Category: Uncategorized

Here’s Another One, Local This Time.

Armed woman sends robber fleeing

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.08.2006

A robber got some spare change and a scare when he threatened a woman in Midtown on Monday morning. The 56-year-old woman was walking near East Fort Lowell Road and North Country Club Road when a man dressed in black approached her and demanded money, said Officer Dallas Wilson, a Tucson Police Department spokesman. The robber implied he had a gun, so the woman complied with his order and gave him $1.50, hoping he would leave, Wilson said. Then, thinking her life was in danger, she drew a Smith & Wesson revolver and pointed it at the robber, who ran away. The woman — whose name was not released by police — had a concealed-weapon permit, Wilson said. “She was in fear for her life and she defended herself appropriately,” he said. Police have no suspects in the case. For more information on concealed-weapon permits, visit the Arizona Department of Public Safety’s Web site at www.dps.state.az.us/ccw.

Adding the contact info for the DPS’s CCW site was a nice touch.

Another Story You’ll Never Hear Coming from the UK.
or “Why a Firearm is the Best Defense”

Cumberland Co. Mother Shoots Home Intruder, Authorities Say

EUREKA SPRINGS, N.C. — An armed intruder confronted with a pregnant Cumberland County mother Tuesday afternoon, allegedly trying to rob her home. The incident ended in a shootout that left the invader dead.

Detectives say 23-year-old Crystal Strickland — 9 months pregnant and mother of two small children — acted in self defense

“He broke into the apartment, she ran into the back bedroom where there were some children in the apartment to defend them, and when he entered into the bedroom area, shots were fired,” said Debbie Tanner with the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office.

Strickland told authorities she did not know the armed man. Her two young girls were taking a nap when the violent encounter happened. The 3-year-old said she wasn’t scared.

“I didn’t get hurt,” she said.

Residents in the area said they have noticed a pattern of break-ins — five in the last month, and most occurring in broad daylight.

“My house got robbed, the side door got kicked in,” said neighbor Shawn Kilbourne. “They took some small things, including a pistol.”

Kilbourne suspects the recent break-ins are related. He said if an armed man busted through his family’s door, he would do the same thing his neighbor did.

Investigators are still trying to determine the identity of the home intruder. Detectives say that the case is still under investigation and when that when it is complete it will be turned over the district attorney who decide whether to file charges.

What other weapon makes a nine-month pregnant woman the physical equal of a healthy male?

Good job, Ms. Strickland. Hopefully the DA isn’t a transplant from New Jersey.

Best of Me Symphony #120.

It’s up at Gary Cruse’s Owner’s Manual – and I have an entry this week: Reasonable People from December. The Symphony is “hosted” by W.B. Yeats, and oddly enough the snippet of poetry selected to go along with my piece I used as the opening of an earlier, related essay, True Believers. The poem is The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Good choice, that.

Give the rest of the Symphony contributors a read. All of the posts are at least 60 days old, and have seasoned with age.

Movie Recommendation.

It’s probably been a couple of months since my wife and I went to a movie. We just got back from one I can enthusiastically recommend – World’s Fastest Indian, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins in one of his best performances (IMHO). Hollywood doesn’t make feel-good movies much anymore, they’d rather shove political correctness down your throat. This is a feel-good movie, (loosely) based on a true story. (Really, this time. No fantasy horse-race that never happened.)

It’s been out for a while, surviving on word-of-mouth. I can’t remember even seeing a TV ad for it.

Go see it, you’ll enjoy it. I promise.

A Strongly Recommended Read.

In association with Birthrates below, I recommend you read Fran Porretto’s piece Gender Wars: The Battle of the Bulge for another aspect on the topic of declining birthrates.

Excerpt:

No, you’re not imagining the tone of disapproval in the above. Miss Hirshman definitely takes the Simone de Beauvoir attitude toward free choice: women who choose to be homemakers and mothers are choosing wrongly. By their free choices — by opting for traditional women’s roles rather than some alternative in the market economy — they’re helping to derail feminism. And the advance of feminism, we must remember, is what really counts, not the happiness of women or the well-being of their children.

That ought to pique your interest…

Jumped the Gun a Bit (so to Speak).

My wife and I got our taxes done today. Between the home refinance, medical expenses, and various and sundry other incidentals, our “non-interest-bearing payroll savings plan” bore considerably more fruit than I had expected. In celebration, I got to buy another firearm!

One of my more recent purchases was my S&W Model 25 Mountain Gun, chambered in .45 Colt. I’ve wanted a companion lever gun chambered in the same round. I got it today.

We went to what my wife refers to as “Caveman’s Warehouse” – the local Sportman’s Warehouse that opened (very) near my house recently. Back at the gun counter, I asked if they had any lever guns chambered in .45LC. The counterman handed me a very nice Henry Big Boy, but it was about $650, which is more than I was willing to pay. Then he said, “I think there’s a Winchester 94 in the back. Let me go look.” Sure enough, there was. A manager, he said, had his eye on it, but hadn’t put it on layaway. It was a “Legacy” version, with a 24″ barrel, curved pistol grip, etc. In fact, it looks just like this:

(Click for super-size.) It has an MSRP of $497. Caveman’s Warehouse wanted $399.

It came home with me! Looks like I bought my BAG day gun a month early. Or my birthday present a couple of days late.

Oops!

Too Much of a Good Thing.

Quote of the day:

I was reminded of a lecture I once attended by the authors of The 60-Minute Orgasm. An attentive older woman in the front row asked, “Do you have anything at around five minutes?”

– Roger Ebert in his review of The Libertine

Birthrates.

(Sorry for the absolute dearth of posting. I’ve been busy, and just as absolutely devoid of interest or inspiration. This threatens to continue, but I’ve got one short post in me today. This one.)

A lot of ink and pixels have been spent recently on the topic of declining birth rates in the Western world – the whys and the wherefores. I admit, I’m a (non-)contributor. I married into “instant family.” My wife had a teenager by a previous marriage, and we are both happy with just one. She divorced when her daughter was five, and had no interest in repeating the motherhood experience, and I was never keen on the idea of kids to begin with. (Grandkids are OK. You get to hand them back once you’ve finished spoiling them.)

I’m your typical American materialistic, selfish sonofabitch.

A post today over at AR15.com caught my attention, though. It illustrates graphically one reason for the decline in birthrates here, anyway:

Cost Of Raising A Baby

My wife and I were on the computer trying to see how much we would spend on the first year of our baby’s life.

Not counting the medical bill for the delivery, I came up with $18,000 for the first 12 months while my wife came up with $16,000. This includes diapers, formula, clothes, baby sitter, nanny, etc.

Hate to see the numbers for 18 years

Various comments, excerpted:

You assume that the childbirth will be normal. My second son showed up two months early and spent a month in neonatal ICU. Bill from hospital: about 80K. Careflight for the wife: about 8k (which is not covered by insurance). If male, insurance doesn’t cover circumcision.
You assume also that your child will have no allergies, such as milk or normal formula or even breastmilk. Price ProSobee or some of the other soy based formulas.
Most professional daycares charge upwards of $150/week for infant care.
What if she has twins?
Recalculate.

—

$600 a month with part time day care and medical expenses.

—

Two biggest expenses are nanny at $720/mo and health insurance at $280/mo.
Thank God he has no medical problems.

—

daycare = 1100/month

why- cause having the wife not work would put us in the poor house.

why- cause we like actually living in a house…

—

I was in this boat 8-months ago when my son was born, we where both working full time good jobs, $20+ an hour. I decided I wanted my son to be raised by his mother, not a stranger, she wanted to continue working some. We agreed that he would go to day care twice a week and she could work two days a week. Luckly she is very good at what she does and they where glad to have her, some places would have let her go.

Anyways her are my expenses:

Diapers $40 a month
Formula $120 a month
Daycare two days a week $352
Ins. $130
Clothing ect. $20
$572 monthly, however if I include my wifes loss in pay it would be $3,200 more a month.
$6,864 yearly in cost
$38,400 in lost pay.

All the comments are not negative, and I’ve edited out the uniform “It’s worth it” addenda to these comments, but the fact remains: If you’re middle-class in this country, having a kid is a major financial burden because of the way we choose to live.

As an aside, I work with two guys with large families. One had six kids naturally. His wife stays at home and homeschools. He makes a reasonable income, but raising six kids on his pay cannot be easy. The other has adopted five. His wife also stays home. His income is better, but I doubt he earns what I do (could be wrong about that) and I’d be hard-pressed to pay for that many.

I imagine this situation is true in most Western nations. If you’re already poor, whether you live in an impoverished country or not, squirting out another kid doesn’t add that much financial burden. In a wealthy, materialistic society, for those with a middle income or higher it does, because we choose for it to. In a welfare society, most of those extra expenses the poor would experience will be offset by government largesse. For the middle classes, they get to carry the burden of designer baby clothes and nannies (and medical insurance) on their own.

Sociologists have noted that societies tend to reduce their birthrates with increasing average wealth, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb notwithstanding. I submit this is the reason why. It has nothing (or at least not much) to do with a lack of hope or the belief in a bleak future, and almost everything to do with a conscious economic decision. The poor can reproduce without much repercussion. The middle class cannot – not if they want to maintain or even improve upon the life to which they’ve become accustomed.

The problem is, as others have noted, our system pretty much requires at least a zero-growth birthrate to sustain it. In many countries, they aren’t keeping up with even that. The result has been an influx of immigrants from (relatively) impoverished nations to fill the vacuum, and these immigrants do breed. And they aren’t assimilating into the host cultures.

And this does not bode well for the near future.

Something to Think About.

War of the Worlds – William S. Lind

I found this at AR15.com. A pullquote to pique your interest:

There is one element of the real Brave New World Huxley missed, and that is ideology. At the heart of the West’s assault on itself, on traditional, Christian, Western culture, is the ideology of cultural Marxism, the civilizational IED planted by Gramsci, Lukacs, and the Frankfurt School. Known most commonly as political correctness or multiculturalism, cultural Marxism holds sway over all Western elites; to deny or contravene it (without groveling apologies) is to cease instantly to be a member of the elite. It has already made vast progress toward its goals of “negation” of Western culture and the “transvaluation of all values” (stolen from Nietzsche), which means simply that the old sins become virtues and the old virtues, sins. Buggery is a fine, normal, high-principled thing, but for God’s sake, don’t smoke.

As summarized by the guy who found it, our choices are:

‘If it feels good, do it.’

‘as-Salamu- ‘Alaikum’

‘When in the Course of Human Events…..’

Quite succinct. Give it a read. I’m interested in your comments.

Submitted for your review:

Rachel Corrie Pancake Breakfast

The Rachel Corrie Memorial Committee of Victoria Invites you to a pancake breakfast at Denny’s Restaurant Sunday March 12 , 2006 10 am.

The Public is invited to a memorial pancake breakfast at Denny’s Restaurant on Douglas Street near Finlayson, 10 am, Sunday March 12, 2006 to celebrate the life and untimely death of Rachel Corrie, Peace Activist with the International Solidarity Movement.

There will be a reading of selections from Ms. Corrie’s letters and diary, followed by a ceremony at Topaz Park, where a stone cairn will be erected in her honour.

Attendees are encouraged to wear their keffiahs, and to dress in black.

No weapons, drugs, or alcohol please.

For those of you with a short memory, Ms. Corrie was the young woman who was protesting the Israeli policy of knocking down the homes of the families of Palestinian terrorists. She died under an Israeli Caterpillar bulldozer.

Some of the comments at the Indymedia site:

Pancake Breakfast
by DK • Sunday March 05, 2006 at 12:38 PM

I know that Corrie got flattened like a pancake by a Killdozer, but is this real? this seems way way way too funny to be real.

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by Che • Sunday March 05, 2006 at 02:05 PM

I saw it in Monday magazine and posted at UVIC and Caosun

Leave your AK-47’s at home. No need to startle The little leaguers and soccer players who will be sharing the park at the same time.

I guess it’s OK to burn tires though.

—

by Spirit of the Wolf • Sunday March 05, 2006 at 09:38 PM

Can I get strawberries and strawberry syrup on those pancakes?

A very fitting tribute visually 😀

There’s more. There’s much more.