The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Quote of the Day
I for one support any operation that boils down to “Hey, what happens if we concentrate the power consumption of the eastern seaboard of the US into a space roughly the size of Barack Obama’s integrity?” You just know something cool is gonna happen.
Stingray at Atomic Nerds in I Love CERN!
Personally, I’d like to see them try to concentrate that power into a space the size of Hillary’s integrity, but that produces a divide-by-zero error.
More from Liberal Fascism
Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don’t matter. It also highlights the real fascist legacy of World War I and the New Deal: the notion that government action in the name of “good things” under the direction of “our people” is always and everywhere justified. Dissent by the right people is the highest form of patriotism. Dissent by the wrong people is troubling evidence of incipient fascism. The anti-dogmatism that progressives and fascists alike inherited from Pragmatism made the motives of the activist the only criteria for judging the legitimacy of action.
—
This has been the liberal enterprise ever since: to transform a democratic republic into an enormous tribal community, to give every member of society from Key West, Florida, to Fairbanks, Alaska, that same sense of belonging – “we’re all in it together!” – that we allegedly feel in a close-knit community. The yearning for community is deep and human and decent. But these yearnings are often misplaced when channeled through the federal government and imposed across a diverse nation with a republican constitution. This was the debate at the heart of the Constitutional Convention and one that the progressives sought to settle permanently in their favor. The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good. And yet ever since the New Deal, liberals have been unable to shake this fundamental dogma that the state can be the instrument for a politics of meaning that transforms the entire nation into a village.
Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism pp. 158, 159-160
From today’s lunchtime reading.
Quote of the Day.
How much training do you think you need to determine that the thug/s standing there demanding your wallet, car keys, or vagina is not there to hold hands, eat a bowl of granola and sing Kumbyah with you?
– Gunscribe at From the Heartland, “Editorial Staff Lack Education” on why private citizens don’t need the “incredible amount of firearms training” that police receive.
RTWT if you haven’t already.
And it’s been my experience that private citizens interested in firearms “train” a lot more than most police officers do, at least at the “hitting the target” part.
Over the last weekend and this evening I loaded 500 rounds of .223 and 100 rounds of .308. For every one I used my (relatively) new RCBS Chargemaster 1500 that I bought last May. I’ve reported on it before, but (now that I’ve actually, you know, read the instructions and made use of some of the neater features) I thought I’d report in again.
Worth every penny.
However: “Throw a measured charge ±0.1 grain, in about 20 seconds?” HAH!
All my loading over the last few days has been with Varget, which is a short-cut extruded powder. The Chargemaster handles it fine, but each charge takes closer to 30-35 seconds. Plus, it never throws a charge light. It either hits the mark or goes 1-3 tenths over. One tenth I will live with. Two or more, no.
This is a function of how the powder stacks up in the trickler tube, mostly. Tonight, for example, I threw twenty charges each of 42.0, 42.2, 42.4, 42.6 and 42.8 grains. On average I probably had to throw 22-24 charges to get twenty at the programed weight (within 0.1 grain). Interestingly, at 42.6, the Chargemaster threw 19 precisely at the programmed weight and one at 42.7, but when I programmed it for 42.8, I had to throw 25 charges because it kept trickling up to 43.0-43.1.
Still, it’s faster than I used to be using an RCBS powder measure and a Wheeler Engineering trickler over a PACT electronic scale, so I’m not going to complain.
Previously I used the Chargemaster to throw some 2400 loads for .45LC. 2400 is a tiny ball powder, and it measured a bit more accurately. Plus, the lighter charges measured out a tiny bit quicker. The individual granules of 2400 don’t weigh as much as the cut granules of Varget, so consequently it takes a few more of them to make up 0.2 grain.
Like I said – worth every penny. If you’re loading for accuracy, this is a very nice setup.
UPDATE: Original JS-Kit/Echo comment thread available here, thanks to reader John Hardin.
This is a Test
This is only a test.
I’m trying out Blogger’s “Title” feature to see if it A) works, and B) if I like it.
Quote of the Day.
Gun owners, men and women alike, have been very therapeutic for me. They are an incredibly encouraging and generous lot, letting a newcomer borrow their pistols, try a variety of guns and use up their ammunition. With the price of metal so high, sharing bullets is right up there with putting gas in my tank.
– Julia Zaher, Columnist’s NRA gun instruction continues, MLive.com
This weekend I loaded 200 rounds of .45ACP (all I had brass for – more is on order), and 500 rounds of .223. I also prepped the 50 .308 cases I fired last weekend, and some time this week I’ll be loading 200 rounds of .308, and later this week I should be receiving 1,000 .45ACP cases and 1,000 200 grain Rainier hollowpoints, but I doubt I’ll get a chance to load many of those before I leave for the NRA convention next week.
Damned straight ammo is expensive.
h/t: Say Uncle
Vote Early & Often.
Patti Patton-Bader, founder of Soldiers’ Angels, is one of the fifteen semi-finalists in NBC’s “America’s Favorite Mom” contest. There are five categories, and she is nominated with two other mom’s in the “military mom’s” category. The winner receives a $250,000 cash prize, and Patti has said she’d like to use the money to build a ranch for soldiers and their families to vacation at with assistance from Angel families.
Tomorrow, Patti will be featured in the morning on NBC’s Today Show, and all day tomorrow (but ONLY tomorrow) folks will have the opportunity to vote for her at http://www.nbc.com/Americas_Favorite_Mom/. Allegedly everyone can vote up to ten times per email address, so I’m hoping folks will vote early and often!
As you’ll note, Soldier’s Angels is at the top of my left sidebar, and directly under it is a subset of that group, Project Valour IT.
Patti Patton-Bader is someone special. Please vote for her tomorrow – early and often.
h/t to Instapundit, who got the email from NZBear.
I Don’t Care, This One Wins!.
From Cowboy Blob’s caption contest:
“Elementary schools in rural American have discovered bitterness starts early.” – Maggie Mama
Quote of the Day.
No matter what you get, you’re going to get a piece of American history. Just think of it as a little bit of Americana….. with a bayonet lug.
– “Barney” from a comment at Bad Dogs and Such on CMP rifles.
Hell yeah!
Sales of the IBMeraphim open on July 7. My order’s going out FedEx.
Iron Man ROCKS!.
My wife and I just got back from seeing Iron Man. I also just read Kyle Smith’s review of the film at Pajamas Media.
Oh, please. Enough with the “Hollywood hates America” paranoia. Look, we all know that a bunch of people in Hollywood do, but not every film coming out of Tinsel Town has anti-Americanism undertones. (It’s not paranoia when they really are out to get you, but it is paranoia where you see them where they ain’t.)
First: The special effects in this film enhance – make it possible, in fact – but do not overwhelm the film.
Second: Robert Downey Jr. is outstanding, and the rest of the supporting cast ain’t bad, either. Gwyneth Paltrow has never looked better. Somebody needs a Oscar nomination for casting.
Third: It’s PG-13. Really. Unless you don’t mind your small children watching Robert Downey Jr. rolling around in bed with a hot blonde (who gets up the next morning and wanders around his palatial house in nothing but one of his shirts), leave them at home.
I’m not going to write a review full of spoilers, but I take exception to this line from Smith’s review:
You come to Iron Man to see a bullet-proof one-man flying tank, not hear a Ralph Nader lecture on how American industry is responsible for all the wars in the world.
Excuse me? Did we see the same film? Downey’s character had witnessed a bunch of American soldiers killed with weapons that had his company’s name on them. He had a negative reaction to that, and it’s understandable and well-played.
I won’t comment on the final fight scene – I didn’t see Transformers, so I don’t know how that film played out. I will say I thought it was terrific and I’d like to see it again.
The whole film (with the exception of the initial battle scene) was a lot of fun. I strongly recommend this film to anyone who likes the genre.