Excellent blogpost on free speech

Read the whole thing. Money quote is at the end.

Let’s go back to 451, which I found myself re-reading recently. It begins with Guy Montag burning a house that contained books. Why? How did it come to be that fireman burned books instead of putting out fires as they always had?

The fireman have been doing it for so long they have no idea. Most of them have never even read a book. Except one fireman—Captain Beatty—who has been around long enough to remember what life was like before. As Montag begins to doubt his profession—going as far as to hide a book in his house—he is subjected to a speech from Beatty. In it Beatty explains that it wasn’t the government that decided that books were a threat. It was his fellow citizens.

This post isn’t very comfortable to read

The revelation that our generals expect Americans solders to allow screaming young boys to be sodomized and not stop it is simply the latest manifestation of the utter moral bankruptcy infecting the senior ranks of the U.S. military.

The problems with America’s military—which has now failed to win three wars in a row against backward fanatics whom the nineteenth-century Brits would have handily dispatched to hell in time for tea—are not merely budgetary. You can’t buy real leaders, leaders with strategic competence and moral courage. Aging equipment, while a problem, is nothing compared to the incompetence and moral cowardice of our military’s senior leaders.

Please read the rest, here.

Boys and sticks

Simcha Fischer writes:

Boys who are never allowed to be wild are boys who never learn how to control that wildness. Boys who are not allowed to whack and be whacked with sticks never learn what fighting is like. What’s so bad about that? Well, they may end up hitting someone weak, with no idea how much it hurts to be hit. Or they may end up standing by while the strong go after the weak – and have no idea that it’s their job to put a stop to it.

Either way, the weak suffer. The whole world suffers.

From Patheos, here. It’s well worth the read

Muddy Mountain exploration- this time it was a success!

I rode the Rokon onto Pitchpine ridge on Sunday, and finally found the structure I saw on Google earth. It’s a large wood pile of boards left over from the production of large timbers:

Had to go to the woodpile...

The other side of the woodpile...

There’s a foundation, I presume for an engine or saw:

The foundation...

Another view of the foundation.

And lots of old junk laying around- a fuel tank for a car, and an old running board:

The running board that isn't any more.

I left the area, and took another road out. Next to the road, I came upon a tree with a “Bearing Tree” placard:

Bearing tree placard

Under the tree was a brass cap:

Brass cap

I took the road along a fence separating BLM from private land, and came to a place where two fences met-and found yet another brass cap:

Brass cap

And then rode the bike up the south face of Muddy mountain, coming out to the road just above the dogleg in the road. The bike worked well, although my back was a bit sore from the ride. It was more than worth it.

Now if I can just find the other structure that is on Google Earth. But that’s for another weekend.