A Memory from This Day in History by Pat Hurley Laird


It’s been a year since she posted this on the first full day of Spring, 2018. Robert’s Attempt to Get Banned from Book Publishing in Two Different Centuries. It’s pricey but worth it for the Renaissance artwork and the Turing Test flowcharts alone.

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Mad Max 2026

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  The Interceptor The Lord of the Rings is a great trilogy, both as books and movies, but it’s not my favorite trilogy this morning. I’m here to talk about Mad Max, the Road Warrior, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Both stories are allegories, LOTR in the grand universal sense, MM in the lowdown ‘fighting for our lives here, boss’ sense. Both stories apply to our current situation in America, but one is more useful as a tool of both engagement and patience. That would be the guy with the leg brace and the bad attitude. It doesn’t hurt that I identify personally more with Max than I do with Frodo Baggins or, for that matter with Aragorn, Gandalf, or Legolas. There’s an otherness about both settings, but Max’s focus on roads, vehicles, speed, and gasoline are close enough to my own youth that it’s easier for  me to be behind the wheel with him than dodging orcs on the ramparts of Gondor or in the caves of Moria. I have driven fast, a lot, and in more ways than one, very often in...
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A Colony Called Canada, Part 1

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  This is only the first of two, possibly three posts on the most overlooked problem area in the Western Hemisphere. This is the part where I do what most commentators rarely do, come clean about the existing biases on the subject in my own past, which are on record and not repudiated. A keyword search here at IPR will show you two recent posts about the recent convulsions in U,S.-Canada relations, but this one might have remained hidden if I hadn’t dug it out from the Internet Archive to show you. That’s where I’ll leave it for now while work continues on researching the present mess. Tuesday, July 05, 2005  Canada Day! One of Canada's remote provinces launches its two fireworks. REGRET . Yeah, it's a bit late.  Canada Day  is really celebrated on July 1, but it's impossible to pay attention to it until after the July 4th festivities are over. Even now, I feel kind of guilty discussing Canada Day without having done more to reemphasize the profound significance ...
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Not to be an alarmist, but a Reminder is in order…

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You remember this guy ? His name was John Wilkes Booth. He killed President Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday it is today. He was a Confederate sympathizer who believed Lincoln and the federal government that enforced United States laws were evil. Pretty much like — no, exactly like — today’s Democrat know-it-alls who encourage violence against federal laws removing the technical non-voters they think they own like the crooked judges who make their fortunes. John Wilkes Booth was considered insignificant before he killed the President. He was an actor, related to a more famous actor and living pretty much on his name only anymore. Sound like any bios you’ve heard lately?  I’m just asking you to remember that the following people may seem like insignificant entertainers with all their violent threats agains Trump, but in their kind of work they all learn how to load and cocks guns. And pull the trigger while aiming at the red laser dot.  Yeah, these people. What do they all claim...
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  P. T. Barnum’s Most Famous Attraction My first job at NCR Corporation was in Product Marketing, which encompasses marketing strategy, marketing communications, and sales support in the form of competition information. Yawn. But my career began with an immediate crisis. When I was taking stock of what I had to work with, I tried to find my division marketing strategy. There wasn’t one. Well, there was, but it wasn’t a strategy; it was a simple directive. Pursue major accounts. Period. So I wrote a marketing strategy document and showed it to the smartest guy I knew at NCR, the one-man band who gave Executive Briefings to targeted major account decision makers. He shook his head at me. “It’s great,” he told me. “But there’s nobody to show it to. Not your boss, not his boss, and not the Director of Marketing. He doesn’t give this kind of stuff the time of day.”  Oh. We talked. He got more enthusiastic. “What might work is sending it directly to our real boss, the Division VP. Y...
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What’s wrong with this picture ? A rough history of the Great White Mess as a North American colony has been covered in a previous post , but what must concern us as American citizens is the role they’ll be playing in the critical years ahead. None of the options is promising. Geographically, Canada is the second largest nation on earth. In every other respect it is not even an also ran. Maybe a ‘coulda ran’ depending on how you look at it, but ‘didna ran’ is more like it. For most of their history as a quasi-semi-ex-colony of the British Empire and stepchild of the British Commonwealth, they seem to have just been just sitting there taking handouts from the adults of western civilization. When you look for greats (and I have), they are there but in small numbers and often with sad stories.  Their greatest writer was Malcolm Lowry, not Canadian by birth but by exile and adoption, who died soon after writing what has been ranked (by the people who do such rankings) as the eleventh b...
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