Losing the Plot

Posted on October 10, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Over the weekend, MSNBC host, Contessa Brewer, ran a segment on the subject of arming teachers in public schools. Her guests were former Air America talk show host Mike Malloy and a right wing talker I’ve never heard of, Steve Malzberg.

Jamie Holly at the CrooksandLiarsblog has recorded the video and you can watch it in here. She has, of course, a little idol worship of Malloy going on, taking his insults as actual talking points. As a matter of fact, Malloy doesn’t even get a point out other than that he is a bitter old leftist who lives to insult anyone who doesn’t think as he does.

The segment starts out pretty well, with an clip of a Repub pol from Wisconsin before the two talkers come on. Malloy starts in with the insults in his hello to Brewer, which in case you never heard him before he was deservedly dumped off Air America, is his only forte. Malzberg gets to speak to the topic first, and comes in with decent ideas, but then gets laughed at for suggesting that terrorists might try and pull off a Beslan here in America.

Malloy comes in with the usual platitudes about how “he is a hunter” and is all for “responsible gun ownership”. But then gets off the subject and decides to critque Malzberg’s pronunciation of “Kalashnikov” instead of saying anything substantive.

And that is where it all goes downhill. Malzberg falls for the insult and the bickering starts. Then someone in the studio where Malzberg is at makes a noise and Brewer gets in on the action.

I know that the MSM folks like to get the weakest right-wing proponents they can find and set them right up in front of the country to look foolish, but I just wish that there was a way we could get someone who knows the ploy and can fight the urge to fall for the bait.

Watch the video.

Posted in The Left is Never Right | 1 Comment

Lahar

Posted on October 10, 2006 by Phil Kadath

It’s not just a metal band from the Netherlands.

Aftershocks rumble at Mount Rainier

The effects of this weekend’s magnitude 4.5 earthquake at Mount Rainier may simmer for several more days as low-level aftershocks continue, scientists said Sunday.

The quake caused minor rockslides in some areas, but all roads were open, with visitors cautioned to watch for falling rocks.

More of a curiosity than a threat, the quake occurred just before 8 p.m. Saturday.

It is uncommon to have a quake centered on the east side of the mountain — in this case, about two miles beneath Cowlitz Chimney in Lewis County, said Tom Yelin, a geophysicist at the University of Washington seismology lab.

“There haven’t been many of those in the last 30 to 40 years,” Yelin said. The last one was a magnitude 4.7 quake in 1974.

I’ve stated here in the past that one of the reasons I’ve decided to stay in the liberal armpit of the United States of America instead of somewhere more sensible, like Montana, is because of the gorgeous scenery.

Rainier84.jpg

I can go from Mount Rainier, St. Helens or any of the other multitude of Alpine peaks that makes Washington’s terrain more like Switzerland than any other state in the nation all the way down to any of the beaches along our hundreds of miles of coastline in an hour.

But I know the dangers that come with such opportunity: Tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, and most devastating of all, volcanic eruptions.

For those not in the know, a “Lahar” is basically the mudflow that comes from the swift melting of glacial ice during a volcanic eruption. There are three main paths for the Rainier lahar on the west side of the mountain, the largest of which runs through the town of Orting, which has seen it’s population double if not triple in the last decade.

Scary thoughts.

Calling Rainier just a “mountain” is somewhat disingenuous. It is, and has been for over 1000 years, the largest dormant volcano on the west coast. I have little to no doubt that it will pop in my lifetime, which is why I have made preparations and arrangements.

You have too, I suppose?

Posted in Armageddon, By Ourselves, For Ourselves | 7 Comments

RNS Quote of the Day: 10/10/06

Posted on October 10, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Following up from yesterday’s

Governing by excruciating detail, dictating every result in advance, might indeed suggest to you the pattern with which Mr. Havel has so much experience. Modern regulatory law resembles central planning. Instead of an economist in Moscow making complex flowcharts on how to harvest Siberia’s wheat, generally forgetting something like spare parts for the delivery trucks, we have highly detailed laws and rules, often written years earlier, that catalog the conditions for our action.

Government in both cases is blinded by its own predetermined rules, entranced by the Rationalist’s promise that all can be set out before we get there. As the philosopher, Michael Oakenschott, observed “The Rationalist…does not merely neglect the kind of knowledge which would save him, he begins by destroying it. First he turns out the light and then complains he cannot see.”

There are differences, of course. The Soviets tried to run their country like a puppeteer pulling millions of strings. In our country, the words of law are like millions of trip wires, preventing us from doing the sensible thing.

The Death of Common Sense – Philip K. Howard

Posted in Quote of the Day | Leave a comment

The Dumbest Thing I’ve Read All Day: 10/10

Posted on October 10, 2006 by Phil Kadath

John Amato at the CrooksAndLiarsblog links to an overly long piece of drivel at the similarly leftist OnceUponATimeblog of Arthur Silber.

Silber’s piece goes on and on, quoting nutjob Alice Miller and relating it to the “Foley talked about touching pages in the bathing suit area” kerfuffle. I normally wouldn’t have read such a long, whining diatribe except that Amato singled out a section in Silber’s post that focuses on corporal punishment.

For all the talk we’ve been hearing lately about how we need to protect our children–please answer me this: How does corporal punishment still exist in our schools?

Silber links to a NYT piece which is unavailable for non-MYT members (why do liberals always do that?), so I found a copy of it at the Florida Herald Tribune. It opens as follows

Anthony Price does not mince words when talking about corporal punishment which he refers to as taking pops a practice he recently reinstated at the suburban Fort Worth middle school where he is principal.

Im a big fan, Mr. Price said. I know it can be abused. But if used properly, along with other punishments, a few pops can help turn a school around. Its had a huge effect here.

It goes on with the usual NYT spin about how mean it is to use more than a “time out” against unruly children, and after a few choice quotes at his place, Silber whines

I emphasize that this article concerns public schools. That means that you are helping to pay for the systematic, institutionalized brutalization of children.

Did you even know of this story, or how common these barbarities still are? Are our national legislators denouncing these methods straight out of the Dark Ages, or threatening to cut off funds for public schools that still use them? Is even one of the Democrats leaping on the Foley story with undisguised and sickening glee passionately decrying this commonplace form of torture — torture of those children they claim to be so concerned about? Of course not.

But they’re deeply committed to “protecting the children.” Or so they tell us. Lies, all lies.

For those who don’t know who Alice Miller is, she is, according to Wikipedia “a psychologist noted for her work on child abuse and its effects upon society as well as the lives of individuals.”

Sounds noble and reasonable. But what they don’t say is that, according to Alice, Child Abouse Is (from her website):

“Humiliations, spankings and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away.”

So, if we’re to believe Alice, a spanking is the same as sexual exploitation, and that anything but wonderous praise said to a child could make their future an unhappy one.

cough HORSESHIT cough

Teaching a child that they are good beyond anyone’s knowledge and that doing wrong will get them no punishment beyond a gentle talking to is a recipie for a megalomaniacal adult. A whuppin’ of ass will erase that crap right out of a misbehaving youngin’.

A could think of at least a few leftists who could have used a spanking once or twice during their childhoods.

Posted in The Left is Never Right | 2 Comments

Carnival of Cordite’s Up…

Posted on October 9, 2006 by Alaska

…with a submission from yours truly. The rest of it’s pretty good, too. Go here now.

Posted in Kewel! | Leave a comment

Citizen Saves Self and Possibly Others

Posted on October 9, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Of course, that isn’t a headline you’ll read in any of the Seattle papers about a very public use of a firearm in self-defense that happened over the weekend.

Assault victim fatally shoots assailant outside Westlake Center

Witnesses reported a man in a yellow shirt acting erratically, insulting and threatening passing pedestrians at Pike Street and Boren Avenue near the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, said Seattle police spokeswoman Deb Brown.

A half-hour later, a man matching the same description was reported near Westlake Center. At the same time, a second man, described by witnesses as balding and wearing a leather jacket, was walking through the nearby plaza after finishing his lunch.

Neither man’s identity was released by police on Saturday.

The man in the yellow shirt apparently focused in on the second man, saying, “I am going to kill you,” Brown said. He then began punching and kicking the second man until the man fell to the sidewalk.

“He was down there, minding his own business. There is nothing to think he was anything but a random target,” Brown said.

The victim happened to have a concealed-weapons permit, Brown said, and he was carrying a handgun. He pulled out the gun and fired once, hitting his attacker in the abdomen.

“It looked to me like he shot him in self-defense,” said Linda Vu, who was across the street from the shooting, handing out fliers for political activist Lyndon LaRouche. “It’s kind of crazy.”

Thankfully and surprisingly enough, the Seattle Police have pretty much settled on the fact that the shooting was self-defense.

The man was randomly attacked, he gave up ground to a person who publically exclaimed he was going to kill him. After giving up the ground and being put into a position of extreme disadvantage, he drew his weapon and fired.

Several nearby Seattle police officers heard the gunshot. When they arrived at the shooting scene, the victim, sitting on a streetside planter full of purple pansies, handed the gun to them and said, “I am the one who did this,” according to Assistant Police Chief Jim Pugel.

The man was arrested, but after questioning him and other witnesses, detectives determined they did not have probable cause to book him into the King County Jail. The man was released. Police said they were withholding his name as a crime victim — of the assault.

It will be up to the county prosecutor to determine whether the man will face charges. But Pugel said, “It could be considered justifiable homicide.”

And any other verdict would be preposterous.

But after a person was randomly attacked by a crazed and delusional individual in the middle of Seattle’s downtown, high-end public shopping area, the local media still focuses on the man’s firearm.

A bizarre case of what appeared to be justifiable homicide rattled the heart of Seattle’s swanky downtown shopping district late Saturday morning.

Seattle police are still piecing together what happened, but this much is known: A young man was killed on the crowded sidewalk outside Westlake Center, and the confessed shooter was allowed to walk out of a police station.

I put these two paragraphs at the end of my post, but are there any guesses as to where the Seattle Times put them?

You guessed it; these are the opening paragraphs of the story. How nice of the Times to act as “Judge” in this case before presenting any evidence.

Posted in Heroes, Comrades and Brothers | 9 Comments

A Lone Cry in the Wilderness

Posted on October 9, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Ben, The Reasonable Nut, tells us how he really feels

I Hate Single Action Shooters

Let me qualify a bit before letting loose on these fat, middle-aged pussies. At our club, there are 8 ranges: 1 silhouette, 1 military long range, 1 200 meter range, 3 action pistol ranges, and 2 practice ranges. If you are on one of the action pistol ranges and one of the Village People in chaps wants to use that range, according to the rules, you have to surrender it. Of course, this street doesn’t go both ways.

While a range I used to go to wasn’t quite this militant, they did have certain ideas about priviledges the SASS folks were given over everyone else, except for maybe the Trap and Skeet shooters.

At this to-be-left-unnamed range, the SASS guys were given the IDPA range to decorate in the old west style and use. The IDPA folks had to carve themselves new, smaller ones out of the woods. Sometimes, even these new ranges would be given to the SASS without notice.

The Trap and Skeet guys were always wanting an expanded area for their shooting discipline, and the range gave them an area just off from the rifle range. They said this was safe, but I know that the stuff falling out of the sky as I walked past the 100yd berm and out to the 200yd mark was not frozen gray rain.

It seems that the skeet guys were ignoring the rules about not following clays past a certain point. When this was complained about, I was told that I should just make sure no one was using that shooting position on the Trap and Skeet range before deciding to shoot past 100yds.

Needless to say, even though the rangemaster was both knowlegable and helpful (not a common occurance in rangemasters, in my experience) I don’t go there any longer.

Except for the obvious safety concerns with #9 birdshot landing on my head, the motives of the range were easily discerned by just going to the range on any given weekend.

The SASS and the T&S guys were the moneymakers for the range. Being a place to go shoot in Western Washington these days is rather expensive because 1. You need a goodly about of decent, level acreage, and 2. They get sued by some community organization or other BS group just about every other year for some made up concern that said community organization believes should cost the club their license.

This particular range had been in the same location since the mid-1930’s, yet because the county decided to build a school within a mile of it, in the opposite direction of ALL fire, Ceasefire Washignton decided that the range needed to go bye-bye. Everyone’s range fees went up shortly after the delivery of the legal paperwork on that case. The range won, btw.

Ranges need the money and the community support which are brought about by large groups of local shooters. It is also nicer to have someone dressed like Wyatt Earp or “Pheasant Hunter Jim” around when the inevitable reporter for the local MSM station drops by, unannounced and with a camera crew, to do a story on the current lawsuit against the club, than it is to have non-friendly looking me with my shooting glasses and vest and my large, ominous looking “sniper rifle”.

range031305.jpg

I do not know that the club Ben is talking about has these exact concerns, so I will not excuse them for the rules that he is objecting to, because they’re deplorable. But then again, I may be biased here because I also am no fan of the majority of the strictly SASS and T&S shooters.

I have never been looked down upon by any other type of shooter/fellow gun owner so frequently as I have been by them. Modern Action Pistol shooters and the guys like me who bring our so called “assault rifles” to the range are looked at as less “sophisticated” than they.

Certainly not all of them think as such, but I would venture an educated guess that probably half of each of the two respective groups, at least locally, would not lose sleep over a new “Assault Weapons Ban”, simply because of the weapons themselves. They wouldn’t see it as an encroachment on their rights, because they only own tricked out lever guns and single action revolvers.

I don’t have to whip out the “First they came for the…” quote here, right?

I will still, of course, fight for their rights to shoot whatever they want to, knowing full well that a good number of them will not return the favor. Common courtesy, like common sense, just isn’t so common anymore.

Posted in Have Gun, Will Travel | 8 Comments

RNS Quote of the Day: 10/09/06

Posted on October 9, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Vaclav Havel, the President of the Czech Republic and a playwright, is also a noted observer of the modern world order.

He has observed that in a Communist society people were not allowed to act without explicit authorization. In a free society, by contrast, the presumption is the opposite: We are free to do what we want unless it is prohibited.

The idea that highly detailed rules will tell us exactly what to do changes the presumption back again: We can’t do what we want because the law details our course.

The Death of Common Sense – Philip K. Howard

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Dumbest Thing I’ve Read All Day: 10/09

Posted on October 9, 2006 by Phil Kadath

John Avarosis of the deceptively named “Americablog” has to be playing purposely ignorant.

Or maybe not.

Cheney and the White House have been maiking this point for some time now, that Ronald Reagan’s withdrawl of US troops from Beirut in 1983 emboldened al Qeada.

For some reason, the media has been loathe to report on it. Oh sure, they mention Cheney’s quotes, and list Beirut as one of two US withdrawls that emboldened al Qeada, but the media never seems to catch the fact that the Beirut withdrawl was Reagan’s doing. That Cheney is flat out saying that Ronald Reagan’s policies emboldened al Qeada (Wonder how Nancy feels about that.)

To wit, from today’s Washington Post

“If we follow Congressman Murtha’s advice and withdraw from Iraq the same way we withdrew from Beirut in 1983 and Somalia in 1993, all we will do is validate the al-Qaeda strategy and invite even more terrorist attacks,” Cheney said in Milwaukee.

Note the Beirut reference. Also note the Somalia reference. Who got us into the mess in Somalia? President George H. W. Bush and his Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney. So Cheney is blaming Reagan and Bush, Sr., and himself for “inviting more terrorist attacks” against Americans.

Now do you think that’s a story?

So, because HW Bush and Cheney took us to Somalia, it is their fault that the Clinton Administration folded so easily and withdrew, emboldening al Qeada?

I’ve ever been able to understand the willful delusion of the liberal mind, what with the having to blame everything on someone else complex. I believe that this is mostly because I don’t think spending time on a mental ward is a “fun time”. 

Conservatives know and have come to grips with the fact that the Beirut pull-out in 83 was a bad move. Hindsight is almost always 20-20 and we have learned from it. Nevermind that, unlike 1993, there was no al Qeada in 1983, because that is neither here nor there. Al Qeada learned from the history of the Beirut pull-out just as they did of the Somalia pull-out.

I also like his feigning of concern for the Honorable Mrs. Reagan. I wonder how much concern he had for her durng President Reagan’s funeral? Seeing as how I cannot find the archives, and the general lack of respect the left had during that time, I’m going zero to none. 

But for Avarosis to just shut his cranium off for long enough to type out that paragraph blaming Cheney and HW Bush for Clinton’s tail-tucking scurry in 1993 is sheer madness.

Or maybe it is stupidity. I don’t know.

Either way, Avarosis wrote the Dumbest Thing I’ve Read All Day.

Posted in Too Stupid to Live | Leave a comment

The Always Offended

Posted on October 8, 2006 by Phil Kadath

Our good man in Central Oregon, John of Just Some Poor Schmuck, linked to the report of AlGore making the claim about cigarrette smoking being a significant contributor to global warming and has some commentary on the story here.

A commenter from the UK, someone named Julian posting under the moniker “goatchurch” wanders on in to John’s place and starts, claiming the story cannot be so true because the statement is stupid.

Of course, this leads to a wonderful little discussion between John and “goatchurch” about whether or not AlGore is dumb enough to say what is claimed he said.

Before long, “goatchurch” resorts to attempting to switch topics to Operation Iraqi Freedom (and I’m sure you can guess whose side he’s on). So, in this case, I want you to click this link first and look at the top banner pictures and the medallion above the calender before you click the link at the end of the first paragraph of the story.

Trust me, the laugh is much stronger if you do.

And judging from this post, I think John wants “goatchurch” to come back. Kicking leftist ass shouldn’t be that easy.

Posted in Freaks, Mutants, and Morons | 1 Comment