The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Do it again, only HARDER!
Number of shell casings collected by COBIS as of January 1: 258,700Number of crimes solved because of COBIS as of January 1: 0Stolen in its entirety from GUNPOLITICSNY.COM
And why? Because “ballistic fingerprinting” doesn’t (and won’t) work. And I told you that five years ago.
Quote of the Day – Many Categories Edition
When the representative of government tells you to do nothing when a criminal wants something, government is telling you that the action of the criminal is authorized and supported by the government. – Windy Wilson in a comment to the post From the Place Where Great Britain Used to Be at Irons in the Fire
Damned straight, Mr. Wilson. Good pick, Firehand. Thanks for the pointer.
What’s weird about this story? Unless he opens the door wearing his wife’s face, I don’t consider “whacko who hoards grenades & cats kills wife” to be all that weird anymore.
I guess society has shifted in my eyes and I expect less and less out of people. – “Joseph” in commenting on this post at Tam’s.
Quote of the Day – Health Care Edition
The Left believes it will achieve final victory through socialized medicine, which will forever shackle the middle class as dependents of the State, and destroy the independence that makes them dangerous. — Dr. Zero, Hot Air – Targeting the Tea Party
Question from the Audience II
I received an email Thursday from reader Joe P.:
I read your post about refusing to pay taxes in order to starve the beast. In it, Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is mentioned, as is the strategy of making people more miserable in order to get them to join the revolution. I pondered that a bit and had something I wanted to run past you. How likely is it that this is the strategy of the current administration? Make all of us – the producers – so miserable that we finally revolt? It would be a fight we couldn’t win, for sure, and with the media complicit in much of what was going on, it would give them all the cover they needed to eliminate the last vestiges of true freedom – gun rights, for sure, probably the 4th amendment (what little meaning it retains, that is), etc. The way I see it, they have us right where they want us. If we tolerate the quickly tightening screws, they win. If we go out in a second amendment blaze of glory, they win faster and probably more decisively.
And the ballot box? Who’s running? More socialists? No society in history has successfully gotten people to give up loot from the public treasury for the good of the nation. I think Donald Sensing was right. We are the last generation to experience meaningful freedom.
Anyway, I was just interested in your thoughts on the matter.
I am, as I have noted previously, a pessimist by temperament. I am not, however, a conspiracy theorist. No, I don’t think the current administration has a strategy to fire up the populace and bring us to armed rebellion, I really don’t. I don’t think they fear us at all. By the same token, I agree that an armed uprising would merely hasten the current disassembly of the Constitution. And I am in full agreement, as I have also stated previously, that merely throwing out the Democrats in the next two elections is not equal to “taking back our country” or our Constitution, because we have nothing worthy to replace them with.
It has taken over a hundred years for us to get to where we are. We have gotten here through the actions of thousands of people, each chipping away (and most with the best of intentions) at the foundations of the American culture: self-reliance, independence, the Protestant work-ethic, individual (as opposed to collective) compassion, education (especially in history and civics, later mathematics and language), etc. The actions of those thousands have spread geometrically until now the majority of the population lacks the skills, the knowledge and the philosophy necessary to support a culture of liberty.
I don’t know how to get it back. I’m afraid that whoever wrote the historical sequence attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler had it right, that civilizations go through a predictable cycle due to human nature:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back again into bondage.
I’d put the majority of the population at late-stage apathy, early-stage dependence.
I was going to save this for tomorrow’s Quote of the Day, but here is as good a place to put it as any (and hell, it’ll still be tomorrow’s QotD):
The Left believes it will achieve final victory through socialized medicine, which will forever shackle the middle class as dependents of the State, and destroy the independence that makes them dangerous. — Dr. Zero, Hot Air – Targeting the Tea Party
And those are my thoughts on the matter.
Combination QotD and Gun Pr0n
First the pr0n, the Mossberg 500 Road Blocker:
The Quote of the Day:
Guard dogs have to be fed, walked groomed, trained. These you just oil.
These both come from the concluding piece of NRO’s Uncommon Knowledge interview of Dr. Thomas Sowell on his latest book Intellectuals and Society:
Sowell: We’re becoming a nation of people who are propagandized from elementary school right on through to the graduate school in a certain vision of the world. And only the ones who, for one reason or another, either experience or insight or whatever, leads them to say “Wait a minute!” Only those are the ones we have to depend on.
—
Peter Robinson: If you had a sentence or two to say to the Cabinet assembled around President Obama, and this cabinet holds glittering degrees from one impressive institution after another, if you could beseech them to conduct themselves in one particular way between now and the time they leave office, what would you say?
Thomas Sowell: Actually, I would say only one word: Goodbye. Because I know there’s no point talking to them.
Quote of the Day – Optimism Edition
From the GeekWithA.45, in comments referring to his post to Bill Whittle’s latest Afterburner:
It wasn’t the details of what the retrofuture contained, it was the unbridled optimism that we were going to totally p0wn the future, that nature was our bitch, that mankind was full of WIN, and that most of society shared in this bouyant enthusiasm.
I remember those days.
Quote of the Day – Health Care Edition
From segment 1 of Peter Robinson’s NRO Uncommon Knowledge interview of Paul Rahe about his book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect.
Robinson: Paul let me ask you a question. You said that President Obama’s underlying intention is to cut health care costs. Do you believe that, or do – not so much with regard to President Obama personally as to the entire political impetus behind the health care legislation – or do you believe that there actually is a statist impulse in Washington that wishes to see the State expand for the sake of State expansion? Are they simply stumbling into this mistakenly? Or do they know what they’re doing and want it?
Rahe: They know what they’re doing and they want it.
Let me see if I can put it this way. We are all in the grips of the meddling impulse. If I were to say to you that you were a busybody you might say to me “surely not.” And I would say to you “ask your children.” And everyone’s children would say that the parent is a busybody because we all feel that impulse. That is to say that we all feel that we know better than other people. (Sometimes we really do!) The more educated people become – when you give them Ph.D’s, the more expertise they have – the more you have inflated their sense of the right to interfere in the lives of other people. So the Progressive impulse goes back to the 1870’s and the 1880’s and the establishment of major research universities on the German model in the United States.
The function of these institutions is to produce people who can successfully meddle in other people’s lives.
Robinson: And in Barack Obama we have . . .
Rahe: The representative of that class. The perfect representative of that class.
This is a fascinating interview.
Another excerpt:
Rahe: (Montesquieu) comes up with a political typology into republics, monarchies and despotisms, and monarchies are governments where you have a king, but his power is limited in one fashion or another – usually by a nobility. Despotism is unlimited power, and these operate on the basis of psychological principles. What drives a despotism is terror. What drives a monarchy is the sense of honor, the love of honor that elicits a certain kind of behavior from people. What’s required in a republic is virtue. That’s hard to achieve, because you have to train people in virtue and it doesn’t come naturally or easy to us to prefer the public interest over the private interest.
No indeed. And when the system stops teaching honor and virtue? When it, in fact, denigrates them both?
Quote of the Day – Working Edition
We’ve declared war on work. As a society – all of us. It’s a civil war, it’s a cold war, really. We didn’t set out to do it, and we didn’t twist our mustache in some Machiavellian way, but we’ve done it. And we’ve waged this war on at least four fronts. Certainly in Hollywood. The way we portray working people on TV? It’s laughable. If there’s a plumber, he’s 300 pounds and he has a giant butt-crack, admit it. You’ve seen it all the time, that’s what plumbers look like, right? We turn ’em into heroes or we turn ’em into punchlines. That’s what TV does. We try hard on Dirty Jobs not to do that, which is why I do the work and I don’t cheat.
We’ve waged this war on Madison Avenue. So many of the commercials that come out there in the way of a message, what’s really being said? Life would be better if you could work a little less. If you didn’t have to work so hard. If you could get home a little earlier, if you could retire a little faster, if you could punch out a little sooner. It’s all in there, over and over, again and again.
Washington? I can’t even begin to talk about the deals and policies in place that affect the bottom-line reality of the available jobs ’cause I don’t really know. I just know that that’s a front in this war.
And right here, guys; Silicon Valley. How many people have an iPhone on ’em right now? How many people have their Blackberries? We’re plugged in, we’re connected. I would never suggest for a second that something bad has come out of the tech revolution. Good grief, not to this crowd. But I would suggest that innovation without imitation is a complete waste of time. And nobody celebrates imitation the way Dirty Jobs guys know it has to be done. Your iPhone without those people making the same interface, the same circuitry, the same board over and over – all that, that’s what makes it equally as possible as the genius that goes inside of it.
And so we’ve got this new tool box. Our tools today don’t look like shovels and picks, they look like the stuff we walk around with. And so the collective effect of all of that has been this marginalization of lots and lots of jobs.
Mike Rowe from his speech at TED.
And I’m reminded of this old, old joke:
5,000 years ago, Moses said:
“Load up your camels, pick up your shovels, mount your asses,
and I will lead you to the promised land.”5,000 years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt said:
“Lay down your shovels, sit on your asses, light up a Camel,
this IS the promised land.”