The title above should have been the title of last night’s post, but I didn’t think of it until down in the comments.

I’m extremely pleased with that line. If this were a commercial blog, I’d print up tee-shirts or bumper stickers featuring it in large letters, along with our URL, and sell them. Because I’m a capitalist, after all, and it’s about time I got serious about grinding down the oppressed masses.



By way of Greg Slade and the Christian-fandom e-mail list, here’s a link to Galaxiki, a wiki-based online universe-building site. Greg describes it thus:

Membership is free and there are tons of community solar systems that

can be edited, but it’s also possible to acquire your own, personal

solar system.

Not my kind of thing, but surely there are some titanically grandiose among our readers.

Speaking of freedom, on June 3, 1989, many Chinese people were protesting in 100-acre Tiananmen Square when their government, who apparently cannot tolerate dissent, rebuked them. Hundreds were killed, some not in the square but in their homes. Even ambulance drivers were shot, according to this firsthand report from the BBC. It’s a sickening irony that the massacre happened in a place apparently named “gate of heavenly peace.”

This is Chairman Mao’s legacy, forced submission and debasing equality. But I think the Chinese people may rise above it, especially as the gospel spreads. They were made to be more than numbers in The People’s Machine.

This last one was the closest thing to a pleasant spring weekend we’ve had so far (at least so far as I recall), which means that it rained and was overcast much of the time, but there was that beautiful morning and early afternoon on Saturday… before it started hailing. Dime-sized servings here, no serious damage that I could see.

The man who invented the Pringle’s potato crisp cardboard tube has passed away, and some of his ashes were buried, as per his request, in one of those impact-resistant, re-closable packages.

I suffer from low self-esteem, I know, but I think I’d have to be pretty darn secure about my family’s love before I asked one of them to spoon some of me out of the urn and transfer it to a separate container. Even if they did wear a face mask.



By way of Red State, there’s a story about how the police in Great Britain are enforcing Gospel-free zones, where the presence of a Muslim majority makes it illegal to preach Christ.

I’m sure there are people on the Left who find this restriction of free speech repugnant. But I’m convinced a lot of them don’t see any problem. “Freedom of speech isn’t for you. It’s for them. Because they’re victims.”

This is one aspect of the major philosophical divide between conservatives and liberals today. Conservatives love freedom, and liberals love equality.

It comes down to your definition of equality, I think. Conservatives are terrified of equality as an absolute value, because it means the extinction of freedom. If you give people freedom, some will do better in the world than others. Then equality is gone. The race may not always be to the swift, but it is often enough to make the results unequal.

Liberals believe that the only real freedom is equality. If you insist on equality, then you can’t permit freedom in the traditional sense. Because freedom always ends up with the toys unequally distributed.

The bureaucrats of Britain see the Muslim population as an oppressed group which has been denied the equality it deserves. Therefore they must be given every freedom, and their opponents must be shackled, in order to achieve the supreme goal of equality.

It’s very likely too late for Great Britain, and for all of Europe. It may be too late for us, too. We’ll see.

Fifty teachers/professors with a bit of time on their hands have decided Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is “the science fiction film with the most realistic vision of the future of mankind.” One professor comments, “It is not beyond the realms of possibility that artificial intelligence could turn on its creators.”

Blade Runner was deemed pretty realistic as well as The Andromeda Strain, and that’s not all.

Barry DiGregorio, research Associate for the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, and a member of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return, said: “I have been campaigning against NASA’s plans to bring back samples from Mars as I believe they could possibly endanger the Earth’s biosphere with microbial contamination from the planet.

“In a worst case scenario this could lead to an Andromeda Strain-type situation. My concerns are based on the Viking biology data that were conducted on Mars in 1976. NASA have always opposed the claim that their data found microbial life on Mars, however, two NASA astrobiologists have publicly stated otherwise and I have worked with them to bring attention to their finds.”

Forgive me for wasting your time posting news of authors in Atlanta, because this next story has the smell of greater importance. Mary Rigdon has cleared state hurdles for establishing her cheesemaking dairy, Decimal Place Farm, right in the city. Elizabeth Lee reports:

Rigdon makes the cheese on her and husband Ed’s 18-acre Conley farm, tucked away at the back of a subdivision. They purchased the land 13 years ago, moving from a Grant Park house on a tenth of an acre. Decimal Place Farm is a nod to that house, where she lived when she first got interested in raising dairy goats.

Next time you’re in Atlanta, perhaps you can look her up.