Quote of the Day

Today is my birthday, so you get two for the price of one. From the same source, no less.

Before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant. . . .
Frances Piven, leftist firebrand from the 60s.

The quote was from Jan 10th, so we have here proof she's never grown up. I suppose it takes a while to get over being hurt and ashamed at constantly being called a lazy good-for-nothing hippie. You get to be angry and indignant when the government announces its cutting off your allowance, which enabled you to maintain the lifestyle of a lazy good-for-nothing hippie.

Quote of the Day

H/T to Taranto for this one:

"We just have to make sure we're doing everything we can to unlock the productivity of American workers, unleash the ingenuity of American businesses, and harness the dynamism of America's economy."--President Obama, weekly radio address, Jan. 22

To which I say: One out of three so far. The other two are anathema.

First Time For Everything

Up to now it's been an article of faith that crazed gunmen looking to set a new high score, don't normally make their attempts in police stations. We has one here in Colorado some time back in which a fellow pulled up in front of the Castle Rock PD building and opened fire toward the building. As I recall, no one in the building was hit, and even though the fellow had his 2 small children with him, it ended about like you'd expect.

The thinking was that he didn't really expect to kill anyone in the building.

Someone has tried again, this time in Detroit, where someone walked in to the station with a pistol-grip shotgun, and began blazing away. No real details out yet, but 4 cops were wounded and the shooter is toast.

Quick! What should we ban now?

Law-N-Order

I was wondering when someone in the international community would grow a pair when dealing with the Somali pirates, and now it's happened. H/T to Hot Air for the lead and here is the winner of the contest to be the first to deal with pirates in the traditional manner: The South Koreans.

The tepid response to date has been a blot on the character of civilized countries world wide since the inception of the Somali efforts. The hijacked ships should represent nothing more than a training exercise for the elite units accompanying the warships that frequent those waters ranging from the Egyptian Navy up.

Cheers for the ROK marines, and a note to future pirates: the ROKs don't care if you survive or not. The story says 8 pirates dead, and 5 prisoners, no casualties among the crew. Anybody want to make book on weather the prisoners survive the experience?

Gun Law

Peggy Noonan, one of the RINO columnists at the Wall St Journal, is proposing that in order to sustain his recent upswing in popularity, the president should wholeheartedly get behind a ban on "extended ammo clips".

I could almost agree with her on this one, since the definition of "extended" would likely be left up to the BATFEIEIO, who would revise the number down any time they found themselves looking for some new mischief to get in to. Official policy like this would stir up a firestorm of activity, confirming everything the right had to say about the president in the first place.

Presumably someone who knew what they were talking about would write this, so that "ammo clips" would become "magazines". Notice I didn't say detachable. This would extend the ban to include tube-fed firearms that could accept more than this weeks limit on bullets.

Proposing legislation for this is political suicide in most districts, so it probably won't happen, or if it does, it won't come to a vote so that no one will be held accountable next election. No, the Chicago way to get this done is to have the BATFE write a "ruling" which carries the force of law, but bypasses the embarrassment of actually having to vote on the thing.

Word going around right now suggests that the Saiga shotgun, and possibly the Rossi lever-action .410 are both in the agency's sights for a ruling come Monday. With control of the agencies, the congress becomes unnecessary.

When writing your representatives, never forget to include the closing lines asking that the BATFE be defunded and abolished.

Energy and Environment

News is beginning to percolate up about the Bakken oil field in North Dakota, which also extends into Montana. The actual size is uncertain, but the estimates keep getting bigger.

If the discovery turns out to be significant, expect the interior department to name the entire area the "Chief Sitting Bull National Wilderness Preserve" and ban all human activity anywhere near it. This will be closely coincident to a generous campaign contribution to the administration from the Saudi royal family, reminiscent of a similar practice in the 90's in which a contribution from the coal magnate Riady family of Indonesia got the worlds largest deposit of clean coal declared a national monument in Utah.

Energy

The administration has put out a good deal of lip service about energy production, but has delivered little beyond looming shortages. Gas, for example was $1.60 in late 2008, but is currently just over $3/gallon. I don't use heating oil, but I'm pretty sure the price there has followed apace.

Most of the solutions we've seen so far tend to be large sums of money funneled into beta-level production of schemes that produce energy in small and unreliable squirts, such as wind and solar.

Here's a piece on two proposed nuclear options that have the advantage of being proven designs in both scalable and modular modes. At least one of the designs draws from our experience with Naval reactors which are designed to be operated by enlisted men, and be pretty much 100% reliable. The other is a bit more nebulous, or I'm too lazy to dig far enough to ferret out the details, but uses many of the same buzzwords, like small, modular, and scalable.

The other advantage of the small plants is the hardening of the power grid that stems from the dispersion of the generators. Myself, I prefer the efficiencies of large central generating stations, but in this case, the losses from lack of scale don't seem to be as great as what you would get from a similar dispersion of coal or gas-fired plants.

The biggest obstacle right now is the government, who gets to regulate nukes. The purpose of a government regulator is to see that nothing new is introduced that might inconvenience anyone already in the market. Of course you remember I did include the Department of Energy in my proposed budget cuts, right?

Balancing the Budget

Back on the 7th, I speculated on the effort required to get federal spending under control, and without too much effort, came up with $269B in spending cuts.

Now the Republicans are looking into the same problem, and have come up with $2.5T worth of cuts. Disclaimer: this is added up over 10 years, so the number would be comparable to $250B in the next year, which is close to what I came up with.

What impresses me is that they claim be able to repeat this feat every year for the next 9 years. Hopefully this isn't done by projecting the elimination of some bogus agency for a savings of $250M, then counting that cut every year thereafter for the next 10 years. Still, it looks like a good start, and goes to prove that the folks in Washington are marching right along with me, singing together as voices of reason, and not even remotely the blood-splattered, masked wielders of chainsaws some people make us out to be.

Weather

It was once said that if the U.S. government controlled the Sahara desert, in6 months there would be a shortage of sand.

This afternoon the snow fell, lightly, and the temps dropped, mightily. Evidently the government now controls the Sahara, because there's not so much as a single grain on any street I drove on to get home tonight, through 5 municipal districts.

Getting in tomorrow should be amusing too.

Climate Change

Climate change research has been shown to have more than a few holes in it of late.

This does not prevent its supporters from attempting to cover them up by making investigating the fraud illegal.

AGW is a problem that, at this point, I have to conclude, doesn't exist. Well, O.K. I was never really convinced it really existed. What it was, was the modern equivalent to chicken Little, running about madly screaming that the world was about to end, and the only solution was to let him and his friends, all of whom knew better than me, manage the economy.

Noteworthy was evidence that letting these people manage my life would cause a great deal of my money would wind up in their pockets, mostly to their benefit. I am reminded of the doomsday cults of the past, usually religiously based, who promised paradise to true believers who would give over their worldly goods to the chief charlatan before the apocalypse.

Testing, Testing

The Taiwanese test fired several missiles today, presumably to demonstrate preparedness in the face of ChiCom aggression.

Most of them missed their targets.

Look, guys, don't buy your military hardware or software from someone who might be your enemy. As Hamas found out in Gaza, a stinger missile will not launch against an Apache helicopter. As the space forces of Earth found out, Cylon designed fighters can be turned off by the Cylons. As the Taiwanese found out, missiles using iPhone-based guidance systems, assembled in China fly poorly that close to China.

Arms Race

You knew it would happen, after introducing the Taurus Judge in various barrel lengths to shoot .45 and .410 shotgun shells, they had to preemptively bring out an even bigger one, the "Raging Judge":
in glorious 28 ga. That's .54 caliber in case you were thinking of sniffing out some actual pistol-type bullets to go with this. I don't know of such a cartridge on the market, so I suppose you're reduced to alternating shot with slugs for variety.

Soon to appear, the "Batshit Crazy Judge", in 12 ga. Still in development it would appear.

Hmmmm.... Has anybody heard of anyone using a .410 Judge with slugs in a bowling pin match?

Freedom Of Speech

Free speech can't exist unchained. US politics needs the tonic of order.
Simon Jenkins, Guardian, UK

Honest you can't make this stuff up. The only thing that can preserve the freedom of speech in America is restrictions on what people are allowed to say. Once you realize the suggestion is coming from England, the idiocy becomes somewhat more expected.

It's scary to see such things put forward, as it's possible some people in the administration will take the suggestion seriously, or rather more seriously than they do already, and try to act on it.

Come to think of it, they already are. There is, I suppose, nothing wrong with a free society that a bit less freedom won't make better.

Gun News

Found in North Central Idaho, this quote from the usual suspects:

As household gun ownership has dropped dramatically since the early 1970s and America’s youth turn away from guns, the SHOT Show is proof of the gun industry’s embrace of increased lethality to shore up its fading market and declining sales.

Violence Policy Center
January 13, 2011

A little looking shows just how much gun sales are fading:
"Peaking", maybe. When the January stats come out we'll see if the shootings in Tucson had any noticeable effect.

Meanwhile, Rep King (RINO-NY) has proposed a law that would prohibit carrying a gun within 1000 ft of a high government official, such as a politburo member. This raises the question of how, exactly we're supposed to tell we're within 1000 feet of such an august presence?

Folks, it's only hard when the wind is blowing the wrong direction. Downwind, it's easy.

Disclaimer

What she said. All that, and more.