Education

Our school system doesn't do a great job at teaching; part of this is because the subjects aren't as relevant as they could be. Realistically, who needs to know how to diagram a sentence?

Here are some classes I wish we'd had in high school:

• Home and auto repair and maintenance
• Nutrition, cooking, and health
• Economics and behavioral econ
• Finances, budgeting, and banking
• Politics and propaganda

Guns of August Convention

The Old Dominion Military Society is having a gaming convention in Williamsburg Virginia,  August 12-14.

Great Blue Heron

Gunwalker scandal

As Larry Correia (best-selling novelist and former gun shop owner) put it:

As a novelist, if I were to write a thriller in which a federal law enforcement agency knowingly allowed and even encouraged thousands of American guns to cross the border to arm Mexican drug cartels, in an effort to pad their stats to push for more gun control laws, even though innocent Mexican citizens and a US Border Patrol agent were killed in the process, and afterward there would be a huge cover up that went all the way to the President… I know some reviewers would say that my plot was silly, just some naive right-wing fantasy.

Yeah… You got me there. Surely no federal agency would be that stupid. Surely nobody in Washington would arm brutal drug cartels just to push their own politics.

Nope. That’s crazy talk. [...]

This is bigger than Watergate. A crime was committed in Nixon’s administration and he tried to cover it up. The same thing is happening here. But at least in Watergate, nobody got killed.

As The Professor says, read the whole thing.

Cinnamon Wonderfuls

1. Prepare a yellow cake mix
2. Bake in mini-mini muffin pans
3. Dip each mini-cake into melted butter, then roll in sugar and cinnamon
4. Yum

Tuaregs

The Tuaregs of North Africa are famous as "the Blue Men"; their clothing was blue and they sometimes rubbed indigo dye into their skin as well. But they've been desert dwellers for at least 1500 years; if you're in the desert and you don't want white, you can get black wool or black goat hair, but where do you get indigo blue from? I'm sure you've been laying awake at night, pondering that very question. It turns out that they went south across the desert in caravans to the markets and dye pits of Kano, a city in northern Nigeria.

Wild Bunch

We watched most of The Wild Bunch tonight. I say "most of" because I got tired of watching it; the cinematography was great, but the story and characters were not enjoyable. Apparently this is Peckinpah's best, which means I can skip anything else he did.