2011 – Page 31 – Shall Not Be Questioned

NRA Ad on F&F

As election season approaches, we can expect to see more in this vein:

Getting holder out would be a great victory, but if Holder hangs on this will be a campaign issue if the Republicans will be willing to make it one (which so far, they have not been). Either way, NRA will hopefully have the money to run ads like this in important markets for Obama, like Pennsylvania, during the 2012 elections.

So either he fires Holder, or we use Holder as a boat anchor to drag down the entire administration’s re-election prospects. Not too concerned about how we carve this turkey, as long as Obama doesn’t get to pick the next justice on the Supreme Court. Let’s hope that Justice Ginsburg can hang in there just a little longer.

The Guns Will Come Out, Tomorrow

Concealed carry takes effect in Wisconsin tomorrow. My Google alerts have, since the bill was signed into law, been filled with stories of various local political bodies, and fearful businesses and community groups wringing their hands over what this is going to bring. You’d think, given that this has happened in so many other states with relatively little fanfare, people would be able to take an objective look at things, and conclude that there won’t be colander-faced gangs roaming the highways of the Badger State tomorrow trying to steal your “juice.” But hysterical people are going to be hysterical, no matter what the evidence, and anti-gun folks are some of the more hysterical people I’ve run across in politics.

There’s also at least one other aspect of this that ought not be ignored. From a friend in Wisconsin:

WI will cut its Brady score in half next time they bother to count.

And that, friends, is a good enough reason as any to celebrate this Halloween.

I’ll Have the Mammoth Steak, Extra Rare

Apparently a restaurant in Berlin is featuring a menu made up entirely of “paleolithic cuisine!”Â I’m not one for trendy food fads, but this is one I’d give a try. The only problem I see here is that quite a lot of the meat our paleolithic ancestors fed on are no longer available, possibly because we hunted them all to extinction. Some humans are revolted by that possibility, but it just makes me want to celebrate our species’ success as an apex predator. This cuisine seems a good way to do that.

I’m going to bet a paleodiet actually turns out to work pretty well for people in terms of weight loss, and controlling all the naughty stuff your doctor warns you about. It’s just a hypothesis, but we evolved as hunter gatherers, and didn’t develop agriculture until fairly recently. It seems reasonable that our bodies just don’t deal well with the types of food agriculture produces in abundance. Of course, we also didn’t live until 80 on average until very recently, and considering nature doesn’t give a flying rats behind about your fitness beyond prime reproduction and child rearing years, it’s quite possible we get sick and die beyond those years no matter what we eat.

But maybe if this cuisine catches on, it’ll create a market for using our biomedical technology to bring back the mammoth. Jurassic Park aside, I’ve always thought that would be a rather cool experiment.

Subscribe to Comments Feature Enhancement

Someone (I can’t remember who) asked if the subscribe to comments feature, which will send you an e-mail alert on future comments, could provide a link to the specific comment, rather than the comment section as a whole. This was never a problem in the past, because I didn’t have threaded comments enabled, but now we do, and that makes finding the new comment more difficult.

The plugin I use does not have many options, but it was fairly easy to find and make the change in the PHP code. That plugin hasn’t been updated for years, so hopefully I’ll remember I made a change if it ever does. Either way, the e-mail will now link directly to the new comment.

Winning: Headlines I Never Thought I’d See

A lot of my readers have been in this issue for a long time. What got me concerned about Second Amendment rights was the federal government thinking it was constitutionally unproblematic to ban “assault weapons,” all the way back in 1994. Those of us who paid attention back then remember how the media treated the issue, and remembered how shooters, collectors, and people concerned about the Second Amendment couldn’t get a fair shake. So chalk this up to headlines I’d never thought I’d see:

CBS Carries NRA’s Water On Flawed Gallup Poll

For those of us who remember the media environment in the 90s: did you ever think you’d see left-wing media complaining that CBS News was carrying NRA’s water? Granted, Media Matters are paid shills of George Soros and Joyce, but it’s still satisfying to see. The media environment has gotten considerably better just in the past few years; good enough it’s actually getting harder to find really ridiculous reporting on the issue. That might be bad news if you’re a gun blogger, but it’s good news for the Second Amendment. Granted, the major papers still editorialize against us regularly, but the actual reporting is better, and our point of view is getting a fairer shake. Our opponents are aware of this, and it’s probably part of the reason support for gun control has been declining. Media Matters can try to spin this all they want, but that Gallup poll is bad news for gun control advocates, and everyone knows it.

More on Instructor Certification Non-Discrimination

Following up on the post from Friday, about the State of Texas threatening to revoke certification of a Texas man who ran a radio ad stating he won’t teach muslims, I have some additional thoughts for folks who are troubled by this. Let me state up front that this whole issue is an example of why requiring training to exercise a right is problematic. If this guy were in Pennsylvania, where we do not require training, this would be largely a non-issue, because the man would be free to teach whoever the hell he wanted, and not much would be implicated in terms of the right to bear arms. He is still free to teach or not teach who he wants in Texas, but the question at hand is whether it’s appropriate for the State of Texas to prohibit discrimination as a condition of holding a certification to teach their required concealed carry course.

My position is that it’s not inappropriate for the state to mandate this. By the state issuing instructor credentials, and requiring anyone wishing to carry a firearm to take instruction from a certified instructor, it makes those instructors an instrument of the state, and an instrument of state policy. In this instance, I believe the state may instruct the people carrying out its public policy that they may not discriminate. In fact, I believe that’s what’s morally required, given the exercise of a right is at stake.

I’ll put this in different terms, since prejudice against muslims is more prevalent today, and not as widely condemned. I’ll take it back 80 years or so, to the Jim Crow era. Texas has the same policy, except they allow discrimination by certified instructors. You’re a black man, and want to get a permit. You can’t find any white instructor who will teach you, and there aren’t any black instructors in your area because getting the certification is difficult and expensive, and there are only a handful of black instructors in the whole state. For the most part, this hypothetical black man has been disenfranchised out of his right to bear arms. If I were a fair minded federal judge, and this case came before me, I’d toss the training requirement, and make it clear to the State of Texas that it either needed to fix the discrimination problem, or go without training.

I don’t like training being a condition of accessing a right, because the cost alone puts its exercise out of reach of many. In my opinion, if the state is going to require training to access a right, it had damned well do its best to make sure the required training is widely available and affordable, and part of that can be an anti-discrimination policy that applies to instructors that are certified by the state under its training program.

Many states solve this problem by either not requiring training, or accepting privately certified instruction, and perhaps Texas should as well. That would largely remove the state from the equation in regards to this guy in Texas, though I would still argue if he were NRA certified, he should lose that certification too because I just flatly don’t agree with the kind of discrimination he’s practicing on general principle, and NRA, as a private entity, is perfectly free to set non-discrimination policies for the instructors it certifies.

I Slept Through Fall

Decided to sleep in today, but apparently I woke up having slept through fall and gone straight into Winter. Not much accumulation on the ground here, but it’s coming down. The real concern is there are many outages on power. We’re pretty good here so far, but if the blog disappears, you’ll know why. I have about 50 minutes on UPS if things go south, so I’ll update in that case, assuming it doesn’t happen in the middle of the night.

My relatives up in Connecticut are reporting 7 inches. I’m hearing reports from New Jersey that it’s more like 4 inches there. We’re in the “Wintery Mix” zone, which means we’re getting wet, heavy slush like accumulation. My only concern is my trees still have their leaves, and freezing water over that large a surface area, with wind gusts, is a lot to ask of a tree. And much like the Money Pit, we have very weak trees.

Been working on getting some performance tracking working for the new server. I never really cared that much previously, but I decided to put some time into getting some MRTG tracking working. This way if we get a traffic spike while I’m not paying attention I at least have some data to analyze. Here’s some preliminary stats if anyone is interested.

Help We Don’t Need

I’m not a fan of this guy, and I wouldn’t blame the State of Texas for revoking his instructor certification:

“We will attempt to teach you all the necessary information you need to obtain your [Concealed Handgun License],” the ad says. Then towards the end, it adds: “If you are a socialist liberal and/or voted for the current campaigner in chief, please do not take this class. You have already proven that you cannot make a knowledgeable and prudent decision under the law.”

And then: “If you are a non-Christian Arab or Muslim, I will not teach you the class with no shame; I am Crockett Keller, thank you, and God bless America.”

I’m not of the opinion that Second Amendment rights are limited to Christians or Republicans, and if you’re licensed by the state to administer a concealed carry class, you should do it without regards to race, religion or national origin. I agree that this man has a right to be a bigot, but he doesn’t have a right to be a government certified bigot. To treat every non-Christian Arab or muslim as a potential cold blooded killer is exactly the same kind of bigotry that’s perpetrated against many law-abiding gun owners by the folks who hate gun ownership. It’s not going to help us, and it’s definitely an example of how not to win.

Overheard in the House

Bitter, putting on a sweater, “It’s really starting to get cold.”

“Well, the furnace doesn’t kick on until it drops below 66 degrees,” I note, “But it should stay warmer in here because of the computers running.” Putting my hand over the running machine, “Though, they aren’t doing much now so it’s not putting out much heat.”

Bitter quips, “Maybe you should try to get a link from Glenn Reynolds so it will work harder, and generate more heat.”

“Think Glenn would be responsive to a pitch that goes something like ‘Hey, I need my server to work harder so we’re not so cold in here. Could you spare a link?'” I ponder.

“If an Instalanche doesn’t make the server put out enough heat, Fark probably would,” Bitter notes.

“Hmm,” I ponder, “using computers for both communication and heat? I could probably sell it as a green jobs initiative and get a fat check from the Obama Administration. It could also be a recycling initiative for all those old AMD chips that take heat sinks the size of the Eiffel Tower.”

Thinking Through Resistance

From Jewish Week, comes Guns and the Holocaust:

The idea that Jews or any of the other persecuted groups facing the Third Reich, the most lethal killing machine in human history could have somehow blasted their way out of Germany or German occupied territory with handguns or rifles from their homes is profoundly absurd.

Yes, armed partisan groups that contained Jews were effective in fighting the Nazis. With perhaps as many as a million fighters interspersed in Europe, they were like an additional army and yes, guns made them effective. But for the most part they worked in coordination with the Allies who provided arms and intelligence. Less organized resistance didn’t fare as well.

I think they are vastly understating the effectiveness armed resistance had against the Nazis. To put down the uprising in Warsaw, for instance, the Germans had to bring in crack SS troops, who during that period were not on the front fighting the Americans or the Russians.

But aside from that, Jewish Week is, quite improperly in my view, looking at this through a lens of military effectiveness. I could care less whether individual resistance to a murdering regime makes a huge difference in the overarching military picture. I do care greatly about an individual person’s right to decide if he’s going to die, he’s going to die a free man, and to take at least a few of those bastards out with him. If everyone was imbued with that attitude, what would it take to wage genocide?

I think can speak for many of us when I suggest that no one is going to stuff me into a cattle car alive. So just using a single individual as an example, not examining any greater resistance movement, what kind of resources would it take to get compliance to implement a Nazi-like final solution? You can’t send a few Gestapo agents to knock on the door and haul someone off, because they’ll all end up shot. You can send Stosstruppen to break down the door, and try to take someone by surprise, but now you’re already having to expend more resources, and I’m betting odds a prudent man would still be able to shoot a few members of the raiding party before being killed himself. I suppose they could always just bomb the house, or send a shell into it, but then you have one tank, or one plane, or one artillery piece that’s not serving on the front line. How many tanks, bombs, or artillery pieces would be needed to clear out an entire neighborhood?

I’ve long said, you won’t stop your government from killing you if that’s what it means to do, but you can raise the cost of doing so to an unacceptably high level. It’s not really about winning militarily, so much is it’s about allowing people to maintain their person dignity, and raising the cost of mass murder. That’s what Jewish Week is overlooking.