Octopodial Chrome

William J. Federer writes that is religion, and more specifically Christianity, which is the fundamental basis for freedom. Without God, rights spring from the State—and may be removed thereby. Without equality under God, secularists are free to exterminate those races they despise. Without morality, no government can govern—and in the headlong dash to its own destruction, it will be forced to legislate and legislate its citizens into slavery.

According to Suzanne Fields, copyright law was used to silence an article about Hitler. Apparently, Homes & Gardens had published a fawning article about Hitler in ’38, which was recently posted online at the Guardian (a left-wing English newspaper). The article was forced down by the current editor in an attempt to quell his embarrassment.

When will we learn that information wants to be free?

So far as I know, Uhl Studios are owned by a Uhl completely and totally unrelated to myself. And yet they are located in the same town as we are, and I’ve never heard of them until now. Small world, indeed.

The New Yorker discusses the latest Chicago Manual of Style. It makes the excellent point that any manual of style is purely idiosyncratic. I have my own style which I use always; so too every other writer of any taste whatsoever. It’s the small mind which is limited by the vision of others.

The discussion of the supposed horrors of writing the end matter of one’s works made me laugh: I use LaTeX, which is built on a text formatter older, I believe, than myself, and I never had any issues. Of course, anyone foolish enough to use anything so inadequate as Microsoft Word deserves every wasted hour and misery-filled breath. Those of us with wit will have retired to bed long ago, secure in our superiority.

Anyway, the closing paragraph expresses the oh-so-true sentiment: there is, if not a right way, a best way to do every single thing, down to the proverbial dotting of the i. Those who haven’t an opinion on what that best is, aren’t really trying hard enough.

Dennis Prager writes on the absurdity of the leftist position regarding race and two items: a California girl who (apparently innocently) wants a white-kid’s club, there being clubs for every other ethnicity; and a conservative student group which sold cookies at prices dependent on the race and sex of those purchasing, in order to make a point about discrimination (which is termed affirmative action these days).

From Smart Guns/Foolish Legislators:

A real-world example of the statistical evidence found by Lott and Whitley was the incident in Merced, California, in August 2000. There, a pitchfork-wielding man cut the phone lines to a home, then broke in and began attacking the four children, while their parents were not home. The oldest child, fourteen-year-old Jessica Carpenter was unable to retrieve her father's guns from a locked cabinet. She ran to a neighbour’s home, and begged him to use his own gun to confront the attacker. The neighbour did not do so, but 911 was called. By the time the police arrived, Jessica Carpenter’s seven-year-old brother and nine-year-old sister had been murdered. Jessica's fathers guns were locked up in accordance with the California felony CAP law.

A CAP law is a so-called Child Access Prevention law. Had California not had one, it’s likely that the fourteen-year-old could have saved her brother and sister. The legislators who proposed, drafted & approved that law are responsible for those deaths; so too the worm of a governor who failed to veto it, and the thugs of police who enforced it. As for the neighbour, I hope he burns in hell: the whole point of gun-owning is to be able to wield force appropriately. Refusal to do so is a dereliction of duty.

Yesterday I had lunch with the two youngest of my three brothers. Although they’re still quite young (John’s 20 and Stephen’s but 17), it was really nice to be able to sit there and dine with them. I pity the only child, or the child from a small family. Looking back, the trade-off of vacations to Disney World for them was well worth it.

Perhaps inspired by Philip Greenspun’s proposal for free tuition, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created MIT OpenCourseWare, a collection of freely-viewable and somewhat freely-distributable course materials for many fields. This could be a truly Great Thing.