Via Robb Allen, read the story of how Popgun took an Anti and his wife to the range. You don’t reach them by insulting them. (Something I need to work on occasionally myself.)
Tag: Awakenings
This is the America I Live In
John “Silky Pony” Edwards was right, but for the wrong reason. There are “two Americas.” Watch this video. It illustrates the difference between them. It is the best sixteen minutes you will spend this month. Possibly this year.
And Then There Were Forty-Nine
Shortly after I started TSM I wrote about the American Civil Liberties Union and its position on the Second Amendment in The ACLU Hasn’t Changed Its Tune. President Nadine Strossen was clear on it back in 2003:
The plain language of the Second Amendment in no way, shape, or form, can be construed, I think, as giving an absolute right to unregulated gun ownership. It says, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed.” Certainly, when you have the notion of “well-regulated” right in the constitutional language itself, it seems to defy any argument that regulation is inconsistent with the amendment.
Putting all that aside, I don’t want to dwell on constitutional analysis, because our view has never been that civil liberties are necessarily coextensive with constitutional rights. Conversely, I guess the fact that something is mentioned in the Constitution doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a fundamental civil liberty.
Something mentioned in the Constitution? It’s the second item in the BILL OF RIGHTS, Nadine!
And she’s still President.
But now there’s been a break. Via Dave Hardy we learn:
And, one would hope, to keep them.
Everyone loves guns in Nevada. Ducks Unlimited, the National Rifle Association, Republicans, the American Civil Liberties Union, the …
Wait. The ACLU?
The Nevada ACLU has declared its support for an individual’s right to bear arms, apparently making it the first state affiliate in the nation to buck the national organization’s position on the Second Amendment.
The state board of directors reached the decision this month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects the rights of individuals to own handguns.
Said Supreme Court ruling coming in June of 2008. You don’t want to move too fast, ladies and gentlemen. You might suffer whiplash! I take it back. Justin Buist in comments notes that the Nevada ACLU did indeed change their position almost immediately after the Heller decision, and the piece linked is dated July, 2008, not 2010. In other words, this is old news.
New to me (and apparently Dave), but old nonetheless.
Kudos, ladies and gentlemen, for your swift action. Too bad your move apparently wasn’t followed by any of your sister organizations.
“The Nevada ACLU respects the individual’s right to bear arms subject to constitutionally permissible regulations,” a statement on the organization’s Web site said. “The ACLU of Nevada will defend this right as it defends other constitutional rights.”
Will it also defend the right to keep? And does this mean the ACLU will be filing suit against North Las Vegas soon? (Apparently not.)
“This was the consensus,” said Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for ACLU of Nevada. “There really wasn’t a lot of dissent.”
One more reason for Sarah and Kristin and Josh and Paul to be Sad Pandas. (Can we rub their noses in it?)
But the state affiliate’s position puts it at odds with the national organization.
I’ll say.
There’s more to the story, but it’s interesting to see a split in that organization over this topic at this time.
We’re (still!) winning.
Fvckin’-A
Thank you, Breda.
Quote of the Day – Reality Edition
Unix-Jedi put the last part of this into a comment, and I liked it so much I went searching for the source. The original is, apparently, old enough that the source is unknown, but it’s still accurate today:
Reality is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of ugly facts.
Theory and reality are only theoretically related.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice there is.
I may make this the new official motto of TSM!
Old News, but How Did I Miss THIS?
OK, today I stumbled across the fact that a couple of the stars of the now completed SciFi series Battlestar Galactica appeared at the UN for a panel discussion back in March of last year. The New York Times gave it some print, stating:
The Sci Fi Channel series “Battlestar Galactica” will be the subject of a panel discussion involving the creators of the show, two of its stars, Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos, and representatives from the United Nations’ offices of the secretary general and high commissioner for human rights.
How a television series about interstellar travel, ancient prophecies and genocidal robots came to join forces with a terrestrial intergovernmental body relates to the Sci Fi Channel’s philanthropic activities and the United Nations’ efforts to become more media savvy.
Oooookay.
For the United Nations, the event represents the second effort of its Creative Community Outreach Initiative. Announced by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at last June’s Jackson Hole Film Festival, the initiative is the organization’s attempt to “establish partnerships with the entertainment industry to tell the U.N.’s story,” said Juan Carlos Brandt, a spokesman.
Its first undertaking was to allow a television crew to shoot at United Nations facilities this month for an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” about child soldiers.
Will they do another episode, this one about child-rapists and child prostitution? That’s part of “the UN’s story” too.
Representatives from the Sci Fi Channel approached the United Nations early this year. “They came to us and explained that there were themes common to both the show and the U.N.,” Mr. Brandt said, “and that those themes could be discussed here in a serious manner.”
Whoopi Goldberg will moderate the discussions.
Whoopi.
The exemplar of calm, deliberate, factual debate!
Then the following June a couple of UN representatives traveled to Hollyweird and another panel discussion took place there!
The panel featured Battlestar’s executive producers Ron Moore and David Eick; actors Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell; and U.N. representatives Steven Siqueira and Craig Mokhiber (whose actual job titles are so formidable and impressive, they would require a separate essay). Serving as moderator was L.A. Times’ Geoff Boucher. A packed house sat in anticipation of some solid political discourse, which Boucher was quick to point could not have found a more likely home that the intersection of Hollywood and Highland (what with the guy paid to wear that SpongeBob costume being just yards away…….).
SpongeBob for UN Secretary General! The denizens of the ocean are insufficiently represented in the UN!
The U.N.’s Mokhiber seemed sincere in his admission that the U.N. has come to view Battlestar Galactica as “more allegory than fiction.” He cited “freedom from fear and freedom from want” as issues that fuel both the U.N. and BSG’s plotlines, with enough overlap that Mokhiber insisted Battlestar must surely “owe royalties to the U.N.”
“Freedom from fear and freedom from want.”
Must be nice. Who provides that?
There’s more you probably ought to read, but I’m going to skip to this part (hey, it’s my blog):
Siqueira said that while the U.N. has at times been given a spot in big Hollywood filims(sic), it had been more of a “bit player or prop” in the past. Its recently heightened show business presence stems from the realization that the entertainment industry is “much better at communicating these issues.”
Funny how that works. Music and movies and video games don’t influence the public when it’s something bad they’re accused of, but when it’s something good, well then! Nothing better for it!
This admission was interesting as well:
Eick confessed that the evolution of the show as a lighting rod for political discourse was “surreal” given that the show was initially “dreamed up in sports bars.” He says it was a matter of trying to tell good stories “that were being informed by a sick world.” Eick seemed less shy about pointing a finger of admonishment toward specific political figures. Especially ones nicknamed Dubya. “If we’d done this show ten years later,” he said, it would have been a totally different ballgame.
And then there was this:
As Boucher optimistically posed to the panelists: What can people do to become more politically active?
Mokhiber noted there are no shortage of volunteer opportunities through organizations like Amnesty International, but even more simply than that, he relayed that people ought to “find out what the heck is going on” in the first place.
Siqueira offered up: “Care about one issue deeply, and act.”
We have. It’s called the TEA Party movement. But that’s not what they wanted:
Eick, on the other hand, continued to serve up a more sassy partisan opinion of how to enact change. “Find somebody to beat the hell out of Glen Beck!” he insisted.
Why are Leftists such h8rs and so (vicariously) violent? (Or recently, personally violent?)
I Think I’ll Buy a Fountain Pen This Weekend
And some good writing paper. I may be practicing my cursive for the first time in decades.
From My Brother
From My Brother
A guy who is not all that politically involved, in an email titled “In humor there’s truth”:
Hmmm…
My Take on WarmerGate
My Take on WarmerGate
Van der Leun points to an excellent piece at Chicago Boyz, Scientists Are Not Software Engineers, which contains an outstanding visual representation of the issue, which I will reproduce here:
It’s hard to explain to non-programmers just how bad the code is but I will try. Suppose the code was a motorcycle. Based on the repeated statements that Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming was “settled science” you would expect that the computer code that helped settle the science would look like this…
…when in reality it looks like this:
Do read the whole piece.
I am reminded of this Sidney Harris cartoon from (I believe) the late 1960’s that I have had hanging on my office wall for literally years:
(Note: cartoon pulled due to requested $35 honorarium by artist. It can be seen here. It’s the “Then A Miracle Occurs” cartoon.)
As many have said, we’re supposed to rein in the entire economies of all the Western nations, cutting fossil fuel use by huge percentages and adversely affecting the standard of living of billions of people based on this? Man adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, “Then a miracle occurs!” and irreversible global warming kills us all?
I don’t fucking think so. We’ve played this “mankind kills Mother Gaia” game before, and the point of it is and has always been “Give up your rights or we all DIE!!“
No. They’ve gotten farther with this scam than any before, but NO. Not this time either.
Who Should We Worry About?
Interesting piece from “Robin of Berkely” – “a psychotherapist and a recovering liberal” now writing for American Thinker. In her latest piece, Obama’s Mind Game, she opens:
It’s a chilling moment when the light goes out in someone’s eyes. A once-radiant child hardens from abuse. A woman’s heart shrinks after her husband’s abandonment.
The person looks the same, maybe acts the same. But something is gone, and what’s lost is irretrievable. It’s like when a person dies: in a heartbeat, the soul vanishes.
I witnessed this alteration recently when I visited my goddaughter, a radiant girl. Her mom, a hardcore progressive, has started exposing her to the darkest elements of the left. And the last time I looked in the girl’s eyes, the light had gone out. Disappeared. Just like that.
I see this phenomenon every day: a light dimming. The friendly shopkeeper snaps at me. My cheerful neighbor seems flattened.
And you hear it in the news: people acting strangely, going off the deep end. The most bizarre behavior becoming the new normal.
A thug bites off a finger. Sarah Palin’s church is torched. Bullies intimidate voters.
Last week, an esteemed Columbia University black architecture professor punched a white female coworker in the eye for not doing more about white privilege.
He has no history of violence. So why now?
Why now? This may be the most important question of our time. Why are some people reaching the boiling point? Why do many others look vacant, like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The shootings at military bases, from Little Rock to Fort Hood — why now?
It’s Obama, of course.
Quite aware of what she just said, she follows it with:
Liberals will excoriate me for writing this.
Can I have “DUH!” for $1,000, Alex?
Interesting piece. The howls of anguished outrage will be more interesting still.
(h/t: MK Freeberg)