On Wednesday a jury in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania sentenced Robert Bowers to death. Bowers was the gunman who, on October 27, 2018, entered the Tree of Life Jewish synagogue and opened fire on congregants attending sabbath worship services there. Armed with an AR-15 style assault rifle and other firearms he killed 11 people and wounded 7 others, ( Read more... )

The US Supreme Court has ended race-based affirmative action in universities. I know, unless you've been living in a cave that's not exactly news anymore. The Supremes handed down their somewhat predictably 6-3 decision (with its super-majority of conservative and ultra-conservative justices) just over two weeks ago, on Thursday, June 29. Example ( Read more... )

Mississippi Travelog #7
En route to New Orleans - Thursday, 26 Apr 2023, 2pm

We had an amazing hike at Red Bluff today in Mississippi. "Where's the blog with beautiful pictures?" you may ask. It's in my backlog. The workflow for those beautiful pictures takes more time than I have some days while still in the middle of a trip. Rather than let the ( Read more... )

A week ago I wrote What is "Woke"? Ask an Idiot! about a conservative author/speaker who, in moment that went viral, completely choked when a streaming interviewer asked her to define the term, woke. My use of the label "idiot" was ironic. The woman interviewed, Bethany Mandel, is coauthor of a 2022 book all about woke-ism and its supposed perils. ( Read more... )

Several days ago I wrote about the intellectual bankruptcy of conservatives blaming the failure of banks like SVB on them being too "woke". So what is "woke"? you might ask. The term has actually been bandied about quite a bit on the political right. The recent failure of a few banks was hardly the first time conservative political leaders and ( Read more... )

This past weekend the comic strip "Dilbert" was canceled, and its author, Scott Adams, effectively was, too. As I mentioned in a brief blog yesterday, these were consequences of Adams publishing video of himself going on a racist tirade ( Read more... )

Last weekend hundreds of newspapers across the country dropped the comic strip Dilbert because of a racist rant by its author, Scott Adams. In a racist tirade on YouTube- which I will not link to because I will not give it more airings than it deserves- Adams called Black Americans a "hate group" and suggesting that White people should "get the ( Read more... )

When I browsed the list of episode titles in the Band of Brothers miniseries I noted Ep. 9, "Why We Fight" and figured it would be an upbeat morality lesson about fighting that is just. It's a morality lesson, all right, though it's anything but upbeat. It's about the evil we must oppose. It's about Allied troops discovering German concentration ( Read more... )

In what has sadly become far too common of a story, police officers pulled over Black motorist Tyre Nichols for an alleged traffic violation, beat him heavily in a confrontation that turned violent, and Nichols subsequently died of his injuries.


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Earlier today I posted " Democrats Screwed Up The Messaging" about how they've not just lost the messaging war for this year's election but have underperformed on messaging for several years running. There are two important facets to messaging.... It's not just what you say but how you say it. In my previous blog I explained the high level mistakes ( Read more... )