Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

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Earth Week Flotsam and Jetsam

Over on NRO's Planet Gore, I offer a new quiz: can you tell Charlie Sheen from Charlie Manson?  Not as easy as you think.

And since Earth Day is Friday, my newly "rebooted" franchise, the Almanac of Environmental Trends, is out today.

Discussions - 4 Comments

I had read that interview with Charlie Manson (have been ignoring Sheen) and thought two things. First, that I could remember a time in about 1968/69 when I had heard that kind of rhetoric often enough that it almost made sense to me. I knew people who thought like that and spoke like that and people, even college-educated people, took them seriously. This, especially, after Manson was arrested and making public statements.

Second, I have a non-traditional student (that means she's about my age) this semester who has been working with the elderly for about the last 30 years. She is writing a research paper for class so she can try to find statistics about the health of the homeless elderly to verify her experiences with them. There is plenty of material on the topic. They are almost always mentally imbalanced. They frequently have been substance abusers. I make the connection because her descriptions of conversations with the elderly homeless are equivalent to what Charlie Manson said in that interview. Of course, being in prison, he's had good healthcare and will live longer. In addition, there are people who will take what he says seriously, because of his fame, whereas the homeless elderly -- who would ever listen to them? We know they are nuts.

The Sheen or Manson quiz is slightly more entertaining than your old promotion of the Gore=Unabomber garbage (esp. the lie that "they found Al Gore's book in the Unabomber's shack")

https://nlt.ashbrook.org/2010/09/gore-v-the-unabomber-redux.php#comment-71250

but equally meaningless.

Just for fun, how about a Glenn Beck (who Peter Schramm described, after Beck's Ashbrook dinner speech, as "inspiring," "informative," and who "tells it like it is" and "cuts through the fog,") or NLT Blogger quiz?

But since Earth Day is coming, it's a good time to revisit the "Goofus or Gallant?" quiz:
https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158798&cid=13301230

Sorry, had to come back for just a bit more fun.

Steven, are the things in your almanac intended to be taken as factual statements?

To promote the almanac, you should do a book tour. You could give the "oil spills are no big whoop and probably won't happen again" speech on the Gulf Coast and you could give the "radiation poisoning is just like eating a lot of bananas" speech in the towns evacuated around the Dai-chi reactors.

What is really, really depressing about Manson is that he beat the death penalty. He was convicted in 1970 (I believe that is the year the trial ended) and sentence to death in the gas chamber (along with Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins and Leslie Van Houten). In 1972, the California Supreme Court (this was the start of California's downslide into liberalism) ruled the death penalty cruel and unusual punishment. All of their death sentences were reduced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. In 1976, the voting population, which was not yet awashed in Liberalism, voted the death penalty back into law. I believe that the voters reinstatement of the death penalty was due to the fact that people still were reeling from what the Manson Family did and unabashed anger at the California Supreme Court for being so stupid. Unfortunately, even though the death penalty was reinstated, the Manson family's life sentences could not be reversed back to the gas chamber.

Susan Atkins developed brain cancer while in prison and her medical bills and security at the hospital cost the taxpayers over $2 million dollars in about a two year period. Manson and the rest of his harem have been living quite well off California taxpayers for the past 40 years.

What we should have done with the Manson family long ago is performed a partial birth abortion, much like Susan Atkins did on Sharon Tate's unborn child. That way the liberals would be happy with the abortion procedure and the remaining sane taxpayers in California would have not had to finance the lives of useless citizens. Of course I joke. The liberals would have done everything to save the Manson Family lives while not caring less about the murder of a unborn child and 7 innocent, productive citizens who did nothing to deserve what the Manson Family did to them. Liberalism.....

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