On violence
Letter to the editor;
“Violence does not solve everything.” (Authentic American proverb)
“Have we been told that ‘violence does not solve everything’ so often that we have come to believe that violence does not solve anything?” (The late Col. Jeff Cooper)
Generally, when no violence is offered, it is not a good thing to commit violence.
Generally, one must not commit violence. That is, if some “really bad dude” is saying bad words and moving in a manner suggestive of evil intentions, the best thing to do is to watch and wait.
However, if the bad guy goes from mere rhetoric to hurting people, it might be a good idea to hit him with a fist or a ball-bat or something. If he is killing people or making a really convincing show that he will kill someone in a second or two, it may be time “to initiate deadly force” – or maybe even shoot him.
The Arizona Legislature made it possible for responsible residents with clean records to carry concealed weapons: You and your predecessors knew violence.
Violence happens fairly often at schools. Mostly it is stopped by a school employee stepping in and saying words to the students involved.
But there is a kind of school violence that is beyond stopping with words and gestures. There is the dreaded “school-shooter,” who, driven by inner demons, comes prepared to kill as many children as possible. It takes the threat of deadly force, or perhaps even deadly force itself to stop such a disturbed man.
The fastest police force may be able to get there in a minute. (How many children will a school-shooter kill in a minute?) But every school can have a great number of responsible adults with guns in their hands IN ONE SECOND.
I recommend that the Arizona Legislature act to encourage Arizona schools to welcome those who have earned the Concealed Weapons Permit to carry their weapons on the school grounds – especially school employees.
Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona
Friday, June 20, 2008
The "logic" of "Liberalism"
T H E O P I N I O N P A P E R glenn3@frontiernet.net
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
Permission is granted to edit, print and/or broadcast these weekly polemical essays.
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Spoofing “Liberalism”
Letter to the editor;
LIBERAL: We need a giant government program to make war on illiteracy.
ME: “War . . . ”?!
LIBERAL: Certainly. We can put a tax on books and newspapers and use the money to fund a National Literacy Agency with local headquarters in each . . .
ME: How about just teaching children the sounds of letters and lending them interesting reading material?
LIBERAL: “Sounds”?! Phonics?! You troglodyte! Phonics has been discredited in a thousand studies. Why, California outlawed phonics forty years ago! Whole-word recognition is the modern way to go.
ME: We all read by whole-word recognition – after we get to recognize a word. A few hours’ study of the sounds of letters and letter-combinations gives a child the ability to “sound-out” an unfamiliar word. English is not all that phonetic, but most words can be sounded out, and even a child can learn the sounds and the principles.
LIBERAL (changing the subject): And you probably carry a gun, too.
ME: Certainly. Does that disqualify me from the human race?
LIBERAL: Uncivilized! Uncouth! Murderer! Do you think this is the Wild West?
ME: None of the above. What’s your point?
LIBERAL: People in a proper civilized society shouldn’t have to worry about guns.
ME: People in a proper civilized society shouldn’t have to worry about kitchen fires, either, but I see that you keep a fire extinguisher by each door.
LIBERAL (changing the subject again): And you’re a Sunday-school teacher!
Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
Permission is granted to edit, print and/or broadcast these weekly polemical essays.
(To subscribe -- for yourself or a friend – or to unsubscribe – send the e-address.)
Spoofing “Liberalism”
Letter to the editor;
LIBERAL: We need a giant government program to make war on illiteracy.
ME: “War . . . ”?!
LIBERAL: Certainly. We can put a tax on books and newspapers and use the money to fund a National Literacy Agency with local headquarters in each . . .
ME: How about just teaching children the sounds of letters and lending them interesting reading material?
LIBERAL: “Sounds”?! Phonics?! You troglodyte! Phonics has been discredited in a thousand studies. Why, California outlawed phonics forty years ago! Whole-word recognition is the modern way to go.
ME: We all read by whole-word recognition – after we get to recognize a word. A few hours’ study of the sounds of letters and letter-combinations gives a child the ability to “sound-out” an unfamiliar word. English is not all that phonetic, but most words can be sounded out, and even a child can learn the sounds and the principles.
LIBERAL (changing the subject): And you probably carry a gun, too.
ME: Certainly. Does that disqualify me from the human race?
LIBERAL: Uncivilized! Uncouth! Murderer! Do you think this is the Wild West?
ME: None of the above. What’s your point?
LIBERAL: People in a proper civilized society shouldn’t have to worry about guns.
ME: People in a proper civilized society shouldn’t have to worry about kitchen fires, either, but I see that you keep a fire extinguisher by each door.
LIBERAL (changing the subject again): And you’re a Sunday-school teacher!
Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Home production of food
T H E O P I N I O N P A P E R glenn3@frontiernet.net
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
Permission is granted to edit, print and/or broadcast these weekly polemical essays.
(To subscribe -- for yourself or a friend – or to unsubscribe – send the e-address.)
Victory gardens
Letter to the editor;
Anybody remember the yard-gardens during World War Two? (Slogan: “We will win the war with food!”) Many American women took part in the war by digging up their lawns and planting corn and peas and beans and squash from the street to the front door. (Others worked long hours at defense plants.)
Every bushel of produce they grew potentially released truck-and-tractor fuel from the farms to the battle front. Every door-garden potentially released farm-raised food to feed the troops. Every dollar not spent at the grocery stores was potentially available to buy war bonds to finance the war.
We have a different sort of war going on now, and we cannot even tell who the enemy is. There does not seem to be trouble feeding the fighters. But somehow that I cannot tell, this war is tangled up with the constantly rising prices of food and fuel. We may need to follow the sterling example of out mothers and grandmothers, raising a significant part of our food right on our private premises.
Every dollar we don’t spend on commercial groceries is at least potentially available toward paying off our obscene credit card debts. Every trip we don’t make to the store is a gallon or a quart of gasoline not bought and burned. And, who knows? It might even benefit our children and grandchildren to bring food into existence from earth, water, seeds and labor.
Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
Permission is granted to edit, print and/or broadcast these weekly polemical essays.
(To subscribe -- for yourself or a friend – or to unsubscribe – send the e-address.)
Victory gardens
Letter to the editor;
Anybody remember the yard-gardens during World War Two? (Slogan: “We will win the war with food!”) Many American women took part in the war by digging up their lawns and planting corn and peas and beans and squash from the street to the front door. (Others worked long hours at defense plants.)
Every bushel of produce they grew potentially released truck-and-tractor fuel from the farms to the battle front. Every door-garden potentially released farm-raised food to feed the troops. Every dollar not spent at the grocery stores was potentially available to buy war bonds to finance the war.
We have a different sort of war going on now, and we cannot even tell who the enemy is. There does not seem to be trouble feeding the fighters. But somehow that I cannot tell, this war is tangled up with the constantly rising prices of food and fuel. We may need to follow the sterling example of out mothers and grandmothers, raising a significant part of our food right on our private premises.
Every dollar we don’t spend on commercial groceries is at least potentially available toward paying off our obscene credit card debts. Every trip we don’t make to the store is a gallon or a quart of gasoline not bought and burned. And, who knows? It might even benefit our children and grandchildren to bring food into existence from earth, water, seeds and labor.
Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona
When reading hurts
T H E O P I N I O N P A P E R glenn3@frontiernet.net
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
Permission is granted to edit, print and/or broadcast these weekly polemical essays.
(To subscribe -- for yourself or a friend – or to unsubscribe – send the e-address.)
Dis-education
Letter to the editor;
The most basic part of education is to learn to read. Reading is the key to a lifetime of self-education and enjoyment. What a shock it was, therefore, to hear that there exists a scientific method to teach school-children to dislike reading.
Aldus Huxley’s memorable book, Brave New World, depicts giving selected children electrical shocks when they touched beautiful, bright, illustrated books. The idea was to keep them from being attracted to books, getting educated on their own and therefore becoming unsatisfied with their assigned low-grade lot in life.
We can only speculate on what evil motives and/or stupidity might drive modern American school administrators to purchase “readers” deliberately designed to inflict emotional pain on children who read them.
Remember the “readers” of generations a-gone, with illustrated stories of pioneer families, victorious children, brave and assertive children, and young inventors?
The sad news I hear now is that these have been replaced to some degree by pitiful stories of losers, mocked and discouraged and forever failing in valueless endeavors. The stories are especially hard on children who make an individual effort on self-chosen projects.
The suspicion is that such emotional pain is inflicted deliberately on children who read this stuff so that they quit reading – except when forced to read by overwhelming authority. That is, they would not read for fun or information or inspiration.
Now, someone is going to respond that, why, um, these stories are furnished to prepare children for modern life. What? Prepare them for un-ending failure? How about a few shining examples to prepare them to detect problems, make corrections, push forward despite the obstacles, and succeed?
There are thousands of really good children’s books available. They can be borrowed for free from libraries or purchased outright. There is no reason to inflict emotional pain on children because of the choices of “educational” bureaucrats.
Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona
Glenn Jacobs / 130 N. Poverty Flat / Box 954 / Eagar, Arizona 85925 / 928-333-3517
Permission is granted to edit, print and/or broadcast these weekly polemical essays.
(To subscribe -- for yourself or a friend – or to unsubscribe – send the e-address.)
Dis-education
Letter to the editor;
The most basic part of education is to learn to read. Reading is the key to a lifetime of self-education and enjoyment. What a shock it was, therefore, to hear that there exists a scientific method to teach school-children to dislike reading.
Aldus Huxley’s memorable book, Brave New World, depicts giving selected children electrical shocks when they touched beautiful, bright, illustrated books. The idea was to keep them from being attracted to books, getting educated on their own and therefore becoming unsatisfied with their assigned low-grade lot in life.
We can only speculate on what evil motives and/or stupidity might drive modern American school administrators to purchase “readers” deliberately designed to inflict emotional pain on children who read them.
Remember the “readers” of generations a-gone, with illustrated stories of pioneer families, victorious children, brave and assertive children, and young inventors?
The sad news I hear now is that these have been replaced to some degree by pitiful stories of losers, mocked and discouraged and forever failing in valueless endeavors. The stories are especially hard on children who make an individual effort on self-chosen projects.
The suspicion is that such emotional pain is inflicted deliberately on children who read this stuff so that they quit reading – except when forced to read by overwhelming authority. That is, they would not read for fun or information or inspiration.
Now, someone is going to respond that, why, um, these stories are furnished to prepare children for modern life. What? Prepare them for un-ending failure? How about a few shining examples to prepare them to detect problems, make corrections, push forward despite the obstacles, and succeed?
There are thousands of really good children’s books available. They can be borrowed for free from libraries or purchased outright. There is no reason to inflict emotional pain on children because of the choices of “educational” bureaucrats.
Glenn Jacobs
Eagar, Arizona
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