We are thrilled to announce that, after much deliberation, a suitable site has been chosen for our first in-person National convention: Beautiful Utqiagvik, Alaska!
This historic and close-knit burg lies just a few miles from Point Barrow on the idyllic Beaufort Sea. As it turns out, meeting space comes at a real discount in Utqiagvik, particularly during the off-season in late January.
This will also be an invaluable opportunity to bring our whole-life message to an area where ASP organizing has been relatively sparse.
Guests will be treated to the cultural riches of the North Slope region, including a traditional Inupiat delicacies like raw caribou and whale blubber, snowmobiling, ice fishing, and a guided sealing expedition (guests will be provided with their own club).
To make this an even more memorable occasion, we will be rolling out some exclusive ASP swag, such as our members-only Pelican anorak, great for those famously brisk Utqiagvik nights
See here for seasonal forecasts and plan accordingly.
For those interested, we are also planning to host an ecumenical sunrise prayer service at 1 PM Sunday, followed by vespers at 2:15 PM.
The party welcomes your feedback as we plan for this exciting next step in the ASP’s history!
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This is an important point, in all seriousness: trade can and does brings benefits, but we need to look at the costs for all those cheap consumer products that don’t get rung up at the cash register.
Since we’re talking about socks, Fort Payne, Alabama was the sock capital of the world until the 1990’s. One small town literally made 1 in 8 socks on the planet, and the factories employed more than half the town.
The thing about mass shootings is that they are a meme–in the original sense of the word, that is. They are a cultural template for a certain way people behave that has been propagated overtime (like a gene in biology).
That is, for a certain subset of isolated, angry, unstable men (usually it’s men), lashing out at the world with a gun has become a recognizable pattern that they can emulate to deal (if you can call it that) with their inner rage. One commentator called it a “slow-motion riot.”
Unhappiness and mental/emotional struggles exist in every society. But this particular deadly meme has only really come to the forefront in ours during the last several decades.
One of the distasteful aspects of our national mass-shooting ritual is the part where we all speculate about the motives and identity of the shooter before we know anything about them, just to make sure we can get a dunk in on our ideological opponents.
We're not saying "don't politicize this," because there often are real social and political issues at play. What we *are* saying is that people should question their kneejerk reactions when those reactions are always to blame groups of people they are already inclined to dislike.
On that note: tragedies like this are just as worthy of our attention as the more dramatic Columbine-style mass shootings are (maybe more so, as they're distressingly common). But it's rare that they're discussed except as rhetorical point-scoring.
As the guys at PragerU should know, one the better takes on Ayn Rand remains that of Whittaker Chambers, a long-time Soviet spy who recanted, then became a political conservative and a writer for National Review.
"The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: “Excruciatingly awful.” I find it a remarkably silly book."
There are legitimate ways to criticize the Biden administration's immigration policy (including in ways it fails to live up to those "humane treatment" claims).
"Actually we should be crueler" is not it, though.
You would think immigration hawks would be invested in thinking that border enforcement and humane treatment are not incompatible (which most people agree with, broadly speaking).
Looks like PragerU didn't catch our thread yesterday.
It's kinda weird, though, that a group that praises Judeo-Christian values so much is also pushing this sort of content, which equates morality with pure liberalism, in the classical sense of the word.