Does your father enjoy sport shooting, hunting, or just owning guns as a personal pleasure? If so, consider giving him a gift that will please him and will flaunt the recent calls for “gun control” measures. Here are a few good ideas. Flaunt your liberties and make your dad happy – what could be better?
Since Sunday I’ve been caring for a young kitten – five, perhaps six weeks old – found alone by neighbors in a storeroom. I don’t need another cat, but she needed care and I wouldn’t to help. She seems to be in good health, though she was a bit thin and undernourished. A few days on wet food and kitten formula should fix her up. She’s really quite beautiful, with striking tabby stripes and evidence of some Maine Coon qualities. She stole my heart in five minutes flat.
Her purr motor is wonderfully loud for such a tiny cat. Turn up computer volume on the video and you’ll hear little Emily roar…
Thunderstorms rumbled all night; I woke to them early this morning. They continued all day, dropping four inches of rain on top of the several inches we received through the week. When I returned home from the shelter late in the afternoon, the sky was still dark, but the bay was alive with activity: boats and ships, flocks of pelicans feeding, songbirds at the feeders, and my dear buddy cats. Light was poor for photographs, but I took many because there was magic in this day. Too often I take this lovely place for granted, until days like this make me appreciate it anew.
Yesterday my youngest niece, Ella Selden, was baptized. Ella is the 12-year-old daughter of my brother Rush and his wife Lisa. It was quite a family gathering: grandparents, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, all came to witness and to enjoy a magnificent meal after at Rush and Lisa’s house. A few photos here. I’ll upload video soon.
And now a few photos of family, taken after niece Cora’s dance recital:
Kim and Jim Stewart, friends in Michigan, share this photo of Dora, an orphan kitten they are fostering, eating dinner with their adult cats. Blessings on them for caring for the little girl.
Nephew Keith, a fine young man who just completed his first year in college, biked last month in the MS150, an annual event to raise money for muscular dystrophy cure research. He rode with friends from a Christian service fraternity he belongs to. Bad weather shortened the two-day ride to one day, but lengthened the ride to almost 100 miles. I’ll let him tell the story:
“Sadly, the second day of riding was canceled due to the weather. Because of this, I and a bunch of the guys who I have been riding with, decided to do the 100 mile first day ride instead of the usual 78. Now I have to say that this was the first endurance sport that I have ever done, and I was unsure of how it would go. Yesterday we rode from Tully stadium to La Grange which (according to my bike computer) ended up being 98.8 miles. While I am very tired today, the ride was actually quite enjoyable and it was great to do it with some of my best friends.”
My heart fills with pride for Keith. If ever I fear for the future, I think of him and young people like him, and my hope is renewed. (Now he will spend the summer as a counselor helping young people at the wonderful Pine Cove summer camp.) Though still a teenager, he already exceeds the grace and goodness of his old uncle. Blessings on thee, young man.
Keith (on left) with friends:
My choice for awarding the first “civil liberty hero of the week” is one I never would have anticipated: the Pink Pistols, an organization “dedicated to the legal, safe, and responsible use of firearms for self-defense of the sexual-minority community,” a community, they note, which suffers the second highest rate of hate crimes in the U.S.
Pink Pistols sued the District of Columbia over its “good reason” requirement for the issue of gun permits. This week the federal District Court for the District of Columbia sided with them, granting an injunction against the requirement.
The so-called “good reason” requirement for the issue of gun permits, in place in several states and cities, is a flagrant violation of a fundamental civil liberty. It is most often used to circumvent court decisions validating the 2nd Amendment (DC uses it to flaunt the Supreme Court’s Heller decision). I will write more about this soon.
I’ll let Pink Pistols speak to the court’s decision:
“This clause was a travesty of justice from its inception,” said Gwendolyn Patton, First Speaker of the Pink Pistols. “It left the free exercise of an inherent human right up to bureaucrats and police officials.”
“[We] maintain that nowhere in the Second Amendment is the concept of “good reason” enumerated, and a requirement to show such special need is fundamentally unconstitutional.
“We are dedicated to the legal, safe, and responsible use of firearms for self-defense of the sexual-minority community. We no longer believe it is the right of those who hate and fear gay, lesbian, bi, trans, or polyamorous persons to use us as targets for their rage. Self-defense is our RIGHT.”
I am not gay, and I’ve never suffered blatant discrimination or violence, but I stand with Pink Pistols and congratulate them for standing up for themselves and for all citizens. I consider them brothers and sisters in the pursuit for freedom. We share and defend common ground. The rights and liberties of free people hold for all.
In reply to my post below, a friend asks: “Could you explain the notion of “ordered anarchy”? What is the source of the order? What maintains it?”
These are good questions, addressing an important political theory. I will try find time soon to answer them in detail (as best I can; I understand the concept only as a layman). For now, however, I refer anyone interested in the subject to the writings of Anthony de Jasay, the French political economist who has best expounded on the concept. His books “The State” and “Against Politics” are brilliant – I would almost say revolutionary – arguments against the dangers of excessive state control and manipulation of human capital and social and economic markets.
A useful, brief (but free!) introduction to Jasay’s work can be found here.
Ski forecast in hell: packed powder base, inches of fresh powder on all slopes. That’s no more surprising than finding that Senator Dianne Feinstein and I agree on something. (I quote the entire article below.)
Few things are more vital to protection of civil liberties than government transparency. Though I most often oppose her conventional and predictable statist positions, she is fairly aggressive in guarding against unnecessary government secrecy. The current and previous presidential administrations have expanded federal opacity to dangerous levels. Kudos to Senator Feinstein for demanding better…at least in this case.
The CIA’s internal watchdog claims it accidentally deleted its only copy of the controversial “torture report” outlining the agency’s use of enhanced interrogations techniques, the latest wrinkle in the saga over the report’s publication.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,700-page report has not yet been made public by the Obama administration and has been at the center over a years-long fight to make the report public. There are other copies of the report at other federal agencies.
Former Chair and current ranking Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein has been pushing for the report to be released while Republican Chairman Richard Burr has opposed even distribution of the full report to the executive branch, let alone the public.
Yahoo News first reported Monday that the CIA inspector general had “mistakenly” deleted both the electronic and hard copy of the report. Yahoo reported that officials deleted the uploaded version of the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that contained the report.
Other agencies have been given copies of the report but the development has alarmed Feinstein, who immediately wrote to CIA Director John Brennan and Attorney General Loretta Lynch calling for the IG to be given another copy “immediately.”
“Your prompt response will allay my concern that this was more than an ‘accident,'” Feinstein wrote pointedly to Brennan and Lynch.
The error comes just days after a federal appeals court Friday rejected efforts to release the full version of the report, upholding a lower court decision that said the report is a congressional record exempt from disclosure laws.
The committee released a 500-plus-page summary of the report to the public in 2014, but the American Civil Liberties Union sued to obtain the full version.
tejaslibertas 