Total eclipse of the sun 2024

It’s not often a bunch of middle-aged adult siblings get to gather together – at all – when they live all across the country.  But such was the achievement of my birth family for the 8 April 2024 total eclipse visible in North America.  We even had two teenagers with us, both in specially-curated schooling situations.  The viewing location was Broken Bow, Oklahoma, a small but relatively busy tourist and sportsmen’s destination at the extreme southeastern edge of the state.

Broken Bow has a population of about 4,200 according to online resources.  It’s in the Choctaw area of the state assigned to the tribe when it arrived from the tragedy-laden “Trail of Tears” trek from the East,

One guitar announces itself to the world

OK, OK, I’ll write about the criticism of Oliver Anthony from National Review.

Next time, Oliver Anthony should consider singing about what makes America a great land — a land of opportunity, not of guaranteed success.

A land made for you and me. | @mawrightjr https://t.co/Yrx1LCVxeq

— National Review (@NRO) August 14, 2023

.@SohrabAhmari It's not "hunky-dory conservatism" to state the facts.

And it's not condescending to speak the truth.https://t.co/HIFVMJzKYF

— Mark Antonio Wright (@mawrightjr) August 15, 2023

I imagine readers all know who Oliver Anthony is.

TOC Ready Room 26 October 2022: 101st Airborne in Romania; Kanye, China, and other wonders

This will be a rough-and-ready Ready Room, intended to spray a few current topics out there without going in-depth on any of them.  I really mean it this time, so throw rotten fruit if you catch a glimpse of over-analysis out here in the heathery rough.

The first topic is the headline teaser:  deployment of the U.S. 101st Airborne to Europe.  CBS did a segment this past week in which its crew accompanied soldiers of the 101st on field activities in Romania, just “a few miles” from the border of Ukraine.

CBS gets an exclusive sneak peak: "The US Army's 101st Airborne is practicing for war with Russia just miles from Ukraine's border"

"It's not just about defending NATO territory," correspondent @charliecbs reports. "They're fully prepared to cross over into Ukrainian territory" pic.twitter.com/XE2OfHZV4o

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 22, 2022

A great deal was made of the point that the 101st hasn’t deployed to Europe since World War II.

What really happened in the Colorado Springs shooting?

Emergency responders escort bystanders away from the active-shooter threat at the Centennial medical park on Friday, 27 Nov 2015. (Image: Colorado Springs Gazette)

Will we eventually know what really happened in Colorado Springs this past week?

That’s a good question, now that the city’s mayor has already pronounced the shooting incident to be an act of “domestic terrorism.”  (For some reason, our authorities don’t seem able to jump to conclusions quite as quickly when a suspect shouts “Allahu akbar!” while attacking American servicemen.)

The drumbeat of a narrative emerged almost instantly, about Planned Parenthood being attacked because Colorado Springs is a “hub for conservative Christians” (whatever that is) who are implicitly slavering to shoot up abortion clinics.

A counter-narrative is also circulating, with some reports suggesting that the shooting attack on Friday had nothing to do – at least nothing that goes to motive – with the Planned Parenthood location on which subsequent news coverage has centered.

Oregon killer singled out Christians to shoot them in the head

Chris Harper-Mercer at MySpace.

The killer at Umpqua Community College (UCC) in Oregon was identified on Thursday evening as Chris Harper-Mercer, 26, of Torrance, California, a Los Angeles suburb.  As Howard Portnoy reported earlier, Harper-Mercer died when police shot him to end his killing spree.

A lot of rumors are flying around the web among him right now.  There is zero substantiation, from what I can tell, of a report that he was a Muslim.  (Charles C. Johnson of Got News posted that report, but his website is hammered right now and the link doesn’t come up.  Here’s one of many citations of the Johnson report.)

However, eyewitnesses came forward in the hours after the massacre to report that Harper-Mercer asked each student in turn, in the classroom where he was shooting them, what religion they were.  He shot the Christians in the head.