The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
Milton Friedman
[Friedman probably was talking about economics but, as I’m sure he knew, the statement is much more broadly applicable than that. Those that would ban or even restrict gun ownership appear to be in denial of or are oblivious to the truth of the statement.–Joe]
…(or how many times you’ve seen it already) that’s funny right there. With credit given to Larry The Cable Guy (you do also have an alter to him in your bedroom closet, complete with votive candles, don’t you? Or am I weird?)
This goes out to Dennis A. Henigan, who clearly needs some cheering up these days as he’s being beaten by a bunch of redneck dolts, and to the people of the TSSAA, who need a little bit of reality therapy to help them in their decision making during these trying times.
Dennis; the dialog in the video is a little more than one of us dumb, inbred, backwoods Idaho rednecks can fit on a bumper sticker. Maybe we could reduce it to a simple, easily repeatable and easy to spell phrase like, “Gun Free Zones Are Dumb”. I don’t know; with your superior intellect, maybe you could do a little better. If you do a good job I promise to put it on the back window of my “rig” as we say in Idaho. Just be sure to make it small enough that it doesn’t obscure the AR-15 in the gun rack of my beat-up 4 x 4 pickup.
The economic stimulus plan has created or saved 150,000 jobs since its inception in February, a senior White House Budget Office official said Wednesday.
Rob Nabors, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, told a congressional panel that the jobs figure is based on an economic model used by the Obama administration.
I wonder if that was using the same economic model that generated this graph (from Kevin):
At Microsoft when our tools yield results that even a little bit erratic we investigate and fix them. I would suggest the Obama administration examine their tools but I am suspicious the tools involved are producing the results desired by the administration and they see no need to even investigate–let alone fix them.
Shortly after I began my career as a lawyer and advocate for the nation’s leading gun control group, I started to notice a peculiar repetitiveness in my opponents’ arguments. Whether it was on radio or TV talk shows or panel discussions or speeches with audience Q&A, there was a striking similarity in the substance of the arguments, and even the language, used by my opponents. Over and over again, I would hear that “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” I would hear “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” I would hear “An armed society is a polite society.” I had seen these sayings on bumpers stickers for years, but I discovered that my opponents actually argued in these terms. Even when these exact phrases weren’t used, the thoughts they express were conveyed in other words. In more scholarly settings, critics of gun regulation would dress up their arguments in the arcane language of academia and in mounds of statistics, but their basic claims could, to a remarkable degree, be boiled down to the same themes I had heard on countless talk shows.
Dennis A. Henigan
Pages 5-6, Lethal Logic — Exploding the Myths That Paralyze American Gun Policy
[I’ve addressed some of his points in this book from a press release here. I now have the book in hand having borrowed it from Carnaby last night. We’ll see if there is anything particularly interesting in it. So far, part way through the prologue, he is just complaining that the gun control movement has trouble getting any traction and all the pro-gun people have is bumper stickers.
It seems to me that if your opposition is able to hold you down with a few bumper stickers then perhaps your vehicle is lacking substance under the hood.–Joe]
As I have pointed out before it’s not really possible to keep explosives off of airplanes. Of course it’s not going to be any easier to keep them out of buildings on the ground. This obvious truth has just been demonstrated:
Government investigators smuggled bomb-making materials into federal buildings past the police agency charged with protecting those buildings and found numerous other gaps in security, according to a congressional report.
The Government Accountability Office said investigators carried bomb-making materials past security at 10 federal buildings. Security at these buildings and a total of about 9,000 federal buildings around the country is provided by the Federal Protective Service, a target of the probe.
Once GAO investigators got the materials in the buildings, the report said, they constructed explosive devices and carried them around inside. For security reasons, the GAO report did not give the location of the buildings.
It’s Security Theater. I hope you enjoy the show because you are paying enough for it.
Some people call them vultures. I call them capitalists providing a much needed service. It’s no surprise the people calling them vultures are in San Francisco:
The California IOU has become the prey of so-called vulture investors who hope to profit by buying them on the cheap and redeeming them later.
The idea is that “distressed asset investors” (their nicer name) will pay less than face value to mom-and-pop businesses that receive IOUs but need cash immediately to meet payroll or other expenses. Once the IOUs mature on Oct. 2, the investors will cash them in for their full value plus the 3.75 percent interest the state is offering.
They call the IOU “the prey”? What does that make the state of California? Bambi’s mother? The parents of baby seals? In reality the state is the predator. The state contracted for services and/or goods (or taken excess money in taxes then failed to return the excess as promised) and is now failing to live up to the contract. Had they given IOUs to those that had not provided goods and/or services, such as welfare recipients, I would be less harsh in condemning the state. But to receive something of value and then fail to compensate them as agreed is really unacceptable.
But these people see the state fail to live up to its obligations creating countless victims, the capitalists provide relief to the victims, and then they condemn those providing the relief–that is some sort of insanity. Sometimes I have to conclude that Michael Savage is right on at least one point–Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.
The sad part is that the IOUs are, in essence, a new form of currency. I’m certain the state will soon realize this and start offering to pay in IOUs instead of money. The people, knowing they can sell them for 85% (whatever) of face value will ask for IOUs with face value of $118 for every $100 (85% of 118 is ~100) of goods and/or services. The state will, in a sick, perverted, rationalized sort of way, figure their money mostly problems are solved and not cut back on spending. This will drive the state faster and harder into the financial abyss.
Expect that result to be blamed on “vultures” as well.
You can pick a socialist out of large crowd in about 3.5 to 3.85 seconds. He’s the one angrily protesting the use of the word “socialist” while simultaneously advocating socialism, while simultaneously trying to sound educated. That’s quite a trick. You have to give socialists that much; they can be fairly good at multi tasking and they have been known to work hard. Loudly advocating stagnation and decay, while strenuously denying it at the same time, all while taking and disposing of other people’s property and money, while compiling massive lists of massive lists of massive sub lists of dos and don’ts for all of us to follow, all under various threats, isn’t easy. Fighting the revolution and getting the constitution written and ratified was a minor task by comparison.
In comments here, Endif, running full speed and damn the torpedoes into my nets, referred to the federal takeover of banks and automakers (and presumably everything else the government has taken over in whole or in part, from education to agriculture to energy and transportation industries, to drugs, alcohol and gambling, etc., etc., etc., etc.) as “Investment”.
Socialists get all agitated and defensive at the mention of the “S” word. What is to be done about it? What term designating state sponsored coercion would they accept as properly defining their belief system? We know they quit liking the term “Liberal” and they never understood that “Fascist” applied to them. You call one of them a Fascist and they’ll take offense, thinking you’re calling them a conservative. It’s great fun but it doesn’t lead to even a rudimentaqry level of understanding when two people are using the same words but speaking entirely different languages. They seem to be using “Progressive” less and less too, now that more people know where and when that political term originated.
What’s happening in the U.S. is more akin to Fascism. It’s all the same to me, or to put it another way; the subtle distinctions between different versions of state sponsored coercion don’t interest me, nor do the distinctions between the Crips and the Bloods. Nor do I much care what the advocates and practitioners of socialism prefer to be called– I just know what they don’t like being called, and that in itself is interesting.
Tell us which you prefer, Socialists, the word “socialism” or the word “Fascism”. If you dislike being called a socialist, surely you have some specific preference. We know you don’t like “Nazi” mainly because you think it too means conservative. “Moderate” works for me, since moderates are people who have accepted the premises of socialism but aren’t willing to admit it. “Socialist in denial” is pretty descriptive too, if redundant. Ooh; how about “Investment Coordinator”? Hey, I like that. We can henceforth refer to socialists as Investment Coordinators. They’ll like that, I bet. But wait; what would we call real investment coordinators?
On second thought, I’ll keep calling socialists socialists. We all know what it means, even if socialists try to act like they don’t.
Even though gun businesses are vilified by the anti-gun bigots there is a lot of cooperation with the ATF when they play half-way decent toward reasonable goals. The NSSF is gearing up for another “Don’t lie for the other guy” campaign. My experiences with the ATF have all been positive even if there have been a few government bureaucracy moments.
I am of the opinion the ATF is unconstitutional and should be completely disbanded but that doesn’t mean they don’t do some good as well as the obvious harm. Ruby Ridge and Waco are just two of the worst instances, dozens, if not hundreds of incidents of abuse occur each year. But I don’t really see the harm advocating gun dealers not sell to violent criminals or them asking for a sample of my explosives for forensic comparison (they haven’t actually done this, but they said they might and I agreed to do so).
When the anti-gun bigots whine about people exercising their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms I think they should be asked, “Who has done more to catch criminals using guns and explosives for evil, anti-freedom advocates, or the “Merchants of Death”?
Via the apex of the Triangle of Death I just found out two-thirds of the nation’s attorneys general have filed an amicus brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to grant certiorari in the case of NRA v. Chicago and hold that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
No doubt it was due to being encouraged by wheelbarrows full of cash. I know that was my motivation for posting the news.
In any case, having the states say, “Yes, the 2nd Amendment should be a restriction on the states as well as the Federal government” bodes well.
I wonder how the Brady Campaign, VPC, et al. are going to spin this. They probably will claim it had something to do with the wheelbarrows full of cash. If so, then it seems to me that the NRA should give those guys a few wheelbarrows and see if they can be encouraged to change their tune. After all it appears the Joyce Foundation is cutting back on funding and with all the new members the NRA should have more money available.
It’s been up for less than a year and there aren’t many guns there yet. But it’s free to both sellers and buyers. GunListings.org.
It is a mark of modern ignorance to think that we have become progressively smarter…. Who is to say whether the task of tackling a problem without the benefit of a well-developed body of methods and information may not have required far greater intellectual vigor and originality than is needed [today] for proceeding from problem to problem within the safely established disciplines? Prehistoric, early historic, as well as medieval science have faced such a task.
Thomas Goldstein
The historian of science, not the other one.
[I would extend Goldstein’s observation to politics. Compare the results of the U.S. Constitution to those advocated by Marx a few decades later and implemented a century or two later.
Modern ignorance. Yes, that describes what I see in politics today.–Joe]
A guy on our team speaks with a very noticeable German accent. I never thought much of it. Another guy is from South Vietnam, another from China, the new person on our team (just today) and my officemate are both from India. If there is anything unusual about the foreigners around the office is that they work harder than the U.S. born people. This guy is no exception. I see emails sent by him from late at night and all weekend.
But he stopped by to talk about stuff last Thursday and we ended up talking about where he grew up. He was born in East Germany. I hadn’t realized that. For some reason I always thought of West Germany whenever I might have considered his origins. He hates the communists. “Communism makes people lazy. Yah!”
I said it always amazes me that experiment has been run so many times and resulted in 10s of millions dead and still people keep wanting to try it again. I told him of someone I know who told me they didn’t think people should own their own houses. The government should own them and allocated them on the basis of need. This person told me, “You and Barb don’t need such a big house. Some other family with a larger family needs it more than you do.”
His eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. “You tell them I lived that. You tell them to go visit this town. Yah!”, and he showed me a town on a map of Germany. “Not one bomb was dropped on that town during the entire war”, he said. “There was no fighting in that town. But if you go there that town looks like it was all bombed out. When people don’t own their property they don’t care. The roofs, they are all falling down. Yah! You tell him to go there and look for himself.”
After he got married they applied to the housing allocation board for a place to live. There was “nothing available”. But other people who applied after him got really nice places. But they were the children of the people on the board, and the people who had connections to people on the board. After two years the housing board told him that his parents had permission to make some changes to their place (I understood this to be partitions, plumbing, etc.) and then he and his wife could live there.
He told me he graduated, “The best in my class.” But he couldn’t get into college because his family weren’t “good communists”. He got a job in a picture tube factory (television sets I presume) and he did so well the company used its pull to get him a position in school. He got a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering. Then he got a PhD in Computer Science.
After the Germany’s were reunited his father obtained his secret police file. Every letter to or from West Germany, where some of their family lived, was read and a summary was put in his file. He found out who had spied on him and who said things about him that put his loyalty to the communist party in doubt and stopped his career.
“Joe”, he said, “People complain about how unequal things are with the rich executives in a capitalist society. But it’s just the same under communism–it’s the politically connected that have the money and the people that aren’t connected don’t have anything. I know. I lived it. Communism, it’s very bad.”
I need to ask what he thinks of the plans for health care and the take over of the banking industry, etc. in this country. That should be interesting.
Via Ben and his Dad, who do insurance for a living, liability insurance for people that concealed carry:
Comprehensive Firearms Liability Coverage For Holders of Concealed Carry Licenses
(currently available in AZ, CO & NM, TEXAS COMING SOON)
An Iowa group once active in lobbying for gun control has disbanded after losing a major grant. The November 1st coalition began after the November 1, 1991 shootings on the University of Iowa campus and was later renamed Iowans for the Prevention of Gun Violence.
…
Honey says most recently the group has relied on volunteers to lobby the legislature. “There was a grant with the Joyce foundation for a period of close to a decade from the mid 90s well into this decade, and that funding did end,” Honey said.
I wonder if the Joyce Foundation is cutting back on all their anti-gun funding or just some of them. Could it be they weren’t getting their moneys worth from the Iowa group? I wonder if they are happy with the results of their grants to the Violence Policy Center, The Gun Guys, and The Brady Campaign. The Heller decision must be quite the “bone in their throat”.
Markadelphia questioning my logical reasoning ability is like Helen Keller questioning my taste in music.
Robb Allen
July 4, 2009
In a comment to It’s the End of the World as We Know It
[Markadelphia, for those that don’t know, is a liberal who frequently makes comments at Kevin’s place.
I am of the opinion that with the quote above Robb actually somewhat understates the situation.–Joe]
The fact that militias were among the primary culprits the Framers identified as violating the right to bear arms renders any continued suggestion of a purely collective right belonging to state governments impossible to square with the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Steven M. Simpson
D.C. versus Heller
Brief for the Institute for Justice as Amicus Curiae in support of respondent.
[Of course, as pointed out by Workman, many of the anti-gun bigots make no effort to square reality with their beliefs.–Joe]
Don’t be silly, Ninety-Nine. We have to shoot, kill, and destroy.
We represent everything that’s wholesome and good in the world.
Maxwell Smart
Get Smart TV show
[I was going to save this for another Ruby Ridge, Waco, or other similar incident but I’ll used it now anyway. Just imagine another “wrong house” raid occurred or something, okay?–Joe]
I’ve wondered for some time what that New Hampshire slogan really meant. On the surface it seemed to have the wrong people dying. “Leave me alone or die”, I thought, would make more sense, or “live free or kill”, but the meaning of the slogan is something different, as Walter Williams reports. He goes through some development before getting to the New Hampshire bit;
[Mark] Steyn points how it might seem bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of that alliance is pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists and the other half is homophobic, misogynist theocrats. Steyn argues what they have in common overrides their differences, namely, “Both the secular Big Government progressives and the political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential.”
I never thought it bizarre at all. I’ve referred to Progressives and radical Islam as somewhat kindred spirits for years. They both hate capitalism, both hate liberty in general, both want to control the individual, both hate the very fact that the U.S. and Israel exist, and both thrive on chaos and hate prosperity. I could go on for quite a while, but you get the point.
“Live Free or Die,” which graces New Hampshire’s license plate, are the words of John Stark, New Hampshire’s Revolutionary War hero. He uttered those words decades after the War when he was 81 years old, the complete sentence being: “Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.” Steyn says these words should not be interpreted “as a battle cry: We’ll win this thing or die trying, die an honorable death. But in fact it’s something far less dramatic: It’s a bald statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but, if you choose not to, your society will die.”
This weekend as we celebrate the Declaration of Independence and the successful revolution that resulted, lets keep that in mind. To pledge one’s life, fortune, and sacred honor to the overthrow of an over-reaching government that possesses the most powerful military in the world is as serious as it gets, and many of those who did so faired rather badly during the war. We owe them a lot of respect, and only way to do that is to keep from throwing away that which they have given us.
How many Americans could even describe this country’s founding principles without getting sarcastic, to say nothing of being able to defend them? Try asking some of the people you meet this weekend and report back. I’m curious. Something like this; “Can you define this country’s founding principles?” and then, “What would you say to defend them if someone told you that those were outdated, inflexible, and dreamed up by some radical, violent, old, paternal, dead, white slave owners?” (use your own words)
There’s certainly nothing wrong with properly trained adults engaging in these activities.
Daniel Vice
June 28, 2009
Senior attorney for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence
Referring to a Southern Ohio Machine Gun Shoot.
[Something to remember the next time the Brady people start talking about an “assault weapon” ban.
H/T to Buckeye Firearms Association.–Joe]
The rest of the family is packing up to go camping and they will soon discover I’m trying to make a blog post instead of helping them.
A QOTD should show up later today but I’m not sure if I will get others in the queue before I am dragged away, deep into the wilderness of North Central Idaho.