Quote of the Day - TamNation Division

We have guys with their jockeys full of Semtex buying airline tickets with cash, and the feds are busy getting spun up about bubbas in Mossy Oak angry about taxes. Way to keep your eye on the ball... - Tam in I feel so... so... dangerous!

In Celebration of Earth Day . . .

I would REALLY like to win the next Powerball lottery drawing, because for Earth Day I'd REALLY REALLY like to celebrate by purchasing my version of the Ford EarthFucker™ - the SVT Raptor:

411Hp, 14MPG.

I like my rather sedate 2006 2WD Toyota Tundra, but I REALLY WANT this truck.

Unfortunately, the Tundra is paid for, and I am not interested in making payments on a new vehicle.

Thus: I must win the lotto.

UPDATE: No one won the Powerball drawing Saturday.

Wednesday, then!

Vermont Carry

Governor Brewer signed the bill.

Beginning some time in June, I believe (90 days after the legislature adjourns the current session), any non-prohibited person in Arizona may carry a concealed firearm without a permit. This includes visitors from other states.

And now there are three.

Far out!

WANT

On a T-shirt:

Seen at Uncle's.

I Guess I Need to Start Shopping for a Stainless-steel Colander

U.S. military warns of oil production shortage by 2015

The U.S. military thinks we're one step closer to peak oil, the point at which oil demand will forever outstrip oil supply, and therefore we're one step closer to fighting over the last rusting cans of gasoline like so many scraps of meat. On the plus side, we're also one step closer to finally equipping our cars with superchargers and massive gas tanks rigged with explosives a la Mad Max and his archetypal peak-oil sled, "the last of the V-8 Interceptors."

RTWT. (h/t Glenn)

I hope my M14 comes in by then . . .

Your Moment of Zen - Icelandic Sunset Edition

Europe should be getting these for a while:

(Click for larger)

We might get some global cooling out of it, too, even though volcanoes produce massive amounts of "greenhouse" gasses.

The Taurus Paperweight

I've had a couple of inquiries about the Taurus that I bought, and then shortly later traded in last year. BAG day 2009 I bought a 605 2" barreled, blue, snubby .357 revolver. It sat for a few weeks before I had a chance to take it to the range. I actually loaded it up and put it in the console of my pickup for a while, even before I tried it out on the range.

I was later reminded of a scene from the film The Ghost and the Darkness:

You went into battle with an untested weapon?

Thankfully, I didn't.

On that first trip to the range I brought both .38 Special and .357 Magnum loads. Factory loads. I haven't handloaded .357 in a while, and I pretty much never load .38. The first cylinder of .38's went fine. On the second, the lockwork locked. Solid. On the second shot.

I had a revolver with three live rounds in it, and I couldn't fire them, and I couldn't get it to open up.

The three fired rounds looked fine. The projectiles hadn't backed out of the cases or anything, the mechanism was just LOCKED. I suspected the "safety" lock, but I had the key, and THAT wasn't it, or at least I wasn't able to use the key to clear the problem. I ended up taking the gun home and DISASSEMBLING it. I blew it out with carb cleaner, in case something was loose inside the lockwork, I lubed everything lightly, reassembled, and it worked fine - empty.

Another trip was made to the range. Again .38's were loaded. On the second round, it locked up again. By playing with the cylinder and hammer I was able to fiddle with it and get it unlocked. I loaded up some .357's. ONE round, and it was locked up. I was able to get it open, but I was DONE with it. A five-shot revolver that only goes "BANG" at most TWICE is useless.

It sat on my desk in paperweight mode for quite a bit while I debated either returning it for warranty repair, or trading it in. I finally decided on trading it in. Hey, it was hardly used!

Once the trade was agreed to, I told the dealer about the problem. "You can't trade in a defective gun!" he said. "Why not? You sold it to ME that way!" I replied. We agreed to knock $50 off the trade-in value for them to handle the warranty return, and I came home with a (perfectly functional) Kel-Tec PF9.

I don't think I'll be buying another Taurus.

B.A.G. Day

Today is B.A.G. day - "Buy a Gun" Day. B.A.G. day was created by blogger Aaron back in 2003. I've participated many times. In 2004 I bought a Makarov. 2005, a S&W Model 60. 2006 brought a Winchester '94 in .45 Colt (a month early, but still. . . .) I missed in 2007, but in 2008 I bought a scope instead of a gun. Last year I bought a Taurus revolver. (Got rid of it, too, traded it in on a Kel-Tec PF9 that actually goes 'BANG' every time I pull the trigger.)

This year? Well, this year I'm still waiting for my Ted Brown M14. He has the receiver. He's expecting the barrel shortly. The stock is on order.

And still I wait . . . .

Interesting Statistics

Reported recently in an Arizona paper comes these statistics on concealed-carry permits in Arizona:

BY THE NUMBERS: CONCEALED
WEAPONS
• Total number of permits in the state as of April 4: 154,279
• Number of permits suspended: 1,785
• Number of permits revoked: 1,011
• Number of women who have a permit: 33,053
• Among women, the 50 to 59 age group has the largest number of permits at 9,050.
• Number of women over the age of 80 who have permits: 177
• Number of men who have a permit: 125,582
• Among men, the 60-69 age group has the largest number of permits at 28,380.
• According to the Arizona Department of Public Safety, some of the revoked or suspended permits may have been reinstated since the state started keeping records in 1994.
• The four counties with the largest number of permits in the state: Maricopa: 81,375; Pima: 25,246; Yavapai: 9,521; Mohave: 8,726

So, out of 154,279 permits issued, 1,011 (0.655%) have been revoked.

The largest groups taking advantage of concealed carry permits are older men and women.

There are some feisty octogenarian ladies in this state.

Somehow, 33,053 + 125,582 = 154,729

Quote of the Day - Constrained Vision Edition

Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an elite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a willful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses.

But that's just me. - author Richard K. Morgan

We Were Warned

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul. – George Bernard Shaw

--

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money. - Alexis de Tocqueville

--

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. "Alexander Tytler"

So the news is out that this year 47% of households in this country pay no income tax. One (AP) story (which I won't link) states:

The bottom 40 percent, on average, make a profit from the federal income tax, meaning they get more money in tax credits than they would otherwise owe in taxes. For those people, the government sends them a payment.

In other words, the government "redistributes wealth" from the upper 60% to the bottom 40%. (And it's still not enough!)

And what is the result of this?

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 31% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -11. . . Overall, 48% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance.

CNN reports that 46% approve of Obama's job performance. CBS puts his approval rating at 44%. Gallup says 48%.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we've hit rock-bottom on Obama's popularity unless and until he's caught in bed with either a live boy or a dead girl, as the old saying goes.

That 44-48% is bought and payed for - with my tax money and yours.

According to the George Mason University US Elections Project, about 62% of the voting-eligible population in the US turned out for the 2008 election. More than a third of the eligible population didn't vote.

I am going to be fascinated to see the results of the 2010 election. But almost definitely not happy. Billy Beck is right - we're not voting ourselves out of this.

A New Supreme Court Justice

. . . another confirmation hearing.

I'm going to copy-and-paste something I wrote a few years ago, because it fits so perfectly here now that Justice Stevens is retiring. With Obama in the White House and both houses of Congress with Democrat majorities, I'll go out on a limb here and predict that the next nominee will make the retiring "most liberal justice" look like Barry Goldwater.

The founding document of this nation is a legal CONTRACT. This is a point that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia keeps making time and time again in his public speaking. "How," he once asked an audience rhetorically, "do you write a moderate contract?" And if the courts can decide that the words in a contract can mean whatever they want them to mean, then the contract isn't worth the paper it's written on:

If we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us. When we are in that mode, you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless.

Absolutely right. Now bear with me again, because I'm going to quote quite a passage from a speech Justice Scalia made on March 14th of 2005 that makes his point explicitly:

Consider the 19th Amendment, which is the amendment that gave women the vote. It was adopted by the American people in 1920. Why did we adopt a constitutional amendment for that purpose? The Equal Protection Clause existed in 1920; it was adopted right after the Civil War. And you know that if the issue of the franchise for women came up today, we would not have to have a constitutional amendment. Someone would come to the Supreme Court and say, "Your Honors, in a democracy, what could be a greater denial of equal protection than denial of the franchise?" And the Court would say, "Yes! Even though it never meant it before, the Equal Protection Clause means that women have to have the vote." But that's not how the American people thought in 1920. In 1920, they looked at the Equal Protection Clause and said, "What does it mean?" Well, it clearly doesn't mean that you can’t discriminate in the franchise - not only on the basis of sex, but on the basis of property ownership, on the basis of literacy. None of that is unconstitutional. And therefore, since it wasn't unconstitutional, and we wanted it to be, we did things the good old fashioned way and adopted an amendment.

Now, in asserting that originalism used to be orthodoxy, I do not mean to imply that judges did not distort the Constitution now and then, of course they did. We had willful judges then, and we will have willful judges until the end of time. But the difference is that prior to the last 50 years or so, prior to the advent of the "Living Constitution," judges did their distortions the good old fashioned way, the honest way - they lied about it. They said the Constitution means such and such, when it never meant such and such.

It's a big difference that you now no longer have to lie about it, because we are in the era of the evolving Constitution. And the judge can simply say, "Oh yes, the Constitution didn't used to mean that, but it does now." We are in the age in which not only judges, not only lawyers, but even school children have come to learn the Constitution changes. I have grammar school students come into the Court now and then, and they recite very proudly what they have been taught: "The Constitution is a living document." You know, it morphs.

Well, let me first tell you how we got to the "Living Constitution." You don't have to be a lawyer to understand it. The road is not that complicated. Initially, the Court began giving terms in the text of the Constitution a meaning they didn't have when they were adopted. For example, the First Amendment, which forbids Congress to abridge the freedom of speech. What does the freedom of speech mean? Well, it clearly did not mean that Congress or government could not impose any restrictions upon speech. Libel laws, for example, were clearly constitutional. Nobody thought the First Amendment was carte blanche to libel someone. But in the famous case of New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court said, "But the First Amendment does prevent you from suing for libel if you are a public figure and if the libel was not malicious" — that is, the person, a member of the press or otherwise, thought that what the person said was true. Well, that had never been the law. I mean, it might be a good law. And some states could amend their libel law.

It's one thing for a state to amend it's libel law and say, "We think that public figures shouldn’t be able to sue." That's fine. But the courts have said that the First Amendment, which never meant this before, now means that if you are a public figure, that you can't sue for libel unless it’s intentional, malicious. So that's one way to do it.

Another example is the Constitution guarantees the right to be represented by counsel. That never meant the state had to pay for your counsel. But you can reinterpret it to mean that.

That was step one. Step two, I mean, that will only get you so far. There is no text in the Constitution that you could reinterpret to create a right to abortion, for example. So you need something else. The something else is called the doctrine of "Substantive Due Process." Only lawyers can walk around talking about substantive process, in as much as it’s a contradiction in terms. If you referred to substantive process or procedural substance at a cocktail party, people would look at you funny. But, lawyers talk this way all the time.

What substantive due process is is quite simple - the Constitution has a Due Process Clause, which says that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Now, what does this guarantee? Does it guarantee life, liberty or property? No, indeed! All three can be taken away. You can be fined, you can be incarcerated, you can even be executed, but not without due process of law. It's a procedural guarantee. But the Court said, and this goes way back, in the 1920s at least, in fact the first case to do it was Dred Scott. But it became more popular in the 1920s. The Court said there are some liberties that are so important, that no process will suffice to take them away. Hence, substantive due process.

Now, what liberties are they? The Court will tell you. Be patient. When the doctrine of substantive due process was initially announced, it was limited in this way, the Court said it embraces only those liberties that are fundamental to a democratic society and rooted in the traditions of the American people.

Just to insert, the Dred Scott court listed "those liberties that are fundamental to a democratic society and rooted in the traditions of the American people" and here I repeat Chief Justice Taney's listing of the rights that could not be conferred upon blacks, free or slave:

(Citizenship) would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.

Those liberties. In 1856 the Supreme Court wasn't yet willing to reinterpret a "living Constitution," so instead the Court's members decided that excluding an entire race of people from its protections was perfectly valid. It's only a little damage, and it's for public safety, you know.

Scalia continues:

Then we come to step three. Step three: that limitation is eliminated. Within the last 20 years, we have found to be covered by due process the right to abortion, which was so little rooted in the traditions of the American people that it was criminal for 200 years; the right to homosexual sodomy, which was so little rooted in the traditions of the American people that it was criminal for 200 years. So it is literally true, and I don't think this is an exaggeration, that the Court has essentially liberated itself from the text of the Constitution, from the text and even from the traditions of the American people. It is up to the Court to say what is covered by substantive due process.

And, we see even more damage done in the name of that "Living Constitution" idea. Erosion of the First Amendment protections on political speech under McCain-Feingold, the continuing decimation of the Fourth and portions of the Fifth Amendment because of the War on (some) Drugs™, and the continuous assault on the Second Amendment under the aegis of "public safety," just to name a few. (Granted, we've started winning on that last item over the last decade or so, though there are still examples of that assault in the courts.)

Scalia again:

If you believe, however, that the Constitution is not a legal text, like the texts involved when judges reconcile or decide which of two statutes prevail; if you think the Constitution is some exhortation to give effect to the most fundamental values of the society as those values change from year to year; if you think that it is meant to reflect, as some of the Supreme Court cases say, particularly those involving the Eighth Amendment, if you think it is simply meant to reflect the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society - if that is what you think it is, then why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers? What do I know about the evolving standards of decency of American society? I'm afraid to ask.

If that is what you think the Constitution is, then Marbury v. Madison is wrong. It shouldn't be up to the judges, it should be up to the legislature. We should have a system like the English - whatever the legislature thinks is constitutional is constitutional. They know the evolving standards of American society, I don't. So in principle, it's incompatible with the legal regime that America has established.

Secondly, and this is the killer argument - I mean, it's the best debaters argument - they say in politics you can’t beat somebody with nobody, it's the same thing with principles of legal interpretation. If you don’t believe in originalism, then you need some other principle of interpretation. Being a non-originalist is not enough. You see, I have my rules that confine me. I know what I'm looking for. When I find it - the original meaning of the Constitution - I am handcuffed. If I believe that the First Amendment meant when it was adopted that you are entitled to burn the American flag, I have to come out that way even though I don't like to come out that way. When I find that the original meaning of the jury trial guarantee is that any additional time you spend in prison which depends upon a fact must depend upon a fact found by a jury - once I find that's what the jury trial guarantee means, I am handcuffed. Though I'm a law-and-order type, I cannot do all the mean conservative things I would like to do to this society. You got me.

Now, if you're not going to control your judges that way, what other criterion are you going to place before them? What is the criterion that governs the Living Constitutional judge? What can you possibly use, besides original meaning? Think about that. Natural law? We all agree on that, don't we? The philosophy of John Rawls? That's easy. There really is nothing else. You either tell your judges, "Look, this is a law, like all laws, give it the meaning it had when it was adopted." Or, you tell your judges, "Govern us. You tell us whether people under 18, who committed their crimes when they were under 18, should be executed. You tell us whether there ought to be an unlimited right to abortion or a partial right to abortion. You make these decisions for us." I have put this question - you know I speak at law schools with some frequency just to make trouble - and I put this question to the faculty all the time, or incite the students to ask their Living Constitutional professors: "Okay professor, you are not an originalist, what is your criterion?" There is none other.

And here's where I quote (again) my favorite judge on my pet topic, 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski, in his dissent to the denial to hear Silveira v. Lockyer en banc:

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that "speech, or . . . the press" also means the Internet...and that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" also means public telephone booths....When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases - or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we’re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it’s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.

The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have succumbed to the temptation to pick and choose. Had they brought the same generous approach to the Second Amendment that they routinely bring to the First, Fourth and selected portions of the Fifth, they would have had no trouble finding an individual right to bear arms. Indeed, to conclude otherwise, they had to ignore binding precedent. United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), did not hold that the defendants lacked standing to raise a Second Amendment defense, even though the government argued the collective rights theory in its brief. The Supreme Court reached the Second Amendment claim and rejected it on the merits after finding no evidence that Miller's weapon - a sawed-off shotgun - was reasonably susceptible to militia use. We are bound not only by the outcome of Miller but also by its rationale. If Miller's claim was dead on arrival because it was raised by a person rather than a state, why would the Court have bothered discussing whether a sawed-off shotgun was suitable for militia use? The panel majority not only ignores Miller's test; it renders most of the opinion wholly superfluous. As an inferior court, we may not tell the Supreme Court it was out to lunch when it last visited a constitutional provision.

The majority falls prey to the delusion - popular in some circles - that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth - born of experience - is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks' homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process. In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the institution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 417 (1857) (finding black citizenship unthinkable because it would give blacks the right to "keep and carry arms wherever they went"). A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.

All too many of the other great tragedies of history - Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few - were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

Fortunately, the Framers were wise enough to entrench the right of the people to keep and bear arms within our constitutional structure. The purpose and importance of that right was still fresh in their minds, and they spelled it out clearly so it would not be forgotten. Despite the panel’s mighty struggle to erase these words, they remain, and the people themselves can read what they say plainly enough:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The sheer ponderousness of the panel's opinion - the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of constitutional text - refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel's labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it - and is just as likely to succeed.

(All emphasis in original, most legal references removed for clarity.)

Now there's a man who can read and understand a sentence.

"The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees." And what might give the government the belief that it could refuse to stand for reelection? What might strip the courts of their "courage to oppose" or the people their power to resist?

How about the systematic evisceration of the Constitution by making it a "living document" decided on by nine black-robed Justices who have, as Scalia pointed out, divorced themselves from the restrictions of that document. And we've let them. Scalia one more time:

The worst thing about the Living Constitution is that it will destroy the Constitution. You heard in the introduction that I was confirmed, close to 19 years ago now, by a vote of 98 to nothing. The two missing were Barry Goldwater and Jake Garnes, so make it 100. I was known at that time to be, in my political and social views, fairly conservative. But still, I was known to be a good lawyer, an honest man — somebody who could read a text and give it its fair meaning — had judicial impartiality and so forth. And so I was unanimously confirmed. Today, barely 20 years later, it is difficult to get someone confirmed to the Court of Appeals. What has happened? The American people have figured out what is going on. If we are selecting lawyers, if we are selecting people to read a text and give it the fair meaning it had when it was adopted, yes, the most important thing to do is to get a good lawyer. If on the other hand, we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a new constitution with all sorts of new values to govern our society, then we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look principally for people who agree with us, the majority, as to whether there ought to be this right, that right and the other right. We want to pick people that would write the new constitution that we would want.

And that way lies chaos.

Which appears to be the plan.

Bowling Pin Shoot - Tucson, Sunday, April 11

OK, I'm going to do a "dry run" of the bowling pin match on Sunday, April 11 at the Tucson Rifle Club. The plan is to try to have the first rounds downrange by 8:00AM. I'm not charging entry fees for this one, other than the daily range fees if you are not already a member.

The plan is thus: Each shooter will shoot five tables of five pins, each run timed on a shot timer. Longest time gets thrown out, the remaining four are averaged. Once everyone's been through, shooters will be paired off by time to compete against each other, best two runs out of three. Winners from the first match-ups will be paired off, losers will be paired off. Lose twice, and you're done for the day, but you'll have shot at least nine tables, four in competition against another shooter. We keep going until only one shooter is left who hasn't lost twice.

Any repeating handgun in .38 Special / 9x19mm or higher caliber. Hollow-point, soft-point and flat-point bullets are far superior to round-nose "hardball" ammo. The more power, the better, BUT:

"Major" loads (.40 S&W and larger) will have the pins located 12" back from the FRONT edge of the table.

"Minor" loads (smaller than .40 S&W) will have the pins located 16" off the BACK edge of the table.

The front edge of the table will be 25 feet from the firing line.

Bear in mind, this is a PRACTICE RUN to see how all of this works out. If it goes well, I plan to run a match each second Sunday of the month.

We'll see how it goes. Hope you can make it.

The Knowledge Problem

Yesterday I quoted a bit from Glenn Reynold's weekend piece Progressives can't get past the Knowledge Problem wherein he also wrote:

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew.

In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together.

Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on.

Turns out, it's not just what they don't know that's the problem.

Like Ronald Reagan said, "It's what they know that ain't so."

Today I read an interesting piece by Lane Wallace in The Atlantic, The Bias of Veteran Journalists. In that piece Lane noted that she was disturbed when she recognized her fellow journalists were asking questions that indicated that they'd already chosen a story line and only asked questions that would further that story line. I recommend you read the whole piece.

But what jumped out at me was this:

In his new book, How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer cites a research study done by U.C. Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock. Tetlock questioned 284 people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends," asking them to make predictions about future events. Over the course of the study, Tetlock collected quantitative data on over 82,000 predictions, as well as information from follow-up interviews with the subjects about the thought processes they'd used to come to those predictions.

His findings were surprising. Most of Tetlock's questions about the future events were put in the form of specific, multiple choice questions, with three possible answers. But for all their expertise, the pundits' predictions turned out to be correct less than 33% of the time. Which meant, as Lehrer puts it, that a "dart-throwing chimp" would have had a higher rate of success. Tetlock also found that the least accurate predictions were made by the most famous experts in the group.

Why was that? According to Lehrer,

The central error diagnosed by Tetlock was the sin of certainty, which led the 'experts' to impose a top-down solution on their decision-making processes ... When pundits were convinced that they were right, they ignored any brain areas that implied they might be wrong.

Tetlock himself, Lehrer says, concluded that "The dominant danger [for pundits] remains hubris, the vice of closed-mindedness, of dismissing dissonant possibilities too quickly."

It's not just pundits. It's the people that Thomas Sowell characterizes as "The Anointed" who gravitate into government to save us poor rubes from ourselves.

Apply Tetlock's observations, for example, to the Anthropogenic Global Warming Intelligentsia. Or the gun control organizations that constantly predict "Wild-West shootouts" and blood in the streets after each incremental repeal of gun control.

"Dart-throwing chimps" indeed.

I'm Gobsmacked - in a GOOD Way

Amazing.

Arizona's House of Representatives voted today, 36-19, to allow permitless "Vermont" concealed carry. The Senate passed the bill on March 29, 20-10. Jan Brewer, our Republican governor who took office when Janet Napolitano was elevated to Secretary of Homeland Security, is running for election, and running hard.

I think she'll sign it.

I'm shocked. Arizona will probably become the third "Vermont Carry" state in the nation at the end of July.

Like Alaska, Arizona will still offer permits that allow reciprocity with other states, and our recent "guns in restaurants" legislation requires anyone who carries into a restaurant that serves alcohol to be a permit holder. The AP reports that more than 154,000 permits are currently on issue in the state. Our population is about 6.6 million, so about 2.3% of us have permits, which is about par for the course among the states with "shall issue" laws.

OK, I WILL Post Something

The United States Code -- containing federal statutory law -- is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117 pages long and composes 226 volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can't be aware of all the real-world complications it's producing, it can't even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it's doing.

But Big Business is "unregulated" to hear it from some people.

(That excerpt is from Instapundit's Washington Examiner piece Progressives can't get past the Knowledge Problem, which is worth reading in full.)

The Free Ice Cream Freezer's Busted

I know that the First Rule of Blogging™ is Post Something Every Day™.

I ain't feeling it.

I am, however, feeling the onset of Spring.

I hate Spring.

Itchy, goopy eyes; pre- and post-nasal drip; coughing fits that leave my chest hurting; sneezing; antihistamines that damned near put me to sleep at my desk, a serious case of the trots from the post-nasal drip; etc. etc. etc.

Did I mention that I hate Spring?

From (formerly) Great Britain - America's Petri Dish

The left has seen the pinnacle of its efforts to sell "utopia" and "social justice" pass by without the success they envisioned, and have resorted to voter cultivation and union terrorism to produce what their manipulation and appeals to compassion have failed to achieve. They are simply no longer interested in what the white British family wants, feels, or have the potential to be; the white British family is now a threat and a detriment to Marxist goals for the future state. When one fails to vote as commanded, then social engineering through mass immigration and a total breakdown of morality through creating apathetic dependence shall compel a "new" British voter to simply vote for what will keep them alive and free of any responsibility whatsoever. This, according to their plan, creates an unopposed mandate for generations to come. That, my friends, is the evil which we must eradicate with the coldest and most brutal determination if we are to survive.

I would also ask that my American readers take notice of these extraordinary times and try to draw parallels to their own demise currently in progress. The initial step was to create a two pronged attack; the first would be to effectively destroy one sixth of the economy, the private sector, and nationalize it. The second would be to create the ultimate dependency of the people to their well informed and all powerful dear leader. There can be no greater power over the people than the decision of who lives and who dies. "Vote for them and you shall lose your tit from which you suckle for your very existence" they will say. Meanwhile by eradicating such a major swath of the private sector, they can begin to scoop up the newly unemployed by putting them on the government payroll; no one would vote against the hand that feeds. The next and most obvious step would be amnesty for 20 to 30 odd million illegals.

-- Torchlight - Great Britain: Emails Reveal Labour Is No Less Than The Future Communist Party Under Union Control

This is what reader PhilB abandoned the UK to escape. And it's coming here. RTWT

Quote of the Day - 'We've Met the Enemy' Edition

From a comment to a WaPo piece, Obama's 17-minute, 2,500-word response to woman's claim of being 'over-taxed' from yesterday:

The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the presidency. It will be easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.

The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails us. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.

Posted by: Grandpa2 | April 3, 2010 11:24 PM

But what if he's not? A fool, that is.

I've been arguing since about day one on this blog that the unannounced but obvious purpose of our public school system over the last 100 years has been the deliberate dumbing-down of the electorate so that they would be easier to lead around, said purpose justified by a philosophy that made its end game the destruction of the capitalist West - a philosophy still around even after the collapse of its spawning ground, the Soviet Union. "Grandpa2" believes Obama a fool that the country can survive, but 95 year-old Harold Estes is concerned that he's not a fool, but a determined enemy. Lou Pritchett shares that concern.

So do I.

But "Grandpa2" has hit upon the problem: we elected him. Not only that, but we settled for John McCain as his opponent. And before that, George Bush and John Kerry, and before that George Bush and Al Gore. And before that....

Comedian Lewis Black had it right, back during the run-up to the 2000 election. "In my lifetime," he said, "we've gone from JFK to Al Gore. In my lifetime, we've gone from Ike to G.W. Bush.

"If this is progress, in a few years we're going to be voting for PLANTS!"

And not wondering why.

They've trained us well.

But Can it Survive Emnity?

That was a question I asked last August when I wrote Restoring the Lost Constitution. I quoted from Orson Scott Card's recent book Shadow of the Giant:

(America) was a nation created out of nothing - nothing but a set of ideals that they never measured up to. Now and then they had great leaders, but usually nothing but political hacks, and I mean right from the start. Washington was great, but Adams was paranoid and lazy, and Jefferson was as vile a scheming politician as a nation has ever been cursed with.

...

America shaped itself with institutions so strong that it could survive corruption, stupidity, vanity, ambition, recklessness, and even insanity in its chief executive.

But, I asked, can it survive enmity?

Today I received an interesting email from a coworker about a letter sent to The Won by a WWII veteran. Here's that letter in its entirety:

Dear President Obama,

My name is Harold Estes, approaching 95 on December 13 of this year. People meeting me for the first time don't believe my age because I remain wrinkle free and pretty much mentally alert. I enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1934 and served proudly before, during and after WW II retiring as a Master Chief Bos'n Mate. Now I live in a "rest home" located on the western end of Pearl Harbor, allowing me to keep alive the memories of 23 years of service to my country.

One of the benefits of my age, perhaps the only one, is to speak my mind, blunt and direct even to the head man. So here goes:

I am amazed, angry and determined not to see my country die before I do, but you seem hell bent not to grant me that wish.

I can't figure out what country you are the president of. You fly around the world telling our friends and enemies despicable lies like:

"We're no longer a Christian nation"

" America is arrogant" - (Your wife even announced to the world," America is mean-spirited. " Please tell her to try preaching that nonsense to 23 generations of our war dead buried all over the globe who died for no other reason than to free a whole lot of strangers from tyranny and hopelessness.)

I'd say shame on the both of you, but I don't think you like America, nor do I see an ounce of gratefulness in anything you do, for the obvious gifts this country has given you. To be without shame or gratefulness is a dangerous thing for a man sitting in the White House.

After 9/11 you said, "America hasn't lived up to her ideals."

Which ones did you mean? Was it the notion of personal liberty that 11,000 farmers and shopkeepers died for to win independence from the British? Or maybe the ideal that no man should be a slave to another man, that 500,000 men died for in the Civil War? I hope you didn't mean the ideal 470,000 fathers, brothers, husbands, and a lot of fellas I knew personally died for in WWII, because we felt real strongly about not letting any nation push us around, because we stand for freedom.

I don't think you mean the ideal that says equality is better than discrimination. You know the one that a whole lot of white people understood when they helped to get you elected.

Take a little advice from a very old geezer, young man.

Shape up and start acting like an American! If you don't, I'll do what I can to see you get shipped out of that fancy rental on Pennsylvania Avenue .. You were elected to lead not to bow, apologize and kiss the hands of murderers and corrupt leaders who still treat their people like slaves.

And just who do you think you are telling the American people not to jump to conclusions and condemn that Muslim major who killed 13 of his fellow soldiers and wounded dozens more. You mean you don't want us to do what you did when that white cop used force to subdue that black college professor in Massachusetts , who was putting up a fight? You don't mind offending the police calling them stupid but you don't want us to offend Muslim fanatics by calling them what they are, terrorists.

One more thing. I realize you never served in the military and never had to defend your country with your life, but you're the Commander-in-Chief now, son. Do your job. When your battle-hardened field General asks you for 40,000 more troops to complete the mission, give them to him. But if you're not in this fight to win, then get out. The life of one American soldier is not worth the best political strategy you're thinking of.

You could be our greatest president because you face the greatest challenge ever presented to any president.

You're not going to restore American greatness by bringing back our bloated economy. That's not our greatest threat. Losing the heart and soul of who we are as Americans is our big fight now. And I sure as hell don't want to think my president is the enemy in this final battle.

Sincerely,

Harold B. Estes

Neither do I, Mr. Estes, but I'm wondering how hell I could tell the difference?

This letter reminded me of another, written by a former vice-president for Procter & Gamble, Lou Pritchett:

Dear President Obama:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core.

You scare me because you lack humility and 'class', always blaming others.

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America' crowd and deliver this message abroad.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

You scare me because you have begun to use 'extortion' tactics against certain banks and corporations.

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O'Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

Lou Pritchett

But then I tell myself that these are both obviously heterosexual white males and are thus racist homophobes and xenophobes and probably almost definitely Republican Palin-supporting teabaggers, so I can safely dismiss their concerns - the Media tells me so.