The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
In comments to Weer’d Beard’s post Mitt Romney Wins the GOP Nomination:
Given how the GOP field has been winnowed, this has really just been a race to determine the form Gozer the Traveler takes.
So this just means the giant Sloar is off the table and means is we’re looking between the moving Torb and the Staypuff Marshmellow man.
— Jack
Edited to add this link to a T-shirt I must have courtesy of WFGodbold.
British expat Phil B. emails from Middle Earth about an Easter event most of us could get behind, a 24-hour bunny shoot!
Guess what the Kiwis do for Easter …
Otago is the bottom right hand bit of the south Island.
Otago bunnies grow BIG (about the size of a hare but proportionately stockier) and are considered a pest. Rules are simple – a team of three, 24 hours, shoot as many as you can in the time. No limit on calibre of rifle, shotgun, method or what state the rabbit is in when it is handed in for counting (i.e. flattened by the Ute still counts).
Doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to the numbers but it pisses off the tree huggers and bunny lovers enormously.
It is usually reported on the 6 O’clock news as the highlight of the Easter weekend news with the scores and discussions about how it was better/worse than last year, record etc. Among firearms afficianados, the subject of rifles, calibres and loads for the ammunition are discussed as avidly as the chances of who’ll win the FA cup in Newcastle.
This year was a little disappointing:
Conditions favoured the rabbits this year at the Great Easter Bunny Hunt in Central Otago, with 10,424 bunnies bagged – the lowest tally for six years.
Teams of hunters from all over New Zealand converged on Alexandra for the 24-hour event, organised by the Alexandra Lions Club.
Their haul was displayed in the town’s Pioneer Park yesterday and the top team out of 36 – the Southern Hopper Stoppers – won the contest with 1035 rabbits.
This year’s tally was less than half last year’s total of 22,904 and event convenor Dave Ramsay said the odds were in the rabbits’ favour this year.
And look at the picture!
OMG! THE CHILDREN!
Well, here’s a couple who brought their kids with them:
The Great Easter Bunny Hunt can have a happy ending – just ask Mike and Kate Evans.
Mike proposed to Kate during the event 17 years ago, and now happily married and living in Arrowtown, the couple are back in the hunt this year in a team that includes son Nicholas and daughter Mikayla.—
Mikayla (7) and Nicholas (11) would be acting as support crew, as “picker-uppers” and maybe doing some cooking or providing hot drinks for the hunters. The family was looking forward to spending some time together “away from any electronic equipment”, Mrs Evans said.
“You get to see countryside that you would never normally have access to and that’s a real privilege,” Mr Evans added.
“It’s a real good weekend, getting out in the fresh air and getting some exercise; spending time with your family. It’s not really about how many rabbits you get.”
Isn’t that nice?
John Derbyshire has been fired from National Review for writing a completely politically incorrect piece entitled The Talk: Nonblack Version. Pretty strong stuff.
Short version:
There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. — Jesse Jackson
Read this piece by Heather Mac Donald, too.
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. — George Orwell
UPDATE: EXCELLENT discussion of the topic over at RobertaX’s place.
UPDATE II: Eric S. Raymond (and his commenters) have some interesting things to say as well. Take Eric’s quiz. At least one commenter here has failed it.
Well, Bill Cosby has opined on the Trayvon Martin incident:
“We’ve got to get the gun out of the hands of people who are supposed to be on neighborhood watch,” said Mr. Cosby, whose remarks were the first he has made publicly about the case.
“Without a gun, I don’t see Mr. Zimmerman approaching Trayvon by himself,” Mr. Cosby explained. “The power-of-the-gun mentality had him unafraid to confront someone. Even police call for backup in similar situations.
“When you carry a gun, you mean to harm somebody, kill somebody,” he said.
Yes, that’s why the police carry them.
Let me refer once again to Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Modern Policing – specifically Principle #7:
Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
Mr. Zimmerman was doing his duty as he saw it. And he couldn’t carry an entire cop around with him. IIRC, he did “call for backup.” There’s audio of the call, in fact.
An honest assessment would say that this is what we know:
- Zimmerman was out doing his neighborhood watch thing and saw Martin.
- He called 911 and followed Martin in his vehicle.
- When Martin walked someplace that Zimmerman couldn’t follow in his vehicle, he got out of his vehicle and followed on foot.
- ???
- In the process of getting his ass beaten, Zimmerman busts a cap in Martin.
The entire case turns on what happened in the ???, but don’t tell that to the media, the folks playing poker with a deck full of race cards, the victim disarmament crowd, or apparently the frickin’ President of the United States of America.
Or Bill Cosby.
UPDATE: On a related note, whom did you mean to harm, to kill, Mr. Cosby?
It has been brought to my attention that the second Sunday in Apri, the 8th, is Easter Sunday. Consequently, there won’t be a Bowling Pin match that day. Sorry for the short notice.
(I really should check a calendar occasionally.)
Quite a while back in the depths of 2004 the Geekwitha.45 wrote a post about the mechanisms of oppression in which he said:
We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see.
We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability.
We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles.
—
We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time.
Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”
Bill Whittle expands on this theme:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgrktRgjBXk?rel=0]
As I said in 2009’s Malice vs. Stupidity:
At some point it becomes immaterial whether the laws were due to incompetence or maliciousness. That point is when their implementation is indistinguishable from maliciousness. I submit that we’ve passed that point, and the only thing preventing even more massive public blowback is our general ignorance and our well-established general respect for the Rule of Law.
And I wonder how much longer that blowback will hold off.
I tell people I spent twenty-one years complaining about consulting/specifying engineers, and then I became one. And I was right. After doing the consultant thing for four and a half years, I left my cloth-covered cubicle and went back to the industrial-supplier side. No more eight-hour meetings, no more bid analysis reports, no more specification writing. Instead, I get to do application, design, programming, startup. Field work. Fun stuff.
Well, I just did an upgrade to a system I installed eleven years ago. Startup had to wait on the customer, since my upgrade occurred during a plant shutdown. Startup was to occur Monday morning at about 10:00AM, so I got up at 4AM and pulled out of the driveway at 4:45 to be on site at 7. They were waiting for me when I arrived.
We tested manual control before 9AM, and just had to wait for plant startup to put it in Auto. Remember 10:00AM? Uh, no. They had some problems. I went to lunch at 11:30. They called me a little after Noon and said it looked like it was going to about 7PM. I went back to the plant and they let me on a computer to do some work, but by 4PM it was obvious that 7PM was not going to happen. I got a hotel room and waited for a call. I tried to get some sleep, but failed at that. I went to dinner about 7. They called.
Midnight.
So I was on site at midnight. We finally fired it up about 4:30AM. I’d been up over 24 hours for the first time in a LONG time, but we weren’t done yet. Due to operations considerations, we still couldn’t put the system in Auto. That didn’t happen until 7AM. My hotel room sat empty all night. I finally hit the sack at 9AM. Two hours later, I got a call – the unit was working, but it was a little slow. They told me I could sleep a little more, though. I tried, but didn’t get much success, maybe another half-hour. After a shower and shave, I was back on site at 1:30PM.
And they were down again. We discussed the problem they’d experienced earlier, and I made some adjustments, but they had no idea when they’d be starting up again. I was pretty confident in my changes, so I went home. I pulled into my driveway 36 hours (and two and a half hours of sleep) after I’d left the day before.
Ten hours of sleep later, I was back in my office, preparing for a class I was supposed to teach the next day. I was also waiting to hear about my system upgrade. I sent an inquiring email, and got to work on my class prep. A response came soon: everyone was very happy with the upgrade. I didn’t need to go back for more adjustment. I could continue my class prep.
Then the main office called. There was a problem on another project. Could I help? What about my class prep? This project was more important, the class could be rescheduled. I pulled out about 10:30AM and headed for the new site. Yes,there were problems. Things did not go well. I got home at 11PM with plans to head back to site at 5:30AM. (It’s a 90 minute drive.)
Back on site at 7AM, we flogged on the problem until late afternoon, but finally figured it out. I pulled into my driveway this evening at 7:15PM.
I’ve put in 66 hours in four days this week. I’m taking Friday off.
I left the cushy comfort of consulting engineering to do this for a living again. I think I made the right choice. Making stuff work is rewarding in ways that specification writing is not.
I just received a review copy of Your Teacher Said WHAT?!: Trying to Raise a Fifth-Grade Capitalist in Obama’s America, by Joe Kernen and his daughter Blake. I’m not quite finished with Paul Kengor’s Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives For A Century, but having just read the preface to Your Teacher Said WHAT?!, it’s interesting seeing the current-day effects of a hundred years of Marxist/socialist influence on education, both primary and higher.
For example, read this excerpt from Dupes, concerning the members of the Weather Underground:
Aside from Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert, and Judy Clark, most of the comrades eluded prison time. Ultimately, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers avoided jail because of charges dropped due to prosecutorial problems. That escape from due justice has since prompted Ayers to celebrate: “Guilty as hell, free as a bird! America is a great country!”Free a a bird to pursue what? Ayers and others may have received the answer to that question as early as 1967, at a pre-Weatherman SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) conference held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ayers’s academic home. The conference, held July 14-16, 1967, was staged by SDS’s Radical Education Project and titled “Radicals in the Professions.” Dr. Quentin Young, the “SDS doctor” who would turn congressional hearings into a circus the following year, spoke on the importance of radicals entering the field of health care. But at the conference, the student radicals paid particular attention to the American educational establishment, especially higher education, and specifically the departments of education, where they could train the future teachers of America.
Bill Ayers would eventually follow the Deweyan tradition of ushering in social and political change through education rather than politics — the latter of which had failed him and his fellow Marxist-Leninists. He and Dohrn both sought out the ivory tower again. They believed they had a lot to import to America’s youth and its future. (Mark) Rudd, too, eventually ended up in education, teaching and lecturing at colleges. Basically, almost all of them would take that path.
But here’s the kicker:
And the contacts they would make in that capacity are nothing short of awe-inspiring. One of them, yet another product of Columbia University, would — forty years after that conference in Ann Arbor — become a political rallying point for the suddenly reborn SDS and Weather Underground “progressives.” He was a beacon for Ayers, Dohrn, Rudd, Hayden, Klonsky, Machtinger, Jones and more. They would come to Chicago, this time with a very different take on the man the Democrats were looking to send to the presidency. In 2008 they would organize yet again, this time working within the system, to help make this man — Barack Obama — president of the United States.To achieve that goal, they would need to be very careful in publicly expressing their true feelings and motivations. Otherwise they would risk driving away the masses, especially traditional Democrats, moderates, and crossover voters. They had made that mistake in the initial SDS split, losing the support of a huge number of non-Communists. In 2008 they would be vigilant not to repeat the error.
And they would not receive just complicity but the the aid and support of the media in keeping their “true feelings and motivations” out of the public view. After all, many in the media shared those feelings and motivations, and understood that they were far from “mainstream” thought.
It starts in the primary school classroom, and continues all the way through the university.
Or there’s something wrong with your soul:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJkZXh9v_i4?rel=0&w=640&h=360]
Found at var/log/otto.
Oh, and fuck PETA.
But in a way, it is.
Like (apparently) a lot of gunbloggers, “I have very few friends in meatspace”. I “know” a lot more people through my interaction with them in the interwebs than I do in person. When, as it happens, someone I “know” or “know of” dies, I feel the loss. The first time this happened to me was when Acidman passed in 2006. When Cathy Siepp died in 2007 I was affected, not because I had ever corresponded with her, but because I’d read so much of what she’d written.
William the Coroner passed away in November. I had listened to William on Vicious Circle, and had seen his comments at other blogs. I had read a few of his posts, but I didn’t “know” him. When Neptunis Lex recently perished in a plane crash, I didn’t comment because I hadn’t really read his blog and really didn’t “know” him either, but both of these men had significant effects on people I do know, and I mourned their loss.
Today we hear that Newbius has joined the ranks of of Bloggers of the Great Beyond. Again, I didn’t read Newbius, and I’ve never met him, but when I clicked over to his blog and saw his blogroll I was taken aback. Under “Deep Thoughts” he has listed only seven blogs, and mine is one of them. The other six are extremely fine company to be in.
And I had no idea. I am honored that he thought well enough of my work to put TSM on his short list. I am abashed that I did not “know” him well enough to be aware of that fact.
I wish I’d gotten a chance to meet the man, and try his pizza. Dammit.
I think I’ll pass on his recommendation:
Stop reading this and go hug somebody important to you. Do it now.
Fair winds, Newbius.