Reading

Kent State Shootings – 1970 Year in Review – Audio – UPI.com

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Kent State Shootings – 1970 Year in Review – Audio – UPI.com

Unknown Speaker: "A group of young people, mostly boys, we can determine the university student, were milling around the downtown area in Kent, where there is a collection of bars and night clubs, where most of the younger crowd frequent. At first they were simply milling around; not really unruly or disorderly. The crowd got larger, and then the violence broke out at about midnight."

Announcer: The place, Kent State University in Ohio. If you were there on May 4th, you would have seen a campus filled with Ohio National Guard units, called into quell student rioting, which began as a protest against the use of U.S. forces in Cambodia.

The guardsmen had been ordered onto the campus after the University's ROTC building had been burned to the ground in the second night of disruption by antiwar students.

So there you are, if a student, you're one of about 600 in a large grassy plain in the middle of campus. If you are a national guardsman, you are a part of the 100 on that same grassy plain. You would just disperse some students with teargas. Your rifle is loaded with real bullets. You stand side by side, walking up a hill. Suddenly a student throws a rock, then another. They are shouting. Then just as suddenly you turn to face the crowd, a skirmish line is formed. You lift your rifle and for about 30 seconds only, the sounds of shooting and screaming fill the air.

Unavoidable consumption of non-renewable resources

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Unavoidable consumption of non-renewable resources… That God damn flipped statement in nearly every environmental impact statement. While a true statement, it always annoys me how flipped the language comes across when they use it. Environmental analysts might just be covering their asses but it’s an obnoxious statement on its face, especially if the document doesn’t propose any mitigation towards stopping to push our planet off the cliff, expanding more of our lands into dumping grounds, fouling the air and paving over our farms and forests.

America’s First Banned Book Really Ticked Off the Plymouth Puritans

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America’s First Banned Book Really Ticked Off the Plymouth Puritans

Apparently, Thomas Morton didn’t get the memo. The English businessman arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 with the Puritans, but he wasn’t exactly on board with the strict, insular, and pious society they had hoped to build for themselves. “He was very much a dandy and a playboy,” says William Heath, a retired professor from Mount Saint Mary’s University who has published extensively on the Puritans. Looking back, Morton and his neighbors were bound to butt heads sooner or later.

I haven’t been doing enough reading lately

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I haven’t been doing enough reading lately. It’s so easy to waste time in the evenings now with my unlimited phone plan and the Youtube, but I have ordered some books from the library for reading in the coming weeks:

Some books about local history and the Pine Bush (I am particularly interested in Paul Grodahl’s book for interviewing more of John Wolcott):

  • Mayor Erastus Corning : Albany icon, Albany enigma / [by Paul Grondahl].
  • Pine Bush : Albany’s last frontier / compiled and edited by Don Rittner.

Some homesteading/farming books:

  • Living with goats : everything you need to know to raise your own backyard herd / Margaret Hathaway ; photographs by Karl Schatz.
  • Storey’s illustrated breed guide to sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs / Carol Ekarius.

Been doing a lot of reading about large livestock, so I figure it’s good to learn now about smaller stock.

Now just to wait for these books to come in stock, and not forget about them while I wait. But once they are available, it’s just drive-thru at the library.

The Dictatorship of Data

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The Dictatorship of Data

McNamara epitomized the hyper-rational executive who relied on numbers rather than sentiments, and who could apply his quantitative skills to any industry he turned them to. In 1960 he was named president of Ford, a position he held for only a few weeks before being tapped to join President Kennedy’s cabinet as secretary of defense.

As the Vietnam conflict escalated and the United States sent more troops, it became clear that this was a war of wills, not of territory. America’s strategy was to pound the Viet Cong to the negotiation table. The way to measure progress, therefore, was by the number of enemy killed. The body count was published daily in the newspapers. To the war’s supporters it was proof of progress; to critics, evidence of its immorality. The body count was the data point that defined an era.

True Story of Winnie the Pooh | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine

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True Story of Winnie the Pooh | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine

In the main branch of the New York Public Library, there lives a group of wild animals that call the children’s section home. Together, in one cage, are a young pig, a donkey, a tiger, a kangaroo, and a bear known the world over as Winnie-the-Pooh. The bear is not the red-shirted “tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluffȁ found in cribs around the world, more a regular ole’ fuzzy variety, a simple knock-around bear. But he’s still Pooh, a bit matted down, a bit overly loved, but in great shape considering he’ll soon be 100 years old. The original Pooh is amazingly still alive, well into the 21st-century, in both literary and animated forms.