I’ve been re-reading some non-fiction favorites recently, and these quotes from Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World” (published 26 years ago, back in 1995) really seem amazingly prescient considering the state of the world in 2021: One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any…
Category: this monkey house.
Isolation update
We are safely isolating here at Castle Frostbite and doing what we do most of the time anyway, which is to cook food and eat snacks and play games. The kids have been in an online charter school for a year now, so not much has changed around here other than the fact that I…
Life after FaceTwitStagram
A little over a month ago, I pulled the plug on all my remaining social media accounts and went full-on cold turkey on everything. And by “cold turkey”, I mean that I didn’t leave myself the option of reactivating those accounts. Twitter and Facebook make it intentionally hard to leave the service altogether, for obvious…
The Münster incident
There was a vehicle-based attack in Germany today. It happened in the city of Münster, which is where I spent much of my childhood. I went to kindergarten and elementary school there, and my family still lives in the surrounding area, so they are in the city a lot. You want to know a Xanax…
facebook, and why i’m tapping out.
I’ve been on Facebook for a long time, but today I’ll be pulling the plug on my account over there. I’ve known for a while that it had become more distraction than useful or fun tool, but today things kind of tipped over for me when one of my real-world writer acquaintances got pissed off…
walls and fences.
25 years….don’t they go by in a blink. A quarter-century ago, the Wall between East and West Berlin finally came down, and a divided city and country began growing back together after 45 years of enforced separation. I was in the military at the time. When the Iron Curtain became porous, and the flow of…
elections, schmelections.
Here’s my (not terribly prescient) prediction for tomorrow’s midterm elections: The GOP will most likely gain Senate control. They will then promptly assume that they weren’t elected because people are tired of Team Blue’s fuckups, but rather that they now have some sort of mandate to double down on stupid and harp on gay marriage…
they can thank “blackboard jungle” for that one.
This excellent and thorough Village Voice article on the outdated, arbitrary, and capricious knife laws in New York City is about “gravity knives”, but those laws share the hallmarks of most weapons-related legislation: They were passed in an emotional atmosphere fanned by perceptions and media coverage They have little to no basis in demonstrable facts or science Their intent…
on hitting your children.
“My parents spanked me, and I turned out okay!” God, how I loathe this argument in favor of corporal punishment. I wasn’t spanked as a child. If someone had set up a nanny cam in our home between the time I was in, oh, first grade, and the time my mother finally left the no-good…
peel’s principles of policing.
Sir Robert Peel, who in his tenure as Home Secretary established London’s Metropolitan Police in the early 19th century, set forth nine principles of policing. They are as follows: 1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment. 2. To recognise always that the…