Once again, others say it better than I can.
This time it’s Borepatch. Go read.
That is all.
Category: Uncategorized
Out of Airspeed, Out of Altitude, and Damned Near Out of Ideas
And there’s no place to eject to.
Bill Whittle’s latest, “Into the Sea”:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwNn7VlnczQ?rel=0&w=640&h=360]
Perfect analogy.
Hey! That’s Mine!
Yesterday Tam pointed to York Arms’ website where they’re advertising their custom-engraved AR-15 lowers. And this one’s mine!
(Click for full size.)
Hopefully it’s on its way to me now. I have dies and brass, the internal parts kit for the lower, and an A2 buttstock with a recoil pad. I still need a buffer and spring, the Rock River upper, some bullets and some powder, but I’m getting there. Oh, and an optic.
Once a Month Until the Election
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ-4gnNz0vc?rel=0]
Idiocracy
Ex-blogger Jed Baer emailed me today to point to a piece at Sippican Cottage. I won’t even try to excerpt from it. Just… go read.
And weep for our future.
Quote of the Day – Precious Snowflake Edition
I have spent hours explaining an essay’s grammatical, stylistic, and logical weaknesses in the wearying certainty that the student was unable, both intellectually and emotionally, to comprehend what I was saying or to act on my advice. It is rare for such students to be genuinely desirous and capable of learning how to improve. Most of them simply hope that I will come around. Their belief that nothing requires improvement except the grade is one of the biggest obstacles that teachers face in the modern university. And that is perhaps the real tragedy of our education system: not only that so many students enter university lacking the basic skills and knowledge to succeed in their courses — terrible in itself — but also that they often arrive essentially unteachable, lacking the personal qualities necessary to respond to criticism. — The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn, Janice Fiamengo
RTWT
And from the first comment:
Under rational circumstances, you don’t try to teach Algebra to students who have no idea of what number theory is, don’t know fractions etc. I had many a student try to tell me that adding 1/2 to 1/3 equaled 2/5. I swear to G-d this is true. Yet this type of student is graduated from high school to join the rational thinking masses. This really scares me to death. These idiots out number us 200 to 1. They can be told anything and they will believe it. Yes, they have the right to vote. How can these idiots, who can barely read, are ignorant of basic math, watch television for their ideas of the world, love their sex and drugs, be given such a privilege as to decide the destiny of our country?
Because it’s easier to lead them around by the nose than a population that understands the world around them. It’s been the plan for a hundred years, and it’s paying off in unintended ways.
Read the comments, too.
Quote of the Day – Economics Edition
From Les Jones:
In the 1988 presidential elections Lloyd Bentsen said “If you let me write $200 billion a year in hot checks, I’ll give you an illusion of prosperity, too.” Man, those were the days. When you could buy the illusion of prosperity for a mere $200 billion a year.
Nine Years, 3,000,000 Visits
Some time between 9:00and 10:00 MST TSM will receive (according to Sitemeter) it’s 3,000,000th site visit.
That’s chicken feed for a big blog like Instapundit (he probably gets that many hits a month) but for a third-tier gunblog, not too shoddy.
Thanks, y’all.
UPDATE: 9:02 AM
Interestingly, the post the reader landed on came from 2003 – the first year of this blog.
Quote of the Day – Confidence Edition
From Captain Capitalism:
If you recall high school economics or college freshman economics (both were the same, colleges just made you pay extra to re-learn what you did in high school) there were “The Factors of Production.”
These factors were essentially the ingredients you needed in order for a business or an individual to “produce” something. There were originally three of them.
Land – you can produce nothing without at minimum some kind of office space.
Labor – the machines will not only not take over the world, they’ll just sit there unless a human spends his or her time running them.
Capital – Nobody is doing nothing until they get paid. And that includes the people who produce the tools and machines you’ll need to get started.A fourth one was entered as they realized even with the above three, nothing would get produced. You needed a leader. An innovator. A man with the plan.
The entrepreneur.
Since there it was commonly accepted that there are three original, but most likely four real factors of production.
However, I would like to tender a fifth.
I’m doing this not to make things more complicated or to somehow be enshrined in the Economics Hall of Fame, but because our economy today practically proves there is a fifth and final factor of production that is required to produce, but is not accounted for in the current list. That fifth component is:
A future.
RTWT.
And then read my February 2009 post, Confidence.
Oh Great, Now He’ll Be Insufferable!
Those belong to Mr. Completely. Seems he traveled to the Netherlands and won himself an individual Gold and a team Bronze in .22 Rimfire in the European Steel Challenge.
Drop over and give Mike a well-earned congratulations. I wish I could shoot that fast.