I gradually came to feel that I would rather be run over by a truck than kill people at the wheel of a car - Nadezhda Mandelstam

between a shitty rock and a shitty hard place

Outside of many great blogs like Andrew Sullivan's, Enter Stage Right, and the dead-on satirical geniuses from South Park, it seems identifying onesself as conservative is fraught with difficulty. I can, and am in fact glad to, be in disagreement with the left on most issues, especially their softness on terrorism and their PC bus that threatens to drive America right to the precipice. But must I be such a voice in the wilderness on what not only I see as conservative, civil libertarian positions? Of course in some ways I was glad to see the Dems get the whipping they deserved in the last elections, but now once again it's an endless stream of GOP attacks on reproductive choice, reasonable immigration, and their favorite bete noir, gays. Where is the support for the military, the increased funding of our necessary war, and the stand for freedom that makes people concerned about their country look towards the right for help? Instead dead horses get beaten. Such frivolity ALMOST makes the Dems look good!

an autodidact's confession 2/2

It's all too easy to view my own path as the sensible one, and all too incorrect. I certainly don't for a minute regret my educational choices up to this point, and often find I have indeed covered more than many history graduates. However, they can easily present cohesive thesises and topical papers, which I barely remember to do. Point being, I'm taking an English comp class next semester, and am even excited about it. I want to freelance and I want to do something with it. Just glad I got off that high horse before it plunged me into the ravine!

an autodidact's confession part one/two

Since I left high school, more that seven years ago, I've read incessantly, purposefully, and hungrily. After so many many history books, and after occasionally doing some writing, I felt as if my self-education was in the best hands possible. But at a suggestion of freelancing for local publications, something entered my mind: I know and understand almost too many facts and dates; I find it easy to write and enjoy doing so; but indeed, I haven't the discipline to write a single article or short story, to put together a single page with a cohesive point. And the cause of this is not a bit of outside input in my learning (outside of dear friends who debated, cajoled, and recommended works to me) when it comes to goals, challenges, and finished products. Continued.

On a lighter note...

To be added to the next edition of the Steven Levin Arizonian Heritage Dictionary: folk music: noun: Traditional and/or ethnic music expropriated, castrated, and wanly performed by those who would consider the original writers uneducated and cultureless. i.e. Pete Seeger. Hey, it's my dictionary! :)

Holocaust Deniers: A movement of bastards, human garbage and slime.PART TWO

This man, who while sorting the clothes of the dead came across garments of his gassed love ones, is not simply an issue of historical obscurism, it is degradation of humanity itself, and a moral wrong. Of course, banning this drivel would be no more right, but in this forum for my thoughts, I simply must record my impression of this filth. It is even beyond the level of that sniveling Marxist moral gelding Satre calling Solzhenitsyn a liar. I hear this movement finds friends among the Iranian government, which doesn't suprise me. Often Soviet crimes are underrepresented by Marxist history professors, in and of itself revolting, but denying the Nazi genocide of Jews is simply despicable. May these people and their drivel be rightly treated as the most hateful type of liars that they are. And let us remember that forgetting atrocity paves the way for its repetition.

Holocaust Deniers: A movement of bastards, human garbage and slime.

I'm currently reading a wonderful book on the regions of Eastern Europe ravaged by both Hitler and Stalin, and showing their atrocities to be of the same stripe. A fine point, as I see it. Interested in the testimony of a Treblinka survivor, I searched online for further information. I stumbled across a site saying the entire Final Solution in no way happened. I've heard of these deniers before, of course, but never read what they purport. They spoke of "supposed" deaths and gas chambers. Revisionist history is rampant nowadays, and always a danger, but even the most ridiculous identity-politics rewritings of history merely bring about a slight pang of anguish in me. To deny the deaths, and perhaps even worse, the inhuman suffering of those poor, poor, people, Jew and Gentile, literally made me sick to my stomach. And in this instance, they were painting one of the 50 survivors out of 700,000 murdered at Treblinka as a foul liar and imaginer of the unspeakable acts he witnessed. To slander this man,