Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.
Patrick Henry
Speech of June 5 1788
“This is a display of anger and rage after more than seven years of struggle to keep what is ours.”
This (riots in Copenhagen) is what you get in a socialist society.
The building, which has been viewed as free public housing by young squatters since the 1980s, has become a popular cultural center for youngsters with anti-establishment and far-left sympathies.
…
The eviction had been planned since last year, when courts ordered the squatters to hand the building over to a Christian congregation that bought it six years ago.
The squatters refused to leave, saying the city had no right to sell the building, which has hosted concerts with performers like Australian Nick Cave and Icelandic singer Bjork. They have demanded another building for free as a replacement.
The problem is they have no sense of what constitutes ownership. They are like spoiled children screaming “Mine! Mine!”
Socialists and communists have a long history of these sort of riots. It’s how they get their way. For example, The National Socialist German Workers Party had numerous riots in their rise to power. Similar riots brought socialists to power throughout all of Western Europe.
The building was sold six years ago and the rightful owners have been unable to use their own property for that time. It’s long past time to send the brats to their “free” jail cell for a long “time-out”. Had the thugs of the Germany National Socialists immediately been thrown in jail millions of lives might have been saved.
My brother Doug still lives on the farm. While visiting recently we talked about the recent trend to make grain into fuel. It’s been done for years but recently there has been a lot of new ethanol plants going in and using up a lot of the corn production. We don’t raise any corn on the farm but prices for wheat and barley have risen because the corn previously used for livestock feed is being pulled off the market for ethanol. Cattle, sheep, and pigs will eat chopped barley and wheat as well as corn so wheat is now at something like a 30 year high. Ignoring for now the fact that it’s not an all time high, that 30+ years ago wheat sold for more than it does today, we realize that there might be an increase in prosperity of some farmers in the near future.
Some people are fantasizing about replacing nearly all our non renewable fuels with “natural” fuels made from grain. The key word in previous sentence is fantasizing. I knew Doug had done the calculations 15 or 20 years ago and realized then farms cannot begin to supply our fuel needs and I asked him to redo the calculations. He sent me this short paper (Microsoft Word .DOC, slightly edited by me). The important information is as follows:
Comparing potential alcohol production to current petroleum production, we see that if we stop eating and make ALL of the world grain production into alcohol, we will produce:
1.77e16/1.447e17 or 12% of the energy we currently get from petroleum.
…
…we are falling behind on world food production versus consumption in the last 10 – 15 years, so there are a few billion people that will have to stop eating if the rest of us want to stop using fossil fuels and switch to biofuels.
Also on the negative side is the fact that the huge increase in agricultural production that we have seen in the last 50 years is mostly due to fertilizers that are based on natural gas. Modern agricultural production also depends on fossil fuels for farm equipment and transportation. Thus, the “renewable” biofuels are also based in part on fossil fuels.
He doesn’t take into account that a fair amount of the oil pumped from the ground is not burned as fuel but is used as lubricants, paints, and materials such as plastic. So that 12% number is wrong in that it assumes all oil is converted into energy. So you can probably boost that number up to something like 15 or 20%. But still that is assuming that the entire world’s production of grain is used for energy. So assuming that we only ask half the planet to stop eating foods that have grain products in them (no more bread, cookies, noodles, or Twinkies and don’t forget most of your meat is grain fed) we can only supply about 8 to 10% of our energy requirements with our current production levels of grain. Also he probably wasn’t aware of this recent news on converting cellulose to fuel.
Maybe we can increase production, right? Yes, some. But the last time I checked the U.S. was losing about one million acres of farm land per year. Farm land is easily converted into roads, housing developments, and shopping malls so that’s what is happening to most of that one million acres per year. Add to that dwindling supply of farm land the increasing population and the fact that most of the prime farm land is already in production and you rapidly realize biofuels aren’t going to be the answer to our energy needs.
Something no person living in the U.S. has experienced is a shortage of food. In Europe during and after WWII there were times when there just wasn’t enough food for everyone. In China and Africa it’s been even more common. But in the U.S. someone might go hungry because they didn’t have enough money for food but there was always food available.
For at least the last 15 years my brother and I have asking each other “when are things going to turn around on the farm?” They are running equipment that is over 30 years old which only keep running because they have a good machine shop and can do their own repairs and even build new parts and equipment. Things have been tough on the farm for a long time and we watched as the cost of production kept rising and the crop prices remained flat or even dropped. Dad figures the government should “set a fair price for everything and keep it there”. Nixon tried that and it didn’t work. That sort of thing will never work. It simply can’t work. There has to be a shortage or at least the threat of a shortage before the price of our crops will increase. Maybe then “things will turn around”.
Food is an interesting exercise in supply and demand. Classically one would claim that as prices go down consumption will increase. But in the U.S. today ask yourself, how much more would you eat if the price of food dropped by half? What if the price of food was 10% of present day prices? Or what if food was free? Would you and your family significantly increase your consumption? Probably not. And in the other direction, how much would you pay to avoid cutting your consumption in half? Food demand is extremely inelastic.
15 or 20 years ago there was something like a years supply of wheat in storage. Stop production, and assuming perfect transportation and distribution, and it would be a year before the supply of breads, noodles, and Twinkies disappeared. Recently that surplus has dwindled down into the neighborhood of 30 to 45 days. And during that time the price of wheat did not increase above the “noise”. Why? Because there was still a surplus and the demand is inelastic. Now, with the ethanol plants coming on line and wheat and barley replacing corn in the feedlots we might see an actual world-wide shortage of wheat in our near future. And then what happens?
That’s an interesting question. Far more interesting that what one might think at first glance. Farmers, contrary to popular impression, are not stupid. All the stupid ones went out of business years ago. What you are left with are smart farmers that were too stubborn to get a job in the city. Smart, stubborn, and making do, scrimping by for 30 years. When it looks like there is actually going to be a shortage do you think those farmers will sell their crop as soon as they get it in from the field? Or will they hold on to it for a while to get a better price? If there wasn’t going to be a shortage there will be as all those smart, stubborn farmers figure it’s payback time. It’s time to make up the missed profit for the last 30 years. They are going to sit on that wheat and wait as long as they can. And with the prices going through the roof it shouldn’t be hard for them to get the banks to loan them the money to pay their bills while they “wait for prices to peak”.
What happens next? My speculation, and everyone I have talked to about this, is that the people in the cities won’t stand for it. Once they start seeing they can’t buy an unlimited number of Twinkies and Big Macs anymore and the ones they can buy are twice as expensive as they were a couple months ago they will demand the government “do something”. Maybe then Dad will get his wish, the government will set a “fair price” for wheat and the farmers that refuse to sell at that price will have their crop forcibly taken from them. Those smart, stubborn farmers with 30 years of resentment built up will have their crops taken.
Every farmer I knew growing up owned one or more guns. Most of them went hunting. I wonder what they will hunt when the government says they have to sell their crop for less than what the market would pay for it?
Interesting times we live in…
Update: Doug made the following comments:
I am aware of cellulose. I went on a tour last summer on WSUs conservation farm north of Pullman. They talked about switch grass in the midwest. It doesn’t grow well here, but we would probably grow things like Reed’s Canary grass here. You can get more energy per acre from switch grass, but they are still working on ways to convert the cellulose to starches and sugars so the yeast can digest it. It didn’t seem like the technological difficulties were insurmountable, but we aren’t there yet. In 10 years, we may be replacing corn ethanol with switch grass ethanol, but I would be willing to bet that without a major crisis of some type, the world demand for energy will continue to outpace production of biofuels. China for example is ramping up their industry and will have an insatiable thirst for energy if that continues to go well for them.
The second point is what happens when we actually have a shortage of food. First off, the wealthy people in the world, (Americans and Europeans) won’t have a food shortage. Africa, the poor contries in the middle east and south east asia will all be unable to buy food. They can’t afford it right now, so we give them a lot of food. If the price of wheat triples, it would then cost a whopping $0.27/lb. This should barely be measurable when you buy a big mac or other prepared foods. Breakfast cereals often cost that much per ounce, so I don’t think the American consumer will get hurt that bad. What I do think will happen is the American people will feel empathy for the starving people of the world and the guilt that people of western european culture seem so eager to feel will take over. The media will start scolding us for taking food out of the mouths of starving children in Africa to put in our SUVs. The political correctness of biofuels will butt head to head with the political correctness of feeding the starving children of the world. The media, which controls the thinking of the American people and which takes sides in nearly every issue will have to decide if we want biofuels or if we want to continue fueling the population explosion of undeveloped countries. My guess is they will instruct the American people through biased reporting to send our food to the starving children of the world. Politicians will respond accordingly and the ethanol mandate and biodiesel tax credits will be swiped away as an experiment gone wrong.
Where does that leave us with energy? I am not certain, but I suspect we will be drilling for more oil and speeding up the process of depleting that natural resource. Greenhouse fears are the fad right now, but will probably fade away when people like Al Gore realize they can’t enjoy the things they want in life without consuming fossil fuels.
Update2: I don’t expect prices to just triple if a shortage occurs. Prices tripled once before when the Russians had a crop failure and started buying a noticeable portion of the worlds supply. They didn’t produce a world wide shortage just reduced the reserves. If there is an actual shortage I wouldn’t be surprised to see prices increase by a factor of 10. This might increase the cost of processed food in the U.S. by something like 25 to 50%. Not so much that most people in the U.S. would be unable to buy it and most probably wouldn’t change their shopping habits. But something Doug did bring up will put some elastic into the demand. We give a lot of food away to other countries. Those give aways are almost for certain dollar based rather than quantity based. As the price rises less food can be purchased for the same amount of money. Hence the demand (demand in the sense that people with money to actually purchase the food as opposed to just being hungry but without the means to buy it) will decrease some with increasing prices. And of course what will happen when people start actually going hungry in some of those other countries? People will die both from actual lack of food and from fighting over what food is available. Interesting times…
The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting.
And I know I’m not going to make very many friend saying this. But it’s about all rights. All of our rights to be able to protect ourselves from all of you guys up there.
Suzanne Hupp
Testifying before congress regarding the assault weapons ban.
[No wonder Schumer, briefly seen in the video, pushed for the ban. Ms. Hupp confirmed his worst fears.–Joe]
Via Phil at Random Nuclear Strikes comes this story from the U.K. about another small step toward a police state:
Thousands of council staff are being trained to police the smoking ban in bars, restaurants and shops in England.
Ministers have given councils £29.5m to pay for staff, who will be able to give on-the-spot £50 fines to individuals and take court action against premises.
They will have the power to enter premises undercover, allowing them to sit among drinkers, and will even be able to photograph and film people.
…
But the council is also exploring the possibility of getting street wardens, who currently aid the local police force, to help ensure the ban is effectively enforced.
Steve Dowling, director of environment and public protection at Nottingham City Council, said: “We have about 100 wardens and they could keep an eye on whether people are smoking in pubs as they go about their other duties.”
“But it is not just about pubs and restaurants. We will also be looking at the likes of car garages and shops are complying as well.”
Does anyone remember what happened with all the “Revenue Agents” after the end of prohibition? Faced with unemployment congress passed a jobs creation bill to keep them employed. That piece of legislation is now known as the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA34, or just NFA). Something that most people don’t think about is that people believed that in order for the Federal government to have the authority to ban the recreational use of alcohol they needed to amend the constitution. And the thinking after the repeal of the 18th Amendment with the 21st Amendment was that without a repeal of the 2nd Amendment congress couldn’t prohibit gun ownership either. But what they could do was put a huge tax on certain guns. $200, the standard transfer tax specified in NFA was about six months salary in 1934. All those “Revenue Agents” now had a job to do. They had to collect those $200 transfer taxes on guns that sold for, maybe, $10.00.
Even if these street wardens and council staff, trained to “keep an eye on people”, don’t have their job functions removed by legislation more enlightened about the rights of property owners there is still a serious danger lurking. Since they are already watching, taking pictures, and reporting on “anti-social” behavior they will be utilized for other things. What will it be next? Will people that complain about the smoking ban get called in to answer some questions about their loyalty to The Crown? Or perhaps ten years from now it will gay lovers who hold hands or steal a kiss in the dark corner of bar that will be charged with a “crime against nature”. East Germany had approximately one out of every 50 people as informers in the late 1980’s just before their collapse. The U.K. has better technology and is now recognized as having the most surveillance of western democracies.
Adding informers to assist their technological surveillance will come in quite useful when the next tyrant comes to power. You don’t think they will get a tyrant in the U.K.? Maybe not anytime soon. But one never knows for certain what can happen in just a few years time. But what you can be certain is that the more power given to the state the more people that love power will be attracted to that centralized power. People that love power (why do I have these images of a certain Senator from New York flashing in my mind now?) use it to gain more power. They then exercise it to the detriment of a free society. Currently the U.K. is further down The Road to Serfdom than we are and just took another step ahead with the training of these informers.
It’s not just Israel, Europe (H/T to Kim), or the United States that Muslim have problems with. Here is the latest from Thailand:
BANGKOK, Thailand — At least 23 bombs exploded Sunday in apparently coordinated attacks in parts of southern Thailand plagued by a Muslim insurgency, killing three people and wounding more than 50, the military said.
The bombings targeted electricity transmitters, hotels, karaoke bars and markets in the country’s southernmost provinces, the only parts of predominantly Buddhist Thailand with Muslim majorities. Two schools were torched.
Violence in the south has been escalating in recent months despite a major policy shift by the military-imposed government, which is trying to replace an earlier, iron-fisted approach in dealing with the rebels with a “hearts and minds” campaign.
More than 2,000 people have died in the provinces bordering Malaysia since the insurgency erupted in 2004, fueled by accusations of decades of misrule by the central government. The insurgents have not announced their goals, but they are believed to be fighting for a separate state imbued with radical Islamic ideology.
Add things like the above to my listening material (audio books) in recent weeks:
And with the recent developments in congress I have become more and more convinced we, the non-Muslims, are going to be pushed into essentially unthinkable actions in the near future. By retreating from, or failing to accomplish, the least distasteful of the options available (what President Bush is trying to accomplish in Iraq) we will allow them to develop and use nuclear weapons against us. This war is different than any other war I have heard about. This is a war where there is no one leader, country, or countries to negotiate “terms of surrender” (the surrender of either side) with. You could take out the top three layers of leadership and still the war would not end.
I believe the “religion of peace” will either permanently succeed or permanently fail in the next few decades at the cost of 100’s of millions, if not billions, of lives.
Last night Barb and I watched the movie the The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The DVD box quotes Roger Ebert, “The most erotic serious film since Last Tango in Paris.” The IMDB plot summary is:
Tomas is a doctor and a lady-killer in 1960s Czechoslovakia, an apolitical man who is struck with love for the bookish country girl Tereza; his more sophisticated sometime lover Sabina eventually accepts their relationship and the two women form an electric friendship. The three are caught up in the events of the Prague Spring (1968), until the Soviet tanks crush the non-violent rebels; their illusions are shattered and their lives change forever.
Tomas is a surgeon, living in Prague. He has a physical relationship with Sabina – but not an emotional one. They are happy with the situation. Then, Tomas meets a waitress in a station, but leaves. Eventually, she comes to see him in Prague. Will he go against his ‘values’ and let himself get emotionally involved?
It was about that and it did have a lot of erotic content and pretty graphic sex for a film made in the 1980s (among other things full frontal nudity of women). But what I got out of the movie was a lot more than just the sex. My first clue was when one of the characters talks of “socialism with a human face” (a real life phrase). Then when the Soviet tanks rolled in I immediately saw the movie from a completely different viewpoint.
Where were the snipers picking off the exposed tank crew members? Why weren’t there Molotov cocktails being thrown from the windows? Why didn’t the communist officials fear a suppressed .22 bullet to the head every time they stepped out of their homes? But I knew the answer. The answer was in socialism and the culture it creates. There isn’t the sense of individual responsibility. People aren’t really expected to provide for themselves and they certainly aren’t expected or even encouraged to protect themselves or their country. That’s the job of the government. In real life the first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubček, told the people not to resist. This was despite the fact that he had initiated the welcomed reforms to the Soviet view of “unshakable fidelity to Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism and declared an implacable struggle against ‘bourgeois’ ideology and all ‘antisocialist’ forces.”
Late in the movie Tomas and Tereza move from the city to a farm. I grew up on a farm and own some land that my brothers still farm. Sometimes they let me help or I borrow some equipment to make some improvements for Boomershoot. The contrast between being on the farm driving a tractor, a truck, or a combine one day and then being 300 miles away in an office building writing software in the city the next is incredibly jarring to me. The contrast is so incredible that I don’t think I can really explain it even if people were to express an interest–which they don’t.
Boomershoot is that way too. My crew and I spend days making explosives and over a hundred people with rifles show up from all over the world to our little patch of land and we make the earth shake with hundreds of explosions and fireballs soar up above us heating our chilled skin in the cold morning air. From 700 yards away targets no bigger than a human head disappear in a cloud of water vapor, dirt, and a chest thumping boom. The day after Boomershoot I’m back in an office in the city writing software. It’s so odd to me when I first sit down in front of my computer again and look across the hall at the other people in front of their computers. Do they know what I was doing yesterday? In a sense, yes, they do know. But in many ways I can’t imagine they do. I don’t think people realize what a difference in mindset living on a farm makes. I wish they had captured that in the movie. But probably nearly all the people involved in the movie didn’t really realize it and how could they capture something they didn’t know existed? And even knowing it exists, I’m not sure I can capture it and put it on display is such a way that non-farm people can really understand.
The “gun culture” is very closely related to life on the farm. Think about it. In both cases who is considered responsible? The individual. You are responsible for your safety and you are responsible not only for yourself and your family. But it goes much further with the farm culture.
It is my memories of farm life that drive a lot of my hostility to socialism. We had a few cattle on the farm when I was growing up. I see the socialists as treating people as cattle (see also this post). I’m certain the cattle viewed us as benign. No different than socialists view government. The cattle-owner/government provides food, shelter, medical care, and protection from predators. What they don’t readily see is being herded, fenced, branded, de-horned, and castrated. The images of Nazis (National Socialism, remember?) putting Jews in cattle cars to be taken away and slaughtered validates the metaphor.
I remember at some meals mom announcing all the food on the table at dinner except for the spices and sugar came from the farm. It included the milk, the homemade butter, cottage cheese, the jam or jelly, the meat, the vegetables, and the fruit. We cut wood from the small forest behind the house for heat in the winter time. Our water came from our own well. We had our own septic system. We burned and/or buried our own trash. We built and maintained our own buildings, machines, private roads, and even our own private telephone system among our buildings.
Just after Christmas 1968, the same year the Russian tanks rolled into Prague, it snowed about six feet on the farm. In places there were snow drifts twice that deep across our driveway. As soon as it stopped snowing and blowing the temperature dropped to -30 F, the electricity went out, our pipes froze, and the phone went out. But our family was fine. We kept the wood stove red hot at times, we melted snow for water and we cooked over what we called “the trash burner” in the kitchen–in essence a small wood cook stove. It was week before the electricity came back on but during that week we never once concerned ourselves about when or if “the government” would help us. We took care of our cattle and we eventually plowed the snow from the county road so we could check on the neighbors–who, of course, were doing the same. It was probably 10 days before we saw the first, and last, government assistence. That assistence was in the form of the county road crew plowing the snow (they had better equipment for it and did a much better job than we and our neighbors had done).
In the movie when the tanks came the people had mass demonstrations, yelled, and shook their fists at the invaders. If they were brave they took pictures of the Soviet tanks and they talked about the failure of their government. I saw perhaps two tanks that burned but they didn’t really fight back. This is consistent with the real life reaction. Early in the movie the people talk about the Soviets in relation to some hostile political writings and conclude, “What can they do?” What they didn’t realize is the Soviets concluded essentially the same thing when planning to send in the tanks, “What can the people of Czechoslovakia do?” And the answer was, essentially, nothing. They had accepted socialism. They did not have a gun or farm culture as I know it and if their government abandoned them to a predator there wasn’t much more they could do than what cattle do when herded into a corral for branding and castration. The cattle make a lot of noise, snort, and give you hostile looks. I saw those crowds surrounding the tanks in Prague as just like those cattle.
I see now the disappearance of the farm culture is a major contributing factor to the loss of our freedom. As much as I love life on the farm I will not even suggest pushing our country in the direction of a farming society. It’s not feasible or even desirable for so many reasons. But is it only our gun culture that can defend our culture of freedom and protect us from, among other things, what Tereza calls The Unbearable Lightness of Being? I don’t know. But I do know this is a part of why I do Boomershoot.
Last week, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta upheld Alabama’s 1998 sex law. The court said states have a “legitimate rational basis” for making rules to preserve public morality.
That law bans nude dancing, limits where strip clubs and X-rated theaters can go, and bans the sale of any device whose main purpose is to stimulate human genitals.
Hmmm. Does that make Viagra a sex toy?
Lee Roop
February 18, 2007
I call a cease-fire in the war on sex toys
Huntsville Times
[I’m reminded of a conversation I had with Barb and Xenia yesterday. Xenia told us of one of the Moscow Idaho high school teachers commented to her about her older brother James and discussions in government class. Paraphrasing, “Sometimes he was ultra conservative. Sometimes he would take a completely liberal position. You just never knew.” As I told Barb and Xenia, “Some people are very confused by freedom.” And I could have added that most people don’t want freedom. I wonder how well the folks in Alabama would get along with Xenia when she posts about celebrating Vagina Day. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t take her to Space Camp in Huntsville during the middle of February.–Joe]
Gun control measures, from the slave gun bans of the 1700s South to the Brady Bill regulations of the 1990s have unfairly targeted black Americans and have worked to curtail a disproportionate number of their constitutional rights. Access to firearms was understood by our founders and many early American jurists as an essential aspect of full US citizenship, and it was for this reason that the Black Codes established after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment — which constitutionally abolished slavery — prevented black freemen from owning guns.
Ken Blackwell
Second Amendment Freedoms Aided the Civil Rights Movement
It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.
Lord Acton
The prerequisite, of course, to getting the correct answers is to ask the right questions. Doing so, of course, will often be extremely difficult, and for a wide variety of reasons.
Regarding the Trolley Square shooting incident: We understand that the perpetrator was stopped by an “off duty policeman”. Said off-duty policeman was also outside of the jurisdiction in which he worked as a policeman and was presumably carrying his own, privately-owned handgun (unless I’m wrong and it is in fact the policy of the Ogden Police Department that officers are allowed to carry their city-owned, issue weapons while off-duty and outside the jurisdiction).
So the questions you wont hear are:
Wouldn’t that make him just another, regular, armed citizen?
Wouldn’t he in fact have been a concealed carry permit holder, like you and me?
If so, how many concealed carry permit holders have you heard of being recommended for honors by city officials after using their guns to save lives, as has been done in this case by Ogden city officials?
Wouldn’t the normal response have been “No charges have been filed as of yet” if the defender had NOT been a policeman?
What might have happened if the perpetrator had done this in NYC, DC, San Francisco, or Chicago, where citizens cannot legally defend themselves with concealed firearms? In that case, wouldn’t we be treated to days or weeks of demands in the media for even more gun restrictions, even though the gun restrictions themselves had resulted in a higher death toll?
How should we, as concerned citizens, treat our public servants when they attempt to undermine our ability to defend ourselves and our families against aggression?
I thought that banks were required by federal law to have the Socialist Security numbers of all account holders. It turns out not be true, apparently, for illegals. I’ll choose to think of that as good news. I’ll assume I can now open accounts all over the country, including credit card accounts, without my Socialist Security number or any other documentation of my true identity. Cool.
This is what happens after you give up your right to keep and bear arms. You are reduced to begging to have even a small fraction of them restored:
Dear Home Secretary,
…
As I am sure your officials will tell you, there was absolutely no evidence to suggest that by banning legally-licensed cartridge pistols and closing legally-operating shooting clubs, we would all sleep safer in our beds. Yet today there are more hand guns on our streets than 10 years ago.
…
When London won the bid for the 2012 Olympics, the British Olympic Association and the governing bodies of shooting put forward a case to your department for legislative exemptions which would allow our pistol shooters and a large squad of sporting hopefuls to be granted dispensation under Section Five of the Act so that they could retain their sporting pistols at home without ammunition in order to do their daily ‘dry training’. Registered regional shooting clubs would also be designated as a place for weapons to be used.
It looked like a way forward could be agreed. The sports minister, Richard Caborn, assured the BOA that he had written to the Home Office giving his support for exemptions. An Early Day Motion in the Commons attracted significant support from all sides of the house and the public have, I believe, realised that target pistol shooters were victims of rough justice in the 1997 legislation. An e-petition on the No 10 website for the restoration of target pistol shooting under suitable controls is gaining signatures every day.
However, somewhere in your department the paper trail has stopped and the silence is deafening. Time is running out.
…
Target shooters are reliable, trustworthy and an asset to their communities – the kind of people your department want to support. Don’t you feel ashamed that most democracies have more faith in their citizens to participate in one of the oldest Olympic sports than we do?
Over to you Home Secretary – we need a decision urgently.
Yours sincerely, Kate Hoey
Labour MP for Vauxhall
Boomershoot 2007 is sold out with a waiting list of eight teams or I would again offer free entry to peasants from the U.K. They need get a glimpse of freedom even if it is just for a weekend.
Tam says, “Making Atlas shrug“.
For people that haven’t read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged the following is probably mostly gibberish but explaining here would be a distraction.
As Tam points out Senator Clinton is one of those rare politicians that:
…has the sheer stones to come right out in front of a national audience and baldly, openly, and without euphemism say “I want to steal your shit.“
If Senator Clinton becomes President Clinton then I can seriously believe it’s time to looking for and/or creating Galt’s Gulch. It might be time for the people that have never before gone on strike to finally do just that. It might be time to forcibly demonstrate to the socialists and communists of the world that theft and redistribute of that booty does not and cannot make “the people” better off. It might be time to demonstrate that you can, after a fashion, force labor but you can’t force someone to think.
The only question I have is; Who is our John Galt?
Same-sex marriage supporters introduce measure requiring heterosexual couples to have children. If you are going to insist that the purpose of marriage is the rearing of children then to be consistent you should be opposed to marriage between heterosexual couples that are unable or have no plans to have children.
Some people had that one coming.
Majority rule only works if you’re also considering individual rights. Because you can’t have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.
Larry Flynt
[I could have imagined myself quoting Larry Flynt–but never with this sort of subject matter. It’s not the first time Mr. Flynt has surprised me either. It might not be the last.
Other people have slightly different versions of this, with a punch line something like “…finding a well-armed sheep”. Individual rights are only guaranteed when the minorities have a means of defending them; i.e. the right to keep and bear arms guarantees the rest.–Joe]
I could only read part of Kevin’s post. After a couple paragraphs I couldn’t think straight. My mind was running wild with rage. Here’s a taste of what I read:
Witnesses to violent street crime should try to ‘distract’ attackers by honking their car horns or even ‘jumping up and down’. That’s according to Labour’s Police Minister.
The extraordinary remarks by Tony McNulty prompted an immediate, angry response from law and order experts, who described him as ‘irresponsible’.
The standard police advice to people who witness violent behaviour is that they should not get involved and immediately call 999.
But in an interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Vine, Mr McNulty said concerned citizens should ‘try some distractive activities’ instead.
This is in the U.K. and it’s unlikely I would be going there and even more unlikely now. But if someone was attacking someone in my family the only jumping up and down I would do would be on top of the attacker. If that wasn’t “distracting” enough I’d disassemble them as rapidly and as violently as I possibly could. Then I would get myself and my loved ones out of the country as quickly as I could before I had to repeat the process on any of the police that tried to arrest me.
I think some people need to read A Nation of Cowards.
Even though I have never built a bomb (ignore all the people that keep asking me for help building one) I know a little about them. Tam gets the sarcasm right and now I’m going to fill in a few technical details for you clueless types:
If you see something suspicious there are two things that are important; 1) How large is it? 2) What is it’s placement?
Here are the evacuation distances based on the size of a bomb. Those are worst case distances based in part over the concern of broken glass from the windows between you and the bomb and on the buildings above the sidewalks. A few licorice string sized objects properly placed would be more effective in taking out a bridge than a car fully loaded with explosives driving across the top.
If the placement is very near some important structure such as a bridge or fuel tank one should be more suspicious than if it is in the middle of the Safeway parking lot.
Blinking lights on a flat panel attached to non-interesting structures are either not a bomb or evidence of a very stupid bomber. In either case it’s not something to shut down a city’s transportation about. Stupid bombers, with the exception of suicide bombers which aren’t bombers but bomb delivery vehicles, are very rare because Darwin is very severe in his thinning of that herd. I just wish Darwin would thin the herd of stupid politicians as severely.
Sometimes people ask me if maybe I’m a little paranoid with all the guns and training and concern about the loss of our constitutional guaranteed freedoms. I point out that the guarantee isn’t worth the paper it’s written on without a means of enforcement. Which is what the guns and training is about–a last ditch enforcement mechanism. I can see where someone could make a case that I’m being paranoid but I think I can make a pretty good case that there are politicians that really are out to, and have, destroy our freedoms.
But no matter how good a case you make against me it doesn’t compare to this type of stuff:
Huffman Aviation, a front for FBI Division 5 and British Intelligence, have hired two known assassins, Robert Cain and Joe Kelso to put together a team that will target outspoken American citizens.
Of course it gets worse. Huffman Aviation is a stooge company with financial links to Keathing 5 bank dick Senator John McCain and Hillary (noted Republican gay-in-the-closet) Clinton Rodenhurst. Cindy McCain has large financial interests in Huffman Aviation.
P.S. Current CIA operative Harvey Hemmett has testified to Congressional investigations that he was part of the government team along with Israeli Mossad who trained Mohamed Atta at the Venice, Florida flight school…
…
Zionist Benjamin Netanyahu, who is not even an official member of the Israeli government, is blackmailing Bushfraud vis a vis using Bush’s homosexual sex and financial fraud, election fraud, criminal fraud, telling Bush either you do this in Iraq and Iran or else.
…
Sandy Berger not only took NATO nuclear codes but he was involved with a Mossad team in Thailand transferring nuclear triggers and other sensitive nuclear information on NATO with the help of Adnan Khashoggi disguising these uranium and nuclear materials as textiles sending through China to Israel. Treason of the highest proportion.
Financing Sandy Berger was Marc Rich, the Bush-Clinton Crime Syndicate fixer.
Attorney General Gonzales is covering all of this up for the Bush-Clinton Crime Syndicate.
It was then Vice President Al Gore, Jr. who tried to have Marc Rich arrested in 1993 and was prevented from doing so by the Israeli Mossad and the Bush-Clinton Crime Syndicate that then dumped Vince Foster in the park that was working with Ambassador Leo Wanta, former FBI Director William Sessions and General Vernon Walters.
Bush plans to use Azerbaijan air bases to attack Iran possibly as early as this Wednesday…
I think someone forgot to take their meds.
Ignorance is the Mother of Devotion.
Robert Burton
[I have no idea what Burton was thinking of but it makes me think of socialists and gun control advocates.–Joe]