The Texas Tower Murders

I just came across a 2006 article in Texas Monthly magazine which has excerpts from interviews with people who were on the University of Texas-Austin campus that August day in 1966.

It was a sobering article, the words of people who he shot, who responded by helping the wounded, who got their own rifles and pinned Whitman down so he couldn't freely fire at more people, who went to the top of the tower and finally were able to kill him.

I had known that one professor had used a deer rifle which he had in his office to keep Whitman's head down, but thought he was alone. It turns out that there were a lot of civilian first responders with rifles, and they likely prevented even more victims from being shot.

What an awful day.

Utah Driving the Anti-Self Defense Crowd Into a Killing Rage

Looks like they will be designating the Colt Model 1911 as the State Pistol.

Winning the Future

Well, that slogan won't last long.



Which reminds me of the "Toyota Racing Development" sign and "TRD" acronym on so many of the vehicles. Who on earth wants to drive a Toyota TRD, and why did no one at Toyota catch that before they plastered it all over their cars and trucks?

Of Lolita and Butterflies

They're both ephemeral (Lolita died near the end of the book) but I had no idea that Vladimir Nabokov was a Harvard curator of Lepidoptera. Now one of his great and dismissed theories of butterfly evolution has been vindicated by DNA analysis.

Recording Our Servants At Work...

...is a fifteen year felony in Illinois.

The cops favor imprisoning their employers who record them at work because having a record of their actions “can affect how an officer does his job on the street.”

No kidding.

More at Reason Magazine.

Science Fiction: More Conservative/Libertarian?

Discussion here.

Picturesque Ripples

It's another Cool Space Pic of the Day.

Remarkable

Frances Fox Piven, a former President of the American Sociological Association, former Vice President of the American Political Science Association, and former President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, pretty clearly to my mind called for riots and firebombings of police and occupied office building, and her defenders, "officers of the American Sociological Association", criticize her critics for "name-calling and invective rising to the level of inciting others to violence."

Thanks to Anne Althouse for the lead and to Glen Reynold aka Instapundit for the lead to Althouse.

Do sociology departments in state universities do anything beyond providing tax-funded paychecks to socialists and Marxists? Seems like an excellent place to cut government spending: Eliminate those departments and allow their profs to find productive jobs.

Content-based Prohibition of a Mural

Hmmm....Seems to me there was a store in Waikiki which ran into a similar ban on signs a couple or three decades ago. A version of Hokusai's Great Wave Off Kanagawa print on the side of a surf shop comes to mind.

More on the current affair here. Arlington, VA, is getting hauled into United States District Court by the Institute for Justice over the First Amendment issue.

The Lod Mosaic, Lod, Israel

Quite a nice mosaic -and quite large at 27 by 50 feet- was discovered in 1996 in Lod, Israel, and is now starting a tour of US museums.

Made around 300 AD, it is virtually pristine except for a section destroyed centuries later when someone dug a cesspit through it.

Lots of pictures of the conservation process at this site, including pics of the bare and shod footprints of the people who made it some 1700 years ago.

Sarah Palin & Feminists

I have to wonder about the screeching hatred: since only right wingers use such language of violence and hatred, the feminists must be pretty radically righists. Yes?

Poor Arsonist Victims in Canada

The arsonists are apparently the victims, that is, so far as the Canadian authorities are concerned.

Very interesting surveillance camera video embedded. I wonder if American cops and prosecutors would arrest and prosecute the homeowner who defended himself with a gun. The arsonists did firebomb an occupied house. Lucky for them the owner didn't just shoot them.

Glen Beck, Frances Fox Piven, and the New York Times

I am not a Glen Beck fan, but he seems to be getting dishonest editorializing from the New York Times about his publicizing the pro-violence rhetoric of lefty Frances Fox Piven. Apparently accurately quoting her amounts to encouraging violence against her.

Accurate reporting is apparently not what the Times favors: It's provocative. More here if you are interested The videos at the first link are interesting.