[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWfph3iNC-k]
Found at Theo Spark.
The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWfph3iNC-k]
Found at Theo Spark.
Hobbyists still do some of the coolest stuff. And I bet it gives our overlords nightmares:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5OZCWaJBdc&rel=0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3&w=640&h=390]
Your own unmanned aerial reconnaissance drone!
This is why there are professional pundits. From Mark Steyn’s most recent jeremiad, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon
Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists — sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, sometimes patrician noblesse oblige statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war western democracies is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: the people can elect “conservatives,” as from time to time the Germans and British have done, and the left is mostly relaxed about it all because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppence-ha’penny would agree to go and take the chill off the toilet seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects were ready to stroll in and assume their rightful place. Republicans have gotten good at keeping the seat warm.
Ain’t that the truth?
I’m only about 100 pages into it, but so far the entire book is filled with bits like this.
Footnoted.
“Get Ready for Armageddon” indeed.
I was introduced to author Richard K. Morgan’s works by my shooting buddy Dusty. Here’s a quote from the novel Altered Carbon appropriate to today:
The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference – the only difference in their eyes – between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.
SayUncle turns nine years old today. I remember back when he actually wrote stuff, and sometimes committed journalism!
All kidding aside, Chance is one of the best aggregators on the web today when it comes to firearms, law and rights. He’s my second stop daily after Tam.
Keep it up, Chance. You do a helluva job.
And here we have the heart of the difference between Hayek and Keynes: one knew that markets work to give us the best of all possible worlds, while governments create and exacerbate malfunctions; the other imagined that governments were somehow capable of both perceiving and correcting malfunctions by means of the printing press, provided the right technocrats are in charge.
View from the Porch turns six today. Tam is always my first stop in the morning, and for good reason. Apparently the same is true for a lot of other people, too. Here’s to many, many more!
I picked up a copy of Mark Steyn’s After America the other day. I haven’t had time to read it yet, but it’s next on my list. (That stack never seems to get any shorter – stuff just keeps getting piled on top.)
Anyway, I found an interview of Steyn by John Hawkins of Right Wing News that contains today’s QotD:
Yes, this is a 50/50 nation. This is a House divided and as I said in the book, it’s a House divided in really the most fundamental way of all because it’s not about rich versus poor, it’s not about black versus white, it’s not about any of that. It’s about the division about the nature of the state itself which is, I think, the most irreconcilable in a way. One side has to win and one side has to lose. We can’t compromise on this. They are two incompatible visions. One vision is broadly consonant with the American idea as it has existed since its founding. The other, which is that we can live as a large Sweden is an utter delusion. So one of these sides has to win and one has to lose. It’s not clear which is going to come out on top in that 51/49 battle.
But that’s the good news, that there is still something to play for. That puts us ahead of Portugal and Greece and a lot of these other places. The bad news is that if the wrong side wins, it will be a totally different scale of disaster from anything that’s likely to happen to Portugal or Iceland. So in other words, if we win, we win big, but if we lose, we lose big.
Here’s the kicker, though:
I noticed Bermuda already has had a lot of wealthy Americans coming in and buying up old estates and things. But, there is not going to be any place to flee. In the end, they’ll come for Bermuda, in the end they’ll come for Monte Carlo, and in the end you’ll be in Switzerland and they’ll come for you there because America is the order maker on the planet and when America goes, eventually as agreeable as Bermuda is, it slides in, and it takes Bermuda down in its wake. So this is the hill to die on.
One of the greatest lines I get told by so-called moderate Republicans about almost anything you talk about is always, “This isn’t the hill to die on. This isn’t the hill to die on, this isn’t the hill to die on.” You have this conversation with them for two hours and you realize you’re already 15 hills back from where you were. This, America, is the hill to die on. If you cannot defend and save a half millennium of western liberty and progress and prosperity on this hill, there is no other hill to die on anywhere on the planet.
Echos from the depths of 1985:
Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime. False. [The] United States is in a state of war: undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system. And the initiator of this war is not Comrade Andropov, of course. It’s the system. However ridiculous it may sound, [it is] the world Communist system (or the world Communist conspiracy). Whether I scare some people or not, I don’t give a hoot. If you are not scared by now, nothing can scare you.
But you don’t have to be paranoid about it. What actually happens now [is] that unlike [me], you have literally several years to live on unless [the] United States [wakes] up. The time bomb is ticking: with every second [he snaps his fingers], the disaster is coming closer and closer. Unlike [me], you will have nowhere to defect to. Unless you want to live in Antarctica with penguins. This is it. This is the last country of freedom and possibility. — Yuri Bezmenov.
Yes, Bezmenov again. Just because he gave an interview to a Bircher does not mean that he was wrong about the endgame.
From Tam, today:
I swear to Mises, if Ayn Rand had put a scene in Atlas Shrugged where the federal environmental cops were raiding musical instrument manufacturers because they weren’t complying with federal wood-labeling laws, critics would have howled with derision at the fanciful and unrealistic scenarios she was making up to ham-handedly hammer her point home.
This is the part where I am grabbing you by your lapels, shaking you and yelling “Now will you people listen?
Claire Wolfe was wrong. It’s not too early, it’s too late.
And I quoted that so I could quote this:
To be raided, let alone arrested, tried and convicted, for possessing a wood product secondary to the Lacey Act would mean war. Not simply self-defense, but war on as many as could be reached.
Not because it is only wood. Because it is such an egregiously insane and tyrannical use of senseless legislation to manipulate and punish anyone a particular bureaucrat or US Attorney would choose to harass. This is the stuff clock towers were made for, but should actually be saved for accurate targeting of principals, not the senseless killing of innocents. — “Reg T” in a comment at Silicon Graybeard.
Instapundit has updates.
The Gun Blogger Rendezvous is fast approaching – September 8-11. Gun rights lawyer extraordinaire Alan Gura will be joining us again. He will be joined by Chuck Michel, the attorney who successfully defended 16 year-old Gary Tudesko who was expelled from California’s Willows High School when unloaded shotguns were found in his pickup truck which was parked off-campus. Mr. Michel will be speaking about this case at the Saturday dinner.
Sponsorship this year is awesome!
- The History Channel and Top Shot
- Project Appleseed
- Brownell’s
- Cabela’s Reno
- Cowboy Fast Draw Association
- Crimson Trace
- Front Sight Training Institute
- Glock
- GunUp Blogger Network
- Hi-Point Firearms
- J. Dewey Manufacturing
- Leupold
- Lucky Gunner Ammo
- Magnum Shooters Supply
- Midway USA
- National Rifle Association
- National Shooting Sports Foundation
- Otis Technology
- The Packing Rat
- Palomino Valley Gun Club
- Para-USA
- Pro-Ears
- Sage Hill Reno Rustlers
- Sig Sauer
- Smallest Minority (Just some t-shirts)
- Springfield Armory
- Sturm, Ruger, and Co.
- Weatherby
- Western Nevada Pistol League
- Woolrich Tactical
And Bea!
Links cheerfully stolen from True Blue Sam.
This should be the best Rendezvous ever!