Tag: Painful Truths

Words fail me.

 

Done, arguably, by the smallest man ever to hold the office. I hate living in historic times.

Now that so much gaming has moved from our PC’s to our phones, I find my ravenous urge to kill and maim is no longer slaked by trivial entertainments such as Call of Duty, BioShock  and World of Tanks; nay, I’ve found something better!

Angry Birds!

Yes, nothing satisfies my urge to chuck chickens at grinning evil green pigs like Angry Birds. If I wasn’t able to sublimate my burning desire for collapsing structures and porcine rolling heads, there is just. no. telling. what I might be capable of…

So heed not my guns and first person shooters- fear my flaming bluebirds!

(side note- did someone put something in the water of my country?)

Top 5 Gun Massacres– note only one in the U.S.- and it’s not the one you think.

Each one was terrible- but terrible things happen and evildoers do evil. That is not a reason to start sacrificing what is left of our rights. I have just written to all my state and federal representatives- I suggest you do the same. The NRA-ILA provides a handy way to get all their addresses, snail-and-email.

…and it would be easy to call it snark, but instead it’s truth (quoted in full):

SO IF WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A “NATIONAL CONVERSATION ON GUNS,” HERE ARE SOME OPENERS:

Why do people who favor gun-control call people who disagree with them murderers or accomplices to murder? Is that constructive?

Would any of the various proposals have actually prevented the tragedy that is the supposed reason for them?

When you say you hope that this event will finally change the debate, do you really mean that you hope you can use emotionalism and blood-libel-bullying to get your way on political issues that were losers in the past?

If you’re a media member or politician, do you have armed security? Do you have a permit for a gun yourself? (I’m asking you Dianne Feinstein!) If so, what makes your life more valuable than other people’s?

Do you know the difference between an automatic weapon and a semi-automatic weapon? Do your public statements reflect that difference?

If guns cause murder, why have murder rates fallen as gun sales have skyrocketed?

Have you talked about “Fast and Furious?” Do you even know what it is? Do you care less when brown people die?

When you say that “we” need to change, how are you planning to change? Does your change involve any actual sacrifice on your part?

Let me know when you’re ready to talk about these things. We’ll have a conversation.

UPDATE: John Lucas emails:

Joe Scarborough, who claims to be a “proud NRA member” just said there is no reason to allow someone to have an “assault weapon” that shoots “30 rounds a second.”

The ignorance is appalling.

Well, yes. It’s MSNBC. But it is interesting that Scarborough — like Mark Shields and Rupert Murdoch — seems entirely ignorant of actual gun law. But to be fair, the National Firearms Act has only been around since 1934.

These are the opinion-makers and the lawmakers. Ignore their ignorance and disregard for the constitution at your own peril. But then again, a lot of you helped elect these clowns, so, I guess I know where you stand.

Just so we’re clear.

I do not like this world we have made for ourselves. I do not like the media and its taste for blood after a terrible tragedy. I do not like politicians who cannot wait a decent time before trying to capitalize on a terrible tragedy. Hence, I do not like this world we- all of us– have made for ourselves.

Bob Owens thinks he sees what a facet of the problem is. I don’t know- I just know the news Friday had me crying like a baby as I tried to drive down Schillinger Road.

I am glad I’m going to ground.

[jwplayer mediaid=”1369″]

This link is good until YouTube takes it down, which probably won’t take long. Michigan Union thugs at work…

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has a gallery of the IBEW thuggishness

Those one or two who read the words I write here may have noted that, since the election (excepting, of course, my sad preoccupation with the travesty of Benghazi) I have done relatively little opinionatin’ about things political.

This is deliberate. This comes from a sad realization that, closely as I hold them, my guiding principles are far out of tune with those of the majority of my fellow-travelers. There very group I worry so much about- our children- have voted, and gotten what they wanted. Look at the demographics of the vote and you’ll see what I mean. The Nanny State is what we want and we’re going to get it good and hard.

Allow me to quote from someone much more well-spoken than I am- he writes a blog called Unqualified Reservations and can be quite brutal in his analysis:

Dear conservatives, I have a question for you.  Suppose God appeared to you in your sleep, and gave you a choice.  You could lose your country, but keep your institutions and constitutions.  Or, you could lose your institutions and constitutions, but keep your country.  Which would you choose?

But I don’t have to choose, you say!  Au contraire, mon frere!  I will save my country, by saving her institutions and constitutions!  Which are the best in history ever!  Look at all this corn and bacon!  Dear conservatives, this is just your way of cursing God.  Do you think he doesn’t have enough fools and drunks to look after?

Do you know what terrifies me?  What terrifies me is that not only do I not think America deserves Mitt Romney, I don’t even think America deserves Barack Obama.  After all, a couple of centuries of diligent looking-after has run us up quite a tab with God.  A tab that will be paid or punished.  What terrifies me is that while I see no collective interest in paying the tab, it doesn’t seem to me that the punishment has even begun to begin.  Barack Obama isn’t exactly Robespierre, you know.  “Capable” might be going too far, but “basically decent” isn’t that much of a stretch.

What terrified me about Mitt Romney is that four years, eight years, of Romney would have been pure borrowed time.  There was not even the slightest intention to pay the tab.  Your intention, dear conservatives, was to sleep and be merry.  Your debt is already terrifying.  Fall on your knees, dear conservatives, and thank God from the bottom of your heart that you didn’t put another decade on it.

I want to believe he’s wrong- surely we aren’t that far down the road- but to read the news with open eyes is to be convinced otherwise. Study some history with your preconceptions thrown aside- look at the rise and fall of nations- and see if some sobering parallels with other once-great nations don’t become apparent.

When the boot comes down over the next two or three decades, remember you grew up in the Golden Age. That memory will be all that is left.

The parable of the Boiled Frog will be something to keep in mind.

Me? I’ll be going to ground as far as I can. I’ll be gone soon and won’t have to see it through to the end. Thank goodness.

Never forget…

The Arizona Memorial.

Nothin’ to say that hasn’t been said before. Just, as with a few other things, never ever ever forget.

Buzzfeed has put up a really nice selection of beautiful and in some cases heart-wrenching photographs from the last year. Here are some I liked:

I’m sure one of the signs of a failed society is when your children point a gun at Mickey…

A scene from a land being stolen and a people being slowly exterminated. Somehow not sexy enough to make the news much- I guess we need that Chinese stuff too badly.

(as always, click pics to embiggen, they’re worth it)

Just another day outside of Gaza- actually, maybe more of ‘just another day’ than you might think. American Digest linked this video which somehow casts that image in a wholly different light:

[jwplayer mediaid=”1320″]

Pictures can lie, and also deceive. It all depends on your agenda, and some agendas are more obvious than others. Dang devious Jews.

Bob Owens gives voice to all us racist, slopeheaded, white Southron wimmin’- hatin’ bigots, In the nicest way:

Hello. My name is Bob, and I’m a racist.

I know this because the editorial board of the Washington Post said so.

While I’m too young to have used water cannons on civil rights protesters, and couldn’t tell you where the local Klan meets (or if there even is one), I have this troubling problem of perspective. It is my inconvenient belief that a cabinet official with a high-level security clearance — the same access to much of the information provided to the CIA director — should avail herself of the same facts known to the rest of the cabinet, especially if she is going to be discussing a specific issue with the television press on a series of national television programs.

It gets better:

I guess I should consider myself fortunate to have even appeared on their radar as an anthropological experiment, being a white, southern, public university graduate. It is not something of which the Post editorial board approves.

The Post editorial board, you see, is a thing of rare beauty and diversity.

Harvard-educated Fred Hiatt has been with the paper since 1981, as has Harvard-educated Lee Hockstader, Harvard-educated Stephen Stromberg, Harvard-educated Charles Lane, and Harvard-educated Opinions editor Marisa Bellack.

Yale-educated Jackson Diehl and Ruth Marcus are the Ivy League “outsiders.” Jo-Ann Armao, another white liberal, comes from the University of Buffalo, along with progressive cartoonist Tom Toles. Jonathan Capehart, the sole African-American on the board, shares the same diversity of thought as his colleagues. His difference from his peers is literally skin-deep, his individual editorials interchangeable with those of his peers in terms of view and substance.

There are no westerners, southerners, or Midwesterners on the Post editorial board, nor are there any libertarians, Republicans, or conservatives.

Read it all here. As Glenn says, “And because of this, they still don’t appreciate how much they damaged their brand with a single editorial.”

And while you’re at it, please take a moment to remember those brave men who died for their country in Benghazi. You do remember Benghazi, right? Right?

Your Tony Woodlief thought for the day:

But the thing is, none of us will heave his corpse, in that last day, onto the same scale. You have the life that has unfolded for you, and I the life that has unfolded for me, and all of us have a very simple and terrifying responsibility, which is simply to answer the question, as Victor Frankl would say, that our lives are asking us. You wake up each day or night and you answer your life’s question. You answer it in cold truth or in warm love or with a craven lie, but you answer it all the same, because only you can answer it, and whether the charming genius with the beautiful Anthropologie watch could answer it better than you is no matter, because he has his own question to answer and it is very, very different than yours, and likely you should thank God it is his question to answer and not yours, because who among us can know, in the dread dark of night, the terror that presses down upon another man’s chest?

I do well to handle my own.

They’re mad as hell and not taking it any more:

Complaints About Turkey Attacks On The Rise In Brookline

BROOKLINE (CBS) – Neighbors are on the offensive in Brookline after what some residents are describing as aggressive turkeys.

“They were attacking the vehicle,” Karen Halvorson said outside her home in the Aspinwall Hill neighborhood.

After getting in her truck, a neighbor came and ran the birds off but it didn’t stop there.

“Then, the turkeys came and started attacking my front door,” she said.

A second run-in came a few weeks ago as she walked nearby.

“I looked back and three of them charged me,” she explained.

She moved to the center of the street to avoid the animals, but it wasn’t enough.

“The turkey flew in my face and scratched my neck,” she said.

Halvorson refuses to give up her walks so she has taken precautions.

“I went down to the hiking store and I got a hiking stick with a big ball on top of it. I walk with it all the time and now I never go without my phone,” she said.

At different spots near the Halvorson house, Karen’s husband cut piles of sticks. Those, too, are for protection.

“At least we can throw a stick at them and run into the house,” said Halvorson.

Aggressive turkeys are a nationwide problem, but not in the particular way that Brookline is suffering.

Evidence here, from Beersheba, in the Negev Desert in Israel:

Spooky incoming missiles. Dang Israelis won’t let Hamas have any fun…

via Ace of Spades