Category: Uncategorized

You Go Girl! (Is that sexist?)

Beth Donovan (She Who Will Be Obeyed, wife of John of Argghhhh!) has an OUTSTANDING post up of her story of when she bitch-slapped (sexist?) an idiot Englishman. Too rich.

Hi There! or (Is My Tinfoil Hat on Straight?)

I see that I’ve received another visit from the Department of Justice servers:

You know, something is wrong when a visit like this causes concern, or as someone else said recently, “When was the last time you built a bonfire on a beach, openly drank a beer and the presence of a policeman was absolutely no cause for concern? Hmmm?”

Anyway, welcome! And feel free to browse around. Hope you find it informative and fascinating!

UPDATE, 1/20/04: Once again the Geek with a .45 comes up with an outstanding post on this topic. I get a lot of traffic from .mil, .gov, and .us too, not just usdoj.

Oh, and He Came in THIRD!

This morning Drudge covers Dr. Dean’s, um…, ah…, excessive reaction to his loss in the Iowa Caucus.

My favorite political cartoonist Mike Ramirez of the LA Times commented on the candidate’s anger last week though:

New Hampshire is next.

Should be interesting.

UPDATE: How appropriate! Michele of A Small Victory comments on Dean’s decline, and uses lyrics of popular songs – one of which is a favorite of mine, Billy Joel’s Angry Young Man:

There’s a place in the world for the angry young man

With his working class ties and his radical plans

He refuses to bend, he refuses to crawl,

He’s always at home with his back to the wall.

And he’s proud of his scars and the battles he’s lost,

And he struggles and bleeds as he hangs on the cross-

And he likes to be known as the angry young man.

Ayup.

I. Will. Be. Damned.

Via Instapundit (as if you don’t read him, but you do read me):

CLINTON’S TRIUMPH

I NEVER thought I’d give Bill Clinton a standing ovation. But last week in Qatar I did just that.

Our former president gave the most perfectly pitched, precisely targeted speech I’ve ever heard to a hall filled with Muslim intellectuals and officials. And they listened.

Read the whole thing.

I wondered why we’d heard so very little out of him recently.

He’s apparently not toeing the “QUAGMIRE!” line.

Failure of the Feminists

Apparently, this week is feminism week. (Last week was homosexualism week.) Who knew?

Last Thursday the local lefty rag the Tucson Weekly hit the stands (it’s free, and worth every penny). I read it occasionally to keep an eye on the loony loyal opposition and see what the moonbats have to say, and I found this op-ed by local pundit Connie Tuttle quite amusing. So, over the weekend I sat down and wrote a rebuttal column and submitted it to the editor.

I just got my first rejection letter *sob*. I have gotten three letters-to-the-editor published there before, but this one required a more thorough job.

Right after I fired off my missive, I found this piece on the Curmudgeon’s Corner, The Feminine Mistake, and thought “Great minds….” I then ran across another feminism post by some big-name blogger, but I’ve lost the link.

Anyway, here’s my (regrettably rejected) response to Ms. Tuttle’s philippic:

There are None so Blind…

Connie Tuttle’s January 15 op-ed “Cosmetic Changes” is wrong in so many ways and right in so few. Connie decries: “The so-called accomplishments of the women’s movement are largely illusory and mostly cosmetic,” and holds as evidence the entertainment industry, women’s magazines, and increasing numbers of girls who believe they are too fat. This, she declares, means that society has not improved in any substantial way. No, she complains, the desires of the true-feminist visionaries were supplanted by the desires of the mere power-seekers who wanted “their share of the pie, rather than a new recipe for the pie.” (Was that a sexist reference to baking? I can’t tell any more.)

She goes on to describe her true-feminist utopia: “What these women wanted was a wholesale reshaping of society: a demilitarized society rather than one where teenage girls could be killed alongside their brothers; a society where people were placed before profits; where no child went hungry or without medical care, and where men and women shared their lives free of the generations-old notions of dominance and submission. What these women wanted was a re-telling of history, a new language and a cultural transformation that went far beyond admittance to previously all-male institutions.”

Really? All that? (And why does this description cause me to picture an unsmiling society, all dressed in matching drab gray but perfectly pressed tunics, all working in vast collectives with large, brightly-colored propaganda posters on all the walls? “UNITY!” “EQUALITY!” “JOY!”)

She continues, quoting former Pentagon adviser Daniel Ellsberg: “Perhaps women and their cultural values will save this country from itself,” and then states “…whatever he meant, the fact is women have not saved the country from itself (which is a preposterous idea).”

Why? I thought the true-feminist ideal was exactly that – to save the country, nay – the world, from itself. To reshape the society wholesale, demilitarize it, place “people before profit,” etc, etc, etc. Yet this is a preposterous idea? It seems we have a logical disconnect here.

Connie goes on to complain about how the failure of true-feminism has resulted in the horrible present administration, and anguishes over a female soldier willing to leave her toddler son behind, go to Iraq and serve her imperfect nation in the mistaken belief that she’s doing the right thing to protect her family and her country. No, Connie states, until both our daughters AND our sons are no longer willing to take up arms will we have made progress towards the true-feminist utopia.

“Blindly.” She did say “blindly take up arms.” But I think it is Connie who is blind, and her piece illustrates it. I grew up during the period Connie writes about. I was eleven years old in 1973 when Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs competed in a tennis match. I remember the rampant bigotry of that period when women stood up and demanded to be treated equally. I remember cheering when Billie Jean won, because in my pre-pubescent idealism it was obvious to me that there was nothing a man could do that a woman couldn’t. America was built on the idea of equality, but it was apparent even to a child that women were second class citizens, and that was wrong.

But I’ve grown up now, and things aren’t as simple as I used to think they were. Women and men, regardless of any idealism, are not interchangeable. I’m a step-grandfather now. I have two grandchildren, eleven months apart, one girl and one boy, and they could not be more different. My granddaughter is most emphatically a girl – interested in pretty clothes, make-up, art. My grandson is most emphatically a boy, interested in smashing things, going fast and getting filthy. They have both been raised primarily by my wife, who quit work to provide day-care while their mother tries to earn a living. My wife, no Stepford Martha Stewart, has not forced my granddaughter into the “feminine” mold, and she has done her best to rein in the excesses of my grandson. Mostly, though, she has done an exemplary job of teaching both children that they can do or be anything they want so long as they are willing to work to achieve it.

And I’ve awoken to the fact that men and women aren’t equal, we’re complimentary. Yin and Yang, as Connie said. Ignoring that and trying instead to force us all into some idealist equality mold could lead to nothing good.

Connie’s true-feminist ideal didn’t fail because of the false-feminists. It didn’t fail because greedy corporations co-opted the movement, patted the little ladies on the head and exploited them too. It failed because the true-feminist ideal ignores human nature, and her vision of utopia, like all utopias, was therefore doomed from the start.

Women have made progress as measured by the yardstick of choice. They can now choose to be and choose to do nearly anything they wish, including being fighter pilots or soldiers. (Yet there’s strong resistance to the idea of their choosing to be mothers and homemakers. Odd, that.)

Connie asks: “What kind of success can the women’s movement claim that justifies young mothers adopting the slogans and sentiments of war?” It can claim the success of reason. It can claim the success of involvement. Because it means that women have a real voice and a physical presence in business, in politics, and as in Connie’s case, in media. In LIFE. They have choice that was once denied to them, and that choice includes the right to look at the realities, weigh the options, and reject Connie’s true-feminist ideology with eyes wide open.

That’s not mere cosmetic change, that’s progress – for those able and willing to see.

UPDATE, 1/20/04: See? I told you it was Feminist Week. Meryl Yourish responds to a Daniel Pipes piece on feminism and muslim headwear for women.

It’s good to be on the leading edge of a wave…

UPDATE, 1/22/03: Another related link, this one from ifeminists.net contributor Carey Roberts, entitled: When Family Dissolution Becomes the Law of the Land. Money quote

Fem-socialists, hell-bent on achieving a genderless society, are now scheming to repeat the same disastrous experiment in Western society. Naturally, they are hoping that you not hear the story of family destruction in Soviet Russia.

My comment about identically-dressed drones working in collectives was right on the mark, it seems. (Via Ipse Dixit.)

But You WILL See Things Like THIS in the National Media

Four people, including toddler, fatally shot in Indiana home

GARY, Indiana (AP) — A woman returning from a shopping trip found her young son seriously wounded and his father and a married couple dead in what police believe were drug-related shootings.

The boy, 23-month-old Anthony McClendon Jr., died a few hours later at a Chicago hospital.

Ronyale Hearne, 23, had taken her son to visit his father Friday evening and then went shopping with a cousin, returning just after midnight Saturday.

The women found the door open and came upon Hearne’s son in the arms of Laurice Jones, 47, who was already dead, apparently from multiple gunshot wounds.

—

Deputy Chief Jeff Kumorek said it appeared that someone in the house was processing crack cocaine.

Yes, this was a horrible crime. Yes, it’s most probably national news because of the age of the youngest victim. However, it illustrates something that the anti-gun forces never really seem to want to dwell on: the overwhelming majority of murderers aren’t law-abiding citizens one minute, and slavering killers the next. And their victims often have long criminal records as well.

Murder in this country is tremendously high, without question, but the “gun control safety” effort isn’t directed at the people who commit murder and armed robbery, it’s aimed at John and Jane Q. Public – who are not the perpetrators of, nor the usual victims of homicide.

“But wait!” cry the anti’s, “That means you don’t need all those guns to protect yourself! So, HAH!”

We’re still the victims of burglary, robbery, carjackings, rape. Just because our risk is low, does not make it non-existent. Yet the efforts of the anti-gunners only work to disarm us. As England has proven, disarming the general populace has not stopped the criminally inclined from acquiring weapons up to and including machineguns and hand-grenades, and we’ve got a large population of the criminally inclined.

Are incidents of armed self-defense rare? Statistical aberrations? John Lott says two million people a year use a firearm to defend themselves against a human or an animal attacker. You can take Mr. Lott’s conclusions with a grain of salt (I do), but even at the rock-bottom absolute minimum estimate of 64,000 annual defensive gun uses, that’s 175 a day – and that was only through 1990 – before Florida began the avalanche of states that have adopted “shall-issue” concealed carry. (Edit: Florida’s shall-issue law passed in 1987. The next state to pass it was Virginia in 1988, but modifications of the law continued through 1992) And who would “gun control” disarm? The people who are willing to obey the law, even if it puts them at risk, like the eight victims of this New York City diner shooting, or the victim of this gang rape.

I’m sorry these people died, especially the infant, but the gun was not the cause, and “gun control” would not have saved them.

And we will continue to see incidents like this one in the national news while incidents like the one below will never get beyond the local fishwrap.

UPDATE, 1/21/04: I looked for this map, but couldn’t find it. Thanks to Ravenwood, here it is – the animated Right-to-Carry map, 1986-2004.

I’ve GOTTA Get Me One of THESE!

Click on the image to go to the site that sells them.

Quick! Before they Figure Out What Hit ‘Em!

Which, with Kucinich supporters might be next year, but Publicola has a highly amusing post with links to a clueless Kucinich supporter’s web page. Go read, before they change the pictures.

But This Never Happens, or News the Networks Never Report

From Keepandbeararms.com, dateline McAlester Oklahoma (a shall-issue CCW state):

Combs Gets His Man

As Longtown resident Bruce Combs prepared to pull his pickup off Kiamichi Street onto State Highway 9, he noticed something unusual.

Combs had stopped to let a truck and trailer heading west on Highway 9 go by before he pulled on the road.

Watching the approaching vehicle through the early-morning darkness last Sunday, Combs started to wonder about the other driver.

“The driver had his lights off; I thought that was odd,” Combs said. He also thought the trailer looked kind of familiar.

Then, as the truck and trailer by him passed by, Combs suddenly realized why the trailer seemed so familiar to him.

“He drove by and I thought ‘Hey, that’s my trailer!'” Combs said.

Combs recognized the trailer as the C&C Quality Building trailer he had left parked at his store, Longtown Texaco.

Priority #1 – PAY ATTENTION

Already fed up after previous break-ins at the store, Combs swung his pickup behind the other driver. He tried to call 911, but wasn’t sure if there was a link to Longtown so he wasn’t surprised when that didn’t work.

He attempted to contact the police but was unsuccessful. HAD he contacted police, the response time would probably have been several minutes, as this was apparently a rural area.

As you can see, Longtown is pretty far from both Tulsa and OK City.

As the driver in front of him started to pick up speed, Combs threw the phone in his pickup seat, pulled into the passing lane and grabbed a pistol he carried with him.

“I pulled up next to him and yelled at him to pull over,” Combs said. When the other driver ignored him, the determined Combs hit the gas pedal and quickly swerved his pickup in front of the other vehicle.

“He pulled off the highway” and into the parking lot of a nearby restaurant, Combs said.

With both vehicles stopped, Combs said he jumped out of his pickup and leveled his pistol at the other driver.

“I said ‘Get out of your truck and keep your hands where I can see them,'” Combs recalled. He said he also ordered a woman who was with the driver out of the truck. He let a boy with them remain inside the vehicle, he said.

Note that Mr. Combs did not let the evil brain-melting rays from his handgun cause him to gun down the man, woman and boy. Nobody was shot. Nobody died. Mr. Combs performed his civilian duty to stop a crime in progress.

The other driver tried to negotiate, according to Combs.

“He said ‘I’ll take your trailer back,’ and I said ‘No, you won’t,'” Combs recalled.

“I told him to keep his hands up. He had on a long black leather coat and he kept putting his hands down and I couldn’t see his left hand, so I fired a shot into the ground” Combs said. “He quit doing it after that.”

Once again, Mr. Combs neither injured nor killed anyone. His handgun is obviously defective.

Combs called the Pittsburg County Sheriff’s Department. He said Deputy Dave Grider, who was in the area, made it to the scene in a few minutes.

Good thing. Though I imagine that when you reach the police and tell them “I’m holding a guy at gunpoint!” they tend to move just a bit faster than if you tell them “He’s driving away with my trailer!”

Grider arrested the other driver, identified as Everett Whittaker, 33, of Pryor, who has been charged with grand larceny and second-degree burglary.

The sheriff’s department then launched an investigation that led to the recovery of an estimated $75,000 in stolen property.

1 Alert, prepared citizen + 1 handgun = 1 crime-in-progress stopped + 1 multiple offender captured + $75k in stolen property recovered. Good job, Mr. Combs.

Combs and others are now thinking of beefing up a neighborhood watch program in Longtown.

“We’re going to see if we can get some people together,” he said.

And, I’d imagine, more than a few of the members will have firearms.

But, we’re told, guns are useless in the hands of citizens. We should give them up and instead rely on the State for our protection. This kind of incident never happens, or we’d hear about it on the nightly news.