The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
The American Form of Government
Many of you, I’m sure, have seen this, but it was new to me. It runs 10:35, and is worth your time if you haven’t seen it before:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DioQooFIcgE&hl=en&fs=1&w=425&h=344]
There’s an entire year of Junior-High Government class in just over ten minutes. One that, sadly, I don’t think gets taught much of anywhere anymore.
THIS is How to Suck Up! 😉
I was checking the referrer log yesterday and noticed a hit from a blog I didn’t recognize, Hecate’s Crossroad. The interesting thing was that the hit had gone to the first post in the Dangerous Victims trilogy of essays, and the reader had continued on reading. So I clicked on over to Hecate’s Crossroad looking to see where the link came from.
She’s linked all three posts on her sidebar!
Now, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Ramblings from Oz was the first blog I know of to post links on the sidebar to essays of mine – in his case, under a heading titled “Favorite Essays.”
I’ll tell you, if you want your ego stroked, this’ll do it.
The Secret of Social Harmony
It the first post of my “Dangerous Victims” trilogy of essays, I quote from Grim Beorn’s Grim’s Hall:
The secret of social harmony is simple: Old men must be dangerous.
I just got back from seeing Clint Eastwood’s latest, Gran Torino, and Clint illustrates this fact with authority in this film.
My (Japanese) wife was shocked by the racist epithets fired at a machine-gun pace throughout the film, but agreed, it’s a damned good movie. It’s also the most un-PC film since Blazing Saddles, which should be enough to recommend it to my readers.
Apparently Eastwood has announced that, at 78, Gran Torino will be his last acting effort. If so this film, I think, suitably completes the cycle of his acting career. He started out doing spaghetti Westerns, slinging lead and gratuitous violence. This proceeded into his stint as Dirty Harry Callahan, doing much the same, only with a badge. But in his later films, Pale Rider, Unforgiven, and now Gran Torino, he has shown that violence is not something that should be treated lightly, but is something that still has its place even in “civil society” and that there is a difference between “violent and predatory” and “violent but protective.”
Go see it.
I called it. Not exactly; back when I was cautioning friends and co-workers not to be too confident about the change-over date, I expected a Democrat-dominated Congress (rather than an incoming Democrat President) to push the date back, frettin’ about the “technologically disenfranchised poor,” or, as PBS President Paula Kerger
whineschides us,she’s especially concerned that children in less-affluent homes that rely on free television might lose access to PBS educational shows for kids.
Especially Sesame Street. Awwww. How ever else will they learn that it takes a village — or a city block of slum tenements inhabited by creatures from a drug hallucination — to hammer a child’s mind into uniformity and compliance? – Roberta X, DTV Cutover Delay?
With both Roberta and Tam in the same domicile, the psychic snark must be oozing out of the walls by now!
UPDATE: See? Here’s Tam:
FDR Jr. at the podium was telling us that we faced an “unprecedented” crisis in our nation, which no doubt made elementary school history teachers cry.
Then he said that the “wait-and-see” approach hadn’t worked. Apparently “wait-and-see” is where you make stupid regulations for things you know nothing about, and throw borrowed imaginary money at irresponsible people in numbers that make astronomers twitch.
So now we’re going to try his way, which is where you make stupid regulations for things you know nothing about, and throw borrowed imaginary money at irresponsible people in numbers that make astronomers twitch.
I see.
Quote of the Day (Ok, ONE post!)
As a follow on to Women Shouldn’t Have Guns . . ., commenter “Lurker” linked this story with more details. A lot more:
Seventy-year-old woman holds home intruder at gunpoint, talks about ordeal
It’s not uncommon to hear stories of people defending their homes and themselves from intruders– but when it’s a 70-year-old woman, that story is a bit more uncommon.
It’s exactly what happened in St. Joseph County on Sunday night, after an intruder broke into an elderly woman’s home on Portage Road.
The woman held the man at gunpoint until police arrived. That man is 28-year-old Cyrus Brown. Brown is being held in jail on a number of charges, including burglary and intimidation.
The woman who defended herself is Sandra. She asked us not to use her last name. Newscenter 16 spoke to her by phone Monday night, while she recovered in her hospital room. She’s being treated for heart problems, problems she didn’t have until Sunday night’s scare.
As you’ll hear, this 70-year-old is a gutsy lady who wasn’t about to let anybody mess with her.
It was all started about nine o’clock Sunday night. Sandra says she was in the midst of splitting wood for her fire and making vegetable soup, when she heard a ruckus outside.
“All of a sudden, I’m hearing fast footsteps around my yard, around my deck,” says Sandra.
That’s when she says she grabbed her gun and called 911. Moments later– the intruder– 28-year-old Cyrus Brown, broke through her back patio door, pushing his way through the glass.
“Immediately, I felt there was danger because he was so desperate,” explains the 70-year-old. “He’s in the kitchen by the stove, I told him to get down on the floor. I said if you come any closer to me, I will shoot you to kill. I told him to sit down, don’t move, and I want to see your hands at all times,” adds Sandra.
Newscenter 16 obtained the 911 call that Sandra made. In the background, you can hear her demanding the suspect get down.
911 call:
Dispatch: “Ma’am, where is he at in the house?”
Sandra: “Get, get, get! You have more to fear from me!”911 call:
Dispatch: “Ma’am, are you holding him at gunpoint?”
Sandra: “Yes, I am. And if he moves towards me, I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill. I don’t want to have to kill him.”In that moment, Sandra says she was glad she had a gun and knew how to use it– just in case.
But he should have taken it away from her! The Violence Policy Center says so!
“I thought that this could turn out badly because I heard of other people being murdered in their house, but I decided, I wasn’t going to go down without a fight. I owe that to my children,” she explains.
And here’s the Quote of the Day:
“Guns aren’t all bad, only in the hands of the criminal and guns can be a good defense.”
Gee, ya THINK?
In the end, you can hear the relief in Sandra’s voice, as the police arrive at her back door.
911 call:
Sandra: “Cops!”
Police: “Get down, get down!”
Dispatch: “Ma’am, can you put the gun down for me please?”
Sandra: “It’s down.”
Dispatch: “Great, great, ok!”
The full 911 audio is available at the link, but the piece doesn’t stop there:
Sandra is a mother of three and has several grandchildren.
She’s set to have a procedure on her heart this week. As you can imagine, this whole situation has caused the 70-year-old a lot of stress.
She says she hopes others can learn from her story and think about protecting themselves. She’s hoping to have a neighborhood meeting in her area to discuss safety in homes.
Good for her! But wait! There’s more!
ORIGINAL STORY: NEIGHBORHOOD REACTION
A man is in custody Sunday night after police say he tried to break into a home on St. Joseph County’s northwest side.
It happened in the 51000-block of Portage near Brick Road.
Police say 28-year-old Cyrus Brown drove off the road and hit a utility pole on Portage. He then attempted to break into a nearby home.
When police arrived, they found an elderly female named Sandra holding the driver at gunpoint, awaiting their arrival. Sandra tells us she was scared to death and yelled at Brown to stay down. She says he begged her not to shoot.
“I would give her thumbs up and tell her to keep up the great work and I’m really proud of her,” Lanore Evins, Sandra’s neighbor, says. “He probably didn’t want anyone to know that happened to him. That’s probably a little embarrassing for him.”
“He was a little combative at first,” explains Sgt. Bill Redman, St. Joseph County Sheriff Department. “The officers had to wrestle with him to get him to comply with their orders. He didn’t mess with the homeowner though.”
Sandra is in the hospital with heart problems she says stemmed from the incident. She says her doctors say the situation caused too much pressure for her. But Sandra hopes her story inspires others to stand up for themselves.
“Doesn’t surprise me about any of us around here. We all fight (for) what’s ours,” says Phyllis Barkley, Sandra’s good friend. “Don’t mess with the gray haired people! We still got a lot of fight in us.”
To quote Grim again, “(I)t’s most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can.” And, “The secret of social harmony is simple: Old men must be dangerous.” Old women, too. Sandra understands that. Her neighbors, it sounds like, do too. And now Cyrus Brown does as well. Sounds like South Bend Indiana is “American-occupied America!”
Congratulations to the local media for a job well done! Too bad that apparently only FOX picked this up nationally, and at that, minimally. There’s a link at the top of the story to the email addresses of the reporters who wrote it. If you feel like it, drop ’em a nice note thanking them for the piece. I did.
Oh, and the comments to the story are generally pretty good, too.
Home! (Again)
Well, this week was 67.5 hours, the last three driving home from Wickenburg. (202 miles in three hours . . . carry the one . . . 67.3MPH average. Not bad!) They wanted us on the site this morning at 6:00AM, so I dragged my butt out of bed at 3:50 this morning, and we were on the road at 4:45.
It’s been a long day. No blog for you!
Women Shouldn’t Have Guns . . .
. . . for self-defense. Assailants will take them away and they’ll be shot with their own guns!
At least, that’s what I’ve heard from about the time I was knee-high to a grasshopper.
Apparently nobody told this woman:
“A seventy year old Indiana woman stops an intruder in his tracks and 911 tapes just released prove she was not going to back down.”
“The woman held a suspect at gunpoint until police arrived.”
But remember: this apparently doesn’t qualify as a “defensive gun use,” since nobody died. That seems to be the criteria used by anti-gun forces. It’s only a DGU if a perp (often referred to as “the victim”) assumes room temperature.
Anybody have more detailed information on this one?
Well, the new Congress has been seated, and they’re off! As Glenn Reynolds stated it, “400 bills on first day of new Congress. Hope and Change!” The only tool in the Congressional toolbox is legislation, so they’re gonna legislate! The oft-quoted Rev. Sensing gets cited again:
A long time ago Steven Den Beste observed in an essay, “The job of bureaucrats is to regulate, and left to themselves, they will regulate everything they can.” Celebrated author Robert Heinlein wrote, “In any advanced society, ‘civil servant’ is a euphemism for ‘civil master.’” Both quotes are not exact, but they’re pretty close. And they’re both exactly right. Big government is itself apolitical. It cares not whose party is in power. It simply continues to grow. Its nourishment is that the people’s money. Its excrement is more and more regulations and laws. Like the Terminator, “that’s what it does, that’s all it does.”
And here they are doing it some more, this year to the tune (projected, almost certain to be exceeded) of $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars!) $1,200,000,000,000 ($1.2 trillion) $1,600,000,000,000 ($1.6 trillion) of deficit spending. (Thanks, DJ!)
The Gross Domestic Product of the U.S. in 2007 was about $13.8 trillion.
More to the point, from that same Sensing piece comes the other rationale for so many bills:
More than anything else, big-government activism is the New Deal’s legacy, and IMO, has come to define the governing philosophy of both parties today. The rising tide of big government has swamped us, held only temporarily at bay by the levees of the Reagan years. (And not really even then, since non-defense spending rose during the Reagan administration.)
Because the present-day Republicans and Democrats are both big-government activists, they have a foundational philosophy that is the same:
America is a problem to be fixed, and Americans are a people to be managed.
“It didn’t work last time, but the philosophy cannot be wrong! Do it again, only HARDER!“
BOHICA!
eBay Strikes Again
My boss has a run-in with eBay. Quote of the Day:
eBay can pucker up and kiss my hairy, old, wrinkled…..
(Click for the visual aid, and the rest of the story.)
Apparently eBay is frightened of images of firearms. Who knew?
Bummer
Just an update. I’m back in Wickenburg again, and it looks very much like I’ll be moving from the apartment here to a house in Bagdad to be closer to the job site during commissioning. That’ll happen tomorrow or Wednesday.
Good news: No more 75 minute commute to and from the site.
Bad news: No internet access.
More bad news: The drive up on Sunday increases from three to four hours.
Looks like I’ll be disconnected from the web for about three or four days. (I should have a Verizon wireless card next week.)
I’m already hyperventilating.
UPDATE – 1/6: Checked out the house this afternoon. Short form: No. Longer form: Oh, HELL no!
After seeing the alternative, the extra two-hour commute isn’t that damned bad. I believe we’re going to decline the generous offer of on-site housing.
The real deal-breaker is the prison-style rollaway cots in each of the bedrooms.
Homey don’t play dat.