Pat Oliphant for July 12, 2010

she’s probably a better shot than the men…

New meaning to “Give me another shot”??

That title was true with my Grandmother, who was a 76-year old widow living in a tough section of Detroit on the 1970’s.One night a young drifter started to break through her back door. Her renter and she screamed, but he kept on coming.

So she pulled out a Smith & Wesson she bought after the death of her husband, closed her eyes, and holding n in her arthritic hands, fired once, and killed the perp. She had a license to own the hand gun—Something impossible today, thanks to Mayor Daley, who enjoys personal protection at Detroit tax payer’s expense.

If my grandmother had waited for the police, all they would have done is draw a chalk outline around her and her dead renter’s body. Everyone has a right to protect themselves.

That’s new. Free advertising, jordaner?

Oregon had a “Granny type” who drew a gun on utility workers and refused to cooperate with police. She was tased, and died of a heart attack (or it just fried her pacemaker).

Guns are NOT TOYS, and I’m not going in any bar where they’re encouraged, and yes I AM a gun owner, but not nuts. (Well not a gun nut.)

It started when that danged new sheriff in town went after the lawless by making everyone leave their guns outside the town’s boundary. It’s a communist Hollywood lie. Everyone knows that true Americans enjoy the occasional gun battle in the streets. Just let us shoot back, & maybe blow something up.

An armed society is a polite society - John Heinlein.

Okay doc, I”m officially 50% nuts (PTSD), but in our ongoing conversations here, you know that often those who are “nuts” may be the most rational? (At least we actually base our views on life experiences and education, plus ongoing “self-educaton”.)

billdogGenius_badge said, about 11 hours ago

@beenthere Daley is the mayor of Chicago, not Detroit. What other elements of your story are BS?

BilldogGenius. You’re right, I made a big mistake about Daley being mayor of Detroit.

But the rest about my Grandmother’s story is true. I’m will email you or anyone else jpgs scans of two separate newspaper accounts upon request. Just let me know.

That’s Robert Heinlein. Respect the master’s name. (But don’t believe everything he says.)

fennec said, about 1 hour ago

Too late, Beemnthere. You’re already compromised. How do we know your story is any better than the cr@p you posted? Do we just take your word for it? Like you’d take our word for anything? Yeah, right.

Hey Fennec, did you read my rebuttal? You can know if my post is correct of not by reading the scans I have—Heck, I’ll even snail mail you copies of the original news articles. You don’t have to take my word–Just read the news clippings.

Kitt – I’ve read just about all of Heinlein up to and including Starship Troopers – after that, I’ve read here and there but not the whole corpus.

In his early and middle periods I think he was a truly great story-teller and an extraordinarily fertile concept maker. His politics were always a little dodgy, but if you look at Double Star, for instance, he clearly was liberalish in some ways at least at one time. That one even suggests he had some respect for FDR.

Greatness in literature does not means good sense in politics. Think of Faulkner.

Then there is Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and doing the same thing over again and expecting a different outcome??

Just think what could happen if we used only 6% of our human potential to seeking peace, and leaving “other people” alone?

Actuality certainly doesn’t seem measurable.

Large portions of my mind are constantly working on things that I’m only aware of intermittently. Do I need to breath now? How about pee? When is my car registration due,again? It would help if I could delete the catchy little tune computer viruses that keep bouncing between the lobes, but trying might be how I lost the name of that great book, you know, the one by that guy…

DrC – I so much agree that consciousness is over-rated. I’ve been saying that for years, and people look at me as if I’m crazy.

About a year ago I read Llinas, I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self, and as I recall he has a very good Darwinian account of the development of the self, and a good discussion of how little consciousness actually does for us. But I have to re-read it – this is not my area at all, and I forget it easily. I’ve also found Damasio interesting, and I’ve just started something called Neuronal Man, by Jean-Pierre Changeux. Also some Edelson. Any suggestions? This stuff is so neat. If I weren’t an old coot, I would be tempted to start over in cognitive science. But I don’t really have the scientific temperament, so it’s probably for the best….

Is Jaynes still current? Not that I’d expressly heard otherwise, but I know that book has been around since I was a kid, and I would have thought some sort of paradigm shift had occurred in the last 30 years or so.

Is it readable?

I read Jaynes when I was a pup, and I don’t remember it very well. Is he indebted to Bruno Snell? There is new work on the sense of the self in Homer – particularly Bernard Williams and a guy at Cornell whose name escapes me for the moment. I’m inclined to believe that the difference between Homeric self-consciousness and ours is less than is sometimes supposed. Jack Goody also writes on the difference between oral and written cultures in interesting ways, partly in response to scholars such as Walter J. Ong.

^ You got me. I’m willing to believe either, with a good argument. I just would put the process back in time a bit, pre-Homeric. But that’s just a provincial detail, nothing fundamental. I tend to think that consciousness came about through a Darwinian process of evolution – and that, as I recall, is part of Llinas’ argument.

Bruno Snell is a German classicist of the mid-century – he wrote a book called The Development of the Mind – Die Entwicklung des Geistes, if my German is right (I read it in English). He argued that Homer had no sense of a unified self, and he then tried to trace the development of the sense of a self through to Plato. All in somewhat Hegelian terms. The book has been extremely influential, among classicists and beyond. Some Homerists, however, defend their master against this primitivist charge. Hayden Pellicia, that’s the guy at Cornell. The more I work on Homer the more I am impressed by his sophistication, so I would need a very strong argument that he didn’t have a sense of the self. I think both the Iliad and the Odyssey are deeply concerned with the relationship between the individual and society, and I don’t see how that could be without a pretty good sense of the self. In fact, I think it’s our time that has problems with the unitary self, more than Homer.

But sure there’s a difference between me and Achilles. He could run faster. But I exist.

I guess they are going to keep running the cartoon until she shoots someone.

Dr canuk, YES Golmans emotional intelligence, shld be required in juvenile halls,and youth jails.

I think his right on there.

Alright! Now I can “accidentally” shoot someone!

My kind of women

Shoot Someone Already – I love Oliphant, and want to see a new toon.

Sooky Rottweiler says; I wonlunteered to keep an eye on my human’s grandma…trouble is, old humans are usually afraid of me.