The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
About a dozen of the expected 30 or so people have already shown up, about half are new faces. There’s no WiFi in the hospitality room this year (the hotel discovered they could charge convention goers extra for that service) so no live-blogging this year, at least from me. I’m going to HAVE to look into a Verizon net card next year.
Oh, and no Überpost this weekend. I didn’t have time to finish it (well, I didn’t take the time) and I’ll be busy the next four days, but I promise it’s coming.
OK, I’m here! I just got checked in and I’m in my room. Next up, the Silver Baron ‘B’ ballroom to find out who else is here.
On the way up to Reno, I’m stopping by this place: Special Interest Arms. They do…interesting things with Lee-Enfield rifles, and I have a couple that I’m interested in selling. I’ve got a No. 4 MkI* Savage barreled action that has a bad bore, and a No. 5 MkI that has way excessive headspace on a #2 bolt head (instant case head separation). Besides, Gardnerville isn’t that far out of the way. I have another No. 4 and an original No. 5. The No. 5 shoots pretty well. The No. 4 not so much. I might try to partially trade the two I’m bringing for a 7.62×39 conversion kit for my other No. 4.
On the other hand, those suppressed .45ACP carbines look wicked cool . . .
And the proprietor has said that he might drop in on the Rendezvous this weekend, which would be cool.
My daughter got one as a freebie in a bundle with a new PC. She liked the printer she already had, and knew that I didn’t have a printer for the Franken-puter I built last year, so she gave it to me. (Prior to this, I’ve been using my Epson Stylus RX620 3-in-1 printer/scanner as a network printer, but I have to have the old machine it’s running on in the other room on at the same time.)
Let me reiterate: The HP DeskJet D2680 SUCKS!!!!
Yes, the HP DeskJet D2680 SUCKS!!!!
And, not to put too fine a point on it, the HP DeskJet D2680 SUCKS!!!!
Not only does it go through (expensive, non-refillable) ink like a 426 Hemi goes through hi-test, it can’t seem to print more than three pages before locking up the print spooler in the middle of a page. Sometimes it can’t even print one entire page.
Apparently this is a known issue. It’s been known for a while. And HP still hasn’t fixed it.
No wonder they’re giving these things away for free. If they actually sold them as printers, they’d be sued for fraud.
I’m in final preparations to head out for Reno tomorrow, and of course I’ll be on the road for most of tomorrow. I’ll check either tomorrow evening (assuming I find a hotel with WiFi) or Thursday once I get checked in at the Silver Legacy.
Hopefully the long-promised next Überpost will be finished and up by Saturday. We’ll see.
Hint: It doesn’t work that way, and no matter how hard you try, wishing won’t make it so.
It especially doesn’t work if you try replacing the technology in the grinder with people.
Here’s some political activism I can get behind:
Send a CFL to your congressman
They’ve mandated these bulbs. I think we should make them choke on ’em.
Zombie agrees with me:
The media and public schools were correctly identified by Gramsci as the most influential cultural institutions, and it was therefore those that the left realized must be targeted.
It is this sophisticated Gramscian plan, and not the more brutish Marxist idea of simply seizing power by force, which has guided leftist thought in America since WWII. And it is why the media and education have, over time, been slowly turned into engines of leftist propaganda. Gramscianism matured into “critical pedagogy” which is the real-world application of his educational theories, and countless left-leaning young adults have for decades been nudged toward careers in education and the media. Some time ago, we crossed a threshold in which the Gramscian infiltrators no longer had to ply their trade surreptitiously, but became the majority in the media and in education, and after that point the process accelerated rapidly as they took over both fields and turned them into ideological weapons.
“Zombie” – In Pursuit of Cultural Hegemony, Part IV of his five-part series on ideological warfare in America’s public school systems.
Read it all.
Just a few minutes ago, someone was directed to my Failure to Communicate essay by plugging the following (verbatim!) into ask.com:
Thomas Sowell Theories is his theories idea or detrimental to society
Mouth hangs agape.
Now I am scared. The NRA may be right. We have heard from several hunter friends they have had the same experience. Either the Department of Justice is a total joke or the government is building a database so they know where to go and pick up private citizens’ guns. — Maybe the NRA’s right to be paranoid
This is not an either/or question. There’s every reason to believe that the answer is “Both.”