Dec 01 2011

Well…. I didn’t think it happened ON PURPOSE

Category: humorharmonicminer @ 8:17 am

Man is accidentally shot by his own dog |

And strangely enough, that’s what really happened to a hapless dog owner in Brigham City, Utah. The man in question–a 46-year-old hunting enthusiast who is not named in local news reports on the incident–got a behind-full of birdshot courtesy of his loyal canine companion when he was out duck hunting over the weekend.

KSL.com reports the man and his dog were traveling in a canoe-like boat when the man stepped out into a shallow marsh to set up some decoys. His left his 12-gauge shotgun resting across the bow of the boat, according to Box Elder County Sheriff’s Deputy Kevin Potter.

That’s when the dog “did something to make the gun discharge,” Potter said. “I don’t know if the safety device was on. It’s not impossible the dog could have taken it off safety.”

Apparently excited to join his owner in the marsh, the dog jumped up on the boat’s bow and stepped on the gun. The gun was fired, hitting the man in the buttocks with 27 pellets of birdshot.

UPDATE: The man lived, so no Darwin award here…. though I assume he won’t be doing much sitting for awhile.

UPDATE II: You don’t suppose his last name is Cheney, do you?


Dec 01 2011

In hock for diversity

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 2:23 am

Here’s an article from Heather McDonald in National Review:

Pepper-Spraying Taxpayers

As protesters festively (oops! I mean “heroically”) rally on college quads across California in the wake of the gratuitous macing of a dozen Occupy Wall Street wannabes at University of California–Davis last Friday, UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion declared that the rising tuition at California’s public universities is giving him “heartburn.” It should, since Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri and his fellow diversity bureaucrats are a large cause of those skyrocketing college fees, not just in California but nationally.

Yep. Given that the real costs and budget allocations are often pretty opaque even to university “insiders” like faculty, it’s pretty hard to know just how much the essentially leftist political goal of diversity is costing higher education under the guise of fairness, or openness, or whatever. I suppose it’s different in different places. But private schools certainly have their share of this problem, too.

This paragraph is especially on point:

The Big Lie of the campus diversity industry has been that without constant monitoring by diversity bureaucrats, faculty and other administrators would discriminate against minority and female professors and students. In fact, anyone who has spent a day inside a university knows that the exact opposite is demonstrably the case: Hundreds of thousands of hours and dollars are wasted each year in the futile pursuit of the same inadequate pool of remotely qualified underrepresented minority and female applicants that every other campus in the country is chasing with as much desperate zeal. The hiring process has been thoroughly corrupted. Faculty applicants are brought onto campus who have no chance of being hired, either because the hiring committee incorrectly assumed from their names or résumés that they were the right sort of minority (East Asians don’t count) for a position set aside for just such a minority, or because, although they were the right sort of minority, their qualifications were so low that their only purpose in being interviewed was to fill an outreach quota.

The whole thing is worth reading. Click the link at the top.

One thing I have to point out, in all the diversity talk: I haven’t heard any real concern expressed over the disproportionate female tilted gender balance of incoming students. It’s 60/40 female to male in lots of universities, and 55/45 almost everywhere else.

I haven’t heard anything about affirmative action for admissions of white male students. But numerically speaking, in the quota-think of the left, such a thing is surely needed.

But maybe that time will come.

Or not.

It’s much more fun to prattle on about white male privilege than to wonder why more white males aren’t in the university to hear themselves being accused of being white males.