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The VFW Generation Divide Nobody Wants to Talk About
I come from patriots. My family respects service, sacrifice, country, and duty. My father is a boomer and a hardcore patriot. Many Gulf War veterans I know are the same way—steady people who love this nation, believe in the flag, and understand freedom is not free. So this is not an attack on veterans. It is an honest question. How did some of the old-school anti-establishment crowd—the Woodstock leftovers, the campus radicals, the “question authority” generation—end up becoming the loudest defenders of progressive orthodoxy, bureaucratic control, censorship culture, and every fashionable left-wing cause pushed by institutions they once claimed to…
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When Predators and Serious Offenders Can Walk Into Government Leadership Races, the System Is Broken
There is something deeply wrong with a political system that allows people with serious criminal histories involving harm to vulnerable individuals to simply file paperwork and seek positions of public trust as if nothing happened. Public office is not a participation trophy. It is not image rehab. It is not a personal rebrand campaign. It…
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I have not been able to write this nearly so well, covering such a large topic so completely in so few words:
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In 1881, Muhammed Ahmad, in the Sudan, declared himself to be the Mahdi and led an uprising that overthrew the Egyptian rule of the area. He died less than four years later. More Sufi than Shia or Sunni, he created an Islamic state running from the Red Sea across central Africa. It lasted almost twenty…
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I ran across this map, showing the number of missing people by state – in terms of missing persons per 100,000. Somehow it wasn’t really surprising that Alaska leads the nation – there is a lot of Alaska to be missing in, and I suspect the state has a lot of unrecovered bodies. Likewise, it’s…
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When I went to get some repair work done, the person I was consulting advised fixing the structural issues and then putting the same ancient dilapidated siding back on the building. The rational? Property taxes. Last summer, we joked about how much the nice flowers my mother had on their porch raised their taxes. They…
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I spent most of a year away from the school after I finished my term. I attended a couple of board meetings because I was asked – on one hand, there was, at the least, the appearance of an unlawful board meeting . . . unlawful because it appeared to violate Montana’s open meeting law.…
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Historically, independent voters, and voters for minor third parties, do not get a large percentage of votes. Often, they’re considered “spoiler” candidates, who lose the election for someone by dra4wing critical support away during a close race. Or their thought of as simply “protest candidates” with no chance of winning. In Montana, for the presidential…
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Not many years ago, if you were faced with a cluster of unacceptable clowns on your ballot, you could write a name in and cast a protest vote. Hell, I guess you still can – the thing is, your write-in protest vote won’t be counted or reported. With the elimination of subsection 7 last year,…
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I’m having trouble summarizing this one, not least because I lost my notes. In short: The meeting did discuss prayer, but did not discuss a four day week. About prayer: The discussion was specifically with regards to having prayer on the agenda as a part of each school board meeting. The result- no. Community presence…
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The proposed library district has me looking at taxation again. One of the great things about Lincoln County is that, with three high school districts, it’s easy to figure out which communities provide the funds that keep our county going. Market Value Taxable Value Percentage Libby $1,687,186,708 $21,911,499 36.42% Troy $831,354,553 $10,966,329 18.23% Eureka $1,974,407,031…
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Now it takes a single click to get the data. So what does it mean? I measured the record lows back in 1977 – this chart, from the Grave Creek site, shows how the critical snowfall that brings us up to normal or above occurs between the February measurements and April 1. I don’t know…
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The USDA has updated plant hardiness zones, and despite last winter’s impressive cold, we’ve jumped up a zone (to 5a from 4b in 2012; the average low went up by 6 degrees) Hardiness zones are a (partial) climate description that’s been in existence for a bit over a century, though the government didn’t get involved…