The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
This year it’s in Houston, May 3-5. I’ve missed the last two three, but Houston is close enough to drive to. (15 hours from Tucson, just like Reno.) So, if you’re going, where will you be staying? I’d like to be in the same hotel with as many other bloggers as I can. Please let me know in comments or by email. Thanks.
UPDATE: I’m staying at the Hampton Inn by the Galleria. I’ll at least get to meet up with JayG!
Now I just have to get my media credentials.
From the InstaProf:
Gun control is a culture-war effort to rub middle America’s nose in the fact that the world is run by its betters. Any actual improvement in public safety is of no concern at all.
From Snarky Posters:
This goes along with today’s QotD.
From Robert Avrech:
Yes, we eager students studied history, literature and art. But soon enough it became clear to me that a massive amount of time was spent on Marxist theory, a material view of the world. Still observant, still wearing a yarmulke, I would ask about religion, about the spirit. With deep condescension, my professors informed me that we live in a post-religious world. Religion, I was lectured, was the opiate of the people.
I wondered, but never had the courage to suggest, that perhaps Marxism was the opiate of the elites.
Fûz over at WeckUpToThees! has a timely post up, …you joined the NRA. Give it a read.
I’ll add only one thing: The Second Amendment Foundation. The NRA and the various state-level organizations fight in the legislatures. The SAF fights in the courts. And we need to be hitting on ALL fronts.
Remember, the new evil capacity is EIGHT!
And yes, THAT is a CLIP.
As others do it better and faster than I.
Obama’s “23 Commandments”? Phelps dissects them perfectly.
And here I was thinking that Obama was going to, you know, DO SOMETHING!
Oh, and this.
Honestly, I ought to just reproduce the whole piece, but from Roger Kimball’s Wall Street Journal column This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit, I have selected this excerpt as QotD:
In “The Road to Serfdom,” Friedrich Hayek noted that “the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.”
And how. But what makes the phenomenon so insidious is that many of the functionaries are as friendly as can be. It’s just that they’re cogs in a machine whose overriding purpose is not service but self-perpetuation and control.
It is, as Alexis de Tocqueville saw, a recipe for a form of despotism peculiar to modern democracies. It does this, wrote Tocqueville, by enforcing “a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules” that reduces citizens “to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” The sobering thought is that we’re all complicit in that infantilization. After all, we keep voting for the politicians who put this leviathan in place.
RTWFT.
I would say “unbelievable,” but it is, in fact, all too believable.
Sorry, haven’t been cranking the free ice-cream machine much recently. Been fighting off the creeping crud, and surrendered to it on Friday. Spent most of the weekend asleep. Now my wife has it worse than I did/do. I’m still not quite over it.
Bleh.
Maybe later….
So Florida Senator Bill Nelson has posted a survey on his .gov homepage asking “Would you favor reinstating the federal assault weapons ban that expired in 2004?” Of course I had to register my vote. But when the results popped up, I was certain I was at a .gov website:
If you can’t read that, it says 23 votes “Yes,” 27 votes “No,” total votes 1745.
So apparently no one on the Senator’s staff can find a real online poll service? Or is this just to prevent the Senator’s embarrassment when the actual results come back 3:1 against reinstating the ban?
Yeah, your .gov at work for sure.
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UPDATE: Somebody finally got it working. At this time, 4,398 votes – 4319 “No,” 67 “Yes,” and 12 “No Opinion.” Oh, and that’s 64.5:1