where Tories and spies had reported the nascent rebellion had a large cache of weapons.<br />
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But neither Smith nor his executive officer, Major John Pitcairn – much less King George – had heard <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3OVmTqSFe6m0uAjtQoNTJJCcPzUTky1xlkVh5bBIVmQfyo4vz3BaAT7iQ6YwubLz5Zx1Kc2dLeaLpamKZtGEFzOKmpVR4bperpdR-wuHY8UAQj5_RPFabamxb5J2kNvZVgw1LrWbAmBHp/s1600/2010+-+Lexington-Concord+tour+Parker.JPG" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">American Captain John Parker</span></a> addressing his militiamen just before dawn. The rebels had waited through the night to see if the British foray into the countryside was just another reconnoiter in force, or something more sinister. Paul Revere and his fellow riders assured them the regulars were on their way intent on disarming the budding rebellion. As the British entered the green, the militiamen assembled from Buckman Tavern and elsewhere to face them. Parker reminded them that while their foremost purpose was to merely demonstrate their resolve, more than that might well be demanded of them. </div>
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“Stand your ground and do not fire unless fired upon,” Parker ordered. “But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”*</div>
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Faced off across a space no larger than a football field, Parker and Pitcairn each commanded their respective forces not to fire. Pitcairn had every reason to expect to be obeyed; British regulars did as they were ordered and Pitcairn’s force of elite light infantry were some of the best troops of the best professional army in the world. Parker, commanding farmers, merchants – and a slave named Prince Estabrook – likewise expected to be obeyed, if for no other reason than because his men had families close at hand, some watching from just off the field. Greek governmental theories, philosophical abstractions and offenses such as the Intolerable Acts may have driven rabble-rousers like Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberty. But for the militiamen on Lexington Green, their homes and farms and livelihoods were all too tangible realities, all too close at hand.</div>
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So no one was meant to fire a shot, but as it as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0504.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">has time and again</span></a> throughout the years, the shot nevertheless was fired** and then everyone on the field let loose. It was over in minutes and the outcome, with many rebels killed or wounded, and only one of his own men hurt, couldn't have surprised Pitcairn, who couldn't have had much doubt about how the rest of the day would go.</div>
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But it was only dawn. And he hadn't heard Parker.</div>
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Pitcairn couldn't have understood at that moment that he hadn't just been a part of a police action or some noisy civil disturbance. Because he hadn't heard Parker, because he didn't know who these Patriots really were, Pitcairn didn't know then that he’d really been a participant in the first skirmish of a remorseless war. But he was soon to learn.</div>
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By the end of that very day, after the desperate running fight down the Battle Road, as the blood ran from the North Bridge to stain the Concord River, Pitcairn could not help but to have had a better understanding of what war with real Americans would mean: All told the rebels had lost 88 men killed and wounded. The butcher’s bill for the most feared and powerful military force in the world was nearly twice that, at 147. By the very next morning – without the aid of Facebook or a single cell phone – 15,000 men of what would eventually*** become a victorious Continental Army were outside of Boston. </div>
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This nation was born of blood and smoke and outrage and an abiding sense that "Enough is enough, damn it." It was born when a secure and prosperous people finally decided that their liberties were more dear to them than their comforts. I am convinced that Americans -- or, at the very least, enough Americans -- still fear blood and smoke less, and love liberty more, than they love their comfort. I believe that Americans still know their way to the Battle Road. I believe this, I confess, in part because I must believe it, or else despair.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Indeed, many of the militiamen may not have heard Parker, either. Her suffered from tuberculosis and had trouble mustering enough breath to speak.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">**Theories vary wildly about who fired first. The best evidence, I think, suggests that it was one of the spectators, townsmen arrayed around the green, but not under Parker’s command.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">*** "Eventually" in spades. In the <b>eight years, four months and 15 days</b> from that day to the Treaty of Paris, there would be some 150,000 casualties, suffered overwhelmingly by the Americans and their families, fighting on their own doorsteps.</span></div>
Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-244800203088489472017-12-07T11:08:00.000-05:002018-06-07T16:48:35.270-04:00PearlDown on the shop floor that Monday lunchtime, most of the company, including Dad’s three best friends, listened to the speech on the radio on the foreman’s desk. At 21, with a two-year business degree, Dad was the most junior of junior executives. So he and a dozen others upstairs listened in his boss’s office. Later that same afternoon, Dad and his buddies were together in that office. They told the boss they’d be back again when it was over.<br />
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The boss pulled a bottle from a drawer, shared glasses all around, and promised them their jobs would be waiting. Dad was grateful for the drink. Grateful, too, he told me once, that the boss – a crusty old Marine – skipped his oft-told stories about the Marne River and Belleau Wood. “If I had to listen to those stories that day,” Dad said, “I’m not sure I’d have kept my nerve.”</div>
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By midday Wednesday the four friends were at the recruiting station. By early in the new year they were on a train headed south for basic. Dad had never been outside of Ohio, and rarely far from Cleveland. Biloxi seemed a world away, but it was warm, and Dad always liked the heat. Before long, though, he was headed a real world away. When we think of the war in the Pacific – those of us who think of it at all anymore – we mostly think of the Marines. But the Army Air Force was there in numbers, too, and if they were spared abattoirs like Peleliu and Iwo Jima, where the Marines traded so many lives for coral rock and glory, that’s not to say the the Army Air Force was spared.</div>
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Dad’s troop ship stopped at Colon, Panama. He was one of hundreds of seasick young men in holds converted to barracks, waiting their turn to lock up through the Canal on the way to the South Pacific. Word came that a headquarters clerk at the major Canal Zone air base was down with appendicitis. (In fact it killed him.) Well, even the most junior of junior executives had a skill crucial to a mid-Twentieth Century army – he could type. Dad was pulled off the ship, and sent to <a href="http://www.pacificwrecks.com/airfields/panama/france/index.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">France Field</span></a>, where he would spend the war.</div>
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Calm, organized, steady, determined and unafraid of the menial or the unpleasant, by the end Dad was a First Sergeant and the post sergeant major – the highest ranking non-com. Forty years later, when I was a newsman covering the Air Force, I asked Dad how it was possible for a guy to go from boot to Top Kick in less than four years. “Robbie,” he explained, “the only thing we never ran out of was rank.”</div>
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The mission at France Field was simplicity itself: Keep the Canal open; keep the ships moving. Planes from the field would hunt down and kill the German U-boat wolf packs and the lesser known, but larger, fleet of Italian subs that operated in the region throughout the war. (Just because you've never heard of the <a href="http://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=276" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Battle of the Caribbean</span></a>, doesn't mean they didn't fight it.)</div>
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Dad would say that he spent the war filing paper, fighting off yellow fever, placating officers, disciplining drunken airmen, and playing a lot of softball. A quiet, contented man, Dad often said he had had an “easy war.” He meant that especially when compared to his three friends, who fought the war from inside B-17s over Europe. One of those guys spent years confined in, then escaping from, a series of increasingly brutal German POW camps. One of them rode his plane into a smoking hole in the Dutch countryside and never made it back to claim the job waiting for him, as promised, at<span style="color: orange;"> <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Elevator_Cars_Elevator_Entrances.html?id=OFvgGAAACAAJ" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">W.S. Tyler Company</span></a>.</span>* If not for some poor guy’s infected appendix, Dad’s war would have been anything but easy. And who can say if three and half years in the Solomons and New Guinea and the Philippines would have sent home the man I was blessed to know as my father or, instead, someone less whole, less gentle.</div>
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Dad never regretted the way things happened, never felt deprived of some sort of martial adventure.** He knew he’d been blessed. “I did what I was called on to do,” is how he would put it. “That's war. I did my job; other guys were just called to give more.”</div>
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I didn't argue the point with him; never would have, never could have. But as I've grown, and especially in the 20 years since he’s been gone, I've come to understand that he was wrong.</div>
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I think of that skinny Cleveland kid, just a few years out of service as an altar boy, standing around the boss’s desk with a drink in his hand, silently praying the old Marine would forego his war stories, lest will and determination fail. I think of a kid for whom the Gulf Coast was far country, signing up to go wherever they sent him. I think of a kid who, as smart as he was with the accounts, could never have figured the value of the note he was signing, but who signed it anyway – and stood ready to pay whatever the tally-man demanded.</div>
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And I think, Dad, that you couldn't have given more than that.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Which isn't to suggest Dad was entirely immune to pride. “The bastards never shut us down, Robbie. They never did.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">** He did have at least one adventure he liked to describe: There was a fire at a remote observation post and Dad was sent to investigate. The Jeep could only go so far before he had to travel by small boat, then hike a day up a jungle mountain. (Faulty generator not sabotage, as it turned out.) Typical of my Dad was his perspective on that story: “I got back in about three days. Got a shower and hot chow. I thought a lot about those guys in the Pacific who had to stay out in that jungle all the time.”</span></div>
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Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-21414007796817231732017-11-10T10:04:00.001-05:002017-11-10T13:46:11.424-05:00Not just a ship<span style="color: orange;"><b>Forty-two years</b></span><br />
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You’ve heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Mighty Fitz was a Great Lakes ore boat and, at more than 700 feet, among the largest of her kind. Forty-two years ago, in a raging late-autumn storm, <a href="http://www.edmundfitzgerald.com/">she broke in two and found the bottom of Lake Superior</a>, taking 29 men with her. You’ve heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald because Gordon Lightfoot wrote a <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0DqPSF2fyo">song</a> about her. But you’ve never heard of my Uncle Bill, because no one ever wrote a song about him.*<br />
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Bill was a cop’s cop and a detective sergeant in the Cleveland suburb of Bedford Heights. That Monday he and his partner, James Toth, visited Blonder’s Paint Store with books of mug shots. The store had been robbed five weeks before, and there still was no arrest. Bill was a sweet man, but that kind of thing pissed him off, so he was going to work the case until something broke.<br />
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Nobody was in the front of the store, so Bill walked through to the back. Michael Manns was waiting for him, hiding behind a bathroom door, because he was robbing Blonder’s Paint Store again. Manns and his crew had the employees held hostage in the back room. The moment Bill came through the door, Manns put a pistol to Bill’s neck and pulled the trigger, blowing out Bill’s spine and carotid artery. Bill fell flat to the floor, shattering the big glasses he always wore -- except his official photo.<br />
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Manns knew exactly whom he was killing when he murdered my uncle. Bill hadn’t wanted to startle store employees, fresh from the prior robbery, who might be jumpy at someone coming through the door unannounced. So he’d called out “Sgt. Prochazka, police department!” as he walked through.<br />
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After firing the shot, Manns fled with his accomplices, George Clayton, Dwain Farrow and Duran Harris. Store employees, now having seen the robbers twice, were able to identify them and Clayton, Farrow and Harris were arrested within a day or so by Cleveland police. Manns was on the run for several weeks, until police caught up with him in Detroit.<br />
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The funeral procession drew police cars from 49 states, every province of Canada and most of Northern Mexico. Bedford Heights was a small department, but despite all the other lawmen there, the BHPD wouldn’t let anyone else stand honor guard over the coffin, day and night, until they put it in the ground.<br />
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Bill, with his twin brother Bob – also a cop – was the youngest of ten brothers and sisters. He left my Aunt Loretta, a daughter and three sons. Over the days of viewing, I saw the strongest people I knew – the strongest people I thought there could be – reduced to mewling, groveling beasts by their grief. During the service, someone played “Amazing Grace” on the piano. Bill’s youngest boy stood before the coffin and saluted, exactly like John John in Stan Stearns’<span style="color: orange;"> <a href="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2012/03/05/obituaries/05stearns1/05stearns1-jumbo.jpg" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">iconic photo</span></a></span>.<br />
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All four men were convicted of aggravated robbery and murder. Our family had people at every day of trial. On the day each man was sentenced to death, all eight of Bill’s surviving siblings, and dozens of cousins, nephews, and nieces stood witness. Not long after that, all of the death sentences were commuted to life in prison when a court ruling banned Ohio’s death penalty. Harris was granted parole and freed in 2003. Corrections officials had failed to inform the family of the parole hearing, so no one was there to oppose his release. Now, as the other men’s hearings periodically arise, someone is always there – led by Bill’s son Robert, a cop in Willowick, Ohio.<br />
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However much we love or are loved, however deep our connections to our wives and husbands and children and friends, there is a sense in which we each travel through life aboard a ship with a single passenger. Even shared experiences are felt uniquely, individually. Standing in the same storm, each of us hears the thunder at a slightly different moment, feels the wind from a certain, personal angle. So it was that, drenched in sadness that entire miserable, sleet-soaked funeral week – and although I loved him so much – I did not cry for Bill.<br />
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I was too busy making an acquaintance of Hate, whom I hadn’t occasion to meet before then.<br />
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Twenty-nine sailors, a good cop and a teen boy’s faith all died that day forty-two years ago, to be buried under steel gray waves, or brown earth, or black despair. I said I was through with God that day, and for twenty years I made good on that vow, except to make war on Him from time to time. But He wasn’t done with me. So today I can pray for Bill, and for his family – and even for Manns, Clayton, Farrow and Harris.<br />
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But that’s another story.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />*Actually, as it happens, <i>I</i> wrote a song about him -- which amounts to the same thing.</span>Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-43537834805103427962017-11-08T10:32:00.000-05:002017-11-10T10:10:00.847-05:00Getting your mind right<br />
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/us/church-shooting-texas.html?_r=0" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Recent events</span></a><span style="color: #990000;"> are having the effect that events always have when they are recent: Folks are thinking and talking -- at least for now -- about issues that are ever present, but are most often ignored by most. It's human nature to do this of course. In the words of the fictional </span><a href="https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=inherit-the-wind" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Matthew Harrison Brady</span></a><span style="color: #990000;">, we don't think about things we don't think about. Indeed, this tendency is itself so predictable that investors have name for the phenomenon: </span><span style="color: orange;"><span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://performance-appraisals.org/faq/biasrecency.htm" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Recency Bias</span></a>.</span> </span><span style="color: #990000;">Still, one supposes it's better to think about these matters episodically, or reactively, than not to think about them at all.</span><span style="color: orange;"> </span><span style="color: #990000;">Here, of course, we think about these issues pretty much all the time.</span><br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><br />So with that, I recycle, for the third time, the most read -- and I think probably most important -- column ever to appear here. Because recent events <b><i>are</i></b> going to be future events. And the time to decide how you will act -- who you will BE -- when that happens is now.</span><br />
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Some folks like a triad. You will also hear lots of discussion about three-legged stools. Others prefer to slice a pie into four pieces. Some would rather disassemble the device into components. Whatever your favored metaphor, the simple notion of “self defense” implicates many considerations.<br />
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You have to have tools that<span style="color: orange;"> <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2010/12/blog-post.html"><span style="color: orange;">work, every time</span></a></span>, and are suited to you. You have to be able to use those tools effectively, so that means adequate marksmanship and competent, reflexive gun-handling. To achieve those, you have to train, and the training has to be realistic and relevant. Then you have to practice often and effectually – recognizing that training and practice are not the same thing. Your ancillary gear has to be suited to your particular use of it, and as reliable as your primary tools.<br />
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But while all of these are necessary, none of them is sufficient. All of these considerations matter, but there is one thing that is lord of them all: Mindset.<br />
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Robert's Rule is that "<b>Mindset Matters Most</b>." Fighting mindset determines outcomes. Mindset implicates the largest questions: How do you believe you came to occupy the universe? Mindset invades the smallest of moments: Will you keep fighting for <i>this</i> next second?<br />
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Not only will the better mindset prevail “all things being equal,” but the man with the better mindset <i>can </i>prevail over an adversary who is better equipped or trained or both, while a poor mindset renders expertise irrelevant. This is not a new notion. Sun Tzu** said 2500 years ago that <span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/suntzu/artofwar/%20"><span style="color: orange;">every battle is won or lost before it is fought</span></a>.</span><br />
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Proper mindset drives you toward the satisfaction of all the other necessary elements: You are determined to expend the time and sweat and money to train realistically and practice effectively. You have done the research and trials necessary to know what weapons and gear will work best for you, and you have not stinted on buying the best you can afford. But mindset stands apart from and above all these other factors.<br />
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Proper mindset means that you have decided that you are a human being and that human beings have the right to defend their lives and wellbeing, and the lives and wellbeing of those in their care or charge. You have decided that you concur with the Founders' belief that your right to life is natural and inalienable. You have decided that the image of an armed woman standing over the bleeding body of a would-be rapist is morally superior to the image of a battered woman lying on the ground, watching as her rapist flees.<br />
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To have a proper mindset is to be utterly ready for that which you earnestly pray will not occur. Proper mindset means that you can walk away from any insult or offense that does not warrant a fight, no matter the injury to your ego. But proper mindset means that you are ready to fight when it <i>is</i> time to fight, because you have decided you <i>will </i>fight long before the fight. Proper mindset is what spares you the paralysis of “this can’t be happening,” so that you can get into the fight when it will do you the most good. It is proper mindset that will <i>keep </i>you in the fight – when you are afraid or exhausted or shot – until you prevail or die.<br />
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Proper mindset means you have thought about what this kind of fight really looks like, even if you have never engaged in or witnessed one. You know that you are willing to do great harm to a determined assailant, to wet your hands with his blood, if that’s what it takes to end his aggression. More than this, you know if you are capable of ending the life of another human being if need be. Proper mindset means that you have examined your heart of hearts with unflinching honesty. If you are a person of faith, proper mindset means you have reconciled these issues with that faith before the moment arises.<br />
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Mindset is not magic; it is not an incantation or a prayer or a mantra. It is neither esoteric nor theoretical; it is, instead, the most practical thing there is. Mindset is a set of decisions, considered with greatest care, resolved to a moral certainty and then followed through, come what may. Proper fighting mindset may come easy or hard for you, but the having or lack of it is not a matter of luck or heredity, nor is it the exclusive province of any particular profession. Mindset can be learned.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Those facts really are very simple and boil down to this -- fewer weapons in the hands of law-abiding citizens equals more crimes committed against them by criminals unconcerned with silly things like gun laws.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />** I will leave it for others to debate the question of whether Sun Tzu actually existed as a single historical figure.</span>Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-36847479656761938202017-09-01T15:32:00.005-04:002017-09-01T22:14:57.553-04:00Je ne suis toujours pas Charlie<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="7a7rn" data-offset-key="a0ts8-0-0" style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<span data-offset-key="a0ts8-0-0"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;">Of course, I entirely defend the right of these </span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0701041/" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">cheese-eating surrender monkeys</span></a><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;"> to publish this cover or, indeed, any damned thing they wish. For those who, eschewing a study of French, have wisely dedicated themselves to learning the language of a relevant world power, it reads: "God Exists! He Drowned All the Neo-Nazis of Texas."<span style="font-size: 14px;">
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</span>I'm not angry or disappointed because, I confess, my expectations are low. We've </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2015/05/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">already discussed here</span></a><span style="color: #1d2129;"> the lack of moral consistency by the Gauloise-sucking "journalists" at Charlie Hebdo. And let's be honest, the Germans may have invented the word </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCQGQ5qBQTA" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">schadenfreude</span></a><span style="color: #1d2129;">, but nobody does it better than the French.
And I know, too, that Nazis are a bit of an uncomfortable subject for the French, given their </span></span></span><span style="color: #1d2129;">legacy of well-earned national shame.</span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;"> Gazing upon this cover, they must have to wonder if a timely flood would have somehow stopped them handing over Jewish schoolchildren for annihilation in exchange for the Germans not burning down some museums. (Not that the French didn't then mount a fine resistance. Courageous cafe owners frequently over-charged German officers for espresso.* And many French housewives valiantly gave German soldiers painful venereal diseases in exchange for stockings and cabbages.)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1d2129;">But . . . here's the thing. You would think that if anyone would not want to rob the swastika of all of its meaning, it would be people who lived under the brutal occupation of </span><b><i>actual </i></b><span style="color: #1d2129;">Nazis. Calling all the victims in Houston -- a city that, for one thing, </span><a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2016/11/11/harris-county-turned-blue/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">overwhelmingly votes Democrat</span></a></span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;"> -- "Nazis" would seem to me to do just that. And it's a glaring example of what's wrong with our own discourse here in recent months.</span></div>
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You see, people who don't believe that the military should enlist transgender service members aren't Nazis. They might be right. They might be wrong. They might be motivated by hate, or fear, or merely a concern for the marginal costs of issuing all those new nametags. But they aren't Nazis -- well at least they aren't Nazis just </span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;">because</span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> they disagree with you about the intersection of gender identity and the armed forces. That guy who favors immigration </span></span><span style="color: #1d2129; white-space: pre-wrap;">amnesty</span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> for "dreamers?" I guess he </span></span><i style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;">might </i><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">be a socialist, but his stance on that single issue offers you insufficient data to reach any such conclusion. And the small-town florist who doesn't want her great-great-</span></span><span style="color: #1d2129; white-space: pre-wrap;">granddaddy's</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"> statue ripped out of the courthouse square? It's not likely she's an actual fascist however troublesome you find that bronze fellow on the horse.
But when you bandy about a word like "Nazi," even though it has the effect of rendering your opponents less than human -- always handy when you want to </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz0KALxwJcw" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">douse them with jars of your own urine</span></a><span style="color: #1d2129;"> or </span><a href="http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/08/30/berkeley-antifa-riot-journalist-beaten-saved-liberal-commentator-keith-campbell" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">peacefully beat them into silence</span></a><span style="color: #1d2129;"> -- it also has the effect of sucking all the meaning from the word. And that's not good for anyone. (I mean, if nothing else, don't the folks who called George W. Bush a Nazi now wish they'd kept that epithet in reserve?)</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;">More than six years ago, I wrote in this space about the </span><a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2011/01/i-believe.html" style="font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Theory of Ubiquitous Polarity</span></a><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;">.** I wrote then from a place of personal frustration, calling for nuance. These days I see it underlying something far more dangerous. </span><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Because if you render every disagreement on any policy and procedure into a </span></span><span style="color: #1d2129; white-space: pre-wrap;">definitive identity for the person with whom you disagree, if you view everyone on the other side of anything as being a member of a class of the fundamentally evil, you leave yourself with nothing to do but go to war. That's what you <b><i>do </i></b>with <b><i>actual </i></b>Nazis. And by the looks of recent events, war is more or less where we're going. </span></div>
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* Thank you </span></span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Shibumi-Novel-Trevanian-ebook/dp/B000FCK4HC/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504291438&sr=8-1&keywords=shibumi+by+trevanian" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Trevanian</span></a><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">** "A</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "georgia" , "utopia" , "palatino linotype" , "palatino" , serif; font-size: 13.2px;"> system under which an observer believes that all beliefs must necessarily be aligned in whatever manner the observer himself aligns them."</span></div>
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Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-28630574335704747842016-10-17T18:20:00.004-04:002016-10-19T15:47:23.623-04:00Balls and strikesWhen I was a boy, “social media” meant mostly baseball gloves and footballs. These were the primary means of our interactions with our peers. We played endless games on our suburban streets, in our connected backyards, in neighborhood parks and even – when local school officials were insufficiently attentive to the locks on their gates – on actual ball fields. If we had enough kids – and at the tail end of the <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/baby-boomers"><span style="color: orange;">Baby Boom</span></a>, we often did – we’d play 11-on-11 or 9-on-9 as the season demanded. If too many kids were sick or grounded or on vacation, we engaged in endless personnel adjustments to make the games even. Somebody might be the designated quarterback for both sides. Or the hitting team might provide its own catcher. But there was one position that was never filled: No one was going to waste valuable play time being the referee or the umpire.<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">With the exception of the occasional squabble, our honor
system worked a treat. If you stepped out of bounds (that is to say, into Mrs. Scheimann's yard), you stopped where you were. If you missed the tag before Billy
Miller made it to the back corner of the Buick, you said so. And if too often you didn't, you were subject to the ultimate sanction: Kids who couldn’t be
counted on to call it square – on themselves most of all – found their doorbell
stopped ringing, because nobody cared if Mikey could come out to play, if Mikey
was a duplicitous sneak.</span><br />
<br /><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This notion, that your personal integrity and commitment to fair play were
paramount, was inculcated into us at every turn, from our earliest days. You memorized “</span><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/46473" style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">If</span></a><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">” in the fourth
grade. They told you George Washington couldn’t tell a lie about his stint as a junior arborist, even at the risk of a
licking* – and this when you were young enough
that ending up over Dad’s knee was an all too available consequence of your own
confessional inclinations. Long before the age of participation trophies, we prized the ones they gave out for sportsmanship.</span></span></span><br />On the not-so-mean streets of 1960s Cleveland Heights, your rep was as important to you as to any inmate on the prison yard. Simply put, we all wanted to win, but we were taught to revile the idea of winning at any cost, and we did. </div>
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If nothing else, this <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/clinton-vs-trump-the-worst-of-all-worlds/474024/"><span style="color: orange;">grotesque presidential campaign</span></a> is demonstrating conclusively that this fundamental truth from my boyhood is now passé. It's not the candidates and their legions of professional apparatchiks who demonstrate this. Those sorts have been ever thus, and we would never have let them play with us anyway. Rather, what is worrisome – indeed, what is frightening – are those people whom one respects or even admires who have, more easily than one could have imagined, abandoned all standards, beliefs, and philosophies they once held dear, who have traded their own integrity, all in sacrifice to the singular value of seeing their side win.<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<br /><br />They have deemed principles not merely articles to be ignored, but luxuries to be scorned. And if you hold to yours, then, at best you're a fool or a patsy – but more likely you'll be denominated a collaborator.<br /><br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Their justifications are as they
always have been:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">"This time is different."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">“The circumstances are exigent, extraordinary.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">"Just this much, just this once. . . <o:p></o:p></span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">“The stakes are too high. . .<o:p></o:p></span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">“After the coup, we will promptly restore democracy, reinstate
civil liberties and release those whom we have interned.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">
Oops. Sorry.<br /><br />That last one wasn’t from this election. It was from every
military coup, by every jumped up dictator since Julius Caesar.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
And here’s the thing: It's working. Whichever candidate prevails as the prettiest pig at the fair, this declaration of vice as virtue seems certain to win out. And for those who have embraced this anti-philosophy, there's no going back. To paraphrase <a href="http://www.ec.it-hiroshima.ac.jp/sakemi/movies/manforall.pdf"><span style="color: orange;">Robert Bolt paraphrasing Thomas More</span></a>, once you let your values slip through your fingers – or, as in this election, once you toss them to the dirt – they cannot be picked up again.**<br /><br />And like the kid who wouldn't take his out, when the election is over, when your chosen, favored, power-hungry narcissist is measuring the drapes for the Oval Office, you’re going to be faced with what I wish I could claim is one of Robert’s Rules, but which I must fairly attribute to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086856/"><span style="color: orange;">Buackaroo Banzai</span></a>:<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">
Wherever you go, there you are.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">To what exigency will you appeal then, when you find yourself with all the time in the world? </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">What lie will you tell then, when there's only you to hear it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Who is going to want to play with you then?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">[</span></span><span style="color: orange; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">UPDATED</span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"> to add, that </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b24Yq1Ndnjo" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">this</span></a><span style="color: #1d2129;"> is the sort of thing I mean by winning at any costs. And to say that support of tactics like this isn't theoretical. People I respect have told me this or that candidate must be stopped, and so. . . ]</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><br /></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #1d2129;">* They did not, of course, tell us that this story, designed to inspire forthright honesty, was </span><a href="http://www.mountvernon.org/digital-encyclopedia/article/cherry-tree-myth/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">utter propaganda</span></a><span style="color: #1d2129;">.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">** What the theatrical More said was:</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"> What is an oath then, but words we say to God?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"> Listen, Meg. When a man takes an oath, he's holding
his own self</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"> in his own hands like water. And if
he opens his fingers then,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"> he needn't hope to find
himself again. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<br />Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-24659757638686396622016-06-15T11:36:00.002-04:002016-06-15T11:51:04.343-04:00Le Médecin malgré lui*<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
(A tragicomedy in one scene.)</div>
<br />
<br />
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<b><i>The scene</i></b> is a doctor's office of another era. A large and well worn oaken desk separates the doctor and his patient. The doctor's chair is high-backed, plush and leather. The patient perches on a plain, straight, armless wooden chair, one leg of which is just slightly shorter than the others causing it to thump as the patient moves in the chair. [Importantly, neither character should ever remark on this, even with a glance or gesture.] Everything in the office speaks of long use and ill attention, except for an enormous, gleaming metal and porcelain cabinet that looms behind the doctor. [Care should be taken to light the cabinet aggressively, so that the effect is of a glowing, sublime and vaguely overwhelming presence.]<br />
<br />
<b><i>The doctor</i></b> is a tall and slender man in his mid-fifties, his close-cropped, once brown hair gone grayish with the strain and aggravation of years spent telling patients exactly what is good for them and not being universally heeded. He wears a dark suit, and a white lab coat with an American flag lapel pin slightly askew.<br />
<br />
<b><i>The patient</i></b> is a woman of indeterminate middle age. Her smart business suit, tame hairdo and (if the director wishes) cliched horn-rimmed spectacles, along with her upright posture, vocabulary and close attention to the doctor all suggest a person of intelligence, education and judgment . . . but all tinged with a wisp of real worry.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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Doc: Well Ms. Jones, you are terribly, terribly
ill.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
Jones: Oh my goodness, what’s wrong with me. Is it
cancer? Lupus? The Zika virus?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitBoLJP8Hfg94MJTmckRqCA8zE6TMCzbw0PzW8aJ-JaMndjxzNKuasPGnRR8yQAlepi4LnnCei7ybfcxsHn9ov-H-v4fRmsSsh-zJWqJXjR-nc-VaJ1tiw_po1ey_Jlkbp1HdKmkr0uOoF/s1600/blue+pill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitBoLJP8Hfg94MJTmckRqCA8zE6TMCzbw0PzW8aJ-JaMndjxzNKuasPGnRR8yQAlepi4LnnCei7ybfcxsHn9ov-H-v4fRmsSsh-zJWqJXjR-nc-VaJ1tiw_po1ey_Jlkbp1HdKmkr0uOoF/s400/blue+pill.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
D: Now, now, none of that. Naming your
disease is not going to change how sick you are, Ms. Jones. Certainly you can
see that.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
J: But don’t you need to diagnose my
disease to treat it? Isn't its etiology important, crucial even, in fashioning an efficacious treatment?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
D: Well now! Look who's spent some time on Web MD. Who’s the doctor here, hmm? I know
exactly what you need. Yes indeed. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<i>::Swivels his chair to the large
cabinet behind him and swings opens the doors to reveal shelves sagging with hundreds of bottles of
blue pills::<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<i>::Swivels back and hands a large
bottles to Mrs. Jones::<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
D: Now take three pills five times a
day. Do your best to combat the nausea, hair loss, cramping, drowsiness, insomnia, spasms, temporary
blindness, light sensitivity, deafness, tinnitus, speaking in tongues, chills, night sweats, flaking skin, oily skin, loss of hearing, loss of libido, loss of memory, constipation and
explosive diarrhea that are certain to accompany the treatment. Do be
sure to report any <b><i>other </i></b>side effects, as I really cannot anticipate what those
might be and I sort of like to keep track.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Alrighty then, you can go now. See
you in 90 days.<br />
<i><br />::He looks down at his papers::</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
J: What are these, Doctor? <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
D: <i>::Looking up, surprised and slightly peeved to see Ms. Jones has kept her seat::</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
Now, missy, that seems obvious. They
are blue pills. These are what I give my all my patients any time any of them
gets sick.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
J: The same pill? No matter what caused their cancer or . . .</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
D: <i>::interrupting with a raised hand::</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
Hey there! We'll have none of that!</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
J: I'm sorry. I mean to say, whatever caused their . . . er. . . .sickness . . . .</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<i>::The doctor smiles and lowers his hand:: </i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
. . . .whatever it might be called – they all get the same pill?<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="text-indent: -0.5in;">D. </span><span style="text-indent: -0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: -0.5in;">Oh yes, of course the same pill.</span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: -0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="text-indent: -0.5in;"> <i>::He comes to his feet then leans across the desk. His voice becomes oratorical::</i></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
I believe very strongly in
these pills, Ms. Jones. I am deeply committed to these pills. I want these
pills to be a part of my legacy.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
J: Are they effica. . . um . . . will they work? Will I get well?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
D: <i>::He sits::</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
I haven’t the slightest idea. Whether they "work," as you call it, whether you get "well" – these are not the point. The <b><i>point </i></b>is that I’m the doctor and I want people –
well, not people, exactly, but my patients – <span style="text-indent: -0.5in;"> to take these blue pills.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
J: Why? <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
D: <i>::Exasperation growing::</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
Now you <b><i>are </i></b>a silly little thing aren’t
you. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<i>::He stands again, reaches across and deliberately pats her head:: </i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Why dear, it is simply common sense
to take these pills. Common sense. You’re not objecting to common sense are
you? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
J: Well, I’m not sure that . . . <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
D: <i>::He sits with a thump of finality::</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
Hush now, child. After all, who’s in
charge here, eh? I’m the doctor. You’re the patient. Yes, you’re terribly sick <b><i>and </i></b>you lack common sense. But never fear, I have something to help with your lack
of common sense as well.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
J: Let me guess. . . . <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<i>::Doctor swivles precisely back to cabinet
for another bottle of blue pills.::<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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D: Now I
really haven’t any more time for your questions today, young lady.<br />
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You scoot
now.<o:p></o:p></div>
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J: OK<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>::She takes
the two large bottles of pills and rises to leave.::</i><br />
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D: <i>::Just as the patient reaches the door. . . :: </i>Wait!
Wait one second!</div>
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J: Yes,
Doctor?<o:p></o:p></div>
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D: You
forgot the bill.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />* Obligatory apologies to Jean-Baptiste Poquelin<span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.4px;"><b>.</b></span></span></span></div>
Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-47482369111324803362016-04-18T10:04:00.000-04:002016-04-18T10:04:12.791-04:00Battle RoadAs the rising sun pierced the billowing gun smoke that April morning 241 years ago, I suspect the British regulars were thinking something along the lines of “Well, that’s for them.” The truth is that the “<a href="http://www.nationalcenter.org/ConcordHymn.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Shot Heard Round the World</span></a>” echoed over an inauspicious field abandoned by a beaten militia in full flight. The only would-be rebels who remained on the Green did so because they were dead or dying.<br />
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So British Colonel Francis Smith might well have thought that, with one lot of traitors shown conclusively who was master, well begun was half done and the day portended well for King George III. It must have been with more than a little confidence that Smith turned his troops down the road toward Concord, where Tories and spies had reported the nascent rebellion had a large cache of weapons.<br />
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But neither Smith nor his executive officer, Major John Pitcairn – much less King George – had heard <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3OVmTqSFe6m0uAjtQoNTJJCcPzUTky1xlkVh5bBIVmQfyo4vz3BaAT7iQ6YwubLz5Zx1Kc2dLeaLpamKZtGEFzOKmpVR4bperpdR-wuHY8UAQj5_RPFabamxb5J2kNvZVgw1LrWbAmBHp/s1600/2010+-+Lexington-Concord+tour+Parker.JPG" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">American Captain John Parker</span></a> addressing his militiamen just before dawn. The rebels had waited through the night to see if the British foray into the countryside was just another reconnoiter in force, or something more sinister. Paul Revere and his fellow riders assured them the regulars were on their way intent on disarming the budding rebellion. As the British entered the green, the militiamen assembled from Buckman Tavern and elsewhere to face them. Parker reminded them that while their foremost purpose was to merely demonstrate their resolve, more than that might well be demanded of them. </div>
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“Stand your ground and do not fire unless fired upon,” Parker ordered. “But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”*</div>
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Faced off across a space no larger than a football field, Parker and Pitcairn each commanded their respective forces not to fire. Pitcairn had every reason to expect to be obeyed; British regulars did as they were ordered and Pitcairn’s force of elite light infantry were some of the best troops of the best professional army in the world. Parker, commanding farmers, merchants – and a slave named Prince Estabrook – likewise expected to be obeyed, if for no other reason than because his men had families close at hand, some watching from just off the field. Greek governmental theories, philosophical abstractions and offenses such as the Intolerable Acts may have driven rabble-rousers like Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberty. But for the militiamen on Lexington Green, their homes and farms and livelihoods were all too tangible realities, all too close at hand.</div>
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So no one was meant to fire a shot, but as it as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0504.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">has time and again</span></a> throughout the years, the shot nevertheless was fired** and then everyone on the field let loose. It was over in minutes and the outcome, with many rebels killed or wounded, and only one of his own men hurt, couldn't have surprised Pitcairn, who couldn't have had much doubt about how the rest of the day would go.</div>
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But it was only dawn. And he hadn't heard Parker.</div>
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Pitcairn couldn't have understood at that moment that he hadn't just been a part of a police action or some noisy civil disturbance. Because he hadn't heard Parker, because he didn't know who these Patriots really were, Pitcairn didn't know then that he’d really been a participant in the first skirmish of a remorseless war. But he was soon to learn.</div>
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By the end of that very day, after the desperate running fight down the Battle Road, as the blood ran from the North Bridge to stain the Concord River, Pitcairn could not help but to have had a better understanding of what war with real Americans would mean: All told the rebels had lost 88 men killed and wounded. The butcher’s bill for the most feared and powerful military force in the world was nearly twice that, at 147. By the very next morning – without the aid of Facebook or a single cell phone – 15,000 men of what would eventually*** become a victorious Continental Army were outside of Boston. </div>
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This nation was born of blood and smoke and outrage and an abiding sense that "Enough is enough, damn it." It was born when a secure and prosperous people finally decided that their liberties were more dear to them than their comforts. I am convinced that Americans -- or, at the very least, enough Americans -- still fear blood and smoke less, and love liberty more, than they love their comfort. I believe that Americans still know their way to the Battle Road. I believe this, I confess, in part because I must believe it, or else despair.<br />
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[This is a repost from the original, slightly revised.]</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Indeed, many of the militiamen may not have heard Parker, either. Her suffered from tuberculosis and had trouble mustering enough breath to speak.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">**Theories vary wildly about who fired first. The best evidence, I think, suggests that it was one of the spectators, townsmen arrayed around the green, but not under Parker’s command.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">*** "Eventually" in spades. In the <b>eight years, four months and 15 days</b> from that day to the Treaty of Paris, there would be some 150,000 casualties, suffered overwhelmingly by the Americans and their families, fighting on their own doorsteps.</span></div>
Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-27737573393279651442016-01-29T18:24:00.002-05:002020-11-05T09:30:39.444-05:00Getting my Irish up<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">I
can see my well-worn copy of "</span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Year-French-Thomas-Flanagan/dp/159017108X" style="font-size: 14pt;" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">The Year of the French</span></a><span style="font-size: 14pt;">" from where I am sitting right now. It was
published </span><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">in 1979, </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">nearly 200 years after the events it portrays. I was a college
freshman. I bought it in hardcover, though I hardly had money for whiskey.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I read it that year and I read it again every year – I’m due to begin again
mid-March. </span><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">Flanagan's book is inextricably tied up in whatever precious sense of Irishness I have been able to reclaim from my fractured personal pedigree as an Irish/German half-breed bastard raised by Czechs. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">In that, and in the facility with which I can now </span><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">finish</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> its sentences, it is an old and important friend. Indeed, so a good a friend that in kindness, I now leave the first edition on the shelf and read it on my </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Year-French-Review-Books-Classics-ebook/dp/B0092FQVIO/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" style="font-size: 14pt;" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Kindle</span></a><span style="font-size: 14pt;">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">In briefest precis, the book is the story of the '98 Rising, fomented by United Irishmen and a host of other lovers of liberty, men and women of a diversity that will surprise those used to thinking of the more modern variety of Troubles in strictly sectarian terms. Framed by the story of a fictional poet and </span><a href="http://www.irish-society.org/home/hedgemaster-archives-2/groups-organizations/the-hedge-schools" style="font-size: 14pt;" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">hedge school</span></a><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> master -- a man with equal affections for the jug, comfortable women and Greek, but having no particular inclination toward revolution -- it </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">is a towering work, a </span><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">staggering literary accomplishment. It is huge and funny and tragic and just so fookin' <b><i>good</i></b>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">And that would be enough. <i>Dayenu</i>, to steal the perfect term from another people of words and woe. Except that while that would be enough, that's not all. What boggles the mind </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">to this day, what fills me with a mixture of powerful awe
and no little writer’s envy, is that this was Flanagan's first novel. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">The utter gall of the man, to write such a work as
a first thing. <i>Dayenu</i>. Except even that isn't all. </span><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">Because</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> I will read TYOTF with special attention this year, as I will be 56
– the age Flanagan was when he published it. His first novel </span><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">– this novel </span><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">–</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> at 56!</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">With the exception of its protagonist, the TYOTF comes under the ambit of mostly true historical fiction. Nothing you will learn in it is false, even if there are those -- mostly British, I'd expect -- critics who might complain of what it leaves alone. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">But frankly, if you wish, you can leave the </span><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">history</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> alone altogether, if it bores or angers or discomfits you. [I spoil nothing to say this Rising ended more less as you will have come to expect although, thanks to French involvement, with even more treachery and disappointment than was strictly usual.] But you must read this book </span><span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">–</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">at last or again, as the case may be for you.</span></div>
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Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-88735621852029500422016-01-21T17:13:00.000-05:002016-01-21T17:13:12.826-05:00Wherein the Suburban Sheepdog engages in wild speculation . . . *<div class="MsoNormal">
One thing we simply don’t do here at the Suburban Sheepdog
is engage in wild speculation. Well. . . . It's not completely prohibited, I suppose, but it is certainly discouraged. Yes . . . discouraged. Frowned upon, one might say. Not the done thing. So maybe let's call this "Theater of the Mind" instead. <o:p></o:p></div>
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For folks with even the slightest knowledge of how guys “in
the boats” operate (and I claim only the slightest knowledge), the story has had the smell of a Qatari-fishmonger’s
day-old wares right from the start. It goes like this:<br /><br />Two modern <span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://www.popsci.com/what-were-boats-that-iran-captured" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Riverine Command Boats</span></a> </span>(carrying loads of sophisticated navigation equipment, communications
gear, highly maintained engines, experienced sailors and – not for nothing –
tow ropes), supposedly traveling within sight of the eastern shore of Arabian
Peninsula while transiting down the western edge of the Persian Gulf got
leagues** off course and both run aground/suffer simultaneous multiple engine
failures/both run out of fuel (this bit of the tale changes with each telling),
and thus wind up in notoriously <a href="http://www.persiangulf.tv/e/index.php/persian-gulf-iranian-islands/97-farsi-island.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">unfriendly Iranian waters</span></a>, where they are
seized.***</div>
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I know, right . . . ?<br /><br />But to understand a story, to test its smell, you have to know the context in
which is told. So how about this for that . . ..<o:p></o:p></div>
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The US and Iran, perhaps as an adjunct to <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/foreign-policy/iran-deal" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Let’s Make a Deal</span></a>,
perhaps as a prerequisite to it, perhaps as a result, agree that there will be a prisoner exchange. We will get back five folks, including a journalist, a student and a pastor. Iran gets
back seven prisoners, most of whom were being held for illegally exporting military
or nuclear program materiel, and we agree to take another Iranian 14 fugitives
off of Interpol’s wanted list. From the US administration’s perspective, the exchange is cheap at twice the price, because our people come home.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But for Iran, not so much. The trouble for Iran is that,
like any despotry, the most important propaganda isn’t the kind they broadcast
to the rest of an unbelieving world. Instead, the propaganda that matters most
is the kind that is disseminated to its own citizens. They must continually be reminded
of – on the one hand – the threat posed by whomever is playing foil to the
regime (for Iran, of course, that’s been US, in the role of “The Great Satan,” a
performance running since at least the overthrow of Mossadegh and extended indefinitely) and – on the
other hand – the power of the Supreme Leader (or El Jefe Maximo or The Grand
Poobah or whatever he’s locally dubbed) to resist that existential outside
threat. Only thus can the President for Life or the Revolutionary Counsel or the Mighty
Morphin’ Magic Mullah justify all the torture, repression and bread lines, and keep his own people at least marginally at bay.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So, knowing they are about to release some US “spies” and “operatives,”
and not quite satisfied with a better than 4-to-1 exchange rate, one can
imagine Iran demanding that a callow U.S. administration put a little sweetener
into the pot. Our benighted leadership is all too eager to ante up. But . . . what’s
left? We’re already giving back all the money we seized and lifting the sanctions we imposed,
all on unverifiable promises that Iran will behave itself in years to come, you
know, nuclear bomb-wise. We already have demonstrated that <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-insists-it-didnt-violate-nuclear-deal-with-missile-test-1444666005" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">a few unauthorized missile launches here and there aren’t going to be enough to queer the deal</span></a>. Naked
before a fully-clothed Iran, what’s left for the pot in this one-sided strip
poker game? What to do? What to do?<br /></div>
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And then I imagine**** someone speaking up from the back row
of some conference room – maybe an eager-beaver back-wall staffer who’s prized for thinking
outside the box: “Say . . . How about some
American sailors on their knees? Now hear me out. . . . There’s – I dunno – a ‘navigation
failure.’ They – whadaya call it? – ‘stray into Iranian waters’? And you Iranians . . .ya know . . . seize the boats. Nobody gets hurt. You guys take some photos and steal some telephone SIM cards. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drBDkujALM4" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Maybe you shoot a little video that you can broadcast over encouraging chyrons describing the ‘cowardice’and ‘submission of the United States.’</span></a> Time it just right to coordinate with
the prisoner exchange. . . Then you give the sailors back and we get to say we ‘recovered’
them, which is easy 'cause we gave em over in the first place. . . ."<br /><br />"Ohhh! Ohhh!" pipes up a staffer on the political team, eager to think outside a box of her own. "Get this . . . this is good: POTUS doesn't say a <b>word </b>about the seizure during the State of the Union. Team R <b>howls</b>. Then they look foolish when we announce it like the next day. Sort of like <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/day-osama-bin-laden-died-article-1.1070399" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Operation Neptune Spear and the Correspondents' Dinner</span></a>. The President is going to look so -- what's the word? -- Presidential."<br /><br />"Three or four news cycles at the most" says the first staffer, glaring at the young woman who has stolen some of his thunder, vowing his revenge. "Everybody gets well. We emphasize the prisoner exchange; you focus on the 'incursion.' Whadaya
say?"<br /><br />But that’s all wild speculation. . . .</div>
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<br />. . . And we don’t do that here.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* . . . and uses a lot of ellipses. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">** “League” is just a salty way of saying 3 nautical miles. Nautical mile is just a salty way of saying 1.15 miles. To get the picture, try this
exercise. Go to <a href="https://www.google.com/maps" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Google Maps</span></a> and search up “Farsi Island.” (Keep zooming in; you
will see it eventually.) Now draw a line from Kuwait to Bahrain. There you go. Actual
distances involved are about 42 miles between Farsi Island and the nearest
point on the Saudi coast. Yes, the Iranians claim waters around Farsi Island as
their own. Even so . . . <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*** I have no cavil with the “seized” part from that point.
These boats are not designed to engage in combat on the open seas with bigger
craft, nor was the mission here to do so, nor would the Rules of Engagement
have allowed such a fight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">**** And of course, I only <b>can </b>imagine, since <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csP1XXOhnKI" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">I wasn’t in the room where it happened</span></a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /><br /></span> <o:p></o:p></div>
Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-73284536796667347892015-11-18T12:48:00.001-05:002015-11-18T12:48:58.732-05:00Déjà vu<div class="MsoNormal">
Well that didn’t take long. But as we have learned
in the <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2013/05/obstructing-justice.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">past</span></a>, statists and aspiring tyrants like to feed on the bodies
while they are still warm. And so, as predictable as the springtime return of
short skirts to the Tuileries, as ubiquitous as the <i>jambon buerre</i>, as inevitable as an <a href="http://www.sncf.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">SNCF</span></a> strike, Paris now brings us calls for restrictions (is it t0o soon to say “containment”?) of free peoples’ civil
liberties as the only possible means to avert even more attacks. </div>
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Everyone, it seems, wants a bloody mouthful. French
President Hollande wants his 12-day "extraordinary powers" – which include warrantless
searches and detentions, and prohibitions of certain gatherings –
<a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2015/11/16/hollande-wants-new-powers-saying-france-war/4zusWByFx7JqqbfEgN7jaN/story.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">extended</span></a> for three months now and then written into the French constitution in
a way that eliminates that onerous consultation with Parliament.</div>
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Here in the US, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that the FBI director wants private use of encryption
<a href="https://twitter.com/Jose_Pagliery/status/667001411037741056" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">restricted</span></a>. But you have to admire the bureaucratic ambitions of the
chairman of the Federal Communication Commission – last I checked, not a law
enforcement agency – <span style="color: orange;"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/17/the-fcc-suggests-expanded-wiretap-laws-in-response-to-the-paris-attacks/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">calling for more wire taps</span></a>.</span> Fortunately for them, these members of the Executive Branch needn't worry overmuch about pesky checks and balances by the Legislative Branch. They'll have enthusiastic support from lawmakers like Diane Feinstein, who never met an exercise of
state control she didn’t want to take home and take to bed -- including state control over <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-16/paris-attacks-renew-u-s-call-to-access-encrypted-communications" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">the cooperative playing of Mario Cart</span></a>.<br /><br />But then, we are talking about a government – at least here in the United States –
that seems more than a little fuzzy on notions like the free exchange of ideas. How else
to understand Secretary of State John Kerry’s facile and frightening distinction between last
week’s Paris attacks – which he considers thoroughly unjustified – and the January murders of journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which murders he described
as “<span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://qz.com/553165/unlike-the-latest-paris-attacks-john-kerry-could-see-the-rationale-of-the-charlie-hebdo-shootings/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">legitimate, er, rational, um, particularized.</span></a>”</span>*</div>
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We’ve talked about this before, this tendency for <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2011/01/hard-facts-bad-law.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">hard facts</span></a>
to make <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-law-is-ass.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">bad</span></a> – usually grandiosely named -- law. But the danger is that you might want understand
this impulse only as the sort of paroxysm of desperate, <i>ex post facto</i>
panic that leads even a liberal Montessori mom to spank her toddler after he’s
run into the street. But this is not an emotional overreaction by an otherwise
liberty-minded set of leaders. This is no aberration.**<o:p></o:p></div>
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Rather it is <a href="http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">inherent in the nature of the state</span></a> always to
expand its power and always to seek to expand. At its core is an understanding that, to ever expand, rulers must “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yeA_kHHLow" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">never let a crisis go to waste</span></a>.”*** As soon as, and every time that, events make the people
a little less vigilant of the state, the state will take advantage.**** So while you're keeping an eye out for Daesh, spare one for Washington.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* OK. I admit it. That paraphrase isn’t precisely perfect. But the link will
take you to what he actually said, which was, frankly, worse.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">** For this, I like to quote Robespierre: "The principle of the republican government is virtue, and the means required to establish virtue is terror."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*** Rahm Emanuel said it recently, perhaps revealing more than he meant to about his particular team strategy. But the concept by no means belongs to progressives alone. The quote is originally attributed to Winston Churchill (aren't they all), no progressive he, but quite the fellow for expanding state power, as many a dead Irish patriot could tell you from his grave.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">**** And here we mean "take advantage" in the precisely same way a father means it when he warns his daughter before prom "not to let that boy take advantage."</span></div>
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Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-23395190969395546202015-11-10T15:08:00.003-05:002020-11-10T07:43:45.750-05:00EOW 11-10-75 (Redux)<span style="color: orange;"><b>On the fortieth anniversary, redux.</b><span style="color: black;">You’ve heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Mighty Fitz was a Great Lakes ore boat and, at more than 700 feet, among the largest of her kind. <strike>Thirty-five</strike> Forty years ago, in a raging late-autumn storm, </span><a href="http://www.edmundfitzgerald.com/">she broke in two and found the bottom of Lake Superior</a><span style="color: black;"> , taking 29 men with her. You’ve heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald because Gordon Lightfoot wrote a </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0DqPSF2fyo">song</a><span style="color: black;"> about her. But you’ve never heard of my Uncle Bill, because no one ever wrote a song about him.*</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjyNR7QpAf4Nj0-nB2zwWCwwFu9_Wni7IwIz_0iGWyzzDmQdy0jHU8wkm3pOkU_KC1gDv04R3zk9hzfuJakgxLcFXIbSm0Y4FnqGmDmIACAD3Ox2si_sx-6Y5mQRVVsf-XuQZh3u60DpcD/s1600/bill+color.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjyNR7QpAf4Nj0-nB2zwWCwwFu9_Wni7IwIz_0iGWyzzDmQdy0jHU8wkm3pOkU_KC1gDv04R3zk9hzfuJakgxLcFXIbSm0Y4FnqGmDmIACAD3Ox2si_sx-6Y5mQRVVsf-XuQZh3u60DpcD/s320/bill+color.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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Bill was a cop’s cop and a detective sergeant in the Cleveland suburb of Bedford Heights. That Monday he and his partner, James Toth, visited Blonder’s Paint Store with books of mug shots. The store had been robbed five weeks before, and there still was no arrest. Bill was a sweet man, but that kind of thing pissed him off, so he was going to work the case until something broke.<br />
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Nobody was in the front of the store, so Bill walked through to the back. Michael Manns was waiting for him, hiding behind a bathroom door, because he was robbing Blonder’s Paint Store again. Manns and his crew had the employees held hostage in the back room. The moment Bill came through the door, Manns put a pistol to Bill’s neck and pulled the trigger, blowing out Bill’s spine and carotid artery. Bill fell flat to the floor, shattering the big glasses he always wore -- except his official photo.<br />
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Manns knew exactly whom he was killing when he murdered my uncle. Bill hadn’t wanted to startle store employees fresh from the prior robbery, who might be jumpy at someone coming through the door unannounced. So he’d called out “Sgt. Prochazka, police department!” as he walked through.<br />
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After firing the shot, Manns fled with his accomplices, George Clayton, Dwain Farrow and Duran Harris. Store employees, now having seen the robbers twice, were able to identify them and Clayton, Farrow and Harris were arrested within a day or so by Cleveland police. Manns was on the run for several weeks, until police caught up with him in Detroit.<br />
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The funeral procession drew police cars from 49 states, every province of Canada and most of Northern Mexico. Bedford Heights was a small department, but despite all the other lawmen there, the BHPD wouldn’t let anyone else stand honor guard over the coffin, day and night, until they put it in the ground.<br />
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Bill, with his twin brother Bob – also a cop – was the youngest of ten brothers and sisters. He left my Aunt Loretta, a daughter and three sons. Over the days of viewing, I saw the strongest people I knew – the strongest people I thought there could be – reduced to mewling, groveling beasts by their grief. During the service, someone played “Amazing Grace” on the piano. Bill’s youngest boy stood before the coffin and saluted, exactly like John John in Stan Stearns’ iconic photo.<br />
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All four men were convicted of aggravated robbery and murder. Our family had people at every day of trial. On the day each man was sentenced to death, all eight of Bill’s surviving siblings, and dozens of cousins, nephews, and nieces stood witness. Not long after that, all of the death sentences were commuted to life in prison when a court ruling banned Ohio’s death penalty. Harris was granted parole and freed in 2003. Corrections officials had failed to inform the family of the parole hearing, so no one was there to oppose his release. Now, as the other men’s hearings periodically arise, someone is always there – led by Bill’s son Robert, a cop in Willowick, Ohio.<br />
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However much we love or are loved, however deep our connections to our wives and husbands and children and friends, there is a sense in which we each travel through life aboard a ship with a single passenger. Even shared experiences are felt uniquely, individually. Standing in the same storm, each of us hears the thunder at a slightly different moment, feels the wind from a certain, personal angle. So it was that, drenched in sadness that entire miserable, sleet-soaked funeral week – and although I loved him so much – I did not cry for Bill.<br />
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I was too busy making an acquaintance of hate, whom I hadn’t occasion to meet before then.<br />
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Twenty-nine sailors, a good cop and a teen boy’s faith all died that day <strike>thirty-five</strike> <strike>forty</strike> forty-five years ago, to be buried under steel gray waves, or brown earth, or black despair. I said I was through with God that day, and for twenty years I made good on that vow, except to make war on Him from time to time. But He wasn’t done with me. So today I can pray for Bill, and for his family – and even for Manns, Clayton, Farrow and Harris.<br />
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But that’s another story.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />*Actually, as it happens, <i>I</i> wrote a song about him -- which amounts to the same thing.</span><br />
<br />Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-28987796645771887112015-07-16T16:44:00.000-04:002015-07-17T11:01:09.662-04:001,000 wordsIf there was any chance you still have not come to understand the simple, self-delusional, criminal idiocy that forms the foundation of the "gun free zone," then this image ought finally to convince you.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvZ5C6qbZVF2_VmN22WahBvR8XBm63kuJrXPfEqzfDK_nZ4ZouF5jHI4karrTyWOkv04sOybOKUAk1PdzHM81RCrDeVQDPgRRW6T2RC_FDV6dXGvk1ORQlvttt-ehRKDZkwD65xE_Cacd1/s1600/gun+free+zone+chatanooga.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvZ5C6qbZVF2_VmN22WahBvR8XBm63kuJrXPfEqzfDK_nZ4ZouF5jHI4karrTyWOkv04sOybOKUAk1PdzHM81RCrDeVQDPgRRW6T2RC_FDV6dXGvk1ORQlvttt-ehRKDZkwD65xE_Cacd1/s400/gun+free+zone+chatanooga.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Except, of course, that it won't.<br />
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If you were ever capable of believing that a man already set on murder, as was, evidently, <a href="http://heavy.com/news/2015/07/muhammad-youssef-abdulazeez-chattanooga-shooter-shooting-shot-killed-marines-recruiting-center-islam-muslim-terrorism-photos-facebook-twitter-age-bio/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez</span></a>, would be deterred by a sign, then I think we have to admit to ourselves that while you are capable of believing anything, you are capable of learning nothing.<br />
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If you ever endorsed the efficacy of the "gun free zone," that means you were possessed of the sort of spectacularly limber imagination that George Lucas or Walt Disney could only envy. Because you were able to picture, in your mind's eye, a disgruntled ex-employee or a seething jihadi or a garden variety madman -- heedless of the laws of God and man that have ever prohibited murder -- being pulled up short by silhouette of a gun and null sign. You could script an internal conversation that went something like this:<br />
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"Well. I <b><i>had </i></b>planned on annihilating everyone in the place, before sending myself to join them in hell or paradise. But whereas I don't care how many of my fellow men have to die to (satiate my rage) (satisfy my theology) (silence the voices in my head), I am certainly <i><b>not</b></i> going to stoop to taking a gun into a building that is <b><i>quite clearly</i></b> labeled to bar such conduct.</blockquote>
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Why, that would be wrong.</blockquote>
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I suppose I'll just go home."</blockquote>
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A mind that can contain that depth of imagination has its merits, but it's not the sort place terribly hospitable to facts.<br />
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If you ever argued that "gun free zones" make anyone safer from anything or anyone, then you are either a hoplophobic fool or -- and this, I fear, is too widely the case -- the sort of heartless ideologue for whom truth is a mere speed bump on the way to the tyranny you desire, and for whom <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/16/us/tennessee-naval-reserve-shooting/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">today's events in Chattanooga</span></a> are nothing more nor less than another <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yeA_kHHLow" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">crisis not to be wasted</span></a>.<br />
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As I have <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2010/12/youve-got-to-be-carefully-taught.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">said</span></a> and <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-law-is-ass.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">said </span></a>and <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2011/01/doubleplus-ungood.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">said </span></a>- Robert's Rule holds that gun free zones aren't.<br />
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But then you knew that, didn't you?Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-49216152820683147632015-06-18T12:21:00.000-04:002015-06-21T17:22:32.238-04:00On Our Knees*<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: orange;">UPDATED</span><br />
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It’s one of Robert’s Rules, and one of the saddest, that Facts Pursue
Narratives - Narratives Flee From Facts. Perhaps it has always been this way, but we see the Rule writ
especially large in an era of 24-hour, multi-channel blather, where every
agenda has its ardent proponents, all of whom are far more quick and ready to push their
party line than the reporters in the field are quick and able to dig up and disseminate actual
information. So literally before the bodies in <a href="http://www.emanuelamechurch.org/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church</span></a> had begun to cool, you could find commentators, politicians and
shills of every stripe using those murdered believers as a fulcrum to raise this or that particular agenda just that bit higher.</div>
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The coming hours and days will doubtless produce more facts, and they’ll
doubtless be slipped into and hammered onto and wedged under the narratives we all have
come to expect -- however fast those narratives flee from facts that don't suit. But instead of speculating on what those facts may prove to be, I
want to talk about what we knew before that first shot was fired yesterday, what is true in the harsh light of morning, and what will be true no matter what facts we learn in days to come.</div>
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Before the first shot we knew that Emanuel AME was some variety of persistent miracle. To begin, the church was founded in 1816. Let
that date sit with you a moment, because that’s <i>47 years</i> <i>before </i>a presidential order that finally said that black human beings like those who founded that church could no longer be <i>owned</i> by other human
beings. In the two tempestuous centuries since its founding, Emanuel AME has survived upheaval, violence, persecution, prejudice and even – in South Carolina? – an earthquake. A man named <span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/12/denmark-vesey-forgotten-hero/305673/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Denmark Vesey</span></a>,</span> was – just six years after helping to found the church – tried in secret by a kangaroo court and hanged for his role in a planned revolt of human beings who wished no longer to be owned by other human beings.</div>
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Thus we knew Wednesday that the believers of Emanuel AME had
survived great horrors before and had prospered and grown and loved their church to the
glory of God even so. After the last echo of the last shot has passed, I think we
know that they will do the same. We know that with the
prayers and love and shared tears of believers and people of good will, Emanuel
AME will persevere as it has persevered. We know that if this killer thought to strike down this church – let alone the Church – he has already failed, as even worse men have failed, as even the <a href="http://biblehub.com/esv/matthew/16.htm" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Gates of Hell must fail</span></a>.</div>
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I knew Wednesday, and I know today, and nothing to come will make me doubt that God
does not abandon His people. I knew Wednesday, and I know today, that only He
can lift and comfort those who mourn. <b>I knew Wednesday, and I know today, that people of Emanuel AME are my brothers and sisters in Christ and that He hears my prayers for them.</b></div>
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But there's something else I knew Wednesday, and still know today.<br />
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Before the first shot, I knew that the black folks I talk to were
feeling more insecure than at any time since we all became adults. And let’s be
clear, the black folks I talk to are mostly people of means and position – even
of power. They own and run businesses and law firms; they direct the doings of
governments; they carry badges and stethoscopes and resumes filled with
degrees. But I knew Wednesday that despite all these friends have accomplished;
despite all the influence, recognition and prosperity they have earned; despite
– not for nothing – the presence of a black man in the White House, they are
troubled and angry and, yes, afraid, like I have not seen before. I know that today those doubts and fears can only be worse.</div>
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What I did not
know Wednesday and do not know today is how definitively to fix that. But I refuse to be paralyzed by that, to let the absence of the perfect be the death of the good. I did and do know that, at the very least,
<i>we have to talk to each other</i>. We have to talk in frankest possible terms, about
the most difficult things, in fearlessness and love. We have to be robust. We
have to be slow to take offense and quick to forgive the inadvertent
slight. We have to examine ourselves and let our hearts of hearts be examined. </div>
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Two hundred years after those brave believers founded Emanuel AME, human beings are dying in America because of the color of their skin. I don't know if the nine at Emanuel AME were among them – that seems likely, but we don't know yet. <span style="color: orange;">[<b># Update below]</b></span> (Perhaps they died because they were Christians. Thousands do nowadays, despite the echoing media silence about that.) But even if, by some chance, these nine didn't die because of their color, too many of our countrymen, of our fellow human beings, do. And – God forgive us – 200 years from now, unless we now take on that fact with brutal honesty and powerful love, that will still be so.</div>
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<o:p>And, despite the thundering din of the Narratives fleeing the facts as fast as they can, there's something else we knew on Wednesday, that hasn't changed this morning – however efficiently </o:p>America’s great cynical hoplophobic industrial complex churns out its lies, slickly tailored to capitalize on the deaths of people about whom it cares not one jot.</div>
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Before the first shot, we knew – if we were honest with
ourselves – that there exists no piece of gun legislation we can craft that would
matter to or deter a man who is otherwise willing to take the lives of nine or
dozen a other human beings. Before the first shot, we knew that when men so inclined decide to match action to inclination, they almost always seek a place where they know their
intended victims will be unarmed.** I knew Wednesday – as did many of my
co-coreligionists – that if the flock is going to be protected on a Sunday
morning or a Wednesday evening, then some of the shepherds, and some sheepdogs, have to
stand ready to put down the wolves. </div>
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<o:p> </o:p> </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Note that you get on your knees only to pray – or possibly for
gardening. Roberts Rules for Armed Robbery and Hostage Taking are explicit:</span></div>
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</div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Never let them put you on your knees.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Never let them put you in another room.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;">Never let them put you in a car.</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Long and bitter experience has proven that each of these is a prelude
to murder. At that point, whatever the odds, fight like one already dead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">** Among other things, the shootings in Aurora, Fort Hood and Sandy
Hook all had this in common.</span><br />
<span style="color: orange;"><b><br /># UPDATED: Given the <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/18/us/charleston-south-carolina-shooting/index.html" target="_blank">reported words</a> of the killer -- whose name will gain no fame here -- and given what has been learned about him in the past 24 hours, there now seems to be no doubt that he was acting out of racial hatred.</b></span></div>
Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-77962856149221143562015-05-08T16:53:00.003-04:002015-05-08T16:53:35.517-04:00Sommes-nous Charlie?<div class="MsoNormal">
In the wake of global jihad’s sudden realization that <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/05/us/texas-police-shooting-hero/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">there are safer places to take up the cause than a Texas art show</span></a>, there has been a wave
of hand wringing, sympathizing and second guessing all around the notion that
Pam Geller and those in attendance at her event – while not exactly “asking for it” –
were imprudently courting the sort of violent response the two erstwhile terrorists hoped to mete out. If you suspect someone may react violently to your speech, the "reasoning" goes, then the onus is on your to refrain from such speech so as to prevent the violence.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcBDNEYXRjRsiKUOg2cupELaKBP0l_Hnuxz4rhSQEXay-NaBb0I-FTj2H-Y2RA6db_52u_8CDQ1CzI8MTsePfUkE-lOUAb26HFcb6MfgLMREkiw57VuXVBlazvwRzPhdG0zffk6RMRSach/s1600/my+mohammed.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcBDNEYXRjRsiKUOg2cupELaKBP0l_Hnuxz4rhSQEXay-NaBb0I-FTj2H-Y2RA6db_52u_8CDQ1CzI8MTsePfUkE-lOUAb26HFcb6MfgLMREkiw57VuXVBlazvwRzPhdG0zffk6RMRSach/s320/my+mohammed.png" width="218" /></a></div>
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This call has come from some surprising places.* For example, in the <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/charlie-hebdo-rejects-pamela-geller-comparisons.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">view of two <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> editors,</span></a><span style="color: orange;"> </span>while the slaughter of their coworkers for drawing cartoons of Mohammed were appalling, it turns out threats of violence to others who draw cartoons are very different, however much the same they appear to those of us in the non-cartooning <i>hoi polloi</i>. It’s not clear if the distinction rests on
the quality of the cartoons.** But the upshot was: For-profit French cartoons of the Prophet are OK; non-profit American cartoons of the Prophet, are not OK.<br />
<br />
And here I naively thought <i>je suis Charlie</i>.</div>
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Mind you, those folks at <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> had better be careful not to get too comfy in the saddle of their high horse. <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/the-abuse-of-satire/390312/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Yet another cartoonist</span></a>, who has made a living for 45 years by giving offense,
seemed to think the fellows at Charlie Hebdo – while not exactly “asking for it”
– were out of line, too, and should well have expected what they got.</div>
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Now, I have written before about <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2013/12/long-walk-ended.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">how nuanced the world is</span></a>, how much is grey, how little absolute. But I've also always maintained my <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2011/03/i-wonder-if-williard-will-show-her-some.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Whitman Contradiction License</span></a>. So let me go ahead and lay down an absolute Robert's Rule: Speech is speech. Violence is violence. </div>
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<br />
Even the most offensive speech you can imagine -- that Westboro gang's hateful three
word signs at soldiers' funerals, dunking crucifixes in urinals, 90% of all the anonymous comments everywhere on the internet -- does not
justify even the least violence you can imagine. The only acceptable response to speech, presuming you don't simply ignore it, is more speech. Orations, blogs, stage plays, anthems, epic poems, sky writing, sculpture, tracts, pamphlets, bumper stickers -- all are good to go. You can employ condemnation, vilification, expressions of loathing, mockery, satire, sneering contempt and the thumbing of your own nose. Have
at it.***<br />
<br />
But you do not get to raise a finger against the speaker, and an inquiry into
his motives -- which are damned tricky to divine, even if <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/05/08/juan_williams_pam_geller_is_no_better_than_your_average_self_promoting_pyromaniac/#comments" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Juan Williams</span></a> seems to believe he can -- cannot amend the Rule.<br />
<br />
Here's a diagnostic you can run on yourself. If you think a speaker is "provoking violence" by speaking, then you utterly fail to understand the difference between speech and
violence. Violence can often justifiably provoke violence -- assault someone
and he has the right to defend himself; assault him with deadly force and he
has the right to end your life. But speech cannot justifiably provoke even a
slap in the face. This is the law. But more than that, it is a founding
principle of this nation. </div>
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<br />
The wonderful thing about speech, even of the vilest sort, is that it leaves everyone
free to engage in more speech. Violence, on the other hand, leaves only the winners free to engage in more violence. And as a recent pair
of would be jihadis learned the hard way, that violence thing doesn't
always work out quite like you're expecting it to.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* I'm not being sarcastic here. I was honestly surprised, although I know I shouldn't be.</span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></o:p></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-size: x-small;">** The Geller event was no Armory Show, but I sure hope that's not the key criterion. I drew the picture above on MS Paint and it is not a very good drawing at all.<br /><br />*** Certainly lots of folks <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/pamela-geller" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">have done just that </span></a>with the tirelessly self-promoting Ms. Geller,</span></o:p></div>
Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-12079425169060710232015-04-30T16:39:00.001-04:002015-05-01T15:19:55.191-04:00You'll taste the rainbow, and like it<div class="MsoNormal">
Here follows the only approved manner in which to eat Skittles. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFGSKAP6LSctJBJpwZoBV8tIZJm0HsQo1nsOcNz8t2lUiZa22qmU4vP9M5IoExZeeY2OCq1cuVMu6FkAs2g78zWNc1QlkV1n-wxQCV8pkNg-iTyG1Ip60jP7hgmn9wMEQV7grIgL6H2JdS/s1600/Skittles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFGSKAP6LSctJBJpwZoBV8tIZJm0HsQo1nsOcNz8t2lUiZa22qmU4vP9M5IoExZeeY2OCq1cuVMu6FkAs2g78zWNc1QlkV1n-wxQCV8pkNg-iTyG1Ip60jP7hgmn9wMEQV7grIgL6H2JdS/s1600/Skittles.jpg" height="299" width="400" /></a></div>
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Tear a corner off of the package so as to be able to control
the flow of Skittles. Pour one-third of the package onto the surface of your
desk.*</div>
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Separate the Skittles by color, then eat in the color order
below, according to the following system:</div>
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Eat Skittles of the same color two at a time. If there is an
odd number of same color Skittles greater than one, then eat same-colored Skittles
two at a time until three Skittles remain, then consume the three remaining
same-colored Skittles together. If a given pour contains only one Skittle of a
given color, eat that Skittle by itself. If a pour contains only three Skittles of a given color, eat them all together.**</div>
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Color order: You will consume the green Skittles first.
(Alternatively, the green Skittles can be thrown into the trash because they are nasty.***) Eat either
the yellow or the orange Skittles second. Eat either the orange or the yellow
Skittles third. Eat the purple Skittles fourth. Eat the red Skittles last.</div>
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Once you have consumed all the Skittles from the first pour,
pour out the second third of the package and repeat. Then complete the same
process to consume the remaining third.</div>
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Now, I eat Skittles this way because that’s how I <b><i>like </i></b>to
eat Skittles. But <i><b>you </b></i>will eat Skittles this way because it is policy that
Skittles will be eaten this way. You cannot be trusted to decide <a href="http://www.today.com/parents/principal-sends-boston-marathon-letter-over-family-vacation-t18061" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">where your children go</span></a>. You cannot be trusted to decide <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Health/mom-lunch-shamed-school-packing-oreos-daughter/story?id=30674158" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">what your children eat</span></a>. You cannot be
trusted to express your <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11570181/Former-Monty-Python-cameraman-arrested-over-satirical-posters.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">contempt for your local bureaucrats</span></a>. All this is evident just from today's news. I shudder to contemplate what fits of radical non-conformity tomorrow may bring. So eat your Skittles as you are damn told.</div>
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Please know that if you question my Skittles policy I will not engage with you on the genesis of the policy, nor will I discuss its merits. The policy is the policy, as anyone -- <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/04/30/a_dads_case_for_playing_hooky_goes_viral/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">particularly groveling left-wing statists</span></a> -- can tell you, and policies are there to be obeyed.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />* This applies to the 2.17 ounce package of Skittles. The 11 ounce family size Skittles is consumed in exactly the same way, but is poured out into 15 sub-portions, rather than three.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** Yes I know. There is an irresolvable contradiction contained in this part of the policy that arises when a given pour contains three and only three Skittles of a given color. Tough. The policy is absolute and you must conform to it perfectly, even where it contradicts itself.<br /><br />*** Personally I always consume the green Skittles because: 1. Wasting food is a sin; and 2. They enhance my appreciation of the delicious Skittles soon to come. At present, the consumption or discard of the green Skittles is not a matter of policy and Skittle consumers are free to make their own choice in this regard. Yay, liberty!</span></div>
Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-3516512567416592742015-04-20T17:38:00.002-04:002020-09-26T11:54:19.716-04:00Say my name<div class="MsoNormal">
You have been told <a href="http://horizon.hesston.edu/isis-does-not-reflect-islam/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">over</span></a> and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bassem-youssef/isis-mirror-reflects_b_6903542.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">over </span></a>again – and by some awfully<span style="color: orange;"> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/29/john-kerry-is-calling-the-islamic-state-by-the-wrong-name-and-its-helping-the-islamic-state/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">important</span></a> </span>and powerful <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2959270/We-not-war-Islam-war-people-perverted-Islam-Obama-says-no-way-predict-terrorist-including-religion.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">folks </span></a>– that the gruesome outrages committed more or less daily by ISIS and Boko Haram and Al Shabaab – and, most recently, some random Muslim refugees
in a boat – are “not about Islam.” Some fairly <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-reformation-for-islam-1426859626" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">well-informed</span></a> and <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">studious </span></a>people seem to disagree
with that. But, I get it. We live in an age where it’s much more comfortable to
discuss <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/06/nidal-hasan-s-murders-termed-workplace-violence-by-u-s.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">workplace violence</span></a> instead of <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/army-rules-fort-hood-shooting-victims-receive-purple/story?id=28780956" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">terrorism </span></a>– even when
we’re talking about the same event. (Indeed, some folks, like Ben Affleck, are so disinclined to
engage uncomfortable facts that their <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln9D81eO60" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">passionate denial about the roots of the terrorism</span></a>
is exceeded only by their desperation to deny their <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/04/19/ben_affleck_asked_pbs_to_ignore_slave_owning_family_past_in_finding_your.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">own personal roots</span></a>.)<br />
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<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/29/john-kerry-is-calling-the-islamic-state-by-the-wrong-name-and-its-helping-the-islamic-state/" target="_blank"></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0R4xQPL_AUVbeX4Dm5z5wTdnTvlp_Zk79L8Fcfh2klWmCzX_o86gCaThe4EpZW4bUm0JtTQU5SMn6-1feUJgAeyNTifPdGE1Me66apfHY-qeTLlq1vyRkfLsaPC-apEEjHC1Sc1NxRxV-/s1600/president+hand+on+mouth.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0R4xQPL_AUVbeX4Dm5z5wTdnTvlp_Zk79L8Fcfh2klWmCzX_o86gCaThe4EpZW4bUm0JtTQU5SMn6-1feUJgAeyNTifPdGE1Me66apfHY-qeTLlq1vyRkfLsaPC-apEEjHC1Sc1NxRxV-/s1600/president+hand+on+mouth.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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So let’s spare ourselves the whole mess about what is Islam
and what isn't. Let’s not talk about whether ISIS, or Boko Haram, or Al Shabaab,
or Hezbollah, or Al Qaeda – or some random Muslim refugees in a boat – were <i>motivated</i> <i>by Islam </i>to act as they did. Let’s
put the perpetrators’ motives aside and focus merely upon the identity of the
victims. </div>
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Those random Muslim refugees in the Mediterranean <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/16/europe/italy-migrants-christians-thrown-overboard/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">tossed overboard and drowned</span></a> those who, as
terrified as they were, called out to God and prayed with their hands folded.
Al Shabaab, at the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/westgate-mall-attacks-kenya" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Westgate Mall</span></a> and at <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/70-killed-hundreds-rescued-after-kenya-university-attack-by-al-shabab-militants/2015/04/02/0c554516-d951-11e4-ba28-f2a685dc7f89_story.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Garissa University College</span></a>, employed
the simple expediency of asking potential victims if they were Christian or
not. Boko Haram saves itself the trouble of even asking by simply <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2014/july/christian-worshippers-targets-nigerian-violence-boko-haram.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">attacking Christians at worship</span></a>. ISIS on the<span style="color: orange;"> <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/19/africa/libya-isis-executions-ethiopian-christians/index.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Libyan beach</span></a></span> expressly warned that beheading was the fate all
Christians will face if they do not convert.</div>
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So if we cannot say these scores
and scores of brutal, terror-filled, agonizing deaths have got to do with Islam, can we acknowledge – for pity’s sake can we at least say out loud
– that they incontrovertibly <b><i>have </i></b>got something to do with Christianity?*</div>
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</div>
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And more than say it in this space, can we hear it from the one fellow from whom we most need to hear it? Here is the <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/04/19/statement-national-security-council-spokesperson-bernadette-meehan-murde" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Administration statement</span></a> from last night,
issued by Bernadette Meehan, the spokesperson for the National Security
Council.</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">The United States condemns in the strongest terms the
brutal mass murder purportedly of Ethiopian Christians by ISIL-affiliated
terrorists in Libya. We express our condolences to the families of the
victims and our support to the Ethiopian government and people as they grieve
for their fellow citizens. That these terrorists killed these men solely
because of their faith lays bare the terrorists’ vicious, senseless
brutality. This atrocity once again underscores the urgent need for a
political resolution to the conflict in Libya to empower a unified Libyan
rejection of terrorist groups.</span></div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" style="font-size: x-small;">Even as terrorists attempt through their
unconscionable acts to sow discord among religious communities, we recall that
people of various faiths have coexisted as neighbors for centuries in the
Middle East and Africa. With the force of this shared history behind
them, people across all faiths will remain united in the face of the
terrorists’ barbarity. The United States stands with them. While
these dehumanizing acts of terror aim to test the world's resolve – as groups
throughout history have – none have the power to vanquish the powerful core of
moral decency which binds humanity and which will ultimately prove the
terrorists' undoing.</span></span></blockquote>
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That’s not nothing, I suppose.** As best I can tell, by acknowledging even barely that the victims were Christian, and were victims because they were Christian, it's <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/15/statement-press-secretary-murder-egyptian-citizens" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">a first of sorts</span></a>. But it is not enough by miles.</div>
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Because I have to wonder. The President, in an act of
<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/historians-weigh-obamas-comparison-isis-militants-medieval-christian/story?id=28787194" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">staggering sophistry</span></a>, used the occasion of the recent National Prayer Breakfast
to state: “Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other
place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed
terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”*** Now, as the death toll of Christians
killed for being Christians mounts around the world, can't he simply say their name?****<br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">* Yes. I know. ISIS and its ilk kill many, many Muslims as
well. The killers in those cases would tell you in no uncertain terms that
those killings are all about Islam, that as <i>takfiri</i>,
they are condemning and justly punishing apostate traitors to Islam. But just
for now, just for this space, since so few folks seem to want to, we’re going
to talk about Christians.<br />
<br />** I’m sure <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernadette_Meehan" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Bernadette Meehan is a fine and important person</span></a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><br />
*** Let’s be clear: He hardly needed to reach back 900 years for some awful
behavior by Christians. On the most fundamental level possible, Christianity is about people
so sinful, vile and evil that they all are damned to hell – except for the
Grace of Jesus. And even those who claim Him and have received that Grace are,
necessarily, sinners in the present tense.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That sin is not theoretical. It’s
entirely too real, and all too often it’s even associated with the faith itself.
That Midwestern gang of homophobic thugs who like to picket soldiers’ funerals and
have the words “Baptist” and “church” right there in their name. Pedophile
clerics are likely to go after the convenient lambs in their own flocks. No
Christian deserves praise or even deference merely for being a Christian. Any
Christian who would expect that </span>hasn't<span style="font-family: inherit;"> really paid attention to his own
theology. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">**** It is rare -- in fact, I think unprecedented -- for this blog directly to criticize the President, I find the greatest danger is that some reader might imagine I support those who oppose him.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Remember, please <b>Robert's Rule of Binary American Politics: </b></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Team R versus Team D is really just an intra-squad scrimmage
by players from the same team, staged to distract the cheering fans from
noticing that the stadium is on fire and their cars are being stolen from the
parking lot.</b></span></div>
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Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-70742520655220061582015-04-17T12:43:00.002-04:002016-04-18T09:58:24.073-04:00Battle RoadAs the rising sun pierced the billowing gun smoke that April morning 240 years ago this Sunday, I suspect the British regulars were thinking something along the lines of “Well, that’s for them.” The truth is that the “<a href="http://www.nationalcenter.org/ConcordHymn.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Shot Heard Round the World</span></a>” echoed over an inauspicious field abandoned by a beaten militia in full flight. The only would-be rebels who remained on the Green did so because they were dead or dying.<br />
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So British Colonel Francis Smith might well have thought that, with one lot of traitors shown conclusively who was master, well begun was half done and the day portended well for King George III. It must have been with more than a little confidence that Smith turned his troops down the road toward Concord, where Tories and spies had reported the nascent rebellion had a large cache of weapons.<br />
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But neither Smith nor his executive officer, Major John Pitcairn – much less King George – had heard <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3OVmTqSFe6m0uAjtQoNTJJCcPzUTky1xlkVh5bBIVmQfyo4vz3BaAT7iQ6YwubLz5Zx1Kc2dLeaLpamKZtGEFzOKmpVR4bperpdR-wuHY8UAQj5_RPFabamxb5J2kNvZVgw1LrWbAmBHp/s1600/2010+-+Lexington-Concord+tour+Parker.JPG" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">American Captain John Parker</span></a> addressing his militiamen just before dawn. The rebels had waited through the night to see if the British foray into the countryside was just another reconnoiter in force, or something more sinister. Paul Revere and his fellow riders assured them the regulars were on their way intent on disarming the budding rebellion. As the British entered the green, the militiamen assembled from Buckman Tavern and elsewhere to face them. Parker reminded them that while their foremost purpose was to merely demonstrate their resolve, more than that might well be demanded of them. </div>
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“Stand your ground and do not fire unless fired upon,” Parker ordered. “But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”*</div>
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Faced off across a space no larger than a football field, Parker and Pitcairn each commanded their respective forces not to fire. Pitcairn had every reason to expect to be obeyed; British regulars did as they were ordered and Pitcairn’s force of elite light infantry were some of the best troops of the best professional army in the world. Parker, commanding farmers, merchants – and a slave named Prince Estabrook – likewise expected to be obeyed, if for no other reason than because his men had families close at hand, some watching from just off the field. Greek governmental theories, philosophical abstractions and offenses such as the Intolerable Acts may have driven rabble-rousers like Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberty. But for the militiamen on Lexington Green, their homes and farms and livelihoods were all too tangible realities, all too close at hand.</div>
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So no one was meant to fire a shot, but as it as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0504.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">has time and again</span></a> throughout the years, the shot nevertheless was fired** and then everyone on the field let loose. It was over in minutes and the outcome, with many rebels killed or wounded, and only one of his own men hurt, couldn't have surprised Pitcairn, who couldn't have had much doubt about how the rest of the day would go.</div>
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But it was only dawn. And he hadn't heard Parker.</div>
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Pitcairn couldn't have understood at that moment that he hadn't just been a part of a police action or some noisy civil disturbance. Because he hadn't heard Parker, because he didn't know who these Patriots really were, Pitcairn didn't know then that he’d really been a participant in the first skirmish of a remorseless war. But he was soon to learn.</div>
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By the end of that very day, after the desperate running fight down the Battle Road, as the blood ran from the North Bridge to stain the Concord River, Pitcairn could not help but to have had a better understanding of what war with real Americans would mean: All told the rebels had lost 88 men killed and wounded. The butcher’s bill for the most feared and powerful military force in the world was nearly twice that, at 147. By the very next morning – without the aid of Facebook or a single cell phone – 15,000 men of what would eventually*** become a victorious Continental Army were outside of Boston. </div>
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This nation was born of blood and smoke and outrage and an abiding sense that "Enough is enough, damn it." It was born when a secure and prosperous people finally decided that their liberties were more dear to them than their comforts. I am convinced that Americans -- or, at the very least, enough Americans -- still fear blood and smoke less, and love liberty more, than they love their comfort. I believe that Americans still know their way to the Battle Road. I believe this, I confess, in part because I must believe it, or else despair.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Indeed, many of the militiamen may not have heard Parker, either. Her suffered from tuberculosis and had trouble mustering enough breath to speak.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">**Theories vary wildly about who fired first. The best evidence, I think, suggests that it was one of the spectators, townsmen arrayed around the green, but not under Parker’s command.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*** "Eventually" in spades. In the <b>eight years, four months and 15 days</b> from that day to the Treaty of Paris, there would be some 150,000 casualties, suffered overwhelmingly by the Americans and their families, fighting on their own doorsteps.</span></div>
Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-20778792131232321842015-02-10T17:03:00.003-05:002015-02-10T18:05:36.112-05:00Be afraid. Be very afraid.<a href="http://www.murphy.senate.gov/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">United States Senator Chris Murphy</span></a> (Team D. - Connecticut) is afraid. What, you ask, in a world wracked by terrorist attacks, unbalanced by a resurgent Russia, alternately frozen by polar vortices and simmered by global warming frightens Sen. Murphy? Of whom, you wonder, in a world populated with the likes of <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/26/donald-sterling-racist_n_5218572.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Donald Sterling</span></a>, <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2014/12/19/who-isis-leader-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-290081.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Abu Bakr al-Bahgdadi</span></a>, and <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/02/kanye-beck-grammys?mbid=social_twitter" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Kanye West</span></a> is Sen. Murphy afraid?<br />
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Well you might ask. Because the answer, if you happen to own a full-sized pistol manufactured in the past 80 years* or so, turns out to be . . . you.<br />
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I know this because The Hill <a href="http://thehill.com/regulation/231884-democrat-uses-capitol-shooting-threat-in-push-for-ammo-limits" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">reports </span></a>that, after what we must assume was careful and objective analysis (i.e., asking a couple of anti-gun lobbyists what they thought), Sen. Murphy is throwing his support behind the push for a new federal law banning magazines that hold more than 10 rounds because, he says<br />
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. . . he has not met “a single hunter or a single person who hunts for sport” who needs more than 10 rounds [and] those who wanted high-capacity magazines were more interested in “arming against the government.”</div>
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Now, I'm not going to engage in a political assessment of the bill's chances for passage. (Which are, in the words of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKS0GVvoE9I" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Dean Wormer</span></a>, zero-point-zero.) Rather, let's address this notion that the reason folks want to own modern firearms is to take arms against the government.<br />
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Because, now that you mention it, Sen. Murphy . . . um . . . yeah. Sorta. If you insist.<br />
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I've <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2013/07/hold-these-truths.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">pointed out before</span></a> that when it comes to the founding philosophy of this nation, there are some absolutely essential bits that get all too conveniently forgotten -- or intentionally ignored -- by the fellows who consider themselves to be in charge nowadays. Because a belief that men have God-given rights that other men cannot take is a fine and a true and a worthwhile thing. But what it isn't, in and of itself, is any sort of justification for even a punch in the nose, let alone bloody revolution against one's duly emplaced leaders. Not by a long shot. If you want to wage war against your own government -- precisely what the Founders did for eight and a half deadly years -- you're going to need something more. You're going to need to to keep reading:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 14.7839994430542px;">That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, </span><b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 14.7839994430542px;">That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, </b><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 14.7839994430542px;">and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.</span></blockquote>
That was the justification upon which Americans committed what most viewed as a grave sin and abolished their until-then-lawful government. And if it ever becomes necessary to do so again, the justification for such an awful event will be precisely the same.<br />
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The Founders knew that to be true. And, having just thrown off one tyrant, they did not imagine for a moment that there were no tyrants left. Indeed, they recognized in themselves and in each other the human inclination to tyranny -- what Frederic Bastiat calls "<a href="http://www.constitution.org/cmt/bastiat/the_law.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">A Fatal Tendency of Mankind</span></a>" -- and they were determined to guard against it. That's why the Constitution creates three co-equal branches of government. And that is at least one reason why, when they set out the Bill of Rights, <a href="http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa46.htm" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">they put</span></a> the Second Amendment second.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* I make a distinction here between revolvers and pistols, and I arbitrarily picked 80 years because that is the year John Moses Browning's second most-famous pistol made its appearance, seven years after his death, but incorporating important improvements he wanted to make to his more famous </span><a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2011/03/i-wonder-if-williard-will-show-her-some.html" style="font-size: small;" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">1911</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;">. The </span><a href="http://www.browning.com/products/catalog/family.asp?webflag_=007B" style="font-size: small;" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Browning Hi Power</span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> -- or P35 for its first year of manufacture -- had a magazine capacity of 13 rounds in 9mm and set the trend, still followed today, for pistols to carry as many rounds as conveniently fit, given the grip size and caliber.</span><br />
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<br />Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-64158770605737525432015-02-08T12:31:00.002-05:002015-02-10T18:04:58.962-05:00Construction<div style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 15.4559993743896px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #141823;">Let's establish at the outset that I am no fan of Ted Cruz. I think he's a buffoon and, as a key player on Team R, instrumental in the most dangerous </span><a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2010/11/one-from-column-one-from-column-b.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">intramural scrimmage</span></a><span style="color: #141823;"> ever played. But it turns out I am even less of a fan of sanctimony and race-baiting and the tyranny of orthodoxy -- equally so the left-handed variety as the right.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 15.4559993743896px;"><span style="color: #141823;">Race, certainly, and even ethnicity are, to a large degree, just </span><a href="https://anthrogenetics.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/how-is-race-and-ethnic-identity-socially-constructed/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">social</span></a><span style="color: #141823;"> </span></span><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-mean-when-we-say-race-is-a-social-construct/275872/" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 15.4559993743896px;" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">constructs</span></a><span style="color: #141823;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 15.4559993743896px;">. If you tell 50 people in a room to stand up and arrange themselves from darkest to lightest, you'll get some pretty funny looks* but you also get to observe an interesting phenomenon: Reduce someone's literal place to the single signifier of his skin color, and the light begins to dawn about how much more complex the concept of race really is. Just as interesting -- especially in the United States -- is to ask someone about his ethnicity and listen to the second order algebraic equation that follows. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #141823;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; line-height: 15.4559993743896px;">There's nothing wrong with this, so long as you let people do it for themselves. Our own idea of our race and ethnicity helps us to fix ourselves in the great, centuries-long parade of human kind. It gives us a context and place from which to view the world. It gives a list of foods we really like. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 15.4559993743896px;">Now, I cannot speak in detail to the race or ethnicity of Amy Louise Bardach, who recently </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/opinion/why-are-cubans-so-special.html?_r=1" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 15.4559993743896px;" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">posited</span></a><span style="color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 15.4559993743896px;"> that Ted Cruz doesn't get to call himself Hispanic because of his politics. But Bardach doesn't <i>sound** </i>especially Latino, and neither -- if that happens to be a married name -- does Amy Louise.*** So I am left to wonder: Where does she get the nerve?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 15.4559993743896px;"><span style="color: #141823;">This kind of reductive, aggressive, third-party imposition of identity is beyond offensive. It is the worst variety of the </span><a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2011/01/i-believe.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">Theory of Ubiquitous Polarity</span></a><span style="color: #141823;">. It is just another stripe of telling people what they are allowed to believe and, i</span></span><span style="color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 15.4559993743896px;">n the hands of a powerful institution</span><span style="color: #141823; font-size: 14px; line-height: 15.4559993743896px;"> like The New York Times, or the federal government, or the Central Committee, or the Gestapo****, or any other tyrant, it's damned dangerous.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; line-height: 15.4559993743896px;"><span style="color: #141823;">My wife is white (well, really this kind of amazing <i>cafe con leche</i> color) but clearly Latina. ("Latino" versus "Hispanic" is </span><a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/28/in-texas-its-hispanic-por-favor/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">another discussion</span></a><span style="color: #141823;">.) My boys are white (well, one's sort of tanish-white and the other is a little more beige) and medio-latino. I'm white (well, OK, sorta ruddy, blotchy, freckly white) and half Irish, half German (albeit I was raised in an entirely Czech family, and so identify there as well). None of that changes depending on how any of us vote, anymore than it does if one of my sons suddenly decided he didn't like beans and rice.***** And no editorial writer gets to tell us - or Ted Cruz, for that matter - otherwise.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Doubt me? Here's a simple exercise. Imagine a Wall Street Journal editorial positing that Barack Obama is not really black.<br />
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But maybe, before you try that thought experiment, you'd better put on a hard hat.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* I know because I have done exactly that, rather to make this very
point to a classroom full of folks who were -- because of another <a href="http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CCC/0612-dec09/CCC0612Close.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">social construct</span></a> -- largely inclined to do as I asked.</span></div>
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** Como el único gringo en una familia de 150 cubanos, y como residente de
25 años de una de las ciudades más latino en los Estados Unidos, me siento que
puedo hablar con experiencia, si no con la autoridad perfecta, sobre el tema.
Pero cualquiera que sea mi conjeturo, yo soy de ninguna manera que sugieren que
podría o debería imponer una etnia a la Sra Bardach, ni privarlo de su derecho
a reclamar lo que uno - o los - ella afirma . De esa manera, somos muy diferentes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*** And in any event, if it seems offensive to you that I'd speculate at all about <i><b>her </b></i>ethnicity, maybe go ahead and check your irony meter for full function.</span></div>
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**** What good is to have Godwin's Law if we cannot break it from time to time?</span></div>
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***** Consider it an argument <i>ad absurdim</i>.</span></div>
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Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-64777492913831046312014-06-19T12:01:00.001-04:002014-06-19T14:21:32.203-04:00Terrifying<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Let’s
be clear about one thing from the start. Hillary Clinton is <b><i>not</i></b> running for
President. Rather she is engaged in the simple exercise of capitalism, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/09/hillary-clinton-book-tour-interviews_n_5472391.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">putting on a massive tour to flog her new book</span></a>. </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">So don’t get the idea that her recent appearance at
a<span style="color: orange;"> <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/17/politics/clinton-town-hall-what-to-watch/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">CNN “Town Hall”</span></a></span> was about running for President. </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">I mean it. Do not get that idea. Do not dare even to hold that thought in your
head. Because, as Ms. Clinton made clear when asked about her support for a new
“<a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2012/12/calvinball.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">assault weapon</span></a>” ban, the mere holding of an idea in your head can be an act of
terror.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">For example, if you happen not to support a new “assault
weapon” ban, even if you keep your opposition to yourself, you are little
better than those fellows who flew those planes into those buildings. (You still remember those fellows, right?) Ms. Clinton helpfully explained:</span><br />
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<i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPpUwBfZjeg" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>“I believe that we need a more thoughtful conversation, we cannot let a minority of people — and that’s what it is, it is a minority ofpeople — hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”</b></span></a></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I submit that the
enormity of that sentence is too great to absorb in just a single
breath, so I’ll give you thirty seconds to take it in.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">OK. Ready to go on?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Let’s break this sentence
down from back to front. We learn that a “viewpoint” can terrorize – at least at the
exact moment of this writing – <a href="http://www.census.gov/popclock/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">159,133,793 people</span></a>.* Not an action
to vindicate a viewpoint. Not a violent or even peaceful demonstration in support of a viewpoint. Not even the
plain expression of the viewpoint. Rather, the mere
<b><i>holding </i></b>of a viewpoint – well, at least of a viewpoint with which Ms. Clinton
disagrees – is an act of terror. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Fortunately,
however, Ms. Clinton offers hope that we might someday rest easy in our beds,
unterrorized by viewpoints. Because as we work our way toward
the front of the sentence, we learn that Ms. Clinton is determined that such
viewpoints simply are not going to be permitted. We cannot, she declaims, let
(read “allow” or “permit”) a minority of people <b><i>hold </i></b>this terrible, terrifying
point of view. In other words, some beliefs are too dangerous to be believed.**<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 18.399999618530273px;">From there, Ms. Clinton is a little short on detail. She fails to explain precisely how she plans to prohibit the holding of this viewpoint and, presumably, other viewpoints that ought not be held. And this determination to eliminate terrible viewpoints really does want some detail. After all, </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">Medgar Evers – who, it would sadly turn out, had
best reason to know – observed that “you can kill a man, but you cannot kill an
idea.” Viewpoints, one supposes, are equally robust and thus their eradication seems likely to be <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/medgar-evers/4/" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">equally messy</span></a>.</span><span style="line-height: 18.399999618530273px;"><br /><br />But perhaps it is churlish of me to press Ms. Clinton for her plan – after all, it's not like she is running for President.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Because that would be terrifying</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">* </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">This assumes Clinton meant a majority of the people
in the United States. If she meant that a viewpoint is capable of terrorizing
the majority of ALL the people, then we’re talking somewhere north of three and
a half billion trembling victims of a viewpoint.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">** Pay close attention to the terms “majority” and “minority”
in Ms. Clinton’s statement. She is here espousing an idea that actually <b><i>is</i></b> terrifying, a brand of tyranny called democracy, best characterized by
events like one actually called <a href="http://suburbansheepdog.blogspot.com/2013/05/obstructing-justice.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: orange;">the Great Terror</span></a>. </span></span></div>
Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5755087349201445537.post-91557891709950974442013-12-06T11:26:00.000-05:002013-12-06T11:33:34.995-05:00Long walk ended<div class="MsoNormal">
I am sorry to have to inform you, but the world is a complex
place, full of contradiction and nuance, populated by human beings who
are the corporeal embodiment of that complexity</div>
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Those vilifying Nelson Mandela in these days following his death – and there are plenty of
them – ignore certain essential facts about his later life, of which I will
mention only a salient two: He more or less singlehandedly averted a national
convulsion of bloodletting and racial war by embracing the notion that even
those who participated in decades of brutal oppression ought to have a place
and a voice in South Africa, and that even those who opposed that oppression
ought to answer in truth for their own crimes. And – in the public act for which
he ought to be most highly praised – having attained more or less complete
power, and being positioned to keep and wield it so long as ever he wished, Mandela
instead relinquished it – soon, peaceably and willingly. Compare that to nearly
any other post-colonial revolutionary leader on that continent.</div>
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Those lionizing Mandela – and there are many more of them –
do no better. He was in younger years a proponent of systemic violence, and
when he was arrested his house was filled with tens of thousands of weapons
designed to wield that violence in the most indiscriminate fashion. To ignore
that is to ignore conduct that he himself later repudiated, not only in others,
but in himself. And while he may not have chosen himself to become a dictator,
he supported and embraced brutal dictators – quite literally so – along with
leftist policies that almost no American of any political stripe would endorse
upon close examination.</div>
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This duality – plurality, really – in a single man is the
furthest thing from being unique. It is our essential nature. Whitman said it best: “Do I
contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain
multitudes.”</div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mandela the man contained just these multitudes.
The evolving legacy of a post-apartheid South Africa is more complex still.
(And, by all present indications, not headed toward a future Mandela would have wanted to see.) It is easier and more comfortable to feed our
confirmation bias and assuage our cognitive dissonance by imagining that he or
it was or is all one thing or all another. Easier, more comfortable, but false.</span></span>Robert Kuntzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08629632558320667302noreply@blogger.com0