Category: Uncategorized

Quote of the Day – Lines from Fiction Edition

KevinLeave a comment

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.

Quote of the Day – Mark Steyn Edition

KevinLeave a comment

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.

Quote of the Day – Atlas is Pissed Edition

KevinLeave a comment

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.

Time’s Running Out!

KevinLeave a comment

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!

And Bea!

Links cheerfully stolen from True Blue Sam.

This should be the best Rendezvous ever!

A “Chilling Effect”

KevinLeave a comment

In my long discussion with Australian computer science professor Tim Lambert on the topic of self-defense in the UK, I finally got him to admit that the laws there had a “chilling effect” on the willingness of residents of that polity to defend themselves against attack. Of course, that was our fault for pointing out the vagaries of the Crown Court’s prosecution policies.

Using UK newspaper stories.

Well, here’s another illustration of that chilling effect:

Before Monday (August 8) evening’s events there were warnings that Turkish shopkeepers in Tottenham were forming “protection units” to stop their businesses being looted, while retailers in nearby Wood Green were said to have equipped themselves with crowbars and other weapons after holding emergency meetings.

When the trouble came, hairdressers, sales assistants and butchers were among the scores of Turkish and Kurdish workers who stood outside their businesses in Green Lanes, Haringey, from 8pm having been warned by police to expect trouble.

The Guardian filmed others – some armed with baseball bats – on guard outside shops and restaurants in Kingsland Road, only a mile away from Hackney’s burning high street. Three workers from Re-Style Hairdressers were among those out in Green Lanes, after word spread that an attack was imminent at about 4pm.

“I was here with my brother and my boss waiting for them until about midnight,” said 16-year-old Huseyin Beytar. “If some guy ever breaks a window in this street, all the Turkish Kurdish people come down to protect the shops. We’re like a family.”

“We have to do things for ourselves,” said Huseyin. “We have to look after each other. If they come here tonight there will be a fight, a big fight.”

“We were outside ready and expecting them,” said the manager of Turkish Food Market, who asked not to be named.

“But I felt very panicky because we are not safe from either the rioters or police.

“We put all of our efforts into this shop. It took 20 years to get it like this. But we do not know about our rights.

“I’m scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses.

“We are being squeezed between the two.”

(My emphasis.)  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is not the fault of the people pointing out what the government does to its own citizens.

The Top 100

KevinLeave a comment

So NPR did a “top 100 fantasy and sci-fi” book list as voted on by their audience.  It was picked up as a meme by a chunk of the blogosphere, including here.  At almost every site the complaint was the same – “They picked that? There’s no mention of (x)!”

So here’s your opportunity.  In the comments, leave your top 10 favorite fantasy and/or sci-fi novels or series.  They don’t need to be in order.  Assuming this draws enough response, I’ll try to combine all the responses into a real “top 100.”  I think the TSM audience is a much better population sample for something like this.

I’ll go first.

1.  The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein

2.  Starship Troopers – Robert A. Heinlein

3.  Dune – Frank Herbert

4.  The General series – David Drake, S.M. Stirling – the original quintilogy, not the three follow-ons.

5.  The Vorkosigan saga – Lois McMaster Bujold

6.  The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I – this is cheating, but it is a book I re-read, and I went to a lot of effort to get a copy when one I loaned out never came back.  This is where I first read Flowers for Algernon, and it is by far not the best story in that anthology.

7.  The Hammer’s Slammers series – David Drake

8.  The Ring of Fire series – Eric Flint & others.  I also enjoy the Dies the Fire flip-side of this universe.

9.  The Nantucket series – S.M. Stirling

10.  The Past Through Tomorrow:  A Future History – Robert A. Heinlein.  Another anthology, but this one is all Heinlein.

I discovered Sci-Fi at about age 11 – Heinlein’s juveniles.  When I was 13 or so, I found The Science Fiction Hall of Fame in the school library.  That was it.  I was hooked for life.  Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and everything else Heinlein wrote followed.  Also Azimov, Clark, etc., though honestly I like Azimov’s nonfiction better than his fiction.  While Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell are not represented on this list, I do love their stuff. The Mote in God’s Eye and Footfall are favorites, I just don’t find myself re-reading them.

This list represents the books that I re-read on a relatively regular basis – books I’ve literally worn out and had to replace.  I read a lot of other stuff, both fiction and non-fiction, but Sci-Fi is my preferred genre.  SF can be anything, from pulp to high literature, bodice-ripper to deepest, darkest horror.  Science Fiction is the ultimate “what-if?”

One more:

11.  Empire of the East – Fred Saberhagen.

So, what are yours?