have a happy Turkey day!

Mine lives on a bookshelf. I have The Yale Shakespeare: The Complete Works, which is a beast: http://www.amazon.com/The-Yale-Shakespeare-Complete-Works/dp/0760759391/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_2/180-7267854-3267838.

I've actually been thinking of picking up something that's a bit more manageable for reading purposes. Mine is only really usable when sitting at a desk.

I actually have multiple editions, the most useful being The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, with its copious annotations:

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Pelican-Shakespeare-William/dp/0141000589

However, my go-to version still tends to be my fifties-era Britannica Great Books edition, which is the first version with which I read the entire canon, and has the most highlights and markings from my readings in it; that makes it easier to find passages of note to me.


As an aside to that, I got into a Facebook argument with a couple of friends over the issue of gun control post-Sandy Hook, with me being the one to argue for closing the "gun show loophole," regulating extended clips and so-called "assault weapons," and keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, and my friends arguing for an unlimited, unrestricted view of the Second Amendment. One of them foolishly asked, "Stephen, have you even READ the Second Amendment? It says . . . " and then proceeded to misquote it to me. I reached over without even getting up from my desk and grabbed my dog-eared Britannica Great Books version of the American State papers and found my handily yellow-highlighted relevant passages to quote back to him, accurately, without leaving out the part about the "well-regulated militia" that he did, and also hit him back with the portions of Article One that empower Congress to pass laws to do just that, namely, regulate the militia (and its arms.)


Important life lesson for him: never, NEVER attack a pedant while simultaneously misquoting something on the subject at hand! It is just possible that not only has he read what you are talking about, but he likely has the reference material right at hand to back him up! I dearly, dearly love my Britannica Great Books. They were my first exposure to great literature. My father bought the entire series one volume at a time back when it was published in the Fifties, and I always told him that when he died, I did not care about anything in his house, but I wanted those books. Since he never really uses them anymore, several years ago he finally just went ahead and gave them to me BEFORE he passes on.

The incident in Sandy Hooks is terrible. While the world continues to trod along, I often think about those families for whom time will not move along quite so quickly. Nevertheless, the event might be local to Sandy Hooks, but its effects are far-reaching. Christmas must have been a blur for many in 2012.

I will be interested to see how the US reacts regarding gun control. Even in Canada (where gun controls are tighter, though lenient when compared with the likes of the UK), you will find many divided on the issue. I think there should be tighter regulations, but it will be interesting to see if political arguments postpone or derail a lobby for new regulations.

Gun control. Republican are controlled by the NRA and all the news media has moved on to the latest news. Didn't you hear a papparazi died trying to take a picture of bieber and Kim kardishan is preganant. Americans are... it's pointless. (tada).

Indeed.

Having never visited the site, I decided to look up the NRA's website. Interesting pitch on the home page.

Not sure that I can take that right now. Their whole "let's arm the schools" thing is bad enough.

Interesting was probably the wrong word choice. Not sure I could have captured the irony in my voice as I typed that. To put it bluntly, their homepage reads like propaganda. I get the right to bear arms, but that is taking it to a bad and unsafe place.

Oh no, I got your intentions perfectly clearly. But I still could not stand even looking at it. Just reading Wayne LaPierre's speech from a few days ago -- made, in a true definition of irony, while a psycho in Pennsylvania was shooting up people on the highway -- was about all that I could take. And I have little tolerence for arguments made about the Second Amendment from people who have supported violating the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments, as nearly all of those who speak up about the Second Amendment have condonded warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, torture, and extrajudicial assassination.

Assuming that you can segregate political positions as left-leaning and right leaning, I think the courts have generally gone to far to the left. However, in this case, I think the courts have gone to far to the right. I don't see how possession of assult weapns has any connection to our right to a well-regulated militia.

The idea of possessing these items as a collector seems equally as lame. Would I be allowed to collect historically accurate examples of WMD or how about examples of meth. labs?

No countdown in that post? Disappointment!!!!


It is one of those arguments that falls to a reductio ad absurdem. Even those who are in favor of unrestricted access to any kind of weaponry will eventually draw a line SOMEWHERE. Do they support the individual right to bear grenade launchers? Stinger missle launchers? Tactical nuclear weapons? Of course they do not. So they DO think that there is a line where the government should regulate or ban certain kinds of weapons. Since none of these are explicitly mentioned in the Second Amendment, any more than so-called "assault weapons," then they are already acknowledging that the Second Amendment is NOT absolute, and therefore conversations about banning extended magazines, automatic and some semi-automatic weapons are hardly unacceptable.

The militia part drives me batty, too. Most of the defenders of the individual right to bear arms say that the "founder fathers" thought that it was necessary to allow the people to rise up against a tyrannical goverment. However, if you check out the powers given to Congress in Article One regarding the militia and how to regulate it, they explicitly gave Congress the power to call out the militia, among other things to "supress insurrection." So ironically, the very purpose of the militia was the OPPOSITE of what people think! (And of course, the whole point of the militia anyway was to give the government an army that it could call up at any time to not just supress insurrection, but to defend against invaders as well; the "founding fathers" actually had an abhorrence toward standing armies and made the provision about the militia in their stead. Needless to say, we have gone far afield on that whole "standing armies" issue!)


By the way, ethelred, did you check out my new toy that I posted pictures of in then Bond thread?

By the way, ethelred, did you check out my new toy that I posted pictures of in then Bond thread?.

I missed it, which page?

Second-to-last -- 29, I think?