Australian nanny state-ism?

Let’s see, we have …

1. A security guard licensed to carry a pistol, who is …

2. Supposed to protect US $21,000 at a hotel from …

3. An armed robber who who inflicts on her “ a fractured skull, a broken nose and left hand, and possible brain damage ,” so . . .

4. She shoots him (and there is no such thing as “shoot to wound” when your life is on the line), he dies, and . . . .

5. She is charged with murder.

Pretty soon I’m going to start sounding like Kim du Toit, if this keeps up. I’m glad that I live in a state where what should be the common-law right to self defense is written into the statutes.

Any Australian readers care to elucidate?

“The Village”

Those merry pranksters at Landover Baptist Church are

Let the games begin

Jason Pitzl-Waters at Wild Hunt blogs about the revived Nemean Games, where you do not have to be a world-class athlete to run the same race as did the ancient Greeks.

Meanwhile, PBS will be running two episodes next week of The Real Olympics, complete with the gore of chariot racing, the blood and flies from the sacrifices . . . or at least as much as can be put on television.

‘Give it up to the Goddess’

I confess that I had not looked at Eurotrash’s blog for a while, so I missed this account of her summer solstice trip to Avebury.

It is safe to say that it provides a certain balance to the stories told by some friends who spent the night there this past solstice.

Her link to Children of the Stones did not work for me, so here is another guide to its episodes.

Apocalypse

Worth reading: “The Last Man on Earth,” an essay by Kathryn Joyce at The Revealer, on the enduring power of such books as 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Brave New World. Here is the first paragraph:

“In my father’s favorite dark fantasy he is Mr. Mead of Ray Bradbury’s short story, ‘The Pedestrian’: persecuted for walking alone at night without purpose instead of watching television, as everyone else does in a disturbingly-familiar authoritarian state of the future. That Bradbury’s dystopia sounds a lot like Westchester, where my father grew up, or any other suburb, is of course the real chill — an intended one, one of recognition.”

Nanny-state tendencies, and what about that May Pole?

Recently, British police officers have been forbidden to join the British National Party, a political party which might charitably be described as far-right. More here from Wikipedia.

You don’t like far-right parties? Fine. But the BNP is, as its web site points out, a legal political party in the UK. Imagine an American cop being told, “You will lose your job if you register as Libertarian (or Green).”

In another weird drug-war development, it is seriously suggested that British children could be vaccinated against euphoria.

I don’t mean to pick on the Brits. These same things could happen tomorrow in Canada under the banner of “order and good government.” They could happen the day after tomorrow in the United States under the banner of “The War on (whatever).”

Two incomplete thoughts:

1. As a Pagan, I have strong small-l libertarian feelings. As Judy Harrow once pointed out to me, ours is a “high-choice ethic.” We make up our own minds. Evidently Police Constable Smith is no longer to be trusted to make up his own mind. Nor would the kids be trusted. The less a government trusts the people, the more totalitarian it becomes–even if for the “best” of reasons.

2. Back to the BNP: Take another look at its web page. Click on the link at upper right that says, “”New ‘Land and People’ site launched.” Watch the photos–particularly in the upper right. See that May Pole? Hmm. Does the American political right own “family values”? Does the British political right own (revived) Pagan symbolism?

“There are 60,000 recipes in Italy”

USA Today brings an Italian cooking expert to rate the food at the Olive Garden restaurant chain. (Ah, the typical strip-mall setting shown on the web site.)

“This is bad. This is really bad,” Marcella says. She stares into the bowl. “This is Bolognese sauce?” She reaches for a menu in disbelief.

“I must console myself,” Marcella says. She orders a Jack Daniel’s.

Hat tip to Consumer Whore.

Buffy as spiritual director

This book had to happen: the only part that surprises me is that I had an image of Jossey-Bass as a fairly staid publisher, based on their display at AAR-SBL meetings.

It started out as a joke.

Two academic women were laughing over the absurdity of writing a book about the spirituality of the teen TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in May 2002. But by fall of that year, Jana Riess, religion book review editor at Publishers Weekly, was writing a book proposal.

Read more from Religion News Blog

It is believed . . .

that I have added D’Alliance, blog of the Drug Policy Alliance, to my blogroll, not least because of this wicked skewering of the “bureaucratic passive voice.”