Letter to the Editor Sam,
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Just a brief note to support you in the fight for liberty.
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Any thoughts on the situation in America?
—Joseph, of Northridge, California
There are too many people and not enough humility.
—editor
Smitten With Embarrassment Department
(Seldom Used) Sam Aurelius Milam III![15x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/15x5_Page_Background.gif)
In the December 2023 issue, I made the statement, “Mass shootings aren’t the problem. Government is the problem.”
In the context of the article, my intended meaning is clear.
Sadly, the first sentence is easily taken out of context, or misconstrued.
I try to avoid such clumsy errors but, in this case, I failed. I expect that somebody will misconstrue the statement and accuse me
of approving of mass shootings. I don’t approve of mass shootings.
They are
a problem but not
the problem.
The difference between
a and
the, in context, changes the meaning of the statement.
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Nicholas NelsonFiction by Sam Aurelius Milam III![15x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/15x5_Page_Background.gif)
Nicholas Nelson had never obtained a college degree, or even gone to college, but he’d spent his entire life, from early childhood, studying physics. He knew more about physics than anybody else in the world, without exception. He was completely unknown within scientific circles, but he was the greatest physicist in the world.
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Nicholas Nelson lived in the granny apartment behind his mother’s house. He’d lived there for his entire adult life. He did his work in his mother’s garage. He’d
built all of his devices there, himself. It was a small space,
but it contained devices that would have amazed even the scientists
at CERN. The devices were small, and necessarily so, given his
limited space and finances, but he could do things that the CERN scientists
wouldn’t have believed.
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Nicholas Nelson intended to write a series of books, documenting his work, after the work was complete. He was waiting only to finish his last project, a time machine.
After the series of books was published, he would be recognized, and rightly so, as the greatest physicist in the world.
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Nicholas Nelson finished his time machine.
He was so confident that it would work that he didn’t even intend
to test it on a rock or even on a cat. (His mother wouldn’t let him anywhere near her cats.) He intended to actually take the maiden voyage himself.
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Nicholas Nelson built a simple timer to click the activation switch for him, because he couldn’t reach the switch from within his time machine’s region of influence. He adjusted his time machine for five days in the future. He left a little note for his mother. He set the timer for 20 seconds and stepped into the region of influence. The time machine sent him five days
into the future.
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Nicholas Nelson had neglected one small circumstance of physics, or maybe he just never thought of it. Time and distance are totally unrelated. They’re completely independent of one another. So, when Nicholas Nelson appeared in the future, he appeared at exactly the same location in the universe that he’d occupied before the transfer. Meanwhile, the solar system had spent five days following its long and lonely path around the galaxy, leaving that location far behind. Nicholas Nelson didn’t live long enough, in the vacuum of free space, to understand what had happened. He might not have lived long enough to even notice.
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Nicholas Nelson had exactly the same speed and direction, after his time transfer, as he’d had before it. Momentum and energy are always conserved. It’s a law of physics.
So, Nicholas Nelson spent quite a lot of time, thereafter, following his own long and lonely path around the galaxy, a path that somewhat approximated that of the solar system.
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Nicholas Nelson’s mother eventually rented the granny apartment to a college student studying at the local
community college. The student had a car and needed the garage,
so Nicholas Nelson’s mother hired some day laborers to take the
huge accumulation of junk out of the garage and haul it to the dump.
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Barely CensoredSam Aurelius Milam III![15x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/15x5_Page_Background.gif)
I watch a lot of funny videos on the TV. A while back, I saw one that was amusing for a slightly different reason than is usually the case. It was a normal family and friends situation, with some people horsing around on a lawn somewhere. As might be expected, one of the women backed up, tripped over something, went over backwards, butt down, legs up, skirt flying. I noticed right away that part of the view was blurred. The reason for the censorship quickly became evident when the narrator said, “Now that’s a good reason to always wear panties!”
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