PJTV: Chicago Murder Rate Proves That Liberals Do Not Care About Gun Deaths:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIgJMoXOSes?rel=0]
And “gun control” isn’t about guns, it’s about CONTROL.
Month: January 2013
Quote of the Day – Taki’s Mag Edition
Wherein the editors tell us how they really feel:
Trying to rein in Leviathan is somehow depicted as “obstructionist.” One must never obstruct the bloody beast. One must continue tossing raw meat into its maw. Anyone who stands in the beast’s way is full of “hate” and “anger.” We know who the problem is here, right? It’s those Tea Party redneck rural paint-huffing Bible-thumping cousin-humping bigots who aren’t like we are and whose chief sin is that they don’t like people who are different than they are. We all know it’s a scientific fact that those people are only against abortion because they prefer the taste of newborn babies.
The average naïve and uninformed American seems to believe that a politician’s main role is to care about his or her feelings. As long as the words sound vaguely compassionate and the soundtrack is uplifting, they’ll swallow whatever ball of honey-coated dung that politicians feed them. In truth, politicians care about us so much, they even indenture the unborn to lifetime financial servitude.
If you oppose taxing the lifeblood out of the people until their bodies are dried-up like beef jerky, well, you’re obviously a racist. Not that there’s any correlation. There doesn’t need to be a correlation in a world where feelings trump facts.
I Already Liked Jeremy Clarkson…
…but now I want to build a shrine to him. And I now understand why Piers Morgan moved to the U.S.
Clarkson punched him.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_2ZsMFY0fg?rel=0]
And doesn’t want him back.
George F. Will on Religion and Politics
Former Blogger Jed Baer sent me an email New Year’s Eve with a link to a recent speech given by George F. Will at St. Louis’ Washington University for their John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. I respect Mr. Will quite a bit, having quoted him numerous times on this blog including the entire text of his keynote speech at the Cato Institute’s biennial Milton Friedman Prize dinner from May of 2010. I won’t do that again, even though I have much better PDF version of this speech from which to work than I had of the previous one. No, this time I’ll just embed the video.
Mr. Will explains that he is “secular,” by which I assume he means small-“a” atheist or agnostic, but his defense of religion in America had me nodding along throughout the speech. If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend the speech and Q&A that follows:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbA5ab18SCo?rel=0]
I will excerpt a short bit, though, to whet your appetite:
When people today speak of nature, they generally speak of flora and fauna, of trees and animals and other things not human. But the Founders spoke of nature as a guide to and and a measure of human action. They thought of nature not as something merely to be manipulated for human convenience, but rather as a source of norms to be discovered. They understood that natural rights could not be asserted, celebrated and defended unless nature, including human nature, is regarded as a normative rather than a merely contingent fact.
This was a view buttressed by the teaching of biblical religion, that nature is not chaos, but rather it is the replacement of chaos reflecting the mind and will of the Creator. This is the creator who endows us with natural rights, that are inevitable, inalienable, and universal, and hence the foundation of democratic equality. And these natural rights are the foundation of limited government, government defined by the limited goal of securing those rights so that individuals may flourish in the free and responsible exercise of those rights.
A government thus limited is not in the business of imposing its opinions about what happiness or what excellence the citizens should choose to pursue. Having such opinions is the business of other institutions, private and voluntary institutions, especially religious ones that supply the conditions of liberty. Thus the Founders did not consider natural rights reasonable because religion affirmed them, rather the Founders considered religion reasonable because it secured natural rights.
There may, however, be a cultural contradiction in modernity. The contradiction is that while religion can sustain liberty, liberty does not necessarily sustain religion. This is of paramount importance because the seminal importance of the Declaration of Independence.
And he goes on to explain why.
Worth your ninety minutes.
Fracking Hollywood
A while back, I chipped in some cash so that the documentary FrackNation could be finished. Well, it’s finished:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqRyyzoARJo?rel=0]
Yup, it’s going to be on cable, on AXS TV. I’ll DVR it. Should be interesting when compared to Matt Damon’s oil-money-funded feature drama Promised Land.
UPDATE: And they’ve upped the ante with respect to Promised Land:
Accompanied by this photo:
Movieline.com attended on a panel discussion about “Promised Land” featuring Damon and reported that Damon said the movie wasn’t political.
“I don’t want to call Matt Damon a liar but he’s a liar, really,” McAleer said. “It’s a deeply political movie and it’s deeply disingenuous for Matt Damon to say otherwise. … Matt Damon isn’t telling the truth.”
Quote of the Day – Astute Observation Edition
In a sane nation, “Contempt of Congress” would not be a crime. It would be a Pulitzer Prize category. – Jim @ The Travis McGee Reader
Or a Nobel Prize category….
Just sayin’.
FORWARD!
From The People’s Cube:
Quote of the Day – Rachel Lucas Edition
Rachel starts the year off right with the title to her post, which I made QotD:
Thank God our heroic president spent more than three million dollars of our money to heroically help our heroic Congress heroically do exactly shit-all.
After the title, she really gets going.
Read it all, and all the links. Quoting Rachel again:
When I encounter people in conversation who acknowledge the set of facts about what’s happening in the Western world right now and then say, “Meh, bah, blah blah, there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m just going to enjoy my life,” I literally – I do mean literally – almost burst into tears because it feels so hopeless and frustrating if even the most reasonable of us flat-out do not give a shit. I actually have burst into tears when certain people very close to me have offered those rhetorical shoulder-shrugs.
Sorry to be so pessimistic. Last thing I want is for this blog to become depressing for anyone who likes it. It’s just that I read all that insanity about the fiscal cliff “deal” today, and then a trainload of terrifying anti-2nd Amendment rhetoric by fascists dressed in sheep’s clothing, and then two pieces by the excellent historian and writer Victor Hanson Davis, and I’m ready to offer a cash reward for anyone who can convince me that America as we’ve known it is not irretrievably gone.
I’ve got nothin’ else for you today.
2012 TSM Year in Review
I’ve done this every January 1st since 2007, but I almost skipped it this year. I think burnout is getting to me. But I decided to do it anyway, so here we go.
January brought the single most popular post here ever. My dad sent me the link in an email, and since I put it up on January 11 (according to Google Analytics) it’s drawn 396,497 hits: That’s not Recoil, THIS is RECOIL. And 144 comments without a peep from Markadelphia. Yup, a YouTube video. Somebody ELSE’s YouTube video.
In February another YouTube video post became the #2 all-time traffic draw with 129,711 hits so far and counting: THIS Might Make Me Want to Try Shotgunning. Why do I bother with überposts?
In March, we lost another blogger. Newbius passed away. I know more people online who have died than I know in meatspace, and as I get older that list gets longer. The first death of an online personality that really affected me was when Acidman passed in June of 2006. Rob Smith is, in a way, responsible for the existence of this blog. But it’s still a shock when someone known to you is no longer there. Fair winds to them all.
I had another very popular post – again, someone else’s work – when I posted the story of J. David Phillips and his last-ditch self-defense: The .25ACP and “Stopping Power”
April brought us the conclusion of the GOP primary race, and the Quote of the Year that predicted, somewhat, the outcome in November:
Given how the GOP field has been winnowed, this has really just been a race to determine the form Gozer the Traveler takes.
So this just means the giant Sloar is off the table and means is we’re looking between the moving Torb and the Staypuff Marshmellow man.— Jack
And, of course, the accompanying T-Shirt. Also in April, I drank the Kool-Aid and bought an M&P9.
Speaking of traditions, May 1 is now Victims of Communism Day. I intend to commemorate it every year. I bought a new AR lower. Those are thin on the ground these days. And TSM turned nine years old and drew its 3,000,000th visitor, and that ain’t bad.
Instead of original content (who reads that?) in June I posted a series of Quotes of the Day from educator John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education. Twelve of them, in fact.
In July, the Supreme Court ruled on the Constitutionality of Obamacare. A 5-4 decision, written by Chief Justice Roberts, said it was. I took exception.
I was introduced to the concept of “hyperindividualism.” And finally, on the event of Milton Friedman’s 100th birthday, I posted a video of an excellent speech he gave in 1978 at the University of Chicago. I strongly recommend you watch it.
In relation to that video, in early August I posted a Quote of the Day in apposition to one from the video illustrating the ongoing decline Friedman warned about, preceded the previous day by a QotD that illustrates why I think this is happening. Meanwhile in Sarah Brady Paradise, their criminals have apparently started using hand-grenades. I thought that only happened in Mexico. How’s that gun control (on an island no less) working out for them?
September brought the Seventh Annual Gun Blogger Rendezvous, but this year instead of driving, I got to fly up. In a Cessna 310. Still haven’t won a gun there, though. And over in Sarah Brady Paradise, a cop-killer used a hand-grenade in the double-murder of two female Bobbys. And Markadelphia returned to the comment threads. If you see a post with 50+ comments, chances are Markadelphia is in it at least once.
October brought us a preview of coming attractions I thought should be shared, and another from closer to home. I finally concluded that Anthropogenic Global Warming Climate Change is bullshit based on the evidence in hand. And I made my grandson a kick-ass Halloween costume.
November. Ah yes, November. I think the country reached the point of no return in November. Honestly, it happened long before November, but the election ended any speculation on the question. As I said, OUR Austerity Riots are going to be SPECTACULAR!
And finally, December. First post of the month, How We “Lost the Culture War.” Not an überpost, but I’ve kinda lost my enthusiasm for those. There was some good news – Illinois’ ban on concealed carry was found unconstitutional. And we had another mass shooting, this time involving twenty dead first-graders. For the gun-banners, they couldn’t have dreamed of a better pool of blood to dance in. But Newtown, Connecticut is not Dunblane, Scotland. America’s response? There’s not an AR-15 left on a gun store shelf, nor a standard-capacity magazine to fit one. Seven thousand AR-15 rifles sold in Arizona in ten days, according to the Arizona State Rifle & Pistol Association.
SPECTACULAR, I tell you.
2013? Maybe there’s something behind Triskaidekaphobia after all.
Happy New Year, y’all.
New Years Wishes
I bestow upon you, my readers, my fondest and most fervent wishes that 2013 will not be the whirling vortex of suck and fail I expect it to be. Party hard, be safe, and awake tomorrow with no hangover.
(And I wonder why I never get invited to parties…..)