The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
…when she posted her video.
Via AR15.com, I give you “While my Ukulele Gently Weeps”:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puSkP3uym5k?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&w=480&h=385]
The guy has talent!
And for the hell of it, I’m going to add this piece, which I think is both freaking amazing to watch, and beautiful to listen to – Andy McKee, “Drifting”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfF4QLO-L_4?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&w=640&h=385]
Enjoy!
I’ve been getting links and comments from The Silicon Graybeard for a while now, but I’ll admit that I haven’t spent much time over there.
That’s going to change. One excellent example of why is this recent post, On Germs, Weeds, Companies, Governments and Skunks. Excerpt:
(Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine’s) most memorable law, and where I’m going with this, was “Systems of Regulations created as a management surrogate take on a life of their own and exhibit a growth history which closely parallels other living entities observed in nature”. He went on to show the number of pages in armed forces procurement regulation vs. time along with a curve of weed growth (from the journal “Weed Science”), and produced a graph any biology student will instantly recognize as the sigmoid growth curve of populations, also called the logistic function.
A usual example is the common bacteria E. coli. This species can divide and produce a new generation every 20 minutes; if conditions could remain optimum it would undergo geometric growth and produce a colony the size of the planet in 24 hours. Because conditions can’t remain optimum, it has a logistic growth curve, producing much smaller colonies.
In regulations, there is a price for this. Although the legislators and regulators never consider this, every regulation consumes some amount of time and money to comply with. The new Finance Reform bill has been estimated to required the development of 250-300 new regulations. Every regulation slows down, hinders and costs every honest business real money. Despite the widespread talk of corrupt CEOs and general lack of corporate ethics, I’ve been working in the manufacturing industry since the mid 1970s, and every company has had an active, if not aggressive, ethics compliance program with requirements for training and seminars every year. There are exceptions but most companies do their best to be honest and law-abiding. Government seems to think it’s mere coincidence that countries with lower tax rates and lower regulation attract business, and they demonize companies for moving to countries where the environment is better.
A simple way of determining if someone you talk to has any economic sense is to ask them about corporate taxes. The economically ignorant (I’ll be polite) will scream to tax the corporations. Those with sense will tell you corporations are fictitious and can’t pay tax. Tax is part of the cost of doing business and therefore passed on to the buyer (the people calling for them to be taxed). Corporations can collect taxes for the government (for which they are punished with more costs, not paid) but cannot generate them. Every penny a company has comes from its customers. In a global market where they compete with companies in cheaper environments, they are at a disadvantage.
I quoted that so I could quote this:
This is where we find ourselves as a nation.
We are strangling in a bureaucracy with a Code of Federal Regulations that has grown like a bacterial culture. A nation that was founded by a constitution that fills about 14 printed pages in today’s technologies, passes financial reform bills that go over 2000 pages, health care bills that go almost 3000 pages, and more. Each bill creates hundreds of new regulations, which are so poorly written they have to be refined by hundreds of court cases. The court cases effectively create new law and new regulations. Since congress is in session every year and passes at least one new law every year, the total number of laws and regulations increases without limit and everything eventually becomes illegal.
What can we do? We can’t form a “skunkworks country” that can get around our laws and create a more mobile, productive society. We only have one option: we have to create a national process, like industries do, to become more “lean, mean and low to the ground”. Get rid of superfluous laws. We simply must reduce the size of the CFR and reduce the destruction caused by the regulation and litigation in our society. To me, Tort Reform is absolutely essential. A big part of the industrial lean activities is to study what policies need to be gotten rid of because “we’ve always done it that way”. The same should be done with the CFR.
In other words: “deregulation.”
There’s a lot more there. Please, go read.
And Graybeard? You’re on the blogroll.
I met some new people at this year’s Rendezvous. First, GG from Girls {Heart} Guns, who is a newbie shooter, and very enthusiastic! She’s also very safe, as she relates in this post.
Next up was Olav and his wife Patricia from Firearms and Training. Olav is a fine shot, and QUICK. On Saturday, the last run we did was five shots on a single steel plate at 7 yards as fast as possible. I watched Olav put five rounds on target from his 9mm S&W M&P in just over a second. You could have covered the group with a playing card. I told him I didn’t see the happy-switch on his pistol!
Two guys from CS Tactical made their first trip to the Rendezvous, Mike Cecil and Andrew “Mase” Mason. CS Tactical has a forum, too! Not only that, but Mike’s a helluva competitor. He won the Cowboy Fast Draw match on Sunday, beating out “Millisecond Molly” by literally milliseconds.
True Blue Sam made it this year. Zeke of Engineering Johnson couldn’t make it due to work (he was in Viet Nam showing ’em how to make pop-top cans), but his grandmother Bea was insistent that she was going to her second Rendezvous, so it was up to Sam, her son, to provide escort duty! Bea is 79 years old and has been shooting for just a couple of years, but she handloads her own ammo – .357, .44, and .45 Colt.
Making his second trip to a Rendezvous was D.W. Drang of The Cluemeter. I haven’t had him on the blogroll before, but I will shortly!
This was also Molly’s second Rendezvous. She’s going on the roll as well.
Also new this year was Dan Hall of GUNUP.com, a new site (not quite ready, but soon!) that aims to be THE place for people to go for gun-related information on the web. Sounds like they have a plan and the people, let’s wish ’em luck!
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.
Because I’m going to the USPSA match, and probably won’t be posting anything tomorrow, and I don’t want to post-date this particular bit of linkage. From Dr. Sanity:
Eleven score and four years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Today we live in an Animal Farm world where our elites in Congress consider themselves more equal than you or I; and the wealth created by the productive people in our society is regularly redistributed to those who produce nothing; or, it is wasted on the pet projects of those preening elites who are certain that they know what is best for for everyone. In short, we (and our children and their children) are slowly but inexorably being transformed into slaves of the State.
From Our Very Own Little Country of Horrors which I urge you to read in its (brief) entirety.
Then skip down and read Between Brains, which is longer, deeper, and more important.
Thomas Sowell has a four-part essay up at Townhall.com by that title. Read it.
I’ll be on tonight’s Vicious Circle where I’m sure this will be a topic, because I’m going to bring it up.
UPDATE: Dr. Sowell is again featured on NRO’s Uncommon Knowledge. This week the topic is “American Collapse.” I’m watching it now.
From the comments at Tam’s:
I tutor children from our public schools and I, too, had a high-school senior who didn’t know that the Sun is a star around which the Earth revolves, that the Moon is a planet that revolves around the Earth, or that light travels very fast. This student had memorized the multiplication tables in elementary school but didn’t know what multiplication “means.”
Another example was with a high-school senior taking an “AP Chemistry” class. This student wanted help understanding how to calculate the molarity of a solution. I kept working “backwards” through the “things one needs to know” in search of the student’s baseline competence. At one point I posed the question “If you have two five pound bags of sugar, how much sugar do you have?” The student responded, “Twenty-five pounds. You multiply don’t you?”Several years ago, I had a third grade student who needed help with arithmetic. This student was very bright but didn’t seem to be retaining much from her class at school. I made an appointment with the teacher to try to get more information about what and how my student was being taught.
At one point in the conversation I mentioned that my student didn’t seem confident in even basic facts like knowing the “multiplication table.” The teacher said, “Well, we’re not as concerned about their knowing the exact answer as how they feel about that answer.”
At this point, I knew I had found the root of this student’s problem. I thanked the teacher for taking time to meet with me and backed slowly out of the office.
Again, all of the students in these examples were very bright and had managed to be very successful in their classes. They were all eager students and found their way to me because they really wanted to learn. They all came from homes where their parents were present, loving, dedicated, and involved in their lives. In every case, their performance improved quickly once we put some of the basics in place. All graduated from college and are successful in their careers. The first is now an accountant, the second is a nurse, and the third is a psychiatrist. In short, the only thing preventing them from getting a high quality education was the Educational System itself. – “Larry”
I looked at Bobbi today at the fair and said “You know, it’d be a damn shame to live 80 years on a planet with elephants on it and die without ever having ridden one.“– Tam, in a comment to her own post What I Did on My Summer Staycation
Word.
Sturgeon’s Law says that “90% of everything is crap.” It can be said that “crap is in the eye of the beholder,” but I’d agree that Sturgeon’s law is pretty much undeniable, especially when it comes to the Blogosphere. Technorati, for example, tracks well over 50 million blogs, and says that only about 4% of those are “professional” – the rest being run by people as a hobby rather than a business. Still, ten percent of a million is 100,000, so there’s a lot of good content out there.
But, as with everything, there are some far-edge-of-the-bell-curve extraordinary flawless gems.
Gerard Van der Leun’s American Digest is one of those. His blog has been at the top of my “True Excellence” blogroll since I first stumbled upon it several years ago. AD just turned seven, which is (as I’ve said) like 49 in blog years. Here’s an example of the reason Gerard’s site is one of the best in the ‘sphere: PUDDY: The Gift. Go read. Have some Kleenex handy. And read the comments, especially. All the way to the bottom.
Polite, efficient and responsive policing is a luxury that can only be afforded by states not drowning in politically motivated entitlement spending. The rest of the world gets by with surly, low paid constables and paper-checkers who exist to serve the needs of the state and not the citizenry, and sooner rather than later, we will find out what that’s like here. – Papa Delta Bravo, What Civil Collapse Looks Like
This is a good place to repost Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Modern Policing from all the way back in the nineteenth century:
1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.
2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.
3. Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.
4. The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.
5. Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.
6. Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient.
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.
8. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.
9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.
Looks like Philadelphia is failing #9.