The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Given yesterday’s announcement that the Obama administration needs to engage in a “War on Coal,” I was amused by an Instapundit reader’s comment:
Given the success of the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, if I’m Big Coal, I’m praying for a War on Coal.
This goes well with yesterday’s QotD, which concluded:
…in government, failure is an exciting excuse to ask for more funding or more power.
Can I get an “AMEN!”?
Texas to Pay Sportsmen to Hunt Hogs
There are an estimated five million feral pigs in the United States, half of which are located in the Lone Star State. Texas already spends $7 million on their hog management programs but experts say that is not enough to prevent the population from tripling in the next five years. To keep the pigs under control, the state will have to eliminate nearly 66 percent of the swine every year. For comparison, hunters and trappers accounted for over 750,000 pigs harvested in 2010, only 29 percent of the population.
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The Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) will be partnering with county governments to launch the 2013 County Hog Abatement Matching Program (CHAMP). The initiative will encourage counties to match state funding dollar-for-dollar up to $30,000, which will be then paid to hunters.
I think I need to start loading some .458 SOCOM…
There’s now a web site where you can get PDF petition forms to recall both Arizona Senators Flake and McCain. The impetus behind this is the “Immigration Reform” bill that they now both support. It started out just to recall Flake, but popular demand has added a form for McCain as well.
I’ll sign.
The eighth (8th!) annual Gun Blogger Rendezvous is coming up, September 5-8 in Reno, Nevada. Each year the Rendezvous is sponsored by several manufacturers and distributors of firearms and firearm accessories, along with gun rights and advocacy groups:
Allchin Gun Parts
Brownells
Cabelas
COMP-TAC
Crimson Trace
Dillon Precision
Front Sight Academy
Gunbroker.com
Hi-Point / MKS Supply
Lucky Gunner
NRA
NSSF
SAF
Tactical Solutions
Burris Optics
GunAuction.Com
True Blue Sam did a little video of some of last year’s sponsors:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPUxmaCZOYM?rel=0]
Trust me, the swag is worth the $30 registration fee alone, and this year the sponsors will be feeding us breakfast Friday and Saturday, and dinner Saturday as well.
S&W team shooter “Millisecond” Molly Smith and her family will be joining us again this year, and for the first time we’ll have a bowling ball mortar at one of our shoots:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQvTIEH0H7I?rel=0]
Bowling ball mortar courtesy of new GBR sponsor Gunauction.com. If I did the math right, a 22 second hang-time corresponds to a peak altitude of approximately 1950 feet AGL. Impressive. If you come to GBR-VIII, I’ll tell you the story of the bowling ball mortar at the second big AR15.com Southern Arizona shoot….
From his NRO review of the book The End Is Near and It’s Going to be Awesome by Kevin Williamson, Leviathan Fail:
While new iPhones regularly burst forth like gifts from the gods, politics plods along. “Other than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use,” he writes. “Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business — despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.” Hence, it is not U.S. Steel, which was eventually washed away like an imposing sand castle in the surf, but only politics that can claim to be “the eternal corporation.”
The reason for this immortality is simple: The people running the State are never sufficiently willing to contemplate that they are the problem. If a program dedicated to putting the round pegs of humanity into square holes fails, the bureaucrats running it will conclude that the citizens need to be squared off long before it dawns on them that the State should stop treating people like pegs in the first place. Furthermore, in government, failure is an exciting excuse to ask for more funding or more power.
RTWT. I had Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey lined up next in the nonfiction queue, but I think I’m going to have to get a copy of The End is Near and read it next instead. Kevin Williamson echoes some of the things Bill Whittle has been saying of late, but I have some disagreements with Whittle’s optimism, and it seems Jonah Goldberg has some (albeit minor) disagreements with Williamson. I’m looking forward to the read.
Bill Whittle’s latest Afterburner:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIKRCov8Kj8?rel=0]
I don’t have a brief for Snowden. He seems to be a new form of narcissistic international creep, similar to Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame. I hope he gets dysentery in Ecuador or wherever he winds up.
But he may have done us a favor, putting an exclamation point on the activities of the NSA so there are no doubts. He also has made obvious the utter contempt with which Russia and China treat the Obama administration. (Evidently this was surprising to Dianne Feinstein on Face the Nation Sunday. Go figure.)
Also interesting is that the heightened concern for our civil liberties under government digital surveillance crosses political and party lines. Given the plethora of scandals confronting the administration, this presents an opportunity for dialogue we haven’t had for many years. Who knows if it will happen?
But if it does, I hope it will be intelligent and substantive. — What Snowden Knew
Don’t hold your breath waiting for that one, Roger. What I find most interesting is who has come out in defense of essentially unlimited government snooping. That crosses political and party lines as well.
That’s how long it took for my Arizona CCW permit renewal from the day I mailed it until it came back to me.
Nice to be all legal again.
Still pretty much on hiatus. Sorry ’bout that.
First rule of blogging: Post Something Every Day.
FAIL!
I’ve been busy with work. Three days in a row in Phoenix, leaving at 0500 and not getting home until well after 1700. Too burned out to post.
Free ice cream machine is on the blink. Read the archives or somebody else. I’ll get back to this thing sooner or later.
UPDATE:
From the comments to this post. I’ll just leave this here:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgbNymZ7vqY?rel=0]
Thanks. I needed that.
Yeah, I’m a fan. Don’t get HBO, but I caught an episode during the first season when I was on the road. I’d read the first book in the series several years ago and really enjoyed it, but when I bought the second one I was put off by the “23 characters in search of a plot” storyline. I didn’t pick up the third. But having watched one of the shows, I thought it very well done, as a lot of HBO productions are. It was available on Netflix, so I put it in my queue. Watched the first disc, then the second, then went to Amazon and bought the whole thing. My wife and I were hooked.
I pre-ordered Season 2. Waited the better part of a year for it to ship, and we blew through it the weekend after it arrived.
Season 3 is on pre-order now.
I discovered that I could order the five available books as a set in eBook format, and I had some Barnes & Noble gift cards (and the Nook app on my iPod Touch), so I did. I just finished reading A Feast for Crows, and I’ve come to a conclusion:
George R.R. Martin is a sadist.
Four thousand or so pages into this, and not one character has had anything good happen to them (at least that didn’t later turn to sh!t). Major sympathetic characters have been slain horribly. Major evil characters have been slain horribly. Major characters have been maimed. (And there are a LOT of Major Characters.)
And it. Keeps. Dragging. On. And. On. And. ON.
HBO has done, as far as I can tell, the almost unheard-of: It has turned the movie version of a book or books into a BETTER product than the text version. Granted, this is because the live-performance version FORCES the screenwriters to prune viciously and excerpt only those parts that will make good cinema, but in general this editing process destroys the story being told by the book. Not in this case.
I appreciate the grand, sweeping vision – the breadth of the world that Martin has built and the characters he has filled (FILLED!) it with, but I have the uneasy feeling that at the end of this series (assuming Martin finishes it before he shuffles off this mortal coil) the Others will rule that world, and everyone we’ve come to love and hate will be horribly, horribly dead.
Hodor.
UPDATE: Joke from the comments – G.R.R. Martin’s Twitter account has been closed. He killed all 140 characters!