Celebrations around Piracy?

The news is full of Captain Richard Phillips’ impending return to his Vermont hometown, where there will be what is expected to be the biggest celebration in Underhill’s (VT) history.
I’m all for celebrating courage and resourcefulness, and Capt. Phillips has those aplenty.
What worries me is that a ship that was carry food aid to Africa [...]

People and Guns

I used to be a competitive rifle shooter for my University in England. I have several Oxford ‘Blues’ as a result, and was the captain of several teams. And that’s why I feel I can say something about guns now.
A newsletter I received today stated that since Obama came to power [...]

Phil Spector

Music legend Phil Spector was convicted yesterday of murder - as you may know - when what is said to have been a game of Russian Roulette (how did that ever become a ‘game’?) claimed a woman’s life. She was the sixth such woman that we know of on whom Spector inflicted this behavior [...]

Somalia and Piracy

So the most recent Somali-pirate stand off was resolved by the skillful shooting of the US snipers. Today’s news lets us know that, meanwhile, three more ships have been seized by their brethren, while the US mission to Somalia actually came under mortar fire as their plane left Mogadishu.
The problem with high-profile rescues of this [...]

Announcement

Welcome to my new redesigned site! If you subscribe in a feed reader, you’ll want to resubscribe, or make a new bookmark, because the address is slightly different. Please look around—all the old features are here but now the blog is right up front!

Welcome to the New Site

This is the new-look site and I must say I’m very pleased with it. Kelly Ferry was the genius who put right the confusions of the previous site, which just grew until it needed focused pruning. Cat Bennett was the person who created the design that Kelly made happen. Can you tell [...]

Shooting?

So: yesterday three Pittsburgh police officers were killed by a man wearing a bullet proof vest and using an assault rifle.  Two other officers were wounded.  Also yesterday in Washington state a man shot his five children to death and then killed himself.  That’s nine deaths.  Two weeks earlier in Oakland CA four policemen were [...]

Michelle Obama and the Queen

One of the most heartwarming things to hit the press in the past few days has been the real affection shown between Michelle Obama and the Queen, who were pictured having a friendly hug.
To give context to this, a few years ago the Prime Minister of Australia gave the Queen a bit of a hug [...]

G20: Money and Murder

The violent confrontations in London over the arrival of the main movers of the economic world has sparked a few questions, to say the least.  Police and protestors, some of whom seemed to be bleeding profusely, are pictured in most of the news coverage.
In the US, though, we have violent protests of another sort.  There [...]

Murder and the US

Perhaps I shouldn’t have written, two posts ago, about how there’s a tendency in the US for people not to protest on the streets and instead to turn to private violence.
Why? Because it happened again, this time in Brighampton NY.  If you followed today’s news an Asian-American man entered a facility for helping immigrants, barricaded [...]