Dick Locher Chicago Tribune Dec 27, 2012 |
ANTIGONOS' BRAIN
| Your Brain is Green |
 |
Friday, December 28, 2012
Sunday, December 16, 2012
The US Is Too Much In Love With Guns To Ever Control Them
I wrote yesterday that soon we'd hear that the reason the children were massacred in Connecticut was that there weren't enough guns around, well, the victims aren't all buried yet, and it's begun... Along with the rationalizations why the US can't ever have gun control.
What was that about "fast as a speeding bullet"? Oh, that was how fast Superman was supposed to be able to move. So are the pens of the gun lovers very fast.
What was that about "fast as a speeding bullet"? Oh, that was how fast Superman was supposed to be able to move. So are the pens of the gun lovers very fast.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Reflections on the US's Latest Gun Tragedy
When the first news broke of the school massacre, my husband asked "Arabs?", meaning "is this an Islamic terrorist attack?" THAT is completely understandable to him. I replied that it most probably was an ex-school employee who'd been fired or some other borderline lunatic who'd snapped, and my husband's next question was "Why didn't the school guards stop him?" to which I had to reply that schools in the US do not usually have guards at the gates as all of our schools do.
My own unworthy thought was, yes, it is really terrible, but what can one expect when guns are so readily available to the sane, the insane, and the mildly mentally deranged.? Someone once estimated that if one-tenth of one percent of Americans were crazy enough to want to assassinate the President, that meant the Secret Service had to keep tabs on over 30,000 people. I'm waiting for the NRA or the gun lobby to claim that the massacre could have been averted, not with stricter gun control, but if more citzens packed six-shooters and so could have "taken out the shooter" before he managed to kill so many.
And then I thought, to all those American parents in towns all over the US, who have children in unguarded classrooms, now you know how we feel every single day, since we don't have to fear the lone meshuggeneh but tens, if not hundreds, of thousands who plan to do this to our children [and us] all the time. [And there are rumblings, following the Hamas rally in Hebron yesterday, that another intifada might erupt soon]
But we have guards at the gates, everywhere. And strict gun laws. And no Palestinian school bus, or school, has ever been attacked by us.
My own unworthy thought was, yes, it is really terrible, but what can one expect when guns are so readily available to the sane, the insane, and the mildly mentally deranged.? Someone once estimated that if one-tenth of one percent of Americans were crazy enough to want to assassinate the President, that meant the Secret Service had to keep tabs on over 30,000 people. I'm waiting for the NRA or the gun lobby to claim that the massacre could have been averted, not with stricter gun control, but if more citzens packed six-shooters and so could have "taken out the shooter" before he managed to kill so many.
And then I thought, to all those American parents in towns all over the US, who have children in unguarded classrooms, now you know how we feel every single day, since we don't have to fear the lone meshuggeneh but tens, if not hundreds, of thousands who plan to do this to our children [and us] all the time. [And there are rumblings, following the Hamas rally in Hebron yesterday, that another intifada might erupt soon]
But we have guards at the gates, everywhere. And strict gun laws. And no Palestinian school bus, or school, has ever been attacked by us.
Tuesday, December 04, 2012
Catching UP
There's been rather a gap, occasioned [mostly] my the cruise my husband and I took at the beginning of November, and then, we returned to a "war", and my granddaughter decided to stop holding on to things and we haven't caught up with her yet...and more routine things like cleaning a house which had been shut up for two weeks, shopping, doing two weeks' worth of laundry, doctors' appointments, and so on.
Friar Yid has made a number of interesting posts on his blog, which deserve longer comments than one usually puts on a blog, FY, you're not forgotten!
I've got a bit to write about our cruise, and what impressed me most, and of course, the recent outbreak of hostilities with Hamas. Going back a bit, I think the US elections deserve a certain amount of attention, especially since I think the reason Hamas was more antsy than usual was because they thought Obama wouldn't support Israel any more than he has done previously.
It just happened that my computer went blooey two days before we went on vacation, and I didn't get it back from the "computer hospital", where it underwent a total reinstall of Windows, until about a week after we returned. The new install required reinstallation of a lot of programs [fortunately most data was stored on an external hard drive, but I had to completely rebuild my iTunes library, and I have about 200 GB of music and audiobooks, all lovingly categorized into playlists, and that vanished with the program]. Moreover the nice guys who repaired my computer installed Office 2007 -- I'd previously had Office 2003 -- and that took some getting used to. I'm still wrestling with Excell. The old version allowed me to simply enter number series; this version tries to turn any combination of numbers into a two decimal number as if it was money. There must be a way around this, but I haven't discovered it yet.
So bear with me, eventually I'll have some uninterrupted time to pontificate on the state of the world, or at least Antigonos' part of it.
Friar Yid has made a number of interesting posts on his blog, which deserve longer comments than one usually puts on a blog, FY, you're not forgotten!
I've got a bit to write about our cruise, and what impressed me most, and of course, the recent outbreak of hostilities with Hamas. Going back a bit, I think the US elections deserve a certain amount of attention, especially since I think the reason Hamas was more antsy than usual was because they thought Obama wouldn't support Israel any more than he has done previously.
It just happened that my computer went blooey two days before we went on vacation, and I didn't get it back from the "computer hospital", where it underwent a total reinstall of Windows, until about a week after we returned. The new install required reinstallation of a lot of programs [fortunately most data was stored on an external hard drive, but I had to completely rebuild my iTunes library, and I have about 200 GB of music and audiobooks, all lovingly categorized into playlists, and that vanished with the program]. Moreover the nice guys who repaired my computer installed Office 2007 -- I'd previously had Office 2003 -- and that took some getting used to. I'm still wrestling with Excell. The old version allowed me to simply enter number series; this version tries to turn any combination of numbers into a two decimal number as if it was money. There must be a way around this, but I haven't discovered it yet.
So bear with me, eventually I'll have some uninterrupted time to pontificate on the state of the world, or at least Antigonos' part of it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
