A Feature, Not A Bug

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When George F. Will delivered the keynote speech at the Cato Institute’s 2010 Milton Friedman Prize dinner, (an excellent speech, BTW) among other things he said this:

The Wall Street Journal this morning announced with a sort of breathless surprise that about 80% of the American people disapprove of congress. Raising a fascinating question: who are the 20%?

It is a sign of national health that Americans still think about Washington the way they used to talk about the old Washington Senators baseball team, when the saying was “Washington: first in war, first in peace and last in the American League.” Back then they were run, the Senators were, by a man named Clark Griffith who said, “The fans like home runs, and we have assembled a pitching staff to please our fans.”

That is why the American people do not mind what they are instructed by their supposed betters to mind, that is the so-called problem of gridlock. Ladies and gentlemen gridlock is not an American problem, it is an American achievement. When James Madison and fifty-four other geniuses went to Philadelphia in the sweltering summer of 1787, they did not go there to design an efficient government, the idea would have horrified them. They wanted a safe government to which end they filled it with blocking mechanisms. Three branches of government. Two branches of the legislative branch. Veto. Veto override. Supermajorities. Judicial review. And yet I can think of nothing the American people have wanted intensely and protractedly that they did not eventually get.

The world understands. A world most of whose people live under governments they wish were capable of gridlock, that we always have more to fear from government speed than government tardiness. We are told that one must not be a party of “NO.” To “NO” I say an emphatic “YES!” For two reasons. The reason that almost all “improvements” make matters worse is that most new ideas are false. Second: the most beautiful five words in the English language are the first five words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law.”

On Sunday the Washington Post reported, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger:

According to congressional records, there have been fewer than 60 public laws enacted in the first 11 months of this year, so below the previous low in legislative output that officials have already declared this first session of the 113th Congress the least productive ever. In 1995, when the newly empowered GOP congressional majority confronted the Clinton administration, 88 laws were enacted, the record low in the post-World War II era.

Mark Twain is quoted as saying: “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.“ Will Rogers said: “This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”

Gridlock is a FEATURE, not a BUG.

Quote of the Day – Tam Again Edition

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What can I say?  She’s the Empress of Snark™

I’m not sure whether the Canadian government gave it up for dashingly goateed Uncle Sam like a roofie’d lumberjack in a lonely logging camp or whether the NSA figured out that the master password for the OHIP was still set as “PASSWORD”, but there you go.

Whole battalions of radical Islamic terrorists might be coming across the southern border hidden inside the bales of marijuana, but we’re stopping that invasion of depressed Canadian paraplegics cold, right in its Little Rascal-ridin’ tracks.

Still Playing over at Quora.com

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Someone left this question:

What are the pros and cons for a national gun registry in the United States?

I left this answer:

One of my favorite quotes is “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice.  In practice, there is.”

Theoretically, a gun registry makes perfect sense.  In practice, it does not.

There are an estimated 300 million firearms in private hands in the United States.  Very few jurisdictions require firearm or even gun owner registration, so no one except the current owners know where the overwhelming majority of these guns are or who they belong to.  Guns are durable items.  The oldest one I personally own was made in 1918.  It still works fine.  I doubt the record of its manufacture still exists – that is, I don’t think anyone knows to even look for it.

So, for one thing, the sheer size of the task is overwhelming.

Canada recently attempted a “long gun registry” – a registry of all rifles and shotguns in the country.  (They already had a handgun registry.)  They estimated that there were about 8 million long guns in private hands.  Legislators were told that the registry would cost something like $119 million to implement, with $117 million of the cost covered by registration fees – so for $2 million, they’d be able to register all 8 million guns, and it would go quickly.

The law passed in 1995, with licensing starting in 1998 and all long guns were to be registered by January 1, 2003.  By 2000, it was obviously not going according to theory.  Registrations were backlogged and riddled with errors, and costs were WAY over estimates.  An audit in December of 2002 showed that costs were going to exceed $1 billion by 2005, with an income from registration fees of only $145 million.

And then there was the lack of compliance.  By January 1, 2003, only about 65% of the estimated 8 million firearms were registered, and there was no reason to believe that the other 35% were going to be.

Finally in 2012 Canada scrapped its long-gun registry, after dumping an estimated $2 billion into it.  It solved no crimes, it apparently prevented no crimes, and it took vast quantities of money and manpower away from law enforcement with its implementation.

This is not an isolated incident.  Something very similar occurred in New Zealand.  They abandoned their long-gun registry in 1983.

Extrapolate that to the U.S, where the overwhelming majority of gun owners believe the Second Amendment’s “shall not be infringed” clause actually means something.  Our firearm pool is 37 times larger than Canada’s.  Our population is far more likely to disobey such a law, or creatively mess with it.

There’s a thing they teach in Officer Candidate School in the military – “Never give an order you know will not be obeyed.”  Trying to implement a national registry in the U.S. is a non-starter.  There are no “pros” for this idea.

I love a target-rich environment!

Praising with Apocalyptic Damns

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Sorry, had to come out of hiatus for THIS Quote of the Day.  Former Enron Adviser Paul Krugman on Obamacare:

…we’re probably heading for a turning point in the health reform discussion. Conservatives are operating on the assumption that it’s an irredeemable disaster that they can ride all the way to 2016; but the facts on the ground are getting better by the day, and Obamacare will turn into a Benghazi-type affair where Republicans are screaming about a scandal nobody else cares about.

He said it, I didn’t.

Remember Benghazi? Of course you don’t.  The media has decided it’s a non-issue, which is what Krugman is counting on.  But the internet never forgets:


But if that’s Krugman’s best-case scenario for Obamacare, then it’s really, really bad.

Ammo by the Pound

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Here’s a sale I can get behind!  (Yes, I’m aware that some people have a problem with Ammoman.com having to do with an SKS rifle that was supposedly a “bring-back” that wasn’t.  I don’t have first-hand knowledge of this, and my dealings with the site have always been good.)

Ammoman.com is having an “ammo by the pound” sale:

More often than we’d like, we pull ammo off the delivery truck from a manufacturer and we find blemishes or damage to the packaging itself. Often, it’s nothing major. Maybe the corner of the box was torn or the logo of the ammunition maker was scraped so it’s just not as pretty as what you’d expect.

The rounds are good, the cases are undamaged, and the rounds will function properly but nobody wants to get a banged up box of ammo when they’re paying full price. So, we’re generally forced to scrap the ammo. Our guys take it out of the box, toss the rounds into a barrel, and pile up in the corner calling it “waste”.

We don’t have a ton of it, but it’s been collecting in our warehouse for years and it could be making somebody’s guns really happy. These rounds need a home.

While it would take us years to separate the full metal jacket range rounds from the hollow-point self-defense rounds but we could easily find a way to sort the calibers.

The boys in the warehouse went to work and found a solution.

They bought a few shell sorters and separated out all the calibers and then hand-checked to ensure the sort was done properly. Combined, it’s a lot of ammo in a wide range of calibers. We’re talking thousands of rounds ranging from 9mm to .22 long rifle, to 5.56×45 NATO.

What that means is we have bins of various known calibers unsorted by grain or bullet type. For example, our 9mm round bins contain rounds ranging from full metal jacket to jacketed hollow point, 115 grain to 147 grain, all mixed together in a bit of a hodge-podge. To sort it would cost thousands of dollars but we’d rather pass the savings on to shooters.

From there, each caliber was bagged and placed inside a 30 Cal Plano or 50 Cal ammo can. Now, we have a limited inventory of these rounds available for a price that’s extremely competitive and likely better than what you’ll find anywhere else.

Check it out.  The sale goes live at midnight Thursday night/Friday morning.

UPDATE:  12:00AM EST and the Ammoman.com website was obviously made by the same people who did Healthcare.gov!  Somehow I don’t think I’m going to get to order any 9mm tonight.

UPDATE: 12:22AM EST Aaaand it’s gone!

Quote of the Day – Daniel Hannan Edition

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Daniel Hannan is a member of the EU Parliament representing South East England for the Conservative Party.  He’s authored a new book, Inventing Freedom:  How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World and has written a short piece for The Telegraph that Billy Beck pointed to on Facebook.

Here’s today’s QotD from that piece:

We are still experiencing the after-effects of an astonishing event. The inhabitants of a damp island at the western tip of the Eurasian landmass stumbled upon the idea that the government ought to be subject to the law, not the other way around. The rule of law created security of property and contract, which in turn led to industrialisation and modern capitalism. For the first time in the history of the species, a system grew up that, on the whole, rewarded production better than predation.

Savor that last line:  

“For the first time in the history of the species, a system grew up that, on the whole, rewarded production better than predation.”

And now, after centuries of this, we’re descending back to predation through crony capitalism and “too big to fail” businesses.

Requiescat in Pace

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Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert cartoon documentary strip, recently wrote a scathing post on his blog.  Excerpt:

I hope my father dies soon.

And while I’m at it, I might want you to die a painful death too.

I’m entirely serious on both counts.

My father, age 86, is on the final approach to the long dirt nap (to use his own phrase). His mind is 98% gone, and all he has left is hours or possibly months of hideous unpleasantness in a hospital bed. I’ll spare you the details, but it’s as close to a living Hell as you can get.

If my dad were a cat, we would have put him to sleep long ago. And not once would we have looked back and thought too soon.

Because it’s not too soon. It’s far too late. His smallish estate pays about $8,000 per month to keep him in this state of perpetual suffering. Rarely has money been so poorly spent.

I’d like to proactively end his suffering and let him go out with some dignity. But my government says I can’t make that decision. Neither can his doctors. So, for all practical purposes, the government is torturing my father until he dies.

I’m a patriotic guy by nature. I love my country. But the government? Well, we just broke up.

And let me say this next part as clearly as I can.

If you’re a politician who has ever voted against doctor-assisted suicide, or you would vote against it in the future, I hate your fucking guts and I would like you to die a long, horrible death. I would be happy to kill you personally and watch you bleed out. I won’t do that, because I fear the consequences. But I’d enjoy it, because you motherfuckers are responsible for torturing my father. Now it’s personal.

It goes on that way a bit longer, concluding with a post script announcing that Scott’s father had passed a few hours after he wrote the post.

I sincerely hope I never get to the point that Scott’s father did – mind “98% gone” and in agony.  I hope to keep my faculties about me as long as I can, so that I get to decide when I check out, government be damned.

The modern version of the Hippocratic Oath goes:

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.

I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery.

I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

The part I’ve emphasized in bold is the one where the .gov should butt the hell out and let doctors and the patient, or in cases like Scott’s father, the patient’s family, decide when enough is enough and the point of “therapeutic nihilism” has been reached.

I understand the “slippery slope to euthanasia” argument – I’m a gun-control opponent. OF COURSE I understand “slippery slope” arguments, but the fact remains that we treat people at the end of life worse than we treat our pets.

Quote of the Day – “Junk-on-the-Bunk” Edition

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Some time back, the Empress of Snark™ quipped:

It’s good to have goals. Mine is that, when they finally come after me for felony jaywalking or confuse my address with the crack house two blocks down, and in the aftermath spread all my stuff on bedsheets in the front yard, I want the kids on the intarw3bz gun boards to look at that junk-on-the-bunk display and say “Wow, that is an arsenal.”

But that’s not the QotD.

The latest news in the world is that George Zimmerman, the man who actually had to use a firearm in self-defense, and was found not guilty of murder by a jury of his peers after a modern-day media witch-hunt, is now in trouble on a domestic violence charge. The judge in the case demanded that Mr. Zimmerman surrender his firearms during the course of the legal proceedings.

Mediaite reports:

Following George Zimmerman’s recent arrest for alleged domestic abuse against girlfriend Samantha Scheibe, police conducted a search of the house where the couple had been staying that uncovered a large cache of weapons and ammunition.

What constitutes a “large cache” in the eyes of the Mediaite reporter?

Three handguns
One 12-gauge shotgun
One AR-15 rifle
106 rounds of ammunition, including two AR-15 magazines

Now, Mr. Zimmerman is only 30 years old, so he hasn’t had a lot of time to acquire much of a junk-on-the-bunk collection, but honestly – that’s pretty pathetic. I know there’s been a recent drought, but only two AR-15 magazines? Really?

I told you that so I could tell you this: Today’s Quote of the Day – the first comment to Popehat’s post on it is:

Jesus! That’s enough ammunition for the NYPD to shoot two people! — Ken White

Where would you like your internets delivered, Mr. White?

(h/t to SayUncle for the Popehat link.)