Quote of the day—Jayant Bhandari

Posted on by

Western culture, which developed organically over at least the two and half millennia, starting from Greco-Roman philosophers, is not easy to duplicate. This culture requires thrift, honesty, hard work, liberty, individuality, dispassionate reason, objective justice, loyalty, honor, stoicism, a desire to rise above oneself, and many other factors that perhaps cannot be seen or isolated but must be absorbed subliminally in all their complex interactions. These are reflected in social, religious, and political structures of the West — the three independent branches of government, the rule of law, compassion for others, charity, family system, etc.

The West and East Asia, including China, comprise a mere 2.5 billion people.

“The Rest,” the Third World, comprises 5 billion out of 7.5 billion people on the planet. The cultural factors underpinning the West sound like clichés until one who gives up political correctness for the truth starts to see that the Third World, despite its several centuries of interactions with the West, simply fails to understand them.

The Third World is blind to what makes the West a civilization. It is as if the Third World cannot rise above animal instincts — craving for food, power over others, sex, and for the material.

Jayant Bhandari
June 24, 2020
The Decline of the Third World
[Via email from Chet.

I have three children. Each of them exhibited personality traits in the first few hours after birth that they still exhibit 30+ years later. I’ve seen an insane, counter productive, behavior by a mother regarded as profoundly brilliant by her children. Then as years passed this behavior gradually blossomed as self-destructive behaviors (literally culminating in multiple suicide attempts) by one of those children despite repeated attempts, over many years, by her spouse to get her professional help. The help was not only refused as unnecessary, it was vigorously asserted it was the spouse who was in need of professional help and behavior modification.

I’m convinced there are aptitudes and personality traits hardwired in the brain which destines certain genetic lines to aspire for, and literally reach, the stars. And other genetic lines which lack the capacity to grasp rational thought or fully understand numbers, let alone arithmetic and math.

These people can’t be reasoned with. They can’t be taught. If those who aspire for the stars are serious about their goals, or even avoiding being dragged into and out of sight into the mud, they must make some uncomfortable decisions very soon.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on by

The angry and the demonstrating are loud and visible; their opponents are angry and quiet.

The election will reveal not just who is more numerous — but sadly also who is the angriest.

Victor Davis Hanson
June 24, 2020
2020 Election Will Be a Contest of the Angry
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—J. KB

Posted on by

These protesters and activists are the most supremely ignorant people in history.

They literally have the entire wealth of recorded human knowledge at their fingertips. It’s all available online and immediately accessible through the smartphones that they all have.

I can only believe that they have to be willfully ignorant because they should have at least accidentally stumbled onto some bit of knowledge by now.

J. KB
June 27, 2020
Splatter is coming, Part 5
[And/or lying and/or delusional.

In any case J. KB concludes with:

There is no reasoning with them. That is abundantly clear.

As they used to say “civilize ’em with a Krag.” I have a feeling it will come to that.

I don’t think it has to come to that. I think arrests, convictions, and a few years in prison will help them reconnect with reality. Getting them out of their bubble for even a few months will be therapeutic.

H/T to less fat Dave @BigFatDave for the pointer.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Maj Toure

Posted on by

I believe that more Black people would be alive if they were armed. So when I hear ‘unarmed Black man,’ I’m sad because there should be no such thing.

Maj Toure
Founder Black Guns Matter
July 28, 2020
Black gun ownership rises after pandemic and protests
[From the same article:

Phillip Smith, the president of the National African American Gun Association, told Politico he’s getting 2,000 membership requests per day – what used to be the annual numbers. There are now 90,000 members on the organization’s Facebook page.

This could change the voting demographics. Do these seem like people who are going to vote for someone who says things like:

The idea that we don’t have elimination of assault type weapons, magazines that can hold multiple bullets bullets in them, is absolutely mindless. It is no violation of the Second Amendment. It’s just a bow to the special interests, the gun manufacturers, the NRA.

It’s gotta stop.

It’s Biden that just has to be stopped. The dramatic increase in first time gun purchasers, and, in particular, the increased ownership by black Americans will decrease the likelihood that he will win the election.

We live in historic times.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Stephen Kruiser

Posted on by

The nagging feeling that these putrid progressive cities should be left to riot and rot long enough for people to vote with their feet keeps growing on me.

Stephen Kruiser
July 27, 2020
The Morning Briefing: It Might Be Time to Let the Liberal Riot Hellholes Burn — Let Seattle and Portland Riot Themselves Into Oblivion 
[I suppose one could say, “It worked” for Detroit.

I realize it’s not legal or practical but I fantasize about conditioning such abandonment on the building of a wall around the city to keep the vermin from escaping. It could be the inspiration and location of a movie for someone like Kurt Russell, Escape from Seattle.—Joe]

Living in a bubble

Posted on by

Early yesterday Alien asked:

Random thought: Joe, are you and Barb giving any consideration to relocating?

I mentioned this to Barb as we were getting up and received the expected answer, “No.”

That’s a little more strongly worded than the reality and also deserves a bit of an explanation. Barb and I talked about it some as we went on our morning walk and I took a few pictures to help explain. As we walked along I was struck by the alternate reality she and I are living in compared to downtown Seattle only a few miles away. Barb elaborated with, “We are living in bubble.”

In this picture, a short walk from our house, you can see the U.S. flag on the left edge of the image:

20200726_085042

Below is an expanded snip of another flag near the car on the right in the image above:

image

It’s extremely rare to see a U.S. flag in downtown Seattle. Unless, of course, if someone is burning it.

Here is a common view on our walk:

image

In the distance to the south you see Mount Rainier which is over 50 miles away. The air is frequently that clear. My cell phone camera doesn’t do it justice but you can almost as frequently see Mount Baker 80 miles to the north from another location on our walk.

In the picture below you can see Seattle (click to get higher resolution and see the Space Needle) in the distance the night after the most recent “peaceful protests”. I imagine the couple on their deck reading about the riot in the newspaper as if it had happened 1000 miles away instead of 10.

image

Our reality is much different from downtown Seattle. The streets and air are clean, the neighbors are polite, the police are responsive, the views in all directions with only a short hike are a joy to behold. There is a lot of territory between us and ground zero of the riots. There are thousands of homes and a large lake between us and the terrorists. The roads into our neighborhood are few with lots of cover and concealment along the sides. It is my belief that there will be a lot of warning and a heck of a lot of “vigorous”  resistance to the terrorists migrating out of their turf into ours. And the primary resistance will be supplied by the local police department who has not been shackled like the Seattle Police.Department. When I was shooting matches I frequently had a Bellevue police officer on my squad. The next chance I get I will ask a few questions about how he thinks an attempt at a riot migration to our side of the lake might turn out.

That said, daughter Jaime asked that Barb and I take a look at houses “out in the country” with her and her spouse last Saturday. They live in Bellevue near where the nearly completed light rail from downtown Seattle terminates near Microsoft. She tends a bit toward the neurotic side of normal and her location near easy access from the communist infected downtown Seattle bothers her. She received permission from “all the way up the management chain” at Microsoft to work from home “forever”. Barb and I looked at homes with them for several hours which were an hour drive from her current location. They made an offer on a place with a one acre lot next door to a home with a “Trump 2020” sign in the yard. That might as well be an alternate universe from downtown Seattle.

Also, I have accelerated my plans to buy or build a home in Idaho. A good part of our visit over the 4th of July weekend was to look at three different homes near Boomershoot we expect to be on the market soon. In this neighborhood property seldom gets formally “listed”. It’s almost always via word of mouth that you find out something is for sale or someone is interested in buying. We drove by the homes and told my brothers and sister-in-law that we are interested. We also looked at three different potential sites on my property to build. We chose one and have contacted a potential builder/architect. Then yesterday I completed a tentative floor plan. This would be small “summer home” or bugout location if things get too dangerous or politically intolerable in our current location.

So, to answer Alien’s question in something more than one word and less than a page, we feel pretty safe where we are for now and really like what we have here. We won’t be moving unless there is some pretty drastic changes happening a lot closer to home. However, we and others, are implementing plans to deal with that scenario.

Quote of the day—Carl "Bear" Bussjaeger @BearBussjaeger

Posted on by

Dear Seattle,

You’re screwed, and it’s the mayor and city council’s fault.

Best ‘luck with the riots.

Luv&Kisses,

Police

Carl “Bear” Bussjaeger @BearBussjaeger
Tweeted on July 25, 2020
[This was in response to this open letter from the Chief of Police to local businesses and residents.:

SpdLetter20200725

We live in interesting times.—Joe]

Karma

Posted on by

Via Milo Yiannopoulos @m

YourNext

While I got a chuckle out of this it’s quite misleading. There is a big difference between the gun owner protests which leave the streets cleaner than when they arrived with the most “violent” exchanges are spirited legal briefs compared to the riots, looting, and destruction of the Marxists of the last few weeks.

They can’t honestly believe we would be on their side. You almost have to start looking at elderly nun demographics to find a group of people more law abiding than people who have concealed carry licenses.

The only thing that I know of which we have in common is the skill set and tools to quickly create a lot of damage. It’s just that no one has flipped our switch yet with a valid target. There are a number of scenarios where the rioting Marxist change that. But in all the futures I see the police will give the gun owners a slight nod and turn back to engage the remaining commies.

Quote of the day—Jason Sullivan and Bill Binney

Posted on by

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

Jason Sullivan and Bill Binney
July 11, 2020
Binney & Sullivan: An Open Letter Challenge To Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey On Censorship
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

You don’t need guns

Posted on by

Via Matthew Bracken @Matt_Bracken:

ThePoliceWillProtect

Quote of the day—Peter Savodnik

Posted on by

We should be able to agree that, in today’s ever-coarsening discourse, there are dangerous echoes of these fictional characters who anticipated the Bolsheviks and Stalinists—the destroyers of ancient civilizations who burned it all down only so they could rebuild the world in their own image.

We know how this turned out, and for those who have forgotten, or for those who are too young or ignorant to know, we should remind them over and over: Those who questioned the revolution, objected to any of its ends or means, thought there might be something worth preserving, were deemed hostile combatants or hapless chumps whose false consciousness inhibited progress. In the end, they were all airbrushed. In the end, the way one escaped this airbrushing was to signal, with a great and inauthentic virtue, that one was not a hostile combatant by spotlighting the real enemies of progress. Whether these enemies were real or “real” was immaterial. Only idiots worried about the truth. There was no truth. What was most important was to keep one’s head down and, if need be, accuse wantonly. Accuse! Accuse! Accuse! Or as Americans like to say, the best defense is a good offense. Everyone knew this would never lead to the place they had been promised it would lead to, but what else was there to do? As the violence ratcheted up, it was necessary to signal with ever greater ferocity, to name more names, to out more wrong-thinkers, until all that was left was the pathetic, bloodless corpse of a country dislodged from itself.

When I imagine this people we are becoming, I think of old men I have interviewed, in Moscow, Minsk, Brest, Kiev, Tblisi, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, who once spent a year or two or 10 or 20 in a camp in the far north or far east of Russia. This was in the 1940s and ’50s. Their crime was usually petty or not even a crime. It often had to do with survival—stealing a stale loaf of bread. Or talking to the wrong person, or saying something impolitic. Or being accused, without any evidence, of something worse.

Peter Savodnik
July 14, 2020
Woke America Is a Russian Novel
[Via Ed Driscoll.

So, it’s not just me seeing the parallels between Russia and the U.S.—Joe]

What am I missing?

Posted on by

A Seattle Times reporter claims:

When asked to elaborate on the risk she replied,

We do not work for or with the police, and it’s important that we are not perceived as doing so. Journalists have been met with increasing hostility and threats because of this perception.

But, the subjects of those pictures and video surely would expect the recordings to fall into the hands of law enforcement when they were published. That is, unless they expected them to be edited or withheld in their favor before being published, right?

So, it would seem to me, that either the criminals would have to expect reporters to be biased in their favor or expect the recordings be available to the police. Hence, either the reporters are complicit in the crime or the risk to reporters is not changed.

Am I missing something here?

Quote of the day—Glenn Reynolds

Posted on by

So when do we switch from “punch a Nazi” to “punch a wokester?”

Glenn Reynolds
THIS IS, OF COURSE, THE WHOLE POINT OF “WOKENESS.”
July 23, 2020
[The context is Survey: Majority of Americans Afraid of Expressing Political Beliefs.

One of the commenters to Reynolds post brought the sarcasm with

But I’ll be 100% honest when you call me and ask who I’m voting for..

Just like the polls on gun ownership can be trusted.—Joe]

Common Barrel Thread References

Posted on by

From Silencer Shop:

One question that has always been a mainstay in our most-questions-asked category is whether a specific silencer will fit a specific gun. With threading looking similar, and acronyms being thrown around like hot tamales, we understand your plight. As the suppressor industry grows, it seems thread pitch options have too.

While some thread pitches are more popular than others due to military use or it being made common by specific firearm manufacturers, the last thing you want to happen is to finally get your suppressor in and realize that it doesn’t match up with your host firearm’s threading.

The list that we are providing you is to serve as a reference for quickly locating how your barrel may be threaded. Remember that factory barrel threadings and after market threadings aren’t always the same.

Details, which are kept up to date, are here.

Interesting demographics

Posted on by

It’s time for me to renew my Arizona concealed weapons permit (so I can carry in Nevada). While looking for the renewal application I found this:

Chart
last updated: 07/19/2020

  ACTIVE SUSPENDED REVOKED
PERMITS 360666 4834 1259

PERMITS 19-20 21-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 80+
ASIAN 0 147 412 548 498 273 95 8
BLACK 0 186 492 651 562 333 105 9
INDIAN 0 97 194 225 266 188 90 14
UNKNOWN 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
WHITE 4 4270 8979 11539 18469 21471 12639 1698
FEMALE TOTAL 4 4700 10077 12963 19795 22265 12930 1729

PERMITS 19-20 21-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 80+
ASIAN 3 777 1926 2595 1974 1176 429 79
BLACK 5 903 1888 2415 2399 1650 754 133
INDIAN 1 251 520 522 544 506 326 90
UNKNOWN 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
WHITE 32 15051 31188 39480 52869 62273 52958 13343
MALE TOTAL 41 16982 35522 45012 57786 65605 54468 13645

Notice the peak age category for both female and male?

I would not have guessed that would be the case.

Peaceful protestors

Posted on by

Portland Mayor yesterday:

I keep thinking that nearby rooftops occupied by small teams with suppressed AR’s would calm things down quietly and quickly.

Apparently nothing really changed because we didn’t get a fresh batch of truly peaceful protestors last night. It was the same stuff with “peaceful protestors” trying to barricade the exits of the Federal building then setting it on fire with law enforcement officers inside.

Historic

Posted on by

A few minutes ago the price of gold reached a new high in relation to the U.S. dollar. Or, one could be equally accurate to say that the U.S. dollar reached a new low relative to gold. Click for a higher resolution version:

GoldHistory

In the mid to late 1990’s gold was selling for $300/ounce. I was making more money than I am now (contracting work for Microsoft with unlimited amounts of overtime allowed at 1.5X base rate) and bought a few ounces. But most of my money went into paying down the house mortgage and putting a new roof on it. And then half of that, which wasn’t very much to begin with, went to my ex-wife in the divorce. I wish I had bought more now. It would be worth a lot more than what the house appreciation was.

Gold surging is generally an indicator of troubling times which certainly describes 2020. But what is interesting now is that vaccine trials are looking pretty good and the economy is doing okay considering the circumstances. But yet, the price of gold continues to climb. I suspect the huge surge in the “printing” of money is a major contributor.

We live in interesting times. This year will be one for the history books.

Quote of the day—Glaeser and Shleifer

Posted on by

By differentially taxing different groups of voters, the incumbent leader can encourage emigration of one of the groups, and maximize the share of the voters who support him. While benefiting the incumbent, these taxes may actually impoverish the area and make both groups worse off.

Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer
2013
JLEO, V21 N1 1T he Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate
[Via a comment by Richard in regard to Cascading failures in policing where he said:

Look up the Curley Effect. This was perfected by Coleman Young, mayor of, you guessed it, Detroit

I haven’t read the whole paper yet. The Appendix looks particularly interesting. It starts with:

ProofsOfPropositions

I was going to make a big blog post after reading this paper and several others on the topic address the current situation in Seattle, Portland, and other cities, then extrapolate the concepts to corporate cultures. I didn’t get around to it because I worked late on some work stuff then one of my daughters called and we talked for quite a while. Maybe tomorrow.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Rawhide Wraith@olddustyghost

Posted on by

Democrats want to eliminate the electoral college, the Senate, the 1st amendment, the 2nd amendment for sure, and the rest of the constitution, our borders, citizenship, carbon based fuels, cars, cows.

And the first step in their scheme is to eliminate Trump.

We better fight like hell or those of us who aren’t shot during the disarmament or who don’t starve when fuel and food are eliminated are going to be slaves.

Rawhide Wraith@olddustyghost
Tooted on September 28, 2019
[There’s far too much truth in this.—Joe]

A reasonable idea

Posted on by

I had read this earlier in the day but it didn’t occur to me to reinforce it with a link from my own blog until it was suggested via email from John H.

No In-Person GRPC But You Can Still Support The Second Amendment Foundation