HSU IT Department

Apparently the 60th anniversary edition of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which I don't own but clearly need to possess, includes a new coda by the author. It is a masterpiece of literate laceration, in which he excoriates the obsession with political correctness which, taken to its extreme, leads to everything sounding just like everything else.

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conservationist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons like not my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall...

Read the full text here, and tell me what you think.

I must thank the Octuplet Mom for waking me up this morning by providing me with inspiration for truly vigorous rant.  What kind of a moron is this woman???  Six kids, ages 2 to 7 (so that's six kids in five years -- ok, some of them are twins, but still), three of them disabled, and all of them on WELFARE, and what does this cosmically stupid woman do?  She has eight more.  EIGHT!!

??!!?!??

I was very close to speechless and believe me that does not happen often.  So now my tax dollars are supporing this women and all FOURTEEN (!!!!!!) of her children.  I practically go speechless again just thinking about it.  (She has the nerve to say that she doesn't consider herself on welfare.  I have news for you, missy -- when you can't support your kids and you take money from the government, Ii believe that's called being on welfare.)

I seriously hope someone is bringing ethics charges against her doctor; he had no business helping this woman have more kids when she couldn't support the ones she already had.  He should be on the hook to pay for them, not Joe Taxpayer.  And who paid for her fertility treatments?  I surely hope that Medicaid didn't, because that would mean that we the taxpayer paid for the privilege of her having eight more kids so that we the taxpayer could then pay to raise them.  Wow.  Maybe she'll be individually mentioned in the bailout bill.

And her "spokesperson" has the nerve to blame people's outrage on the economy, saying that last year people would have welcomed these kids and donated lots of money.  Well now, let's think about this...six months ago she still would have had six kids, the taxpayer still would have been forking over food stamps and welfare checks for her, her three disabled kids would still need lots of attention...hmmm....

Nope.  Still monumentally wrong-headed and colossally selfish.