Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 26

November 2021 Texas propositions

There are several proposed amendments to the Texas constitution on the ballot November 2. Here are some quick summaries of what they mean.

The ruling class’s unexpectedly old clothes

I recently ran across early use of “unexpectedly” for a conservative’s strong economy, referring to the early 1981 market recovery under President Reagan.

Cream of coconut jack-o-lantern soup

If last year’s jack-o-lantern soup wasn’t gruesome enough, try mixing your pumpkin’s disgouged facial parts with coconut and ginger.

Future Snark

Why does the past get the future wrong? More specifically, why do expert predictions always seem to be hand your lives over to technocrats or we’ll all die?

Regenerate multiple files

The “pipewalk” command will regenerate multiple output files from multiple source files, using any arbitrary command that accepts filenames and produces to standard output.

The Life of Stephen A. Douglas

Where Abraham Lincoln’s conservative principles made a flawed man better, Stephen A. Douglas’s belief in the responsibility of government elites for managing lesser men made him far worse.

Caption this! Add captions to image files

Need a quick caption for an image? This command-line script uses Swift to tack a caption above, below, or right on top of, any image macOS understands.

That’s a man, baby: Your fantasy is hurting people

We are beating and mutilating children in the name of tolerance. There will come a time when our denial of biological reality is recognized as a mass hysteria, when child castration is recognized as the barbarity that it is.

How Rural Colorado Parents Created A ‘No Politics’ Public School In Just One Year linked on Editorials

“These highly skilled parents came together to not just solve their own kids' education needs but offer a high-quality education to families in their glorious Colorado mountain town.” Educational officials told them “You’re crazy, you can’t get this done in a year.” (Where have we heard that before?) They did it anyway.

“As a classical school, it offers a low-screen, high-relationship environment and a focus on creative and critical thinking through careful attention to classic works and traditional approaches to math and science. These are things parents wanted that weren’t available through the Woodland Park School District, which like many in the nation has become computer-centered over the last several years.”

Criminal Negligence linked on Editorials

“Since 1960 crime has risen, fallen, and risen again… The changes were especially pronounced in New York, America’s most populous city and, as the nation’s media center, most prominent.” William Voegeli writes a long article but a very short history of the crime rate in the United States from 1963 to today, describes how it rose and fell, what policies were implemented in response, and how politicians reacted. This is well worth the read.

And part of that is knowing who Joseph Fournier was. Just about everyone who pays attention to politics knows the name of Willie Horton, but not the seventeen-year-old who Horton stuffed into a garbage can to bleed to death after stabbing him repeatedly.

“Democrats’ denunciations of Bush for condemning the Massachusetts furlough program were paired with their silence about Dukakis creating the issue. Very few liberal politicians, columnists, or editorialists offered an opinion as to whether the Massachusetts policy was a wise one…”