Where is Grant?

Wow...where did I leave him? In front of a crowd I think. Might be time to bring back the talking dog, he seems to get me going...

17 now?

12 killed today over the accidental burning of a book.

In other news, 0 killed in years of "American Taliban" rallies and protests.

Edited at 10pm:

Stolen premise or two

Because I owe a chapter of S&S and I don't have it ready yet, I decided to do the next best thing, steal J.R. Wagner's idea.  I am linking him though, so that makes it okay.
That post deals with rejection, and how getting those letters can make a writer better, or even more hungry. This is true, and part of writing has always been finding the people who like what you write. Sometimes a book is rejected because the editor had a bad day...
Many of the authors listed in the post over at the blog linked are millionaires now, after all the rejection, and many of them, when submitting work under their own names, would never be rejected again. I venture to say, however, had Mr. King submitted "from a Buick Eight" under an assumed name, it would still be languishing in his trunk...sometimes the editors need to grow a set of...thingies...and reject the lesser stories of the big names, freeing up printing space and time for the next big name.

As more of a poet than a prose dude, I know the sting of the rejection letter, very few publishers want poetry from new poets. I don't worry about that anymore, I just keep writing them, filling notebooks and journals and memory sticks. Someday, maybe, my kids will get the stuff published, or, maybe my grand-kids. Then again, maybe it'll all be tossed out when I finally leave this place, around 2055 or so!

Sure, it's all relative

Burning a Koran, because it has been defaced, is a legitimate reason to kill people, right?

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2012/02/23/Afghan-soldier-kills-2-US-soldiers/UPI-66781330001572/

Right?  C'mon, all you people who have called the Tea Party groups the "American Taliban", post a comment here defending yourselves. Be sure to link to all the articles where Christians have killed people because someone offended them. Please...link to all the people the Tea Party groups have killed, maimed, raped...to all the stories of burned cars and buildings.

What? Can't find them? Keep looking, remember, they are the "American Taliban", they are as dangerous, or even more-so, than the real taliban...right? Right? RIGHT?

Tired and cranky

But now that the number of people who rely directly or indirectly on the government for subsistence outnumber those of us who do not, that war may be lost. Some of us will continue to fight, but why would those who rely on government? Apathy kills freedom, I wish I had saved the text of that speech, the one I gave in 1986 in a public speaking class in college (self serving, I must admit, it was student senate election day and I was running), but the sentiment still rings true.

Those who can’t be bothered to vote, who can’t be bothered to be involved, have destroyed this once great nation. And the political class has loved every minute of it. Who, over the age of forty, or even thirty, can even imagine an America where the a second son of a failed President would even be considered to hold the office? An America where the wife of an impeached President was almost elected? An America where the choice for President is made by the political elite and the media, not the voters?

Life will go on for us, those who work hard to succeed. Some will continue to rise above the middle, others will get by, and still more will find it easier to simply take what is earned by others. The two former classes will shrink, the latter will grow, and eventually, in a hundred, two hundred years, it will all come crashing down. The climate will have nothing to do with it, we’ll start to kill each other for food because no one will remember how to work for it.

They were wrong, sort of

So some idiots in Afghanistan tried to dispose of defaced Korans by bagging and burning. Detainees were using the books to send jihadist messages to one another, so the Americans decided to dispose of the defaced books, the method of disposal over there being burning of almost everything. The only mistake they made was not enlisting Muslim soldiers to do the deed:

Muslims are advised to wrap a worn and unusable copy of the Koran in cloth and to bury it in such a way that people do not walk over the place where the Koran is buried. That would be considered disrespectful.
The other option is to wrap the Koran and place it in a moving body of water, with some jurists advising that the Koran be tied to an object so that it sinks.
Where these two options are not available, some scholars do argue that Muslims can burn a Koran.

And now it is time to move on from this, apologies have been made.  Will there be apologies from the Muslim community for the deaths that are going to happen in the next day or two over this?

Just some random thoughts

I have been sucked into the political blogs of late, I know I should stay away, but I am an addict. For some reason the hypocrisy of it all amazes me. Take for instance the release of private documents from a right wing group versus the release of documents from what is supposed to be a non-partisan group. Heartland institute pushes for many right wing causes, about 25% of their money (privately donated) goes to fighting the global warming fraud. East Anglica University is supposed to be a college that does scientific stuff without bias and with public money. Emails from both are illegally obtained. One because the public entity is fighting a completely legal freedom of information request and deleting stuff as they do so, the other because someone wanted to smear HI. I can say that because those are the facts. One of the documents from the HI dump has been proven to be fake while NONE of the CRU documents have been. Hypocrisy enough right there, but it gets better.
Some may notice that one of the blogs that was linked on my side bar is no longer there. This is because Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has become a hypocritical lefty.
In 2003 the blog was fun to read, then it went anti-Christian and pro global warming. For a short while dissent was allowed, but then the posters became more leftist than the owner and the whole place went to the crapper. In 2009 Charles clearly stated many times that linking to the stolen CRU documents would be cause for banning and explained why many times. This past weekend he not only allowed the linking of the stolen Heartland documents, he top-posted them!
I don't really care about the ideology of it all, I think that both sets are now out there, might as well read them...but...with the understanding that the CRU emails have all been authenticated, the HI documents have not, and one, the one that the left is crowing over, is clearly faked!
I guess I am calling again for intellectual honesty, although I know I will never see it on that site. But I do see it from many of my lefty friends, so that is good!