Evidently Harrel Braddy wasn’t reformed by his 13 year sentence for attempted murder, judging from the fact that, after being released early for good behavior, he kidnapped a woman and her child and deliberately left the little girl to be eaten by alligators. Braddy had befriended Shandelle Maycock and her daughter Quatisha. Maycock testified that…
Author: marc
Marc is a software developer, writer, and part-time political know-it-all who currently resides in Texas in the good ol' U.S.A.
Judgment
As I’ve written about before, there is something profoundly lacking in the world today – namely men and women with the courage of their convictions and the will to act on them. Sometime in the last century it went out of fashion for men to act on their own independent judgment. Group-think is in and…
No God of Mine
Speaking about the murder of Kenneth Cummings, the killer, Terry Mark Mangum of Cypress, Texas says: “I believe I’m Elijah, called by God to be a prophet,” said 26-year-old Terry Mark Mangum, charged with murder June 11. ” … I believe with all my heart that I was doing the right thing.” … Mangum —…
Rights
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. For Americans this statement forms the basis for our personal freedoms. It’s a simple, direct statement whose meaning cannot be misunderstood without a…
GOP and Gays
At GOP Progress today, Nate Nelson had this to say about Republicans and gays: Without exception, the anti-gay sentiment within the Republican Party comes from those who cannot accept that people will believe and behave differently than they do. These are the people who believe that consensual sex between gay and lesbian adults should still…
Schools Suck…
…in part…because of laughable administrative decisions like this one: Writing “I love Alex” on a school gymnasium wall brought a 12-year-old the same punishment as if she had made terrorist threats. The Katy Independent School District rated the message, written with a baby blue marker by sixth-grader Shelby Sendelbach, as a Level 4 infraction —…
Spring Victim’s Suicide
David Ritcheson, the young man from my former home town who was brutalized by a pair of Nazi wannabes last year, has killed himself. According to Fox News: Ritcheson, a small and quiet youth, once lamented being known as “that kid” who survived the party attack. He rarely discussed his feelings and declined to get…
The Ethanol Problem
David Broussard recently penned a piece describing the problem with the push to use ethanol as a “renewable energy source”, one that is supposed to ease our dependence on foreign – read “Islamic” – oil. As David says, the dream of replacing gasoline with corn alcohol simply is not going to happen: The US uses about 130…
Freedoms
A while back George Will wrote a column titled “Valuing Speech” that is apropos for Independence Day, I think, and another discussion about the relative correctness of liberalism, conservatism, and constructionism. Will says: Marriage is the foundation of the natural family and sustains family values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime. At…
Science == Prosperity
The National Academies of Science recently produced a report titled “Condensed-Matter and Materials Physics: The Science of the World Around Us” and in it says that the U.S. has failed to increase funding for CMMP research at the same rate as our competitors and that we have all but lost our position of leadership in…