Busy

Sorry about the lack of content.  I've been busy.  Got stuff lined up I want to write about, but don't have the time.

I do, however, have a bleg:  what happened to Doc Russia and Bloodletting?  The blog has disappeared.  I didn't visit often, but whenever I did, I tried to catch up.  (Doc posted infrequently as it was.)  That Kim du Toit quote at the top of the page went to a Bloodletting post.

Quote of the Month - Tam Edition

Mailing a check to the government to help the poor because you're feeling compassionate is like handing the local crackhead a twenty to fetch you a pizza because you're feeling hungry.

From The Basic Problem, a response to the question "What's this libertarian stuff about?"

Tam at her best!

Quote of the Day - "Grand Theft NATO" Edition

From a comment to yesterday's Victor Davis Hanson piece from which I took the QotD:

(W)elcome to “free market communism”.

This is “redistribution through gaming the system”. Flashing through all Western civilization, in every European, Canadian, Australian, and US marketplace. If it had a video version it would be called “Grand Theft NATO”.

50% of the people play by the “old” rules. They pay taxes, pay their mortgages, pay their own food bills, enter the country legally, and basically support the “other half”.

The “other half”…play the “victim” of the paying “majority”…and try to guilt them into paying for MORE stuff….while amassing goods and services at the discount window of the “government”, which slanders the paying majority as “greedy”. (and any other slander that imposes immediate guilt and shame…pick a weapon as you walk through the terrain…racism, sexism, homophobia, jingoism, etc)

In Grand Theft NATO, the “have nots”…are GIVEN more and more and more. They are “protected” by their benefactors…but, in order to recharge their “batteries” to press on…they MUST vote when they see their “energy” being depleted. Vote for a leftist…get more “energy”, be given more stuff…and more powerful “weapons”.

As you reach higher and more sophisticated levels…you get assistance in weapons of mass deception. Global warming is used as a hoax weapon to “redistribute” money, power, influence…from the “haves” who are ripped off on a worldwide basis…to the “have nots” in leftist enclaves.

You also get “mass media” protections…a force field shield that covers you for every misdeed, puts out false information and distortions for your benefit.

Grand Theft NATO is available everywhere you can find leftists in power. Thanks for playing…now hand over some more of OUR money…you have made enough already.

"cfbleachers"

Yup, that's pretty much it in a nutshell.  Thanks to The Silicon Graybeard for the pointer.

Quote of the Day - Victor Davis Hanson Edition

History's revolutions and upheavals — whether the Nika rioting in Constantinople, the periodic uprising of the turba in Rome, the French upheavals, or the Bolshevik Revolution — are rarely fueled by the starving and despised, but by the subsidized and frustrated, who either see their umbilical cord threatened, or their comfort and subsidies static rather than expansive — or their own condition surpassed by that of an envied kulak class. Perceived relative inequality rather than absolute poverty is the engine of revolution.

These are strange and dangerous times. An insolvent federal government, an exporting China and India, and an almost complete indifference to federal immigration, tax, and regulatory laws have all combined to create a well-entitled but increasingly angry population, one "empowered" and made more, not less, bitter by the last two years of governance in Washington.

Victor Davis Hanson, Works and Days, Thoughts on a Surreal Depression

I'm Going to be in Houston on the 20th

I've got business meetings in the morning and afternoon, but the evening is free. Anybody want to get together for dinner? I'm staying over on the West side off of the Katy freeway. Can't stay out too late. I've got to leave for the airport at 5:00AM.

Quote of the Day - Coulterism Edition

Our mighty Navy SEALs not only put a bullet through Osama's head, but carried off his computers, disks and hard drives. So far, all they've revealed is that Osama had multiple Netflix rentals of "Rendition," "In the Valley of Elah," "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Love Actually."


Can you imagine what's on Osama's hard drives? I mean besides the goat pornography. Pants are wetting throughout Pakistan's military establishment.

Ann Coulter, Next Time, Use FedEx

It's a Twofer!

So (formerly) Great Britain has "some of the toughest gun laws in the world," according to former Home Secretary Alun Michael, gun laws that were necessary because (he said) "We recognize that only the strictest control of firearms will protect the public."

They tell us that getting groped and probed and scanned by the TSA is necessary too, and for the same reason - "protecting the public."

Oh really?

So much for airport security: Man 'smuggled 80 guns into Britain' by hiding them in suitcases


An American man is suspected of smuggling 80 weapons into the UK by hiding them in his suitcases.

Former U.S. marine Steven Greenoe, who holds British citizenship, apparently strolled through airport security in both Britain and America with dozens of handguns stashed in his suitcases on ten flights last year.

He is believed to have delivered them to criminal contacts in the North West of England.

On one occasion, Greenoe was stopped after officials at Atlanta airport spotted the firearms.

But incredibly he was allowed to board the flight after telling officials he worked as an international security consultant.

The revelations are an embarrassment for transatlantic security and for the UK Border Agency.  (Ya THINK?)

It makes a mockery of security regulations which mean innocent passengers have to carry cosmetics in clear plastic bags when in fact Greenoe apparently had no problems carrying weapons in a suitcase.  (Those regulations were already a mockery.  Now they're a belly-laugh.)

So... did Project Fast and Furious expand to include Jolly Olde England?  Is Greenoe a BATF employee, on or off the books? 

Oh, and get this:

A number of 9mm semi-automatic pistols believed to have been bought by Mr Greenoe for $500 each in a North Carolina gunshop were offered for sale at up to £5,000 a piece in Britain a week later, according to the Times.


More than 60 weapons, including more than 20 Glock pistols and more than a dozen Ruger handguns, are understood to be still unaccounted for.

Wow! At current exchange rates, that's an $8200 return on a $500 investment (minus, of course, the plane fare.) Still, you're looking at close to a 16:1 ROI if you can move five at a time, and he's moved at least 60 guns that they know about. At a guess, we're talking $400k worth of profit.

I am once again reminded of Father Guido Sarducci's Five-Minute University Economics class: "Supply and-a Demand. That's it."

Apparently no one in Britain's gun-control culture has taken that one.

Got a New Gun Blogger Rendezvous Attendee

The United travel vouchers have been used.  The Redneck Engineer will be coming this year, flying in from Texas.  He may be bringing his homemade .50!

I guess I'd better make my reservations soon.

The Jokes have Started

From Primeval Papa this morning (we work together):

A Navy SEAL walks into a bar and says, "Give me a bin Laden!" 

The bartender says, "Sorry, sir, but I don't know that cocktail."

"It's easy," replies the SEAL.  "Two shots and a splash of water!"

Want to Make $200?

Pascal is running a contest:

The GOP is having a debate tomorrow in South Carolina.

Your challenge is to listen to the questions and answers and decide what the best answer YOU would come up with.

In the past, TV tells us who wins, and they've rigged the set-up. IOW, they NAIL our minds with this set up time and again. I have myself come up with better answers, some of which were quite funny while being practical.

It is my thinking that the American public is far smarter than any currently serving politician or well-known spokesmouth. Here is your chance to prove that is true and get some publicity too.

I am going to do my part to drum up interest in unofficial answers.

To that end, I am prepared to divide up $200 for the answers submitted to my email box that I find better than the answers given by the GOP stiffs to the conservative unfriendly questions served up by the establishmentarian water carriers. And turning the tables on the water carriers by mocking their question before tailoring your answer can be a winner!

Deadline for submission is 11:59 PM Saturday, 5/07/11.

Go read the whole thing.  And give 'em hell!

Public Education Achieves its Goals

In Detroit.

Report: Nearly Half Of Detroiters Can’t Read

From that report (PDF):

The National Institute for Literacy estimates that 47% of adults (more than 200,000 individuals) in the City of Detroit are functionally illiterate, referring to the inability of an individual to use reading, speaking, writing, and computational skills in everyday life situations.

It gets better:

We also know that of the 200,000 adults who are functionally illiterate, approximately half have a high school diploma or GED, so this issue cannot be solely addressed by a focus on adult high-school completion.

While these numbers are less severe for the region as a whole, the region at-large is far from immune to this issue. Within the tri-county region, there are a number of municipalities with illiteracy rates rivaling Detroit: Southfield at 24%, Warren at 17%, Inkster at 34%, Pontiac at 34%.

Further, from the (short) CBS story, it would appear that certain areas in the D.C. metropolis and around Cleveland are even worse.  Truly, if our education system had been foisted on us by a foreign power, it would have been an act of war.

UPDATE:  Breda takes this and puts her own, much more detailed spin on it.

Quote of the Day - "Imagine" Edition

Imagine Harry out in the woods, wearing his invisibility cloak, carrying a .50bmg Barrett, turning Deatheaters into pink mist, scratching a lightning bolt into his rifle stock for each kill. I don’t think Madam Pomfrey has any spells that can scrape your brains off of the trees and put you back together after something like that. Voldmort’s wand may be 13.5 inches with a phoenix-feather core, but Harry’s would be 0.50 inches with a tungsten core. Let’s see Voldy wave his at 3,000 feet per second. Better hope you have some Essence of Dittany for that sucking chest wound.

William the Coroner, Harry Potter Needs a 1911

RTWT

I'm Conflicted on This One (Possibly NSFW)

I don't know if it's brilliant, or if I'd have the (*ahem*) testicular fortitude to post a picture of it had I thought of it myself, but you be the judge:


Click Here for Image

I bet the charge throws are very consistent!

I'm not even going to ask what he uses for case lube.

Found at (where else?) AR15.com.

Quote of the Day - Human Transformation Edition

It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment. – Christopher Hitchens

See What We Got Here Is ... Failure to Communicate for more on this concept.  See also this previous QotD and this one. 

Now THAT'S Funny!

Today's The Whiteboard:





Probably true, too.

Sad But True

XKCD.  The rollover for this one reads:

The universe is probably littered with one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones that made the irrational decision.

Once Again, No Bowling Pin Match

The May Bowling Pin match should have been next Sunday - Mother's Day. Outstanding planning, no?

Well, like last month, it's been cancelled. The range is still doing berm work, so the Action ranges are not available.

I've been promised, however, that the work will be done in time for the June match, so the next match is Sunday, June 12 at 8:00AM at the Tucson Rifle Club. Same rules, same price: $10 for your first gun, $5 per additional gun.

Hope to see you there!

Ding-Dong, Bin Laden's Dead

And apparently we have the body to prove it.

One down, how many more to go?

UPDATE: I once again bow to Iowahawk for his preternatural ability to insert multiple skewers into the various orifices of the Left when handed such opportunities.

"Apocalypse Now?" Indeed

Via Instapundit:

The Mississippi River, its tributaries swollen by snowmelt and stormwater, is rising toward a flood level that could equal or exceed anything in its recorded history. The threat to Cairo, Illinois — just below the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers — is so grave that the US Army Corps of Engineers is about to blow up a levee just downstream at Bird’s Point, Missouri, to relieve the flooding in Cairo by deliberately inundating 140,000 acres of farms and towns. The emotional controversy that has arisen over this move obscures a real and rising threat to the economy of the United States.

But the real threat posed by this historic, gathering flood may well lie several hundred miles to the south, where the Mississippi crosses the Louisiana border. There, as the Corps well knows but dare not discuss, this historic flood threatens to overwhelm one of the frailest defenses industrial humanity has offered to preserve its profits from the immutable processes of nature. This flood has the potential to be a mortal blow to the economy of the United States, and outside the Corp of Engineers virtually no one knows why.

RTWT.

May Victims of Communism Day

Today is the third annual Victims of Communism Day, a day to remember the people murdered by their own governments in their quest to achieve a "worker's paradise" where everyone is equal, where "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities" is the beautiful dream lie.  R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, has calculated that the total number of victims of Communism - that is, the domestic victims of their own governments - in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia is 98.4 million people.  For all Communist governments during the 20^th Century, he puts the estimate at approximately 110 million.  And this wasn't in warfare against other nations, this was what these governments did to their own people - "breaking eggs" to make their utopian omlette.

Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and another six million people the Nazis decided were "undesirable" went with them.  "Never again" is the motto of the modern Jew, and many others just as dedicated.  But "again and again and again" seems to be the rebuke of history.

The Communists are hardly alone in these crimes.  Rummel estimates that the total number of people murdered by their own governments during the 20^th Century is on the close order of 262 million, but the single biggest chunk of that truly frightening number is directly due to one pernicious idea:  That we can make people better.

Why do I own guns?  For a number of reasons, but one of them is this:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?  --  Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago

--

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. -- Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to re-hear en banc, 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2003.

I intend to repeat this post each May 1 that I continue to run this blog.  This is the second time I have put it up.

UPDATE:  Sipsey Street Irregulars has a post to go along with this one.  STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.