The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
I’m SO Glad Ford Didn’t Take “Bailout” Money
http://img.photobucket.com/player.swf?file=http://vidmg.photobucket.com/albums/v99/smallestminority/PerhapstheBestFordCommercia.flv
They made this a couple of years ago, but this is the first time I’ve been able to download a copy for myself. I thought I’d share.
For Stingray:
From Mostly Cajun‘s “Random Thoughts”:
51. As a driver I hate pedestrians, and as a pedestrian I hate drivers, but no matter what the mode of transportation, I always hate cyclists.
Back to loading . . .
Idio-Seconds and Darwin Awards
Gerard reports via Exurban League. Wincingly humorous.
The Rendezvous starts in two (2) days. I’m leaving tomorrow morning at O-Dark-Thirty AM, and I plan on driving straight through. That should put me in Reno between 9 and 10 PM. I’ve decided to travel through Mordor California this year, at least on the way up. It should (I emphasize should) save me about an hour, and hopefully the scenery will be better than the sun-blasted landscape of Nevada has been these last three years.
On-line ticket sales for the Para GI Expert / Front Sight training certificate ended Saturday at midnight, or close to it. Total ticket sales, both at Soldiers’ Angels before PayPal went asshat, and after LuckyGunner.com was kind enough to pick up the gauntlet, came to (drumroll please): 449! After the 3% credit card processing fee (and PayPal’s cut), that means y’all have donated $4,355 to Project Valour IT. Thank you! With what we’ll add at the Rendezvous, Project Valour IT should be able to pick up several new systems!
The weather this year looks to be perfect, with daily highs of about 90 and evening lows in the upper 50’s. Perfect T-shirt weather, rather than the snow we got last year. And I own so many offensive, politically-incorrect T-shirts, it makes choosing which ones to take very difficult.
Speaking of choice, I’m still trying to decide what boomsticks to take with me. The Remington 700 5R (now with a NightForce scope in place of the Leupold) is a given, and one of the ARs, I think. The Garand, and I believe I’ll bring Baby Blue, too. (No .30 Carbine ammo to be had in Tucson. Oops. Perhaps I’ll bring Conan the Borg instead. It’s been a while since that one’s been out of the safe, and I have .22 ammo.) I’ll have to buy some ammo for her, though. I haven’t had a chance to reload for .30 Carbine yet. But I’ve got this new (to me) P14 Enfield I’ve yet to put a round through . . .
For handguns, my full-size Kimber upper is out getting the slide Gunkoted and some tritium night-sights installed. I hoped to have it back in time for the Rendezvous, but no. I think I’ll bring my S&W 25-13 Mountain Gun and some .45LC for it, but I’ll be leaving the companion Winchester 94 here. I might bring the Hi-Power, since I have the better part of a case of 124gr. NATO-spec Europellets. Of course, I’ll bring the Para Gun Blog 45, and the GI Expert I’m giving away. And last but not least, I think I’ll bring my Boomershoot pistol.
Anyway, I’ve got to do some running around, pick up some ammo, load some ammo, pack everything up, and then get to bed early. No posting tomorrow, probably – at least not until I get to Reno, and even then I’ll probably be too wiped to post more than “I’m here!” If you’re coming, I look forward to seeing you! If you’re not, shame on you! But stay tuned – we’ll be liveblogging a lot of it!
Here’s the updated schedule of events.
From a link in LabRat’s Parasite memes and monkeyspheres, David Wong’s Cracked.com piece What is the Monkeysphere?:
(S)ome people in the distant past naively thought they could sit all of the millions of monkeys down and say, “Okay, everybody go pick the bananas, then bring them here, and we’ll distribute them with a complex formula determining banana need! Now go gather bananas for the good of society!” For the monkeys it was a confused, comical, tree-humping disaster.
Later, a far more realistic man sat the monkeys down and said, “You want bananas? Each of you go get your own. I’m taking a nap.” That man, of course, was German philosopher Hans Capitalism.As long as everybody gets their own bananas and shares with the few in their Monkeysphere, the system will thrive even though nobody is even trying to make the system thrive. This is perhaps how Ayn Rand would have put it, had she not been such a hateful bitch.
The Things Worth Believing In
In relation to my two recent posts, Restoring the Lost Constitution and Entropy Happens, I was reminded of an überpost I wrote almost three years ago, The United Federation of Planets. That post begins with a quote from a movie. Here it is on YouTube:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2MWKaDHUNs&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&w=640&h=505]
You might find that old post interesting in relation to the two new ones . . .
I Wonder . . .
Would Markadelphia pass the test?
Luckygunner.com will be terminating the on-line ticket sales for the Para USA GI Expert pistol and the $2,000 value training certificate to Front Sight Saturday night, September 5, at midnight. So far just a bit over 250 tickets have sold, so your odds of winning a $600 MSRP pistol for $10 are still pretty good! Get your orders in soon, and remember, it’s a tax-deductible donation to a great cause!
Monday’s scoop of free ice cream has drawn some traffic, some links, and some comments, and last night’s gun blogger roundtable at Gun Nuts Radio has provided another spark of inspiration. Unfortunately, twelve-hour days and 2:30AM cat fights in the kitchen are conspiring to smother that spark, so I’m afraid this piece isn’t going to be quite the quality I’d prefer, but I want to keep up with Rule of Blogging #1 as best I can.
One of the comments left at Restoring the Lost Constitution was this one:
“Thus perish all compromise with tyranny!”
(William Lloyd Garrison, setting fire to the constitution on Framingham Green, Massachusetts, July 4, 1854)
Word.
Billy Beck
Immediately followed by this one:
The Necronstitution.
Why try to restore a thing so instrumental in the death of America?
“The American Revolution in fact died with the ratification of the US Constitution.”
It was only a matter of time to arrive at this point. That was clear before the ink was even dry on that thing.
Matt
Obviously neither Beck nor Matt are particular fans of the Constitution, but the fact of the matter remains that there are a significant number of us who want what we believe that document promised us restored. We far outnumber those of the Anarchist bent, but (as I have been cataloging here at TSM for the last six years) we’re both overrun by people who have been fed Rousseau (the overwhelming majority unknowingly) for their entire lives.
And that feeding has been deliberate. I strongly recommend you watch Bill Whittle’s 13 minute piece on “The Great Liberal Narrative”. As commenter “jb” put it in his linking post,
Gramsci saw it correctly, although he was a minor marxist of his time. Jailbirds rarely get recognition.
“Gramsci rejected the state-worship that results from identifying political society with civil society, as was done by the Jacobins and Fascists. He believes the proletariat’s historical task is to create a ‘regulated society’ and defines the ‘withering away of the state’ as the full development of civil society’s ability to regulate itself.” (Wikipedia)
He was a communist’s communist–he kept the end goal in sight at all times. Lenin and Stalin were more deadly, but Gramsci was more consistent. Give the proletariat the essentials of life, or even a bit better and they (the proletariat) will let the marxist masters do what they wish.
So what about that inspiration from the Roundtable discussion last night? Hold on just a bit longer.
Back in October of 2006 I wrote an überpost, hoping to conclude my series on “What is a Right?” entitled The United Federation of Planets. If you’ve got an hour or two, you might want to go peruse that piece, but the key relating to this post is that what people believe drives the cultures they live in. At one time, the vast majority of this society believed that the Constitution protected our rights and our property. Many of us want that protection back. Apparently most people think they do, but honestly don’t understand that what they’re agitating for is its exact opposite. Those who do understand it are (IMHO) evil.
Last night, one of the questions we bloggers were asked was “what was our favorite or most popular post?” LabRat said one of hers was Parasite memes and monkeyspheres. It’s one of my favorites as well, and it starts out with this:
It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: “Kings. What a good idea.” Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. — Terry Pratchett, from Feet of Clay
She goes on to argue a convincing case that human evolution prewires us to hate rich people, and embrace “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
So if LabRat is even half right, it’s not really surprising that socialism is so seductive to so much of the population, and that the ideology laid down in the Declaration of Independence very well may have had the seeds of its destruction sown with the ratification of the Constitution of the United States.
Entropy happens, and it generally only goes one way without a huge influx of carefully directed power from outside the observed system: downhill. Our Constitutionally-oriented belief system has survived, mostly intact, for over 200 years – which is a pretty damned good run, historically. What the people of this nation have accomplished in that period is more than exceptional, it’s quite literally so extraordinary as to seem almost impossible.
But it’s not enough, apparently, to overcome the siren song of “we’ll take care of you!”
That major design flaw, it seems, is catching up to us.
Good night. I hope you sleep better than I probably will.