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Rugged toys

Polaris Industries’ Ranger RZR

REINVENTING THE WHEEL_Stylish Off-Roaders By JONATHAN WELSH, April 17, 2008; Page D8

What It Is: A new group of small recreational utility vehicles are bringing horsepower and style to a previously dowdy segment of off-road driving. For years farmers and ranchers have used small two-seat utility vehicles to get around on their land. The machines, which fit somewhere between all-terrain vehicles and small off-road trucks, are hard-working but slow — about 15 miles an hour at most. Now a small group of companies are building faster, sportier models that appear better suited for racing across the Baja peninsula than hauling hay bales. Some of the new models can top 50 miles an hour and have shunned the plain, boxy styling of their predecessors. RUV sales represent a small but rapidly growing part of the overall utility-vehicle market and totaled about 80,000 units last year, up from 20,000 in 2005.

How to Get It: Kawasaki, a motorcycle maker also known for its lineup of utilitarian but unglamorous Mule work vehicles, recently rolled out the Teryx. The new machine is fast and looks almost like a sports car next to the Mules. Polaris Industries Inc. added the RZR (pronounced “razor”) to its range of Ranger utilities for 2008. Yamaha and Arctic Cat, known mainly for motorcycles and snowmobiles, respectively, added the speedy, sportier versions of their Rhino and Prowler vehicles.

Upside: Now you can take a friend for a fast ride across the range or along a forest trail more easily and comfortably than was possible with traditional ATVs, which have little passenger room. The new models have car-like features, such as the adjustable tilting steering wheel, disc brakes and digital dashboard gauges on the Arctic Cat Prowler XTX 700 H1 LE. Like older models, the new RUVs have pickup-truck style cargo beds and can tow small trailers.

Kawasaki’s Teryx 750

Downside: Extra power and speed are sure to get unwanted attention from environmentalists and others who frown on noise and potential landscape damage that motor vehicles bring to the forest and other natural areas. (Hunters and outdoor enthusiasts are a target market.) RUVs’ larger size could make them harder to handle on trails and other tight spaces than smaller Downside: Extra power and speed are sure to get unwanted attention from environmentalists and others who frown on noise and potential landscape damage that motor vehicles bring to the forest and other natural areas. (Hunters and outdoor enthusiasts are a target market.) RUVs’ larger size could make them harder to handle on trails and other tight spaces than smaller ATVs.

Cost: RUVs aren’t cheap. Prices range roughly from $9,799 for a basic version of the Kawasaki Teryx to $12,099 for the Yamaha Rhino 700 F1. Special editions are available, from the camouflage-colored Kawasaki Teryx NRA Outdoors model for $11,349 and the Ducks Unlimited version of Yamaha’s Rhino for $11,499.

Write to Jonathan Welsh at jonathan.welsh@wsj.com.

'Race and American Memory'

Roger Cohen of The New York Times (or should I say the International Herald Tribune?) is fast becoming my favorite columnist. He is a great writer with a searching conscience and vision.

Cohen was writing about the decision by Congress in 2003 to spend $500 million to build the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is set to open in 2015.

The question Cohen asked, after taking a measure of the Holocaust Museum, was why there is no institution before now to wrestle with the America’s tortured racial history, especially as it pertains to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and violence perpetrated against African Americans, including lynchings.

A timely question.

For nations to confront their failings is arduous. It involves what Germans, experts in this field, call Geschichtspolitik, or “the politics of history.” It demands the passage from the personal to the universal, from individual memory to memorial. Yet there is as yet in the United States no adequate memorial to the ravages of race.

The King Center is a fine institution. But it’s a modest museum, like others scattered through the country that deal with aspects of the nation’s most divisive subject. Why, I wondered as I viewed the exhibit, does the Holocaust, a German crime, hold pride of place over U.S. lynchings in American memorialization?

Let’s be clear: I am not comparing Jim Crow with industrialized mass murder, or suggesting an exact Klan-Nazi moral equivalency. But I do think some psychological displacement is at work when a magnificent Holocaust Memorial Museum, in which the criminals are not Americans, precedes a Washington institution of equivalent stature dedicated to the saga of national violence that is slavery and segregation.

I lived in Berlin for three years, a period spanning the Bundestag’s decision in 1999 to build a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The debate, 54 years after the collapse of Hitler’s Reich, was fraught. It takes time to traverse the politics of history, confront guilt and arrive at an adequate memorialization of national crimes that also offers a possible path to reconciliation.

Germans have confronted the monstrous in them. In the end, they concluded the taint was so pervasive that Degussa, which was linked to the company that produced Zyklon-B gas, was permitted to provide the anti-graffiti coating for the memorial. The truth can be brutal, but flight from it even more devastating.

America’s heroic narrative of itself is still in flight from race.

'Wright loves America'

http://foxnews1.a.mms.mavenapps.net/mms/rt/1/site/foxnews1-foxnews-pub01-live/current/videolandingpage/fncLargePlayer/client/embedded/embedded.swf

Here’s a brief description from wikipedia:

The Reverend Michael Louis Pfleger (born May 22, 1949[1]) is a Roman Catholic priest and social activist in Chicago, Illinois.

A German American from the south side of Chicago, Pfleger attended Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary South, Loyola University and the University of Saint Mary of the Lake. He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Chicago on May 14, 1975. Since 1981, Pfleger has been pastor of the mostly African American Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood. When he was appointed to his present position at the age of 31, he became the youngest pastor in the Chicago archdiocese.His parishioners have affectionately referred to him as a “blue-eyed black soul”. Under Pfleger’s leadership, Saint Sabina has established an Employment Resource Center, a Social Service Center, and also an Elders home.

Father Pfleger’s social activism has brought him recognition throughout Chicago and beyond. He has often collaborated and associated with African American religious, political and social leaders such as Jeremiah Wright, Joseph Lowery, Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, and Louis Farrakhan. What follows are some of his most notable campaigns.

The black prayer

From Lewis Blain:

Why Did You Make Me Black Lord …..
Lord . Why did you make me black?
Why did you make someone
the world would hold back?
Black is the color of dirty clothes,
of grimy hands and feet…
Black is the color of darkness,
of tired beaten streets…

Why did you give me thick lips,
a broad nose and kinky hair?
Why did you create someone
who receives the hated stare?

Black is the color of the bruised eye
when someone gets hurt…
Black is the color of darkness,
black is the color of dirt.

Why is my bone structure so thick,
my hips and cheeks so high?
Why are my eyes brown,
and not the color of the sky?

Why do people think I’m useless?
How come I feel so used?
Why do people see my skin
and think I should be abused?

Lord, I just don’t understand…
What is it about my skin?
Why is it some people want to hate me
and not know the person within?

Black is what people are ‘Labeled’
when others want to keep them away…
Black is the color of shadows cast…
Black is the end of the day.

Lord you know my own people mistreat me, and you know this just ain’t right…
They don’t like my hair, they don’t like my skin, as they say I’m too dark or too light!

Lord, don’t you think
it’s time to make a change?
Why don’t you redo creation
and make everyone the same?

God’s Reply:

Why did I make you black? Why did I make you black?

I made you in the color of coal
from which beautiful diamonds are formed…

I made you in the color of oil,
the black gold which keeps people warm.

Your color is the same as the rich dark soil that grows the food you need…
Your color is the same as the black stallion and panther, Oh what majestic creatures indeed!

All colors of the heavenly rainbow
can be found throughout every nation…
When all these colors are blended,
you become my greatest creation!

Your hair is the texture of lamb’s wool,
such a beautiful creature is he…
I am the shepherd who watches them,
I will ALWAYS watch over thee!

You are the color of the midnight sky,
I put star glitter in your eyes…
There’s a beautiful smile hidden behind your pain…
That’s why your cheeks are so high!

You are the color of dark clouds
from the hurricanes I create in September…
I made your lips so full and thick,
so when you kiss…they will remember!

Your stature is strong,
your bone structure thick to withstand the burden of time…
The reflection you see in the mirror,
that image that looks back, that is MINE!

So get off your knees,
look in the mirror and tell me what you see?
I didn’t make you in the image of darkness…
I made you in the image of ME!

The machines

This is a future that should not be lived and, with this incident, hopefully it’ll never come to pass.

I am talking about news that robots that the U.S. Army hopes to use to fight Iraqi insurgents acted like they had a mind of their own and that the army has decided to retire the damn things, setting the program back, at least 10 years and, maybe, as much as 20 years. I don’t know how else to formulate this but to say that we should not be in Iraq and I don’t blame the people there for fighting back. Without these machines, we have spread enough death and destruction on that nation the past five years. Talk about “smart weapons.” Here’s a commenter from last August when the army announced the robots have been deployed:

Posted by: Jon | Aug 2, 2007 2:20:13 PM

Wow, this is really a low point in the honor and integrity of our armed forces. The more we remove ourselves from the moral responsibility of taking human life, the more we will be willing to take it without regard to the consequences.

To me this is another reason why we can’t win this struggle against these extremists, they are all to willing to put everything on the line, while we look for ways to get out of the fight and engage from air conditioned command centers.

“If these robots kill an innocent civilian, who will be held responsible?”

Probably no one, they’ll write it off as some sort of malfunction and bad officers will finally free themselves from the responsibility of command.

Posted by: DF | Aug 2, 2007 2:22:47 PM