politics ⁽⁶⁶⁾

Some random commentary and other updates follow. Rather than cram all new updates and commentary into a single post, I’ll spread the latest updates over a few posts. I began preparing this post back in early January, but I then set it aside until now; as a result, some items may seem dated, as may items in succeeding posts. Items in this post all relate in some way to English usage or…

The relentless march of time continues, making another update necessary. This post is that update. In the items that follow, I bid a sad farewell to the unpeaceable rhetoric of “culture war,” object to the distasteful secular rhetoric of “sex workers,” affirm the right of the people (individuals) to keep and bear arms, condemn public-venue hosting of transvestite events, and make some closing remarks. On 12 October I sent an item to…

Introduction and Contents A printed letter objecting to a columnist’s conflation of race and religion; An unprinted letter concerning the latest ultra-rich guy’s call for higher taxes; An unprinted U-T “Your Say” submission suggesting a lesson to be drawn from a tried soldier’s conduct; An unprinted letter drawing the same lesson from the same conduct, but with less detail; Am unprinted letter indicating that the politics of racial identity makes racists of…

Welcome to this latest edition in my “...Prompts Letter(s)” series. The materials following should bring you and this site up to date. Not addressed in detail in my various items below, though touched upon by one of them, is the efforts by Democrats to claim the moral high ground based on Trump’s long history of poor personal morals and on the simultaneous widespread support of Trump by self-identified evangelical Christians. As indicated…

I’ve continued to enjoy my new letters-to-the-editor hobby, though none of the letters I sent this past week has made it into print. (Nor has any of them shown up on the paper’s Web site, assuming the site’s search function isn’t missing anything.) While my outside-the-mainstream views and direct contradiction of the Opinion page’s editorial staff could play a role, I think the main reason none of this latest batch has been…

I took some time to check the San Diego Union-Tribune (SDUT) site to see if any of my printed, or my unprinted, letters or other submissions had ended up being posted there. It turns out a few of the printed ones have (all title are those assigned by the paper’s editors): (1) “Your Say | Facebook’s future? Tech giant brought it on itself” (I meant for this particular tech giant to represent…

My trending-left local paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune (SDUT), sometimes known in the past as the U-T San Diego, recently made a point of selecting syndicated editorials that insist on interpreting all support for physical barriers at the border, and all suggestions that unlimited and uncontrolled immigration might have drawbacks, as racially motivated. I felt obligated to write letters to this paper, unnatural though it is for me to express my thoughts…

The mainstream media were briefly abuzz last week over left-liberal Media Matters’ unearthing of some old Tucker Carlson audio. Media Matters’ Madeline Peltz begins her related article (topically organized transcript collection) with a summary of Carlson’s bad behavior, part of which reads as follows: Between 2006 and 2011, Tucker Carlson spent approximately an hour a week calling in to Bubba the Love Sponge [BTLS], a popular shock jock radio program where he…

Re Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal: socialist fever dreams that can never be realized solve nothing. We need a Green Nuke Deal: “nuclear power is the only carbon-free technology that has proven capability, and which is demonstrably scalable at a rate that can contribute significantly to solving the [alleged] climate problem [assuming it exists and is caused and solvable by humans]”(Tom M. L. Wigley, Ph.D., meteorologist and theoretical physicist, Nuclear Energy Fact…

I just posted a comment on Craig Huey’s site concerning a handy resource.

“…the voice of one crying in the wilderness…”: It’s been a year, but the major parties remain as fiscally irresponsible as ever. Rand Paul’s 2018 plea still resonates: http://ow.ly/Le8030nLfUk.

Image: “All we are saying is give peace a chance. John Lennon,” photo by Kate Ter Haar via Flicker, cropped, resized, and stretched a bit. Used under the Attribution 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0). Advocates of a less interventionist U.S. foreign policy, such as Ron Paul, have long argued that foreign hostility against the United States, and with it attempts by terrorists to attack the U.S., would be much…