February isn't even over (thanks, leap year!) and we have an obvious winner of the Headline Of The Year award:

Meerkat expert cleared of assault in zoo love triangle spat

Yes, the story includes the word "llama."

1: If an opinion is not fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma -- John Stuart Mill.

2: If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all -- Noam Chomsky.

3: Not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character -- Martin Luther King.

4: It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women -- Camille Paglia.

5. True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it -- Karl Popper.

From the evil website of WrongThink, Breitbart.com.

The eeeeevil Koch Brothers are supporting . . . the United Negro College Fund. Well, the organization uses the word "negro" in its name, so the Kochs are obviously racists, right? Right?

If you want to see the end game of where the Democratic Party wants to take the United States, just look at Venezuela right now. Public hospitals going unfunded. Food riots. A worthless national currency. All in a nation rich in oil wealth. This is what you're voting for when you vote for a Democrat.

Two churches were bombed in New Mexico. But somebody killed a lion!!!

People are unhappy with how much Obamacare costs and what it covers. It's almost as if the Democrats lied when they passed it in the dead of night without a single supporting vote from the opposition party.

Now, every politician lies, that's been known since there has been politicians--it's pretty much the job description. But the difference today is that the lies that the Democrats tell are propped up and reinforced by the full weight of the mass media, academia, and the government. You can still work your way towards something like the truth, but you have to work hard to do it, reading the tea leaves like the Soviet people used to read Pravda, and sifting through the further tea leaves and coffee grounds of the new media on the Internet.

But most people don't have the time or energy to do that sifting, so they just absorb whatever bullshit lie the Democrats and their media sycophants choose to spout that day. The result has a name: the low information voter. Democrats want low information voters. That's why they want immigration. That's why they want to, essentially, abolish any law restricting access to voting. It's not about rights. It's about grabbing, and holding power.

In the end, it's about turning the United States into Venezuela, although they are not clever enough to realize that. They think that they are smarter than all the other socialists who have come before. But they're not. It's just the same old socialist song and dance, and it always ends the same way.

"You either give or you suck. There is no in between." -- Kansas City Royals' first-base coach Rusty Kuntz, quoted by Sam Mellinger in this Kansas City Star story.

Do you give, or do you suck?

If your "giving" consists of sucking from others rather than generating your own energy, power, resources, money, and life, I have news for you. That is not giving. That is sucking.

If you spend all of your time and resources donating to "social justice," "equality," "human rights," "racial reparations," "green environment," or other, similar movements designed to take from Peter to pay Paul, then I have news for you. You are not giving. You are sucking. You are sucking time, energy, and resources from your fellow human beings to feed your own sense of self-importance and self-worth. You are a vampire, not a social justice crusader.

It is not a virtue to be generous with other people's money.

America today is filled with suckers, and the givers are starting to get really, really tired of the games the suckers play.

There is only one way to true success: hard work, personal commitment, personal integrity, perseverance, all combined with a true respect for all others.

A common feature of so many of the "social justice" causes infesting our culture today is their very lack of respect for a certain, identified person or group which must be separated out from society, isolated, shamed, demeaned, or destroyed. The person or group to be vilified varies somewhat, but we see a particularly virulent strain of this in the "Black Lives Matter" movement. To these people, the mere suggestion that perhaps all lives matter, not just black lives, brings a visceral, vicious response.

Even something as trivial as a science fiction writing award has come to represent this same pattern. The group in power, when challenged to open up the selection process, responded with some of the most vicious, slanderous rhetoric you can imagine towards the reformers.

Power corrupts, Lord Acton wrote, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Today, the "social justice" campaigners are in power in almost every segment of our society: government, education, media. Represented best by their elder states-woman, Hillary Clinton, they have discovered the profitability of corruption when in power. We don't even blink any more when Obama shovels billions of dollars of other people's money to political cronies while calling it "green energy" or "health care." This is the "power of suck" in full operation.

Our society is corrupt. From top to bottom. Too many ordinary people today only care about "giving" as a way to suck the lifeblood out of their neighbors.

The good news is that this can't last forever. At some point, the suckers will have taken all that the givers have to give. The bad news is that at that point, civilization will likely collapse. There is time to avoid that, but in order to do so, people have to fight the urge to take. History indicates that this is rare, and usually a result of some catastrophe. Something to look forward to, isn't it?

"Gun-Free Zones" kill people.

This is because criminals and psychopaths don't give a damn about some sign on a door or a lawn proclaiming an office, a building, a park, or a campus to be "gun-free."

Because criminals and psychopaths don't give a damn about laws and rules, just generally.

What does get their attention is the capability of their prospective victims to return fire, to put the criminals' and psychopaths' own safety at serious, imminent, and immediate risk. Criminals and psychopaths may be evil, but they are not that stupid.

On the other hand, a sign proclaiming a "gun-free zone" is nothing more than a big, flashing neon sign saying to those who are so inclined to "come victimize us, we won't fight back." Almost all of the mass shootings which have occurred in the developed world over the past couple of decades have occurred in areas which have been decreed to be "gun-free." Somehow, the perpetrators of the shootings missed the memo saying that they have to obey the "gun-free zone" sign.

Because criminals don't give a damn about rules and laws, and because they prevent otherwise law-abiding people from a crucial self-defense tool (i.e. a firearm), "Gun-free zones" are deeply, profoundly immoral. They are the moral equivalent of telling people that they can not wear coats and warm shoes on a cold winter day. Mass shootings result from firearm bans as surely as frostbite results from prolonged exposure of human skin to sub-freezing temperatures.

The only move for a prudent society is to protect its members from the effects of predictable phenomena.

Freezing temperatures happen. So do criminals and psychopaths. Wishing either of them away is equally delusional.

It is not guns which should be banned. It is "gun-free zones," and the mentality of wishing away the most unpleasant aspects of predictable human nature.

The climate alarmism, or the psychological problems?

Climate Scientists Face Psychological Problems

Or is hysteria about "climate change" (or whatever "extreme weather" or whatever the ever-changing scare-word for the ever-changing weather and climate is this week) itself a marker of mental illness?

When science becomes religion (i.e. saying things like "the science is settled" and invoking nonsense like "the precautionary principle") then science ceases to be science. Science is the very definition of constant, rigorous doubt in, and testing of, one's own observations, theories, judgments, conclusions.

Religion is faith.

Fanatical religion is faith combined with an unwillingness to even consider any alternatives to the received dogmas and doctrines.

The extreme alarmists among climate "scientists" are not practicing science. They are acting like priests of a religion of mysteries. They might as well be wearing miters and swinging braziers of burning incense, invoking the gods of computer models and the mysteries of highly complex, poorly understood non-linear fluid dynamics to terrify the masses who do not speak the Latin of Science-ese. They worship not science, but power.

Hello, there! Remember once upon a time when I did a "whip" . . . basically a list of articles I'd stumbled across on the web that I thought were of interest?

Why yes, it is a lot of work, actually, which is why I didn't keep it up.

But paraphrasing what Kara said on the old Star Trek TV show's worst ever episode, Spock's Brain, "Work and work . . . what is work?"

So, a tentative, nay furtive return of The Whip:

Why are American schools slowing down so many bright children? Better question: Why are American schools drugging and dumbing down so many bright children - - especially boys?

A Nation Empowered: Evidence Trumps the Excuses Holding Back America’s Brightest Students - - The University of Iowa is, sorta, on the case!

Google Chrome Listening In To Your Room Shows The Importance Of Privacy Defense In Depth. I hate Google only slightly less than I hate, oh, say, Comcast. Google's corporate slogan is, allegedly, "Don't Be Evil." Yeah . . . Evil - - I do not think the word means what you think it means, Google.

PSA Announcement: If you want somebody prosecuted and/or fired simply because what they say has offended your tender sensibilities, you are not being a nice person. And yes, I myself have occasionally been guilty of this on occasion. None of us are perfect, are we?

Another PSA Announcement: "Fascism/fascist" - - I do not think the word means what you think it means. It is not simply a synonym for "poopy-butt."

That's all for now.

"Wherever I have been, I am back." - Gandalf the White (nee Grey)

You may think that it is wrong to withhold services to someone because you disagree with their lifestyle, and that disagreement may rise to the level of a religious conviction.

In Christianity (somewhat unique among the major religions), a major tenet is "hate the sin but love the sinner."

Is it wrong then to withhold your services?

From a crass commercial, economic standpoint, it's a rather silly and short-sighted thing to do, and I think there's little disagreement on that point.

But those errors in judgment (if they are errors in judgment) pale in comparison to the vitriolic, frenzied, mindless hate spewed towards anyone who dares to make those rather minor errors.

Threatening someone with social ostracism, shunning, and violence is an entirely different, and more serious level of social transgression than is simply withholding services to someone you do not wish to serve.

What are you doing?

Think.

My hosting provider upgraded PHP. That's good, right?

Not when it breaks the blog software which, admittedly, I have not been terribly diligent in upgrading lately.

So now I'm running beta code.

Yay.

Anyway, it's ugly, but it's working, for certain definitions of working. And when I get time to pretty it up, I shall do so.

Whew. Now to go fix the blog side of sdsufans.com . . .