Match Report: Copper, Lead and Wood Chips

Today we held our seventh monthly bowling pin match at Tucson Rifle Club. Fourteen people (besides myself) came to shoot, and eight of them brought a .22 along with their centerfire pistols. We changed the match format for this month. Instead of shooting qualifying times and then a handicapped best-of-three double-elimination tournament, everybody shot against everybody else once (except where I screwed up the scoring and had some people shoot against each other twice). Oh, and there were two ties that required reshoots.

We started the match at about 8:30, and went non-stop until about 1:30. That's a lot of shooting, ladies and gentlemen. (Hint: it shouldn't take that long! ;-)

So here are the scores, .22 Rimfire first:

Travis Higgins, Ruger MkIII: 7 wins (undefeated)
Elaine Tab, S&W Model 41: 5 wins
Cliff Reed, Kimber: 4 wins
Bill Tab, S&W Model 41: 3 wins
David Carr, Ruger MkIII: 3 wins
John Higgins, EAA Witness: 3 wins
Froilan Gutierrez, Ruger MkIII: 3 wins
Kyle Blecker, suppressed ?: 0 wins

Kyle had a lot of ammo trouble, but his gun sure was quiet!

Centerfire:

Kevin Baker, Kimber Classic, .45ACP: 14 wins (undefeated)
John Higgins, EAA Witness, 9mm: 12 wins
Clifford Reed, Norinco 1911, .45ACP: 10 wins
Jim Walters, EAA Witness, 9mm: 9 wins
Ken Cabrera, Sig 220, .45ACP: 9 wins
Jim Burnett, Clark Custom 1911, 45ACP: 8 wins
Bill Tab, Kimber Classic Target, .45ACP: 8 wins
Travis Higgins, Browning Hi-Power, 9mm: 7 wins
Rick Lavaty, 1911 (unknown), .45ACP: 6 wins
Joe Lancaster, Beretta 92, 9mm: 6 wins
Skip Blecker, Glock, 9mm: 4 wins
Larry Boykin, Rock Island 1911, 9mm: 4 wins
Elaine Tab, Kimber Classic Target, .45ACP: 3 wins
Froilan Gutierrez, Colt 1911 custom, .45ACP: 3 wins
Kyle Blecker, Glock 9mm: 2 wins

If you do the math, that's 28 rimfire matches and 105 centerfire matches for a total of 133 matches in five hours, or about one match every 2¼ minutes. We were busy.

I'd also like to say that this is the first match out of the seven we've held that I've won. Yeaaaa me!

Rick Lavaty won the prize drawing and at least got his gas money back, all $23 worth. Bill and Elaine Tab shared one .45 and one .22, and had to borrow guns to shoot against each other. Bill said he and Elaine went through about $200 worth of ammo for this one match, but it was better than "blowing it at the casino!" I can agree with that!

My tables are all shot up again, so it's time to rebuild them. Thanks to those who donated to the table fund! And thanks to everyone who helped set up, set pins, run the match, and especially tear down at the end! Special thanks to those of you who helped saw off pin tops for the .22 matches. That's a lot of work to do with your strong hand during a match.

Next month we're staying with the same format, but with one change - minor calibers will compete against minors, majors against majors, and the winners from each will compete against each other, best two-out-of-three for the title. That ought to cut down a bit on the round count and get us done a bit earlier. Plus, the match will start at 9:00AM instead of 8:00.

Sunday, December 12. Put it on your calendars!

If You Write for the Alt SF Weekly. . .

. . . does that mean you're a conservative?

I strongly recommend to you a two week old SF Weekly story, Let It Bleed, that begins like this:

"Infinite" is not a word you expect to find in a report on municipal spending. It's more of a science fiction–type term — Tremble, Earthling, before the infinite might of Galaxor! But there it was, in a recent report on San Francisco's finances: Spending on the city's employee retirement system in the past decade had grown at an "infinite" rate.

Naturally, that's an exaggeration. If you do the math, the city's retirement costs for employees in the past 10 years actually grew only 66,733 percent.

Still, you might call that a Galaxor-sized number.

In fiscal year 1999-2000, the city spent about $300,000 on its retirement system. In fiscal year 2009-10, it was $200.5 million. Benefits alone — not salaries, just benefits — for current and retired employees this year are budgeted at $993 million. Spending on retirees' health care and pensions is conservatively projected to triple within five years.

And after that? Infinite.

Oh, and this:

San Francisco has known about this looming crisis for a decade — and gone out of its way to make things worse.

In fact, on those few occasions when somebody has tried to do something about it, city government has worked with unions to successfully sabotage those efforts. San Francisco may not be in as deep a hole as many cities, but it's shoveling a lot harder.

Go. Read. And ask yourself how many other cities are in a similar bind, and what they're going to do about it.

Tough history coming, indeed.

Politically Incorrect Commercial

British, obviously, since the driver is on the wrong side of the car, but still...

It's better than that damned Audi "Green Police" ad.

The VW ad is an old one, but there are still a lot of people who've never seen it.

The Narrative

The first Stephen Hunter book I ever read was The Master Sniper, picked up at a library book sale many, many years ago. It was obvious to me then that the author was not one of those for whom a firearm is a magic talisman or an incomprehensible piece of technology. This guy understood guns. Yes, he exaggerated and embellished, but you had to know firearms to know that. At least nothing he wrote in that novel made me want to whack my forehead against a wall.

Later, I found more of his books, and discovered that his day job was as a film critic for The Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. In his spare time, he cranked out novels, novels that always included firearms as minor, sometimes major, plot devices. Novels where the gun-handling wasn't unbelievable because it was wrong, it was just sometimes unbelievable because nobody's that perfect. Hunter's book Point of Impact was made into the movie Shooter in 2007. He retired from the WaPo in 2008.

A coincidence, I'm sure.

I've liked everything I've read that Hunter has written, and that includes his "homage" to the Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai, The 47^th Samurai, which some people just didn't care for.

I'm currently reading his latest paperback, I, Sniper, which is living up to my expectations, but I want to relate one interesting passage. Remember, Hunter spent more than 37 years working for big-city newspapers, one of the few people in those organizations not fully a member of the media zeitgeist.

Stephen Hunter on "The Narrative:"

You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything.
--
The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It's so powerful because it's unconscious. It's not like they get together every morning and decide "These are the lies we will tell today." No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it's a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they've never really experienced that's arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they've chosen to live their lives. It's a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama is a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know that Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up.... Cheney's a devil. Biden's a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin.
--
And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don't even know they're true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin'-stroy anybody who makes them question that....

I, Sniper, pp. 231-232

I refer you now to The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation from January, 2008.

Hunter's next novel, Dead Zero comes out in hardcover in December. Oh, and Hunter doesn't take himself too seriously, either.

So, Did ACORN Help With Tax Advice?

Somali gangs trafficked girls for sex

We're Getting to be More Like England

Our "yobs" are becoming more and more like theirs.

Re-read "History and Moral Philosophy." And recall that it was first published in 1959.

My Response to James Kelly

...which is seriously overdue, provided by Bill Whittle:

Bill is, as always, so very much more eloquent than I.

And brief.

From Friday's "Learned Feudalism"

Madison said rights pre-exist government. Wilson said government exists to dispense whatever agenda of rights suits its fancy, and to annihilate, regulate or attenuate or dilute those others. Madison said the rights we are owed are those that are necessary for the individual pursuit of happiness. Wilson and the progressives said the rights you deserve are those that will deliver material happiness to you and spare you the strain and terror of striving.

From today, Barry Rubin's It’s How You Play the Game: The Fate of Western Civilization and Grade-School Soccer:

My son is playing on a local soccer team which has lost every one of its games, often by humiliating scores. The coach is a nice guy, but seems an archetype of contemporary thinking: he tells the kids not to care about whether they win, puts players at any positions they want, and doesn't listen to their suggestions.

He never criticizes a player or suggests how a player could do better. My son, bless him, once remarked to me: "How are you going to play better if nobody tells you what you're doing wrong?" The coach just tells them how well they are playing. Even after an 8-0 defeat, he told them they'd played a great game.

And of course, the league gives trophies to everyone, whether their team finishes in first or last place.

I'd even seen an American television documentary about boys and sports which justified this approach, explaining that coaches were doing something terrible by deriding failure, urging competitiveness, and demanding victory. So were the kids really happier to be "relieved" of the strain of trying to win, "liberated" from feeling bad at the inequality of athletic talent?

As George Will said, "the agenda is constant." But RTWT. It won't surprise the Madisonians. The Wilsonians will ignore it.

Bowlin Pin Shoot - Tucson, Sunday November 14

Tucson Rifle Club action range. Registration begins at 8:00 AM. Sign in at the range office, but if all you're going to do is shoot the match, you don't need to pay the daily use range fee - it's part of the match entry fee for non-members. $10 for the first gun, $5 each for additional guns. First round downrange (hopefully) by about 8:30.

This one's going to be a little different.

Centerfire and .22 rimfire will be run as separate classes, other than that, it's everybody against everybody.

Smallest centerfire allowed: .38 Special. Hollowpoint and flat-point bullets work better at carrying pins off the tables than round-nose or FMJ bullets do, regardless of caliber.

If you show up, you'll be paired off against all other shooters for one (1) man-on-man competition each. Bring enough ammo. Attendance has been running in the 12-15 shooter range, If you shoot against 12 other people and only five rounds per match, that's 60 rounds.

Most people take more than five shots.

A LOT more.

Even if you lose the match, you get to keep shooting until you've cleared your table. Consider it practice for the next round.

Whoever wins the most tables will be declared victor of the day. Your only prize: the accolades of your peers.

Everyone who hangs around until the end of the match will be put in for the drawing. $1 of each entry goes into a pot. A drawing from the names of those present will be taken, and the winner gets the whole pot. It's been running about $20, so you get your entry fee back, and a little gas money.

See you next Sunday!

Back from the Range

Man, I'm beat. I got up at 4:00AM this morning, partly because the better-half decided that this would be a good weekend to have a yard sale, and I had to move my truck out of the driveway so she could set up. I didn't leave until about a quarter after six, since I had to help, but I got to the range about 7:15 and Exurban Kevin was right behind me. My new cart was one of the best purchases I've made recently. It really helped in getting all of the stuff from my truck to the shooting benches and then downrange and back again.

A total of about twelve people showed up, mostly from AR15.com, but besides us the range was PACKED. One group showed up with some full-auto fun and a single-shot .50BMG, about half of the rest of the crowd had EBRs of one flavor or another. My steel took quite a beating. I managed to break a weld on the one I hung up at 100 yards, but the other weld held so we kept shooting at it. Now my ammo stocks are low again and I need to do some serious reloading. Thankfully the component drought has ended and I have a pretty good supply on hand so that I can.

Thanks again to Exurban Kevin for the idea, and we'll have to do this again next year. (Pictures to follow - though not many, I was busy shooting - when I get a chance to download them.)

Off to the Range!

I'm almost finished packing up the truck for the hour-long drive to the range. Hope to see you there!

Learned Feudalism

On May 13, George Will delivered the keynote speech at the Cato Institute's biennial Milton Friedman Prize dinner. You can listen to the podcast, or if you prefer, I've cleaned up the voice-recognition transcript that was, to put it mildly, "not 100% accurate" below. It's a good speech, and after Tuesday, it's even more relevant:

Someone once said that the Chicago Cubs are to the World Series as the Tenth Amendment is to constitutional law: of rare and inconsequential appearance. Thank you Ed for that generous introduction that proves that not all forms of inflation are painful. It put me in mind of the Renaissance Pope who used to travel about Rome being greeted by crowds with cries of the "Deus Est, Deus Est" - "Thou art God, Thou art God." The Pope said "It's a trifle strong, but really very pleasant."

I want to thank all of the people in this room for making Cato and its work possible. And I want to thank a few million more people who in recent weeks have toiled to demonstrate in a timely manner why Cato is necessary - I refer of course to the people of Greece.

Milton Friedman, whose name we honor tonight, was honored often for his recondite and subtle scholarship. But it was complemented by a sturdy common sense much in fashion nowhere now. About forty years ago he found himself in an Asian country where the government was extremely eager to show off a public works project which was inordinately and excessively fond – it was digging a canal. They took Milton out to see this, and he was astonished because there were hordes of workers, but no heavy earth moving equipment. And he remarked upon this to his government guide, and the man said "Mr. Friedman, you don't understand this is a jobs program. That's why we only have men with shovels.” To which Friedman said, "Well, if it's a jobs program why don't they have spoons instead of shovels?"

The attempt to educate the world to the principles of rationality and liberty never ends. It began in earnest for a lot of us in 1962 with the publication of Capitalism and Freedom. In 1964, two years later, we got a demonstration of how urgent it was to have that book when Lyndon Johnson, campaigning for president said, "We're in favor of a lot of things and we're against mighty few."

Well the man running against him at that time, 1964, was of course Barry Goldwater, who, to the superficial observer, seemed to lose because he only carried 44 states. When the final votes were tabulated sixteen years later however, it was clear that he had won. However it was a contingent victory. In 2007 per capita welfare state spending - per capita welfare state spending, adjusted for inflation - was 70% higher than it had been when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated 27 years earlier.

The trend continues and the trend is ominous.

Fifty-one days ago now, the President signed into law the Health Care Reform, the great lunge to complete the new deal project, and the Great Society project. The great lunge to make us more European. At exactly the moment that this is done the European Ponzi scheme of the social welfare state is being revealed for what it is. There's a difference. We are not Europeans, we are not in Orwell's phrase "a state-broken people." We do not have a feudal background of subservience to the State. No, that is the project of the current administration. It can be boiled down to "Learned feudalism."

It is a dependency agenda that I have been talking about ad nauseam. Two recent examples. When the government took over student loans, making that the case that now the two most important financial transactions of the average family - get a housing mortgage and a loan for college tuition - will now be transactions with the government, they included a provision in the student loan legislation that says there will be special forgiveness of student loans for those who go into work for the government or for non-profits. One-third of the recent stimulus was devoted to preserving Unionized public employees' jobs in states and localities, and so it goes. The agenda is constant.

In 1965 with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the final dissolution in some ways of the sense of restraint on the part of the federal government, it was advertised as aid for the poorest of the poor. Ten years later, in 1975, 80% of all school districts were participating in this. It is a principle of liberal social legislation that a program for the poor is a poor program. The assumption is that middle class Americans will not support a program aimed only for the poor.

That is a theory refuted by the fact that the earned income tax credit, supported and expanded by Ronald Reagan, is extremely popular in this country. But it does reveal the fact that dependency is the agenda of the other side. It is the agenda to make more and more people dependent in more and more things on the government. We can now see today in the headlines from Europe where that leads. It leads to the streets of Athens where we had described by media as "anti-government mobs."

The "anti-government mobs" were composed almost entirely of government employees.

The Greeks - the Greeks and the Europeans have said all along as they increase the weight of the state, in danger of suffocating the economy, "So far so good." They kept saying, "So far so good."

Reminds me of - everything does sooner or later – of baseball stories. True story. In 1951 Warren Spahn, on the way to becoming the winningest left handed pitcher in the history of baseball, was pitching for the then Boston Braves against the then New York Giants in the then Polo Grounds. And the Giants sent up to the plate a rookie who is 0-for-twelve. It’s clear this kid would never hit big league pitching, some kid named Willie Mays. Spahn stood out on the mound sixty feet six inches from home plate, threw the ball to Mays. Crushed it. First hit, first home run. After the game the sports writers went up to Spahn in the clubhouse, said “Spawny, what happened?” Spahn said, “Gentlemen, for the first sixty feet that was a hell of a pitch.”

It's not good enough in baseball and it's not good enough in governance either. Let me give you a sense, a framework to understand this extraordinarily interesting moment in which we live. I believe that today, as has been the case for 100 years and as will be the case for the foreseeable future, the American political argument is an argument between two Princetonians: James Madison of the class of 1771, and Thomas Woodrow Wilson of the class of 1879.

I firmly believe the most important decision taken anywhere in the twentieth century was the decision taken as to where to locate the Princeton graduate college.

President of Princeton Woodrow Wilson wanted it located down on the campus. Other people wanted to located where it in fact is, up on the golf course away from the campus. When Wilson lost that, he had one of his characteristic tantrums, went into politics and ruined the twentieth century.

I'm - I'm simplifying a bit.

Madison asserted that politics should take its bearings from nature, from human nature and the natural rights with which we are endowed that pre-exist government. Woodrow Wilson, like all people steeped in the nineteenth century discovery (or so they thought) that History is a proper noun with a capital "H," that history has a mind and life of its own, he argued that human nature is as malleable and changeable as history itself, and that it is the job of the state to regulate and guide the evolution of human nature, and the changeable nature of the rights we are owed by the government that in his view dispensed rights.

Heraclitus famously said "You cannot step into the same river twice," meaning that the river would change. The modern progressive believes that you can't step into the same river twice because you change constantly. Well those of us of the Madisonian persuasion believe that we take our bearings from a certain constancy. Not from, well to coin a phrase "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

That has become, that phrase from Justice Brennan, has become the standard by which the constitution is turned into a "living document." A constitution that no longer can constitute. A constitution has, as Justice Scalia said, an anti-evolution purpose. The very virtue of a constitution is that it is not changeable. It exists to prevent change, to embed certain rights so that they cannot easily be taken away.

Madison said rights pre-exist government. Wilson said government exists to dispense whatever agenda of rights suits its fancy, and to annihilate, regulate or attenuate or dilute those others. Madison said the rights we are owed are those that are necessary for the individual pursuit of happiness. Wilson and the progressives said the rights you deserve are those that will deliver material happiness to you and spare you the strain and terror of striving.

The result of this is now clear. We see in the rampant indebtedness of our country and the European countries what someone has called "a gluttonous feast on the flesh of the future." We see the infantilization of publics that become inert and passive, waiting for the state to take care of them. One statistic: 50% of all Americans 55 years old or older have less than $50,000 in savings and investment.

The feast on the flesh of the future is what debt is. To get a sense of the size of our debt, in 1916, midway in Woodrow Wilson's first term, the richest man in America John D. Rockefeller could have written a personal check and retired the National Debt. Today the richest man in America, Bill Gates, could write a personal check for all his worth and not pay two months interest on the National Debt. Five years from now interest debt service will consume half of all income taxes. Ten years from now the three main entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security plus interest will consume 93% of all federal revenues. Twenty years from now debt service interest will be the largest item in the federal budget.

Calvin Coolidge, the last president with whom I fully agreed, once said that when you see a problem coming down the road at you, relax. Nine times out of ten it will go into the ditch before it gets to you. He was wrong about the one we now face. We are facing the most predictable financial crisis, most predictable social and political crisis of our time. And all the political class can do is practice what I call "the politics of assuming a ladder." That's an old famous story of two people walking down the road, one's an economist the other's a normal American, and they fall into a pit with very steep sides. The normal American at the bottom says "Good lord we can't get out!" The economists said, "Not to worry, we'll just assume a ladder."

This seems to me what is the only approach they have to the Ponzi nature of our own welfare state. I think what it is time for us to understand, that the model that we share in a somewhat attenuated form so far with Europe simply cannot work. It is that on the one hand we should tax the rich, AKA the investing and job creating class, yet count on spending the revenues of investment and job creation. No one has explained to the political class that it is very dangerous to try to leap a chasm in two bounds.

We are now being told that a value-added tax is going to be required. Well, the value-added tax would help the political class to shower benefits on those who can vote for them while taxing people who can't vote for them. The beauty of the value-added tax is that it taxes everybody but nobody quite notices it.

We are going to come now to a time when America's going to have to revisit Madison's Federalist Paper 45, and his statement "the powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined."

Few and defined.

The cost of not facing this fact of not enforcing the doctrine in some sense of enumerated powers, is that big government inevitably breeds bigger government. James Q. Wilson, one of the great social scientists in American history, put it this way: "Once politics was about only a few things. Today it is about nearly everything. Once the legitimacy barrier has fallen, political conflict takes a very different form. New programs need not await the advent of a crisis of extraordinary majority, because no program is any longer new. It is seen rather as an extension, a modification or an enlargement of something the government is already doing. Since there is virtually nothing the government has not tried to do, there is little that it cannot be asked to do."

And so we have today's death spiral of the welfare state: an ever larger government resting on an ever smaller tax base. Government impeding the creation of wealth in order to enforce the redistribution of it. We're not fooling, however, the American people. The Wall Street Journal this morning announced with a sort of breathless surprise that about 80% of the American people disapprove of congress. Raising a fascinating question: who are the 20%?

It is a sign of national health that Americans still think about Washington the way they used to talk about the old Washington Senators baseball team, when the saying was "Washington: first in war, first in peace and last in the American League." Back then they were run, the Senators were, by a man named Clark Griffith who said, "The fans like home runs, and we have assembled a pitching staff to please our fans."

That is why the American people do not mind what they are instructed by their supposed betters to mind, that is the so-called problem of gridlock. Ladies and gentlemen gridlock is not an American problem, it is an American achievement. When James Madison and fifty-four other geniuses went to Philadelphia in the sweltering summer of 1787, they did not go there to design an efficient government, the idea would have horrified them. They wanted a safe government to which end they filled it with blocking mechanisms. Three branches of government. Two branches of the legislative branch. Veto. Veto override. Supermajorities. Judicial review. And yet I can think of nothing the American people have wanted intensely and protractedly that they did not eventually get.

The world understands. A world most of whose people live under governments they wish were capable of gridlock, that we always have more to fear from government speed than government tardiness. We are told that one must not be a party of "NO." To "NO" I say an emphatic "YES!" For two reasons. The reason that almost all "improvements" make matters worse is that most new ideas are false. Second: the most beautiful five words in the English language are the first five words of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law."

No law abridging freedom of speech, no law establishing religion, no law interfering with the right to assemble to petition for redress of grievance, and the bill of rights goes on in a litany, a tissue of "noes." No unreasonable searches and seizures. No cruel and unusual punishments, and so it goes. The American people are, I think, healthier than they are given credit for. They have only one defect: We have nothing to fear right now but an insufficiency of fear itself. It is time for a wholesome fear of what people are trying to do.

We have few allies. We don't have Hollywood. We don't have academia. We don't have the mainstream media. But we have two things: First we've arithmetic on our side. The numbers do not add up and cannot be made to do so. Second, we have the Cato Institute. People in this room are what the Keynesians call a multiplier. And for once they are right.

In Athens, the so called cradle of democracy, the Demos - a Greek word, "the people" - have been demonstrating in recent days the degradation that attends a people who become state-broken to a fault. Who become crippled by dependency and the infantilization that comes with it. Well, we shall see. I think America is organized around the very principle of individualism, which I can best illustrate with what I promise you is the last baseball story.

True story. Rogers Hornsby was at the plate, the greatest right-handed hitter in the history of baseball, and a rookie was on the mound who was quite reasonably petrified. The rookie threw three pitches that he thought were on the edge of the plate but the umpire said "Ball one, ball two, ball three."

The rookie got flustered and shouted in at the umpire, "Those were strikes!" The umpire took off his mask, looked out at the rookie, and said "Young man, when you throw a strike, Mr. Hornsby will let you know." Hornsby had become the standard of excellence. If he didn't swing, it wasn't a strike. We want a country in which everyone is encouraged to strive to be his own standard of excellence and have the freedom to pursue it. Now there are reasons for being downcast at the moment. Certain recent elections have not gone so well. Let me remind you something again going back to 1964. In 1964 the liberal candidate got 90% of the electoral votes. Eight years later the liberal candidate got 3% of the electoral votes.

This is a very changeable country.

I would recall the words to you of the first Republican president, who two years before he became president spoke at the Wisconsin state fair with terrible clouds of civil strife lowering over the country. Lincoln told his audience the story of the oriental despot who summoned his wise men, and assigned them to go away and come back when they had devised a statement to be carved in stone to be forever in view and forever true. They came back 'ere long and the statement they had carved in stone was "This too shall pass away."

"How consoling in times of grief," said Lincoln. "How chastening in times of pride. And yet," said Lincoln, "if we cultivate the moral world within us as prodigiously as we Americans cultivate the physical world around us, it need not be true." Lincoln understood that freedom is the basis of values. It’s not the alternative to a values approach to politics. Freedom is the prerequisite for the moral dimension to flower.

Given freedom the American people will flower. Given the Cato Institute, the American people will have in time secured freedom. Thank you very much and thank you for your help to Cato.

Quote of the Day - Thomas Sowell Edition

(Y)ou can't depend on the government because the government is not some brooding presence in the sky. The government is an organization with its own interest which it will serve over and above whatever interest it is supposedly being set up to serve. -- Thomas Sowell, interviewed at Right Wing News

Correspondingly, Shepherd Book from Firefly, "War Stories" -

A government is a body of people, usually, notably ungoverned.

QE2

So, the Fed announces that it's going to purchase $600,000,000,000 in Treasury bonds, since the rest of the world (read "China") has decided that America isn't a good risk anymore.

Remember this?

Don't think QE2, but Titanic.

Damned Racist Teabaggers . . .

They went and elected Lt. Col. Allen West, someone I've mentioned here before.

Here's his acceptance speech:

Outstanding!

Promise Kept

Quote of the Day - Conflict of Visions Edition

Adherents of the unconstrained vision are idealists, those who believe in Utopia, or Heaven on earth. Unfortunately, their attempts to create these Heavens on earth have always led to Hells, and always will. The reason? Believing human nature is perfectible, they must always project all evil onto other people, who must be sacrificed in order to leave only the "good." The term for this is "scapegoating," and as M. Scott Peck clearly noted, it is "the genesis of human evil."

If I had to describe the left (those who believe in the unconstrained vision) in three phrases, it would be the "lust to destroy," the "lust for power," and the "lust for attention." Those three traits, in the West, are the main ones of Satan, who wanted to be God. His sin was that of hubris, as it is the main sin of the left.

As I noted, these divisions exist even among libertarians. Objectivism, for example, is strongly leftist, with its belief in a minuscule group of intellectually and morally superior people who have the right to rule over a destroyed world. Since Objectivists are idealists who believe in a perfect Galtian Utopia, those who do not are in their minds not merely mistaken, but evil.

--

The Constrained and Unconstrained Visions, Bob Wallace, The Price of Liberty

Interesting essay.

Your Moment of Zen - Blue and Gold Edition

Just...wow:

Click for the full-size version.

Quote of the Day - Election Edition

Remember this one as you go to the polls tomorrow:

Leftists perpetuate hopelessness while conservatives are optimists. If you believe that you have no hope of making the most of yourself and building a prosperous life, then the hopelessness of Leftism makes sense to you and you believe that money comes from luck and/or exploitation and you can only get it by taking it from those who are making it. In contrast, fiscal conservatism is about optimism in the individual’s ability to create wealth and the recognition that the system that allows individuals to keep the majority of the wealth they create harnesses one of the greatest powers in the universe: human ambition.

Cynthia Yockey, A Newly Conservative Lesbian - The economic theory of Leftist hopelessness vs. conservative optimism

Do read the whole piece. It's quite good.

Southern Arizona Blogshoot - Update

OK, here's what we have:

ExurbanKevin and I are setting up a completely informal get-together of bloggers, message board members, and readers. We did this last year and had a very good time. I want this one to be bigger. The weather should be beautiful.

Date: Saturday, November 6, 2010
Time: 7:00AM 'till ?
Location: Elsy Pearson Public Shooting Range, Casa Grande, AZ, just off of I-8, just West of the I-10/I-8 interchange.

The Elsy Pearson Public Range has three areas with shooting benches and sun shades. There is a 100 yard range, a 300 yard range, and a 25 yard range. There's also a bigass rock outcropping on the side of the mountain about 600 yards downrange if you want something to bounce bullets off of. The city of Casa Grande has finally seen fit to equip the range with a Porta-pottie, but there still isn't any running water. Everyone needs to bring lots of fluids, if nothing else. Oh, and sunscreen. It may be cool, but the UV count is still high.

The range is unattended. We are expected to behave ourselves and clean up afterward. The site is posted "Absolutely No Explosives," so no Tannerite on site, and no exploding targets of any kind. Sorry. They don't like .50BMG at the range, but I've seen people shooting them there and so far as I know, no one has complained.

The same cannot be said for Tannerite.

Full auto, on the other hand, is A-OK. (Just have your paperwork. The police range is about 400 yards away.)

There are concrete shooting benches, but no chairs. Bring your own. The shooting area is fenced, so no vehicles downrange. If your stuff is heavy, bring a cart that'll fit through a 3' man-gate. (I have to get one of those.)

I plan on bringing my tables and bowling pins and setting up for pin shooting on the 25 yard range - no charge, just come shoot. I have my steel plates (9" x 11" x 1" AR500 armor - they'll stop a .50) and I'll be bringing a few of those for people to shoot at. (That's why I need a cart. Those mothers weigh 35 lbs each!) I'll bring some other things to play with, too.

The range HAS NO TARGET STANDS. Bring something to put your targets on. The ground is about as hard as concrete, so the cheap-ass wire frames you're supposed to stick in the ground? Uh-uh. My stand is made of 2" PVC pipe and 2x2 lumber. Other people just bring big cardboard boxes they set on the ground, or their own target stands that just sit on the surface. Whatever works for you.

Oh, NO GLASS. If you want to shoot something that breaks, I'll be bringing some clay pigeons.

We're planning on lunch at the range. I'm going to bring a small gas-fired grill and some burgers 'n fixin's, I encourage others to do the same. Sharing is fun! (Please don't share salmonella.)

Bear in mind, this is a public range. Other people not associated with this shoot will be there, too.

Please do plan on coming. See you Saturday!

Oh, and BTW, aside from some short posts this week, I won't be blogging much. I need to load some ammo for the shoot.