#ICouldHaveBeenARepublicanBut I am not a crazy old white guy with a small penis and a gun fetish!
Eric Darcman (@Darcman)
Tweeted on February 5, 2013
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
Category Archives: Politics
Coyote attack
Going down the youtube rabbit hole I came across this. It was in Northern BC, where it’s far, far less populated than around here. Here the coyotes tend to keep their distance, or they generally get shot. Or they get shot from long distance. The closest I’ve ever got to one, that I knew about, was around 30 yards– Three different occasions in winter while I was out hunting. Their heavy winter coats are quite spectacular, and I’ve yet to have the heart to kill one. Beautiful or not though, if a ‘yote were putting its teeth on me, even my boot, it’d be dead right quick I think. If the bugger is that bold, I may respect it in a way, but it’s going to be causing serious trouble for someone if it isn’t stopped. Kind of like Progressives– They’ll push things until someone gets hurt.
Well there’s your problem right there
As a constituent I get regular e-mails from WA State Rep. Joe Schmick (legislative district 9 – the Far East Hinterlands of the state [FEH]). Here’s a sample from today;
”We are now two-thirds of the way through the 2014 legislative session. We spent much of the past two weeks on the House floor debating and voting on House bills. The floor cutoff was this week, meaning any House bill that hasn’t passed the House by now is considered dead (unless it is “necessary to implement the budget” – NTIB). The same goes for Senate bills in the Senate. As of today, the House has passed 333 House bills and the Senate has passed 189 Senate bills. Monday was a very long day that actually stretched into the wee hours of Tuesday as the House passed 100 bills and the Senate passed 21.”
333 bills passed in one session, in one state, announced with no sense of irony– just letting us know that they’re working hard and being “productive” I suppose. Care to guess whether any of those new bills were repeals of previous ones?
With the proliferation of the word “sustainable” in politics, no one has yet considered a sustainability study when it comes to passing so many laws each year for hundreds of years. If this was an average legislative year, and counting from Washington statehood in 1889, that comes to 41,625 bills, not counting local statutes, ordinances, rulings and other bureaucratic restrictions and requirements, nor any jurisprudence concerning any of the same, or anything whatsoever on the federal level, or laws from other states that one might should know about if one were traveling or doing interstate commerce. Washington is one of the youngest states, so others back east have had a lot more time to create more gunk to complicate, distract, hinder and waste people’s lives.
The rest of his letter is inside baseball stuff, shout-outs, name-dropping, awards announcements and the like. I can’t read that stuff without getting a serious case of cotton-mouth and then kicking myself for having wasted so much of my time. It’s like staring at that debilitating, mesmerizing, sickening light you weren’t suppose to look into in that movie “Cowboys and Aliens”.
Zombies. You can’t be around them for long without being infected yourself.
Extermination Order in Missouri
There was an extermination order against the Mormons in Missouri. It was an executive order by Governor Lilburn Boggs in 1838 and it was technically in effect until 1976.
More on all that here. Something leads me to believe that the story of the Mormon War is relevant to today. Anyway, you might want to read up when you have some time.
Maybe you all knew about it, but I was unaware of that executive order until recent months. Hat tip; Glenn Beck
Quote of the day—Emily Miller
Americans realized that infringing upon their Second Amendment rights must have a proven public safety purpose.
Since no gun-control law has ever reduced crime, they now realize they have to strengthen the laws affirming their constitutional rights before they are further chipped away.
Emily Miller
January 28, 2014
MILLER: South Carolina kicks back ban on gun concealed carry in restaurants
[A stronger form of Just One Question. Nice.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Juanita Jean
There’s very little talk among political junkies in Texas this morning about anything else except Wendy Davis’ stunning and unexpected announcement that she favors open carry in Texas. That means strapping a gun on your hip and parading around town like something out of a damn John Wayne movie. Oh yeah, Texas needs more guys with tiny winkies strapping on holsters.
Juanita Jean
February 8, 2014
Juanita Jean Is Mad As Hell At Wendy Davis
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
H/T to Weer’d Beard for the email.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Larry P. Card
I sense a great disturbance in the Force…as if a million liberals screamed out in terror, and were suddenly told by the court to grow up already…
Larry P. Card
Comment on Facebook in regard to a comment of mine to the post May-Issue CCW struck down in California.
[But will they grow up now?
No. They will not grow up now. There will have to be many, many, more lessons taught before they will be fit to participate in a free society with the rest of us. And many will never be fit for more than prison.—Joe]
The news is what isn’t news
How often do we hear news reports of cold weather or a snowstorm in Canada or Alaska, or the Rocky Mountain States, and how it’s disrupting everyone’s regular lives there and…Oh the horror!? I can’t remember for sure whether I’ve ever heard or seen even one such report in my 55 years.
Yet if we HAD been hearing of these regular winter events which are not at all unique and therefore never considered “news”, AND had reports on how the people there were COPING WITH IT JUST FINE, maybe more people in Georgia and Tennessee would understand how to cope with such things themselves. Hmm?
So I think we can define news, not as something merely unusual, but something unusual and gloomy, or unusual and horrible– something that shows helpless people succumbing to their weaknesses.
To me, “News” would give you helpful, actionable information, such as how the Alaskans deal with 40 or more below zero temps for weeks on end, how those in Truckee, California deal with ten feet of snow falling within a week or two and go on about their daily lives, or how the poor can become successful and go on to help others. THAT would make interesting investigative reports AND it might help a few million of the clueless and helpless become a little bit less helpless and clueless. The closest we get to helpfullness in the news is when they’re being condescending, “teaching” us how to eat, how not to fall off a ladder, how to find government services and so on.
Quote of the day—Paul Koning
Prof. Randy Barnett, in his excellent book “Restoring the Lost Constitution” talks at length about this point. Briefly, he argues that you have to think of this (as Weer’d mentions) like the rule for reading a contract. A contract means what the words meant to reasonable people at the time it was signed. If the words change meaning later, that has no effect. Never mind if the words still mean what they did but it’s merely the wishes of one of the parties that have changed.
So it is here. After all, the Constitution is the document that most deserves to be called “Contract with America”. So you have to read each article using the interpretation that normal persons reading it at the time of that article’s adoption would have used.
By the way, that means “original intent” is the wrong term. What matters is not the intent of those who wrote the text — often that’s only a guess and some of the people involved did not have honorable intent anyway. What matters is the common understanding of those who APPROVED the text — the voters who ratified it. And that is easy enough to find out, just read the newspaper discussions and meeting minutes of the time.
If you do this, it’s easy to see that those who oppose the individual rights interpretation of the 2nd Amendment are dishonest and use fraudulent argument to justify their anti-American goals.
Paul Koning
February 12, 2014
Comment to Quote of the day—ebola05
[Shorter version: The U.S. Constitution is the original “Contract with America”.
What isn’t said but I think should have been in the contract is a penalties clause. Something like those who passed and/or enforced laws which were later found to be unconstitutional would be held liable for all legal fees and treble damages.—Joe]
The science is settled
Via @ItsRobbAllen we have an article about a paper demonstrating that mass shootings do not usher in a new age of gun control. In fact it is just the opposite.
Correlation is not causation but from looking at the numbers it seems pretty clear that horrific mass shootings are followed, a year or so later, by less support for gun control than just before the mass shooting.
The authors of the paper are clearly in favor of gun control. They ask, and answer, the question of how to go about “Breaking the Cycle”. The cycle being the “regression to the mean” and a continued drop in support after an initial surge in support for gun control following a particularly horrific mass shooting.
Their answer, in part, is:
To change the shooting cycle, gun control advocates must change the gun culture. But to change the gun culture, gun control advocates must explain, or at least distance themselves from the position that causes the fiercest opposition—that the Brady Campaign sees as its ultimate goal the criminalization of possessing guns. Nelson “Pete” Shields III, a founder of Handgun Control, Inc.—the aptly named progenitor of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence—openly advocated for the elimination of all handguns: “‘We’re going to have to take this one step at a time. . . . Our ultimate goal—total control of all guns—is going to take time.’ The ‘final problem,’ he insisted, ‘is to make the possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition’ for ordinary civilians ‘totally illegal.’”197 John Hechinger, a sponsor of the D.C. handgun ban and a board member of Handgun Control, Inc., put it simply: “We have to do away with the guns.”198
The anti-gun people have difficult hurdles to overcome. They must attract supporters that are willing to donate money and time to, at best, only make small incremental, paper-work type, changes to gun laws. They cannot speak or even whisper of banning guns. Without banning, and perhaps even with draconian bans, people with any smarts about them will realize “universal background checks”, “gun free zones”, and restrictive carry laws are just crazy talk. How many people are willing to spend time and money on something that only benefits their cause in some abstract way of encumbering “the gun culture”.
If they could speak of grand plans to ban guns and create a “gun free America” if only given enough money and time then they probably could get more support. But doing so increases their opposition more than their support.
So how to “change” (eliminate) the gun culture? That is another huge hurdle. There are no “anti-gun ranges” or “anti-gun shows” to take people to for fun, learning, and familiarity. A process/cycle has been identified for which the chances of the anti-gun forces breaking is very low. To disrupt the cycle requires a raising the bar to gun ownership such that the propagation of “the gun culture” is inhibited. But raising such a bar is virtually impossible at this time because of the courts and the resistance with which disruption is met with.
It’s a similar problem to that faced by those who advocate for reducing greenhouse gases which contribute to “Global Warming”/”Climate Change”. People like the benefits of those activities which produce the greenhouse gases as a side effect. Any effort to break “the cycle” of greenhouse gas production encounters very stiff resistance on the specifics of the proposed legislative action even though some polling data indicates a sizable portion of the (mostly ignorant) population agree with the vague, overall goals.
One could say that this paper settles the science on the politics of gun control. The gun control people are losing and as long as we continue expanding our culture they will continue to lose.
Quote of the day—ebola05
Anyone who utters the words “the Constitution is a living document” or “the Constitution must be interpreted in the context of the times we live in” believes in a society with no governing rules.
These folks are not “Americans”, but true believers in the Marxist cause.
Ignore them or ridicule them.
ebola05
February 9, 2014
Comment to Second Amendment applies to carrying guns in cars
[I’m not so certain you can safely conclude “the Marxist cause” but I’m confident the rest is correct.—Joe]
Quote of the day—John Tkazyik
It did not take long to realize that MAIG’s agenda was much more than ridding felons of illegal guns; that under the guise of helping mayors facing a crime and drug epidemic, MAIG intended to promote confiscation of guns from law-abiding citizens. I don’t believe, never have believed and never will believe that public safety is enhanced by encroaching on our right to bear arms, and I will not be a part of any organization that does.
…
Troubled urban areas desperately need an economy that welcomes businesses to locate and remain in our cities. Robust respect for the Second Amendment rights of the law abiding does this by discouraging theft and enhancing personal safety.
Unless Bloomberg and MAIG recognize and implement these principles, their efforts are doomed not only to fail, but also to cause further — if unintended — harm.
John Tkazyik
Mayor of Poughkeepsie New York.
February 5, 2014
Valley View: Mayoral group’s gun agenda is wrong
[If you read the comments you will find they generally don’t believe he had a true change of heart. Rather, he decided he was on the wrong side of the issue because of a shift in political winds.
Whatever.
Regardless of the reason his removal from MAIG and his public support for the 2nd Amendment his actions weakens our opponents and strengthens our side.—Joe]
NY SAFE-legal AR
One ugly gun. But legal and effective enough.I guess that what freedom and market demands will do, though, when confronted by stupid laws.
Idiots… There are nothing but complete idiots in office in that state. The mind boggles.
Quote of the day—Anonymous Conservative
As the amygdala enters high gear, its flagging and weighing functions will deteriorate, and details and complex thoughts will become much less noticed than grossly perceived, broad-stroke emotional stimuli. This is why decisions to make Civil War, or just go wantonly killing every Liberal you can find in a bloody orgy of violence, will not be made rationally, whenever they get made.
…
This all relates to politics, in that Liberals try to quiet their own amygdalae by getting government to stimulate Conservative amygdalae in some way. They want to make Conservatives pay for their birth control, to tax them, to disarm them so they can’t defend their families, to regulate their businesses into oblivion, to force them to confront sexual themes and activities which disgust and repel them, to prevent them from enjoying something under the guise of environmentalism, or prevent them from forming free associations to get healthcare or economic advantage. I mean, Leftists try to make parts of US parks off limits to humans who just want to peacefully enjoy them. They even insist Conservatives stop publicly acknowledging realities that bother the Liberal, from the failure of the multi-cult, to the bad effects from destroying the family unit, all so the Liberal can more easily retreat into a bubble of fantasy and false reality that will help the Leftist avoid all amygdala stimulation. That leftist behavior is all amygdala-stimulating to a freedom-loving K-psychology, and Liberals know this. Liberals are the people who feel good when others are irritated. That is not as uncommon a psychology as people think.
The thing is, when Conservatives reach sufficient levels of amygdala stimulation, they will let the pressure out, and it will likely be in the form of violence. We haven’t evolved that much in the last 500 years. The same humans who gladly hunted Comanche nearly to extinction, fought the revolutionary war, angrily killed their own brothers in the Civil War, happily flame-thrower’d Japanese in the Pacific, dragged Mussolini’s dead body through the streets, ruthlessly wanted blood after 9/11, and murdered Khadafi after torturing him on the spot, are all still around today. Push the right buttons, and all of that can happen again.
The danger for us K-strategists is, we tend to fight without thinking clearly, when we approach Meat’s level of amygdala stimulation – and that level of amygdala stimulation is almost the only time we will actually fight. This can lead us to be easily manipulated by r-strategists into fighting other K-strategists. Few Conservatives, pissed that the Federal government is seizing their guns, will hunt down the nearest unarmed Liberal rabbit hiding in their bedroom, and kill them in cold blood in their own house, as the rabbit pleads their helplessness and innocence. Rather, K-strategists will tend to fight anybody but the Liberal, from heavily armed government agents who come to take guns, to radical Muslims trying to implement Sharia on the streets of America, to K-strategists of another race who have been goaded into wanting to fight us by the Left. Even though the Liberal is a vile creature, and the source of all our problems, we are almost programmed to fight anyone but them.
Anonymous Conservative
February 7, 2014
The Amygdala Hijack In Action – A Video Example
[I can’t begin to explain how strongly this resonates with me. I could give many personal examples in my childhood and countless examples from both personal and political experience from the last 20 years.
We must learn how to use this power against them.—Joe]
Not so random thought of the day
The quote of the day by Lyle this morning caused me to do some more thinking.
I’m certain most of my readers already get this at some level but for me putting it in different words made it more clear.
Libertarians will sometimes point out that government and all laws are declaration of intent to use force. From the law that says pay a sales tax on your purchase of a pair of shoes to the law that says do not murder. In the final analysis they all mean that if you don’t do as the laws says people with guns will hunt you down and either force you to do as the laws says or punish you for your failure to do so. And if you resist they will use the guns against you.
This is true. And it is a necessary part of government and probably is a societal requirement in population groups larger than a few hundred. But what I just realized is the same observation could be used in “the other direction”. Government must be controlled so that it does not become a outlaw. This means men with guns must be willing and able to hunt down the agents of government and force them to comply with the law and/or punish them.
The Constitution is the law authorizing and governing our government and the Second Amendment is the ultimate enforcement authorization for the people to keep government within the bounds of that law.
Those that would demand we give up our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms are demanding there be no effective enforcement of the limits to government. This is no different than there being laws and courts but without a police force to enforce the laws and court decisions. And that is another example of crazy talk by those that want to infringe upon our right to keep and bear arms.
Quote of the day—Lyle
We already have “limits” on paper and those aren’t being observed. I don’t see how anyone can believe that some new and shiny set of “limits” will fare any better. The only true limit is death or the threat of it.
How many times have we scoffed at the notion of a “gun free zone” sign deterring a criminal? A constitutional limit is exactly the same as a “gun free zone” sign – that piece of paper or parchment isn’t going to magically stop anyone, and most especially it won’t stop anyone when there are trillions of dollars and near absolute power on the other side of that piece of paper.
Lyle
Comment to Quote of the day—M.E. Thomas
[Shorter version: “A constitution without the right of the people to keep and bear arms is like a ‘gun free zone’ without metal detectors and armed guards.”—Joe]
Be prepared
I spent some time going through the anti-gun talking points document published by the “Progressive Majority Action Fund”.
For a moment I was concerned they might have used my video in this paragraph:
In the hands of someone with practice, an assault weapon can fire almost as fast as a machinegun. You can see this on videos all over YouTube, here for example. But even without much practice, any fool can fire two rounds per second, emptying a 30 round magazine in 15 seconds or less.
But the link comes up as “This video is unavailable. Sorry about that.”
Good.
The document is filled with half-truths and outright lies “errors”. They claim suppressors (they call them silencers, which is the same term the ATF uses) and machine guns are illegal. You can buy suppressors at many gun stories in the Seattle area as well as in most other states. It requires filling out a form and the paying of a $200 tax to the ATF but they aren’t illegal.
They claim the blocking of sales via background checks is proof the background check system “works”. Well, yes. For certain definitions of “works”. Such as casting a chilling effect on the exercise of a specific enumerated right.
But to believe the background checks make people safer is crazy talk. Even the INSTITUTE OF MEDICINE AND NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES says the issue is far from settled:
Controlling access to guns through background checks or restrictions on particular types of firearms remains controversial, and the effectiveness of various types of control is inadequately researched.
Read the anti-gun document and the National Academies document and be prepared.
Only white men get asked…
Ergo it is a disingenuous question, and/or the person asking it is a blithering fool. QED.
Bill Cosby, for example, never gets asked why white people are under-represented in his show, nor should he ever be asked. What a stupid question.
BTW; I had watched Cosby’s shows (including live action – the cartoon came later) on TV since I was a little kid, and I never knew he was black until I heard someone say so. It surprised me, in a way. That happened when I was entering adulthood, so my “ignorance” lasted through quite a few years of watching him. He never made an issue out of it, so I never noticed. The Cosby Kids cartoon showed kids just like us and our friends, doing crazy stuff just like we did. Same with Sanford and Son for the most part. They were a fairly typical father and son, much like the first-generation European immigrants and their kids that I grew up with in my home town.
Now you get crap if you don’t tow someone else’s agenda line or something. So ignore the crap and mind your business– It’s not that difficult, as Seinfeld points out..
Quote of the day—Jeannie Darneille
I am not a person who handles guns. I don’t own guns. I don’t…they shock me, quite frankly. We’re an open carry state and when I see people open carrying their guns, while it may be perfectly legal, it creates a visceral, personal, physical reaction in me as it does in other people…
Jeannie Darneille
January 29, 2014
Washington State Senator (D-27th District)
In Senate, less circus, more circumspection, no media, one ‘shock’
[This is precisely what Anonymous Conservative says happens in the brains of liberals. The rabbit brain cannot handle the concept of stress. To others guns are tools to protect innocent life when threatened with immediate danger—a stressful situation.
She is compelled to reduce the thought of stress by demanding you become a rabbit or at least masquerade as a rabbit.—Joe]
Meet Gabrielle Giffords in Olympia today
I have my vacation budget allocated up through Boomershoot this year or I would be on my way to Olympia Washington today to testify against the “universal background check” initiative. Gabrielle Giffords is coming in from Arizona to testify in favor of it. And almost for certain she will imply the initiative would have prevented the shooting in which she was a victim. This is rather odd because the guy that shot her passed a background check. She knows she can only make progress on her agenda if she is deceptive.
Barron Barnett and Anette Wachter say they are going.
Despite what KING5 says it is TODAY that we need your testimony. Here is where you go and what you do. It’s not hard. Even an introvert like me has successfully done it.
Be civil and succinct. Think “sound bite” instead of “essay”. Don’t repeat what others before you have said.
If you want some ideas on what to say read my Crazy Talk post. Or more succulently say something like this:
“Universal background checks” is crazy talk. They cannot be any more useful than bans on recreational drugs or underage drinking and smoking which are bypassed by any high school dropout in minutes.
The only thing the proposed legislation will be useful for is harassing people exercising their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. It will cast a chilling effect on this right and, if it were any other right being regulated in this manner, will be declared unconstitutional.
I am adamantly opposed to the proposal.