Mike Ramirez comments on the latest news:
Happy Birthday to Me!
So last year, I was given a Colt Pocket Hammerless Vest Pocket .25. It was the second-oldest gun in my safe. Now it’s third-oldest. This year, my father-in-law gave me his original 1917-vintage Colt 1911!
It’s pretty pitted, and appears to have been reblued some time in the past, but I believe the double-diamond walnut grip panels are original, and I know for a fact that it feeds and shoots hardball just fine. Not bad for a 96 year-old handgun.
Remember that Sultan Knish Piece…
…The Closing of the Liberal Mind that I took a QotD from on Tuesday? Here’s another:
As a scientist, you formulate a conclusion that will lead to a healthier society, and then you build a hypothesis around it, and then you declare it to be science. Your science, like your journalism, consists of the progressive narrative that proves whatever you want it to prove, whether it’s that capitalism will melt the icebergs, homosexuality is genetically fixed or oil is about to run out. Scientific objectivity has no more meaning to you than it did to the Caliph who torched the Library of Alexandria. If science is worth anything, then it’s progressive. And if it doesn’t, then it’s worthless.
And PowerLine has a recent example of exactly that.
Of course, the whole history of gun control is an example of exactly that, but….
“STOP DIGGING!”
Reader Phil B., the Brit expat now living in Middle Earth, sent me a link to a wall-o’-text essay, Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell, by one Scott Alexander. Aside from being a tremendous source for Quotes of the Day, it’s an absolutely outstanding piece of work I cannot recommend strongly enough.
But it is, absolutely, an überpost. Get a beverage and a snack before you sit down to savor it. Excerpt:
Reaction isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s not suggesting there’s a secret campaign for organized repression. To steal an example from the other side of the aisle, it’s positing something more like patriarchy. Patriarchy doesn’t have an actual Patriarch coordinating men in their efforts to keep down women. It’s just that when lots of people share some really strong cultural norms, they manage to self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting new ideas. And Western society just happens to have a really strong progressivist immune system ready to gobble you up if you say anything insufficiently progressive.
And so the main difference between modern liberal democracy and older repressive societies is that older societies repressed things you liked, but modern liberal democracies only repress things you don’t like. Having only things you don’t like repressed looks from the inside a lot like there being no repression at all.
The good Catholic in medieval Spain doesn’t feel repressed, even when the Inquisition drags away her neighbor. She feels like decent people have total freedom to worship whichever saint they want, total freedom to go to whatever cathedral they choose, total freedom to debate who the next bishop should be – oh, and thank goodness someone’s around to deal with those crazy people who are trying to damn the rest of us to Hell.
And that’s just for openers. Go. Read.
It Worked for Caleb
Dunkin’ Donuts worker stops robbery — with hot coffee
When a man tried to rob a Dunkin’ Donuts in Connecticut on Saturday night, an employee acted quickly and stopped him with the closest weapon available — hot coffee.
The attempted robbery happened shortly after 11 p.m. at a Dunkin’ Donuts in West Haven, when a man pulled up to the drive-through and asked the clerk for change for a $100 bill, according to Sgt. David Tammaro, of the West Haven Police Department.
When the clerk refused to make the change, the man said this was a robbery and tried to climb through the drive-through window, police said.That is when the clerk threw hot coffee in man’s face, police said.
The man fled the area in a newer model white Ford Explorer without stealing anything, according to a news release from police.
When a man tried to mug Caleb a few years ago, he got a hot cup of Starbucks in his face, with the same result.
Which resulted in this coffee mug:
Quote of the Day – Sultan Knish Edition
Via email from Unix Jedi:
But now you are a liberal in 2013 and the society is already very liberal. You are the product of liberal professors who learned at the feet of other liberal professors for 3 or 4 generations. You grew up in a liberal community to parents whose grandparents were already singing red campfire songs. Like them, you came of age as a member of a natural elite.
The newspapers you read, the textbooks you studied, the movies you watch, the professors who taught you and every adult you grew up with all reflect your point of view. You have no sense of being marginalized or out of step. Nor do you have any sense that there is another point of view out there. Only ranks of ignorant teabaggers paid for by corporate money who are about to be swept away into the dustbin of history as soon as the multicultural youth of tomorrow put together another Hip-Hop Against AIDS protest.
You live in a bubble and you see no need for an open society or for maintaining the integrity of institutions such as journalism or the scientific community. The very idea of objectivity is at odds with your entire way of thinking because it presumes that there is some higher truth than the one propounded by the progressive reality-based community. And you know, with the casual faith of any born believer, that this is not possible.
Violent and Predatory vs. Violent but Protective
A couple of months ago, while attending a play group with my four-year-old son and one-year-old daughter, another little two-year-old girl lashed out and hit another child. Her mother, ripe with indignation, swept the girl into her arms and scolded, “No! It is NEVER okay to hit people.”
My skin crawled. The scenarios flowed through my head and I couldn’t restrain myself.
“Would you tell her that if she was being abducted?” I asked.
The mother stopped and blinked a few times and then stuttered, “Well… that’s different.”
“Yes, it is,” I said. “But you just told her that it was never okay to hit people. That’s not entirely true. There are times it’s okay to hit people and to hit them hard.”
That’s from Limatunes’ Range Diary, Yes, My Son, It Is Okay To Hit People. Read the whole thing. Good mom.
Quote of the Day – Malum In Se Edition
Geek WithA.45 left this in a comment:
The reality is that a segment of our society abuses the mechanisms of democracy to seek the authority of law to destroy the lives of honest men who offer harm to none, but who reject ideological compliance. Apparently, “comply or be destroyed” is now an acceptable American modus operandi.
How can that be characterized as anything but evil?
How, indeed?
To Quote Tam (Again)
Remember this passage from that novel?
There is no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is to crack down on criminals. When there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking the law. Create a nation of lawbreakers and then you can cash in on the guilt. Now that’s the system!
Were you aware that in at least one jurisdiction sneaking into a movie you haven’t paid for in a multiplex is a FELONY?
Couple Faces Felony Rap For Movie Sneak
The married couple went to the movies Saturday night at a multiplex in Portage, Indiana, where they watched “Snitch,” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When the action flick ended, the Harbins exited theater #13 and headed into theater #15, where the zombie film “Warm Bodies” was about to start.
The Harbins, however, had not purchased $6.75 tickets to the second movie, which resulted in the duo’s arrest for felony theft, according to a Portage Police Department report.
—
The duo was “taken into custody without incident” and transported to the Porter County jail, where they were booked on the felony count and later released on their own recognizance.
A $13.50 felony.
Once again, I’d like to point out that 18 U.S.C. § 922(d) states:
It shall be unlawful for any person to sell or otherwise dispose of any firearm or ammunition to any person knowing or having reasonable cause to believe that such person –
(1) is under indictment for, or has been convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
And 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) says:
It shall be unlawful for any person –
(1) who has been convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year
to ship or transport in interstate or foreign commerce, or possess in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition; or to receive any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.
In general, a felony crime is one defined as:
(A)n offense for which a sentence to a term of imprisonment in excess of one year is authorized. Felonies are serious crimes, such as murder, rape, or burglary, punishable by a harsher sentence than that given for a misdemeanor.
So, if they plead to anything that could result in a jail term “exceeding one year” – regardless of what the sentence actually is – then they have forever lost their right to arms.
Over a $13.50 theft.
This is a “serious crime”? On what planet?
Quote of the Day – Registration Edition
Via Oleg Volk:
From Boris Karpa, a man who was an American born elsewhere by accident: “Let me be clear about this: background checks for private transfers is gun registration.
“Not ‘could lead to gun registration’, it literally IS gun registration.
“It does not matter if they put in a little sentence that says ‘the government is not allowed to keep records’ – that sentence will go away at the next mass-shooting – and then the government will simply start hitting the SAVE button after it processes your next gun purchase. We’re in the world of computers now. Keeping terabytes of data only costs a few dollars.
“If Tom Coburn argues that putting a little proviso in there to say ‘you are not allowed to keep records’ makes it anything other but gun registration, that only helps us know who Tom Coburn is.
“What this will decide is nothing less but the answer to the question – is America a unique nation, that trusts its citizens to own weapons – not ‘hunting implements’, not ‘sporting firearms’, but weapons – or it is just another country, and jut like everywhere else, the gun control movement wins battle after battle, and the gun rights organizations are only fighting a delaying action.
“Because if this passes, it will never be repealed. The NRA is not capable of, and does not have the stomach for – attacking existing Federal gun laws. They will promise to work to repeal it. They will lie, just like they lied about the Hughes amendment, where they made some symbolic move to try and strike it down and then surrendered too. But they will not repeal it if it passes.
“If they win this fight, then the gun rights movement in America is over, and everything else is a long delaying action.”
I do not disagree with a single word there.