The theory behind representative government is that superior men—or at all events, men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity—are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honesty. There is little support for that theory in the known facts…
H. L. Mencken
From Minority Report, H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, Knopf, 1956.
[And, sadly, representative government is better than all other forms attempted.—Joe]
No one can honestly say Clint Eastwood isn’t a great actor.
Nor can they say he’s a bad director. He has acted in, directed, produced, produced
music for, or even three all four of those, in seven movies in just the last four
years. His most recent interviews have shown him to be sharp, eloquent, and
engaged. If you saw Gran Torino in
the theater, you could watch a movie he wrote, directed, produced, and made
music for, and watch a trailer for an upcoming movie he directed and produced. His
brain is fully functioning.
So, why and how did his speech at the RNC seem so… rambling, unfocused, edgy, and odd? If we KNOW he’s mentally all there, what
was he doing? If we assume he was doing exactly
what he intended to do, what was he intending?
I think that the republican base is going to vote for Mitt,
some enthusiastically, some holding their nose, but they’ll vote for him
none-the-less. The Dem base will likewise vote for O. No-one on a national
stage will convince that 90% of the electorate of anything different, only
personal experience or epiphany will change anything for them. I think he’s
smart enough to know that, so he wasn’t talking to any of them. He’s an actor and director – focusing on reaching the target audience is what he does.
But, if the R convention attendees and typical convention watchers and committed D or R voters are not his audience, then who was he speaking
to? Perhaps it was the very-low-information voter, the apolitical working-stiff,
the disengaged voter, who recognizes a movie star but has nary a clue who their rep
or senator is, who ANY of the SCOTUS are, and don’t normally watch conventions.
Perhaps he chose to speak in a way that makes all the well-scripted speakers and high-information voters cringe, but in a way that
was different, weird, and odd, but also put humor and the strange right next to the
hard-hitting stuff, so when it got played and replayed and discussed by various
folks in all sorts of outlets, both by those who agree AND those who disagree,
it will get those fundamental facts, like highlighting there are 23,000,000
unemployed, out to many of those low-info voters, and will sway them. It got
the movie-going-but-not-political voter to tune in, and stay and watch Rubio. It
created an instant icon for the politically-absent president, the empty chair. He used unexpected and oblique off-color humor that perfectly captured the essence of the trash-talking Chicago bully in the White House. It
is possible, when we look back on that moment three months from now, that it
will be seen as an absolutely brilliant piece of seeming scatter-brained-improve
that shifted that all-important indecisive, low-information, non-ideological
middle, the folks that vote with their hearts but not their brains. Either that, or it’s one of the fasted pieces of rapid-onset dementia
ever.
My Doctor’s an idiot. A few years ago, he started expressing concerns about my weight, pointing at this chart supposedly showing how much a man of my height should weigh. One glance at his stupid chart and it was clear to me that he had completely misdiagnosed my condition. There was nothing wrong with my weight, I just wasn’t tall enough. Clearly I needed to grow my way out of this. So I went home and googled “how to stimulate growth.” Once I got past the all the baldness cures and penis pumps (it’s not my bag, baby), I found hundreds of papers so incredibly boring I knew they had to be true. In no time, I was able to design and implement my own stimulus plan based on the irrefutable scientificky principles of Nobel prize winners and other people so smart they never had to do an honest day’s work in their lives. Despite the difficulty climbing stairs, I was feeling pretty good about things until my last check-up….
“Hi, Doc.”
“Hi,” he said, examining my file. He looked up, “You’ve put on twenty pounds since the last time I saw you”
“Thanks for noticing,” I beamed.
He frowned. “I remember now. You’re the guy on the diet designed to make you grow. What’s that called again?”
“The Keynesian Plan.”
Mark McHugh
August 31, 2012
Gold Is A Barbeque Relish
[Read the whole thing.—Joe]
Although it doesn’t show up on balance sheets I’m sure there is intellectual capital that is headed for Gault’s Gulch as well as the financial capital:
Spain saw close to a 40 percent rise in capital outflow in June, Bank of Spain data showed on Friday, as investor confidence in a country struggling to balance its public accounts eroded further.
The central bank reported that net capital outflow, not including central bank operations, was 56.6 billion euros ($71 billion) in June, after an outflow of 41.3 billion euros in May.
A total of 315.6 billion euros of capital has left the country in the year to end-June, equivalent to nearly one-third of the country’s economic output. In the first half of 2012 capital outflow was 220 billion euros.
Emphasis added.
This is one of the Achilles Heels of the “tax the rich” schemes. Those that demand “tax the rich, feed the poor, until there are rich no more” can succeed, but the success is achieved in an unintended manner. The rich, in essence, evaporate. They either leave the country and take both their intellectual and financial wealth with them or they say, “It’s not worth it” and just stop producing wealth. In either case the looters run out of places to loot. The end result is that everyone is worse off than if the looters had produced wealth on their own rather than demanded they be given the wealth of others.
Socialism is like a herd of hogs turned loose in a corn field. They feed extraordinarily well for a few days but destroy the crop that should have lasted through the winter and provided seed for the following year.
I took a new shooter to the range yesterday.
The usual happened. Big smiles and almost uncontrolled glee:
Yes Kim, that is your bullet hole nearly dead center in the bull.
It’s nice to enable someone to accomplish something that gives them great happiness.
Can the Brady Campaign enable individual accomplishments that will provide a lifetime of pleasure? Despite their stated best of intentions the achievement of their goals would actually block such pleasures as well as the defense of innocent life and enable violent crime that will cause sorrow to the end of your days.
Take a non-shooter to the range, make Sarah and Jim Brady cry, and make the world a better place.
Something tells me if a random 1/2 dozen “friends of Tam” decided to go the full clock tower, the government reaction/solution would (eventually) be “call off the swat team, if there are any still moving, & call in the artillery”.
If y’all got cornered, that is.
Anonymous
August 30, 2012
Comment to I don’t get it….
[While being on the receiving end of artillery is certain to reduce the chances of a long and healthy retirement it’s the air support that I would worry about the most. Those bunker busters are a real bitch to defend against.—Joe]
I have been asked what tools I used to design USPSA stages. I use something I downloaded years ago from some place I don’t remember. I was unsure of the copyright issues and went looking again. I found essentially the same tool plus a better prop and target selection and a 3-D design tool here.
Enjoy.
We are not your citizens. The actual relationship is that you are our elected official. You answer to us. Apparently, you’ve lost a little perspective. The reason the founders included the 2nd amendment was so that, if necessary, we could remove politicians that lost perspective. Regardless of your personal delusions, Mr. Pawlowski, Allentown is not your little kingdom where you can wave a scepter and institute what you want, when you want.
In America, Mr. Pawlowski, the people and the Constitution are in charge.
Stu Ronaldson
August 28, 2012
The Left’s New Gun-Control Strategy
[I’ve said essentially the same thing before but in a more general sense. It probably is beneficial to be a little more direct to an individual politician that is getting a little too uppity. Good job Stu.—Joe]
Hollow points are evil because they’re made to inflict maximum damage upon soft flesh. Jacketed rounds are evil because they’re designed for military use, and penetrate armor. Lead rounds are evil because they poison our beloved vultures. Non-lead rounds are evil because they start fires and/or penetrate armor.
In response to concerns over the innate evilness of so much of their product line, in January of this year ammunition manufacturer ATK/Teksystems began investigating the possibility of crafting bullets exclusively from puppy love and rainbows, to be dubbed their new PLRB line of politically sensitive ammunition.
NYC Mayor Bloomberg has already moved proactively against this effort, expending a portion of his personal fortune to found a new PAC “Mayors Against Illegal Puppy Love And Rainbows”, however Mr. Bloomberg’s initiative has seen a rocky start, drawing harsh criticism from PETA after 5 of his PAC’s 11 founding members were convicted on charges ranging from cruelty to animals to felony sexual assault on a puppy, while the remainder of the fledgling lobbying group continues to be haunted by rumors of colluding with senior DOJ officials to operate a puppy porn ring.
The White House Press Secretary ended speculation on the President’s long silence on the controversy when he told reporters on Friday that “the President believes puppies and rainbows belong in the hands of soldiers”, and also asserted that although allegations of DOJ involvement in organized puppy abuse were absolutely untrue and unfounded, the alleged policy of puppy abuse was actually formulated under the Bush administration.
Brennan Bailey
August 28, 2012 11:13 AM
[Via the gun email list at work.
I have nothing to add.—Joe]
A couple of possibilities come to mind.
Maybe she stood in front of the bulldozer believing that when
the driver saw her, he’s stop. That would imply that she believed the Israelis
are moral and reasonable, and directly gives lie to much of what’s been said
about them in defending her actions.
Maybe she thought the driver would not stop, meaning she deliberately
let herself get killed, to be used as a propaganda tool. This would sort of imply some serious psych issues.
Maybe she was so stupid / ignorant of heavy equipment that
she didn’t realize that the driver might not see her, and not stop because he
was in a military zone that civilians had been excluded from and had no reason
to believe that some idiot might be standing in front of him.
In no case do I see any reason to support her actions,
change my beliefs, or care about her and “her cause” in any way, because it’s
nothing more than a personal tragedy for her family (who failed to educate her
properly), and a propaganda tool for people who want to re-create the holocaust
and tear down the best parts of Western civilization.
There will always be useful idiots. That doesn’t mean we have
to give them a platform.
All we have to do is stop selling guns to people who are potentially violent or totally whacky. Then our gun troubles would be over — only the sane and sensible would be armed to the teeth, ready to shoot only when it was sane and sensible to do so, whenever that might be.
People get training for all sorts of things, from muscles to job skills, so training must be the key to success. Gun show salesmen, gun shop owners and anyone else who sells weapons that shoot would be trained to recognize the dangerous and the demented and be authorized to “just say no” when such folks ask for guns or ammunition.
If we’d instituted these bans years ago, we would have avoided James Brady, Simon’s Rock, Columbine High, Aurora. And we would have saved any number of wives, husbands and state troopers. The no-gun people could be registered, just like sex offenders.
Ruth Bass
August 27, 2012
Gun control must mesh with the times
[At first I thought it was sarcasm or someone mocking the anti-gun position. But by the second paragraph I realized it wasn’t that at all. I felt I.Q. points being sucked into the vacuum by the third paragraph and last night after reading the entire article I barely stumbled into bed before falling into a coma.
There should be barricades in place a light-millisecond in all directions around that vortex of stupidity to prevent people with poor constitutions from having their brains sucked dry beyond any hope of recovery.—Joe]
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.
Sebastian gives us a report on Twitter fake followers so I used the tool to check out the followers of my Twitter feed.
The result were decent: 3% fake, 12% inactive, and 85% good.
Thanks guys!
If it wasn’t for sexual inadequacy the National Rifle Association would go broke!
Boris Yellnikoff
A character in the Woody Allen movie Whatever Works (2009).
Via a tweet from Linoge in response to a tweet from David Ali.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
You would think that if the “intellectuals” of this country wanted to have a discussion about the role of guns in society they could do better than this.—Joe]
We don’t know the details of the discussion but we can say one or both parties didn’t know what they were doing:
Police said Fleming was in a dispute with her 55-year-old boyfriend after discovering that he had brought his loaded 12 gauge shotgun into their shared home. They were discussing gun safety, including the proper handling of a loaded firearm.
It’s unclear the other details of the argument, but police said Fleming at one point intentionally opened fire from a close range from an upstairs room and blew out a hole about the size of a softball.
Instead of arguing they should have just taken an NRA gun safety class together.
Sometimes a picture is worth a 1000 words.
Brady Campaign president Dan Gross wrote:
From the moment I started to get involved in the gun violence issue, I found the disproportionate attention given to our story also made me feel uncomfortable.
People seemed to care more because my brother was a white, upper-middle-class, young musician, shot at a famous landmark. A common theme began to emerge: “that kind of tragedy isn’t supposed to happen in places like that, to people like your brother.”
Over the years now, I have seen this same theme repeated. We seem to care more about certain tragedies, like suburban school shootings or psychotic shooting sprees in office buildings or malls or famous victims. Certain deaths seem to matter more.
“Certain deaths seem to matter more.”? Absolutely true. For example, self defense deaths are far more acceptable (sometimes even praiseworthy) than murders. Doesn’t Gross understand that?
The irony is that the Gross and his ilk are one of the worst in regards to “certain deaths seem to matter more”. I have long been critical of the Brady Campaign and anti-gun activists in general when they complain about “gun deaths” as if they were somehow more important that “fists and feet deaths” or “knife deaths”. And he complains “certain deaths seem to matter more” to the population at large? Wipe some of the soot off your face pal.
Gross goes on to say:
As a result, there is far too little focus on a shockingly common problem, that poses a far greater threat to all of us than most realize, and we fail to examine surprisingly simple and accessible opportunities to prevent it.
Absolutely true. And that is why we are working to get rid of all those gun laws that create victim disarmament zones. People have a right to defend themselves whether it is in their home, at work, or on the streets. Disarming potential victims is just wrong and just allowing people to use the best tools available for self defense will improve the odds for everyone. We agree there are “surprising simple and accessible opportunities” to prevent and stop criminal violence. Why does the Brady Campaign fight us on this? We are better than this.
If immediately after police officers accidently shoot nine innocent people while shooting just one bad guy is it “dancing in the blood of the victims” if private citizen gun owners point out the following?
A nationwide study by Kates, the constitutional lawyer and criminologist, found that only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The “error rate” for the police, however, was 11 percent, over five times as high.
The study cited above isn’t exactly fair to the cops in the Empire State Building shooting. They correctly identified the bad guy. They had a bad situation with a lot of innocent people in the background. From the latest reports I have read at most ten shots out of 16 hit the bad guy. That is actually an above average hit rate for a self-defense shooting.
I think I could do better in those same circumstances but until you are actually staring down the barrel of someone else’s gun you don’t really know how well all your faculties are going to work when the rest of your life might be measured in milliseconds.
The Mayor was likely distracted by his profound confusion how a deranged assassin with intent to kill was so blatantly unaware of New York City Administrative Code § 10-131 on the use of Firearms, which effectively makes any use or carrying of guns in the city of New York illegal.
Oh well, time to cut the maximum legal size of a New York soda drink by edict one more time.
Tyler Durden
August 25, 2012
Was The NYPD Responsible For 10 Of The 11 People Shot Yesterday?
[This makes as much sense as anything else Bloomberg has proposed in regards to guns.—Joe]