Hiatus

I’m going to take some time off blogging. It seems that pretty much everything I read and everything I want to write about just makes me more bummed-out and pissed off. It’s time for a break.

The free ice cream machine is unplugged for a bit.

Some Good News

I’ve been going to the Gun Blogger Rendezvous for the last five years, and all that time my Arizona CCW permit has not been recognized by Nevada.  That’s about to change:

Out of State Carry Concealed Weapon Permit Recognition

*Effective July 1, 2011

In accordance with NRS 202.3689 (effective October 1, 2007) the State of Nevada will recognize the following States’ CCW permit holders:

Alaska
Arizona*
Arkansas
Kansas
Kentucky*
Louisiana
Michigan
Missouri
Nebraska
New Mexico
North Carolina
Ohio
Tennessee
Rhode Island
West Virginia

This law allows holders of valid permits from these states to carry a concealed weapon while in the State of Nevada. The permit must be in the possession of the issue at all times while carrying a firearm.

More Linkery

If you haven’t read Walter Russell Mead’s When Government Jumps the Shark, I strongly advise you to.  In it, Mr. Mead divides .gov programs up into five distinct stages that I think are brilliant in their concise descriptivity:

  • Great White Hope
  • Great White Father
  • Great White Elephant
  • Great White Shark
  • Great White Whale

My first exposure to Mr. Mead came from another brilliant essay, The Jacksonian Tradition, which I found via Steven Den Beste many years ago, and I’ve cited it in several pieces here. He’s not lost anything in the ensuing decade.

Quote of the Day – It’s Not Imperialism Edition

Like it or not, the United States is a revolutionary power. Whether our government is trying to overthrow foreign dictators is almost irrelevant; American society is the most revolutionary force on the planet. The Internet is more subversive than the CIA in its prime. The dynamism of American society is constantly creating new businesses, new technologies, new ideas and new social models. These innovations travel, and they make trouble when they do. Saudi conservatives know that whatever geopolitical arrangements the Saudi princes make with the American government, the American people are busily undermining the core principles of Saudi society. It’s not just our NGOs educating Saudi women and civil society activists; it’s not just the impact of American college life on the rising generation of the Saudi elite. We change the world even when we aren’t thinking anything about global revolution — when Hollywood and rap musicians are just trying to make a buck, they are stoking the fires of change around the world.


A revolutionary nation cannot make a conservative foreign policy work for long.

— Walter Russell Mead, The Conservative Revolutionary

Unintended Irony

From Politico‘s piece, Long-lost Sarah Palin surfaces in emails:

That’s not to say the picture of Palin is all rosy. She whines constantly about her treatment by the press. She uses subterfuge to manipulate her image, ghostwriting a letter to the editor praising her, for instance, or conducting a phony television interview in which she reads answers from a teleprompter.

She increasingly sees enemies all around, repeatedly demanding to know whether her privacy has been breached. In one case, it turns out her husband Todd, not a hacker, sent an email from one of her accounts. She convinces herself that rumors about her last pregnancy have been deliberately and maliciously spread by an enemy in the state Legislature.

The seeds of the paranoia and belligerence that so prominently mark her current public persona are visible in early form.

This on a piece about the media’s pathetic feeding-frenzy over the publication of nearly 25,000 emails dating back to prior to 2008.

Here’s a hint: It’s not paranoia when they actually are out to get you, and it isn’t “whining” when the press is the instrument of that attack. As JammieWearingFool puts it, linking to the Politico piece:

How badly has this fishing expedition blown up in the faces of the left? Well, for one, the cartoon character portrayal of Palin is now gone forever.

Coming next: The media will launch an exhaustive background check of the current occupant of the White House.

Yeah, right.

She appeared on the media radar in 2008 and they haven’t stopped trying to dig up dirt on her for a minute since.

Obama?

Yeah, right.

See also today’s QotD.

Quote of the Day – Do It Your Own Damned Self Edition

I like Palin insofar as she makes the right people’s heads explode. She’s playing the MSM like a fiddle and they’re dancing to her tune every single time. The woman can give the talking heads on TV the vapors by just ordering a value meal from McDonalds. When she was running as the VP, I read a lot into her tenure as Alaska’s Governor and her record was fairly decent. She had faults and failures which meant she was human, but overall it did appear she ran a much more conservative governorship than anything I’ve ever seen. But, I don’t really see her as some sort of American Savior.
That job falls to the Americans.
We need to stop letting these idiots who can’t even keep their privates off of the Internet run our country into the ground. We need to stop bending over with each new unconstitutional law they pass and start ignoring them. The key word there is WE, not some politician (and make no bones about it, Sarah Palin is still a politician) who will come in with a magic wand and make all the bad things go away. It’s that false belief in ‘Hope & Change’ that got us here today, and I’m not just talking about Obama.
YOU do it. Don’t want for someone else. That’s the problem.

Robb Allen, Sharp as a Marble, One of the Reasons I Have Very Little Hope for the Future

Can I get an “AMEN!“?

Quote of the Day – “Yes, Exactly” Edition

Jennifer asked her readers to explain “How did that happen? How did you become gunnies?” The answers have been fascinating. I’ve left my own tale in a post below this one, but today’s QotD comes from Big Smart Human‘s story:

My husband & I discussed getting an NRA bumper sticker — not actually joining the NRA, mind you! Just having the bumper sticker on our car. We thought about what to do to make it appear that we are armed.


And then I realized: the way to appear armed is to be armed; the way to appear dangerous is to be dangerous.

That was three years ago. It has been a slow and steady escalation of knowledge, skill and firearms ever since.

Now I love the Second Amendment and fully understand why citizens may feel very wary about all this “reasonable gun control” blather certain folks like to throw around.

Now, in fact, I see myself as a citizen. Before guns, I never really thought about citizenship, beyond voting at every opportunity.

Along the way, the hardest lesson has been that I can trust myself.

EXACTLY! (All emphasis mine, all links in the quotation are mine also.)  What she describes is exactly what the Left fears most about an armed populace – that they can be an empowered, confident group of citizens that trust themselves, and can tell their self-annointed “betters” to go to hell.  She exemplifies what I’ve been writing about here for eight years now.