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Gun fearing socialist pussies everywhere, relax: my favorite African-American, Kim du Toit, is closing The Other Side of Kim, having gotten tired of shouting the ugly truth into the faces of people who have an ideological commitment to not hearing it.

When he started, he was one of the few strong advocates for the crazy idea that ordinary American citizens, men and women regardless of creed or color, were competent to run their own affairs, even in matters of life and death. He started the idea of National Buy a Gun Day, as a part of his Nation of Riflemen campaign, aimed at re-arming the militia of which the Second Amendment speaks, the unorganized one.

He has also been a tireless critic of communism, socialism, nannyism,and big government generally.

He was one of my very first daily-read bookmarks when I myself realized that the Second Amendment imposed much the same duty as the first: to actively participate in the nation’s political process in ways far beyond mere voting. (What, you thought the First Amendment was all about Freedom From Religion, and your right to buy, sell, and make child pornography?)

He put his money where his mouth is, nearly suffering financial ruin when his employer discovered he, uh, Spoke Real Truth to Real Power, and fired him. So great was his distress that he actually sold off some of his substantial collection of firearms to make ends meet. (And you may judge the size and value of that arsenal by the fact that selling off only a part of it actually made a difference in the finances of a family, including teenagers, who had recently purchased a new home in Dallas.)

He has also taken dozens of people, men, women, and children, Off to the Range, and taught them how to shoot. Fittingly, one of his last posts today was about one such excursion.

All Americans can be proud that when he escaped from the hell hole of South Africa he chose to come here; all Texans can be proud that when he abandoned Mayor Daley’s fiefdom to its own rot, he came here. He came not for a free handout, but to do his part in holding the line in the world’s Last, Best Hope for Liberty.

He, a foreigner, has been a better American than I, a native; indeed, a far better American than almost all of us, including especially many of those who now hold elective office. He took an oath to become one of us, he meant it, and he’s done his level best to keep it.

Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Please enjoy having a private life again; you have already done more than your share.

The most important thing I’ve posted for the women and girls in my audience ever:

The National Firearms Association, the Canadian equivalent of the NRA, puts out this amazing pamphlet [PDF] on some very simple self-defense moves allowing you to disable and escape from a would-be rapist.

No gun needed.

The Lioness correctly notes that the most important element of self-defense is not any particular weapon or skill, but simply the spring-loaded decision to meet violence with violence:

When a rape begins, there is no one there but you and the rapist. When it ends, there is still no one there but you and the rapist. When it ends, you will be dead, or alive but physically and emotionally shattered, probably permanently. You may also be pregnant, or under sentence of death from the AIDS infection he just gave you. Rapists don’t use condoms.

The police don’t come during a rape; they come afterward. It is vanishingly rare to find an instance where a rape has been interrupted or prevented by anyone but the intended victim.

When that realization hits you, you have ten seconds. Within ten seconds, your attacker should be incapacitated, unconscious, or running for his life; or you’ve probably lost. A good fight is short, sharp, and decisive, not a movie-style brawl. Would you like to learn how to end your rapist’s career?

If you believe that you cannot injure another human being, this training is not for you.

If you believe that it is proper to stop a violent criminal to save yourself and others, it is.

None of what you have just learned will do you any good whatever, if you wait until the realization hits you to decide what to do. You’ll take too much time to make the decision.

The Lioness may be printed and distributed freely, as long as it unchanged from the original. There are high-quality PDFs of each page suitable for sending to your local printer.

Along the same lines, read Lawdog’s “Appropriate Countermeasures to the Front Chokehold”, which cannot be safely excerpted, and by that I don’t mean “Not Safe For Work”, I mean “might result in accidental injury or death”. You must read the whole thing.

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For a very long time, official sources have promulgated the myth that if you are being raped, the best thing to do is to cooperate. Fighting back, it’s been alleged, just makes the guy mad, and results in greater injuries. Purse snatching, mugging, rape, home invasion, doesn’t matter: just give the guy what he wants.

That turns out not to be the case.

Fighting a potential rapist might anger him, but likely he’s acting out of rage anyway, says the psychologist.

Fighting an intended attacker might provoke him, but he’s already trying to force his body into yours, says the criminologist.

Fighting off a man who’s trying to have sex with you against your will might hurt you, but nothing matches the pain of a completed sexual assault, says the rape advocate. ["Rape advocate"? Was the editor on this article on coffee break? -- djm]

Fighting a man hand-to-hand transfers his hair or skin cells onto you, helping police track him down, says the self-defense coach.

And fighting back increases your odds of escaping unraped because most rapists are looking for an easy target, said a prominent criminal justice professor who studies how women avoid rape.

“The odds of getting away are increased when you fight back,” said Sarah E. Ullman, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who tracks how women manage to escape sexual assault.

“(Rapists) don’t expect a forceful response. If they get that, they may be quickly deterred and that may be all it takes to stop the assault.”

…
Once a woman has decided to put up a fight, the strategy is clear: Be active, confident and forceful. Attack the rapist’s vulnerabilities: his groin, his eyes. [And ankles and knees and Adam's Apple -- djm] Playing victim won’t work, Ullman said. Neither will begging, pleading, crying or negotiating. Talking to stall when confronted in a public place or business may allow passersby or customers to interrupt the attack, but assertive commands can also buy time and give the woman a chance to run away. And a woman wielding a weapon to a stranger is less likely to have the rape completed.

…
“Women are socialized to not make a scene, to take care of other people’s feelings, to not assume the worst,” Ullman said. “Trust your instincts. If something doesn’t feel right, it isn’t right.

“Don’t worry about making a scene.”

Filling out forms is more important than saving lives:

A volunteer coastguard crew face disciplinary action after going to the rescue of a teenage swimmer in a boat that had recently been repaired and was awaiting a seaworthiness inspection.

The four crewmen were on duty at Hope Cove in South Devon when the 15-year-old girl was swept out to sea by a powerful rip tide. They braved heavy surf to launch their 17ft rigid inflatable.

The girl was rescued by a diver and the coastguard crew brought her ashore. But within hours their boat had been confiscated and the station officer and his crew had been threatened with disciplinary action.

…

Ian Pedrick, 49, the station officer, radioed for permission to launch the boat because the girl was already 150 yards out to sea but the crew lost radio contact with coastguard headquarters at Brixham and went ahead with the rescue.

…

Mr Pedrick, who runs the Hope and Anchor pub near the beach, said that he had been ordered by the MCA not to comment on the incident.

Joe Horn, the Pasadena, Texas man who shot two burglers leaving a neighbor’s home with a bag full of cash, was eventually cleared by a Grand Jury. (I wish I could link to an article from my local paper, the Houston Chronicle, but although they published several opinion pieces by goblin supporter Lisa Flakenberg, their archive did not return any articles about the Grand Jury’s decision. I did find such a link on another Horn story, but it returned a “file not found” error. Gosh, it’s almost as if the Chron doesn’t want you to know Horn was cleared….)

I just ran across video of the police interviewing Horn the night of the incident, as he walks them through his house and yard at Chris’ Simple Musings from a Guy with Guns. The Chron does have this video on their website, but I can’t find a way to link directly to it there.

Here’s a link if the embed doesn’t work for you.

Two things stand out for me:

• Horn is visibly upset as he describes the shooting. He is not proud of having taken lives.
• The goblins were right there in his yard as he came out his front door. He did not chase them down, nor did he shoot them on his neighbor’s property.

Falkenberg’s ignorant ranting aside, this is not a case of a bag full of cash being worth human lives. It’s a case of the people being safe and secure in their homes being worth lives. If anyone decided the stolen goods were worth lives, it was the goblins involved — they just didn’t expect that it would be their lives.

(Also, see Chris’ comments on keeping your mouth shut while talking to the police. I admit, though, that in this case it doesn’t seem to have hurt Horn’s case.)

Earlier, I referred to Irena Sendler, hero of the Holocaust, getting elbowed out of the Nobel Peace Prize by the Goreacle.

I missed this cartoon attached to the story at Flopping Aces:

From Errant Story, Poe’s fantasy online comic:

Ah, yes. Those who “move to the sound of the guns”. Bless them and keep them, as they keep all of us.

The “sheepdog” reference of my title comes from David Grossman’s essay,  “On Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs”.

“…A catastrophic failure in the victim-selection process.” — Massad Ayoob

Kim DuToit provides an excellent example, but really, it’s the phrase itself that’s getting the blog play today.

Cultural self-perpetuation is on my mind today. I’ve posted before on this Civics Literacy Quiz, which was given to freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities. By and large, they failed miserably, with the Ivy League students doing the worst. (I scored 55 out of 60, an A-.)

The QOTD post below, “I’ve heard of that,” links to a brief introduction to the problem.

Now go over to Kevin Baker at The Smallest Minority and read the long version. I’m not even going to bother to quote from it. It is infinitely worth your time, particularly you home schoolers out there, who are facing state execution, because you are doing the job that state teachers are specifically trying to eradicate: turning your kids into functional, literate citizens. (Hi, Chanda!)

Oh, OK, fine then, fine. Here’s your quote:

I am of the carefully considered opinion that both our media and our educational system have been largely taken over by people who are acolytes of the Holy Grail that Socialism promised, and who put themselves in those positions in the belief that it is up to them to help create the New Men that Socialism cannot succeed without. Our schools, especially, have become centers for the teaching of collectivism, “identity politics,” and for want of a better term, “rage against the machine.”

And to some extent, it has worked.

To a larger extent, it has not.

What has resulted are the unintended consequences of declining standards, high dropout rates, functional illiteracy and innumeracy, almost no general knowledge of geography, history, or civics, and nearly complete ignorance of science - both general and applied.

Schools should be the foundry through which the raw material of our youth is run, coming out the other end with strong and tempered minds well prepared for the world. The ore hasn’t changed, but the ratio of dross to valuable product has grown precipitously.

OK, I gave you the quote. Now do your share and read the whole thing, where Baker backs it up with statistics, with quotes, with news articles, with cold hard logic.

Public schools aren’t simply incompetent. They’re doing an excellent job of creating a people fit for socialist tyranny, which means a people unable to govern themselves.

Today marks the start of the American Revolution at Concord and Lexington–The Shot Heard Round The World, “the crack of terrible dawn“. Crittendon has Gen. Gage’s orders to destroy the colonial militia, Paul Revere’s account of his ride, and numerous “sworn accounts” of the ensuing action.

Orders from Gen. Thomas Gage to Lieut. Col. Smith, 10th Regt. Foot, 18 April 1775:

Having received intelligence, that a quantity of Ammunition, Provisions, Artillery, Tents and small Arms, have been collected at Concord, for the Avowed Purpose of raising and supporting a Rebellion against His Majesty, you will March with a Corps of Grenadiers and Light Infantry, put under your Command, with the utmost expedition and Secrecy to Concord, where you will seize and distroy all Artillery, Ammunition, Provisions, Tents, Small Arms, and all Military Stores whatever. But you will take care that the Soldiers do not plunder the Inhabitants, or hurt private property.

It can’t be repeated often enough: the opening shots of the American Revolution were fired over gun control.

Capt. John Parker, Lexington Militia, alleged remarks at Lexington:

Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.

There will be no celebration here in Texas. I can find no mention searching The Houston Chronicle’s website. Nothing at NPR.

Mark it yourself by going to Crittenden’s, and reading some of the accounts.

From Donald Kingsbury’s The Moon Goddess and the Son:

Any god who is a major thinker and a master manipulator can build magnificently to his own design, but, alas, his palace will always crumble for he will have to build it of unfired bricks. There is only only one fire in the universe strong enough to bake enduring bricks: the flame of thought. And yet, whoever builds his edifice out of thinking men, cannot build to his own design for his bricks will be having a say about where they are put. Alas to be a god!

This is the core insight underlying capitalism and libertarianism. Both socialism and Islamism shun this kiln, and so their bricks always crumble.

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Kingsbury’s story telling tends to be a bit clunky. Moon Goddess and Son was stitched together out of a couple of short stories, and it shows. Everybody in it seems to speak with Kingsbury’s voice. I still highly recommend it for his analysis of Russian history and little nuggets of political insights like these. (I wish I could find someone who actually knew Russian history to tell me how accurate it is.)

And, despite its clunkiness, the story’s rollicking good fun, for an engineering sensibility.