For the Man Who Has Everything

For the Man Who Has Everything

I don't think he has one of these:


The 57mm M18 Recoilless Rifle. NOTHING says "Destructive Device" like a 57mm projectile!

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Quietly, but not surrepitiously, the numbers of dissatisfied American individuals is growing, and many of them are armed, but not offensively dangerous. Meaning these American individuals have come to the conclusion that America is heading down a path it should not be on, trespassing so to speak, pillaging along the way, and armed resistance may, unfortunately, be required. They’ve had all they can stand, and they can’t stand any more. - John Venlet, Improved Clinch - Quietly on my Mind

An Accompanying Sea of Disinformation

An Accompanying Sea of Disinformation

The whole quote is:

Simply put, gun control cannot survive without an accompanying sea of disinformation. - Anonymous

Here's a perfect example. I'd make a drinking game out of it, but nobody can drink that fast, or that much:


"Gun Facts" my aching sphincter. You have to wonder about someone who can spew that much bullshit in that short a period. You really do.

As Mostly Cajun put it recently, “Remember, being ignorant isn’t your fault; staying ignorant is.” This isn't ignorance, though. It's deliberate misinformation. And it's just one of the reasons I started this blog - to expose these people for what they are.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

We live in democracies. Rule by the majority. Rule by the people. Fifty per cent of people are below average in intelligence. This explains everything about politics. - P.J. O'Rourke, The ditch carp of democracy

Hat tip to Tam, who chose a different quote, but as usual for a P.J. piece, the entire thing is quotable.

Quote for the YEAR

Quote for the YEAR

It's past time to vote these criminals out of office. It's time we peasants got a wild-eyed mob together. We gather our pitchforks and our torches, we go to Washington, and we track these people down with hunting dogs. - Bill Whittle, Afterburner - Mountains of Money: Do you know how much $1 trillion is?

I fully expect Bill to be arrested shortly for sedition or inciting to riot, or some other similar charge.

But he's right. And we're fooked.

See also this post by Joe Huffman.

The First Modern Soft Totalitarian State

And the UK is America's petri dish. Presented for your review:

Thought police muscle up in Britain

Hal G. P. Colebatch | April 21, 2009
BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely.

There are no concentration camps or gulags but there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.

Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution's principal tasks was "to alter people's actual psychology". Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people's psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.

The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the "global baggage of empire" was linked to soccer violence by "racist and xenophobic white males". He claimed the English "propensity for violence" was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were "potentially very aggressive".

In the past 10 years I have collected reports of many instances of draconian punishments, including the arrest and criminal prosecution of children, for thought-crimes and offences against political correctness.

Countryside Restoration Trust chairman and columnist Robin Page said at a rally against the Government's anti-hunting laws in Gloucestershire in 2002: "If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you." Page was arrested, and after four months he received a letter saying no charges would be pressed, but that: "If further evidence comes to our attention whereby your involvement is implicated, we will seek to initiate proceedings." It took him five years to clear his name.

Page was at least an adult. In September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher's first response, according to Stott, was to scream at her: "It's racist, you're going to get done by the police!" Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed. According to her mother, she was placed in a bare cell for 3 1/2 hours. She was questioned on suspicion of committing a racial public order offence and then released without charge. The school was said to be investigating what further action to take, not against the teacher, but against Stott. Headmaster Anthony Edkins reportedly said: "An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark. We aim to ensure a caring and tolerant attitude towards pupils of all ethnic backgrounds and will not stand for racism in any form."

A 10-year-old child was arrested and brought before a judge, for having allegedly called an 11-year-old boya "Paki" and "bin Laden" during a playground argument at a primary school (the other boy had called him a skunk and a Teletubby). When it reached the court the case had cost taxpayers pound stg. 25,000. The accused was so distressed that he had stopped attending school. The judge, Jonathan Finestein, said: "Have we really got to the stage where we are prosecuting 10-year-old boys because of political correctness? There are major crimes out there and the police don't bother to prosecute. This is nonsense."

Finestein was fiercely attacked by teaching union leaders, as in those witch-hunt trials where any who spoke in defence of an accused or pointed to defects in the prosecution were immediately targeted as witches and candidates for burning.

Hate-crime police investigated Basil Brush, a puppet fox on children's television, who had made a joke about Gypsies. The BBC confessed that Brush had behaved inappropriately and assured police that the episode would be banned.

A bishop was warned by the police for not having done enough to "celebrate diversity", the enforcing of which is now apparently a police function. A Christian home for retired clergy and religious workers lost a grant because it would not reveal to official snoopers how many of the residents were homosexual. That they had never been asked was taken as evidence of homophobia.

Muslim parents who objected to young children being given books advocating same-sex marriage and adoption at one school last year had their wishes respected and the offending material withdrawn. This year, Muslim and Christian parents at another school objecting to the same material have not only had their objections ignored but have been threatened with prosecution if they withdraw their children.

There have been innumerable cases in recent months of people in schools, hospitals and other institutions losing their jobs because of various religious scruples, often, as in the East Germany of yore, not shouted fanatically from the rooftops but betrayed in private conversations and reported to authorities. The crime of one nurse was to offer to pray for a patient, who did not complain but merely mentioned the matter to another nurse. A primary school receptionist, Jennie Cain, whose five-year-old daughter was told off for talking about Jesus in class, faces the sack for seeking support from her church. A private email from her to other members of the church asking for prayers fell into the hands of school authorities.

Permissiveness as well as draconianism can be deployed to destroy socially accepted norms and values. The Royal Navy, for instance, has installed a satanist chapel in a warship to accommodate the proclivities of a satanist crew member. "What would Nelson have said?" is a British newspaper cliche about navy scandals, but in this case seems a legitimate question. Satanist paraphernalia is also supplied to prison inmates who need it.

This campaign seems to come from unelected or quasi-governmental bodies controlling various institutions, which are more or less unanswerable to electors, more than it does directly from the Government, although the Government helps drive it and condones it in a fudged and deniable manner.

Any one of these incidents might be dismissed as an aberration, but taken together - and I have only mentioned a tiny sample; more are reported almost every day - they add up to a pretty clear picture.

Discuss.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

I am in no way implying that this is some formidable armed force that will rise up and recover America to her Constitutional greatness. what I AM saying though, is that I’m seeing a level of dissatisfaction and concern that was not even approached in the years of the Clintons. - Mostly Cajun, A Considerable Number

And we're just over 100 days in . . .

Yup. The Other Side is Paying Attention

Yup. The Other Side is Paying Attention

Right on schedule.

The Far Right's First 100 Days: Getting More Extreme by the Day

Sometime back in February, about three weeks into Barack Obama's administration, everybody on the left suddenly noticed that there was something different going on with the conservatives.

The outrageous screeds and paranoid delusions sounded pretty much as they always had -- but there was a new fury behind them, a strident urgency that hadn't been there before, and a very audible shift of the gears in right-wing behavior and rhetoric.

None of this came as a surprise to veteran right-wing watchers -- we'd been predicting a bad backlash since the 2006 election -- but more than three months into the new administration, it's increasingly hard to ignore the fact that this ominous new trend is taking on a momentum of its own.

On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security ratified some of those observations. Fueled by bone-deep racism, an unnatural terror of liberal government, frustration over the economic downturn, and fears about America's loss of world standing, they said, the militant right wing is indeed rising again.

Its numbers are up, its talk is turning ugly, and it's not unthinkable that we could be in for a wave of domestic terrorism unseen since the mid-1990s.

I've been meaning for a while to talk about what changed after the inauguration, and why, and what it means to the country going forward. Our observance of the end of the first 100 days seems to be a good time to do that.

The DHS report laid out the history and the current drivers in straight factual terms and made some safe predictions about what might make the situation worse. But the report stopped short of taking the next step.

(Interestingly, the nightmare scenario for most right-wing watchers -- a white-hot backlash in the wake of another major terrorist attack -- appears nowhere in the DHS assessment. Perhaps they didn't want to put ideas into paranoid right-wing heads.)

We need to look at what long experience has taught us about the past escalation patterns of right-wing rhetoric and violence and figure out where we currently stand within those patterns.

We actually know quite a bit about this. Most national agencies tasked with keeping tabs on political and religious extremist groups look for specific signs that help them sort out who's just talking the talk and who's actually getting ready to walk the walk.

The criteria vary from agency to agency; and our collective insights into these patterns changes and deepens every year. But there are some generally accepted principles -- and applying them to the current state of conservatism gives a clearer view what's changed in the past 100 days, what the shift really means and what could be coming next if the right keeps going down this road.

I want to make it clear: The DHS report emphasizes that there's no specific evidence that any particular group is planning any particular action.

At the same time, what's equally clear from the pattern analysis is that the upshift we heard was the right wing going into overdrive -- the speed at which talk about revolution (which has been going on for years, but intensified after 2006) accelerates into concrete preparation for action.

Here's why:

Go read the rest, you rightwing extremist! There's quite a bit.

Oh, and here's the blurb on the author:

Sara Robinson is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006 and is a founding member of Group News Blog.

What the hell is a "trained social futurist"? Does this mean she predicts the future if you throw her an occasional herring?

Wait until you read tomorrow's Quote of the Day!

Dr. Sanity is On a ROLL

Dr. Sanity is On a ROLL!

Read this and this and this. Pack a lunch. (Don't attempt this at work - the last two are überposts!) Looks like somebody lit her fuse!

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

That’s where we’re at. Laws apply to us in the middle. Those at the top are too big, powerful or important to have to live by them, and those at the ‘bottom’ don’t either. And darned if I’m not getting more than a little dissatisfied by the deal. - Mostly Cajun - Not for You or Me

A lot of us are. Read the whole backstory.

Vanderboegh Speaks Sense:

We are not ready. Not politically, not militarily. I don't know about you, Anonymous. Are YOU ready to take on an even greater military force than the British Empire of the Eighteenth Century? I'm not. No one I know is. Well, there ARE a few folks up in Winston County. ;-) Anyway, FEW people I know are. The Minutemen and common militia at Lexington and Concord and long road back into Boston had been preparing for YEARS. Read General Galvin's book, The Minutemen. The ability to blunt and harry a British column was not an accident. I tell you plainly, WE ARE NOT READY. The military groundwork has not been laid. The political groundwork has not been laid. We are not ready and you want to start something that will make our defeat easy?

"A long train of abuses and usurpations." When did Jefferson write those words? MORE THAN A YEAR AFTER LEXINGTON. Olofson's case certainly falls into that category. But it is not yet time. This fight, if all else fails politically to prevent it, MUST be undertaken reluctantly. We must accept the burden of the abuses and usurpations as long as they can be borne, so that when we round on the whipmaster and feed him his whip it will be seen as justice by as many onlookers as possible. The Regulars MUST march out of Boston of their own accord. They MUST fire the first shot. Or the second. Or the third. THEN, and ONLY then, we will finish them and their tyranny. If they pass laws to accomplish this (they think) without direct confrontation, we will defy the laws and goad them into attempting to force us to comply. Think Boston Tea Party. Their whole system depends upon willing subjects. They don't react well to defiance. They WILL give us the moral high ground. Their appetites will demand it.

Because what happens the moment after that shot is fired is so horrible than any sane person would do anything to avoid it. I have NO patience for someone who WANTS A FIGHT. It usually means they've never been in one. Do you understand what horrors await us all after that terrible moment? Have you ever seen the bloated bodies of children on the road? Entire neighborhoods in flames? Heard screams of dying innocents in the night? Smelled roasting flesh of men, women and children, people, innocent people, even as you, or me, or our loved ones?

I doubt it. But you know what? Neither have I. My son has. But I have not. Still, I am smart enough to understand that that's what happens when you open up the Pandora's box of civil war. Why wouldn't you do everything in your power to put that off as long as possible, until you could not delay a second longer this side of defeat and slavery?

There's a lot more, before and after.

The only real difference that exists between me and Mike in this case is that I don't believe the Republic and the Constitution can be restored. As Ambrose Bierce put it, revolution will resort - at most - only in "an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment." My choice, and the choice of people like me, will be whether to live in servitude or die resisting it. As Mostly Cajun put it, "Retire? I will probably get killed in the early battles of the coming revolution." And the reason for that is illustrated by JD of Ballistic Deanimation and many others (including yours truly) in posts like Dumbing Down and The George Orwell Daycare Center. We've been outmaneuvered, and now we're overwhelmingly outnumbered. The Founders could at least depend on a third of their countrymen to support them. We cannot. And I don't think we'll ever again be able to, because Leviathan can Olofson anyone, at any time, (or worse) and we'll never be ready. Remember Atlas Shrugged:

There is no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking the law. Create a nation of lawbreakers and then you can cash in on the guilt. Now that's the system!

So people like Mike and like me are considered "anti-government extremists." No we're not. We're Constitutionalists, who think that our elected and appointed officials ought to mean it when they swear their oaths to "uphold and defend the Constitution." They ought to at least be somewhat familiar with the thing. But that time has passed, sometime around FDR's first term. The next "shot heard 'round the world" will never be fired. There will just be a few more Carl Dregas, a few more Marvin Heemeyers, and probably a Timothy McVeigh or two. And the screws will tighten further, and the long train of abuses and usurpations will continue. Eventually a breaking point will be reached, and we still won't be ready.

And we'll lose.

And that's why my line-in-the-sand is my front door, but not, necessarily, yours.

On that happy, note: Sleep tight.

The Ballad of Timothy Geithner

The Ballad of Timothy Geithner


"Only in America, folks. Pass it on."

Consider it passed, Ms. McKinney. Consider it passed.

Your Moment of Zen

Your Moment of Zen

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

"Corporate taxes" are, in the long run, just regressive taxes that don't hurt progressives at the ballot box because the electorate is collectively about as smart as a colony of clams. - Tam, Follow the Money

Promiscuity and a G.E.D.

Promiscuity and a G.E.D.


Nope, not so bad a strategy after all. It's almost like someone planned it that way!

This Makes More Sense Now . . .

This Makes More Sense Now . . .

. . . well, if sense is the right word.

One of the books I picked up recently is Matthew Bracken's Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Actually, I ordered Domestic Enemies via Amazon and it came in on Thursday, but I bought Enemies Foreign and Domestic at the Funshow Saturday. I'm reading it first. I'm about halfway done.

I now understand the Department of Homeland Security's "Rightwing Extremism" report we were all talking about a couple of weeks ago.

Apparently someone in the department read it recently.

I bet they had kittens.

Good.

The concept of Personal Sovereignty must scare the piss out of them.

Just not enough, you know, to actually stop.

Empty Shelves

Empty Shelves

So, I went to the funshow yesterday at the Tucson Convention Center specifically to look for primers. I got there before the doors opened, but not before about 150 other people lined up in front of me to get in. It was, as these things go, not a big show - I'd say less than a hundred tables, though I only saw one jerky vendor, and absolutely no Beanie Babies. (There were, however, two Nazi memorabilia vendors.)

Here's what I found in the primer department, initially:


Sorry about the crappy cell phone photo, but they don't like cameras in the show. Here's a closer view:


Yes, that's one (1) box of Remington 9½ Large Rifle Magnum primers. The rest of the table consisted of quite a few bags of range brass of different calibers.

I continued perusing the show. These are the only other primers I found:


Those are CCI 450 Small Rifle Magnum primers, and a box of Winchester something-or-other.

I was very thorough. That was it at the show.

Afterward, just for grins 'n giggles, I went to the local Sportsman's Warehouse to see if they'd gotten anything in. Here's their shelves where they normally keep powder & primers:


I don't know if you can see all that clearly, but there's one one-pound cannister of VV powder, and no primers at all. Zip, zilch, zero, nada. Usually the top shelf is lined with 8-lb. kegs, and that middle empty row is full of every primer known to man.

So, when is the primer fairy going to return?

Seen this?

Seen this?


(Embedding has been denied, and the only version available runs seven minutes. The portion of interest - well, of greater interest, comes at about 3:30-4:30.)

I am so confident in the superiority of the public health care option that I think he has every reason to be frightened.

I'm certainly frightened. P.J. O'Rourke nailed it long ago:

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

Rep. Schakowsky said it out loud:

This is not a principled fight.

Indeed not.

I'm reminded of another quote, Henry Louis Mencken this time:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

BOHICA

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

You’re a product of the public system, they say. You turned out all right, so it must be…..

No.

Stop looking for outside influences as the root cause of problems. I drank, I smoked, I slept with girls and went to parties and ditched class and got into trouble. I also realized that the school systems are a joke, and learned to work that in my favor. Yeah, I learned…how to skirt the system, just as these jokers today are doing. But in my case, I had a genuine hunger for knowledge.

I read ceaselessly outside of school. I worked on chemistry and physics stuff at home, because I liked it. I did computer science classes at the JC. I learned…just not in that system. I played catch up in college for it, but that was easy. For me…not them.

So, no…the problem is the system.

But…

No.

The kids are getting dumber.

I have data to support this statement. It is not an opinion.

Every. Single. Year. It happens. The graduating class scores lower on their tests than the year before, and the next year is lower, and lower, etc. All this while classes are being cut due to budget constraints, schools are tightening admissions requirements and looking for higher and higher test scores and GPA’s.

They’re still being filled up, but not by local kids.

Local kids are failing. They start college level math, something for which they should be prepared, and then throw their hands up in defeat because they never learned the foundation materials.

You can’t do quadratics when your teacher let you watch TV in class instead of teaching you the order of operations.

Do you understand?

I’ve got a girl here, born in the US, schooled here to 13 years in this system, ready to receive a diploma from this system. I give her a test on college level material, and she does so poorly THE COMPUTER ASSUMES SHE MUST NOT SPEAK ENGLISH!

Does that not concern anyone else?

Ballistic Deanimation - Dumbing Down

READ THE WHOLE THING. It even has illustrations!

OK, So, I Lied

OK, So, I Lied

I said a couple of days ago that "normal blogging would resume" shortly.

OOPS!

I took the rest of this week off, and figured I'd use the time to write and reload. WRONG! Instead, I've been reading and vegetating - plugged Serenity into the DVD player Thursday and thoroughly enjoyed it for the n^th time, finished reading S.M. Stirling's In the Courts of the Crimson Kings yesterday, then went to the book store and picked up some more books, saw Wolverine yesterday afternoon, then blasted through John Scalzi's Zoë's Tale last night (first time I've done a non-stop cover-to-cover read in quite a while).

I've got stuff I want to write about. (Specifically, I want to finish my final reply to James Kelly, but I'm having problems working up the enthusiasm to actually do it. Sorry.)

I guess you could say I'm enjoying my vacation.

And now I'm getting ready to go to the gun show downtown to see if I can find any of that elusive prey known as primers. Wish me luck.