Transmillennial

There was a National Review tweet in my Twitter feed this morning. Not sure why I looked at it (coffee hadn’t really cut in, probably) but it seemed at first glance to be a link to yet another extended whine about how a conservative speaker on a East-coast liberal arts campus hadn’t received the proper level of adulation from the assembled lumpen. Yawn! But First Amendment, I suppose, so I read on... Then the coffee started doing its magic, and I got curious. It was about a retired college professor named Paul Gottfried, who recently gave a lecture at Hamilton College, in upstate New York. A gauntlet of students accosted him before he had said a single word, tossing around epithets and accusations. OK crappy writing. Don't they know a gauntlet is a little glove? No, obvs. not. Buckley no longer edits. And epithets and accusations …oh, sweet merciful Cthulhu! (OK, I’m jaded. I’ve been binge-watching Supernatural, and am therefore unaroused anything less than stabby silver k...

John Kuehn (DVM) loves him some executions. He loves them so much he wants to protect them from the prying eyes of people who might foolishly believe having the state inject people with lethal substances to kill them might not be such a wonderful thing. Although he hilariously claims to be a steadfast advocate of transparency in government , this transparency does not extend to the suppliers of execution drugs to the state of Nebraska. So he's sponsoring a bill to conceal the identities of manufacturers and suppliers of the ingredients of death-penalty cocktails. He wrote just a couple of months ago , and on other occasions previous to that , that there are worldwide shortages of sodium thiopental, an important component of these cocktails but also a valuable drug for actually treating people instead of killing them. Activism and misrepresentation of sodium thiopental has virtually eliminated the drug from the global market, at the cost of untold lives. The technical ter...

The Nebraska political blog Leavenworth Street was once worth reading. It often published insider information that scooped the two major state newspapers, which was especially remarkable considering the blog owner, Street Sweeper/Jerry Kratochvil lives in Kansas. It was also often pungently funny. Heck, I even guest-posted once. But, as with everything else Republican/Conservative in the age of Trump, it's now pretty much a dumpster fire. Sweeper's replacement, Locke, is a joke; humorless, sanctimonious, hypocritical, and apparently with very little actual content to share. It reached rock-bottom today, though, with a sermon on civility . Trumpkins notoriously lack any introspection or self-awareness, but seriously, do they actually think they have standing to lecture anyone about civility? Which led me to ponder: what, actually, can Trumpkins still preach to us about, without conjuring up outright derision? Which of the seven deadly sins, for example, do they have stan...