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Month: October 2010
What We Believe, Part II
Bill Whittle strikes again:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0MESB6VZM4?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&w=640&h=385]
I can’t wait for Part III.
GunUp Goes Live
At this year’s Gun Blogger Rendezvous, Dan Hall, founder and CEO of GunUp.com came out to tell us about his plan to build the biggest, bestest site on the intertubes for people interested in things firearm to go to. Their mission statement is short and concise:
Our mission is to provide prospective, new, and experienced gun enthusiasts with a one-stop destination to share, discuss, review, and compare guns with confidence.
That site has now gone live.
Sunday Movie Reviews
I’ve seen two movies in the last three days, RED and Secretariat. Both were excellent. RED is your typical anti-gun Hollyweird crowd making big bucks using weapons we can’t have in ways only governments permit to their agents, but it’s a load of fun as a summer (now fall) blowup movie. Catch it at a matinee. It’s great.
Secretariat is what we expect from a Disney film – wholesome family entertainment. But remember when I wrote a couple of days ago about Capitalism TV? This is a capitalist movie. Rich people are not treated as evil. The “Death Tax” plays a prominent (if understated) role. And risk – real risk – is portrayed as something worth taking, not avoiding at all costs. As the main character, “housewife” Penny Chenery Tweedy says,
This is about life being ahead of you, and you run at it.
It’s the will to win, if you can, and live with it if you can’t.
It shows us what we as a nation have sacrificed over the last thirty-odd years on the altar of “self-esteem” with the abhorrence of competition. It is a very “tea-party” movie about people who are not ashamed to be bold, successful, and who are willing to take risks.
Besides that, it’s a well written, well acted, and well made film I strongly recommend.
UPDATE: Eric S. Raymond also highly recommends RED. Good review.
Government /= Adulthood
Quite while back I quoted one Jeffery Gardener from an April 27, 2005 Albuquerque Journal column, “Save Us From Us”. In it Gardener said:
During the 1992 presidential debates, there was a moment of absurdity that so defied the laws of absurdity that even today when I recall it, I just shake my head.
It was during the town hall “debate” in Richmond, Va., between the first President Bush and contenders Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.
A grown man – a baby boomer – took the microphone from the moderator, Carol Simpson of ABC News, and said, in a fashion: You’re the president, so you’re like our father, and we’re your children.
See? My head’s shaking already. Where did that come from? Would a grown man have told a president something like that 100 years ago – or 50?
We’ve got our wires crossed, and our ability to accept responsibility for our lives – once so ingrained in our American nature that President Kennedy felt comfortable telling us to “ask not what your country can do for you” – has been short-circuited. We’ve slouched en masse into an almost-childlike outlook: You’re the president, so you’re like our father.
The fact that an adult – on national television, no less – would say this and later be interviewed as though he’d spoken some profound truth struck me then, as now, as more than a little absurd. It was alarming.
It’s still alarming.
In today’s USA Today was a letter from G. Bruce Hedlund of San Andreas, California. Mr. Hedlund said this:
Think of our country as a society made up of children and a government made up of adults. It is up to the adults to weigh all the options and provide services in the best interests of the children.
There is so much wrong with this I don’t even know where to start, but I will say that this attitude is responsible for the US receiving the government we’ve voted for.
On that note, I think I’m going to go get some dinner.
Internet Access
I haz it. Bandwidth, no so much. And I’m on the wired network, not WiFi.
Giant Multinational Corp. provided it as part of the conference package. I imagine that they had to, considering their clientele, and the fact that the equipment this conference is covering starts in the low eight-figures price range.
I’ll say this for the venue: Posh. Very, very posh. I feel out of place.
It promises to be a busy couple of days, so blogging will remain light.
Oh, and still no reply from Alan Baird. He must’ve thought my missive was a death threat, too.
On the Road Again
I’ll be out of town until Saturday night. I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a conference. Apparently no one told the Giant Multinational Corporation that Las Vegas was a politically-incorrect place to hold one of these things, and since it’s only a six and a half hour drive I’ll be bypassing the friendly Security Theater kabuki actors and making the round trip by ground vehicle. (I really need to get a Nevada non-resident carry permit.)
Anyway, I don’t know if the hotel will be providing WiFi gratis. If not, I probably won’t be posting much the next three days.
Oh, and as of 7:00 PM MST, no reply from Alan C. Baird.
More Anti-gun Bigotry
I found this through Northwest FreeThinker. It seems a blogger for Salon, a fellow Arizonan, got all bent out of shape when he saw an old man open-carrying in his local Whole Foods or its equivalent. He wrote a blog post about it, entitled “Gunfight at the Shopping Cart Corral.”
It went viral throughout the open-carry community. That piece, or at least a long excerpt from it, is posted at We The Armed. Please go read. A second piece, “National Quick-Draw Contest” was also written. These two essays resulted in irate comments and what the author, Alan C. Baird, states were not one but two “death threats.”
“Reasoned Discourse” broke out. The author flushed not one but both of the essays. As is normal, protests that his First Amendment rights were violated have been invoked.
So I dropped Mr. Alan C. Baird an email this evening. Here it is:
Mr. Baird
I’m sure by now you’re probably sick of the subject, but please allow me to add one more voice to the cacophony inspired by your recent pieces on the carriage of firearms in Arizona.
You just experienced the backlash from what Dr. Michael S. Brown described in 2000 as “a decades-long slow-motion hate crime.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to read the whole piece, merely the excerpt at the “WetheArmed” forum (I assume it was an excerpt. Surely you weren’t finished?) but do you really think these words were not insulting?
“Don’t look. He might shoot.”
“…some corpulent 80-year-old a**hole was standing in front of the donut peaches, packing a pistol.”
“80-year-old” is descriptive. “Corpulent” is descriptive. “Packing a pistol” is descriptive. But unless he was wearing an “I am an Asshole” t-shirt, the last is merely an illustration of your personal prejudice. This is known where I come from as “bigotry.”
“Not a law enforcement guy, just some retired jerkoff who evidently wanted to enhance the perceived size of his schlong.”
Now, just out of curiosity, how could you tell that this jerkoff – er, gentleman wasn’t, say, a retired law officer? And what is it that makes “law enforcement guys” somehow better than non-law enforcement guys when it comes to carrying a weapon? This too illustrates your bigotry. And what is it with you people and penis size? If you believe that gun owners own guns to compensate for the size of their wedding tackle, does your desire to disarm everyone mean you want yours cut off?
…when I saw that gun in the grocery store, steam started shooting from my ears.
Why, exactly? Could you please explain that to me? Feel free to use big words, I have a college degree. In something useful.
I marched up to the front office and loudly demanded to see the manager. When he arrived, I was apoplectic….
I’m very glad you don’t own a gun. Obviously have anger control issues and you’re not a stable person. I’m beginning to understand why you don’t like to see other people armed – you think they’re just like you, and lack of self-control is “normal.” I assure you, it is not.
Oh, the manager lied to you (he might not be aware of it, but he’s wrong). There’s no law that states that any business cannot post a “no firearms” sign. It’s perfectly legal. Stores are private property, and they may post to their heart’s content. They just run the risk of losing business.
I pulled out the big guns: “Displaying a gun is an implied threat of violence.”
Not when it’s “displayed” on someone’s hip in a holster. Pulling it out and waving it around, known legally as “brandishing,” is. Oh, and I love your double entendre there, “pulled out the big guns.” Cute metaphor, pen being mightier than the sword and all.
I notice you weren’t willing to test that theory here.
“Guns are just murders waiting to happen.'”
Really? All of mine must be defective, then. This too is bigotry.
“If he’s psycho enough to wear a gun in a grocery store, he’s psycho enough to use it. All of us would end up on the evening news, looking like Swiss cheese.”
Wow, you are such a bigot! Do you hate black people too? Replace “gun owner” with the “N” word, and you’re expressing precisely the same hatred of a minority group. I seem to recall there was a penis-fixation component in that bigotry, too.
Here are some examples for you to review of elderly people compensating for their tiny shriveled-up “fazes”:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/crime/os-senior-thwarts-robber-20100925,0,7201060.story
http://nalert.blogspot.com/2010/05/chicago-man-80-did-what-he-had-to-do.html
http://www.kcci.com/news/23208133/detail.htmlhttp://www.kvoa.com/news/82-year-old-fights-off-attacker/
If you only read one of these links, read the last one. An 82-year-old a**shole, er, woman is attacked in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in Sierra Vista. I’m betting she’s not retired from any police department. I’m sure that prior to this assault most people believed that the worst criminals in that area were jaywalkers, too. At worst, shoplifters. That didn’t stop her from being assaulted there severely enough to put her in the hospital for a few days.
Her handgun stopped the assault, though. Was she compensating for the size of her penis?
Perhaps if she’d been wearing her penis, er, handgun exposed, her attacker would have picked a different victim. Had she not been carrying her handgun, perhaps her walking stick might have been “a murder waiting to happen.” Her assailant said words to the effect that he planned to kill her before he took it from her and began beating her with it.
Mr. Baird, you’re a bigot. An angry bigot. You are prejudiced against guns, and by extension the people who own and carry them. You have very little self-control, and you believe that’s normal – you must be normal, right? Therefore no one should own a gun, much less carry one – except for those who collect a government paycheck. Somehow that distinction makes them special, different, trustworthy.
Would you like a list of links about corrupt, murderous cops?
Mr. Baird, I too am a resident of Arizona. I live in Tucson. I’m a gun owner, and I possess a Concealed Carry permit (though those are no longer strictly necessary since Arizona became the third “Constitutional Carry” state.) I’m a recreational shooter. I try to get to the range at least a couple of days a month on the weekends. I run a bowling-pin match at the range I belong to every second Sunday of the month. I’m also a blogger. I run The Smallest Minority, and this letter will be posted there in its entirety – with links – as soon as I hit “send.” A few thousand people will see it. It will probably generate some more mail. Sorry about that, but hey, you reap what you sow.
My blog has open comments. In over seven years, I think I’ve only banned two commenters, and I’ve NEVER flushed a post down the memory-hole.
In closing, I think it might behoove you to get some psychiatric help. Work on your bigotry, your fear of firearms, your self-control issues, and your curious fixation on things penile. Also your hatred of your fellow man. If you don’t, you might end up strapping on a firearm and calling out an 80-year-old a**hole who might blow your penis off with his .45 in self-defense.
Trust me, I know some old guys who can SHOOT.
Kevin Baker, proprietor,
http://smallestminority.blogspot.comP.S. – The First Amendment does not protect you from the public consequences of your own words. It protects you from government infringement in the expression of your thoughts and ideas. You know, where armed agents of the State come and tell you to shut up – or else. If you’d like, drop me a line and we can discuss it.
Somehow I doubt I’ll hear from Mr. Baird, though I’d love for him to come to the November 6 Blog Shoot.
Joe Huffman has a piece up on the topic, too.
Hopenchange Fails Again
I’m not sure how long it takes to bring a TV series from concept to the small screen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s about 20 months if you really push.
I’m betting that NBC’s Outlaw was a brainstorm that occurred about the time someone realized that Obama was going to be President. Consider the premise: an ultra right-wing Supreme Court Justice, gambler, womanizer, picks up an ACLU lawyer one night after boozing and betting in Atlantic City, and in the morning he becomes a new man! (I’m surprised he didn’t come out of the closet, too!) He retires from the bench to open his own law practice to protect the “little guy” against capitalists, conservatives, all the evil exploiters of the downtrodden! (But I repeat myself.)
How could it miss?
Apparently they showed three episodes an then put it on hiatus.
Which is now permanent.
All together now, aaaaaawwwww!
UPDATE: Reader Sarah left an interesting comment which caused me to do a little research into the writing of the show. As far as I can tell, the creator, producer, and writer for the shows that aired is John Eisendrath. He was interviewed before the show premiered, and here is his explanation of the thoughts behind its creation:
I wanted to do this show because I do not have much faith in the legal system and I have seen innocent people be hurt by it. And I longed for [change] particularly by judges who knew they were doing something that would hurt innocent people but felt that they were bound by the law to hurt them because that was their job, to uphold the law.
I wanted to write a story about a judge who couldn’t do that anymore, who felt like he had a higher calling that went beyond (h)is obligation to following the law as a judge. But as a conservative, he knew that he couldn’t just make it up as he went along, so he left to do something in pursuit of that higher calling.
Yup, that’s one definition of conservatism. And a beautiful definition of why liberals love judicial activism: Don’t uphold the law, make it up as you go along!
Quote of the Day – de Tocqueville Edition
From the National Review Online column by Mark Krikorian, “A Network of Small Complicated Rules, Minute and Uniform” from October 1:
The federal government bans the incandescent light bulb. It bans street signs that have all capital letters and mandates what font they need to be in. Now, Congress has seen fit to focus its august attention on the volume of TV commercials.
The problem is not that these things create unnecessary costs or destroy jobs, which they do, or that lawmakers have more important things to do, which is also true. Rather, the federal government has no business doing any of these things. Yes, the entitlements trainwreck is a bigger issue, but if we, as a people, continue to shrug at this sort of thing, our unfitness for self-government will become undeniable.
It still amazes me that Tocqueville foresaw this soft despotism so long ago:
It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
That’s about 2/3rds of the whole piece, but it’s the QotD.
I’m amazed at the prescience of de Tocqueville, but given the predictability of human nature, maybe I shouldn’t be.