All Right, One More
From the Geek.
Over.
Month: May 2004
40 Things About Me and This Blog
1) I started this blog on Wednesday, May 14, 2003.
2) I’m 42 years old.
3) I’m male, white, married, and overweight. I drive a pickup. (4WD. No gunrack, though.)
4) I have an IQ somewhere in the 130’s, and my Meyers-Briggs personality type is INTJ. (My wife says I should frame that description for future reference – it’s that accurate.) Supposedly INTJ’s make up only one or two percent of the population. That would explain a lot.
5) I have a BA degree in General Studies after spending 5½ years in college studying Physics, Mathematics, and Engineering.
6) The Arizona Board of Technical Registration says I’m a qualified, registered Professional Engineer, (Electrical).
7) I have a rare genetic enzyme disorder that causes a condition known as Acute Intermittent Porphyria. My case is relatively mild and doesn’t affect my mental balance, but it hurts pretty bad when it occurs and it requires me to sustain a carbohydrate-heavy diet – just ONE reason I’m fat.
8) I do not smoke, I do not drink, and I’ve never taken an illicit substance. I’ve never been intoxicated and never wanted to be. I don’t understand the attraction and don’t want to. But I don’t believe it’s the business of government to tell me that I cannot.
9) I’m a shooter and a reloader. Those are two of my hobbies. My blog is another, though it has consumed the majority of my time, spare and otherwise, over the last year. I also own a 1967 fastback big-block Mustang that will (someday) be built into a 500Hp highway-cruising hotrod.
10) I have two siblings; a brother five years older who is a professional auto mechanic, and a sister four years older who is a public school teacher.
11) Both of my parents are still alive and in their 70’s. We all live in the same city.
12) I was pretty much apolitical for most of my life. I was 12 years old when Nixon resigned, and I was quite happy when Jimmy Carter won the Presidency. THAT was short-lived. I turned 18 in 1980 and voted for Ronald Reagan for President. It was quite obvious to me that Carter was a nice man, but a lousy President. He’s still a nice man, but he should stick to building houses and stay the fuck out of policy.
13) Since that time there has not been a single candidate I was happy to vote for but quite a number I was more than willing to vote against. In almost every case, my vote has been against the Democrat running.
14) In 1992 I voted against G.H.W. Bush AND William Jefferson Clinton by casting my ballot for H. Ross Perot. I did not make that mistake a second time, though by then it didn’t matter. I didn’t really want Dole either.
15) In 2000 I cast my vote against Al Gore. On Sept. 12, 2001 I was very glad I had. I’m not quite as content with my decision today, but I still believe that Gore would have been an unmitigated disaster. (G.W. Bush is merely a mitigated one. His domestic policies are a mess. His prosecution of the war is not.) I believe the same to be true of any potential Democrat candidate for the seat this year. As I note below, I don’t think Kerry will be the name on the ticket come November.
16) In general, my politics are those of a pragmatic libertarian (small “L”). I believe in maximum freedom and personal responsibility. I recognize that those are relatively rare traits. (Remember my Meyers-Briggs personality type. “Does it WORK?”)
17) I had an AR-15 “post-ban” “assault rifle” custom built for me in 1997, specifically because of the 1994 AWB. And that sucker shoots. But it’s still the pipsqueak .223 varmint cartridge.
18) When the AWB sunsets, I intend to buy an FN-FAL “black rifle” in celebration. Probably about 2006. There are other guns I want more in the mean time.
19) I’m a shooter, not a collector. I don’t like overly fancy guns, but functional ones. I like hitting small things from a long way off, so most everything I’ve got is rifled. I have one shotgun, a Mossberg 590 model 50665. It is not a Sporting Clays gun.
20) I’m primarily a handgun shooter, though I really like rifles. I am the match director for the local International Handgun Metallic Silhouette matches a the Tucson Rifle Club.
21) I’m also the TRC’s Pistol Director, though that duty hasn’t required much of me.
22) My favorite target pistol is my Remington XP-100 center-grip chambered in 7mm Benchrest.
23) I’m a shooter, not a hunter. I understand the appeal that hunting has for some, but for me hunting is “taking your gun for a walk.” If you do it right, you only pull the trigger once, and then things get messy.
24) I prefer shooting steel to punching paper. I like reactive targets.
25) I have shot clay pigeons in the air with my sporterized 1917 Enfield in its standard .30-06 chambering, shooting Korean military surplus 147 grain FMJ ammo. I hit three out of the first ten. I have witnesses. (I missed all of the next ten, though.)
26) I want to do it again.
27) My favorite handgun is my Kimber Custom Stainless 1911 in its John Moses Browning intended caliber of .45 ACP. My favorite load (Disclaimer: Use At Your Own Risk) is a 200 grain Speer Gold Dot hollowpoint over 7.0 grains of Unique. Out of my pistol it pushes 950fps, hits with a 6 o’clock hold at 25 yards and with a dead-on hold at 50. It feeds and functions with complete reliability. I wonder if I could hit a clay in the air with it.
27) When it comes to bolt-action rifles, I’m a cock-on-close enthusiast. My first bolt gun was a No. 4 Mk I Lee Enfield, my second a 1896 Swedish Mauser. Now that I’ve acquired a 1917 Enfield, I’m even more convinced that cock-on-close is the way it ought to be. Your mileage may vary. I don’t give a shit.
28) I’m also convinced that recoil, at least to some point, is something you can simply learn to ignore. When I started shooting rifles, my .303 No. 4 kicked pretty damned hard. Now I can sit at a bench and put 100 rounds through my 1917 with essentially no discomfort. I’ve fired a couple hundred rounds of .30-06, .303, and 12 gauge high-base in a single afternoon and had barely a bruise and just a tiny bit of stiffness the next day.
29) Flinching, on the other hand, requires a LOT of practice to overcome, and it comes back if you don’t keep up your practice. Intentionally setting off an explosion a few inches from your face is not a natural act. It takes a while to convince your subconscious that everything is copacetic, and I don’t think it remains convinced long.
30) I think I prefer handguns because shooting a handgun well is more difficult than shooting a rifle well. I like the challenge.
31) I like reloading because it requires concentration and precision, just like shooting does. Loading my own ammo adds that much more control over the entire process. It doesn’ hurt that it costs a lot less than buying commercial, either. But I won’t load for someone else, and I won’t shoot someone else’s reloads.
32) Back to politics: I think our political system has degenerated from “loyal opposition” to out-and-out “the other side.” I think this bodes ill for our future as a nation. The polarization affects about 10-15% of the population, leaving 70-80% in the middle pretty sick and tired of all the crap they have to put up with. Unfortunately, very few in that middle bother to vote much. Fewer bother to think.
33) I’m a REPUBLICAN but not a member of the “Republican Party.” By that, I mean that I believe our Founders had it right in that Democracy was a quick path to Hell. As one local op-ed columnist put it recently
The Electoral College stands as an elitist and blatant reminder that the founders of this nation believed the rabble – that’s us – couldn’t be trusted with the task of directly choosing our president.
And they were right. About that and a lot more. But we’ve managed to (mostly) overcome the safeguards they built in, and the rabble – that’s us – has managed to do what DeTocqueville warned against:
“The American Democratic experiment will succeed until the people realize they can vote themselves money from the public treasury… then it will collapse.”
That’s what a Republic is supposed to prevent. It failed. It was supposed to be foolproof, but we keep making better fools.
34) I have a stepdaughter, about to turn 25, who is a product of Tucson’s public schools.
35) I have two grandchildren, one four and one five, who will also be exposed to that system. I hope to be able to intervene, or at least mitigate the impact. I am not, regardless of my sister’s chosen profession, a public school enthusiast. I am convinced that the public school systems are a tool, deliberately crafted twisted by the left to produce mindless, unthinking, compliant, obedient proles. And they are largely successful in spite of the efforts of teachers like my sister.
36) And I’m beginning to wonder about the effects of 20+ years of public school systems ON my sister.
37) I hope that the world my grandchildren grow up in is a bright, cheerful, and safe one. With the rise of Wahabist Islam and the moonbat Left, I don’t think it will be.
38) I intend for them to be able to think for themselves and stand up for their rights. And I will threaten violence, if necessary, to keep the “authorities” from putting my grandson on Ritalin or any other substance when he happens to exhibit a personality in the classroom.
39) I concentrate in this blog on the right to arms because, to me, it is the litmus test of the politician’s faith. If you do not trust the populace with arms, you should not be a leader. A Republic needs to be lead by leaders, not people courting popular support. Always understand that some will not be worthy of that trust, but that’s not reason to strip all of their rights. Government is there to protect the rights of its citizens, not parent them.
40) In a Democracy, the majority rules. If 50% +1 decide that all left-handed redheads should be exiled, then it’s law and that’s all there is to it. A Constitutional Republic has a basis in law that says “Government may NOT DO” and “Government may ONLY DO” and when it strays from those rules, its citizens lose. That system WORKS, as long as we let it. But once we start bending those restrictions for personal advantage, it begins to fail. Our system began failing almost from inception, but for over 200 years it has worked better than any other government in history in making the United States of America the most free, most productive, and most hopeful nation on Earth.
And I hope we can prevent it from collapsing under the weight of 225 years of being fucked with “by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
This, according to Blogspot, will be my 1,020th post since starting this blog. I don’t intend to post anything tomorrow, and I don’t know about this weekend. I still owe Tim Lambert a response, though, and I may get to it then.
Gun Control with a Happy Face
(Via Ipse Dixit)
PrudentPolitics.com carries an excellent piece by Howard Nemerov, entitled Gun Control and the Next Big Lie.
A taste:
Get ready for gun control with a happy face. Gun banners pretend to no longer want to confiscate your firearms. They are concerned about safety. With all those firearms on the streets, now that 37 states have Shall-Issue Concealed Carry laws, the gun banners want to know who has them and where they are at all times. In their hoplophobia (irrational fear of guns) they believe that anybody carrying a gun is a hair’s breadth away from becoming a homicidal maniac or that demon-possessed guns will leap out of holsters and fire of their own volition. Of course, the only way to keep track of all those guns is to have a registry, and history has shown that registration leads to confiscation, which leads to loss of other civil rights. So we come full circle to a new confiscation scheme.
RTWT. It’s worth your time.
I’d like to remind you of two things when you read this. First, the Violence Policy Center listed as one of its reasons for supporting a ban on “assault weapons”:
Efforts to stop restrictions on assault weapons will only further alienate the police from the gun lobby.
Until recently, police organizations viewed the gun lobby in general, and the NRA in particular, as a reliable friend. This stemmed in part from the role the NRA played in training officers and its reputation regarding gun safety and hunter training. Yet, throughout the 1980s, the NRA has found itself increasingly on the opposite side of police on the gun control issue. Its opposition to legislation banning armor-piercing ammunition, plastic handguns, and machine guns, and its drafting of and support for the McClure/Volkmer handgun decontrol bill, burned many of the bridges the NRA had built throughout the past hundred years. As the result of this, the Law Enforcement Steering Committee was formed. The Committee now favors such restriction measures as waiting periods with background check for handgun purchase and a ban on machine guns and plastic firearms. If police continue to call for assault weapons restrictions, and the NRA continues to fight such measures, the result can only be a further tarnishing of the NRA’s image in the eyes of the public, the police, and NRA members. The organization will no longer be viewed as the defender of the sportsman, but as the defender of the drug dealer.
I submit to you that now they have added “liberalized Concealed Carry” to the list of “dividing issues.”
I’d also like to remind you that it was Broward County, Florida, Sheriff Ken Jenne who hoodwinked CNN’s reporter John Zarella over the differences between pre-ban and post-ban “assault weapons” I reported on last May. For some reason, Florida seems to be a hotbed of anti-gun activity, perhaps because Florida is where the push for “liberalized” Concealed Carry began.
I’ve noted here on numerous occasions that the opposition has (with the notable exception of the Violence Policy Center) abandoned the “gun control” platform for the “gun safety” one, though both mean to them precisely the same thing: Gun ELIMINATION.
Mike Spenis is on a Roll
Excerpts:
First things first:
Nick Berg was not killed because of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. He, like Daniel Pearl, was killed in that particularly grotesque manner because he was Jewish. They will probably do it again, too, when yet another American Jew falls into their hands.
Anybody who was surprised by that video has simply not been paying attention.
—
You don’t measure your success by how easy the job was. We measure it by how well you’ve dealt with the things that were hard.
With examples!
If Rumsfeld ought to resign over the Abu Ghraib scandal, then Kofi Annan ought to go to prison for the Oil For Food scandal. Humiliating and frightening prisoners is nothing compared to running a billion-dollar protection racket for a man with his own ideas of what ‘wide-scale torture’ really meant.
That’s Not a Blogroll
(And not, solely, because I’m on it!)
Tom Diaz Scares Me
Because I don’t think he’s too tightly connected to reality. Tom is one of the principals of the Violence Policy Center which is dedicated to banning handguns.
Our buddies at JoinTogether have published one of his op-eds. Let us fisk:
Had Enough Yet?
by Tom Diaz
It’s an All-American story. Nebraska University soccer star Jenna Cooper throws a barbecue in her home to celebrate the season’s end. Two men argue over stolen shot glasses. One whips out a handgun.
Jenna Cooper, 21-years old, on the cusp of life — talented and loved by her team, her family, and her friends — is gone, taken by a stray bullet fired in anger.
The Lincoln, Nebraska chief of police remarked that Jenna Cooper happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. With all due respect, chief, sir, that is not the problem. The problem is that America is awash with firearms hyper-marketed by a relentless and unregulated gun industry. If a Saturday night barbecue in your own home is the wrong place at the wrong time, what’s left? Not much. There is no right place and right time anymore. How about the office. Bad idea.
Note: Tom doesn’t place any blame on the shooter, but on the gun industry. Anybody see a problem with that?
A co-worker might come in packing to settle an obscure score that has been sloshing around in his cranial brew for years. What about church, or synagogue, or mosque? Nope, that’s been tried. Angry, gun-toting people cork off there, too. Churches have been shot up, even priests officiating masses. Ditto, synagogues and mosques. Schoolyards, the Empire State Building, shopping malls, even the U.S. Capitol have been turned into shooting galleries.
All the fault of gun manufacturers – not the shooters. And not all guns, only handguns.
Except churches, schoolyards, shopping malls et. al have all been shot up by people with rifles, too.
Oh, yeah, and the road rage shooters are out there, waiting to be crossed. One of them just might take the occasion of your flight to safety to decide that you are in too big a hurry, made too sharp a turn, or just plain look like a good candidate for road kill. Had enough yet?
The real problem is that there is barely a crevice left in American life in which the handgun has not taken root. Someone wants to argue over a shot glass or two? Just pull out your argument settler and pop off a round. End of argument.
Again: It’s apparently not the fault of the shooter, but the GUN INDUSTRY.
Now Tom really runs off the rails:
It wasn’t always that way. The American gun industry — one of only two consumer products in America free of federal product health and safety regulation (the other is tobacco) — has created this nightmare.
It has deliberately changed the mix of firearms sold in America over the last 30 years. It has done it because, unlike many other consumer industries that follow population growth, the gun business has faced saturated, declining markets. So it has relentlessly pushed new models of handguns to stimulate sales.
Excuse me? Last time I checked, the market is what drives innovation. If the industry builds it and nobody wants it, that product fails – but Tom is convinced that the industry somehow holds its product to American heads and forces us to buy. Here’s his “evidence”:
This was described some years ago in a magazine called American Firearms Industry: “Without new models that have major technical changes, you eventually exhaust your market. . . This innovation has driven the handgun market.” The most spectacular change in the U.S. civilian firearms market since the end of the Second World War has been the rise of the handgun. In 1946 handguns were only eight percent of firearms sold. Beginning in the mid-1960s this changed.
Handgun sales are now twice the level of 40 years ago, consistently averaging about 40 percent of the overall market. Not only that, the industry is making handguns smaller and more powerful so they can be concealed more easily and do more damage when used. The Austrian company Glock, one of the biggest handgun marketers in America, dubbed its contribution the “Pocket Rocket.”
Let’s stop right there for a moment. Remember, Tom has just built the case that handguns are responsible for turning various places into “shooting galleries,” that handguns represented only 8% of firearms sold, at least in 1946. Now, does that suggest to you that Tom is making the case that homicide rates were much lower in those halcyon days back when handguns were such a tiny percentage of all firearms? Well, here’s a graph of homicide rates in the U.S. from 1900 through 2000. Bear in mind, those rates continued to decline through 2003.
See anything wrong with Tom’s premise?
So those corny old movies and nostalgic television shows are right. In 1946, you could go to a party and maybe somebody would get angry. Maybe a punch or two would be thrown. But it would be darned rare for somebody to pull out a Pocket Rocket and start shooting. Not because people were better then, but because handguns were scarce.
Um, no Tom. Because “pocket rockets” weren’t invented until much later. But what about 1929? Would it have been rare then for someone to have pulled a “gat” and started shooting? Was it the eeeeevil gun manufacturer’s fault then?
Not any more. Now every husband who decides to come home and pop the wife has a handgun readily at hand. Every depressed kid or senior who wants to end it all has a handgun. And every nitwit who wants to feel like a big man at a barbecue has a handgun.
Right. The gun fairy just leaves it under the pillow.
There are a few ideological fantasists who are so hooked on the power of the gun that they claim the answer is simply more guns, to arm more people so they can “defend themselves” and “shoot back.” Jenna Cooper was enjoying a party. The bullet that hit her in the neck and took her life first traveled through another guest’s scalp.
How in the name of blessed reason could she have defended herself from that bizarre sequence with yet another gun? The answer is she couldn’t. Sure, get mad at the guy who shot her. Punish him. But don’t fantasize about blazing gun battles to teach that punk a thing or two.
And don’t blame the wrong place and the wrong time.
Here I actually agree with Tom. He’s correct on this – single – point. But he’s absolutely wrong in his conclusion:
Blame America’s gun industry for putting the gun in his hand.
I have, over the last few weeks, written piece after piece decrying the philosophy of the gun banners. They proclaim that the guns are at fault. That if they could only get rid of the guns none of this would happen. I have shown example after example from that gun-control utopia of England illustrating how even after implementing every single policy supported by gun control forces, gun crime there went up. And as a result, because the philosophy cannot be wrong, the response has been “do it again, only HARDER!“
Tom Diaz exemplifies this mindset. Tom seems to believe that guns are the cause of this violent behavior. That all we have to do is disarm everybody, and THESE. CRIMES. WILL. STOP.
Well, he’s partly right. If the government banned all handguns and demanded that they all be turned in, it’s possible that somewhere somebody might not get shot in a fit of anger. But it’s also possible that law-abiding people might not be able to defend themselves against the criminals who will not hand theirs in. It’s one of those “unintended consequences” that they don’t bother to consider.
Tom wants us all to be safe. He wants security. That’s not a bad thing to want, really. I think Tom suffers, though, from the same problem that is exhibited by most people who hate guns – a lack of trust in their fellow man. I wrote an essay on that topic I entitled TRUST, inspired by another who feared guns, rather than the people willing to misuse them. That piece is the counterpoint to Mr. Diaz’s philippic. Give it a read.
And then think about the path England has chosen, and ask yourself if you really want us to follow them.
Wahabism Delenda Est
John Donovan, I believe, has it right.
Go read.
Now.
The question, of course, is whether we can do it before our internal decay causes us to defeat ourselves. The barbarians by themselves aren’t enough to defeat us. They need our help to do that.
The Philosophy CANNOT Be Wrong! Do it AGAIN, Only HARDER!
Ravenwood links to this news report under the heading of “UK still doesn’t get it“
Blunkett orders overhaul of outdated firearm laws
The Government will attempt to tackle Britain’s gun culture with plans to be unveiled this week for an overhaul of outdated firearms laws.
Really? Outdated?
Let’s see:
1920 saw the introduction of registration of all handguns and rifles.
1936 saw the banning of all privately possessed fully-auto weapons and short-barreled shotguns.
As of 1946, “self-defense” was no longer an acceptable reason for issuance of a firearm license.
In 1953 the Prevention of Crime Act made carrying any “offensive weapon” in public a crime.
The Criminal Justice Act 1967 added shotguns to the registry. And jury trials no longer required a unanimous decision. (If they still did, Tony Martin, the farmer who shot two burglars – in the back – would never have gone to jail. His was a 10-2 decision.)
In 1982 reloaders and blackpowder shooters were made subject to warrantless inspection by police to “ensure safe storage.” Yup, the cops can come into the house without a warrant and inspect the premises.
In 1987 most semi-auto and pump-action shotguns and all rifles of these types were banned and (the legally-owned ones) confiscated.
In 1997 all handguns were banned and (the legally-owned ones) confiscated.
In 2004 a certain type of airgun has been banned. Possession of one without a license will now bring up to a 5-year sentence.
But England’s gun laws are outdated and in need of an overhaul.
Right.
David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, will publish a consultation document which is expected to lead to tougher restrictions on the sale and manufacture of replica firearms as well as new age limits on gun ownership, especially for airguns, starter pistols and shotguns.
What, no new restrictions on the few rifles still in circulation?
The consultation follows lobbying by the police and anti-gun campaigners who say Britain’s gun laws are confused, out of date and in desperate need of reform.
Meaning “It’s still legal for some citizens to own projectile weaponry! THIS MUST END!“
Of particular concern are replica firearms which are popular with gun collectors and can be bought legally but are being converted by criminals into lethal weapons to fire live ammunition.
Next up: Zip guns!
Economics 101: Supply will always rise to meet demand.
Police say that the greatest increase in gun crime is linked to a rise in the use of imitation weapons and converted airguns. In London alone, at least 70 per cent of weapons now seized by officers are converted replicas.
Only because they’re the easiest to get – right now.
Last November, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Gun Crime published a report calling for a complete ban on the import, sale and manufacture of replica firearms.
Remove the word “replica” from that sentence, replace it with “anything even resembling a” and you’d have the gist of the entire gun control movement.
There has also been a rise in attacks on people involving airguns. Last week, a firefighter was shot in the face by an airgun pellet as he drove a 24-ton fire truck along a street in Dumfries, Scotland.
And the airgun is obviously at fault, right? If the hooligan hadn’t had the gun, he wouldn’t have been tempted in the first place. It’s those evil brain-altering mindwaves that guns give off that cause these acts, after all.
Ministers have already brought in some measures to curb gun crime in Britain.
You don’t say! You mean, like that list I gave above that didn’t reduce gun crime a damned bit?
Last month, new anti-social behaviour laws came into effect which included a new imprisonable offence of carrying a replica gun in public.
I love that. Anti-social. What a lovely expression.
The legal age for owning an airgun has also been raised from 14 to 17 and it is now an offence to buy a weapon for someone under 17. But the ban on underage ownership only applies to Brocock-style airguns, which operate using a gas cartridge, and not to all types of airguns.
“Which must be amended, because we cannot have our youth corrupted by actually learning to shoot!”
A Home Office source confirmed that the consultation document would cover all aspects of gun-control legislation. “We will be seeking people’s views on all aspects of firearm legislation. We are looking at the whole issue, although replica and imitation firearms are of particular concern,” the source added.
Left unstated, however, is that people who legally own guns – that tiny minority – need not give their views. Their opinions are not needed or wanted.
Anti-gun groups have welcomed the planned reforms, which are the first major overhaul of firearms laws since 1997, when the Government introduced a ban on handguns after 16 schoolchildren and their teacher were killed at Dunblane primary school in Scotland.
I bet they have. Especially since the conclusion of the inquiry into the Dunblane massacre specifically recommended against the handgun ban that resulted. Note, please, that all the laws enumerated above did not prevent Thomas Hamilton from legally having the handguns he used at Dunblane.
Once again, it’s the gun that is at fault. Remove the guns and the problem will vanish, goes the philosophy.
The Gun Control Network, which campaigns for tighter arms control, said Britain lagged behind other countries because it did not have a universal age limit on people buying guns. “In our increasingly violent world we need to … tighten up on our gun laws,” said Gill Marshall-Andrews, chairwoman of the GCN. “The world-wide pressures are for … an increase in global gun violence.”
“Tighten up?” They’re so tight now you squeek when you walk. And now the push – lead by the UN – is for global gun confiscation control.
And the U.S. remains the evil poster-boy for it. Here we still give more than mere lip-service to the idea of a right to arms.
Barbarians.
But any restrictions on gun ownership are expected to face fierce opposition from the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, which represents gun enthusiasts.
Oh, right. They’ve been so effective in the past.
The cognitive dissonance here is really incredible to me. They’ve tried and tried and tried to reduce violent crime – specifically violent crime involving firearms, for over eighty years – and failed miserably. One definintion of “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. But the philosophy cannot be wrong! Do it again ONLY HARDER!
People You Won’t See on 60 Minutes
Blackfive has one of the finest examples of the merits of blogging available.
Go spend some time there getting to know the people (and puppies) that the media won’t introduce you to. It’s well worth your time.