When you see a front page article on the MSNBC website about women carrying guns you know that we are finally beginning to make headway in the battle about gun rights.Well, we've known we've been making progress for some time, but point taken.
"I learned two main lessons while working on this book," said McCrum, who divides her time between New York City and California when she isn’t traveling for work. "One is that on the subject of guns, nobody is neutral. And the other is that when you get outside of the blue-state cities, everybody has a gun."Gee, ya THINK? "40% of households" my aching buttocks. Forty percent will admit to it.
The story of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane's successful attempt to put together a baseball club on a budget by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his players.The theme of the film is that, while it's possible to buy a championship team if you have bottomless pockets, it's also possible to build a winning team on a budget if you can select players who can get on base and otherwise don't cost that much.
Ride on through the night, ride onI suggest full screen, and crank it. It's worth your eight minutes.
Ride on through the night, ride on
There are visions; there are memories
There are echoes of thundering hooves
There are fires; there is laughter
There's the sound of a thousand doves
In the velvet of the darkness
By the silhouette of silent trees
They are watching, waiting
They are witnessing life's mysteries
Cascading stars on the slumbering hills
They are dancing as far as the sea
Riding o'er the land, you can feel its gentle hand
Leading on to its destiny
Take me with you on this journey
Where the boundaries of time are now tossed
In cathedrals of the forest
In the words of the time is now lost
Find the answers; ask the questions
Find the boles of the clear ancient tree
Take me dancing; take me singing
I ride on too waits the sea
I ride on
In cathedrals of the forest
In the words of the tongues now lost
Find the answers, ask the questions
Find the roots of an ancient tree
Take me dancing, take me singing
I'll ride on till the moon meets the sea
Ride on through the night, ride on
Ride on through the night, ride on
Ride on through the night, ride on
Ride on through the night, ride on
Bottom line: this woman couldn't get a clue if she smeared herself with clue musk and did the clue mating dance in the middle of a field full of horny clues at the height of the clue mating season.Read the post this comes from. It's a perfect assessment. And applicable to more than just clueless columnists.
..support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.has become meaningless. Mere platitudes uttered to put an "X" in the proper box.
(H)ere in America, we've morphed from John Gross's summary of Obama's message— "America is the greatest country on earth: help me change it"— to the Republican message: "Social Security is a Ponzi scheme: let's work to save it for future generations!"
And we think Obama has a tin ear.
Ezra Marsh
Baltimore, Maryland
The Dead ParrotHey, this is a gun blog. The joke's got a gun in it....
At dawn the telephone rings, "Hello, Senor Rod? This is Ernesto, the caretaker at your country house."
"Ah yes, Ernesto. What can I do for you? Is there a problem?"
"Um, I am just calling to advise you, Senor Rod, that your parrot, he is dead.
"My parrot? Dead? The one that won the International competition?"
"Si, Senor, that's the one."
"Damn! That's a pity! I spent a small fortune on that bird. What did he die from?
"From eating the rotten meat, Senor Rod."
"Rotten meat? Who the hell fed him rotten meat?"
"Nobody, Senor. He ate the meat of the dead horse."
"Dead horse? What dead horse?"
"The thoroughbred, Senor Rod."
"My prize thoroughbred is dead?
"Yes, Senor Rod, he died from all that work pulling the water cart."
"Are you insane? What water cart?"
"The one we used to put out the fire, Senor."
"Good Lord! What fire are you talking about, man?"
"The one at your house, Senor! A candle fell and the curtains caught on
fire."
"What the hell? Are you saying that my mansion is destroyed because of a
candle?!"
"Yes, Senor Rod."
"But there's electricity at the house! What was the candle for?"
"For the funeral, Senor Rod."
"WHAT BLOODY FUNERAL??!!"
"Your wife's, Senor Rod. She showed up very late one night and I thought she was a thief, so I shot her with your new Kreighoff Limited Edition Custom Gold Engraved Trap Special with the custom-made Wenig Exhibition Grade Stock. "
SILENCE........... LONG SILENCE.........VERY LONG SILENCE..............
"Ernesto, if you scratched that shotgun, you're in deep shit."
And seriously, Egypt: I have to admire the pluck, but how many ass-whippings do you need to take at the hands of the Israelis before you realize that your days of martial glory were buried with Ramses II? You've been conquered by the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, French, and British. The only nation you've defeated in war since the discovery of iron is Libya, and they can't even kick their own ass without outside help.The French. That's gotta hurt.
We are going to be gifted with a Health Care plan we are forced to purchase, and fined if we do not, which purportedly covers at least ten million more people, without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman says he does not understand it, passed by a Congress that did not read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a President who smokes, with funding administered by a Treasury chief who did not pay his taxes, for which we will be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security & Medicare, all to be overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese, and financed by a country that is broke!! What the hell could possibly go wrong? -- Donald Trump
A couple of days after 9/11, the celebrated German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen told a radio interviewer that the destruction of the World Trade Center was "the greatest work of art ever."What he actually said was worse.
I'm reminded of the late Sir Thomas Beecham's remark when asked if he'd ever conducted any Stockhausen: "No," he replied. "But I think I've trodden in some." Stockhausen stepped in his own that week: in those first days after the assault, even the anti-American Left felt obliged to be somewhat circumspect. But at a certain level the composer understood what Osama was getting at.
Nevertheless, Stockhausen was wrong. The "greatest work of art" is not the morning of 9/11, with the planes slicing through the buildings, and the smoke and the screaming and the jumping, and the swift, eerily smooth collapse of the towers. No, the most eloquent statement about America in the early twenty-first century is Ground Zero in the years after. 9/11 was something America's enemies did to us. The hole in the ground a decade later is something we did to ourselves. By 2010, Michael Bloomberg, the take-charge get-it-done make-it-happen mayor of New York was reduced to promising that that big hole in Lower Manhattan isn't going to be there for another decade, no sir. "I'm not going to leave this world with that hole in the ground ten years from now," he declared defiantly. In the twenty-first century, that's what passes for action, for get-tough boot the can another decade down the road. Sure, those jihad boys got lucky and took out a couple of skyscrapers, but the old can't-do spirit kicked in, and a mere ten years later we had a seven-story hole on which seven billion dollars had been lavished. But, if we can't put up a replacement building within a decade, we can definitely do it within two. Probably. As a lonely steel skeleton began lethargically to rise from the 16-acre site, the unofficial estimated date of the completion for the brand new "1 World Trade Center" was said to be 2018. That date should shame every American.
What happened? Everyone knows the "amber waves of grain" and "purple mountain majesties" in "America the Beautiful," but Katharine Lee Bates' words are also a hymn to modernity:
Oh beautiful for patriot dreamAmerica the Beautiful" is not a nostalgic evocation of a pastoral landscape but a paean to its potential, including the gleaming metropolis. Miss Bates visited the Columbian Exposition in Chicago just before July 4, 1893, and she meant the word "alabaster" very literally: the centerpiece of the fair was the "White City" of the future, fourteen blocks of architectural marvels with marble facades painted white, and shining even whiter in the nightly glow of thousands of electric light bulbs, like a primitive prototype of Al Gore's carbon-offset palace in Tennessee. They were good times, but even in bad the United States could still build marvels. Much of the New York skyline dates from the worst of times. As Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang in the Thirties: "They all laughed at Rockefeller Center, Now they're fighting to get in..."
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears...
The Empire State Building, then the tallest in the world, was put up in eighteen months during a depression -- because the head of General Motors wanted to show the head of Chrysler that he could build something that went higher than the Chrysler building. Three-quarters of a century later, the biggest thing either man's successor had created was a mountain of unsustainable losses -- and both GM and Chrysler were now owned and controlled by government and unions.
In the months after 9/11, I used to get the same joke emailed to me every few days: the proposed design for the replacement World Trade Center. A new skyscraper towering over the city, with the top looking like a stylized hand -- three towers cut off at the joint, and the "middle finger" rising above them, flipping the bird not only to Osama bin Laden but also to Karlheinz Stockhausen and the sneering Euro-lefties and all the rest who rejoiced that day at America getting it, pow, right in the kisser; they all laughed at the Twin Towers takedown. Soon they'll be fighting to get into whatever reach-for-the-skies only-in-America edifice replaces it. The very word "skyscraper" is quintessentially American: it doesn't literally scrape the sky, but hell, as soon as we figure out how to build an even more express elevator, there's no reason why it shouldn't.
But the years go by, and they stopped emailing that joke, because it's not quite so funny after two, three, five, nine years of walking past Windows on the Hole every morning. It doesn't matter what the eventual replacement building is at Ground Zero. The ten-year hole is the memorial: a gaping, multi-story, multi-billion-dollar pit, profound and eloquent in its nullity.
As for the gleam of a brand new "White City," well, in the interests of saving the planet, Congress went and outlawed Edison's light bulb. And on the grounds of the White City hymned by Katherine Lee Bates stands Hyde Park, home to community organizer Barack Obama, terrorist educator William Ayers, and Nation of Islam numerologist and Jeremiah Wright Award-winner Louis Farrakhan. That's one fruited plain all of its own.
In the decade after 9/11, China (which America still thinks of as a cheap assembly plant for your local KrappiMart) built the Three Gorges Dam, the largest electricity-generating plant in the world. Dubai, a mere sub-jurisdiction of the United Arab Emirates, put up the world's tallest building and built a Busby Berkeley geometric kaleidoscope of offshore artificial islands. Brazil, an emerging economic power, began diverting the Sao Francisco River to create some 400 miles of canals to irrigate its parched northeast.
But the hyperpower can't put up a building.
Happily, there is one block in Lower Manhattan where ambitious redevelopnment is in the air. In 2010, plans were announced to build a 15-story mosque at Ground Zero, on the sight of an old Burlington Coat Factory damaged by airplane debris that Tuesday morning.
So, in the ruins of a building reduced to rubble in the name of Islam, a temple to Islam will arise.
A couple of years after the events of that Tuesday morning, James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, wrote:
If 9/11 had really changed us, there'd be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead, there's a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors.The best response to 9/11 on the home front -- if only to demonstrate that there is a "home front" (which is the nub of al-Qaeda's critique of a soft and decadent West) -- would have been to rebuild the World Trade Center bigger, better, taller -- not 150 stories but 250, a marvel of the age. And, if there had to be "the usual muted dolorous abstraction," the National Healing Circle would have been on the penthouse floor with a clear view all the way to al-Quaeda's executive latrine in Waziristan.
Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on Foreign Relations, is not right-winger but rather a sober, respected, judicious paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on American decline, he writes: "The country's economy, infrastructure, public schools and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less-vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit."
That last is the one to watch: a great power can survive a lot of things, but not "a mediocrity of spirit." A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for so long. "Si monumentum requiris, curcumspice" reads the inscription on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul's Cathedral: If you seek my monument, look around. After two-thirds of the City of London was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, Wren designed and rebuilt the capital's tallest building (St. Paul's), another fifty churches, and a new skyline for a devastated metropolis. Three centuries later, if you seek our monument, look in the hole.
It's not about al-Qaeda. It's about us.
Catch-22: NYPD officer James Seiferheld, 47, still receives his $52,365 annual disability pay despite relentless efforts of the department to fire him. He had retired in 2004 on disability, but was ordered back to work when investigators found him doing physical work inconsistent with "disability." However, Seiferheld could not return to work because he repeatedly failed drug screening (for cocaine). Meanwhile, his appeal of the disability denial went to the state Court of Appeals, which found a procedural error and ordered that Seiferheld's "disability" benefits continue (even though the city has proven both that he is physically able and a substance-abuser). [New York Post, 7-12-2011]Then in Federal government:
Once hired, almost no federal employee ever leaves. Turnover is so slight that, among the typical causes for workers leaving, "death by natural causes" is more likely the reason than "fired for poor job performance." According to a July USA Today report, the federal rate of termination for poor performance is less than one-fifth the private sector's, and the annual retention rate for all federal employees was 99.4 percent (and for white collar and upper-income workers, more than 99.8 percent). Government defenders said the numbers reflect excellence in initial recruitment. [USA Today, 7-20-2011]Apparently this inability to relieve someone for cause extends from municipalities all the way up to at least the Federal Bench:
Of the 1,500 judges who referee disputes as to whether someone qualifies for Social Security disability benefits, David Daugherty of West Virginia is the current soft-touch champion, finding for the claimant about 99 percent of the time (compared to judges' overall rate of 60 percent). As The Wall Street Journal reported in May, Daugherty decided many of the cases without hearings or with the briefest of questioning, including batches of cases brought by the same lawyer. He criticized his less lenient colleagues, who "act like it's their own damn money we're giving away." (A week after the Journal report, Judge Daugherty was placed on leave, pending an investigation.) [Wall Street Journal, 5-19-2011, 5-27-2011]And, oh hell, let me throw in one more example of .gov employees giving away other people's money:
Gee, What Do We Do With All This Stimulus Money? The Omaha (Neb.) Public School system spent $130,000 of its stimulus grant recently just to buy 8,000 copies of the book "The Cultural Proficiency Journey: Moving Beyond Ethical Barriers Toward Profound School Change" (Two stars on Amazon. By all means, read the reviews.) -- that is, one copy for every single employee, from principals to building custodians. Alarmingly, wrote an Omaha World-Herald columnist, the book is "riddled with gobbledygook," "endless graphs," and such tedium as the "cultural proficiency continuum" and discussion of the "disequilibrium" arising "due to the struggle to disengage with past actions associated with unhealthy perspectives." [Omaha World-Herald, 7-11-2011]Those four examples came from one single week of News of the Weird.
Wednesday, September 7th.It's still not too late to make plans to go! I'm checking in Wednesday, but I don't know if I'll be there by 6:00 PM or not.
6:00 PM. For those arriving on Wednesday, KeeWee and I and some of the other early arrivals are planning on having dinner at the El Dorado Buffet Restaurant. The El Dorado is part of the same giant casino complex as the Silver Legacy and the Circus Circus.
Thursday, September 8th
8:30 AM. Leave the Silver Legacy "Silver BaronCE” Hospitality Room for one of the restaurants for breakfast.
2:15 PM. Leave the Hospitality Room to car pool to Cabela’s.
3:00 PM – 5:00 PM. Guided tour Cabela’s and browsing/shopping. Pick up munchies and soft drinks on way back to hotel. Buy ammo?
6:00 PM. Leave the Hospitality Room to go to dinner. Location to be determined later.
Thursday Evening until midnight: Refreshments and conversation at the Silver Legacy Hospitality room. Bring your own refreshments and munchies.
Friday, September 9th.
8:00 AM. NRA Sponsored breakfast in the "Silver BaronCE” hospitality room. California firearms Attorney Chuck Michel will be talking to us over breakfast.
9:00 AM. Leave the Silver Legacy Hospitality room to car pool up and head out to the Washoe County Shooting Facility, the Pyramid range for rifle and pistol target shooting out to 900 yards.
9:45 AM – 2:00 PM. At the range.
4:00 PM. – 5:45 PM. Show-N-Tell at the Silver Legacy Hospitality room. Manufacturers and show new stuff, and attendees show neat things too!
6:00 PM. Leave the Silver Legacy Hospitality room to go to Gecko’s BBQ Restaurant for dinner sponsored by GunUp.com.
7:30 PM. (Approx) Alan Gura informally discusses legal stuff.
Friday Evening until midnight: Refreshments and conversation at the Silver Legacy Hospitality room. Bring your own refreshments and munchies.
Saturday, September 10th.
8:00 AM. Otis Technologies sponsored Breakfast in the Silver Legacy "Silver BaronCE" Hospitality room.
9:00 AM. Leave the Silver Legacy Hospitality room to car pool up and head out to the Washoe County Shooting Facility, the Pyramid range for an introduction to Steel Challenge Action Pistol shooting and more.
9:45 AM – 2:00 PM. At the range.
5:00 PM – 6 PM. Bill Brassard of the National Shooting Sports Foundation
6:00 pm. NSSF all you can eat pizza feed at the Silver Legacy Hospitality room. After dinner will be the fund raiser raffle for Project Valour-IT and the drawings for the door prizes.
Saturday Evening until Midnight: Refreshments and conversation at the Silver Legacy Hospitality room. Bring your own refreshments and munchies.
Sunday, September 11th.
8:00 AM. Leave the Silver Legacy "Silver BaronCE" Hospitality room for one of the restaurants for breakfast.
9:00 AM. Leave for the Cowboy Fast Draw Blogger Match.
10:00 AM – 1PM Cowboy Fast Draw Shooting with Quick Cal Eilrich.
The Cowboy Fast Draw shooting will be the last scheduled event of the Gun Blogger Rendezvous. For those not leaving until Monday however, there are still lots of things to do. Virginia city is nearby (you are already part way there at the Fast Draw venue), the Reno Car Museum, and the river walk through downtown Reno are all recommended. There may also be shows available for Sunday night of interest.
As you can see from the schedule, there is not a lot of time extra throughout the day, so we need to try to keep as close to on schedule as we can manage, otherwise it makes it difficult to have enough time for all of the activities. Although the conversations in the evenings tend to go well into the night, I would suggest not staying up too late, as you will regret it as the Rendezvous goes on!
In 1945, Hugh MacLennan wrote a novel set in Montreal whose title came to sum up the relationship between the English and the French in Canada: Two Solitudes. They live in the same nation, sometimes in the same town, sometimes share the same workspace. But they inhabit different psychologies. In 2008, David Warren, a columnist with The Ottawa Citizen, argued that the concept has headed south:This excerpt echos much of what I've written here over the last several years. I attribute the "Two Solitudes" to the differing principles explored by Thomas Sowell in his book A Conflict of Visions, which I wrote about at length in What We Got Here is...Failure to Communicate - two basically irreconcilable fundamentally opposed worldviews in conflict. The "American idea"? I wrote about that in That Sumbitch ain't been BORN!
In the United States, especially in the present election, we get glimpses of two political solitudes that have been created not by any plausible socio-economic division within society, nor by any deep division between different ethnic tribes, but tautologically by the notion of "two solitudes" itself. The nation is divided, roughly half-and-half, between people who instinctively resent the Nanny State, and those who instinctively long for its ministrations.John Edwards, yesterday's coming man, had an oft retailed stump speech about "the two Americas," a Disraelian portrait of Dickensian gloom conjured in the mawkish drool of a Depression-era sob-sister: one America was a wasteland of shuttered mills and shivering "coatless girls," while in the other America Dick Cheney and his Halliburton fat cats were sitting 'round the pool swigging crude straight from the well and toasting their war profits all day long. Edwards was right about the "two Americas," but not about the division: in one America, those who subscribe to the ruling ideology can access a world of tenured security lubricated by government and without creating a dime of wealth for the overall economy; in the other America, millions of people go to work every day to try to support their families and build up businesses and improve themselves, and the harder they work the more they're penalized to support the government class in its privileges. Traditionally, he who paid the piper called the tune. But not anymore. Flownover Country pays the piper, very generously, in salaries, benefits, pensions, and perks. But Conformicrat America calls the tune, the same unending single-note dirge. David Warren regards these as "two basically irreconcilable views of reality": "Only in America are they so equally balanced. Elsewhere in the west, the true believers in the Nanny State have long since prevailed."
Increasingly, America's divide is about the nature of the state itself -- about the American idea. And in that case why go on sharing the same real estate? As someone once said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." The Flownover Country's champion ought, in theory, to be the Republican Party. But, even in less fractious times, this is a loveless marriage. Much of the GOP establishment is either seduced by the Conformicrats, or terrified by them, to the point where they insist on allowing he liberals to set the parameters of the debate -- on health care, immigration, education, Social Security -- and then wonder why elections are always fought on the Democrats' terms. If you let the left make the rules, the right winds up being represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. If you want to prevent Big Government driving America off a cliff, it's insufficient.
The Conformicrats need Flownover Country to fund them. It's less clear why Flownover Country needs the Conformicrats -- and a house divided against itself cannot stand without the guy who keeps up the mortgage payments.
