The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Quote of the Day
People who smoke a gun barrel are pretty serious about checking out of the net, and if a gun isn’t available, they’re off to the nearest tall building or freight crossing. Look at the Land of the Rising Sun. The only guns over there fire plastic pellets, and that doesn’t stop them from whacking themselves with the same amount of industry and efficiency that they put into making Honda Accords. – Tam, Suicidal Stats.
Quote of the Day – Just in Time for Summer!
Quote of the Day
The Saddest Thing About Barack Obama’s Available Military Expertise…
…is that though he has Wes Clark in his corner, the only person he knows with the experience of getting a bomb on target is Bill Ayers. – Confederate Yankee
He shoots, he scores!
Quote of the Day
Prelude:
If big business is so right-wing, why do huge banks fund liberal and left-wing charities, activists, and advocacy groups, then brag about it in commercials and publicity campaigns? How to explain that there’s virtually no major issue in the culture wars – from abortion to gay marriage to affirmative action – where big business has played a major role on the American right while there are dozens of examples of corporations supporting the liberals side?
That’s the lede for this:
Indeed, the myth of the right-wing corporation allows the media to tighten liberalism’s grip on both corporations and the culture. John McCain perfectly symbolizes this catch-22 of modern liberalism. McCain despises the corrupting effect of “big money” in politics, but he is also a major advocate of increased government regulation of business. Apparently he cannot see that the more government regulates business, the more business is going to take an interest in “regulating” government. Instead, he has concluded that he should try to regulate political speech which is like decrying the size of the garbage dump and deciding the best thing to do is regulate the flies. – Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, pp. 312-313.
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You should understand that many of us gun owners today feel the same way as the Cheyenne and Lakota did about the predatory federal government in 1876 — especially after the Olofson case proved to all of us who were paying attention that Waco Rules still govern the ATF. You can and will do anything we can’t or won’t stop you from doing. The rule of law — the faint hope for the justice of a fair trial — is no longer likely for the gun owners your agency selects as targets. Olofson proves that. – Mike Vanderboegh at Mindful Musings, “Closed Hand”: An Open Letter to the ATF’s Jim Cavanaugh
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If the 2nd (Amendment) took the mugging yesterday that the 4th had taken through the ’80s and ’90s, we wouldn’t be allowed to own butterknives, much less duck guns. – Tam
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Being a gentleman of decency, restraint, and a high regard for the social niceties, I elected not to pursue my momentary desire to utilize my extensive martial arts training in order to break both their necks and thereby prevent the evolutionary horrors the two of them might one day unleash upon an unsuspecting planet should they ever happen to stumble upon a method of propagating their brainless species.
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Call it the Art of Enlightened Condescension or the Zen of Contempt, whatever you like, but the only other serious option is to withdraw into a hermit’s cave and never communicate with the larger part of humanity again. – “Vox Day,” The importance of condescension
Quote of the Day
The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’
‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome. – Robert A. Heinlein To Sail Beyond the Sunset
The Heller decision will be handed down a little bit later this morning. That decision will help tell us just how far our “cancer of democracy” has metastasized in the body politic.
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I am incredibly lucky. I exist in the middle of the American middle class – the graviest of the gravy trains in the history of the planet. Hell, if I had a blindfold, a million darts, and a map of the world, nine-hundred-thousand throws would land me in a place worse off than here and now, and a lot of those would be traumatically worse. – Mike, in Wheel of Fortune at MIKE-ISTAN
Sometimes I need to be reminded of that, myself.
Quote of the Day
Went to Kevin’s place for my regular dose of “There went THAT good mood” …. – Firehand