Big Sky Cairn

In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. penned one of the most powerful modern soliloquies in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. The subject was injustice and civil disobedience as a response to injustice. Undoubtedly, one of the students that staged a sit-in at the University of Montana read a rah-rah version of this letter in their “Activism for Dummies” handbook.

At first glance, it seems like a perfect match. Martin Luther King talks about sit-ins to challenge injustices. It’s his entire justification for why he’s sitting in Birmingham Jail writing letters. He is even analytic enough to provide certain steps - goals set forth - for civic disobedience.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

So far so good, right? For MLK, sit-ins were a means to an ends, in this case forcing negotiation with a dominant party that was refusing to come to the table. The sit-ins weren’t designed to get a press hit, they were designed to spark dialog.

But the similarities begin to fade with closer examination.

Read the rest of this entry »

From the comments here at Big Sky Cairn comes this from Mark T:

Read slowly, my friend, s-l-o-w-l-y: Not all republicans are racists, but all racists are Republican.

Does the rest of Sinestra agree with Mark on this?  How does Dextra feel about this claim?  Is this dialog even worth having?

Here’s some unconstructive input I’ve recently learned from our friends on the left.

* The University of Colorado asserts that racism is about white privalege and therefore a racial minority cannot be racist.
* Mark T postulates that all right-thinking people are racist.

There’s this episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk defeats a robot computer machine called Nomad by feeding it a logical paradox. I wonder what will happen when the Left sees this…

Read the rest of this entry »

MtPolitics found this. It’s disturbing - especially since these are the enlightened scholars that the Left would love to put in charge of our public and social policy. One of their main points seems to be that only people afflicted with some sort of disease called Whiteness can be racist - which makes me wonder. Exactly how much whiteness does one have to possess before they cross that threshold. Say someone’s 1/16 white - are they safe? What about 1/8? What’s the threshold here? And if we’re really interested in stamping out racism, wouldn’t it make sense to register anyone over that threshold? We can put them in sensitivity camps starting with Fort Missoula (it’s worked before!) - although my guess is for the sake of eliminating racism we’ll just have to kill them.

Anyway, Craig also found this interesting combo:

*38. Racism — A system of privilege based on race**.
**34. Race — An ever evolving [sic] social, legal and political construct that has no basis in biological fact.***

***You can’t make this [sic] up.

So racism is thus defined as

“A system of privilege based on an ever evolving [sic] social, legal and political construct that has no basis in biological fact.”

Our scholarly friends at the very same tax-funded institution that gave us Ward Churchill have effectively defined as racism:

• a progressive tax system
• welfare
• anti-smoking laws
• medicare
• unemployment benefits
• discounted tickets to Disneyland for residents of California
• any VIP access to any event or activity
• pro-bono legal advice
• government classified information
• …

This list is a bit like the energizer bunny - it could keep going and going and going…

With racism this prevalent, maybe it’s a good thing that Global Warming is going to do all the work of wiping it out via Mass Human Extinction!

The proposal to close the ‘M’ Hiking trail between August and October has touched a bit of a raw nerve with me. In the summer, I probably hike to the M twice a week, and all the way to the wind sock at least once or twice a month. The official reason - concerns about fires - didn’t make much sense to me since there have been other dry years and that mountain has always seemed susceptible to burning (look no further than the North face to see that this isn’t a new threat).

The fire concern also made more sense from a county perspective than a city or university approach. The article clearly explains that the proposal was being floated by both the City of Missoula and the University of Montana. That didn’t make too much sense until I remembered something that I read with regard to the 2000 seat expansion of Washington-Grizzly Stadium. I can’t find it online, and I’ve since thrown away my dead-tree copy, but in essence a University Official was explaining that the expense of the renovations was going to be recouped by a combination of increased ticket sales and higher royalties for television coverage. What caught my attention was that he also said that fans watching the games for free from Mount Sentinel reduced the television ratings, which actually cost the University hundreds of thousands of dollars every season.

Click. Suddenly “August through October” has a whole new significance. Is the University supporting the closure of the ‘M’ to help finance a larger stadium? Maybe.

My biggest concern though is that there is a more insidiously diabolical goal behind this seasonal closure plan. Michael Moore over at Western Montana 360 set my brain working with his post about the concerns that “local plant protectors” (environmentalists, not union bosses) had with the environmental impact of the famous “M” (and to a lesser degree, the “L” too). For the extreme environmental fringe in Missoula, the wide trail cutting its way up to the concrete monstrosity of the “M” has always been contentious. I know that Loyola Sacred Heart High School - which maintains the “L” - has run afoul of environmentalists with it’s annual whitewashing of the stones that make up that letter.

So my question is this. Does anyone actually think that “fire concerns” are the real motivation behind this plan? Or are we seeing a money grab by the University of Montana athletic department? Or is this the first step in reclaiming Mount Sentinel permanently in the name of Mother Gaia?

Read the rest of this entry »

John Lewis is still hurting (on behalf of children, of course) from the fallout of The Joke. I’d love to sit in on that doctor’s appointment.

JL: Ow, doc. It really hurts.
MD: Interesting. Does it hurt when I do this?
JL: It hurts no matter what you do. Oooh, the pain. Can you give me something for it?
MD: Well, ordinarily I’d suggest a strong dose of “getting over it” but my diagnosis is that you addicted to the attention and the so-called pain is just a mental construct for your next fix.
JL: For the children, doc!

But let’s for a second assume that Lewis is really experiencing the pain he says that he is - and that this isn’t just political theatrics. In that case, the cause of that pain is the content of the joke (that has been interpreted in some way that I fail to comprehend as an insult to the gay community). This presumption holds that the joke is quite damaging to the gay community in Montana which begs the question: why is Lewis the only one still sending letters to the editor to remind everyone of something that he himself admits would otherwise be forgotten?

Would a restaurant owner send a letter to the editor reminding people of a health code violation? Would a celebrity send a letter to the editor reminding people of a bad review for a movie she was in last year? Of course not because those reports are legitimately damaging and bringing them back into the forefront of public discourse would re-open the wound.

The way I see it, Lewis is either very dishonest or very stupid. If the joke was truly damaging and he keeps bringing it up, he’s stupid. But smart money is on dishonesty - his outrage is feigned.

Is to too much to ask Lewis to shoot straight with Montana?

It is always good to idly speculate that the Bush White House is behind everything. I found it particulary charming that Obama’s camp initially fired off this gem regarding the passport incident;

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama’s presidential campaign, called for a complete investigation.

“This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight years,” Burton said. “Our government’s duty is to protect the private information of the American people, not use it for political purposes.”

Turns out it was not Department officials, but employees of Obama’s intelligence advisor.