Uh, huh, sure, you bet:
If my revolver uses black powder, it is not considered a firearm. If it uses smokeless powder it is a firearm. That makes no sense.
In some states if my pistol is a different color, it’s illegal. That makes no sense.
If a machine gun was made in 1985 it is legal for me to own if I pay the tax on it. If it was made in 1987 it is illegal to own. That makes no sense.
Just a few examples. Go read the rest.
Nailed to the door at Human Advancement:
1. Free, unregulated, untaxed, and unmonitored trade is the natural right of all human beings
2. In a voluntary trade, both parties receive more than they give up, otherwise neither would trade.
3. Nobody gets taken advantage of through mutually voluntary trade.
4. Taxation forces people to pay for things that aren’t worth the cost
5. Government regulation forces people to abstain from trades they would otherwise voluntarily make.6. Markets collect, organize, and distribute information more rapidly, accurately, fairly, and efficiently than any central authority could ever do, even with superior resources.
7. Prices are information.
8. Force distorts market information.
9. Governments’ only means of action is force.
10. Governments operate blindly because they only see information distorted by force. The more information they gather, the less clear their vision becomes.
11. Aggression is a reaction to unpleasant or unwanted information. It’s motto is “kill the messenger”.
12. A market is smarter than any of it’s participants. A government is stupider than most of it’s participants.13. Governments require markets for their survival; markets thrive in the absence of government.
14. The more efficient a government is, the more dangerous it is.
…
86. The Agora ignores creed and color.
87. When it comes to markets, black is beautiful.
88. Wherever there are human beings, there is an agora. It may be hiding, but it is there.
89. The Agora is a select community – the strict qualification for membership is to want it. Most people don’t.
90. The Agora does not recognize borders or artificial boundaries. It is everywhere, and it is no where.
91. The Agora welcomes you, but does not need you.
92. You need the Agora. Even if you oppose it, you benefit from it.
93. An Agorist movement is an oxymoron. Agorism is the natural state of humanity.
94. Practicing agorism is the only way to achieve agorism. Isolated networks will eventually find each other.95. Governments are on notice the world over: your days are numbered.
Much juicy goodness in the middle, which you should go read.
Nominal RNDR management by the Mission Commander is highlighted in this NASA mission prebriefing, courtesy of Anarchangel.
In comments, venomlash has recommended that I check out Wikipedia to educate myself on climate change. [I'll search out and link to that comment later; I'm pressed now.]
VL is apparently not aware that, as useful as Wiki is for most things, it has a horrendous reputation for subjects where the basic facts are controversial.
Climate change is very controversial, and it turns out that Wiki is extremely biased towards the idea that the climate is warming dramatically and dangerously, and that this is due to human activity.
No wonder: a major AGW advocate wields extraordinary power there.
[U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley] took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.
VL has also asked if I think that the correleation between current warm trend and our current level of technology is a coincidence. (My words, not VL; again, when I have a moment, I’ll hunt down the exact quote, but I think this is a fair paraphrase.)
In short, no, insofar as we are in a warming period, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. See Medieval Warm Period as a prior example:
The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.
Oh, wait, did you think that we puny little humans, who have repeatedly been shown not to be the center of all creation, caused the warming? Hahahahahaha!
[Again, hastily written, mostly as a sticky. I'll come back later and rewrite to be a bit more rigorous, as my real-world duties permit.]
Blogging now from Tina’s Roost, the family owned, chicken-themed coffee-shop/restaurant where I’m currently getting my Saturday Eggs Benedict (”Tina’s Benedict”). I’ll miss them when I’m finished here, probably in January.
With a nod to somebody else in my daily reads who linked to his favorite “Family-owned greasy spoon with open wifi”. I’ll link to him when I find him.
As always, any arrangement I may have with Tina’s, other than their excellent, friendly service and satisfying food, is none of the Fed’s business.
Robin of Berkeley, over at American Thinker, explains about the light going out of American eyes:
It’s a chilling moment when the light goes out in someone’s eyes. A once-radiant child hardens from abuse. A woman’s heart shrinks after her husband’s abandonment.
The person looks the same, maybe acts the same. But something is gone, and what’s lost is irretrievable. It’s like when a person dies: in a heartbeat, the soul vanishes.
I witnessed this alteration recently when I visited my goddaughter, a radiant girl. Her mom, a hardcore progressive, has started exposing her to the darkest elements of the left. And the last time I looked in the girl’s eyes, the light had gone out. Disappeared. Just like that.
I see this phenomenon every day: a light dimming. The friendly shopkeeper snaps at me. My cheerful neighbor seems flattened.
And you hear it in the news: people acting strangely, going off the deep end. The most bizarre behavior becoming the new normal.
A thug bites off a finger. Sarah Palin’s church is torched. Bullies intimidate voters.
Last week, an esteemed Columbia University black architecture professor punched a white female coworker in the eye for not doing more about white privilege.
He has no history of violence. So why now?
Why now? This may be the most important question of our time. Why are some people reaching the boiling point? Why do many others look vacant, like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The shootings at military bases, from Little Rock to Fort Hood — why now?
Absolutely read the whole thing. I have seen this happen myself.
I need to mention something else here: those of us who are not on the left, not liberals, not progressives, not collectivists, who are identified by those on the left as “conservatives” or “capitalists” or “fascists”, we’re the ones with the guns. And yet, we’re the ones with the most peaceful rallies. The ones who get beaten. Who get arrested.
And our response?
We walk around with empty holsters to protest the fact that either open carry is illegal, or that even if it is legal, we’ll be stopped and arrested for “disturbing the peace.”
And, hell, even empty carry attracts attention.
But by and large? We’re the law abiding ones. We’re the non-violent ones.
We’re not the ones, not yet, going to protests with signs showing the sitting President as Hitler. We don’t push around floats showing the President being guillotined.
We don’t even show the President and his cronies as Maoists –but then, we don’t have to. They do that themselves just fine.
The legitimacy of this has yet to established; people I trust seem to think it likely is:
Since I don’t know when I’ll sleep (it’s 4 am now) I’ll write what happened (the abbreviated version…..the long one is already part of the investigation with more to come). I’ll not write about any part of the investigation that I’ve learned about since (as a witness I know more than I should since inevitably my JAG brothers and sisters are deeply involved in the investigation). Don’t assume that most of the current media accounts are very accurate. They’re not. They’ll improve with time. Only those of us who were there really know what went down. But as they collate our statements they’ll get it right.
I did my SRP last week (Soldier Readiness Processing) but you’re supposed to come back a week later to have them look at the smallpox vaccination site (it’s this big itchy growth on your shoulder). I am probably alive because I pulled a ———- and entered the wrong building first (the main SRP building). The Medical SRP building is off to the side. Realizing my mistake I left the main building and walked down the sidewalk to the medical SRP building.
As I’m walking up to it the gunshots start. Slow and methodical. But continuous. Two ambulatory wounded came out. Then two soldiers dragging a third who was covered in blood. Hearing the shots but not seeing the shooter, along with a couple other soldiers I stood in the street and yelled at everyone who came running that it was clear but to “RUN!”. I kept motioning people fast. About 6-10 minutes later (the shooting continuous), two cops ran up. one male, one female. We pointed in the direction of the shots. They headed that way (the medical SRP building was about 50 meters away). Then a lot more gunfire. A couple minutes later a balding man in ACU’s came around the building carrying a pistol and holding it tactically. He started shooting at us and we all dived back to the cars behind us.
I don’t think he hit the couple other guys who were there. I did see the bullet holes later in the cars. First I went behind a tire and then looked under the body of the car. I’ve been trained how to respond to gunfire…but with my own weapon. To have no weapon I don’t know how to explain what that felt like. I hadn’t run away and stayed because I had thought about the consequences or anything like that. I wasn’t thinking anything through. Please understand, there was no intention. I was just staying there because I didn’t think about running. It never occurred to me that he might shoot me. Until he started shooting in my direction and I realized I was
unarmed.Then the female cop comes around the corner. He shoots her (according to the news accounts she got a round into him.) I believe it, I just didn’t see it. He didn’t go down.) She goes down. He starts reloading.
He’s fiddling with his mags. Weirdly he hasn’t dropped the one that was in his weapon. He’s holding the fresh one and the old one (you do that on the range when time is not of the essence but in combat you would just let the old mag go). I see the male cop around the left corner of the building.
(I’m about 15-20 meters from the shooter.) I yell at the cop, “He’s reloading, he’s reloading. Shoot him! Shoot him!) You have to understand, everything was quiet at this point. The cop appears to hear me and comes around the corner and shoots the shooter.
He goes down. The cop kicks his weapon further away. I sprint up to the downed female cop. Another captain (I think he was with me behind the cars) comes up as well. She’s bleeding profusely out of her thigh. We take our belts off and tourniquet her just like we’ve been trained (I hope we did it right…we didn’t have any CLS (combat lifesaver) bags with their awesome tourniquets on us, so we worked with what we had).
Meanwhile, in the most bizarre moment of the day, a photographer was standing over us taking pictures. I suppose I’ll be seeing those tomorrow. Then a soldier came up and identified himself as a medic. I then realized her weapon was lying there unsecured (and on “fire”). I stood over it and when I saw a cop yelled for him to come over and secure her weapon (I would have done so but I was worried someone would mistake me for a bad guy). I then went over to the shooter. He was unconscious. A Lt Colonel
was there and had secured his primary weapon for the time being. He also had a revolver.I couldn’t believe he was one of ours. I didn’t want to believe it.
Then I saw his name and rank and realized this wasn’t just some specialist with mental issues. At this point there was a guy there from CID and I asked him if he knew he was the shooter and had him secured. He said he did. I then went over the slaughter house…the medical SRP building. No human should ever have to see what that looked like, and I won’t tell you.
Just believe me. Please, there was nothing to be done there. Someone then said there was someone critically wounded around the corner. I ran around (while seeing this floor to ceiling window that someone had jumped through movie style) and saw a large African-American soldier lying on his back with two or three soldiers attending. I ran up and identified two entrance wounds on the right side of his stomach, one exit wound on the left side and one head wound. He was not bleeding externally from the stomach wounds (though almost certainly internally) but was bleeding from the head wound.
A soldier was using a shirt to try and stop the head bleeding. He was conscious so I began talking to him to keep him so. He was 42, from North Carolina, he was named something Jr., his son was named something III and he had a daughter as well. His children lived with him. He was divorced. I told him the blubber on his stomach saved his life. He smiled. A young soldier in civvies showed up and identified himself as a combat medic. We debated whether to put him on the back of a pickup truck. A doctor (well, an audiologist) showed up and said you can’t move him, he has a head
wound. We finally sat tight. I went back to the slaughterhouse. They weren’t letting anyone in there not even medics.Finally, after about 45 minutes had elapsed some cops showed up in tactical vests. Someone said the TBI building was unsecured. They headed into there. All of a sudden a couple more shots were fired. People shouted there was a second shooter. A half hour later the SWAT showed up. There was no second shooter, that had been an impetuous cop apparently. But that confused things for a while. Meanwhile, I went back to the shooter.
The female cop had been taken away,and a medic was pumping plasma into the shooter. I’m not proud of this but I went up to her and said “this is the shooter, is there anyone else who needs attention…do them first”. She indicated everyone else living was attended to. I still hadn’t seen any EMTs or ambulances. I had so much blood on me that people kept asking me if I was OK.
But that was all other people’s blood. Eventually, (an hour and a half to two hours after the shootings) they started landing choppers. They took out the big African American guy and the shooter. I guess the ambulatory wounded were all at the SRP building. Everyone else in my area was dead.
I suppose the emergency responders were told there were multiple shooters. I heard that was the delay with the choppers (they were all civilian helicopters). They needed a secure LZ, but other than the initial cops who did everything right, I didnt’ see a lot of them for a while. I did see many a soldier rush out to help their fellows/sisters. There was one female soldier, I dont’ know her name or rank but I would recognize her anywhere who was everywhere helping people. A couple people, mainly civilians, were hysterical, but only a couple. One civilian freaked out when I tried to comfort her when she saw my uniform. I guess she had seen the
shooter up close. A lot of soldiers were rushing out to help even when we
thought there was another gunman out there. This Army is not broken no matter what the pundits say. Not the Army I saw. And then they kept me for a long time to come. oh, and perhaps the most surreal thing, at 1500 (the end of the workday on Thursdays) when the bugle sounded we all came to attention and saluted the flag, In the middle of it all.This is what I saw. It can’t have been real. But this is my small corner of what happened.
Hm, wonder if it would work on Obama as well?
No, wait! The entire Democratic Party! CNN! Chris Matthews!
/me stares off into Happyland, drooling into my beard.
And no sooner do I post that, but I run across this from Eric S. Raymond:
Ego is for little people.
Roissy and Raymond are pointing at the same thing, in different ways and for different reasons, but the same thing nevertheless.
Raymond wrote, amongst many, many other worthy things, two crucial essays, with applications broader than they seem on the surface: The Loginataka, the last stanza of which moves me to tears; and “Ethics From the Barrel of a Gun”, which is what made me understand, at long last, what this was all about.
“What I want to know is, why didn’t that Ft. Hood psychologist diagnose himself with PTSD?”
I replied, “Because he wasn’t suffering from it.”
The thing that struck me about my companion’s question was his automatic assumption that it was PTSD, that no other diagnosis was possible. He was visibly distressed when I proposed jihadism, or at least religious fanaticism, as an alternative, and quickly changed the subject. How is it possible to have a polite conversation with a whacko like me who doesn’t understand that Hasan was a victim, too?
Taranto also clears up the question of terrorism:
In fact, this was not a terrorist attack. By definition, terrorism targets noncombatants. When an irregular force like al Qaeda attacks a military target, such as the bombing of the USS Cole, that is more accurately termed guerrilla warfare.
The real question here is not whether the attack was terrorism but whether it was an act of war as opposed to personal aggression. ABC News reports that “U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago” that the suspect “was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda,” which if true certainly bolsters the case for the affirmative.
When a soldier attacks members of his own force in an act of war, it seems to us the most apt term is treason.
Yes indeed, and when he stands for court-martial, I hope Hasan is tried for treason, and if convicted (as he should be, if he actually was the shooter), he should hung or shot.
Plus, Iowahawk has the latest headlines, plus the finest in news photography. The evidence is indisputable, man!
My favorite is this from ESPN: “Sports psychologists: strain of being a Redskins fan in Cowboy country may have led to breakdown for former DC resident.”
Oh, I deeply sympathize. Perfectly understandable. I, a non-sports-fan, am currently living in Green Bay Packer territory. Jihadis have nothing on these people. The pressure is intense, and if it weren’t temporary, there is no doubt in my mind that sooner or later, I’d go crazy with a cheese grater.
Just a quick link’n'paste now, possible commentary when I have a moment.
John Nolte:
“Independence Day” is one of the most profitable films in history — and after the original “Poseidon Adventure,” one of the greatest bad films ever — but there was no sure-fire, money-making blockbuster sequel because President Bush — The Abraham Lincoln of the Middle East — won the presidency:
In Independence Day, it was about a king who leads his country into a fight against an outside invader. I didn’t want to make that movie during the Bush years. It was not thought that George W. Bush would have made a great king. Now with Obama, it’s another story.
That’s straight from the director, the ball-less Roland Emmerich.
Sure, Hollywood is packed with the worst kind of greedy people who demand higher taxes as they shelter millions — who intend to hang on to their platinum health-care plans as they push rationed care – who demand Big Business pay their “fair share” as they beg for tax incentives… Sure, Leftist Hollywood wants to make money, bucketloads if possible, but…
….not at the expense of The Leftist Cause.
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