Around the house

First up, if the first rule of deer is. "does pose", the second must be...er... "bucks run"...

...but at least he stood around long enough to get his face on the blog.  That was Saturday night, when it was nasty humid after a brief but welcome shower.  Sunday, it was a little nicer and a little more quiet.

As you can see, our "Halloween fungus" is back, though it hasn't yet attained it's full orange color.


I do have a smattering of Martin World News stuff, but not enough to be really entertaining.  But I do have two things off the news wire to share with you.  First up a site called Safewise  came up with "the 50 safest cities in Indiana.  If you have any friends in Fort Wayne, you would no doubt be less than surprised that we didn't make the list.  However, we did have some fairly close neighbors make it.

Decatur, where we ate lunch just a couple Sundays ago, bagged third;  Columbia City was 22, North Manchester 23, Garrett 27;  Huntington, home of the mighty Blue Collar Bar (owned by Laurie's brother) made 33, Auburn (former home- or current, I can't keep track- of the Auburn-Cord-Dusenburg auction) was 38; New Haven, my home for many years, got 39, and Goshen 40.  Six contestants I have to put in the "whereintheheckisthat" category, but most I know at least by name.  The top ten:

1- Zionsville
2- Bargersville- one of those six "whereintheheckisthat" towns.
3- The aforementioned Decatur
4- Carmel, which was Money Magazine's #1 small town to live in in 2012
5- Westville
6- St. John, another "whereintheheckisthat".  Seeings as it's just 24 miles SE of Chicago, don't look at it to make the list much longer...
7- Fishers, which is a short drive from a handful of friends of mine
8- Jasper
9- New Whiteland (apparently a suburb of non-charting Indy- aren't we all- since they mention to visit the Indy Zoo while you're there)
10- Greensburg

And it wouldn't be a Martin blog without a shoutout to Gas City at #30.

SALLLL- UTE!!!!

Finally, I wanted to touch on an article I read the other day.  On the American Thinker site, one Danusha V. Goska published an article called, Why I Am No Longer A Leftist in 10 reasons.

You should read the whole thing yourself, I cannot do this person's epiphany justice in these constraints.  But for the time challenged, I can give you a thumbnail.  This person wasn't a garden variety "yeah I watch MSNBC, so what?" liberal; this was a person whose mother voted for Gus Hall (look him up) and around her alma mater of (what else?) UC Berkeley, "I wore a button saying "Eat the Rich." To me it wasn't a metaphor."

So what could make a card carrying leftist radical vote REPUBLICAN in 2012?  (I mean, besides the obvious?) Trying to boil it down, this is what she said:

10- " We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation."

9- Selective outrage- You get snarls and barks anytime a Republican says boo about women, because they have a WAR on women, but...

I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong. A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. "You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture's rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation."

So being pro life is attacking women.  But....

The left's selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It's an "I hate" phenomenon, rather than an "I love" phenomenon.


8-My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: "Think Globally; Screw up Locally." In other words, "Love Humanity but Hate People."  She goes on to examples of the Peace Corps setting up big grand programs that cannot work in the name of helping the needy, and sneering at those who try to help one person at a time; and Hillary Clinton, who as a young lawyer chuckled at getting a brutal rapist off by humiliating the victim, and then listing "FOUNDED RAPE HOTLINE" on her resume.

7- The elitist snobbery with which the left treats "poor working slobs" like herself:

It's more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.

6- She was a Catholic, and thus a Christian.  Leftists hate God and those who believe.

5- "Truth is that which serves the party."

4- "Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York's WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn't such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, "And you support THAT?"  Well of course THE CALLER did not support that, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent."

3- The policies just don't work.

I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership. Ouch.

2- And if THEIR approaches don't work...

After I realized that our approaches don't work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue's castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is "My God, he's right."

1- And after fighting people like this on FB and other places, I could NOT put the last point any better than she does:

Hate.

If hate were the only reason, I'd stop being a leftist for this reason alone.

 I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I've stumbled upon a left-wing website.


Something to think about, huh?  I encourage all of you- read this article. Whether you are a conservative feeling self-righteous from what you've seen here, or a liberal thinking I am an a-hole for discussing this, READ THE ARTICLE.