Detroit, that is. I’ve been thinking of a Model Cities post for a while, but PJMedia already has a nice one;
Hat Tip; Kevin.
It’s a Model City alright, for exactly the same reasons that North Korea and Cuba are Model Countries. That video should be part of every right/left debate from now until all leftist ideas are shunned from polite society forever.
About this “(multi) trillion dollar tax cut” thingy; First, tax cuts don’t cost anything. Taxes cost us, but cutting taxes saves us money.
That’s not the main point though. The main point is that cutting taxes lightens the ball-and-chain that’s around our ankles, allowing us to invest and produce more, resulting in more income, which in turn increases revenues. Taxing any behaivor reduces the behaivor while incentivising an underground economy (black market) in that behavior.
You might think that taxing something less dynamic, like property values, might be different– that you could actually add up the property values in your district, multiply that by the amount of change in the tax rate, and know exactly the difference in revenue that will result. Simple huh? Well you’d be totally wrong for several reasons. Here in North Idaho we have a whole population of refugees from other states who fled high tax rates in their states, increasing our property values and presumably reducing the values in the areas they fled.
I could barely afford to get new siding on my house and resurface my huge deck, but since it would increase the assessment value, resulting in a higher tax bill, uh, maybe it’s not so important. Not this year. And there is why we have a lot of what I call “Tyvek Houses”. A Tyvek house is one that remains in un-finished condition for decades at a time. They are ugly, and unattractive to buyers, but if you plan to live in your house you don’t care about buyers. You care about the assessed value, because you don’t want to pay out huge sums in taxes year after year, so you don’t want it looking too nice.
You lower the tax rate, and because the punished activity (punished by taxation) becomes more affordable it becomes more common. The result is more tax revenue. M’kay? Reducing rates beyond some extremely low level that we haven’t seen in over 100 years will at some point start to reduce revenues, but in that case we will not only have no use whatsoever for 95+% of what government does today, we’ll have no time nor patience for it.
I needed the first paragraph because there is a plan that could be called a multi-trillion-dollar tax cut. Dramatically slash the income tax rate, and you get trillions more dollars flooding into the treasury. You get trillions more dollars flooding into the country from everywhere too, essentially, because investments in the U.S. (as opposed to investments in other countries) become that much more attractive. Capital, along with the people who own it, moves to where it can be safe and free. Better put it’s; “free and therefore safe”.
The “expert” economists on the left understand all of this perfectly of course, as any kid who ever ran a lemonade stand would. That proves to us that their intentions are not good. If they know that lower taxes will result in a better economy, and that ultra low low taxes will result in a super good economy, and they oppose all tax cuts, well, you figure it out. (hint; they think that America is too big and important already) They want you out in the streets shouting “Eat the rich” while promising to pay for everything in your life through tax revenues. Do you see the blatant contradiction there or has your mind been taken over?
Meanwhile, the Republicans can’t quite bring themselves to explain it, because they’re afraid. That or they have brain damage, but I don’t think it’s brain damage per se.
I say that the American people deserve to have the case made, straight up, what it is that we face, verses what it is that America was meant to be. If the Republicans can’t bring themselves to make the case, we’ll have to take over their stupidshitty, Progressive party and fundamentally transform it from the inside.
I’ve brought this up before, but I keep hearing that assertion. It says you can never pay more to accessorize a gun that the price you paid for the gun. It should always be less. I’ve had people mention their free guns– gifts. “I didn’t pay a dime for the gun, so how can I justify X?” or “I only paid 100 dollars for this Carbine back in the ’60s…!” (Never mind that it may now be worth 800 or more)
There are high-end optics that cost more than almost any firearm made, except for some of the fine double rifles, and you aren’t going to be using these optics on a fine double rifle. Ditto for some of the hand-made flintlock longrifles and such, and a few boutique rifles. There are also sound systems that cost more than a lot of used cars, so I guess you have suffer with an inferior sound system until you can afford a more expensive car to put it in. A friend of mine once had a $50K sound system in his apartment, so I guess he was really breaking the rules.
The way I see it, if you paid some low price for your rifle, and it does the job you need of it, then you now have more money to spend on a good optic. I don’t see a conflict here. It’s all about the setup you want, not some spreadsheet of arbitrary rules based on relative prices of the components.
If it makes anyone feel better, I once had a 150 dollar stereo in a 100 dollar car, with a 500 dollar set Michelins under it. Can someone make the case that I should have restricted myself to crapy tires because I only paid 100 bucks for the car? I put over 100K miles on that car too, which included some rather long road trips – you want to me run retreads on it? Uh; no. It had well over 200K on it when it finally died a violent death, otherwise, 20 years later I might still be driving my 100 dollar 1963 Dodge 330. What’s your problem?
ETA, From comments; “You are not accessorizing your rifle, you are accessorizing your SCOPE!” That is a better way to look at it. Get a great scope and find a rifle that’s good enough for it. Then you have something.
I was asked by Gresham Bouma’s PR guy to speak at a press conference held last Monday. I had all weekend to think about it. The idea was to have some local Business people talk about their challenges in running and growing a business in this economy, with emphasis on the old “jobs” meme (a meme I find ridiculous simply because jobs are the side effect of creation and production, which in turn arise from inspiration, which can’t blossum without liberty. If we seek to add “jobs” without addressing all those prerequisites, we’re completely missing the point and if we allow the prerequisites to exist, we don’t have to worry about “jobs”).
It was only as I was driving to the conference that this little thought came;
A lot of people are not so much thinking of hiring right now as they’re just Bracing For Impact.
I wanted to keep it really short, so I just laid out the two visions of government. In one, I said, the government’s job is to reign us in, control us, direct us, redirect us, tell us what to do and what not to do. It starts with the notion, which comes to every one of us at some point as we watch other people speaking, debating, or running a company, that WE could do a better job if only WE were in charge. I made the point that in a free society, that confidence, justified or not, is what inspires us to go out into the market and prove ourselves. It’s the motivation for the engine of prosperity.
It’s when government comes along, appeals to the spirit that tells us “I can do better”, then promises to take the reins and use the coercive power of government to FORCE people to “do it the right way” that we step off into the abyss.
The other vision of government is that its job is to protect our rights– our property rights and freedom, rather than to direct us.
I looked the press people in the eyes and asked them, personally; “If you were starting a business, under which model of government would you prefer to do it– the one that says government’s job is to rein you in, control you, direct you, pile on requirements and restrict you, and then tax you to pay for public works, or the one in which government is there to protect your rights? “I think it’s pretty obvious” and I left it at that. It only took two minutes or so.
I was watching an old episode of Glen Beck a few nights later. It was almost year old and I’d never seen it, but I was randomly searching the site– something I’d never done because I don’t have the level of subscription that allows me to watch much on there. But there was that old episode under some other heading, way down on the menu, and in it were those exact same words that Beck said had come to him last summer; “Brace for Impact”.
So what if things aren’t going to get all that bad. Maybe we somehow can avoid hyper-inflation, energy and fuel rationing, and all the unrest combined with blatant and not so blatant attacks from all directions by multiple enemies of liberty. If you’re somewhat ready anyway, the worst that can happen is that you’ll have some extra food, backup power, expanded capabilities and overall greater independence. That doesn’ seem like a bad thing.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in turn urged China and its Southeast Asian neighbors to resolve disputes “without coercion, without intimidation, without threats and certainly without the use of force”.
I wish she’d seen the light 40 years or so ago. I wish the U.S. government would treat our citizens the same way. I was at a press conference Monday to say the same thing for Gresham Bouma, but we got thrown off the front porch of the Idaho Department of Labor (which will cease to exist if Hillary gets her way with her new-found policy of eschewing all coercion, intimidation and threats).
Hillary is of course a die-hard Progressive (incremental comminust) and so she is all about using coercion, intimidation and threats. Her quote above does prove that she at least understands coercion, intimidation and threats to be bad things, even if she’s been advocating them all her adult life. There wouldn’t be a Democrat Party without coercion or threats, and only about 3 or 4% of Republicans could exist in their current iterations. It could be said that the main purpose of today’s Democrat Party (together with their media allies and the government education complex) is to rationalize the increased use of coercion, intimidation and threats, and I suppose the purpose of the Republican Party has been to make it possible for the Democrats.
But talk about brass. She’s made a career calling for coercion and threats in nearly every aspect of American life, and now it’s not to be tolerated from communist China. Wow. They must be laughing pretty hard at her right now. You’d think she would lay awake nights thinking of her wild contradictions. That is if she had a conscience. Even if she were only concerned about her reputation for the sake of her position and power, caring nothing for the truth, maybe she’d want to think a little bit before opening her mouth.
Someone I Know (hereinafter refered to as SIK) related an incident at his home that occurred some weeks ago, and I thought that this blog would be a good place to mention it.
In the wee hours of the morning, SIK woke up, went to the living room for some reason or other, and found a stranger passed out on his couch. He tried rousing him to no avail. Shook him a bit, even, as you would do to wake up someone for an urget conversation. No response. The stranger was breathing, but obviously very drunk. SIK went back to bed. In the morning SIK’s wife went to the combination room to make coffee while SIK managed to rouse said drunk for a little chat. Mr. 20-something-year-old Drunk didn’t know where he was at first. He apologized for the intrusion. SIK offered him a ride. Drunk declined, and went on his way. Wife said that she thought she’d seen him at a nearby house before (nothing suspicious – just there, like a neighbor or friend of a neighbor) but wasn’t sure. SIK and his wife have guns in the house and know how to use them, if that matters to you.
End of story.
What would you do? What is the right thing to do? SIK has no small children or anyone else at the house. Just he and his wife, if that matters to you. I think it would matter to me, as I am something of a mother bear if you will. I don’t know the answer for my sake. There are many, many situations that are extremely difficult, at best, to second-guess if you’re not there– if you’re not the person responsible for making the decision. So don’t. You weren’t. Just think about it. I can tell you from experiences (though very different from this scenerio) that I have a hard time going counter to my “instinct”, which ever way that “instinct” might go. Or is it “conscience”? That could be a strength or it could be a weakness. I admit that I don’t know. Reason, alone, as I believe most people think of it, doesn’t always provide the best answer, but then maybe it depends on the depth of the reason. In this case I think it could be argued that SIK made the worst possible decision, from a “tactical” point of view, and that at the same time it had the best possible outcome. But what if the guy had been in a diebetic coma or something?
Edited to Add; The front door was unlocked, so the guy just walked in.
A “job” is the result of inspiration, creativity and production, plus available time.
“But Lyle, a job is the result of need” you say. “The person hiring needs another employee, and the employee needs a job.”
If I’m hiring, it means I have a business, or it means I’m starting a business. If I have a business, it means I created somehting and I’m already producing, and if I’m creating a business it means I’m in the process of creating something. Before I can create something I must be inspired, and I must have the available time.
Before I have the available time, I must have produced, otherwise my time would be taken up merely subsisting– I must have subsisted by producing, and then some, else I have no time to create something new.
See where this is going? A job is the result of productivity, else there is no place for a job.
So when we’re talking about “creating jobs” what do we really mean? Do we really even know what we mean?
Politicians always talk about “creating jobs” and it is perfectly clear to me that they haven’t a clue what they’re saying. Not a single one of them.
If I’m getting inspired to do something, and then find this law, this licensing requirement, this tax, this higher tax for being in business, this government “program” and on and on and on– this whole nightmarish quagmire of red tape and barriers, what do you think is going to happen to my inspiration?
All hell; maybe it wasn’t such a great idea anyway, it would cost a lot and take a lot of time anyway, with a lot of risk, and it would put stress on my family, but with all this red tape crap, these endless rules and endless lists and endless catagories I have to wade through to pick one that applies to me and my new business, the ever-present potential liability, and sometimes the outright harrasment, it just isn’t worth it. (shrug)
You want to “create jobs”? (you don’t, I know, but you like saying you do) There is one way and one way only– Start a business. You don’t have the inspiration, or the creativity, or the guts for risk-taking to start your own business? That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. OK, then get all this extra bullshit out of the way so someone else can. Get the holier-than-thou Central Planners, those who are so mind bogglingly stupid that they think they can, and have the right to, plan our lives better than all of us combined, and get them the hell out of the way. Then keep them out, because we need to believe that our new-found liberty will endure.
That is all it takes. Just that one, simple, cheaper-than-anything-else thing.
At that point, hope has been restored. the imagination is free, capital flows in like a tsunami, business pop up like popcorn, inspiration has been liberated, the looming storm cloud has been lifted (I was going to say “black cloud”, but then I’d be accused of racism [and if you’re one of the would-be accusers, I feel sorry for you]) and Bob’s your uncle.
The jobs come as a side benefit to inspiration, creativity and productivity, so you don’t even have to think about them. They’re a natural outgrowth of liberty.
So it’s a choice between two model views. In one, the government’s job is to reign us in, control us, redirect us, and tax us for public works projects. In the other, the government’s job is to protect liberty by protecting the property rights of every individual.
Just imagine that you’re starting your very own business, with your very own ideas, using your very own resources. In which model would you want to do it? Don’t even bother answering. We all know.
We often come up empty-handed. There are always a lot of words being said and written, but the far less meaning. Our job is to search for the meaning. It’s fun.
Seen on a paper grocery bag;
“[Big grocery chain] has partnered with [presumably Obama stash money-funded green energy company] to convert their waste into power for the community.
This initiative will help produce 3 mega-watts of power. Enough to power 3,000 homes for one year!”
What does that mean? It’s only a one-year project? What happens after that? Or is it that someone flunked their high school physics classes and doesn’t know the difference between power and energy?
Then there’s that all too convenient, catch-all word in there; “help”. Let’s say for sake of argument that all the Columbia hydroelectric projects combined produce on average 100 gigawatts. All by myself then, I could help produce 100 gigawatts by pissing in the river. I could help produce 100 gigawats for one year, each year, by pissing in the river once per year. Hope and Change.
In fact it doesn’t mean anything as written, but either we are supposed to believe that it means something anyway, and love them for it, or the people who wrote it are ignorant and can’t be bothered with looking things up, or both. And among the listed items of “output” from this “initiative” are “green power” and “carbon credits”. Oh goody. I guess the recycling of the paper into new paper is no longer good enough, and the use of food waste as animal feed is no longer a good thing. So we can burn this stuff, cut down more trees and use more farmland. For carbon credits. Hope and Change.
Then there was this “Halftime in America” ad from Chrysler that many people thought meant something really great. It’s one of the more artfully meaningless, and/or misleading bits in television. In fact, if it means anything at all, it means that the government bailout and takeover of Chrysler, using taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars to hand a company over to the unions, is The Way to get out of an economic downturn. It also implies strongly that if one auto company goes into receivership, we stop making cars– a wildly ignorant idea if ever there was one. In fact there is the very real and very well-proven concept of “creative destruction” wherein one badly-run company goes out, making the way for the next, better-run company to flourish, the end result of which is more and better, and more affordable cars, with more stable car-making jobs as a side benefit. “Halftime in America” conveniently ignores all that, instead using pure (false) assumption and building on it with innuendo. And if there is a “halftime” provision written into the U.S. constitution, at which time we were presumed to have entertained the Central Planners for 100 years, started going broke as a result, then regrouped with more central planning to fix the destruction from the earlier Central Planning, then I am Karl Marx’s uncle. In fact we are under attack by the Progressive movement and the only way out is to rid ourselves of it and get back to our beautiful American Principles of Liberty.
The arena with probably the least meaning of all is politics. When millions of people were swooning over Sarah Palin during the Palin/Whatshisname campaign, I went over to her personal web site to see if I could find any meaning. I have to hand it to her– she is very, very good at combining words, thousands of them, into sentence after sentence, without a scintilla of meaning. Total blank-out. Very impressive.
At the same time, Obama told us he wanted “Redistributive Change” and that “When you spread the wealth around everybody benefits” out of one side of his mouth, while telling us he would have the most transparent, open and fiscally responsible administration ever. Right there, at that moment, he proves to the whole world, with just those two assertions, that he is a lying piece of shit. Then we elected him. I guess searching for meaning isn’t a hobby for many people.
Make a point of it. Next time you see a politician speaking, or an advertisement, or anything really, try to see if there is any meaning, and what, exactly, is the meaning.
First;
Then;
Those are the burnt out ruins of Berlin, after Central Planning had run its course.
The lesson? Mind your own business.
On the other hand; if mass destruction is your end goal, then by all means centrally plan to your heart’s content, but of course you’ll need your own army. And it had better be one hell of an army. You see what happened to that son of a bitch in the photo, and he had, in say 1940, the best army and the best air force, and prossibly the best navy in the world. He did accomplish plenty of destruction, so you can look up to him I guess, as one of the greatest Central Planners in history.
He, like all Central Planners, of course naturally assumed that he was smarter than all of the People of Europe, or of the world, combined. It’s always like that– they’re so shockingly ignorant and/or stupid that they think they’re smarter than everyone else, and they are furthermore shockingly stupid enough to think that their towering genius automatically gives them the right to tell us lesser creatures how to live (or not live).
Here’s the clue that maybe you are one of those twisted, nasty, retarded fools. It’s very simple. If you see someone minding their own business, and you hate them, and you want to do something about it, you’re a Central Planner. As a Central Planner, you are of course too fearful to actually do anything yourself about these people who mind their own business, so you’ll seek some official position, or a gang or committee or some such, so you can have other people do your dirty work. That way you don’t feel like the criminal you are, because other people are carrying the guns for you. If you had the guts and the initiative to act on these hatred impulses on your own, you’d be what we call a common criminal.
If you had guts, self initiative, and a little bit of decency, you’d be too busy minding your own business to worry about stopping or redirecting someone else’s. That, and you’d have a vested interest in protecting property rights.
I installed an Aimpoint sight on a 500 S&W pistol for a guy today. He lives in North Idaho and has been hunting here and elsewhere for 30 years. He’d been in and out of our shop, trying to figure out how to make the little Micro sight stay put on his 500 bore, G-force production factory, so we’ve gotten acquainted.
Today he brought in one of his many hunting photo albums. He keeps records of each harvest; date, details of the animal, distance, and so on.
One of his kills was of a circa 2,000 lb Bison bull he got in South Dakota using a traditional muzzleloading rifle. He used a 200 grain XTP 45 caliber handgun bullet in a 50 caliber sabot. Muzzle velocity; ~2000 fps. (he could state his velocity extreme spread off the top of his head). He knows his rifles and his trajectories from years of practical use. That bull was shot from 150 yards. I ran the numbers in Modern Ballistics, and the impact velocity would have been around 1280. The jacketed hollowpoint bullet struck inside the front shoulder (so as to avoid the heavy shoulder joint, he said) in a quartering-toward shot, penetrated the heavy hide, busted a heavy rib, penetrated both lungs, the diaphram, and stopped in the spleen. The bull walked a few yards, laid down and never got up, shot with what amounted to (energy-wise) a 45 magnum handgun.
Some (most)(no; virtually all) would say that his choice of round was drastically too fragile and drastically under-powered, taking a shot at the “practical” range limit of the firearm, but he’d worked with this system for years and knew it’s capabilities and limitations from experience. Do not try this at home.
Anyway; it’s fun to talk with people who actually do things.
By the way; Installing the Micro sight on a 500 Smith requires the “permanent” red (as opposed to the “high strength” red) thread locker. I had to special order it as no one in town knew it existed. According to the tech I spoke with at Aimpoint, you also need to crank the cross-bolt down far beyond the 180-after-contact spec in the instructions, if’n you’re mounting it on the 500 hand cannon. This time we used a ratchet wrench. He’ll try it out tomorrow after the required 24 hour cure time and we’ll see if it worked. I wish they’d go with a square cross bolt for high recoil applications, but in nearly all other applications it matters not a bit, one way or the other.
Phone salesman; “How soon do you need it? Right now, I suppose.”
Me; “Yeah, I have the thing apart, and the customer standing right here, waiting…
continued in my head…
… How much to get it here yesterday?”
Phone salesman; “All the money in the world, times infinity”
Me; “OK. Do you take installment payments?”
Today is a national holiday celebrating the European, and very un-American, idea of the Balkanization of society into classes, and specifically celebrating the “labor class”. I won’t bother trying to unpack all the layers upon layers, and the sub layers upon sub layers of false assumption behind it. Instead I make the very American assertion that every one of us, regardless of circumstance, is an autonomous entrepreneur.
We aren’t born into classes or groups. We are born, or immigrate, into the American Experiment. We may decide to sell our “labor” (and in this case I use the word as a practical noun or a verb as opposed to a classification) to someone else as a part of our life plan, or we may decide to go more or less directly into our own businesses, but neither choice is one that is foisted on us by society.
Actually; whether you are selling your labor to someone else’s business, whether you’re selling products or services under your own personal business banner, or whether you serve on the board of directors for a large corporation, you are in fact your own business. If your name is Billy Bob and you shovel manure for a dairy farmer, you should think of yourself as Billy Bob’s shoveling service. You are your own boss (to the extent anyone is his own boss, which is small). Anyone serving as his own boss needs customers (they’re the real bosses don’t you know – they control the money you’re looking to get) and in this case your customer is that farmer. You serve your customer and in return you get paid. That’s a business you’re in, whether you understand it or not. You’re an entrepreneur. Get your head straight and make the best of it.
“Labor” in the communist sense is something altogether different. In that case, as a laborer you are in a group pitted against the other classes in a political struggle for resources and perks. Your class or group is in direct competition with all others, for a piece of the confiscated booty. It’s gang against gang. Your gang is the only one that counts and all other gangs are your enemies. The pinnacle of success for your gang is when you take over full control of the government.
In the American model on the other hand, you are an autonomous operator– a business consisting of one individual. You compete for the favor of potential customers in a system of property rights protection. Your only method of success then is to do a better job in serving your customers. Lobbying, or the brute strength of gangs (or labor unions) then has little or no place, because there is no power in government to lend favor to your business at the expense of others. Government has no rights to itself – only the responsibility to protect every individual’s property rights. Cooperation in the form of combined resources (the corporation model) does have a place, because the economy of scale (usually but not always) allows a larger business to produce better goods or services at lower prices. It is the height of a polite and just civilization.
Too bad the American system has been corrupted by the Progressive communist movement into something ugly. They make it ugly by getting government’s coercive power involved in it, then use that ugliness to tell us that “capitalism” doesn’t work. Lying scum.
I’ll call this Lying Scum Day then. Have a happy one, suckers.
American veterans under attack by our government? That DHS statement from a few years ago does come to mind.
People are being arrested and “committed” against their will as mental cases for saying things that, by the standards of this blog, are fairly innocuous. They did this sort of thing in the Soviet Union, but it seems to be happening in the U.S. now. Watch both videos, taking note of the things that were said openly by the left on national TV.
I’ve said for years that The Enemy will do things that are so crazy we’re afraid to even mention them for fear of sounding crazy ourselves, or things so crazy no one wants to believe it. It’s happened before, so one can only assume that it will be done over and over. Has it come to this?
What happens next is we start blaming the victims. “They wouldn’t have been arrested if they weren’t doing something stupid or wrong…” Neighbors start informing on neighbors, and “you wouldn’t mind being searched if you had nothing to hide” becomes the word of the day. “We wouldn’t have all this trouble if it weren’t for those people saying things against the government. It’s all their fault. Get ’em!”
Look for it. It’s all happened before, and the sharks are always on the hunt.
When I got into bullet casting, I noticed right off that there was confusion over parts and percentages. People tell you that 20 parts lead to one part tin equals 95% and 5%, but when you start adding your “parts” you put in 20 parts this and one part that, and you realize that you now have 21 parts, which isn’t 95:5. It’s actually 1/21, which is more like 95.3% and 4.7%. Not a big difference, and not enough to really matter in this case, but when mixing several ingredients, you can end up farther off. If you use this oft repeated “method” of calculating for things that really do matter, you’re in trouble.
Anyway, I wanted Lyman #2, and Lyman states the actual percentages. I use other alloys too, and several sources of metal, so I made up this alloy calculator.
I think my assumptions are right…
Alloy Calculator.xls (26.5 KB)
You can fiddle with the composition of your various metal sources, plug in the number of parts in each, and it gives you the makeup of your final alloy in percentages. So I can make #2 alloy from wheelweights, pure tin and 70:30 antimonial lead, or from pure lead, tin, and 70:30, etc. and in theory get a pretty consistent product without having to do much calculating.
We see that term, “stunning” too often. This interview with Dinesh D’Souza however was actually stunning. Please watch the whole thing. Wow! In any other circumstance this stuff would dominate the headlines for months and then linger for generations.
Actually, this is dominating the headlines, but not in the Old Media. You have to look elsewhere. Forget about the Old Liars (ABC NBC CBS MSNBC NYT et al). They are done. How did they get away with it for so long? That, I hope, will be one of the big topical questions in history classes for the next hundred years.
It’s been done, but I second the notion that we stop worrying about about the Old Media. Some people still bitch about them, wringing their hands over the latest dumb thing they did, always reacting and rarely acting. No, Young Grasshopper; move past them, like the wind. They are nothing.
We have our own media and our own culture.
If the gun is primarily a symbol, then it is a symbol of what?
To some it is a symbol of Man’s cruelty, or generally of evil. To others it is a symbol of the love and protection of life and liberty – a defense against evil.
Why would one person take one view as opposed to the other? It seems to me that the more good person is often trying to point out the differences between good and evil, whereas the more evil person wants to maintain some confusion over the matter.
“Get those guns out of the community” then, might be a reaction to a desire to maintain some of that confusion, to avoid addressing something they want kept hidden in the fog. The “bitter clinger” charge lashes out against guns and religion, both of which tend to draw attention to the differences between good and evil. The “bitter clinger” charge, as I see it, reinforces this guns-as-a-symbol concept to explain the rift between the antis and the pro 2As.
See; isn’t this fun?
This year I endeavored to keep a nice garden. The biggest job, after the soil has been worked and the seeds planted, is weeding. Early on, when the seedlings are all very young, it can be difficult to tell the difference between some weed seedlings and the ones you want, so I tend to let some of them get more established before I pull them. It took a lot of work, but between planting the vegetables on little berms and watering only the berms, I have the garden relatively weed free, except for some morning glory that never goes away unless you blast the whole garden several times with Roundup before planting.
But something struck me along the way. Even now, months into it, I find weeds that are mature, “hiding” among the desirable plants. They have a color or a shape just similar enough that we don’t see them among the vegetables unless we look very carefully. Several of us have taken it upon ourselves to hunt down and pull the weeds, but still a few of them can be found, growing and maturing, feeding off of the water, nutrients and sunlight intended for the vegetables, and producing seeds that will hang around until next spring. Then the battle starts all over again.
Although there are many good techniques for keeping them in check, the weeds still find a way to exist and suck some of the life out of the garden, even if it’s just a little bit. It is a never-ending battle that you never really “win”, see, but it can be rewarding all the same if you keep your eyes open and do what needs to be done.
As the Republicans are frantically trying to figure out just what it is they should pretend to believe during the upcoming election, and while we stand here and complain to each other that “we can’t vote our way out of this” there are organizations already in place already doing something about it and already having a positive effect. Even if “we who uphold the principles of liberty” win and win and win, one election after another, we can never stop tending this garden. There is never any final victory after which you can let your guard down and just live. Life is like that. We can complain about how the weeds have just totally taken over the garden, and yet who’s fault is that?
Weeds are what they are– we know exactly what they are and how they operate. We know that they aren’t going to disappear from the Earth. We also know what the vegetables are and what they need to thrive, right? So…
(Sorry if you don’t like allegory. For some reason I’m seeing it all over the place lately, as though life itself is one big set of metaphors and allegories. I get on a kick like this for a while, and then it’s on to another. It’ll pass)
I almost always carry concealed, but Saturday I forgot my Hawaiian shirt as I left the house. “Oh well; I’ll open carry”.
I had my daughter with me in the supermarket, when she said we should get some bananas.
We were discussing the amount of bananas we’d been going though lately when a guy standing very close to us blurted out; “Speaking of bananas…!” and then walked off quickly before I could make sense of it.
“I wonder what that was supposed to mean” I said to my daughter.
“I have no idea” she said with a chuckle. Then I realized that the guy probably was responding to the gun on my hip, and the spare mag carrier on the other. So I’d gotten a drive-by criticism. It was a “drive-by” or a “hit and run” because a charge was made with no possibility of a response.
At the risk of over-analyzing; I’ve often said that the left were cowards, and this response reinforces that assertion. The hit-and-run commenter could make the case that he was afraid of confronting an armed man (but then why say anything at all?) but I say he was afraid of what he himself might do in a straight-up conversation.
Two points then. One; the haters simply cannot help themselves– they’ll blurt out their hate reflexively, without hesitation. Two; they’re afraid, both of themselves (they know they’ll embarrass themselves by their own behavior) and of a fair contest in which their assertions might be challenged and laid bare. When you point out a hater’s hate, they hate you for it. Their hate is projected upon you, so as to make you the source of the hate…
In fact of course he had nothing at all to fear. I would simply have said something like, “Do you keep a fire extinguisher in your home?…”
I’ve spent hours looking. Lots of opinions and assertions from sellers but few citations. Plus, retailing is not the same thing as manufacturing. I also searched the NRA HQ site and turned up nothing that obviously dealt with the issue of manufacturing and shipping an 1860s style pistol. Idaho’s 18-3315A is pretty awesome, but I want to address manufacturing and trade across states.
I did like this bit from the link above;
(2) A personal firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition that is manufactured commercially or privately in Idaho and that remains within the borders of Idaho is not subject to federal law or federal regulation, including registration, under the authority of congress to regulate interstate commerce.
—
(4) Subsections (2) and (3) of this section do not apply to:
(a) A firearm that cannot be carried and used by one (1) person;
(b) A firearm that has a bore diameter greater than one and one-half (1 1/2) inches and that uses smokeless powder…
…or…
Words Mean Things
Hundreds of years ago, when most long guns were stocked to the muzzle, there was usually a metal part known as the muzzle cap at the end of the stock to protect the thin wood and end grain there. The half stock rifle, with which we are all familiar, often has a cap at the forward end of the stock also, but since it’s not at the muzzle, we call it a nose cap or a forend cap. The forward end, or forward portion of the stock, for hundreds of years, has been called the forend or forestock. For some reason hardly anyone, it seems, uses these terms anymore.
When I tell someone they need a nose cap on their AK before they can use a standard forend, they’re at a loss to understand. For one thing, it is no longer a forend but a handguard, and there is apparently no longer any such thing as a nose cap. In these modern times, when we’re still using the exact same features, we need the new term “handguard retainer”. If I try to add clarity by calling it a forend cap, it still doesn’t work. I have to use some version of “That metal thingy what holds the handguard on at the front of the handguard” but that’s a lot more syllables than the centuries old “nose cap”.
“Stock forend” or “forestock” no longer works. I hear “forearm” more often, but most common is “lower handguard” (but some AKs only have the one, so using “lower” only adds confusion. If a rifle doesn’t have an arm or arms, then it cannot have a “forearm” (the forward portion of an arm). Since a rifle is an “arm” (in a different sense of the word) then a “forearm” would be the muzzle, wouldn’t it, or the front sight or something out there?
What really throws me for a loop is the term “foregrip” which I always take to mean “forward pistol grip”. We sell forward pistol grips, so when you ask me for a “foregrip” I can only conclude that you mean forward pistol grip, which is after all a “foregrip” We sell forends too, but you need a nose cap for a standard forend. “You know; that foregrip you sell” applies, potentially, to a wide spectrum of products. When I ask, “Which one?” I almost always get a “what?” or a “the one you have on your web site”. We have a lot of them on our web site, which you would know if you’d looked at it, which I assume you did or you wouldn’t be talking about it. You might as well say, “You know– the one I’m thinking about. I can see it right here in my mind– why can’t you see it in my mind?”
Do you know where your rifle stock’s heel, toe, comb, wrist, forend, nose and nose cap are located? Or is each feature “That thingy, there, next to or at the end of that other doo-hicky, what holds the thing you hold on to…there…by the bracket”? I swear; I have several conversations per day that go along those lines.
Recently I had a guy completely reiterate everything I said, “just to be clear” in his words. He knew all the parts, he knew how to use the language, he knew what part he had called to talk about, and he got everything exactly right. I had to take a break, take a deep breath, and tell everyone about it.
Anyway; I take the common misuse of terms, or unfamiliarity with the jargon, to mean that there are a lot of new gun owners out there, so I try to be as patient as I can. The other day I told a guy he needed to be sure he got Picatinny rings for our M8 rail. Problem was, he didn’t know what “Picatinny”, “rail”, or “rings” meant, nor “Leupold” nor “Burris”. I had to explain the meaning and derivation of each term and how it applied to his situation. “Leupold is a manufacturer of optics including rifle scopes…” At one point in the conversation he said he’d have to call those folks at the Picatinny Arsenal and order some of those rings. He ended up spending a couple hundred dollars with us, so I must not have sounded too exasperated with him.
While I’m at it; a sight is not a site. This is the first time I have cited the use of “site” when “sight” would have been right.