Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.
James Burnham
Suicide of the West
I was sort of down last week after enduring some abuse from Claire Wolfe and friends (this is almost for certain about me too). After talking to numerous people (not even work associates, but gun owners) I’m convinced I’m right about the turning over certain parts of the boomershoot web logs to the counter intelligence guy upstairs. I’ve been thinking about it for days and have an outline of a post on the topic in my mind. Way, way too many other things going to start writing on it though. Basically I am of the opinion their world view is set and not subject to new data and situations. In their minds WW III either doesn’t affect them or doesn’t exist.
I went to the Lewiston Pistol Club IPSC match on Sunday, I sucked big time. I think it was the worst I have done in years. I zeroed one stage. Did poorly on most of the others. The classifier (El Presidente) was the only one I did reasonably well on. I felt really ‘spacey’. Sort of dizzy most of the day. Barb was coming down with something and missed work Monday. I may have become infected too. The dizziness continues and I have a bit of a sore throat as of late Tuesday.
I conducted some explosives tests after the match. They were the continuation of this. Another set of disappointments. None could be detonated with the .22LR and only the 20 and 30 mL of fuel mix detonated with the .30 Carbine. I read some stuff in my new pyrotechnics book that gives me another idea for a fuel to try that might result in a more sensitive mix. It will have to wait for a week or two however. I’m much too busy with other things right now.
Stephanie has been doing a bunch of work on the Boomershoot news releases and related stuff which is really nice to have taken care of.
There are worse things to be than a bigot. I’d rather keep company with a bigot who lets me go my own way than a well-intentioned man who presumes to know what is good for me.
Wendy Thrash
Guns are the catalytic component in murder-suicide. Just as important, it must be understood that the emotional factors that drive suicide can be all too easily turned outward on friends, family, co-workers, and complete strangers because of the unmatched lethality of firearms. Every major murder-suicide study ever conducted has shown that a firearm—with its unmatched combination of lethality and availability—is the weapon most often used to murder the victims, with the offenders then turning the gun on themselves.
Josh Sugarmann
VPC executive director
August 5, 2002
http://www.vpc.org/press/0208nc.htm
[Apparently Mr. Sugarmann didn’t include murder-suicide studies done in Japan in his review of papers. Murder-suicide is far more common in Japan than in the U.S. and yet guns are almost never used.–Joe Huffman]
But I wonder when else, in the history of controversy, there has been such consistent intemperance, insularity, and irascibility as the custodians of the liberal orthodoxy have shown toward conservatives who question some of the orthodoxy’s premise? The liberals’ implicit premise is that intercredal dialogues are what one has with Communists, not conservatives, in relationship with whom normal laws of civilized discourse are suspended.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Up From Liberalism
Do not fix the mistake – Fix the blame.
George Barbarow
In the Rooseveltain era of avowed concern for the underdog, liberals and civil libertarians had been no exception. The stripping of a minority of their constitutional rights, indeed the entire evacuation-internment folly, was ‘engineered by liberals’, asserts Professor William Petersen of Ohio State University. ‘Among the civilians one can hardly name a person, from the President down to the local officials, who was not one.’
Michi Weglyn
Years of Infamy
William Morrow & Company, 1976
page 112
Regard the internment of Japanese citizens in the US during WW II.
See also her obit.
Idiot: A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil’s Dictionary
In a surprisingly fair article the Chicago Tribune reports:
Fresh off its success at poking holes in a Wilmette handgun ban, the National Rifle Association has launched a new legislative drive to dismantle strong gun prohibitions in Chicago and test Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s wavering commitment to broader gun control.
Taking direct aim at Mayor Richard Daley’s hard-line stance against the proliferation of guns, the NRA package of state legislation would allow residents of Chicago and other communities that ban handgun ownership to legally keep the weapons in their homes for self-defense purposes. It also would hold Chicago and other places with bans liable for injuries that residents claimed could have been avoided had they been allowed to carry handguns.
And this editorial claims Howard Dean as chairman of the DNC will be “The last nail in gun control”:
The expected election of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic National Committee this month will strike a crippling blow to the gun-control movement, lobbyists and political observers say.
Like Dean, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is a strong supporter of gun rights. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) supports gun control but rarely mentioned the issue before the 2004 election.
I’ve been watching WA state flirting with an assault weapon and .50 BMG ban the last couple of weeks and I have concluded it probably won’t go anywhere. Yeah, they introduced it but hundreds of freedom supports showed up for the hearings and only a handful of bigots showed their support. Something could pass, but I put the odds at about 30%.
The risk freedom advocates run now is that we relax. NOW is the time to (politically) shoot anti-freedom bigots in the back as they run for cover. We should root them out of their hidey holes like Saddam Hussein and humiliate them with our political victories and the data showing freedom is not to be feared. Let Freedom Ring in our country as well as around the world.
Ken Macdonald, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, announced “licence to kill“ guidelines for householders. Basically they are saying you can use deadly force to defend yourself and your family. The guidelines appear to be pretty close to what you would expect in most of the U.S. Here are some examples from the article:
THE CLUEDO GUIDELINES
Colonel Mustard awakes to find a burglar standing by his bedside — he reaches for a length of lead piping, strikes out and knocks him unconscious or kills him.
LawfulMiss Scarlett hears noises in the night. She creeps downstairs and sees a burglar in her dining room. He has not seen her. She seizes a candlestick, hides behind the door and strikes him unconscious.
LawfulThe Rev Green is woken by the noise of a burglar making his escape. He races after him and and with the butt of his revolver knocks him unconscious to the ground.
LawfulMrs White disturbs a burglar in the library. She seizes a knife in the kitchen and stabs him. He falls to the ground and is rapidly becoming unconscious. Just to teach him a lesson she stabs him again.
UnlawfulProfessor Plum hears on the grapevine that a man he suspects of thefts from his house is planning forced entry through the kitchen. He lies in wait to trap the burglar and then shoots him or knocks him unconscious.
UnlawfulMrs Peacock disturbs burglars in the billiard room. They flee empty-handed. She chases after them with a shotgun and shoots one of them dead.
UnlawfulTHE NEW ADVICE
What is ‘reasonable force’?
You are not expected to make fine judgments over the level of force you use in the heat of the moment. So long as you only do what you honestly and instinctively believe is necessary in the heat of the moment, that would be the strongest evidence of your acting lawfully and in self-defence. This is still the case if you use something to hand as a weapon. The more extreme the circumstances and the fear felt, the more force you can lawfully use in self-defence.
What if the intruder dies?
If you have acted in reasonable self-defence and the intruder dies,you will still have acted lawfully.
When would my actions not be lawful?
If having knocked someone unconscious you decided to hurt them further or kill them to punish them; or you knew of an intended intruder and set a trap to hurt or kill.
What if I chase them as they run off?
You are no longer acting in self-defence and the same degree of force may not be reasonable. You are still allowed to use reasonable force to recover your property and make a citizen’s arrest.
Do I have to wait to be attacked?
No, not if you are in your own home and in fear for yourself or others.
I’ll believe it’s a trend rather than just crumbs thrown to the subjects when they can carry handguns in public for self defense.
Shamil Basayev, the mastermind of the taking of the hostages in the Russian school, was interviewed and had this to say:
Mr Basayev states: “We are planning more Beslan-type operations in the future because we are forced to do so.”
Justifying his attacks on civilian targets, he states: “We are at war and we look at the reality, and not at whether the population has weapons in their hands. We look at the reality of their participation in this war.
“ People who approve of Putin’s policies, people who pay their taxes for this war, people who send their soldiers to this war, priests who sprinkle holy water on them . . . How can they be innocent? They are just without weapons. Russian citizens are accomplices of this war, it just may be that they have no weapons in their hands. Peaceful people for us are those that don’t pay taxes for this war, people who don’t participate, and who speak against this war.”
If you paid your taxes then you are a combatant. I presume this is the rational used to justify 9-11 and the beheadings of female aid workers in Iraq too.
Like I said before, if these guys decide to take out a school in the U.S. they should do it in a major city many, many miles from the nearest farm.
It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Probably a pretty low chance of getting dooced over this. I don’t hold back my opinions at work about this anyway. A bunch of senior managers at DHS are leaving in the next couple of months:
The resignation of Secretary Tom Ridge and Deputy Secretary James Loy was widely publicized. But other resignations include Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security; Frank Libutti, undersecretary for information analysis and infrastructure protection; Robert Liscouski, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection; and C. Suzanne Mencer, executive director of the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness.
So why is government money being spent on trying to help transportation security, and infrastructure? I can see efforts “spilling over” into to industry in a beneficial way, but not having an “undersecretary” for that job. It’s really tough for government to get industry to do something unless they give them incentative of some sort. Typically that involves using force of some type or another. Taxes for example, or the threat of breaking them up (as in the AT&T break up). I’m involved in project right now that has a bunch of academics and “scientist types” (technically I’m one of them) that is supposed to be “helping” industry with something. You can’t just give them a gift and expect them to use it. It has to make economic sense for them to use it. So imagine the following situation. We see some gaping hole in the telephone communicaton industry (no, that’s not what I am working on, it’s just an example, I don’t know of any gaping holes in our communication industry security). This hole is so big that someone with 300 baud modem could dial up almost telephone company central office in the country and set off a chain reaction that cause all but the rotary dial only offices to melt down into a heap of aluminium/epoxy/silicon slag. We come up with a good way to fix it. Suppose we give the solution to industry and it only costs $1.00 per phone to implement, will they fix their security hole? Why should they? It’s going to cost them hundreds of millions of dollars to implement. It’s never happened before, so why should they worry about it now? And if it does happen, what then? Why of course! The government will pay for them (or at least loan them the money like the airlines after 9-11) to build all new central offices in record speed! The public utility commisions will agreed to any rate hike requested and the telecommunications company will be better off if they are attacked!
The problem is that our government will not allow some industries to fail and gives out government sanctioned monopolies. If the free market were allowed to function the utilities would be much more motivated to maintain their investments. Government scientists, like me, would be working for private industry or working on problems that are the proper domain of government like building better tools for intelligence gathering or defending our borders.
Ry just sent out email saying that with the failure of his wheel bearing his road trip was over. I’m sure it was the Super Bowl temporal nexus that caused the bearing to overheat and explode rather than him setting the cruise control at 85 MPH for hours on end as he went through Montana and North Dakota.
Yesterday Hewlett-Packard reported they may have the successor to the transistor working in their labs.
… its researchers have proven that a technology they invented could eventually replace the transistor, a fundamental building block of computers.
In a paper published in Tuesday’s Journal of Applied Physics, HP said three members of its Quantum Science Research group propose and demonstrate a “crossbar latch,” which provides the signal restoration and inversion required for general computing without the need for transistors.
Palo Alto, California-based HP said that the technology could result in computers that are thousands of times more powerful than those that exist today.
…
The crossbar latch — which Williams said was six to 10 years from widespread commercial use — could help to extend Moore’s Law, the 1965 observation by Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore that computing power doubles roughly every 18 months as production costs fall by about half.
I remember back in the late 70’s researchers were doing work with Josephon Junctions and were making all kinds of claims about how they were going to be the next big thing. That work was largely abandoned (but interest has picked up again). I’ve wondered about Moore’s Law for a while. There are physical limits to the size of our current technology and it was the constant reduction in size of the junctions that allowed us to build faster and faster computers. The physics represented a “brick wall” that we were going to hit in the not too distant future. My confidence in the free market and technology said we would find a way around it but the wall was looming larger and larger. Maybe the “crossbar latch” is that path.
It looks like he meets all five of the conditions and he responds just as predicted. He rants:
Iraq is a train wreck. The man who caused it is not in trouble. Tomorrow night he will give his State of the Union speech, and the Washington establishment will applaud him. Tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead. More than 1,400 Americans are dead. An Arab nation is humiliated. Islamic hatred of the West is ignited. The American military is emasculated. Lies define the foreign policy of the United States. On all sides of Operation Iraqi Freedom, there is wreckage. In the center, there are the dead, the maimed, the displaced — those who will be the ghosts of this war for the rest of their days. All for what?
…
The chaos of a destroyed society leaves every new instrument of governance dependent on the American force, even as the American force shows itself incapable of defending against, much less defeating, the suicide legions. The irony is exquisite. The worse the violence gets, the longer the Americans will claim the right to stay. In that way, the ever more emboldened — and brutal — “insurgents” do Bush’s work for him by making it extremely difficult for an authentic Iraqi source of order to emerge. Likewise the elections, which, as universally predicted, have now ratified the country’s deadly factionalism.
Tony Blair, the new Prime Minister of England, has announced officially that his government’s grotesque gun laws are not expected to have any effect upon crime, but rather to eliminate what he calls “the gun culture.” If he succeeds in eliminating the gun culture in Britain, he will presumably feel good. Isn’t that sweet? Well, we ought not to jeer too loudly at the Brits. Just look at what we have elected!
Jeff Cooper
From Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries
Vol. 5, No. 9
August 1997
Saturday Ry stopped by and left his cat with my daughter Xenia while he went on a road trip. I was worried about the dependability of his van and he jokingly thanked me for lending him mine. HA! I told him that if he broke down within 300 miles I would come and rescue him, but if it was a 1000 miles away to forget it. He left Sunday and had his first breakdown at about 500 miles away on Monday. He limped on into town on his own and $93 poorer continued on his way. Tonight he made it almost exactly 1300 miles away before breaking down the second time.
I’m afraid this road trip is going to be one of those “well thought out” plans hatched from his “incompletely myelinated” brain that “seemed like a good idea at the time”. He’s (technically) an adult and just as long as he doesn’t do something that gets him a “felony dumbass” conviction that “insurance doesn’t cover” and he makes it back in time for Boomershoot I guess I don’t have anything to complain about. But I’m almost certain that his spreadsheet for this adventure has a “need for more columns“. OMG, it’s getting close to “Superbowl Sunday” isn’t it?
See Ry’s dictionary to understand the significance of the quoted phrases in the previous paragraph.
Liberty News made a post mentioning Boomershoot today. It seems I can barely keep up with all the postings. Analog Kid again mentioned boomershoot today. There were some others too. I think they are all listed here now and the number of referrals should be close to up-to-date. Claire Wolfe would be the exception, she just keeps racking up the hits on Boomershoot.org. I expect she’ll have a free entry to Boomershoot by tomorrow if she wants it. It’s also very, very interesting to see what sections of Boomershoot.org the various people look at. The Claire Wolfe people are interested in different things than the Kim du Toit people, who are interested in different things than the IsntAPundit people. I can see why the people at work have a full time counter intelligence guy looking at the lab web logs.
There is a lesson in the previous paragraph for people paying attention. Darwin awards await the people that have more balls than brains.
Imagine my surprise when the first referral I see through my blurry eyes to Boomershoot.org this morning is from the blog of my greatest inspiration in our fight for freedom–Claire Wolfe. Her post is rather brief but I’m thrilled just the same. She also mentions my Jews in the Attic Test. Very cool.
I updated the Boomershoot Blogging section 20 minutes ago but Claire’s column already is out of date — it should be 19 now.
Thanks Ms. Wolfe, you made my day.
