And isn't it odd that smiley-faces should have been revived in the form of emoticons on the Internet, an invention that started as a military/governmental application only later adapted by academia? Oh, I use them, because they're convention in a world where it's perilous difficult to convey emotional content, never forgetting that their color, yellow, is the color of alarm and anxiety, and ought never to be used except as an accent. (That would be today's interior decorating tip, guys.)

Good morning, Frank!

My history training has long taught me to consider the source. This is what the source you linked to has to say about himself.

Rich Smith has been a freelance journalist since 1976 and is currently based in a nearly liberal-free zone along the rim of California's fearsome Mojave Desert. He is a regular columnist for Ether Zone.

"Nearly liberal-free zone", hm? Why is that? Is it because liberals don't like the desert? Or is it because liberals find the intellectual climate as hostile and oppressive as the Mojave itself because conservatives in the Ether Zone (which term reminds me of the expression "off in the ether", but never mind) call them Nazis and depict them as the ultimate evil in order to dismiss their ideas? It's difficult to live in a place where you have no voice and your neighbors draw swastikas all over your stuff.

Perhaps thinking like Mr. Smith's can only flourish in places where genuine, living, breathing, human examples of the opposition are not present to contradict the extreme caricatures of liberalism which pay Mr. Smith's bills. It's easy to make up stories about a whole group of people when none of them live among you. That's kind-of the point of segregation, defacto and otherwise.

That's also why I have never entirely shut up. If someone is going to hate me for my beliefs, by God, I am going to be the one who defines what those beliefs really are.

Regards--
Mary Anne

PS -- Order your King Cake yet?