Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Found at Blackfive via Instapundit:


You just have to love that.

What HE Said!

What HE Said!

Thanksgiving dinner was a success. The two-hour 20 lb. turkey was perfect, and the rest of the meal was pretty damned good, if I do say so myself. My lovely bride took over the cleaning chores after the fact, since I'd cooked (and cleaned) all day. Hell, I may do this again at Christmas.

Did a little postprandial web-surfing, and found this: Free in Idaho's "It is NOT My Fault." An excerpt:

The Republican Party has presided over the largest growth of government, the most reckless spending, and some of the most blatant abuses of the Constitution this country has had to endure in many years. Led by George W Bush it has walked further and further away from conservative ideals. Don't tell me Bush just wasn't a good communicator, or that he just didn't articulate the conservative message well. He DOESN'T BELIEVE those things, so how can he communicate them? And when faced with the obviously most Leftist opponents the Dems have ever run, and in spite of the evidence of the surprising support that someone as "not ready to be President" as Ron Paul generated on his message alone, the GOP runs a guy who threatened to jump parties a few years back and as lately as last summer pushed for something not even a majority of "moderates" wanted . . . I'm sorry, blaming conservatives for not joining the team and thus costing them the win is more stupid fingerpointing. Give me one good reason to support the very things we don't believe in. And "at least he isn't a Democrat" is NOT the right answer.

There's a lot more where that came from, and I agree with damned near every word, and I'm not really a conservative. (Oh, I put an "X" next to McCain's name, and I'd have preferred him to the Dali-Bama, but I never liked McCain as a candidate, and the only reason I voted for him was because it was him or HillBama. As the bumper sticker said, McCain was the least repulsive Democrat on the ticket.)

I'm not a true conservative, but I concur with BillH's post-election day statement, (minus the bible reference, of course):

Individual liberty.
Personal responsibility.
Honesty.
Free society.
Private property.
Small government.
Strong defense.
Capitalism.
Stewardship.
Charity.
The Constitution for what it says.
The Bible for what it says.

My list looks the same this morning. How about yours?

Oh, and the first excerpt in this post is Friday's Quote of the Day. Tomorrow is dedicated to reloading, reading, and writing, but not necessarily hitting the "Publish Post" button.

Enjoy your weekend!

The Original Thanksgiving

The Original Thanksgiving

For your holiday reading pleasure I recommend Vin Suprynowicz's For What Do We Give Thanks?, which he first posted in 1999 and has traditionally repeated each year since. Don't worry, it's nice and short.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

From a comment left last night by the GeekWithA.45:

The key cognitive sabotage is to present a method of evaluating information that passes as "rigorous" to an uninformed mind.

Such a substitute cannot, by definition stand against a genuinely rigorous evaluation process, but it doesn't need to, as far as the host is concerned. The mental niche is filled, evaluating the genuinely rigorous process as false, and thus the root of the tree of knowledge is poisoned.

If you look inside the head of such, you'll find Gramsci laughing his ass off, saying "im in ur base, killing ur d00ds."

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. I'll be cooking pretty much all day.

An Example of "Grass-Eating"

An Example of "Grass-Eating"

From the piece linked in the previous post:

Grass-eaters are deathly afraid of anything resembling personal responsibility. They are prohibited from assigning blame to any human being — such an act, after all, would imply that they themselves might someday be blamed for some transgression! Therefore, grass-eaters blame just about anything that isn’t animate for society’s ills — weapons, rap music, video games, black trenchcoats, money, red meat, or the hormone testosterone.

Or, in this wonderful example of "journalism" (wherein someone wrote it, and someone - supposedly - reviewed it before approving it for publication):

SUV hits kids outside suburban Los Angeles school

DIAMOND BAR, Calif. — A sport utility vehicle has struck and injured several people — including at least two children — outside a suburban Los Angeles elementary school. One is listed as critically injured.

Los Angeles County fire Inspector Sam Padilla (puh-DEE'-uh) says firefighters have been called to Maple Hill Elementary School in the town of Diamond Bar, east of Los Angeles.

He says it appears a car struck three people outside the school Wednesday. Two were moderately injured, and the other is listed as critical.

Televised news reports showed an adult and two children being treated. One child was to be airlifted to a hospital.

A black sport utility vehicle was up an embankment near a sidewalk.

(My emphasis.)

Is it racist to note the color of the SUV? And was it trying to flee the scene?

No mention of a driver, is there? No, apparently the SUV is at fault!

And to top it all off, for some reason Comcast seems to believe this should be National News!

Sheesh!

Oh, THIS Gets a Link!

Oh, THIS Gets a Link!

Via LabRat at Atomic Nerds, the phrase of the 21^st Century: "Grass-eater."

Go. Read.

Quote of the Day

From the Yuri Bezmenov interview which has been painstakingly transcribed (trust me, I've done transcription) by Useless Dissident:

(Ideological subversion is) a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow[ly] and is divided [into] four basic stages. The first one being demoralization; it takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which [is required] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged, or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (American patriotism).

The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the sixties, drop-outs, or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and the] educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To [rid] society of these people, you need another twenty or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically-minded and common sense people, who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.

--

The demoralization process in [the] United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years...(this interview occurred in 1985) actually, it's over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.

As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his... then he will understand. But not before that. That's the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.

So basically America is stuck with demoralization and unless... even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American[s], it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.

Instead of 15-20 years, we've been at it since at least the 1950's. But, as noted, the products are now the ones sitting in the places where the decisions about education get made, so changing the path we're on would require tearing it all down and starting over from scratch.

Read the whole thing, or watch the segment I have posted. As I said, it fits all the available evidence.

Good job, UD. Thanks for all that hard work.

Kwoat of teh Dey - Edumakashun Edishun

Victor Davis Hanson from Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts:

After some 20 years of teaching mostly minority youth Greek, Latin, and ancient history and literature in translation (1984-2004), I came to the unfortunate conclusion that ethnic studies, women studies—indeed, anything “studies”— were perhaps the fruits of some evil plot dreamed up by illiberal white separatists to ensure that poor minority students in the public schools and universities were offered only a third-rate education.

...

The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy. This upcoming generation knows instead not to judge anyone by absolute standards (but not why so); to remember to say that its own Western culture is no different from, or indeed far worse than, the alternatives; that race, class, and gender are, well, important in some vague sense; that global warming is manmade and very soon will kill us all; that we must have hope and change of some undefined sort; that AIDs is no more a homosexual- than a heterosexual-prone disease; and that the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.

And yet we're to believe that this is not indoctrination, but education in the skills of critical thought. Oh, and Dr. Hanson is what's known as a primary source on this topic!

(h/t to Unix-Jedi from a comment yesterday.)

UPDATE:  Thanks to the herculean efforts of reader John Hardin, the original JS-Kit/Echo comment thread for this post is available here.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine's Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.

"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage." - As quoted at Politico

The next paragraphs are interesting, too:

Halperin, who maintains Time's political site "The Page," cited two New York Times articles as examples of the divergent coverage of the two candidates.

"The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies," Halperin said. "The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her." The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was "like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is," according to Halperin.

But Halperin's comments met with some disagreement from his colleagues:

New York magazine's John Heilemann, one of Halperin's co-panelists, offered another reason for all the positive press coverage Obama received.

"The biggest bias in the press is towards effectiveness," said Heilemann, who is authoring a book on the 2008 race along with Halperin.

"We love things that are smart."

No, you have an administrative control bias, and you prefer when that administration is Leftist in orientation, because then it behaves like you think it ought to - and is therefore "smart."

Status of the Next Überpost

Status of the Next Überpost

It's . . . morphed. It started out as one thing, and has become something else. Still really long, though.

I don't seem to have any control over it.

I have to go back to Bagdad, AZ Monday and Tuesday, but I do have the long Thanksgiving weekend coming up. Maybe by next Sunday I'll have it hammered out and polished up, just in time for the tryptophan from your turkey sandwich to lull you to complacency. (Yes, I know tryptophan and sleepiness is an urban legend, but I like it!)

Except That Future Might be Dystopian

I saw today in a waiting room while I was having some work done to my truck, a "motivational poster." (No, not one of these, one of the "real" ones.) This one was a beautiful image of natural stone arches against a gorgeous blue sky, with the appellation "Destiny." The quote was from Eleanor Roosevelt:


The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Judging from the result of the last election, Eleanor might well be right, and the future does belong to those people. But I cannot forget this poster on the same topic:



It's a beautiful dream, one people just keep believing in. But it leads to dystopia. I've quoted James Lileks before:

Personally, I'm interested in keeping other people from building Utopia, because the more you believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process.

This, to me, seems the only prudent course, but we're surrounded by people for whom the philosophy cannot be wrong! And they must Do it again, only HARDER!

But the dream is so beautiful . . .

I Can Live With That

I Can Live With That

So I stumbled across this quiz at Atomic Nerds and had to take it:



And it's Über Cool Nerd King (don't forget the umlaut.)

And Now for Your Viewing Pleasure . . .

Waiting for me when I got home was an envelope from ParaUSA, with a nice letter from Kerby Smith, a 2009 calendar, and a DVD. On that DVD is the entire six-part Down Range TV series on the Gunblogger's weekend at Blackwater, and in a separate clip, my first run through the shoothouse.

So here, for your viewing pleasure, is my elephantine ass negotiating the shoothouse, with soundtrack and everything:



I obviously need to work on my reload speed.

UPDATE: The original JS-Kit/Echo comment thread for this post is available here, thanks to reader John Hardin.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Seen on the giant LED marquee of the Flying J truck stop in Eloy, Arizona yesterday while I was driving home from Wickenburg:

#2 DIESEL
.
.
.
$2.25⁹
.
.
.
REGULAR UNL.
.
.
.
$1.95⁹
.
.
.
SERIOUSLY

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Where I live, owning a gun is sufficient to deny hiring. People would try to deny housing. The HOA here would love to kick me out. The goblins would try to rob my house. I have a family to think of Bill. I think you are trying to step on my first amendment and natural rights to say what I want. Are you sure you support individual rights? - Ride Fast & Shoot Straight, Why They Call You a Traitor, Bill Schneider

Gee, you'd think that gun owners there are treated as badly as blacks and gays used to be. More fodder for Joe Huffman's anti-bigotry campaign.

Absolutely

Michael Ramirez says in a picture what I've been saying:


But no one seems to mind a bit that Ayers' job is to teach future teachers.

UPDATE:  Thanks to the herculean efforts of reader John Hardin, the original JS-Kit/Echo comment thread for this post is available here.

Give 'Em Hell!

Give 'Em Hell!

Ride Fast and Shoot Straight does a damned fine job fisking the clueless Bill Schneider's latest column in New West, What I've Learned from Gun Nuts. He's obviously learned the wrong damned lesson, and Ride Fast schools him.

An excerpt:

I’ve learned that most gun owners aren’t hunters and some have nothing but scorn for hunters because we’re soft and care about other amendments. So, they mock us, calling us Elmer Fudds. But the hunter’s revenge is the Pitman-Robinson Act, which mandates excise taxes historically paid mostly by hunters, but now mostly paid by gun owners who never hunt or even loathe hunters as turncoats. Back at you, buddy.

Some, a small minority, may have jokingly called you Fudds, or maybe mocked you. Your guy, Zumbo, called me a terrorist. Who's the nasty bastard now? Bill, the point is we should be on the same side. Hunters fully supporting mere gun owners, shooters supporting hunters, sheep dogs supporting collectors. It's really is all about the guns.

As someone once said to me: You beat that man like a rented mule! Bravo!

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Another 12-hour day. I see my readers have been having fun in the comments! Here's a golden oldie from Rev. Donald Sensing via a new blog, Occupied Nashville:

I think that others, mostly the various gun-control groups, really just can't stand freedom exercised by others. They want to live their lives a certain way and make sure that everyone else does, too. They seek a highly ordered, regimented society made up of people just like them. This desire to control others is pernicious and dangerous. They are "invincibly ignorant" in their campaigns because the actual facts about guns in America mean nothing to them. They simply do not want you or me to own a gun, period, no matter for what reason. They do not want us to be free and sovereign. - Rev. Sensing, Heller and the right to bear arms

RTWT, as usual. Sensing's worth it.

When You Can't Have a Gun . . .

When You Can't Have a Gun . . .

. . . it must be nice that you can afford a bodyguard.

Players taking security measures after murders

MIAMI — Frightened NFL players are carrying guns and hiring bodyguards as they seek to avoid becoming victims of violent crime which has already claimed the lives of two players.

Seven players told the latest edition of ESPN The Magazine, to be published on Friday, that the murders last year of Washington Redskins Sean Taylor safety and Denver Broncos' defensive back Darrent Williams, had raised the alarm among some of the country's toughest sportsmen.

"We are targets, we need to be aware of that everywhere we go," said Tampa Bay Buccaneers corner Ronde Barber.

Taylor was shot during a botched robbery at his home in South Florida while Williams was shot and killed outside a nightclub in Denver on New Years Eve, 2007.

This year, Oakland receiver Jevon Walker was robbed and beaten unconscious in Las Vegas and Jacksonville Jaguars lineman Richard Collier had to have his leg amputated after being shot and left paralyzed below the waist.

The response has been an escalation in security for the players and NFL Players' Association president Kevin Mawae, of the Tennessee Titans, estimates half his team mates carry guns.

"If I had to guess about our locker room, I'd say it's 50-50 when it comes to gun ownership," he told the magazine.

50% is supposedly significantly higher than the national average. But then the national average is based on a survey, and Mr. Mawae actually works with the people he's talking about.

"I don't own a handgun. I have a hunting rifle. My job is to protect my family. If someone comes into my house? Game's on," he said.

Fred Taylor, a Jaguars team mate of Collier, said that not being able to carry guns at the team's facility makes him feel vulnerable.

ARMED ROBBERY

"I have all the security measures at my house -- systems, cameras, I can watch everything from my computer but I still don't think I have enough. Who knows what is enough?

"League officials tell us we need to take measures to protect ourselves. But the NFL says we can't have guns in the facility even in the parking lot. Crooks know this. They can just sit back and wait for us to drive off, knowing we won't have anything in our vehicle from point A to point B," says(sic)

Same for all of us working stiffs who work for companies with similar policies. Like Wal*Mart, for instance. Of course, many would argue that a Wal*Mart employee isn't as likely to be targeted as a healthy, hulking NFL player in the 99th percentile of human size and strength. Just ask Joyce Cordova or the two other employees shot while collecting carts in the other story at that link. Or Megan Leann Holden.

Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger told the magazine that he now has a bodyguard with him at all times.

"The one time I was scared the most, I didn't have anybody with me. I don't want to relive all the details, but this guy brandished a weapon in my face. I kept my cool and talked my way out of it. People showed up and helped get rid of the guy. That's when I decided to have someone with me all the time," he said.

Why carry a gun? An entire cop is too heavy. And for most of us, an entire bodyguard is too expensive.

Houston Texans cornerback Dunta Robinson suffered an armed robbery at his home, having a gun pointed in his face and being tied up, and says that was proof that even stay-at-home players, not just those who enjoy nightlife, can be at risk.

"It was the scariest moment of my life. You hear lots of stories of guys getting robbed and you say 'Man, what were they doing, how did they get into that situation? Flashy guys. Rude Guys, Guys who act like they're better than everyone. I don't roll like that and it still happened to me," he said.

Big salaries and high profiles, along with easily available travel schedules, make the players, easy targets but Dave Abrams, appointed as head of Denver's security following the murder of Williams, worries their families may soon be prayed upon.

"What's the next layer? Wives and children: a kid kidnapped for ransom, or some other kind of craziness. I'm scared to death that's where criminals perceive the next vulnerability is for our players: their families."

More people waking up.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Gun sales in Wisconsin up 82%:

Katherine Boldt of Mukwonago said she and her husband started researching handguns the day after the election, visited a couple of stores and purchased one Thursday night.

"We are not hunters, and this is our first gun purchase. We do not fear for our safety but rather wanted to make sure we took advantage of our right to bear arms, before the possibility of that right being taken away from us," she said in an e-mail.

Somebody else wakes up.