Lost In Time, And Lost In Space, And ONTing

Well gang, it's Thursday night again. How has your week been?

Personal News

Yes, it was a small, local event, and I know the 88 isn't in good enough shape to win anything in a show of any size, but it was still pretty cool. Little took a top 3 trophy in the “modern muscle car” category for his 2006 Mustang GT.

This Guy Has Sand In His Vagina

My son was struggling – then he fell for Trump’s toxic brand of ‘masculinity’. I’m heartbroken

We had moved to the Bay Area in 2017, after Trump won the election. Nick was 15 or 16 when he said that he liked Trump. I can understand how Trump appealed to a childish sensibility: he’s this clownish figure who does whatever he wants.

I also know that when you come of age, you want to reject your parents’ beliefs. My father was a Reagan Republican who was really old school, values wise. A lot of my political development was a rejection of his values, so I wonder now how much of Nick’s fascination with Maga is a reaction against the way I brought him up.

I’ve never been a macho kind of man. To me, our biggest responsibility as humans is to look after each other. Men have been given places of privilege in society, so when people talk about being a man, to me that means: what do you use your privilege for? I worked at a pirate radio station in Houston, and we helped with emergency efforts during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. For me, manhood is all about using your energy to make life better for the person next to you.

This guy has no idea what masculinity is. Probably because he has no experience with it.

In God We Trust

Keeping the Faith

The last half-century of hypersecularism is an oddity in American history. Our first public education law was created by the Massachusetts Bay Colony to ensure children could read the scriptures. Even famed atheist Richard Dawkins declared “a native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.”

Yet the antireligious panic boils over when even the slightest mention of faith enters the public square. Religion, or at least personal virtue, is as essential to the civil order as the Constitution itself—at least according to those who wrote it.

As John Adams wrote in 1798, “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” A less-quoted line in that letter states, “we have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion.”

For the past several decades, America has scrubbed every last indication of spiritual life from the public square. It has been replaced with a weird secular issue du jour based on the latest moral panic. One year it’s #MeToo, the next climate change, then Black Lives Matter, all under a rainbow flag with more stripes added all the time.

Since our “elite” culture views faith traditions as unseemly, government tries to maintain order by adding thousands of laws and tens of thousands of regulations. Browsing the headlines shows that doesn’t work—and never has. As Cicero wrote of ancient Rome, “the more laws a society has, the less justice.” A century later, the great Roman historian Tacitus rephrased it as, “the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”

We're seeing what an anti-religous society looks like. What we had before was better.

The Story Of A Hero

The event is memorialized by the Respect to Mehmetçik Memorial

Musical Interlude

In honor of the Gallipoli Campaign.

A Chance For Justice

Parents of Erin Greenberg, teacher found stabbed 10 times in head, neck, win right to challenge suicide ruling

The parents of a Philadelphia teacher found dead in 2011 with 20 stab wounds in an apparent suicide have won the right to challenge the ruling for the chance of changing it to a homicide, according to a report.

The family of Ellen Greenberg had fought for more than a decade to overturn the city’s ruling over the death of the teacher — whose body was found riddled with stab wounds, including 10 to the back of the head and neck, in her Philadelphia apartment during a blizzard on Jan. 26, 2011.

But last week, Greenberg’s parents, Joshua and Sandee, finally broke ground when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court granted their appeal to hear the case, according to WHP-TV.

“Suicide”. Insane. Good thing she didn't shoot herself a dozen times in the head, it'd be open and shut!

Sport Rants

What's your all time favorite sports rant or quote? Personally, I like Jim McKay, coach of the Tampa Bay Bucks, who when asked what he thought of his team's execution answered “I'm in favor of it”. We have another contend in Cubs manager Lee Elias, you can read his epic and profane rant in its entirety here.

Second Look At Nixon?

Always in the Arena

These fears were not completely unfounded. As the leader of a new majority, Nixon had finally broken the New Deal coalition with his 1972 landslide victory, carrying 49 states and winning more than 60% of the popular vote. In an interview just before the election, Nixon prophesied that he would become known as a great reformer. But unlike his predecessors, whose reforms only expanded government power, Nixon pledged to diffuse federal power throughout the country. “There are no sacred cows,” he said the day after the election, “We will tear up the pea patch.”

It was clear what he intended to do. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had been a costly failure which had driven the rise of a muscular “public sector” and permanent bureaucratic class “steeped in the myths of the New Deal” as its most lasting achievements. His presidency had seen a rapid centralization of administration, crushing deficits, and the birth of a new regulatory apparatus that blurred the line between public service and political activism. Under the Great Society, the federal government had assumed responsibility for the health, happiness, and prosperity of every American, requiring a dramatic expansion of its power and authority over the most intimate details of everyday life. Nixon, who saw the writing on the wall as early as 1965, years before his legendary comeback, had vowed to “reorganize, reduce, or abolish” the last citadels of the Great Society.

I'm a lot more likely to believe that Nixon was the victim of a shadowy cabal of government conspirators now than I would have been before seeing what Trump has gone through these past few years.

Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by music across the generations:

posted by WeirdDave at 10:00 PM

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